Alex Berenson - Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

Pandemia

How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

Alex Berenson

Copyright 2021 by Alex Berenson

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eISBN 978-1-68451-249-2

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Cover design by John Caruso

Cover photo by the author

Author photo by Craig Geller

For Harvey, who fought to the end

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Holmes

Go and try, youll never break me.

Welcome to the Black Parade, My Chemical Romance

A t the beginning, the very beginning, the hide-in-the-basement, stock-up-on-bottled-water, shut-down-the-world-the-plague-is-here panic made sense.

Maybe.

But within a few weeks, even as the United States and Europe had just begun lockdowns, anyone paying attention could see the cure was worse than the disease. In our desperation to control Covid-19, we had done more damage to ourselves and the world than the virus ever could.

By then, though, it was already too late.

This is the true story of how media hysteria, political partisanship, overreliance on unproven technology, and scientific illiteracy brought the United States and the world to the brink of breakdown.

The true story of how we trashed civil liberties we had treasured for generations. How we denied school to our children and destroyed small businesses.

The true story of how we locked down and hid our faces from one another on the thinnest possible evidence. Of how a public health emergency became big business overnight, as governments spent trillions of dollars to fight the coronavirusand unnecessary lockdowns destroyed small businesses, hugely enriched giant corporations, and forced people off paid employment onto government checks. How we spent a year hiding the risks and overestimating the benefits of vaccines based on a radical new biotechnology. And how we then tried to force the shots on tens of millions of unwilling Americanswhile censoring those who raised questions about them.

All in response to a virus much less dangerous than the Spanish flu, much less Ebola. A virus that is less dangerous to healthy children and young adults than influenza. A virus that does most of its damage to people at or very near the end of their lives. A virus that killed slightly more people worldwide than diarrhea or Alzheimers disease in 2020.

This is the true story many of you have never heard.

Not because I have a magic source at the Centers for Disease Control passing me thumb drives with hidden information. The facts that I and a handful of other journalists and skeptics have reported since March 2020 are readily available in government documents and hospital records and scientific papers.

No, the facts youre about to read arent secrets.

The secret is in the perspective.

For the last two years, I have tried to approach Covid-19 and the vaccines for it as I do every story I write as a reporterlooking at evidence with an open mind and evaluating risks realistically. I have tried to compare lockdowns and other Covid policies to previous consensus views on the right way to manage epidemics.

Unfortunately, the media, especially the American media, committed early on to portraying the coronavirus as far riskier than it was and the vaccines as safer. Elite outlets like the New York Times went out of their way to foment panic and ignore positive news. Throughout 2020, many scientific studies offered reassuring data, especially the low risks Sars-Cov-2 posed to kids and young adults and their safety in schools. Practically everything pointed the same way.

Meanwhile, the models that had predicted apocalyptic outcomes proved wrong. Aside from a few bad days in New York City in March and April 2020, American hospitals were never close to being overrun. In fact, they were so empty in the spring of 2020 that many laid off workers. Even in New York, the field hospitals and medical ships went largely unused.

But no one seemed to notice, much less care.

Instead the Times, CNN, and the rest fixated on a single number, the count of Americans who had (reportedly) died from the coronavirus. Cable networks offered real-time tallies. The Times ran a special edition when the figure reached one hundred thousand.

They never put the figure in context. They never explained that our methods for recording Covid-linked deaths were likely producing overcounts. Or that even with our aggressive counting, the Covid death figure represented just over 10 percent of all American deaths in 2020.

Most important, they never explained honestly that Covid almost exclusively targeted the very old and sick.

Instead they went the other way, searching desperately for outlier casesthe handful of coronavirus deaths of people under fifty without preexisting conditions. Inevitably, they made mistakes, as when the Times called the murder of a twenty-seven-year-old Iowa man a Covid death.

Reporters are crucial watchdogs against government mistakes and overreach. All of government. But the medias hatred for Donald Trump blinded journalists to the power that state governors and unelected scientific and medical advisors wielded as the epidemic unfolded.

As Covid hit, governors in many states seized unprecedented control of their citizens. They refused to reopen schools. They imposed draconian rules on businesses. They forced people to wear masks, even outside.

Journalists didnt question these monumental intrusions. They cheered them, while ignoring scientists who challenged the conventional narrative.

Hugely powerful social media companies such as Facebook and tech giants such as Google and Amazon went even further. Those corporations blocked videos and books and groups that questioned the value of the lockdownsfrom which these same corporations have profited enormously. The social media companies worked with organizations such as the World Health Organization to become quasi-governmental censors. In suppressing honest debate and dissent, they set a dangerous precedentand fed the rise of wilder conspiracy theories.

Yet they couldnt silence everyone.

This is the true story of howto my surpriseI became a leading voice calling for an end to lockdowns and a return to normality. How the strange intimacy of celebrity in the age of social media enveloped me. My Twitter follower count grew from 7,000 to 200,000 in months, and then to over 300,000 in 2021. Some people told me I had kept them sane. Others said I was a psychopath who didnt care how many people Covid killed.