You know the theory. It supposes that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out. But if you start at a low temperature and gradually heat the water, the frog will sit there until it’s cooked to death.
President Biden promised to end the COVID pandemic but, in this and everything else, he has failed. Biden’s policies are not based on science but on the COVID fear that is peddled by the media and the guesswork of “experts” and liberals whose only desire is to limit Americans’ personal liberties. The result of Biden’s policies is that we are all simmering frogs.
Benjamin Franklin once said: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” How many restrictions on travel, compulsions to get vaccinated, and orders to mask our faces are we going to tolerate? How long will we allow schools and colleges to impose bans on in-person teaching?
Like it or not, the COVID pandemic is going to be with us for a long time and probably permanently. COVID is endemic, no longer a pandemic. Biden’s actions have proved ineffective but that won’t stop him and the state governors and city mayors who are loyal to woke ideology from restricting Americans’ freedoms.
Even after more than two years of the pandemic, too little is known about the rapidly mutating virus and the ways and means to limit its spread. Vaccines don’t immunize us from the virus, but they are effective in limiting the seriousness of the disease and only about one in five thousand vaccinated people actually become infected with COVID.
Airliner air is filtered through several stages. It’s about the safest air you can breathe outside your own home. So why does everyone on every U.S. flight have to wear a mask all the time?
Many if not most of the statistics that allegedly guide Biden’s policies are faulty. We are told that about 400,000 COVID-related deaths have occurred since Biden was inaugurated and some two thousand more are dying every day.
A “COVID-related death” may not have been caused by the virus at all. Hospitals check each incoming patient for COVID and if the test is positive for the virus and the patient dies, they label the death “COVID-related.” In June 2021, Alameda County, California, admitted that its supposedly COVID-related deaths were exaggerated by 25 percent. International data are totally unreliable because nations such as China, where the COVID-19 virus originated, take every measure necessary to hide the virus’s effect on their countries.
Using the data published by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), we see that there have been about 70.1 million U.S. cases of COVID resulting in about 864,000 deaths. Also using CDC’s numbers for the worst case scenario, there were about 35 million cases of the flu in 2020-2021 resulting in 80,000 deaths.
Those numbers work out to about 1.2 deaths per thousand from COVID cases and 2.28 deaths per thousand from flu cases. The odds of recovering from COVID are very high. So why are we listening to the COVID fear-peddlers?
There are too many examples — vaccine mandates, lockdowns of businesses and schools, and mask mandates come immediately to mind — of our liberties being limited for no good reason to accommodate fear of the virus. One of Americans’ greatest liberties is to travel where we’d like and when we’d like but that’s not possible any longer.
Americans with valid passports cannot enter their own country from abroad unless they can produce a negative COVID test taken within 24 hours of their flight. If anyone tests positive for the virus they have to be quarantined — at their own expense — for an indefinite period until he or she gets a negative test. In some countries — Thailand comes to mind — it may mean being quarantined in a Thai field hospital where proper treatment — antibodies, anyone? — is unavailable and exposure to other, more dangerous, diseases is all too likely.
Contrast this with the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants that come into the U.S. every day. There is no requirement for them to be tested or vaccinated before they are sent off to all parts of our country. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that some who are symptomatic are tested. According to an NBC report last August, more than 18 percent of illegal alien families, and 20 percent of minors, tested positive for COVID. Nevertheless, they’re released into the U.S. and often flown to cities far from the southern border where they entered.
And what is the testing requirement for Americans meant to accomplish other than restricting our travel? The virus’s several forms are already here so no tests or quarantines are going to prevent it from entering the country. New variants may erupt at any time, anywhere, including within the U.S.
Biden vaccination and travel restriction policies for Americans are intolerable. Open borders bring disease, threaten our national security, and burden our economy. Closing them to illegals is a goal easily reached, but closing borders to Americans unless they produce a negative test is a clear infringement on our right to travel.
Are we going to stop all international travel and trade to prevent the next COVID variant from coming into the U.S.? Of course not, so whatever new variant develops will soon spread here despite any limits on Americans’ travel.
Biden is limiting trade in nonsensical ways. The Department of Homeland Security announced that beginning on January 22, people seeking legal entry into the U.S. — such as truck drivers coming from Canada and Mexico — would be required to prove they have been vaccinated. That’s only going to exacerbate the supply-chain crisis which Biden apparently doesn’t care about.
Masks, as I have written before, are ineffective to stop the spread of COVID. Even CDC admits that cloth or paper masks are useless. The diameter of the COVID virus is about eight nanometers. The best N95 masks can stop particles larger than six microns — about a thousand times larger than the virus — which means that the COVID particles can easily slip through.
All masks can do is help — not stop — someone who is infected from spreading the disease by sneezing or coughing. Droplets of moisture released when coughing or sneezing may be caught, but that doesn’t prevent the virus from spreading when its particles are breathed through a mask.
Or they may be caught by air filters on aircraft. Airliner air is filtered through several stages. It’s about the safest air you can breathe outside your own home. So why does everyone on every U.S. flight have to wear a mask all the time? You will be scolded into wearing a mask or your air travel privileges can be revoked if you don’t wear a useless paper mask. Stewardi even require you to put your mask on between bites of food or sips of drinks.
Everyone entering a U.S. airport or airliner has to wear a mask despite the fact that masks are ineffective. Why do we put up with this?
Biden now wants to send 500 million free test kits to American households. Why bother? No airline, hospital, or other entity will accept the result because people can lie about the results.
Instead of his anti-freedom policies Biden should order mass production of effective antibody treatments and make them commonly available. That would be too sensible for him to do. Biden limited shipments of those treatments to Texas and Florida, whose governors oppose him. He’s also followed the example of New York City and made treatments available based on race.
CDC’s latest guidelines provide that even if you’ve had two anti-COVID vaccine shots you don’t qualify as fully vaccinated unless you get a third shot. No one knows if this is true. Israeli studies have shown the booster shot isn’t effective against the Omicron variant, but a study by Pfizer found it is.
And then there are Biden’s vaccine mandates which have attempted
to override personal choice. Two — one for employees of large companies and another for government employees — have already been overturned by the Supreme Court. Others, covering the U.S. military for example, remain in place.
Why military members are different from other federal employees should be obvious. They swore to risk or lose their lives for our country, but should that mean we discharge thousands of troops, sailors, Marines, and airmen — thus reducing military readiness — over the vaccine mandate? No, it shouldn’t.
In the rest of the civilian world, getting the vaccine shots is and should be a personal choice. I and my family are all vaccinated and have received the booster shot as well. But some of my friends — highly intelligent people — fear that the mRNA vaccines, which are supposed to guard against the virus’s DNA, may affect their DNA as well. To finally determine that will take twenty years or more.
Biden should take his cue from the British government. Last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ended all of the UK’s masking and vaccine requirements, vaccine passports, travel restrictions, and social distancing. That more or less returns the UK to a pre-COVID normal.
There will be no return to any sort of pre-COVID normal while Biden is in office. The media will continue to stoke fears of the virus and that’s enough for Old Joe. We have to look forward to 2025 for any relief from Biden’s fear-based and guesswork-based policies.