Is Another Pandemic On The Horizon? 6 Mistakes We Won't Be Repeating This Time Around

At the onset of a crisis, people are understandably flustered, directionless, confused, and scared. The outbreak of Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns were no exception to this rule. Lockdown advocates told us all that there was simply no time to worry about the details – we had to shelter in place quickly as though we were evading nuclear fallout, or else we risked killing grandma. Unless we had the wealth and resources to avoid lockdowns, of course! But even public health officials who had our best interests in mind (as well as the segment of those who definitely didn’t) coerced us into long, drawn-out lockdowns and made many numb to the concept of central planning. 

Though we had all been taught from a young age to stay home when we’re feeling sick (voluntary social distancing) or cover our coughs or sneezes when around others (voluntary covering of your face), the government and prestige media circulated narratives around the transmission of sickness that resulted in a confiscation of normalcy and, in many cases, our livelihoods. 

A few months ago, the White House announced that the national state of emergency brought on by Covid-19 would finally end. If that’s the case, why is it that they’re still enforcing face masks and social distancing mandates for unvaccinated guests at government events? 

Some believe another public health crisis could be on the horizon after the chief of WHO stated, "When the next pandemic comes knocking – and it will – we must be ready to answer decisively, collectively, and equitably,” according to the United Nations. Tedros is warning of "another pathogen emerging with even deadlier potential". And even if that alone doesn't spook you, others believe that now that the ruling class has found their framework for control, some other hysteria could be manufactured, whether that’s the threat of war or cultural panic that leads to riots in the streets.

No matter what the case is, we’ve learned a lot of lessons from the reaction to Covid-19, and if we know what’s good for us, we’re not going to blindly allow history to repeat itself.

1. Masks Likely Caused More Harm Than They Did Good

Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, you’d be hard-pressed to find people out and about in public wearing surgical face masks. Perhaps if you lived in or often traveled to Asia – where it’s culturally more common to wear face coverings out of courtesy if you’re feeling unwell, to give a sense of protection from environmental pollutants, or even as a fashion statement – you may have come across people masking up, but it was arguably less common to see such a thing in Western nations.

Still, face masks, scarves, cloths, and a variety of different facial coverings have been used in medical settings for centuries now, but their efficacy has long been debated. Infectious diseases are no joke, and while we should be cognizant of how our germs can and do spread, we should separate proof from placebo. There are settings and situations where facial coverings would be a smart choice, since they can filter out a degree of large and small particles. If you’re genuinely a frontline healthcare worker dealing with serious disease, you or a family member is high risk or if, perhaps, there’s a serious wildfire or dust storm near you, then there’s no judgment here if you want to mask up.

We learned from Covid-19, however, that mask mandates were, more often than not, ineffective. A meta-analysis reviewing randomized trials to determine the effectiveness that large-scale masking efforts had to “stop the spread” found “little to no” evidence that surgical masks offered protection in the general population. Furthermore, the researchers found that even N95 respirator masks were lacking in providing extra protection to healthcare workers. In an interview, lead author on the study, Tom Jefferson, said that “there is just no evidence” that masks “make any difference.” 

Another bit of bombshell research recently came from an Oxford University epidemiologist who found that mask mandates really didn’t do much to protect people from Covid-19 or slow the spread of the virus. Yet, good ol’ Dr. Anthony Fauci fed us wishy-washy guidance on masks from the start!

Like sheep following their shepherd, many people blindly adopted masking in public settings but also went along with really baffling masking measures like wearing them while sitting alone at a cubicle or driving alone in a car. I fully sympathize with people who have a heightened sense of anxiety about contracting and spreading illness or those who are just a bit germaphobic (I mean, some people can be pretty unhygienic!), but let’s not pretend that we didn’t make some really detrimental trade-offs.

Perhaps if people weren’t coaxed into wearing masks for 8-10 hours a day, people wouldn’t be developing oral health threats like “mask mouth syndrome,” experiencing psychological complexes which manifest in heightened social anxiety, or struggling through developmental delays and cognitive complications. In Japan, some people now undergo coaching in order to relearn the art of… smiling.

So, spare me the “holier than thou” act. We know the truth about masking, and we’re unimpressed by performative, self-flagellating “activism.” If they try to tell us to #MaskUp in order to move freely in society, pardon us for pushing back!

2. Kids Really Weren’t at Risk and Shouldn’t Have Been Kept Home

If you were a student during Covid-19, you probably had your entire world flipped upside down. You missed out on milestones that every other generation could look back fondly on – from proms to graduation ceremonies to just experiencing normal classroom settings that were once part and parcel of the American students’ life. 

Children as young as three were forced to mask up if they wanted to participate in IRL school, rather than Zoom school. Schools cracked the whip on “social distancing” guidelines: placing student desks six-plus feet apart, restricting and reorganizing student groupings to prevent intermixing, canceling field trips and limiting extracurriculars, shutting down communal areas like cafeterias or playgrounds, and limiting the number of students on school buses, among many others.

What did this amount to? Well, as it turns out, kids weren’t exactly affected by Covid-19 like the prestige media insisted they would be. A New York Times reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, falsely and drastically over-exaggerated the volume of child hospitalizations, further fueling hysteria. Mandavilli wrote in 2021 that “nearly 900,000 children” had been hospitalized since the beginning of Covid-19. This claim warranted a tragically comedic correction: The real number was 63,000 child hospitalizations, which made Mandavilli’s reporting off by 837,000 cases.

Not only did school closures and restructurings seriously affect the mental health and educational outcomes for children and teenagers, but they also fostered an incredibly stressful environment for parents and teachers who felt overworked, demoralized, and had to make difficult decisions about their careers and families.

3. Social Distancing and Universal Lockdowns Didn’t Slow or Stop the Spread

Remember when those first few cruise ships were quarantined and a bit of buzz began to spread about the potential need for shelter-in-place (SIP) policies or other universal lockdown measures? It felt like mere moments had passed before we were thrust headlong into mandatory stay-at-home orders and businesses were shuttered.

From 2020 onward, lockdowns came and went whenever it seemed politically convenient to keep people indoors. We got a great model from the Chinese Communist Party, where critics were silenced, power was consolidated, and authoritarian-minded leaders tried to enforce a one-sided narrative. This stood in direct opposition to Western, freedom-focused values: questioning authority where necessary, being open-minded to independent media, and allowing people – not politicians – to determine what’s best for the individual.

We were reassured that lockdowns were just temporary trade-offs for the common good and that we’d be back to normal in no time. Instead, we disrupted our lives en masse and allowed prestige media like Reuters to “fact check” public policy, guiding politicians into making life-changing decisions. These decisions cost us much more than we could have anticipated.  

Stay-at-home mandates were largely based on computer-generated forecasts from empirically untested models, but in the end, the fictional outcome was nothing like the real outcome. Reports have since been released which showed that implementing Covid-19 SIP policies didn’t lower excess deaths and that Covid-19 case growth could’ve been reduced through less draconian interventions.

No matter what, we cannot gloss over the fact that lockdowns were intended to “stop the spread” of one issue but ended up worsening many more. One report from across the pond in particular suggested that the effects of lockdowns, such as cases of undetected disease, cancers, and mental health conditions, were killing more people than the Covid-19 virus.

Forcing people to go under lockdown may also have undermined our immune systems. Known conceptually as the “immunity gap” or “immunity debt,” many experts have suggested that social isolation away from germs prevented people from building up their immune system through natural exposure. Now, some have argued that the term has been misused since it could oversimplify how our immune system works, but that doesn’t change the fact that temporarily reducing exposure to common infectious diseases can’t prevent you from contracting them later on.

For example, two out of three babies will get RSV (a highly contagious virus which leads to respiratory illness) within their first year outside the womb, but because many parents kept their children home throughout lockdowns, exposure to RSV as well as other common viruses was limited. As a result, medical experts began warning the general public in late 2022 about a potential “tripledemic” from a lack of natural immunity to RSV, the flu, and Covid-19.

4. Vaccines Didn’t Work As Intended and Come with Genuine Risks

Trust the science! Unequivocally! The science is settled! I hear rhetoric like that and Kill Bill sirens go off in my head because, as I’ve written before, the science is never settled. From its initial planning stages to its release in August 2021, the Covid vaccine was essentially sold to the public as a golden ticket to freedom. Just get the jab, they’d tell you, and we can open back up the economy. Just get the jab, they’d tell you, and you don’t have to wear a mask indoors anymore. 

We were gaslit from the beginning and told to disregard any side effects that could prove that the vaccine's “efficacy” wasn’t worth the other health tradeoffs. For the 20% or so of us that didn’t get any Covid jab, we were ridiculed and called “anti-vaxxers” despite many not being against vaccinations in their entirety – just these rushed, experimental treatments. 

Once upon a time, many medical professionals touted a 7-year rule to avoid using any new drug until it’s been tested for at least seven years so that researchers can gather data about the safety and efficacy and conclude whether or not its benefits outweigh its potential risks.

Now a couple of summers later, and the prestige media is slowly, timidly coming out of the woodwork to report the vaccine’s ties to myocarditis, heart attack, blood clots, and abnormal menstrual patterns. At Evie, we highlighted menstrual and fertility issues related to the vaccine very early on and received a slew of hateful comments about how we were simply conspiracy theorists. No, we aren’t conspiracy theorists for publishing information that doesn’t align with the mainstream narrative; we’re doing our due diligence to tell the public the hard truths that challenge Big Pharma.

The Cleveland Clinic recently found that the higher number of vaccines a person had received, the higher their risk was for contracting Covid. Yet, many (especially healthcare workers, who were the population investigated in this particular study) were convinced to get the next booster and the next booster and the next. Imagine that, you continually and unnaturally aggravate your immune system with foreign substances and it makes you more susceptible to future infections? 

What’s more, it’s nearly impossible for the voices of those affected by vaccine-related injuries to be heard by the masses. You’d think it would be bigger news that people are suing AstraZeneca over their vaccine-related injuries, for example, but how many medical professionals are actually willing to diagnose their patients with vaccine injuries anyway? 

Government agencies and medical professionals alike are swift to tell us that various immunizations are “very safe” and that the benefits “outweigh the potential risks,” like with the HPV vaccine, but it begins to feel like the healthcare industry is less interested in addressing genuine concerns and more interested in prioritizing profits.

5. We’ll Be Feeling the Economic Impacts of Lockdowns for Years To Come

Back in 2020 at the height of lockdowns, one-fifth of working Americans faced being laid off or having their work hours cut. Some businesses can certainly thrive with WFH structures, but much of the way our world naturally operates is through in-person labor or creative collaboration.

Not every state was quick to reopen its economy, which killed off many businesses and got some people used to remaining on welfare indefinitely. In California alone (largely considered to be an economic powerhouse on the world stage), nearly 40,000 small businesses had closed by September 2020. Typically, 600,000 businesses close permanently each year, but lockdowns forced an additional 200,000 closures.

The federal government spent roughly $5 trillion to support businesses and individuals since March 2020 through more generous Medicaid policies, food stamps, new paid sick and caregiving leave benefits, and continued pandemic benefits such as child allowances or stimulus checks. 

Many safety net programs have since ended, and some may say that the “temporary” welfare state is long gone, but the implications of this public health emergency on our economy are anything but temporary. We let them take an inch by “pushing people into government dependence – and America into an even deeper fiscal and economic hole,” and now that they’ve taken a mile, is it any wonder the largest minimum wage hike proposals to date are being proposed in Congress?

Yes, our economy had a bit of a rebound, but don’t let a positive trajectory fool you. Despite our president insisting that it’s a “good day for the American economy,” reports from the Department of the Treasury affirm that our “economic output continues to fall short.”

Inflation rates rose, remained flat, and elevated once again, causing Americans, regardless of their tax bracket, to feel the burden of paying more for the same or smaller quantity of goods. Egg prices may have flattened out, but housing costs certainly haven’t, as overall housing costs were recently found to be up 8.1% compared to the same last year. Sadly, some Americans are being forced out of retirement in order to manage these uncertain living costs.

6. Government Centralization and Technocratic Censorship Isn’t Endgame

You may like your Brandy Melville babydoll tees and comfortable sweatpants (as do I, for that matter!), but one size doesn’t fit all. Covid offered us all many, many great moments to reflect on how centralization – whether that’s government centralization or technology mega-corporation censorship – is not the way to go.

In government, we watched a concentration of control amass first in Washington, but each state started to flex its own muscles. States like Texas and Florida opened back up at a quicker pace than California, and as a result, many people began to gain important insights about the division of power between our states and federal government. 

If, when a state is left to control its own people, it chooses to prolong lockdowns and mask mandates or stifle small businesses, people make like it’s the free market and flee. For example, California lost 153 major companies in 2021 alone. In the period between April 2020 and July 2022, 500,000 Californians left the state entirely. Turns out, people didn’t actually like living in crime-ridden, urban areas plagued by the “unhoused” or dealing with unaffordable housing, ridiculous gas prices, long commute times, and a worsening business climate!

But you see, that’s the power of federalism. It’s our democratic freedom to hold the government accountable. If the government isn’t working in our favor, when possible we should take advantage of any opportunity to make change. The same can be said for the technocracy that is now falling like an unstable house of cards. Once Elon Musk took over operations at Twitter and began exposing corruption within Big Tech, more voices have come out of the shadows to confirm that there was indeed a “web of deception” pushing a one-sided Covid narrative.

Now that we know the dirty tricks, we’re far less likely to allow the technocracy to mislead us. That said, we also can’t let our guard down. No matter who or where they are in the world, the ruling class won’t stop at anything to achieve a full concentration of control. Nevertheless, Americans are mostly ready to move forward. Most aren’t as fearful of contracting Covid as they once were, and they’ve since begun returning to pre-Covid normalcy. 

Closing Thoughts

Without a doubt, the American lockdowns were nothing compared to the truly draconian measures which the CCP took to exert power over Chinese citizens. And yes, we certainly weren’t being subjected to physical torture, nor were we risking death if we tried to speak out against the regime. But how far would we theoretically be willing to go in the future? Say we get struck by another crisis, and public health officials tell us that there’s just no time to worry about placing hard evidence behind their safety protocols. Will we throw our hands up in defeat, or will we be thoughtfully skeptical?

If you’ve taken even a single history course in school, you’ve inevitably heard that old adage about how if we forget past mistakes, we’re doomed to repeat them. We’ve seen how the public is perhaps a bit too comfortable accepting government power grabs during a crisis, and how the government is perhaps a bit too over-eager to grab that power away from us. Don’t let these somber memories of the past fade away; you never know when “crisis” could strike once again.

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