Thread by @antiviral_mktng

People think COVID is mild because, if it's dangerous, it means you can't trust any authority figure's statements from the past four years. It means every institution has failed.

It's an absolute epistemic and political crisis.

It just can't be true.

"If we needed to mask, the government would tell us to mask."

"RFK said the vax causes blood clots."

"My doctor said I didn't need Paxlovid."

"But all the doctors on TV say we're fine now that we have the vaccine!"

Imagine *actually* having the epiphany that everybody is lying to you.

Now you have to do your own research. How do you even do that?

Shit, you might even have long covid already.

Shit.

Oh my god, how am I going to explain this to my partner?

Are we going to have to take the kids out of school?

What will I tell my boss?

Shit.

What are we going to do with public health?

Who controls the government now? How can somebody be so powerful that they can *invent facts*?

How can I trust anything my doctor says???

Shit!!!

If you're conservative, you now have a massive crisis which capitalism has utterly failed to solve, indeed cannot solve, and clearly requires urgent government intervention. Shit.

If you're progressive, the government is clearly corrupt, having totally failed us, including every party, including and especially the left-wing ones, and the only fleeting response at the moment is individualism. Individuals are masking and building CR boxes. Shit.

Imagine being a doctor and realizing your medical training overlooked the most important and basic fundamentals of patient safety, and that you were taught outright pseudoscience by charlatans, and that you repeated these lies *confidently* to patients who trusted you. Shit.

We dug the hole too deep.

The only "way out" now is to keep pretending.

It can't be true.