Compared to last year’s anniversary text, I will have less to say—to a large part because I used up much ammunition with a text on vindication in December 2024. (That text includes, among other things, a lengthy discussion of the damning report by the U.S. House of Representatives.) A contributing reason, however, is that COVID is increasingly dropping into the background, which implies that future anniversary texts might be short or outright skipped.
While I have skimmed through last year’s text before writing this year’s, I will not update specific open issues there. A particular point is that I have, for the last few months, given up on the Telegraph and have not otherwise inquired into the results of the British investigations (that feature repeatedly in last year’s text).
This because attempts to access the website have, during these few months, been met with nothing but error messages. The cause of these error messages are not clear, but I would suspect that there is either an ill-advised TOR block or an outright unethical block of users with JavaScript disabled.
With the sheer amount of other material to read (by no means limited to the news), I have not been motivated to research/resolve the issue.
Besides my own writings, I point to a very extensive “Covid Response at Five Years” article series by Brownstone, currently being published. (Available at the time of writing are an introductione and parts 1e, 2e, 3e, 4e, 5e, 6e, 7e, and 8e. As usual, I do not vouch for the correctness, especially on the detail level, of linked texts.)
The Biden-regime ended with a number of unfortunate pardons and, even, awards to the likes of Fauci. This is not only highly depressing, but raises great fears that true consequences against the culprits will never follow, and that the same idiocies might be repeated the next time a new or otherwise unusual virus appears.
The problem is made worse by a far lesser apparent willingness to investigate matters outside the U.S. relative in the U.S. Take Germany, where I live: Virtually nothing has happened, no-one appears to have even contemplated persecuting Merkel for her significant and destructive involvement, and Karl Lauterbach is still the minister of health, despite his vocal and inexcusable support for grossly unethical forced COVID vaccinations, which are incompatible with basic human rights (including general, medical, and bodily self-determination and the principle of informed consent).
With the recent poor election performance by SPD, he might be booted by the voters. Even this, however, is not certain, as there are now negotiations between the nominally conservative CDU and the Social-Democrat SPD to form yet another election-nullifying coalition government. If this succeeds, he might well continue in office.
On the upside, Trump has countered by making sound appointments (not all yet confirmed), including on posts for various health-related this-and-thats, which raises hopes that much of what went wrong in the past will be set right in the U.S. (but, again, with less hope for the rest of the world).
Moreover, the trend has been positive on at least Internet censorship and suppression of opinions that do not follow a government and/or Leftist narrative, which gives some hope that free speech can be saved in the U.S. (As for e.g. Europe, J.D. Vance’s recent speech to the Munich Security Conference (see e.g. [1]e) is, sadly, spot on with regard to freedom of speech and democracy, and at least in the right ballpark on other issues.)
We are now five years down the line and there are still ignorant idiots who insist on speaking of “corona” this-and-that. In Germany, this abuse of terminology has dominated throughout the five years; in various English sources, it at least is/has been common. That e.g. incompetent journalists got this wrong in the early phases is unsurprising (if in doubt, I too often get things wrong early on)—but they have had five (!!!) years to get it right and still fail.
To once again set the record straight: Corona viruses form a large and mostly harmless (even compared to COVID) family, and include e.g. some of the leading causes for the common cold. To speak of “corona” where “COVID” is intended is highly misleading and can potentially lead to great confusion, great misunderstanding, and great other problems.
To be perfectly accurate, a differentiation between “COVID” (or, even, “COVID-19”) and “SARS-CoV-2” is needed, the former being a disease and the latter the virus that causes the disease. (Paralleling the differentiation between AIDS and HIV.)
However, unlike with the “corona”/“COVID” differentiation, this is unlikely to be a source of confusion and misunderstanding outside a technical context, and I have only very rarely bothered with this differentiation myself. Indeed, doing so could lead to cumbersome formulations and would likely increase the risk of misunderstandings unless sufficiently many others did the same (which they do not).
Other terminology issues also continue, be it out of ignorance, sloppiness, or agenda pushing. Most notably, even today, it is common to hear claims like “COVID caused X” when it actually was the COVID countermeasures that caused X. Every incorrect such mention can make it harder for the broad masses to keep track of culpability, to understand cause and consequence, etc.—implying that this is another distinction actually worth making.
(And, no, such use is not limited to Leftist media, which could have a vested interest in a continued COVID-is-the-worst-pandemic-since-the-Black-Plague narrative. Even, say, Fox News often screws this up.)
Despite how the COVID era exposed the problems with Leftist attitudes, big government, lack of respect for civil rights (including medical self-determination and free speech), the world does not seem to have drawn the right lessons and to keep the Left out of power. In part, this is because some governments were run by non-Leftists for critical portions of the COVID era and these erred by falling for COVID hysteria (if not to the degree that Leftist governments tended to do), leading to a dissatisfaction effect that paradoxically increased Leftist electoral chances (note e.g. the sad case of the U.K.). In part, there just seems to be an inability to understand who poses what dangers to the people, to democracy, to civil rights, whatnot. Indeed, the Biden-come-Harris campaign absurdly and in an outrageous act of hypocrisy had variations of “Trump is a threat to X” as the main family of selling points—while the Biden-regime, with Harris as VP, had worked hard to destroy X for (at the time) close to four years.
The original election of Biden might be a good example of this, in that Trump might have lost, in part, because of how he botched the COVID response—but how the election of Biden was a jump out of the frying pan into the fire. (With suspicions of other complications, e.g. that increased mail-in voting due to excessive COVID fears could have skewed the vote distribution relative in-person voting. Part 4 of the aforementioned Brownstone texts goes into very detailed discussions of potential such mechanisms.)
Sometimes, I find myself forgetting that the horrors of the COVID-countermeasure era even existed, as if it were a (literal) nightmare that rapidly faded from memory once I woke up.
As with so many other issues, it might be that humans need continual reminders of what is important, where evil lies, what errors to avoid, and so on—and that I really should continue with anniversary texts, no matter how short.
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