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I Just Don't Believe the Coronavirus Story

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Read this recent edict handed down by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York: "Remember that re-opening does not mean that we're going back to the way things were. Life is not about going back. Nobody goes back. We go forward. And it's going to be different." (See https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-begin-reopening-june-8-cuomo/.) It has the ring of finality, doesn't it? Things are "going to be different" not just for the next few weeks but... forever. We'll be wearing masks and keeping our distance from each other from now on. "Nobody goes back." You have been given the order. You must obey. You must not even think about disobeying.

How did Mother Nature suddenly become so innovative? When did she give up on the human immune system and start insisting that only a population wearing surgical masks would be safe from infectious disease? The only enduring protection we have any right to hope for will come from a vaccine--and the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, of course, must never be questioned.

I also have to point out that Gov. Cuomo seems to have forgotten that he's a public servant. He seems to fancy himself as the boss of all bosses, at least in the state of New York. We need to remind him that we residents of New York are his employers and that he is the employee.

Before Cuomo gave his stay-at-home order of March 22, I was employed full-time delivering packages Monday through Friday, and staffing a tourist-information kiosk in lower Manhattan most weekends. This was mostly working outside, during all four seasons (which, in fact, I prefer to sitting at a desk and staring into a screen for eight hours). I also have a modest freelance operation writing and proofreading. (Search "working every day"--note the quotation marks--and you'll get 2.8 million hits. That leads me to conclude that my experience cannot be all that rare.) In December of last year, I was pleasantly surprised that I did not pick up my standard Christmastime head-cold. I even evaded it in January, when it seemed like everybody was coughing his or her brains out. But I wasn't exactly shocked when, in mid-February, I developed an especially nasty head-cold and a bad cough.

Was it COVID-19? I don't know. I never had any fever or sore throat. By the end of the month, the cough went away for a few days and then came back for about a week in March and was slow to completely disappear thereafter. In late March I called New York City Health and Hospitals Corp. to ask about testing. A courageous young M.D. told me over the phone that I wasn't sick enough to come in for a nose swab and I should stay home until I had no symptoms at all for three days. That was at the beginning of this crisis.

But when will it end? And why am I supposed to quietly accept the answer that it may go on for 18 months?

But then... where the hell do I get off complaining about such things in a public forum? Well, I'm sorry... I didn't want to complain about it... but I just felt I had to. I suppose it may turn out that I was wrong to criticize the lockdowns. But I don't think that it will ever be the case that I was wrong to question them. And the question keeps coming up: Do we really need the lockdowns?

I'm not 100 percent certain about much of anything anymore. I just get the very strong feeling that the medical-emergency story being pushed on TV and in the newspapers is, for the most part, phony and manipulative. Parts of the story may be true--but the overall effect of the tale being told in the major media is to deceive people, to distract and terrify them, and to force them to accept a world in which a tiny gang of technocrats, plutocrats, and politicians give the orders and the rest of us obey them.

We really need to get some discussion going--discussion beyond the narrow boundaries that the major media have laid down for us. We have to at least try to do this, it seems to me. We have to be civilized and respectful toward everyone around us, but we also have to be stubborn. We have to insist on having this discussion, this debate, and having it right now. We have to ask many, many questions and demand answers. But if we cannot even bring ourselves to talk about the issue, we will simply end up with no other choice than to refuse to obey.

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Jerry Kann has made his living in New York City since the late 1980s in a variety of odd jobs--proofreader, copywriter, messenger, secretary--all while pursuing the very challenging avocation of independent politics. For years Kann's primary (more...)
 

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