Get the Hell Out of Here 2021 and Oh, S***, Here Comes 2022

[Valin]

Healthy Skeptic

Kevin Roche

December 31, 2021

Back when this was only a health care policy, business and research blog, I would occasionally embarrass myself by making predictions for the coming year.  So how do we sum up 2021 and what the heck worse could happen in 2022?  At a macro-level, largely due to the most mentally and policy incompetent President ever, the world is a much scarier place as authoritarian regimes are greatly emboldened and the risk of serious conflict very high and we are burdened by a very fragile and damaged economy.  In regard to CV-19, strong the obsession is, and if I had to pick one word to describe 2021 and the epidemic, it would be disappointing.  We all hoped and expected to be done with this by now.  It isn’t the vaccines that are the most disappointing aspect, they actually are performing better than I might have anticipated.  It is the persistent stupidity and terrorism of so many political and health leaders.  Engaging in the same dumb and futile efforts to suppress a respiratory virus–masking, distancing, closing schools and businesses, telling people to stay home, test incessantly to no real purpose and continuing the same despicable terror tactics to cow the population into submission.  You might have thought so many smart people, and they think they are really smart, might actually have learned something over two years.

So will things be any better as we head into the Moronic phase of the epidemic?  What will 2022 bring?  I really don’t know.  The truisms I have known and stated since the start should now be apparent to everyone.  You are not, we are not, going to suppress a respiratory virus.  It will be here, we will have to adapt to that, and we can’t destroy our society in that adaption effort.  A corollary to those truisms is that we need to begin ignoring the epidemic, stop the excessive data collection and hysterical reporting.  Out of sight, out of mind.  But can the country and its leaders exert the will to do this obvious right thing?

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But we can’t let that be the end of this sorry episode.  If the opposition party takes Congress in the fall, we need extensive hearings and investigations which fully expose to the public the political machinations behind this Administration’s responses to the epidemic and the lack of data and science to support them.  And we need a new set of laws which set clear limits on executive power across the country and on the declaring of emergencies for any period beyond a week.  With the available technology, there is no excuse for significant decisions not being made by representative bodies in conjunction with the executive branch.  And we must ensure that never again are children held hostage as pawns by teachers’ unions.  That process should start in 2022 and if it doesn’t, that will be the most significant disappointment of the upcoming year.