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Health See other Health Articles Title: Are the Opponents of the Covid Injections "Anti-Vaxx Crackpots"? Interview with Ron Unz Question 1– Your views on the Coronavirus and Covid vaccine are very different than those of Unz Review writers, like Paul Craig Roberts, CJ Hopkins, Israel Shamir and myself. In your estimation, what are the main areas of disagreement and why do you think your analysis is more probable than theirs? Ron Unz– I’d also put Gilad Atzmon in your group, as well as a few additional contributors. I think the biggest area of early disagreement was regarding whether the Covid virus was about as dangerous as the mainstream media was making it out to be. I thought it probably was, while an overwhelming majority of the anti-establishment writers and commenters on this webzine and elsewhere disagreed, in some cases possibly fueled by the early public statements of President Trump and Fox News people taking that same position. Although I can’t be sure, here’s my suspicion about why some of this misinformation took such strong hold. Soon after the Covid outbreak in Wuhan was first revealed to the world, various anti-China groups and websites began producing and promoting propaganda-videos claiming that Chinese society was collapsing from this deadly disease. Some of these hugely popular videos showed Chinese people supposedly dropping dead while walking in the streets, and sometimes suggested that Covid was a deadly Chinese bioweapon that had somehow escaped from one of their weapons labs and would wipe out much of China’s population. Also Covid was closely related to SARS, which had had a 10% to 15% fatality rate. So early on I think there were reasonably widespread rumors going around on social media that Covid had a very high fatality rate, perhaps in the 5% or 10% range, and that it might devastate the human race, naturally leading to a great deal of fear-mongering and panic. Obviously, those numbers turned out to be completely wrong, and as a consequence many of the people who had been bombarded with such extreme nonsense reacted against it, arguing that Covid wasn’t really so very dangerous at all, which is entirely true, at least relative to those early, inflated figures. But perhaps understandably, they then went overboard in the other direction, starting to argue that the disease wasn’t dangerous at all, possibly as a form of wishful thinking. I don’t much use social media and had ignored all those anti-China propaganda videos, instead getting my information from the NYT, the WSJ, and other mainstream news outlets. And most of these had always suggested that Covid seemed to have a fatality rate somewhere in the range of 0.5% to 1%, but containing an extremely sharp age-skew, with people over 60 being more than 100x as vulnerable as those under 40. And these numbers seem to have held up reasonably well over time. Obviously, a disease that usually has a survival rate better than 99% doesn’t mean the end of the world, and lots of commenters have correctly pointed this out. But it’s still a very serious illness, and if it had completely swept through America’s population of 330 million would have produced at least a couple of million deaths, and probably more than that if the critical cases overwhelmed the hospitals and caused a breakdown in the entire health care system as nearly happened in New York City very early in the epidemic. For the first month or two, our American government had almost totally ignored the Covid problem, apparently just hoping that the virus wouldn’t spread here, but when it did, they didn’t really know what to do. The reports out of Northern Italy were horrifying and showed the huge number of deaths that could be produced by a major outbreak. Since Covid was extremely contagious and there seemed to be no effective treatments, traditional public health measures were useless. China had very quickly and effectively stamped out the disease with minimal fatalities using an unprecedented series of local and national lockdowns, so America and most Western governments decided to try the same thing, but they did so in a very haphazard and disorganized way, that wasn’t very effective. Meanwhile, the lockdowns, mandatory masking, and social distancing were tremendously disruptive and unpopular, especially among libertarians and right-wingers, leading to a huge political backlash. Public health became a bitter ideological issue, which didn’t help with its implementation. Once people stop believing the media, they turn to their own favored sources, which can become echo-chambers based upon wishful thinking. People started claiming that Covid wasn’t really dangerous at all and that very few people were dying from it, which is entirely incorrect but became widely popular in certain circles. There’s a certain amount of ambiguity in classifying cause of death, leading people to argue that the Covid fatality figures were vastly inflated, and they sometimes misunderstood government statistics. I’ll quote a sobering comment I’ve repeated on a number of occasions: Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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