|   Ben Scallan   |   Featured

Those that spent years terrifying the elderly now want them to relax

The announcement that many older people are still living in lonely isolation after Covid is tragic – but not surprising.

This week the Irish government announced the new “Hello Again World” campaign, urging the elderly to re-enter public life rather than living in a state of loneliness and Covid dread.

In an open letter to the elderly, the Chief Medical Officer listed all the negative physical and psychological impacts of loneliness on the human mind, and highlighted the real inherent danger of isolating oneself from social contact.

This, of course, contains a tacit admission of what many of us already knew or could have predicted – that the terror instilled by politicians and the press during the pandemic has left many people with long-lasting psychological damage.

This fear is, and was, wildly disproportionate, of course. And we know that for a fact thanks to polling.

For example, a poll in the UK in July of 2020 found that the average Briton believed Covid had killed 7% of the UK population – a figure which was off by a factor of 100.

In other words, they believed Covid to be 100 times deadlier than it actually was – and this was no doubt due to a relentless barrage of media scaremongering.

While this poll was conducted in the UK, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that much of the Irish public likely felt similarly, considering our press and “experts” were no less hysterical at the time.

For example, we had reports of how the virus could kill 180,000 people in Ireland, and that it would be like “Spanish Flu, the Civil War & 1929 Stock Market Crash” rolled into one.

At the time of this article being written, after more than 3 years, Ireland has incurred a total of 8,691 deaths with Covid. It’s impossible to say how many of these were caused directly by the virus, but even by the most charitable reading, the panic level was not even close to proportional.

We had ISAG’s Professor Gerry Killeen telling Virgin Media’s audience that we were going to see “refrigerator trucks and mass graves,” along with “in the region of twenty to thirty thousand fatalities.”

We even had Irish publications describing the scenes from Wuhan as a “zombie land” situation.

Is it really a surprise, then, that so many people are living in a state of abject dread years later?

Older people, of course, can’t be blamed for this; in fact, it would be strange if they weren’t still fearful.

After all, authority figures that they trusted spent years saying that we were living through a world-ending nightmare virus that could kill them at any moment. And if you really believed that, it would be very odd to go from a state of intense fear, to absolute calm in the blink of an eye.

Around this time last year, the government officially began to reverse its various lockdown policies. But it turns out that the human psyche is not nearly as malleable and easy to turn around as legislation – you can’t flip fear on and off like a lightswitch. It stays with people on a deep level, sometimes for a lifetime.

In fact, it’s actually more unusual that so many went from a state of supposed deathly panic, to living their lives normally again like nothing happened, all because a man in a suit on the television told them to. That is actually far more unnatural and irrational – to have such unwarranted faith in flawed so-called experts with poor track records of accuracy, that you allow them to effectively dictate your mood on a moment to moment basis.

“If a man with a PhD tells me to soil myself in fear, I’ll do it on the spot. And the minute he tells me stop shrieking in terror, and nonchalantly wander down to the Paddy’s Day parade with thousands of others like everything’s normal, I’ll do that too. Your wish is my command, Dr. Labcoat.”

That is actually significantly weirder than an older person still living in fear of Covid like a remote Japanese soldier decades after World War 2 ended. At least they’re thinking consistently – their only mistake was trusting the wrong people.

The really sick part of it all is, more people are actually dying every day now than they were during the pandemic when you look at all-cause mortality. Excess deaths are up massively, and nobody in power seems remotely interested in figuring out why.

But when there were actually less deaths, that’s when the public had the life frightened out of them for no good reason. That’s when the media machine’s gears kicked into action to terrify the elderly and induce sheer panic.

Someone needs to be held accountable for this, and a proper Covid inquiry cannot come soon enough.

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