It’s bizarre how a quasi-denialist stance on COVID is becoming the accepted one in mainstream discourse, like, questioning masks and lockdowns and asking Questions about lab leak theory as the Enlightened stance. There are more mainstream stories insisting we must take lab leak seriously and treat it as if it’s basically true, even though we not only haven’t turned up any more evidence for it since 2020, we’ve turned up more evidence that it came from animals at one specific market in Wuhan. There was a piece claiming to turn up evidence, and the evidence was…that some scientists privately mentioned it as a possibility in emails early on. It’s not even partisan anymore bc I’ve seen liberal and leftist publications & influencers all say we need to ask Questions and insist that masks and lockdowns didn’t work, or at least made people angry, and thus we shouldn’t have done them
The weirdest part, though, is that most of these Reflections just…write out Donald Trump and anti-vaxxers? They talk about “scientists” giving mixed messages and about the CDC, but some of them straight up don’t mention Trump, and like. I feel like if you’re talking about confusing messaging about COVID, the entire response being headed by a deranged anti-vaxxer who said whatever came to his mind about how horse medicine would cure it would be a major factor to address, but apparently not! It’s just public health officials who dropped the ball. Hell, it almost feels like people have started to misremember COVID to think Biden was President during the lockdowns, just another step in the strange memory holing of Trump’s first term
(They mess up the basic history of events that happened five years ago, too, like how a lot of these takes talk about how “confusing” it was that they went from “masks are for medical professionals and the most at risk” to “masks for everyone”…without mentioning that wasn’t a random choice, but down to a shortage of masks early in the pandemic. Literally nothing was the result of outside factors or the government, all of it was just scientists confusing us for no reason)
amhrancas 