Omicron inspired ugly.

12/2/2021

The media coverage and fear mongering has been the deadliest piece of the disease.
Vaccines are helpful but not magic.
Survivors were and remain the index for success.
Mask mania spreads fear and mistrust. It was never effective and was never going to be effective.
The public health control measures are being evaluated against the self identified public health success criteria and the “goalposts” move to manage the message. This is politics, pandering, and propaganda 101. It is NOT science.
The best protection is for each individual to choose to protect themselves. This choice protects both liberty and society.
What works?
Selective social distancing. Don’t go out of sick same as always.
Healthy living.
Fresh air, filters, and fellowship.
Education and personal responsibility.
Therapeutics and actual medical science in place of promises and political science.
Drugs… that said, Vaccines don’t protect against the spread, they only lesson the impact of infection. They are not equivalent to natural immunity. Why are they being “mandated” if the effect isn’t complete? Use all of the drugs available at direction of your doctor not government agencies.

We MUST Question the premise of every statement from an “official” and if it stands up to clarification and scrutiny at scale and duration, then perhaps follow the guidance. Ignore speculation. Questioning and proving/disproving IS science. That is, if you are even allowed to question.

If you posit that our collective response was a failure then the real question is why are the same failed control and fear measures still being deployed.
Consider that the Covid response model exemplifies psychological warfare more than it does the practice of medicine.
Diminishing trust and access to proven medicine in hospitals, offices, clinics, and even schools is and was a choice. Leaders stopped thinking and panicked. In their rush to maintain power and influence, they traded respect and influence degrading results. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t mean to kill millions. They did it. History will prove me and so many others to be correct.

None of us is promised tomorrow.
The mandates’ isolations from family, friends, fellowship, and faith are devastating and wrong.

1 Comment

Dominic Inferrera

12/6/2021 01:30:44 am

Boy, is it ever a struggle.

I’m finding that it’s more than just a divide among political lines, although that is a metric many people are blindly clinging to. At the risk of making my situation more important than it is, I’ve been in the “front lines” of performing arts groups in NYC as much as anyone who is still gigging here. Out of self-preservation, I’ve chosen to mostly comply and keep my mouth shut with the protocols of the day, whatever they may be (and they do change literally by the day), and I’m gleaning a lot of interesting insights, sometimes through surprising and unexpected places.

To the credit of the musical community and several producing organizations, we have begun again in earnest. Small and intermediate organizations seem to have done better than large venues such as the NY Phil, who has made less than zero effort to bring back New York singing artists to their stage. Fodder for another thread.

Attrition among musicians has been severe. Some through financial necessity, geographic relocation, and some unfortunately through fear. After the initial two or three months of the pandemic I made the decision that I would consider any gig offered to me under any performing protocols, allowing for the same pre-pandemic considerations of whether said gig was worth the time, artistic level, and all that. I found out soon enough that by virtue of simply making myself available, I’m being asked for just about everything. And I’m grateful.

Almost all gigs are requiring PCR tests, masks, and vaccination. We comply, I comply. Whether the protocols are based on epidemiological science or not is highly debatable, but the musicians who have decided to stick it out are motivated by our mission to not let our industry wither and be diluted by zoom concerts. The art of singing has suffered a bad rap being tagged as some super-spreading phenomenon, but I seem to remember the Italian bel canto masters having to sing with a lit candle in front of their mouth to ensure their technique did the exact opposite. Yet i digress.

So-called “singer masks” are now the norm, and by god I wish I had gotten in on the ground floor of this scam. One popular version now unapologetically has a disclaimer that it it is not proven to mitigate spread at all and has no epidemiological benefit, yet the compliance theater wins out more for liability issues than actual safety. Happily, many singers are beginning to see through this and voicing their skepticism. I’d like to believe that’s as much progress as one could expect. Suffice it to say, singing with a mask sucks, o matter what nifty design it is. I’d like to think we’ll get back to full facial nudity before long. Maybe I should take more of an advocacy role, but there’s the real concern of sacrificing my livelihood and reputation.

A friend today expressed the same concerns to me in confidence knowing my predilections for calling out unscientific bullshit, and this person is not the first. This person thought that the two of us were in the minority of not the only ones who felt this way, and I intimated that there are a LOT more of us that feel this way than (s)he believes.

My modus operandi is to be 90% listener, 10% talker.

I’ll keep you posted.

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