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I saw Jeff Cliff on here this morning.

Hard to believe he's still going on about COVID in late 2025.

Especially after we're years in and many of the predictions made about the lockdowns turned out to be entirely true. A generation of young kids have had their reading severely crippled. Another generation of young adults have had their social foundations severely crippled. The Wall Street economy exploded but the Main Street economy was crippled and never really returned to normal. Homeless encampments that started during COVID never truly went away. Normal people are still visiting food banks at unprecedented levels, and a lot of food banks are having to turn away people because their use rates are so much higher than ever before and the cost of food has skyrocketed.

One thing I do tend to want to correct people about is they blame COVID for things like the lower literacy in classrooms, but it is in fact the lockdowns that caused that, not COVID itself. In fact, for a good chunk of the lockdowns, most places didn't have COVID (by design -- that was the purpose of the lockdowns), and the harm of lockdowns was occurring independently of any harm from COVID.

In medicine, often we need to modulate the immune response in a person because the immune response is what kills us, not the illness itself. We take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce fevers because the fever is worse for us. We also take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce inflammation responses because inflammation is often more damaging to the local tissue than the infection itself, and we can let the more sophisticated parts of our immune system deal with infections instead. Through this metaphor, we can see the fever and inflammation response of lockdowns, masking, and presenting our papers like every restaurant is a soviet checkpoint may have been more harmful than the infection we were trying to resolve. Chronic fever can cause brain damage and organ damage that can take far longer to recover from than the infection itself, and arguably that's exactly what we're seeing from our civilizational fever.

Yet he's still talking as if there's only one truth and that truth is that COVID is the worst thing ever and we never should have ended anti-COVID measures. I recall him also arguing that the downsides I discuss above would never come to pass, and perhaps today would argue they didn't come to pass.

It almost looks like a modernist idea of COVIDism. That isn't to say it's a cult of COVID, but rather a totalizing worldview where one and only one thing matters at the top of the grand narrative hierarchy, and that's COVID.

Part of the risk of the original COVID-19 is that it was a novel coronavirus -- something our immune systems had no defense against. One major argument for the lockdowns is that people didn't have any chance of not getting COVID, so if everyone got sick at once there'd be big implications to that. The problem is, it's been 5 years, and most people have had COVID. In fact, it's a sick joke regarding the vaccines -- where I work, definitionally 100% of the people working there were vaccinated, yet tons of people got COVID anyway.

Honestly, at first I wasn't against the lockdowns, since the argument seemed sound -- we didn't know how lethal it was, there were videos out of China of people dropping dead in the streets (almost certainly fake we now understand), and there was a risk of virtually everyone getting really sick with a bad illness right away. Later we learned that many of the fatalities we saw were a result of bad treatment options such as intubation rather than the inherent lethality of covid. The thing is, by the end of 2020 we already had achieved the goals of the initial lockdowns, but then to totalizing narrative hold to "defeat COVID" had taken hold. People felt like it was possible to totally eliminate a virus that had travelled across the entire world, and wouldn't accept anything but total eradictation. This meant that 14 days became a month became 6 months became 2 years before things finally started to go back to normal.

Ironically, although the vaccine didn't prevent covid, it seems that natural immunity did ultimately do its job. I don't see people getting routinely sick with COVID anymore. A few unusual people got it multiple times, but most people seem to have gotten it once and after that been OK.

I don't know what Jeff's story is. Maybe he lost some important family members early on and never really psychologically recovered. If that's the case, I can sympathize with him, but empirically we can say it's time to let go -- Continuing to fight this fight isn't going to bring your loved ones back, but if you ever got what you wanted a lot more people would suffer because of it.

Maybe he's just keeping up a joke. If it's a joke on his part, he needs to find a new joke because it really isn't funny anymore.

Unrelated to Jeff, some people think 2020 was an exercise in societal compliance. They wanted to see if they could push people to do act insane and they succeeded. That may be the case, but I'd argue because human relationships aren't digital, it's a measurement that changes when you take it -- A lot of society changed as a direct result of 2020, and I know a lot of people are quite sensitive to any similar event occurring again. To enact what they did took massive capital: social capital, political capital, and monetary capital. The scale of what it took to enact the lockdowns was similar to how in order to measure an electron you have to bounce another electron off of it, changing the state of that electron you're measuring -- it doesn't matter what result you get back, the system is fundamentally changed afterwards. You only proved it could be done back then, not that it could be done again.