The COVID reality distortion
When scientific dogmatism hit its zenith during 2021-2024
In our family room hangs a giant 4 x 7 ft painting of golden rolling hills, Oak trees and vineyards that surround our home in wine country. It is a unique rendering captured by one of my husband’s friends, Ross Drago, an artist with a vibrant expressionist style. A few years ago we invited him and his wife Surja over, took them on a tour of our area, and told him he had full reign over the painting and we looked forward to being pleasantly surprised.
This all took place during the heated and political days of the COVID lockdowns. As artists from Berkeley, California, I’m guessing they fall on the liberal end of the spectrum. Berkeley is considered one of the most liberal cities in California, with a robust pipeline. About 47% of students at University of Berkeley consider themselves Liberal vs 7% Conservative. It was my assumption therefore that they would be very sensitive to all matters COVID (prior to this visit, another Berkeley friend declined to share a golf cart outside with my husband!). So when we invited our artist friends to our home, we weren’t sure if they'd even step foot inside, or if we’d just wave at each other and take separate cars for our little tour.
Surprisingly, they walked right up to the door and in a slight whisper asked if we were OK if they came in even though they weren’t vaccinated or masked. Clearly in their regular Berkeley milieu these were not socially acceptable conditions. We told them we didn’t care and that’s part of why we moved from the Bay Area! There was an immediate ease and we had a fabulous time touring them around, and discussing the commission.
What I did learn is that they felt things had gone a bit crazy around COVID, and they felt that many of their friends had “gone off the deep end.” It was clear that COVID was part of a bigger dogmatic context, and they weren’t fans. It amounted to what I call a throughline moment, a time when a person realizes what’s troubling them is more than a single incident, but part of a bigger pattern. In this case COVID and all of its social manifestations had become a monster, and our artist friends didn’t want any part of it.
Recall that in 2020, then President Trump did impose travel bans and in March 2020, he even urged people to stay home. These precautions were not a Left or Right policy. Everyone was on board. I was amazed at the power of mobilization to put everyone in lockstep allegiance to change behavior for the good. In fact, in March 2020, I was one of those willing upright citizens to rally those around me to wear masks and social distance. I was very much in support of behavioral therapy to treat mental health. To me, this was an example of the power of behavioral action to create a healthy society!
But then something went bizarrely wrong: we went from everyone being in it together, to everyone being told what to do.
Spring 2020 - science becomes political
I and many others quickly changed course on our approach to COVID because of doctors like Jay Bhattacharya and Eran Bendavid, who penned an article in late March 2020 in the WSJ about COVID being overhyped. The science around COVID policies was “deeply flawed,” they wrote.
As soon as April 2020, Trump declared the country open, and handed COVID-lockdown authority to the states. He refused national mask mandates, a decision CNN thought he would regret. And even in the summer of 2020, Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos urged states to reopen schools for the fall semester. Trump wanted to decentralize control to accommodate different approaches.
In stark contrast, the policies proposed by Joe Biden, who was then running for president, were far more centralized. In September 2020 - months into collecting enough data to know that COVID disproportionately affected the elderly and sick, Biden said he would shut the country down if experts told him to do so, saying: "I would shut it down. I would listen to the scientists,” he said.
This despite ignoring scientific warnings that a nationwide shutdown was the wrong course of action to take because of the devastating physical and mental effects. In October 2020, Bhattacharya wrote The Great Barrington Declaration, calling for “focused protection” and not widespread lockdowns pushed by the government under the advice of Anthony Fauci, who was the former chief medical advisor to the president at the time. This particular science was quickly labeled “fringe” by Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health. (I won’t go into the details about how Collins and Fauci coordinated this scientific take down. Here’s a good read.)
2021 - Authoritarian mandates begin
Wasting no time, on January 20, 2021, President Biden’s first day in office, he issued an Executive Order to mandate masks. It would be the start of, in hindsight, an era of scientific dogmatism and authoritarianism in the name of the common good. Biden even called school closures “a national emergency” and encouraged lockdown protocols as advised by his Department of Education, even though he gave lip service to opening it up within 100 days of taking office. Then came the push for vaccines despite scientists and doctors, like Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the John Hopkins School of Medicine, advocating for natural immunity especially for children as early as February 2021, in a WSJ Op-Ed.
Ignoring the good news of natural protection, Biden began calling Covid a pandemic “among the unvaccinated.”
(image source : AP news)
In July 2021, Biden urged 90 million eligible Americans to take the vaccine. At another briefing that summer, he said “we follow the science” and all data shows we are in a “pandemic among the nonvaccinated” and for those vaccinated, “you are safe.”
Even in September 2021, he relentlessly gave speeches about the pandemic being of “the unvaccinated” notwithstanding reports that clearly showed those vaccinated were getting sick! These were called “breakthrough” cases and were dismissed as rare, despite data that showed about 19% of those vaccinated ended up with Covid.
Fall 2021 - Acceleration of mandates
The coordinated effort to bury certain information and blame the unvaccinated for the pandemic infused enough fear in the country, many were convinced that in order to save lives, the government had no choice but to declare a nationwide vaccine mandate.
In August 2021, the Defense Department made Covid vaccines a requirement. In September 2021, anyone working at companies employing more than 100 people as well as government healthcare workers were forced to get vaccinated. In October 2021, California required proof of vaccination or weekly testing for state employees and anyone working in healthcare, which was followed by California private companies to begin their own mandatory proof of vaccination requirements. Then cities, like San Francisco, started to enforce proof of vaccination before dining at restaurants.
If this wasn’t restrictive enough, California also targeted kids. In October 2021, California Governor Newsom proclaimed that after successfully implementing “first-in-nation-school masking”, the state would now require vaccinations for K-12.
It was a time of utter chaos and confusion, particularly for me because I was not vaccinated and never planned on it. But the timing was unfortunate. My “Culture, Religion & Technology” event was in October 2021 in Miami. I had no choice but to get vaccinated or risk being turned away from entering the airport or plane. Ultimately, there never was a mandate for proof of vaccination to fly, but that was unclear back then, given the daily and weekly policies created or changed.
At the second “Culture, Religion & Technology” event in Miami, this time held on October 29, 2024, Peter Thiel once again joined me and admitted he regretted getting the vaccine, adding: “The Covid thing was dizzyingly incoherent.”
To be sure, many people died from Covid, and millions got severely sick. It was a time of great distress and pain, even for those in the medical field who worked hard to care for those ill and or dying. I have sympathy for all those who lost a loved one during this time.
But these people were not the problem. The problem was the government's flagrant declarations from Biden’s blaming of the unvaccinated for the pandemic to Anthony Fauci’s arrogance against anyone who resisted his point of view.
Yet to this day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) requires kids to be vaccinated. And Fauci is still revered as “America’s doctor.”
(image source: National Review)
Just recalling those years infuriates me because of the data that was ignored to fulfill some kind of deranged control over society. We knew as early as May 2020 that Covid disproportionately affected the elderly. And by 2021, we had enough data to know that 75% of Covid deaths were from those over 65 years old, and 94% of deaths were from people who had comorbidities and importantly - death of kids under 18 was less than half a percent.
Despite this rarity in children, let alone the risk factors to infertility, in California, 37% of kids 5 to 11 yrs old received a shot within a month of Governor Newsom declaring he’d require it. Around that time, armed with statistics, I made my case to my son’s middle school that we should not mandate student vaccinations. Fortunately, my son was never vaccinated and his school never mandated the vaccines.
Looking back at the crazy days of COVID lockdowns and ridiculous rules, they read like a bad Hunger Games-like satire, in which vile government evildoers dictate ridiculously complex and confusing processes around social activity. In 2021, the COVID mandates started to feel like a significant encroachment and Orwellian government overreach. Just read some of these ludicrous edicts.
“In the eight Bay Area counties with indoor mask mandates, health officers will lift the local orders once they reach low COVID case and hospitalization rates and at least 80% of the total population is fully vaccinated. In lieu of the 80% goal, they can lift the mandates eight weeks after children ages 5 to 11 are eligible for vaccination.”
Or in order to achieve health equity, “Counties that advanced to a less restrictive tier through accelerated progression may return to a more restrictive tier if either one of the following conditions for case rate or countywide test positivity has occurred for two consecutive weeks,
For counties that accelerated from Purple to Red, or Red to Orange, case rate has increased more than 15% for the last two consecutive weeks. Counties accelerated from Purple to Red, countywide test positivity has moved from Orange into Red (5%-8%) for the last two consecutive weeks.”
As Peter saw it, the decrees were “hairpin loop turns where you’re supposed to hug everybody in Chinatown one week in San Francisco, and then mask up the next.”
COVID comeuppance
All this lunacy is starting to change. In 2025, the incoming scientists, doctors and politicians will take over the very institutions that divided the country by virtue of shutting down healthy debate about COVID vaccinations, vaccinations in general, and a host of other medical treatments declared good for society.
Former Florida congressman Dave Weldon, a long-time critic of vaccines in general, has been nominated by president-elect Trump to head the CDC. A quite fitting irony amongst so many of Trump’s picks.
Dr. Bhattacharya has been nominated to be head of the National Institutes of Health - the very institute that tried to condemn his work. Once ignored, slighted and dismissed, Makary has now been recognized and selected to head up the Food and Drug Administration.
Makary may have been a skeptic of COVID vaccine mandates, but he’s not anti-vaccine. At least not as much as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who’s nominated to chair the Health and Human Services department, and is continually grilled on his hesitancy of vaccines, including his opposition to school mandates for any vaccines. In fact, he says he is very skeptical of the 72 doses of 16 vaccines either mandatory or recommended for children, including Hepatitis B, which he believes causes more harm than good.
There is something extremely gratifying to know the medical industrial complex will be turned on its head. It is a positive step forward given how politicized science has become. It also shows the veracity of the biblical words: “For justice will prevail, and all the morally upright will be vindicated,” Psalm 94:15 as well as “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32.
No one is omnipotent or omniscient because only God speaks with authority and represents absolute truth. No one should even try to claim that they stand for incontrovertible truths because we all know “our heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9.
Dogmatism or “rigid consensus models of truth” as Peter would refer to it, should be a big red flag. Dogmatism broke up the Catholic Church from which emerged Protestantism: a new worldview of how to know and worship God. In the case of COVID, it has broken down the elitist scientific community from which is emerging a new approach to medicine and healthcare.
My husband’s Berkeley friends were just the start of this growing skepticism of what was being forced upon society. Little did I know there were millions more like them. Now when I look at my painting hanging on the wall, I not only see the artistic beauty in expressionist reality, I see it as a time in history when scientific dogmatism hit its zenith.