The pants-wetting hysteria that public health officials, politicians, and the media tried shoving down our throats over the Omicron variant has proved to be a huge joke.

Thankfully, Omicron – while highly contagious – is apparently the equivalent of a bad cold. And yet the panic push is continuing for some. School districts nationwide are either closing “temporarily” or requiring testing to return, or threatening to shut down. But reality is beginning to sink in, ever so slightly, to those on the left and in public health.

For example, here is MSNBC’s Chris Hayes saying, “hey, we can’t keep doing this.”

Oh, how convenient. You see, now that the “good” people are coming down with COVID, despite having followed all the rules from High Priest Fauci and believing wholeheartedly in the power of government to protect them, the narrative must change. Why? In order to justify keeping control, of course. Which means that we have always been at war with Eastasia, and Bill de Blasio (good riddance to bad rubbish) has always been against shutdowns.

NBC's Kristen Welker: "Given that some local officials are calling for you to cancel the in-person event altogether, why not scale back [NYC's ball drop] even further?"

Bill de Blasio: "Look, I don't believe in shutdowns. We have to fight our way through Covid." pic.twitter.com/lfS8U5HvwV

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 30, 2021

Anyone else feel like uttering a few profanities after listening to that one? That is the very definition of gaslighting.

But the worst of the worst is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has pretzeled himself into every conceivable position when it comes to public health policy, COVID, and lockdowns, now deciding to admit that pediatric COVID cases have been “overcounted.”

MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin, filling in for Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night, asked President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser to respond to the omicron variant fueling a rise in children ending up in the hospital. Fauci said the surge in numbers has two contributing factors.”

“First of all, quantitatively, you’re having so many more people, including children, who are getting infected. And even though hospitalization among children is much, much lower on a percentage basis than hospitalizations for adults, particularly elderly individuals,” he said, “when you have such a large volume of infections among children, even with a low level of rate of infection, you’re going to still see a lot more children who get hospitalized.”

“But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID,” Fauci continued. “And what we mean by that — if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID. And they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s overcounting the number of children who are, quote, ‘hospitalized with COVID,’ as opposed to because of COVID.”

If the tweet below with the video of Fauci saying this gets disappeared, a link to a non-YouTube video site is carrying it here. Hmmm, I wonder why this isn’t available on YouTube?

Saying this on Twitter would be cause for suspension just a few months ago. https://t.co/S2fSBOjdnA

— Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) December 31, 2021

Even as much as the social media giants might try to suppress the message, Fauci admitting this out loud is a signal to public health officials and to the media. Time to shift the narrative if we want people to keep listening to us!

However, as Glenn Reynolds points out, there should be a reckoning for the lies that have been told. We cannot forget how the American public has been cruelly bullied during this entire pandemic by those who claimed they knew best.

Mistakes are forgivable. In the early days, everything we knew came from the Chinese government, and while we now know that Beijing lies about everything, we knew less then. In fact, it not only lied about the disease’s origins, its nature and its spread, it kept the Wuhan airport open for weeks, allowing (deliberately?) the disease to take hold all over the planet before anyone else knew it was coming.”

And in a fast-moving situation with imperfect information, mistakes are inevitable and hence forgivable. Nobody’s perfect.”

But lies and political manipulation are different. Those are a betrayal of trust, and they’re especially serious because trust is the public-health community’s greatest asset. The record here has been terrible, and we need investigation and accountability.”

Early on, public-health officials minimized COVID’s dangers, with Anthony Fauci telling people that it was safe to go on cruises. Maybe that was just a mistake. But then Fauci told people not to wear masks because they didn’t help, changing his position within a couple of weeks to become stringently pro-mask. The earlier statement, it turned out, wasn’t based on his scientific opinion but on a desire to reserve masks for health-care workers — a worthy goal, but that doesn’t justify the lying.”

Reynolds’s whole column is worth a read, and he points out what Glenn Greenwald pointed out just recently – the moment that broke the trust of many people was when public health officials declared BLM protests okay, but nothing else.

That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they'd politicize their expertise when convenient.

Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests. pic.twitter.com/DvOzIr5JX8

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2021

The message of the elites is shifting because the facts no longer support their extremes. The problem is, once we had information that wasn’t coming from China, their solutions NEVER matched the facts. And no one, beyond Senator Rand Paul and a few others, is trying to hold Fauci and company accountable.

The other reason the message is shifting? As of tomorrow, we are officially in a midterm election year. Brace yourselves, the gaslighting and rewriting of history is about to become extreme. Hang on to your receipts – you’ll need them.

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Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click