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Melissa MacKenzie targets the macabre media fascination with potential death from COVID-19 for ridicule. She writes at The American Spectator (abridged):
It’s time to shut down the shutdown, everywhere and for all the things. It’s done. Over. If people can be trusted to march with 100,000 of their best friends and scream chants, they can be trusted to wear a mask and go to church.
I wrote worriedly (or, as commenters said, fear-mongered) about the Wuhan Flu months ago and considered it a grave threat….. For reasons that are still not understood, the virus seems particularly bad for certain people beyond the obviously targeted elderly and infirm. Is it genetics? Possibly. Is it a more virulent strain? Possibly.
The disease is not the flu even if it has flu-level morbidity (that’s not established yet). And unlike the flu, it can leave permanent damage. The virus destroys the lungs of some of the sufferers.
Even as I believe the initial two-week shutdown saved lives in some places and certainly bent the curve and spared health resources, the shutdowns in the worst places like New York City were absurd. To this day, the subway was never stopped, and that was a vector for spreading the disease. Flights continued in and out of New York, despite seeding the virus everywhere. Gov. Cuomo forced the most fragile into nursing homes, killing thousands needlessly. It took until May 18 to even clean the subway.
The media coverage was and continues to be entirely politically motivated. Outcomes be damned, media and health-care experts are keen to see people die in red states to prove themselves right.
This coercive, controlling, economy-strangling, life-thwarting madness needs to end. Should the American public ever submit to a shutdown again? Not a forced one. Let business owners and individuals assess risks and decide for themselves. Government experts cannot, and should not, be trusted.
By MELISSA MACKENZIE
