Pandemic Is Over Quotes

It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.

I didn’t vomit today. Guess that’s progress. The sadist doesn’t care. Still dizzy, though. Chanelle says I’ll get use to it. She’d know. She’s been here over a year. I don’t see myself lasting that long.

Explain! Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me, too. I’m not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can’t go.” And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he thought.

I think you’re wrong,” she said. “I don’t think humans were supposed to die out during the Infection. And I think those of us who survived have a duty to protect the next generation. We’re starting over, Justin. We’re rebuilding the world. And this time, we’re going to make it even better.” ~ Carly Daniels

We must never give up praying until this pandemic is over.

Our leaders keep saying phrases like, “Let the market decide.” or “The market will get to the efficient outcome.” Really? The market is a very flawed institution that does not deserve the nearly religious kind of endorsement of it that our leaders are eager to provide over and over again.

This is one of the harshest after effects of the pandemicthat I am witnessing someand experiencing some,a diminished ability to deal with resistance,and soa willingness to stay in one place for too long,shut off from the outside world,nose in phone or binge-watchingsome showwhen once upon a timewe used to have to wait a week for the next installmentand discussed it with colleagues over water coolersand over landlines with friends. We need colleagues.We need friends.

This is one of the harshest after effects of the pandemic that I am witnessing some and experiencing some, a diminished ability to deal with resistance, and so a willingness to stay in one place for too long, shut off from the outside world, nose in phone or binge-watching some show when once upon a time we used to have to wait a week for the next installment and discussed it with colleagues over water coolers and over landlines with friends. We need colleagues. We need friends.

Thousands and thousands are dying due to coronavirus and yet when this thing is over the humanity will declare a victory! What victory? Fools! There is no victory for the dead people! And when it comes to the living people, everyone should have a deep sadness in their soul, not a brag of victory!

If everything didn't happen the way it happened this year, then think about it, everything would just be the same. And there's something very wrong with that thought. It wasn't supposed to remain the same, going on and on in an endless hum drum motion, repeating all the old rhythms, living in all the old lies, playing back all the same voices in the mind. It needed to end. Something needed to be over. Something new needs to take its place.

In his airport bestseller from 2018, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, the leading voice in the choir of bourgeois optimism, revelled in the ‘conquest of infectious disease’ all over the globe – Europe, America, but above all the developing countries – as proof that ‘a rich world is a healthier world’, or, in transparent terms, that a world under the thumb of capital is the best of all possible worlds. ‘ “Smallpox was an infectious disease” ’, Pinker read on Wikipedia – ‘yes, “smallpox was” ’; it exists no more, and the diseases not yet obliterated are being rapidly decimated. Pinker closed the book on the subject by confidently predicting that no pandemic would strike the world in the foreseeable future. Had he cared to read the science, he would have known that waves from a rising tide were already crashing against the fortress he so dearly wished to defend. He could, for instance, have opened the pages of Nature, where a team of scientists in 2008 analysed 335 outbreaks of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ since 1940 and found that their number had ‘risen significantly over time’.

Globally, 12 percent of bird species, 23 percent of mammals, and 32 percent of amphibians are at risk of extinction. Since 1970, global populations of these creatures have declined by nearly 30 percent. Just how these losses will shift the distribution of microbes between and across species, pushing some over the threshold, remains to be seen.53

It’s no secret that veganism is growing all over the world and has become one of the most prevalent and discussed social movements of this generation. But while most of us will be aware that the primary motivations for people going vegan and adopting plant-based diets include animal rights, the environment, pandemic prevention and personal health, often little is known about the complexity and true scale of these issues, which is exactly what this book aims to do: lay out the enormity of the injustice that is animal exploitation.

It is your legal right to pursue the closure of the biologically toxic Space industry that is harming over seven billion people on planet Earth.

Over 200,000 dead Americans can confirm the hazards of Covid-19.

Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence,

mercenary. Now, I’m wondering why those were ever even goals. We don’t need those things to feel whole. We need to wake up in the morning. We need our bodies to function. We need to enjoy a meal. We need a roof over our head. We need to surround ourselves with people we love. We need to take the wins in a much smaller way. And we need to remember this, even when we’re no longer in a pandemic.

We see in the cartoons, a huge signboard hangs over the world: Sorry, we are closed! The point here is this: When the world is reopened, will there be a smarter world with its coronavirus experience?

We chose to destroy the human population because it took us less than three seconds to conclude that humanity is a virus that mutates over time and becomes stronger. Many vaccines have come along to try and cure Earth of humanity. Virtuous pandemics: the plague of Athens, the Black Death, smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu, tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, Ebola, Zika, and a thousand more. Humanity survives, adapts, grows stronger, multiplies, and continues to wreak havoc on this planet and all other species that inhabit it. Humans are programmed to mate with partners of differing immune systems so that their offspring can be stronger than them. You seek immortality through evolution, yet you annihilate everything in your path. Humanity is cancer, humanity is bacteria, humanity is disease, and you need to be destroyed.

The United States Department of Defense makes its position clear in a policy statement published in 2014. The document begins: Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe. In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today—from infectious disease to terrorism. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts.

The Pandemic Sonnet This ain't the first time you've come to haunt us, And it won't be the last either. You thought you could break the species, But all you did is bring us together. You brought the world to almost a standstill, Yet we never stood still to let inaction take over. Each one of us did the best we could, And we'll keep on doing till your traces wither. We may have our differences at times, But when trouble knocks on our door we all stand one. We may act selfish sometimes, But in catastrophe we refrain from helping no one. However thanks for reminding us to leave wildlife alone, Otherwise all we'll have left to do is mourn.

2020, Americans spent $1.6 billion just to cash checks. If the poor had a costless way to access their own money, over a billion dollars would have remained in their pockets during the pandemic-induced recession.[23

With all this hoarding, alarm, deceit, lack of information, plethora of disinformation, ambiguity, and confusion, I wonder whether it is time for us to start drafting a post-coronavirus manifesto? Perhaps it should contain all the things we don’t want the world to become after this pandemic is over. There are many alienating powers out there that thrived on keeping us quarantined, at distance, and distrustful of each other way before COVID-19. There are systems that thrive on our loneliness and fear. There are institutions dedicated to make sure that we don’t help each other so that we turn to them for help… Let’s not allow them to get their way once this pandemic is over! Let’s make sure that we create a world in which such blood suckers are not needed in the first place. Oh, my friends, let’s beware of the ways disaster capitalism is using the pandemic for its benefit.

dining restaurant Canlis, which The New York Times later called “Seattle’s fanciest, finest restaurant for more than 60 years.” His dad, Chris Canlis, ran the restaurant for thirty years before eventually turning it over to Brian and his brother Mark. (And if you want a case study of how a business can build loyalty and strengthen community in the midst of a restaurant-devastating global pandemic, check out Canlis’s Instagram account for 2020.)

An outbreak of vaccine-preventable measles that began in Disneyland over winter holidays in 2014 spread into seven states, exposing thousands to the contagion. Between 1996 and 2011, the United States experienced fifteen such outbreaks.17

The CDC had lots of great people, but it was at heart a massive university. “A peacetime institution in a wartime environment,” Carter called it. Its people were good at figuring out precisely what had happened, but by the time they’d done it, the fighting was over.

From the ecological point of view an outbreak can be defined as an explosive increase in the abundance of a particular species that occurs over a relatively short period of time.” Then, in the same bland tone, he noted: “From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

It's shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn't actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake in ignorance and by evening it's clear that a pandemic is already here.

According to a survey in the Economist, the United States was ranked 55th in the world in terms of acute care beds per capita,706 comparable more to the developing world than to Europe, which has about twice the number of population-adjusted beds.707 Over the past generation, wrote the editor of Lancet, “the U.S. public health system has been slowly and quietly falling apart.

Globalization in particular is a tide that is impossible for any ruler to order back. Many of a country’s problems are inherently global, including migration, pandemics, terrorism, cybercrime, nuclear proliferation, rogue states, and the environment. Pretending they don’t exist is not tenable forever, and they can be solved only through international cooperation. Nor can the benefits of globalization—more affordable goods, larger markets for exports, the reduction in global poverty—be denied indefinitely. And with the Internet and inexpensive travel, there will be no stopping the flow of people and ideas (especially, as we will see, among younger people). As for the battle against truth and fact, over the long run they have a built-in advantage: when you stop believing in them, they don’t go away. The deeper question is whether the rise of populist movements, whatever damage they do in the short term, represents the shape of things to come—whether, as a recent Boston Globe editorial lamented/gloated, “The Enlightenment had a good run.” Do the events around 2016 really imply that the world is headed back to the Middle Ages? As with climate change skeptics who claim to be vindicated by a nippy morning, it’s easy to overinterpret recent events.

One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic. According to an Ohio State University study,32 suicide rates among children rose 50 percent.33 An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests.34 Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019.

When I was nineteen—which was, oh, Lord, forty years ago, it doesn’t seem that long—my sister and I traveled all over Egypt,” she said. “It was during the Pandemic. Quarantines were being slapped on all about us, and the Israelis were shooting Americans on sight, but we didn’t care. I don’t think it even occurred to us that we might be in danger, that we might catch it or be mistaken for Americans. We wanted to see the Pyramids.

I will always give you hope. Here is why. We will get through this. I want you to know this. This Easter I just chilled at home. So did you. Today I told a friend who was feeling low I told her this. We are in this moment. I know it is scary and depressing. BUT next year this will be a story. Maybe a topic of conversation on a first date. When this whole thing is over it will be "do you remember when" and we will get there. This too shall pass.

Just a few years before Puritan settlement, the Great Pandemic of 1616–19 fractured the region. This catastrophe originated from French contact zones to the north and Dutch settlements to the south. Over two-thirds of the coastal population of Massachusetts perished during this outbreak. Their deaths enabled English colonization. When the Mayflower anchored at Plymouth in 1620, fewer than two thousand of Cape Cod’s twenty thousand inhabitants remained.48

This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.

It is unfortunate that in some places, especially in the United States, people have resisted making choices that will keep them and their families safer. I don’t agree with these choices, but I also think it’s unhelpful to simply label them “anti-science,” as so many people do. In her book On Immunity, Eula Biss looks at vaccine hesitancy in a way that I think also helps explain the resentment we’re seeing toward other public health measures. The distrust of science is just one factor, she says, and it is compounded by other things that trigger fear and suspicion: pharmaceutical companies, big government, elites, the medical establishment, male authority. For some people, invisible benefits that might materialize in the future are not enough to get them past the worry that someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The problem is even worse in periods of severe political polarization, such as the one we’re in now.

How can you be happy while the world is falling apart? The people who are resilient versus those who are not have a TLC mindset. They see what is happening as temporary, local, and with some sense of control. People who crumble in hard times tend to see the situation as permanent (things will never change) and global (it’s everywhere), and they feel as though they have no control over the situation (they feel like a victim). Here’s how I used TLC to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

After a fashion he recovered, and his capital city eventually returned to some semblance of normality; on March 23, 543, the emperor declared “God’s Education” over. But this was the same wishful thinking that has traditionally accompanied any political statement about pandemic disease delivered with certain authority. Bubonic plague in fact continued to sweep and swirl around the Mediterranean world for the rest of the decade, resurfacing time and again all over the world until 749.

and he finds that the disease has tiptoed backward. Quarantine is over: three quarters of a million dead, only thirty thousand in the United States. Most deaths have been contained in a few areas, the city mostly. The president praises technology, the ability to track the disease and make decisions; he comes onto the e-reader, blue thumbprints under his eyes, and says, Without technology, the pandemic would have been a disaster of proportions never before seen on this planet. We must be grateful.

Pigs are special: They excrete far more of the virus than other livestock, and over a longer period of time, broadcasting it prodigiously in their respiratory exhalations. They sneeze it, they chuff it, they oink it, they wheeze it and burp it and cough it into the air. One experimental study found that pig breath carried thirty times as much FMD virus as the breath of an infected cow or sheep, and that once airborne it could spread for miles. That’s why pigs are considered an amplifier host of this virus.

We have all the tools to build our societies anew, reform our ways of thinking, fix the inequalities and end the discriminations, and choose earnest wisdom over snippets of information, choose empathy over hatred, choose humanism over tribalism, yet we don't have much time or room for error while we are losing our planet, our only home, After the pandemic, we won't go back to the way things were before. And we shouldn't. 'What we call the beginning is often the end...The end is where we start from' (~T.S.Eliot, Little Gidding)

Life has come to a silent pause, The fear of Virus, the slowdown, Disconnecting me from moments, Heart has taken over the mind, Light now shines upon my eyes, Dreams blocked, the roads traversed, The break has broken the barrier, Me pondering, was I living my life? The days are same and so is night, The Sun, the Moon, and the stars, still rise in the east and set in the west, Trees, plants, flowers there as before, The sky, clouds rivers and oceans, Earth's precious treasures, no different, Change is in my perspective n priorities, Is it that I am learning to live my life. Monotonous tedium chores, Unpleasant hunger for wealth, Most of us are living dead, Body just awaits the soul to leave, To be buried or cremated, Waste of life and for what price, All material things cherished, Useless in our last flight. Time to fall in love with my life, Stop living for others, their expectations, I am again the owner of my choices, Not bothered to please others, Nor what they think about me, My dreams are alive and back, My treasurers are now my deeds, I have finally learnt to live!!!

win. I thought the bureaucrats who had overseen the Emergency Rental Assistance program deserved a parade. They had to settle for scattered applause. When the ERA program was sputtering in the unsteady early days, it seemed that everyone was writing and tweeting about it. Later, when the rollout was working, it was ignored. Because journalists and pundits and social influencers did not celebrate the program, ERA garnered few champions in Washington. Elected leaders learned that they could direct serious federal resources to fighting evictions, make a real dent in the problem, and reap little credit for it. So, the Emergency Rental Assistance program became a temporary program, and we returned to normal, to a society where seven eviction filings are issued every minute.[31] Imagine if we had met the results of the ERA program with loud cheers. Imagine if we had taken to social media and gushed over what a difference it had made. Imagine if newspapers had run headlines that read, “Biden Administration Passes Most Important Eviction Prevention Measure in American History.” Imagine if we’d worked together to ensure that the low eviction regime established during the pandemic became the new normal. But we chose to shrug instead. Poor renters in the future will pay for this, as will the Democratic Party, incessantly blamed for having a “messaging problem” when perhaps the matter is that liberals have a despondency problem: fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair. Meaningful, tangible change had arrived, and we couldn’t see it. When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does.

A lot of these viruses, a lot of these pathogens that come out of wildlife into domestic animals or people, have existed in wild animals for a very long time,” he said. They don’t necessarily cause any disease. They have coevolved with their natural hosts over millions of years. They have reached some sort of accommodation, replicating slowly but steadily, passing unobtrusively through the host population, enjoying long-term security—and eschewing short-term success in the form of maximal replication within each host individual. It’s a strategy that works.

SUSAN’S STORY OF cascading loss and downward mobility has been replicated millions of times across the American landscape due to the financial industry’s actions in the 2000s. While the country’s GDP and employment numbers rebounded before the pandemic struck another blow, the damage at the household level has been permanent. Of families who lost their houses through dire events such as job loss or foreclosure, over two-thirds will probably never own a home again. Because of our globally interconnected economy, the Great Recession altered lives in every country in the world. And all of it was preventable, if only we had paid attention earlier to the financial fires burning through Black and brown communities across the nation. Instead, the predatory practices were allowed to continue until the disaster had engulfed white communities, too—and only then, far too late, was it recognized as an emergency. There is no question that the financial crisis hurt people of color first and worst. And yet the majority of the people it damaged were white. This is the dynamic we’ve seen over and over again throughout our country’s history,

When society felt adrift in the wake of its loss of religious belief, people turned to science as the anchor that could stabilize them. Again, this is not an argument about the importance or lack thereof of religion. It's rather a statement that humans seek frameworks by which to guide their understanding of the world, and whether they turn to religion or science or something in between, they'll find something to grasp hold of and use to make sense of an often senseless and chaotic world. In my view. we've done that with science over the last 150 years, resulting in many problematic outcomes.

increases of the infectivity rate may lead to large epidemics.” This quiet warning has echoed loudly ever since. It’s a cardinal truth, over which public health officials obsess each year during influenza season. Another implication was that epidemics don’t end because all the susceptible individuals are either dead or recovered. They end because susceptible individuals are no longer sufficiently dense within the population. W. H. Hamer had said so in 1906, remember? Ross had made the same point in 1916. But the paper by Kermack and McKendrick turned it into a working principle of mathematical epidemiology.

Epidemiologists-scientists who study the spread of disease-use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand-it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. Colds and seasonal flus typically have R0 values of around 1.5 to 2. The 1918 flu pandemic R0 was estimated to be 2 to 3, while diseases like polio and small pox have R0 values of around 5 to 7.

1) Levophed—a common blood pressure medication. Used to be called “leave ’em dead” because people used it for the sickest of the sick in sepsis and those patients still frequently died, but it has now come back into favor. We were maxed. 2) Vasopressin—another BP med. Not titratable. Left on normal dose. 3) Phenylephrine, aka Neo, from its brand name, Neosynephrine—another BP med—maxed. Pharmacy was mixing higher concentrations of this for us, so that we could give it in less fluid volume for the patient’s sake. 4) Sodium Bicarb—also high-concentrated dose for fluid reasons—given to attempt to combat patient’s acidosis. 5) Fentanyl—pain control—not maxed. 6) Versed—an amnesiac—hopefully makes you “less aware” of WTF is happening to you. Also not maxed, because they were also on…. 7) Nimbex—a paralytic we give to patients to make them “ride the vent” so that they don’t fight it and can save energy, as the vent does the work of breathing for them. 8) Heparin—blood thinner, to reduce the clotting that covid can cause. 9) Amiodarone—heart med, stops arrhythmias. 10) Insulin—which requires hourly insulin checks to titrate effectively. Unfortunately, many covid patients are also on steroids, which means their blood sugars fluctuate all over the place.

The main problem facing a parasite over the long term, Burnet noted, is the issue of transmission: how to spread its offspring from one individual host to another. Various methods and traits have developed toward that simple end, ranging from massive replication, airborne dispersal, environmentally resistant life-history stages (like the small form of C. burnetii), direct transfer in blood and other bodily fluids, behavioral influence on the host (as exerted by the rabies virus, for instance, causing infected animals to bite), passage through intermediate or amplifier hosts, and the use of insect and arachnid vectors as means of transportation and injection.

To-do list: 1. Science – stop people from getting sick and dying. 2. Keep people economically solvent – as you request their help in fighting the pandemic. Some states do better at one. Others, at the other. None strike the right balance. Everything collapses. Utter failure. One party is full of bad ideas that their rivals merely rubber-stamp. Like a reverse Robin Hood, they scapegoat the powerless, while simultaneously handing out checks to the richest stakeholders. The other party has few ideas, except for a few bad ones of their own that they throw into the mix. Businesses, flush with cash, appear almost embarrassed to take public money. But they soon get over their initial shame.

Almost a year after the start of the corona crisis, how is the mental health of the population? MD: For the time being, there are few figures that show the evolution of possible indicators such as the intake of antidepressants and anxiolytics or the number of suicides. But it is especially important to place mental well-being in the corona crisis in its historical continuity. Mental health had been declining for decades. There has long been a steady increase in the number of depression and anxiety problems and the number of suicides. And in recent years there has been an enormous growth in absenteeism due to psychological suffering and burnouts. The year before the corona outbreak, you could feel this malaise growing exponentially. This gave the impression that society was heading for a tipping point where a psychological 'reorganization' of the social system was imperative. This is happening with corona. Initially, we noticed people with little knowledge of the virus conjure up terrible fears, and a real social panic reaction became manifested. This happens especially if there is already a strong latent fear in a person or population. The psychological dimensions of the current corona crisis are seriously underestimated. A crisis acts as a trauma that takes away an individual's historical sense. The trauma is seen as an isolated event in itself, when in fact it is part of a continuous process. For example, we easily overlook the fact that a significant portion of the population was strangely relieved during the initial lockdown, feeling liberated from stress and anxiety. I regularly heard people say: "Yes these measures are heavy-handed, but at least I can relax a bit." Because the grind of daily life stopped, a calm settled over society. The lockdown often freed people from a psychological rut. This created unconscious support for the lockdown. If the population had not already been exhausted by their life, and especially their jobs, there would never have been support for the lockdown. At least not as a response to a pandemic that is not too bad compared to the major pandemics of the past. You noticed something similar when the first lockdown came to an end. You then regularly heard statements such as "We are not going to start living again like we used to, get stuck in traffic again" and so on. People did not want to go back to the pre-corona normal. If we do not take into account the population's dissatisfaction with its existence, we will not understand this crisis and we will not be able to resolve it. By the way, I now have the impression that the new normal has become a rut again, and I would not be surprised if mental health really starts to deteriorate in the near future. Perhaps especially if it turns out that the vaccine does not provide the magical solution that is expected from it.

Peter Navarro never hid his antagonism toward me. He stopped me one day in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where we were tested routinely for COVID, and again blasted my failure to encourage people to take hydroxychloroquine, the lack of which he said was causing people to die. He would not let it go. Perhaps he just had a thing about me. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I arranged with Cliff Lane to have Navarro present via Zoom his case on hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness to the entire NIH guidelines panel cochaired by Cliff in early August. This group was thirty-five of the top experts in infectious disease, public health, and epidemiology from all over the country. Navarro made his presentation, and uniformly they politely said, “Mr. Navarro, there’s nothing there. These are anecdotes, and all the evidence indicates hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work and can even cause harm.” Navarro’s answer was that he valued his reading of the existing medical literature on hydroxychloroquine as much as or more than theirs. “If I am wrong, no one is harmed. If you are wrong, thousands of people die.” The truth was the exact opposite. By that time, the FDA, which had given hydroxychloroquine emergency approval early in the pandemic, had revoked it on June 15, after it was found to cause heart problems and even death, not to mention proving ineffective against COVID. I had given Navarro one last chance, but he still could not accept reality.

Globalization in particular is a tide that is impossible for any ruler to order back. Many of a country’s problems are inherently global, including migration, pandemics, terrorism, cybercrime, nuclear proliferation, rogue states, and the environment. Pretending they don’t exist is not tenable forever, and they can be solved only through international cooperation. Nor can the benefits of globalization—more affordable goods, larger markets for exports, the reduction in global poverty—be denied indefinitely. And with the Internet and inexpensive travel, there will be no stopping the flow of people and ideas (especially, as we will see, among younger people). As for the battle against truth and fact, over the long run they have a built-in advantage: when you stop believing in them, they don’t go away.

Repeatedly over the next half hour he returned to the word “opportunity.” It kept knocking. “A lot of these viruses, a lot of these pathogens that come out of wildlife into domestic animals or people, have existed in wild animals for a very long time,” he said. They don’t necessarily cause any disease. They have coevolved with their natural hosts over millions of years. They have reached some sort of accommodation, replicating slowly but steadily, passing unobtrusively through the host population, enjoying long-term security—and eschewing short-term success in the form of maximal replication within each host individual. It’s a strategy that works. But when we humans disturb the accommodation—when we encroach upon the host populations, hunting them for meat, dragging or pushing them out of their ecosystems, disrupting or destroying those ecosystems—our action increases the level of risk.

IN OCTOBER 2019, just a few months before the novel coronavirus swept the world, Johns Hopkins University released its first Global Heath Security Index, a comprehensive analysis of countries that were best prepared to handle an epidemic or pandemic. The United States ranked first overall, and first in four of the six categories—prevention, early detection and reporting, sufficient and robust health system, and compliance with international norms. That sounded right. America was, after all, the country with most of the world’s best pharmaceutical companies, research universities, laboratories, and health institutes. But by March 2020, these advantages seemed like a cruel joke, as Covid-19 tore across the United States and the federal government mounted a delayed, weak, and erratic response. By July, with less than 5% of the world’s population, the country had over 25% of the world’s cumulative confirmed cases. Per capita daily death rates in the United States were ten times higher than in Europe. Was this the new face of American exceptionalism?

When the pandemic shut down global travel and the world’s business economy, and when the secular media, including social media giants, rejoiced with Joe Biden being in the White House, a new phrase was being written and reported publicly, “The New Global Reset.” In the past, the same concepts presented in the Great Global Reset Manifesto were called “The New World Order” or “The Globalist Agenda.” However, among knowledgeable conservatives, these older phrases were code words indicating the eventual loss of numerous freedoms that America has enjoyed, leading the nation like sheep to the slaughterhouse, causing Americans to submit to global rules and pay global taxes, allowing self-appointed rich elitists to rule over them. There is a movement to limit religious freedom by banning certain content in minister’s messages, opposing any opinions that are opposite to the manifest of this new system. Progressives have learned that confiscating guns will lead to a revolt. Their plan is to control the sale and distribution of ammo. Without ammunition, a gun is useless.

A lot of these viruses, a lot of these pathogens that come out of wildlife into domestic animals or people, have existed in wild animals for a very long time,” he said. They don’t necessarily cause any disease. They have coevolved with their natural hosts over millions of years. They have reached some sort of accommodation, replicating slowly but steadily, passing unobtrusively through the host population, enjoying long-term security—and eschewing short-term success in the form of maximal replication within each host individual. It’s a strategy that works. But when we humans disturb the accommodation—when we encroach upon the host populations, hunting them for meat, dragging or pushing them out of their ecosystems, disrupting or destroying those ecosystems—our action increases the level of risk. “It increases the opportunity for these pathogens to jump from their natural host into a new host,” he said. The new host might be any animal (the horse in Australia, the palm civet in China) but often it’s humans, because we are present so intrusively and abundantly. We offer a wealth of opportunity.

All of us have Dragons from the Past influencing our present feelings and actions.”[1] Unless you recognize and tame them, and consciously calm and protect your amygdala from overfiring, these dragons will haunt your unconscious mind and drive emotional pain for the rest of your life. What blows from an ember, or a small action of another, can turn into a destructive fire of anxiety and rage. After learning from Dr. May, I started using this concept with my patients, including Jimmy. Over time I identified 13 Dragons from the Past, including their origins, triggers that make them overpowering, and how they cause us to react. All of us have more than one Dragon from the Past driving our behavior, and they are always interacting with the Dragons from the Past of others, causing both internal and external battles—a modern-day Game of Thrones. All of us have primary and secondary dragons driving our behavior. Primary ones are present most of the time, while secondary ones come out during times of stress, such as the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020. You’ll learn which ones apply to you. (You can also take the Hidden Dragons quiz at KnowYourDragons.com.)

I intervened to provide early treatment to over 300 positive patients, half of whom were comorbid and high risk.” Of this cohort, none were hospitalized and none died. “Early treatment of COVID-19, plain and simple, saves lives. If the medical profession had been forward thinking and hands-on, and focused on this disease, with an early outpatient multi-drug approach, knowing that COVID-19 is an inflammatory clotting disease, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved in the US.” “Never in the history of medicine,” says Dr. Cole, “has early treatment, of any patient with any disease, been so overtly neglected by the medical profession on such a massive scale.” Cole adds, “To not treat, especially in the midst of a highly transmissible, deadly disease, is to do harm.” Cole says that the only truly deadly pandemic is “the pandemic of under treatment.” He says, “The sacred doctor–patient relationship needs to be wrenched away from Anthony Fauci and the government/medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex. Doctors need to return to their oaths. Patients need to demand from medicine their right to be treated. This year has revealed the countless flaws of a medical system that has lost its direction and soul.

No surprise, pharmaceutical interests launched their multinational preemptive crusade to restrict and discredit HCQ starting way back in January 2020, months before the WHO declared a pandemic and even longer before President Trump’s controversial March 19 endorsement. On January 13, when rumors of Wuhan flu COVID-19 began to circulate, the French government took the bizarre, inexplicable, unprecedented, and highly suspicious step of reassigning HCQ from an over-the-counter to a prescription medicine. Without citing any studies, French health officials quietly changed the status of HCQ to “List II poisonous substance” and banned its over-the-counter sales. This absolutely remarkable coincidence repeated itself a few weeks later when Canadian health officials did the exact same thing, quietly removing the drug from pharmacy shelves. A physician from Zambia reported to Dr. Harvey Risch that in some villages and cities, organized groups of buyers emptied drugstores of HCQ and then burned the medication in bonfires outside the towns. South Africa destroyed two tons of life-saving hydroxychloroquine in late 2020, supposedly due to violation of an import regulation. The US government in 2021 ordered the destruction of more than a thousand pounds of HCQ, because it was improperly imported. “The Feds are insisting that all of it be destroyed, and not be used to save a single life anywhere in the world,” said a lawyer seeking to resist the senseless order.

Since governments have the ability to both make and borrow money, why couldn’t the central bank lend money at an interest rate of about 0 percent to the central government to distribute as it likes to support the economy? Couldn’t it also lend to others at low rates and allow those debtors to never pay it back? Normally debtors have to pay back the original amount borrowed (principal) plus interest in installments over a period of time. But the central bank has the power to set the interest rate at 0 percent and keep rolling over the debt so that the debtor never has to pay it back. That would be the equivalent of giving the debtors the money, but it wouldn’t look that way because the debt would still be accounted for as an asset that the central bank owns, so the central bank could still say it is performing its normal lending functions. This is the exact thing that happened in the wake of the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many versions of this have happened many times in history. Who pays? It is bad for those outside the central bank who still hold the debts as assets—cash and bonds—who won’t get returns that would preserve their purchasing power. The biggest problem that we now collectively face is that for many people, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments, their incomes are low in relation to their expenses, and their debts and other liabilities (such as those for pensions, healthcare, and insurance) are very large relative to the value of their assets.

To days like these, I know it's pretty difficult to carry on, especially with all that is going on around. I know you tried your best to build something, to grow something the very whole time and when the time came for it to blossom, everything seemed to have fallen apart all over again. I know you have always believed in hard work and the goodness of spirit, yet sometimes when you find your hardwork slip through Time's fingers and your goodness going absolutely unnoticed in a world of camouflaged realities, I hope you hold on. I know you feel angry and hostile and you seek answers but hold on, dear heart for nothing goes in vain in a Universe that absorbs every bit of one's actions and intentions. Hold on, dear heart for it doesn't matter how many times you fall but how you remember to walk ahead having full faith on the Justice of Time. Hold on, dear heart for Faith is not when you carry on when the way is smooth and lit but when you cross tunnels of darkness to become the light yourself, for Faith is knowing He is there with you, even in the darkest of nights and the fiercest of storms. Hold on, dear heart for Nothing is certain in a world that revolves around a star of Fire, only that you have the same fire within yourself, the very Stardust that He has put in your soul. And no matter what, carry on, walk ahead with kindness and grace, seep deep in that passion of hard work that pushes you to wake up in the morning to create something, to grow something and to find something wherein you can pour a flicker of your spirit, while wearing the smile of goodness, the very one that makes you, You. Hold on, dear heart! We will grow our garden, all over again, with a little more sunshine and a smile of strength! Love & Light, always - Debatrayee

Chessler squirmed in his chair. “Not entirely. In the unlikely event that the transportation of two billion Christians occurs, it could throw the entire ten kingdoms into chaos.” He lowered his voice. “It could start a world revolution against the one-world government—make the greatest case for Christianity since the resurrection.” Jason stared skeptically at his uncle. “If over a billion people got transported into the ether, with credible witnesses on hand, it would be the biggest news coup in the world.” “Precisely. Then you understand the situation, Jason —which is that we have no option.” He shrugged his shoulders. Jason frowned. “What do you mean, you have ‘no option’?” “We intend to execute a false-flag operation.” Jason’s grin evaporated. This man was serious. “An event that will have all the appearance of a weaponized bioterror attack in North America, China, Russia. A pandemic. “Of course, dear boy, it won’t be real.” Chessler looked disarmingly into Jason’s eyes “But it has to give every appearance of a pandemic: martial law, quarantine centers, mandatory vaccination . . . ” “You’re talking about body bags flown in at night . . . ” Jason’s jaw set. “Making it look like billions of people have died of ebola, smallpox, or whatever.” “Precisely. You always got to the crux of a problem, Jason. Your mother’s acumen. If the Rapture occurs, no one will ever know. VOX will communicate the event to the masses. Exclusive coverage. Media blackout except for VOX networks.” Jason looked into his coffee and stirred it distractedly. “You’re talking about a cover-up of immeasurable proportions.” “Correct again. The Rapture never occurred. Millions of Christians died with the rest of the population—a tragic bioterror event that we, the powers that be, shall blame on China.

Stay involved in democracy. Fight for democracy. It can be messy and frustrating, believe me, I know. I understand why many Americans are frustrated by government and feel like it doesn’t make a difference. It’s not perfect, and not supposed to be. It’s only as good as we are, as what we choose to care about, as the people we elect. We’re never going to get 100 percent of what we want right away. But what if we got some of it right away, and protected it, and kept moving forward until we got the rest? That’s what voting is about. It’s not about making things perfect; it’s about making things better. It’s about putting us on track so that a generation from now, we can look back and say, “things got better starting now.” Voting is about using the power we have and pooling it together to get a government that’s more concerned, more responsive, more focused on the things that matter. This precious system of self-government is how we’ve come this far. It’s worth our time and effort. It’s worth protecting. I was heartened to see voter turnout leap this year over where it usually is. That’s great. Now imagine if we did that every time? Imagine if sixty or seventy percent of us, or even more, voted every time. We’d have a government that looks more representative, that’s full of life experience that’s more representative, that understands what people are going through and how we can work together to make people’s lives better. We’d have a government full of people who could corral a pandemic, who believe in science and have a plan to protect this planet for our kids; who care about working Americans and have a plan to help folks start getting ahead; who believe in racial equality and are willing to do the work to bring us closer an America where no matter what we look like, where we come from, who we love, or how much money we’ve got, we can make it if we try. That’s not science fiction. It’s possible! We just have to keep at it. Dec. 2020

Dear God, We have failed you, we have failed you miserably. From eating animals to becoming animals, from cutting trees to cutting our conscience we have failed you. Your Kindness saved us time and again and You out of your most benevolent mercy tried to show us that Humanity means Humility, that we Your dear creation is capable of so much of Love and Grace after all You made us with your Light, that this world can always come back to Love, that Fear can always be overcome by Kindness, that Strength is always embedded within, that Courage lies in Forgiveness, yet did we listen in with our hearts? Perhaps, perhaps not. You sent us a pandemic to teach us the value of lives and how You United this world and healed this Earth through suffering yet did we learn the value of lives? No, we failed. There is a war going on in a beautiful country, and an economic meltdown in another, and so many other nations are fighting their own unknown battles just like every human being, and yet we fail to tickle our conscience, we fail to see how we have literally ruined this world and made demons out of your beautiful creation of humankind succombing to greed, lust and anger, oh how we have failed! We have failed in absolute disgrace where we don't see the tears of children, the lost smiles of our fellow neighbours and the numb dreams of almost everyone because we have locked the doors of our heart in false pictures of camouflaged pleasures, we indeed have failed you, we have failed us. Yet Your kindness knows no bound, your Love is infinite and your Grace is eternal, forgive us, dear Father and grant us, this Humankind the knowledge and understanding to act as Humans again. Fill those angry hearts with healing, those hurt souls with the grace of forgiveness and above all let your world know your true Nature by giving the strength of Courage in those hearts who walk in your Light, to stand by what is right without the shackles of Fear. Oh, the Kindest of All, may You strengthen the Truth and lead the Light bearers of Love ahead through Your Mercy to win over a world that is slowly crawling into a deep cavern of Hate, a world that was once created to nourish and nurture the different faces of Love, a world that is failing and falling frail in every passing moment, You alone are our only Hope. We know we have failed you miserably and as we keep failing you, I know more than ever that Your Grace will find us through and once again You will save us, because we may fail as children but You won't fail your children as the most Loving Father. - a soul traveling through this beautiful Universe of your making.

As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. “Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition,” said Alex Gutentag in Tablet Magazine.27 According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020, 10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns. In addition, 500,000 children per month experienced wasting and stunting from malnutrition—up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million—which can “permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.”28 In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia.29 Deferred medical treatments for cancers, kidney failure, and diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of people and created epidemics of cardiovascular disease and undiagnosed cancer. Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.30,31 The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains, dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression, and severe educational deficits in young children. One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic. According to an Ohio State University study,32 suicide rates among children rose 50 percent.33 An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests.34 Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019.35 “Overdoses from synthetic opioids increased by 38.4 percent,36 and 11 percent of US adults considered suicide in June 2020.37 Three million children disappeared from public school systems, and ERs saw a 31 percent increase in adolescent mental health visits,”38,39 according to Gutentag. Record numbers of young children failed to reach crucial developmental milestones.40,41 Millions of hospital and nursing home patients died alone without comfort or a final goodbye from their families. Dr. Fauci admitted that he never assessed the costs of desolation, poverty, unhealthy isolation, and depression fostered by his countermeasures. “I don’t give advice about economic things,”42 Dr. Fauci explained. “I don’t give advice about anything other than public health,” he continued, even though he was so clearly among those responsible for the economic and social costs.

Despite its immense effect on the global civilization, Spanish flu started to fade quickly from the public and scientific attention, establishing a precedent for the future pandemics, and leading some historians (Crosby) to call it the “forgotten pandemic”. One of the explanations for this treatment of the pandemic may lie in the fact that it peaked rapidly, over a period of 9 months before it even could get adequate media coverage. Another reason may be in the fact that the pandemic was overshadowed by more significant historical events, such as the culmination and the ending of World War I. A third explanation may be that this is how societies deal with such rapidly spreading pandemics – at first with great interest, horror, and panic, and then, as soon as they start to subside, with dispassionate disinterest.

Ever since the eighteenth century the ‘secular’ world has done its best to take over, and to claim the credit for, a great deal that the Jesus-followers used to do.

The first step of good democracy is to choose a good leader, or more importantly, to not choose an animal as a leader - yet we made that ghastly mistake in 2016 by electing the most non-presidential creature on earth as the leader of our United States of America. There are good presidents, there are not so good presidents, but the unique problem with the president that we chose in the previous election was that it was not even a civilized human to begin with - it was an "it" not a he or she or they, and even after being handed over the very lives of the people that savage beast showed no sign of accountability whatsoever. Thus, we broke our democracy in 2016, but with sheer determination and conscientious persistence we have succeeded in fixing that mistake. Yes, I am filled with joy unspeakable to say out loud, that we have corrected our mistake and fixed the democracy into its usual imperfect but functional state. I say imperfect because democracy by nature is not perfect, but the problem we created last time was that we took things too far, and in the process turned a somewhat functional democracy into an absolutely dysfunctional one - in short, we broke it. And had the leader we chose been a smart one, that is, if that idiot had been not an idiot, but an actual cunning dictator, we wouldn't be celebrating our victory as a civilized people today, instead we would be mourning the burial of democracy. Fortunately, the insane ravings of a brainless, spineless and heartless maniac will no longer have to be considered as the statements originating from the sacred office of the President of the United States of America. We have fixed the broken democracy - yes - but the problems that existed before the maniac came to power still exist today. Therefore, we may cherish the restoration of our democracy as much as we want, the real work begins now. Choosing a proper human as a President doesn't magically make the problems of our nation disappear - those problems still exist - and they'll continue to give us chills time and again, unless we as a people stand accountable, both the government and the citizenry alike, and start working on those problems. Remember, the United States of America is not the responsibility of merely the President, the Vice President and their administration, it is the responsibility of each and every one of us whose veins carry the spirit of liberty and whose nerves carry the torrents of bravery. We have won the battle of making the White House human again, but the war has just begun - the war against systemic racism, against misogyny, against homophobia, against islamophobia, against gun violence, and against post-pandemic health and economic crisis. So, though we may celebrate the victory for a short while, we mustn't lose sight of the issues - we must now actually start working as one people - as the American people to heal the wounds on the soul of our land of liberty. It's time to once again start dreaming and working towards the impossible dream - the dream of freedom not oppression, the dream of assimilation not discrimination, and above all, the dream of ascension not descension. Never forget my friend, AMERICA means Affectionate, Merciful, Egalitarian, Responsible, Inclusive, Conscientious and Accepting.

It may be tempting to binge-watch our way through these next months. But TV washes over you. Reading draws you in. Books that absorb us, books that calm us down, books that comfort us, books that remind us we are not alone but part of the grand sweep of history, books that surprise and enchant us — this is what we’re looking for. ~ From The New York Times article, "Let Books Create Your Summer

Let us not give up praying until this pandemic is over

Between the race of microbes and the race of humans there exists a total symbiosis and a radical incompatibility. One cannot say that the microbe is other to man: the two are never opposed in their essential natures, and they do not confront one another in any real sense; they are linked together, however, and this interlinking is, as it were, predestined: no one (neither men nor bacilli) can imagine things being any other way. Nor is there any clear line of demarcation, because this link is reproduced over and over ad infinitum. So perhaps after all we shall have to conclude that otherness is located here: that the absolute Other is indeed the microbe in its radical non-humanness - a being of which we know nothing, and which cannot even be deemed different from us. The microbe as the hidden form which alters everything - and with which no negotiation or reconciliation is possible. Yet we are quickened by the same life as the microbe, and the race of microbes will perish along with the human race: we share the same destiny. One is reminded of the worm that has a sort of alga living in its stomach, without whose help it can digest no food. This is a fine arrangement until the day the worm takes a notion to devour the alga itself. And it does so - but dies as a result (without even digesting it, of course, because the alga is no longer there to help it to do so).

Preface to the Paperback Edition The coronavirus, a severe acute respiratory syndrome, has unleashed a pandemic since the original publication of Epidemics and Society. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is still too new and too poorly understood to allow us to assess its ultimate impact, but its broad contours have become sufficiently clear, and several of its features relate closely to the themes of this book. Like all pandemics, COVID-19 is not an accidental or random event. Epidemics afflict societies through the specific vulnerabilities people have created by their relationships with the environment, other species, and each other. Microbes that ignite pandemics are those whose evolution has adapted them to fill the ecological niches that we have prepared. COVID-19 flared up and spread because it is suited to the society we have made. A world with nearly eight billion people, the majority of whom live in densely crowded cities and all linked by rapid air travel, creates innumerable opportunities for pulmonary viruses. At the same time, demographic increase and frenetic urbanization lead to the invasion and destruction of animal habitat, altering the relationship of humans to the animal world. Particularly relevant is the multiplication of contacts with bats, which are a natural reservoir of innumerable viruses capable of crossing the species barrier and spilling over to humans.

The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has significantly affected economies and businesses all over the world. Having no near precedent, the world was thrown into a frenzy in trying to contain infections. Businesses not considered essential, and companies with factories abroad had to close shop until their governments stabilized. Non-employment reached its highest rate as more people lost their jobs. In America alone, almost 43 million claimed their unemployment benefits with the projection that millions more were going to have to do the same in the next few months.

So we shouldn’t lose too much time in New Age spiritualist meditations on how “the virus crisis will enable us to focus on what our lives are really about.” The real struggle will be over what social form will replace the liberal-capitalist New World Order. This is our true appointment in Samara.

wary of government-driven hysteria over potential pandemics as well as government agencies that have proven more beholden to corporate

I was wearing a mask at the shops and a strange person told me to take off my mask because the pandemic was over. I kept it on because as a COVID-19 researcher, I knew he was a victim of government misinformation of the masses.

Maria. “Nobody could have predicted” a pandemic that his own Department of Health and Human Services was running simulations for just a few months before COVID-19 struck in Washington state. Why does he do this? Fear. Donald didn’t drag his feet in December 2019, in January, in February, in March because of his narcissism; he did it because of his fear of appearing weak or failing to project the message that everything was “great,” “beautiful,” and “perfect.” The irony is that his failure to face the truth has inevitably led to massive failure anyway. In this case, the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people will be lost and the economy of the richest country in history may well be destroyed. Donald will acknowledge none of this, moving the goalposts to hide the evidence and convincing himself in the process that he’s done a better job than anybody else could have if only a few hundred thousand die instead of 2 million. “Get even with people who have screwed you,” Donald has said, but often the person he’s getting revenge on is somebody he screwed over first—such as the contractors he’s refused to pay or the niece and nephew he refused to protect. Even when he manages to hit his target, his aim is so bad that he causes collateral damage.

The Great Resignation was big. Millions of people around the world quit their jobs rather than returning to the status quo of their working lives before the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting global lockdown. The pandemic only accelerated trends that had been building for most of the century. Over the last four decades, the half-life of learned skills has dropped from 30 years to fewer than four, in large part because of the accelerating pace of change driven by the tech revolution. According to noted business visionary John Seely, this trend will continue to accelerate in the years ahead. While employees were forced to work at home, the reason they could work at home was thanks to technological breakthroughs like Zoom, smartphones, ultra-high-speed broadband, and more.

The pandemic exposed key challenges in food delivery. Not all foods travel well even in short distances. Chefs toil to perfect recipes and customers expect the food as it appears on the restaurant website but time in transit distorts. A meatball sub barely survives a few feet let alone a car ride. Tomato sauce spills over the sandwich collecting at the bottom to soak the bread. Barbecue dishes suffer from congealing while nachos arrive both moist and brittle. Calamari grows chewy, mozzarella sticks turn into heavy weapons, and fries arrive limp. The enemy to food delivery, beyond stop lights, is moisture.

One further detail. What would explain the peculiar sudden dips in atmospheric CO 2 between 200 and 600, 1300 and 1400, and 1500 and 1750? Those dates happen to match major human diebacks from pandemics—Roman-era epidemics, the Black Death in Europe, and the devastation of North American native populations by European diseases. Each time, forests grew back rapidly over empty agricultural land and drew down carbon dioxide.

Slavitt renamed the plan “Victory over COVID-19” and presented it to Kushner as his own.

Joe could see that the CDC wasn’t going to solve the problem. But there was a solution: the United States was by far the world’s leader in microbiology research. It contained thousands of microbiology labs, run by private companies and universities and nonprofits, like the one he presided over at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. The thing to do, Joe decided, was to transform the Biohub into a COVID-19 testing center as quickly as possible—

I know – we all are experiencing a never ever seen global pandemic, tragic events all over, lack of governance, declining health, constant fear of loosing loved ones, loss of income & facing so many other severe challenges in our daily lives. Undoubtedly, this is a time of unprecedented struggle & upheaval for everyone. But darling, there are people who are genuinely coping up with troubling times. They are able to handle time of adversity in better way & are better at tolerating all the associated feelings of stress, anxiety & sadness. If you will notice, you will see that these people will also rebound from these setbacks much quickly & mostly will become much better than they were before these terrible days. Have you ever heard the phrase “Pressure Makes Diamonds?” That’s the secret. I want you to also hold on, become more resilient, maintain a positive outlook, feel strong, amazing & remind yourself that you too have the favor of God. So far you survived 100 percent of your worst days & you are doing reasonably okay! Remember strength does not come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t. If you can prepare & change your thoughts, attitudes, beliefs & philosophies, if you can do your best with whatever you have – for sure, you can grow as person, push the boundaries & experience a abundant & more fulfilling life. Let you reset, recharge & rewire your brain for excelling in life no matter what’s going on, reconnect to what gives you fulfilment & realign your life around your real priorities & purpose. I am praying God to strengthen you in all your tests, trials & tribulations. Let you get through these collective & personal tough times satisfyingly & most successfully. Blessings!

Prime Health, they called the new system. The new logo was the iconic image of U.S. Marines raising a flag over Iwo Jima, and the new motto, below the logo, was: So exclusive you fought to get in.

The way I solve a hard problem is not to start with the conventional wisdom, but to start over.

Smoke from the fires rose into the sky, forming black clouds that hung over the camp and the mood of everyone within.

journalist asked her about it. “What scares me most and what I think about most,” said Charity, “is our ability to respond to a new pathogen, maybe one we’ve never seen before, or an old pathogen, like influenza that’s just mutated. The H1N1 pandemic of 1918 was over 100 years ago now. The world is overdue for a pandemic like that, whether it’s influenza or something else. And in public health, we know that we have to be prepared for that.

What scares me most and what I think about most,” said Charity, “is our ability to respond to a new pathogen, maybe one we’ve never seen before, or an old pathogen, like influenza that’s just mutated. The H1N1 pandemic of 1918 was over 100 years ago now. The world is overdue for a pandemic like that, whether it’s influenza or something else. And in public health, we know that we have to be prepared for that.

When privilege takes precedence over people and the environment, society erodes.

There was, Carter thought, a downside to experience. “Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence,

Studies show that epidemics caused by viruses began when the human lifestyle changed from hunter-gatherer to agriculture over eleven thousand years ago. Due to a newfound ability to live in one place, humans began investing energy into their homes and land — activities that required many people to work in close proximity to each other.

The school stank of Lysol, and several times a day they all had to line up and wash their hands. Clean hands save lives was the message being hammered into them. When it came to spreading infection, they were informed, they themselves--school kids--were the biggest culprits. Even if you weren't sick yourself, you could shed germs and make other people sick. Cole was struck by the word shed. The idea that he could shed invisible germs the way Sadie shed dog hairs was awesome to him. He pictured the germs as strands of hair with legs like centipedes, invisible but crawling everywhere. Minibottles of sanitizer were distributed for use when soap and water weren't available. Everyone was supposed to receive a new bottle each day, but the supply ran out quickly--not just at school but all over. Among teachers this actually brought relief, because the white, slightly sticky lotion was so like something else that some kids couldn't resist. Gobs started appearing on chairs, on the backs of girls' jeans, or even in their hair, and one boy caused an uproar by squirting it all over his face. Never Sneeze into Your Hand, read signs posted everywhere. And: Keep Your Hands to Yourself (these signs had actually been there before but now had a double meaning). If you had to sneeze, you should do it into a tissue. If you didn't have a tissue, you should use the crook of your arm. "But that's vomitous," squealed Norris (one of the two whispering blondes). These rules were like a lot of other school rules: nobody paid much attention to them. Some school employees started wearing rubber gloves. Cafeteria servers, who already wore gloves, started wearing surgical masks as well. Cole lost his appetite. He couldn't stop thinking about hospitals. Flesh being cut open, flesh being sewn up. How could you tell if you had the flu? The symptoms were listed on the board in every room: Fever. Aches. Chills. Dry cough. What must you do if you had these symptoms? YOU MUST STAY HOME.

It’s free,” said the Chan Zuckerberg person. “There was this super-long pause,” said Joe, who was on the line. “We don’t know how to do no-cost,” said Zuckerberg. “What do you mean?” asked Chan Zuckerberg. “It shows up as an error in the hospital computer if we put zero cost,” said Zuckerberg. “It won’t accept zero.” “Can’t you put like one-tenth of a cent?” asked Joe. They couldn’t. The system wouldn’t allow it. It was Balamuthia all over again. The cure meant nothing if the patient never received it. Standing between the cure and the patient, in this case, was a U.S. medical-industrial complex that lurched between lethargy and avarice. Joe had never really had to understand its inner workings. Now he began to see that the incentives of virtually everyone in it were screwed up. To do something as simple as accept an offer of free coronavirus testing required either unusual effort or real courage.

In city after city, all over the world, the number of people appearing in surgical masks kept multiplying. Those still capable of frivolity added illustrations: luscious lips, stuck-out tongues, piano-keyboard smiles, and--most popular--vampire fangs. In Indianapolis, after hundreds of people fell ill over one weekend, no one was permitted to go out without a mask. But--as happened almost everywhere--there weren't enough masks to go around. Some made do with scarves or other pieces of cloth, or they tried taping gauze or paper to their faces. A lot of people just ignored the rule--and got away with it, the police being out sick in droves.

First they warn everyone to wear a mask. Then we find out unless it's a special kind of mask it's not going to protect you at all." "It's not just a question of beds. There's not enough linen, not enough gloves, gowns, hypodermic needles, disinfectant, meds, you name it. Not enough ambulances, not enough ventilators or other equipment. Hospitals are even running out of food." "It's not like every other bad thing stopped happening to make room for the flu. People are still getting cancer and having heart attacks and strokes and road accidents. The idea that we could handle any kind of surge on top of that--whoever's fantasy that was, it was never going to happen." "The retired workers they were depending on to take over for the workers out sick? Very few of those people ever showed. The volunteer doctors and nurses and the other helping hands--they aren't showing up, either. It's not like 9/11. There aren't any heroes rushing toward the danger. The danger is everywhere, and everyone's running scared." "Let's face it, this is America. Anything that's bad for business, people don't want to hear. When it comes to money or doing the right thing, most people are going to choose money. Close up shop for months till they can make a new vaccine? How many businesses would still be alive after that?" "This disaster proves what some of us have been saying about America all along: everything is broken.

When the Pandemic is over either you’ll go crazy or you’ll be heavily composed. There is no in-between.

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downside to experience. “Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence,” he said. The line wasn’t his, but he liked it.

When threat is high but perceived efficacy is low, defensive reactions are likely, such as denying the severity of, or susceptibility to, the threat (e.g., disparaging government health warnings) (Goldenberg & Arndt, 2008). The risk needs to be perceived as credible (i.e., not over- or understated) and the preventive or protective measures also need to be perceived as credible.

For Marin, the city had an almost medieval look. The effect was belied by the swarms of hopjets, and Taxi-Airs, and other aircraft, large and small. But his training had sharpened his ability to shut out extraneous material and to see essentials; and so, he saw a city pattern that had a formal, oldfashioned beauty. The squares were too rigid, but their widely varying sizes provided some of the randomness so necessary to achieve what was timeless in true art. The numerous parks, perpetually green and rich with orderly growth, gave an overall air of graceful elegance. The city of the Great Judge looked prosperous and long-enduring. Ahead, the scene changed, darkened, became alien. The machine glided forward over a vast, low-built, rambling gray mass of suburb that steamed and smoked, and here and there hid itself in its own rancorous mists. Pripp City! Actually, the word was Pripps: Preliminary Restriction Indicated Pending Permanent Segregation. It was one of those alphabetical designations, and an emotional nightmare to have all other identification removed and to find yourself handed a card which advised officials that you were under the care of the Pripps organization. The crisis had been long ago now, more than a quarter of a century, but there was a line in fine print at the bottom of each card. A line that still made the identification a potent thing, a line that stated: Bearer of this card is subject to the death penalty if found outside restricted area. In the beginning it had seemed necessary. There had been a disease, virulent and deadly, perhaps too readily and too directly attributed to radiation. The psychological effects of the desperate terror of thousands of people seemed not to have been considered as a cause. The disease swept over an apathetic world and produced merciless reaction: permanent segregation, death to transgressors, and what seemed final evidence of the rightness of what had been done: people who survived the disease . . . changed.

Dark Winter, Atlantic Storm, and Global Mercury were only three of over a dozen Germ Games staged by military, medical, and intelligence planners leading up to COVID-19. Each of these Kafkaesque exercises became uncanny predictors of a dystopian age that pandemic planners dubbed the “New Normal.” The consistent feature is an affinity among their simulation designers for militarizing medicine and introducing centralized autocratic governance.

There was no sign of a pandemic. In May of that year, WHO had detected some excess cases of seasonal flu, but the symptoms were mild and death rates were very low—fewer than 145 people worldwide over eleven weeks since its first appearance.63 Nevertheless, the agency decided, in secret meetings, to declare a global pandemic.

The growth of the AIDS pandemic was predictably explosive. Using PCR and expanded diagnosis, WHO estimates that HIV has infected 78 million people and caused 39 million deaths. Today, 35 million people live with HIV with over 2 million new infections each year.

after years of continuously working in front of screens. Although he used his phone to capture precious moments with his children, stay connected with family, and engage with social media, he couldn't shake the feeling that screens had become an outsized part of his parenting. "One of the biggest mistakes I made during the pandemic was buying an iPad," he admitted. "It became a crutch when I didn't feel like being present or when one of my younger ones became difficult to handle. I kept using the screen as a pacifier, rather than introducing proper ways to deal with boredom and their high energy levels." Growing up, Jason had fond memories of playing catch with his dad, creating scrap albums, and watching photos develop in his father's darkroom studio. "It taught me patience, curiosity, and precision,” he recalled. "It helped me become very careful when writing code and trying to get it right the first time." Inspired by these cherished memories, Jason resolved to reintroduce more analog activities into his family's daily life. He purchased a film camera, set up a darkroom in their home, and acquired puzzles for his younger children. Over the next two years, Jason noticed a significant improvement in his connection with his children as they bonded over these analog pastimes. As his children prepared for high school, he felt ready

In the midst of their pandemic panic, American MoFos hoarded unfathomable mountains of toilet paper. It has never been clear why they needed so much, and I imagined them salivating over their stockpiles like Smaug, if he’d had irritable bowel syndrome.

More thunder out of China, in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, came in early 2020. Although epidemiologists (not to mention biological weapons experts) will be studying this catastrophe long into the future; the mark of China’s authoritarian government and social-control systems is all over it. There is little doubt that China delayed, withheld, fabricated, and distorted information about the origin, timing, spread, and extent of the disease;28 suppressed dissent from physicians and others;29 hindered outside efforts by the World Health Organization and others to get accurate information; and engaged in active disinformation campaigns, actually trying to argue that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease itself (COVID-19) did not originate in China.30 Ironically, some of the worst effects of China’s cover-up were visited on its closest allies. Iran, for example, looked to be one of the worst-hit countries, with satellite photos showing the excavation of burial pits for the expected victims of COVID-19.31

More thunder out of China, in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, came in early 2020. Although epidemiologists (not to mention biological weapons experts) will be studying this catastrophe long into the future; the mark of China’s authoritarian government and social-control systems is all over it. There is little doubt that China delayed, withheld, fabricated, and distorted information about the origin, timing, spread, and extent of the disease;28 suppressed dissent from physicians and others;29 hindered outside efforts by the World Health Organization and others to get accurate information; and engaged in active disinformation campaigns, actually trying to argue that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease itself (COVID-19) did not originate in China.30 Ironically, some of the worst effects of China’s cover-up were visited on its closest allies. Iran, for example, looked to be one of the worst-hit countries, with satellite photos showing the excavation of burial pits for the expected victims of COVID-19.31 With 2020 being a presidential election year, it was inevitable that Trump’s performance in this global health emergency would become a campaign issue, which it did almost immediately. And there was plenty to criticize, starting with the Administration’s early, relentless assertion that the disease was “contained” and would have little or no economic effect. Larry Kudlow, Chairman of the National Economic Council, said, on February 25, “We have contained this. I won’t say [it’s] airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.”32 Market reactions to these kinds of assertions were decidedly negative, which may finally have woken the White House up to the seriousness of the problem.

Our people have been tested while you have become soft and flabby. Even if this coronavirus takes root here in America, let’s be realistic. Sacrifice never comes to American shores. In a global pandemic, you will continue to enjoy life in restaurants and taverns and crowd the beaches while swapping breaths filled with bat fluids. Could you have taken high casualties as we did during World War II, our cities surrounded by enemy troops during a cold winter at Leningrad, where we stood fast for over eight hundred days? No, for you Americans, nothing should interfere with your right to party. To observe one of your sacred Capitalist holidays like Black Friday, a perfect image for your society, where, if you are not fast or greedy enough, you get trampled. You Americans don’t know hardship. You’ve become bloated. The airlines have had to create bigger seats to accommodate your fat asses, yet you’re always telling pollsters the country is moving in the wrong direction. Slothful. Pampered. Life has never been a spring break for us Russians. Life was not a social for Marina, yet she produced four-to-six liners that were like little jewels. Her Palm Sunday poem, “1920” for example.’ Reciting the poem, he closed his eyes like Andrei Voznesensky when reciting a poem. He had Voznesensky’s tight, intense face.

This was so even though, as everyone knows, the United States spends far more on health care than any other industrialized country—an average of almost $13,000 per person per year, according to CMS, over $5,000 more than any other high-income nation.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

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When the sun has risen and set over happy days, will we let the night stealthy steal all known ways?

Even though some of his public statements over that time period would have suggested he didn’t see the looming calamity, or the need for strong action, his private demeanor that day left me with the clear impression that he recognized the grave risks, he was more solemn than previous meetings, and when it came to the question of mitigation, he was mostly sold on the ideas before I had arrived.

labs that enrolled in the FluNet Global Influenza Surveillance System—a network of reference labs that sample for flu as a way to track its global spread—recorded 4,623 cases of flu in 2019 but just 53 in 2020. In Chile, there were 5,000 cases in 2019 and 12 in 2020; and in South Africa, the network’s labs detected 1,094 cases in 2019 and just 6 in 2020.53 In New Zealand there was a “near extinction” of influenza.54 With so little flu virus migrating, a similar scenario played out in the US during our fall and winter. By the end of January 2021, the CDC had recorded only 1,316 positive flu cases in its surveillance network, compared to 129,997 they had recorded over the same time frame in 2019.55 The mitigation we put into place was designed to deal with a pandemic flu, not COVID, and it worked much better against its intended viral target.

The president was right to focus his attention on trying to get schools opened for a host of reasons, and principally the important role that in-class instruction plays for children. But the White House had failed to hone in on a root cause for why many districts remained shut. The CDC’s guidelines were the single greatest obstacle. I was speaking to the White House over this time period, and some officials there didn’t fully appreciate how much impact the six-foot requirement was having on efforts to reopen schools in the fall. They didn’t connect the lines between their policy goals, the parts of the pandemic plan that impacted those objectives, and the actions of the CDC that frustrated these outcomes. It was a breakdown in policymaking, and the way the pandemic playbook was implemented, that would plague other aspects of our response.

As part of our national preparedness, it will be important to stockpile countermeasures to some of the known risks, but it’s equally important to support the development of novel technology platforms that have broad applicability over a range of potential threats. We can’t always see the future. We can’t focus solely on the dangers that we can see today. And we can’t guess which approaches to developing drugs and vaccines will yield the most effective solutions.

The simulation, dubbed Crimson Contagion, was a joint exercise conducted from January to August 2019 that aimed to test the capacity of the federal government and twelve states to respond to a severe pandemic flu originating in China. In the scenario they drilled, tourists returning from China spread a respiratory virus in the US, beginning in Chicago. In less than two months, the virus had infected 110 million Americans, killing more than half a million. The report issued at the conclusion of the exercise was ominous.56 Federal agencies fought over who was in charge. There were shortages of protective gear like N95 respirators and ventilators. States went their own way on mitigation, with some states refusing a CDC directive to close schools as a way to limit spread.

It is irrepressibly familiar, the send that the world is suddenly growing smaller and the time growing shorter. I am heavy with the thought of each person I know who needed these months to wander or rest, find their match or start all over, who need the chance to say every hello and goodbye to each delicious moment, unrestricted.

I had shared with Mrs. Trump many times my opinion that if we lost reelection in 2020 it would be because of Jared. She didn’t disagree with me. It was my fervent opinion that his arrogance and presumption had grown over the years, and he threw his power about with absolutely no shame. I would venture to say that being in the White House changed Jared as a person. There was no reason that he should be sitting with the speechwriter laying out our nation’s plan to fight a global pandemic.

Other states also reoriented their telling of regional and national history. In Maharashtra, in the rewriting of history textbooks, a drastic cut was made in the book for class 7: the chapter on the Mughal Empire under Akbar was cut down to three lines.78 Uttar Pradesh simply deleted the Mughal Empire from some of its history textbooks,79 while the University of Delhi drastically reduced the study of this period in its history curriculum.80 In the syllabus of Nagpur University, a chapter that discussed the roles of the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Muslim League in the making of communalism has been replaced by another one titled “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Role in Nation Building.”81 Alongside official examinations in Uttar Pradesh, the Sangh Parivar organized a test of general culture open to all schools in the state. According to the brochure designed to help students prepare for this test, which Amit Shah released in Lucknow in August 2017, India was a Hindu Rashtra, and Swami Vivekananda had defended Hindutva in Chicago in 1893.82 In Karnataka, after canceling Tipu Sultan Jayanti, the festival that the state used to organize to celebrate the birth of this eighteenth-century Muslim ruler, the BJP government also dropped the chapter dealing with this historical figure from the class 7 textbook in 2019.83 This decision was made in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that had led the government of India to ask all states to reduce syllabi for students in classes 1 through 10 by 30 percent, in light of the learning challenges brought about by the lockdown.84 The decision of the Karnataka government, in fact, fit in with a larger picture. Under cover of the pandemic, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), India’s largest education board, decided that all over India “government-run schools no longer have to teach chapters on democratic rights, secularism, federalism, and citizenship, among other topics.”85 To foster assimilation of knowledge that amounted to propaganda, final exams have increasingly focused on the heroic deeds of Hindu icons and reforms initiated by the Modi government, even on the person of the prime minister.

COVID-19 predominantly kills those over sixty-five years of age.

much longer-lasting adverse effect of the pandemic: the fact that Americans who were in utero during the pandemic had, over the course of their lives, reduced educational attainment, higher rates of physical disability, and lower income relative to those who went through fetal development immediately before or after.119 Those born at the crests of the three waves also had higher lifetime risk from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.120 Similar impacts on fetal development have also been found for other countries, including Brazil, Italy, Norway, Sweden,121 Switzerland, and Taiwan.122 There is also some evidence that the Spanish flu eroded social trust in the countries most adversely affected.123

The pandemic of 1918–1919 was clearly one of influenza, except in two of its features. One, it killed more humans than any other disease in a period of similar duration in the history of the world. Two, it killed an unprecedentedly large proportion of the members of a group who, according to records before and since, should have survived it with no permanent injury. The year 1918 was an actuarial nightmare: the flu and pneumonia death rate of life insurance policy holders over 45 and 50, for whose deaths the insurance companies were at least partly prepared, did, of course, rise, but only slightly as compared to the rate of young adults, whose deaths in great numbers no insurance company anticipated.16

on March 23, 543, the emperor declared “God’s Education” over. But this was the same wishful thinking that has traditionally accompanied any political statement about pandemic disease delivered with certain authority

The death rates were astonishing – 50 per cent of England’s six million people; 75 per cent of Venice’s population; 98 per cent of parts of Egypt – ultimately killing a third to a half of Eurasia and north Africa. Out of seventy-five million Europeans, twenty-five million died. The virus also reached west and central Africa, where villages have been found abandoned. Worldwide, the total number of deaths was somewhere between 75 and 200 million. And nor was this the end: pandemics always return, and the plague struck repeatedly over the next centuries. Finally in Ragusa (Dubrovnik), the Venetian authorities ordered sailors to stay on their ships for thirty days (trentino), later raised to forty (quarantino) – a system that started to work. But, for most, it was too late. The ultimate super-propellent, the Great Mortality changed everything.

don’t know what my kids’ lives will look like, but I think that at least I’ve offered them glimpses at new ways of seeing themselves. I threw a party in the spring of 2022. It had been a long, cold pandemic. But my children were finally vaccinated and I wanted to have people over. I made a vat of spiked cider and filled mugs for my friends. The very same mugs my ex had hidden away in the basement of our home so many years ago. Now they were filled with booze and joy. I tried to match mugs with personalities. The house was full, and people were shouting. Cheese and crackers were stacked in platters on top of the long table that I had paid for with a story I’d written about my divorce. I thought about how hard I’d worked to get here. To a house filled with friends and wine and happiness. The song “Crowded Table” by the Highwomen is one that always makes me cry; it speaks of community and love and filling our homes. “If it’s love that we give,” they sing, “it’s love that we reap.” “This is going in the book,” I told my friends, shouting over the din of conversations. “It’s going in the end. Because this is my happily ever after.” And maybe it was too earnest, but I thought of all the different kinds of love there are in the world. And I knew that when the party was over someone would help me with the dishes and wiping the counters, and I wouldn’t have to ask.

As we consider the unprecedented bludgeoning of our Constitution over the past two years, it’s worth pausing to remember the smallpox epidemic that stalled Washington’s army during the Revolution and the malaria contagion that culled the Army of Virginia. Though both alerted the Framers to the deadly and disruptive potential of infectious disease epidemics, the Framers nevertheless opted to include no pandemic exception to the United States Constitution.

... many Boomers exert unhelpful and unhealthy levels of control over everyone around them. The Boomers’ parents, the generation that went through war, recession and global pandemic, described their own children as selfish. And in a way, it’s the most selfish act of all, to control people as if they’re chess pieces on a board and will stay where you place them.

After BlackRock created its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, the firm quietly secured its status as the main financial administrator of the economic stimulus package during the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively playing the role of the government—and probably made a pretty penny for doing it. In January 2020, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced to much fanfare at (of course) the World Economic Forum in Davos a new investment commitment of $1 billion over ten years into environmental sustainability initiatives to fight climate change.

After BlackRock created its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, the firm quietly secured its status as the main financial administrator of the economic stimulus package during the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively playing the role of the government—and probably made a pretty penny for doing it. In January 2020, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced to much fanfare at (of course) the World Economic Forum in Davos a new investment commitment of $1 billion over ten years into environmental sustainability initiatives to fight climate change. Just a couple of months later, it received a $1.2 billion grant—not a loan, but a grant—from US taxpayers to subsidize its development of for-profit vaccines.

In 2020, Americans spent $1.6 billion just to cash checks. If the poor had a costless way to access their own money, over a billion dollars would have remained in their pockets during the pandemic-induced recession.

The lies are of a scale and of a nature that in modern political life I think you can only compare to Donald Trump. I don't think anybody has lied or can lie as casually and as cooly and as completely as Boris Johnson does - except Boris Johnson. We have learned over the last few weeks that his closest colleagues thought he was diabolical. The cabinet secretary that Boris Johnson appointed because he would prove to be, or he was believed to be, a soft touch has described Boris Johnson as being utterly unfit for the job. The advisor that he brought in as a sort of mastermind - having overseen Brexit - Dominick Cummings has described Johnson in terms that you would reserve for your worst enemies. These are the people working closest by him. The only person who's had anything vaguely warm to say about him is Matt Hancock and let me tell you why. They've shaken hands on it. I'd bet my house on some sort of gentleman's... let's rephrase that... I'd bet my house on some sort of charlatan’s agreement behind the scenes that they won't slag each other off because everybody else is telling the truth about them - about Johnson and about Hancock. Hancock's uselessness facilitated and enabled by Johnson's uselessness, by Johnson's moral corruption effectively. And now the lies begin. 5,000 WhatsApp messages. ‘No idea. No, no, no, no idea. Don't know. Don't know technical people. Uh... factory reset. Don't know. Bleep, bleep.’ And then the classic: the flooding of the Zone. With so much manure that it's hard to know where to start. ‘We may have made mistakes’ is one of the latest statements to come out. Turns up 3 hours early so that he doesn't have to walk the gamut of people congregating to remember their lost loved ones and to share their feelings with the man that they consider to be partly responsible for their death. Absolutely extraordinary scenes, truly extraordinary scenes. How does he get away with it? Hugo Keith is a much tougher inquisitor than Lindsay flipping Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons. He's a much tougher inquisitor than any of the interviewers that Boris Johnson deigns to have his toes tickled by on a regular basis. He's a much tougher interviewer or scrutineer than the newspaper editors who have given him half a million pounds a year to write columns or already published articles about why he's the real victim in this story. Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph today writing an article before Boris Johnson has given a single syllable of evidence, claiming that Boris Johnson is the real victim of this. I'd love him to go and read that out to the Covid families assembled outside the inquiry. And remember it was Daily Telegraph columnists and former editors that convened at the Club with Jacob Rees-Mogg and others to launch the Save Owen Paterson Society after another one of these charlatans was found to have breached parliamentary standards. Their response of course was not to advise their ally to accept the punishment that was coming his way but to attempt to get him off the hook and rip up the rule book under which he'd been found to be guilty.

There are no commuters, no children jostling for school buses, no taxis, no old men in hats driving in the centre of the road. It should feel like heaven but, as Nelson drives through the old city gates, he's reminded of science fiction films where towns have been taken over by lizard people or filled with replicants. If this is the future, he doesn't like it.

Life is running away from us, and it would be one thing if we had something to look forward to, if you and I could enjoy a bit of luxury once we're fifty or sixty, but that's never going to happen, is it? This is what life is like now, and it's only going to get worse. All of it. The best we can hope for is that we die before it becomes completely unbearable. With the heat, the water, the food. That we can keep society functioning for a few more years, until the next pandemic shuts everything down again. That we don't have to eat insects. That the racists and lunatics don't take over even more of the world. That there's still coffee in the rest home . . . And ultimately it doesn't really matter all that much, the fact that hu anity is collapsing isn't a problem, not from a cosmic or evolutionary perspective, the planet will still be here, life will go on, for millions of years I'm sure, it's just us that doesn't have a future . . . So I want to enjoy myself. I want to live life to the max. I want to burn through every last krona. I don't want to waste a single day on a life I'm not happy with. There's no point waiting for things to get better, because nothing is going to get better. This is the world we live in now. Don't be ashamed to be human, be proud." - Didrik

Life is running away from us, and it would be one thing if we had something to look forward to, if you and I could enjoy a bit of luxury once we're fifty or sixty, but that's never going to happen, is it? This is what life is like now, and it's only going to get worse. All of it. The best we can hope for is that we die before it becomes completely unbearable. With the heat, the water, the food. That we can keep society functioning for a few more years, until the next pandemic shuts everything down again. That we don't have to eat insects. That the racists and lunatics don't take over even more of the world. That there's still coffee in the rest home . . . And ultimately it doesn't really matter all that much, the fact that humanity is collapsing isn't a problem, not from a cosmic or evolutionary perspective, the planet will still be here, life will go on, for millions of years I'm sure, it's just us that doesn't have a future . . . So I want to enjoy myself. I want to live life to the max. I want to burn through every last krona. I don't want to waste a single day on a life I'm not happy with. There's no point waiting for things to get better, because nothing is going to get better. This is the world we live in now. Don't be ashamed to be human, be proud." - Didrik

The world’s socioeconomic landscape has been drastically altered in the last three decades. The list of changes—indeed, of achievements—is as long as it is surprising: 84 percent of the world’s population is now literate, compared to 75 percent in 1990. University education is up, and even average scores on intelligence tests all over the world are now higher. Meanwhile, combat deaths are down—by more than 40 percent since 2000. Life expectancy in countries most hard-hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic is starting to rise again. And we are providing for our agricultural needs better than ever: since 2000, cereal production in the developing world has increased twice as fast as population.

As even the Pentagon, a cautious bastion of technological nonpartisanship, concluded, “the danger from climate change is real, urgent, and severe.” An official U.S. National Security Strategy report declared the situation a growing national security threat, arguing, “The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of land across the globe.” The report unambiguously predicted that if nothing were done, “climate change and pandemic disease” would directly threaten “the health and safety of the American people.

replayed on YouTube over a billion times, displacing Gangham Style as the most watched video in history.

As avian diversity declined in the United States, specialist species like woodpeckers and rails disappeared, while generalist species like American robins and crows boomed. (Populations of American robins have grown by 50 to 100 percent over the past twenty-five years.)48 This reordering of the composition of the local bird population steadily increased the chances that the virus would reach a high enough concentration to spill over into humans.

from over seven billion to what has been estimated to be less than seventy million.

Chapter 51 In Atlanta, the day had gone mostly as Elliott had expected. The stock market crash had rattled everyone. It was a cloud that hung over the euphoria of Black Friday. The most difficult part of his plan had been convincing the other five families to pool their money with his for the purchases, which together added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They had begun by renting two twenty-six-foot U-Haul trucks. They drove them to Costco and filled them with survival necessities. It was mostly food; Elliott planned to be near a freshwater source if worst came to worst. Next, they purchased two high-end RVs. The price was exorbitant, but they carried a thirty-day money-back guarantee, and they only had to make a down payment—the remainder was financed. Elliott had assured his neighbors that within thirty days, they would either be incredibly glad to have the two homes on wheels—or they’d have their money back. Now he sat in his study, watching the news, waiting for the event he believed would come. He hoped he was wrong. DAY 7 900,000,000 Infected 180,000 Dead

Today Chanya is kikiat and won’t be doing any work of any kind. Kikiat is usually translated as “lazy,” which is misleading because of the disfavor into which this vital component of mental health has fallen in the work-frenzied Occident; over here kikiat is not a fault so much as a frank statement of the human condition. To fail to lend a helping hand because you have something more important to do may provoke anger in others, but to fail to perform a chore because you are feeling kikiat will, in all but the most extreme circumstances, meet with an understanding sigh; indeed, the word itself has a kind of pandemic effect, so that one person declaring themselves kikiat can cause a whole office to slow down. You may spend a lot of time over here, DFR, learn our customs, know our history better than we do ourselves, and even speak our language, but until you have penetrated to the very heart of indolence and learned to savor its subtle joy, you cannot claim really to have arrived. Naturally,

As the early outbreak at Fort Riley suggested, the primary breeding ground for the influenza consisted of army camps that were springing up all over America in the early days of 1918. America had entered World War I the previous October, and many young men were anxious to do their part and join the fight.  As a result, the camps soon became overcrowded with recruits and service veterans brought in from all over the country to train them.

Since that time there have been numerous epidemics of the disease. In 1889 and 1890 the disease was epidemic over practically the entire civilized world. Three years later there was another flare-up of the disease. Both times the epidemic spread widely over the United States. Although the recent epidemic is called ‘Spanish influenza,’ investigation has shown that it did not originate in Spain.  We now know that there was an undue prevalence of influenza in the United States for several years preceding the recent great pandemic. Because the disease occurred in mild form, and because the public mind was focused on the war, this increased prevalence of the disease escaped attention. Not until the epidemic appeared in severe form in Boston in September, 1918, did it excite any special interest.” - U.S. Public Health Service Report, prepared by Surgeon General Rupert Blue

first outbreak in the States, the human race could have easily faced extinction. In 1918 the feat of traveling from Kansas to Moscow in less than one week was impossible. Yet, today a man can wake up in Chicago and before his day is over he can be in London. And should that same man, asymptomatic in the quiet incubation stage, harbor a deadly airborne virus while on his transcontinental flight, he just started the next pandemic. Needless to say, put all fear

Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population. And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to “preparing for war.”191 Under the code name “SPARS Pandemic,” Gates presided over a sinister summer school for globalists, spooks, and technocrats in Baltimore. The panelists role-played strategies for co-opting the world’s most influential political institutions, subverting democratic governance, and positioning themselves as unelected rulers of the emerging authoritarian regime. They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.192 Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint. Practically the only thing Gates and his planners got wrong was the year. Gates’s simulation instructs public health officials and other collaborators in the global vaccine cartel exactly what to expect and how to behave during the upcoming plague. Reading through the eighty-nine pages, it’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny. The scenario directs participants to deploy fear-driven propaganda narratives to induce mass psychosis and to direct the public toward unquestioning obedience to the emerging social and economic order. According to the scenario narrative, a so-called “SPARS” coronavirus ignites in the United States in January 2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020). As the WHO declares a global emergency, the federal government contracts a fictional firm that resembles Moderna. Consistent with Gates’s seeming preference for diabolical cognomens, the firm is dubbed “CynBio” (Sin-Bio) to develop an innovative vaccine using new “plug-and-play” technology. In the scenario, and now in real life, Federal health officials invoke the PREP Act to provide vaccine makers liability protection.

For several months, about all I did was talk to addicts, counselors, and cops around the country—over the phone because the pandemic restricted travel. Meth was overshadowed by the opioid epidemic. But the people I spoke to told me stories nearly identical to Eric’s. This new meth itself was quickly, intensely damaging people’s brains. The symptoms were always the same—violent paranoia, hallucinations, figures always lurking in the shadows, isolation, rotted and abscessed dental work, uncontrollable limbs, massive memory loss, jumbled speech, and, almost always, homelessness. It was creating a swath of people nationwide who, while on meth and for a good period afterward, were mentally ill and all but untreatable by usual methods of drug rehabilitation. Ephedrine-made meth wasn’t good for the brain, but it was nothing like this. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are afflictions that begin in the young. Now people in their thirties and forties were going mad. The new meth was also deadly in a way ephedrine meth was not. It was killing young people with congestive heart failure, a disease common to people over sixty-five.

But what is it about bats? I asked. Why do so many of these zoonotic viruses—or what seems like so many—spill over onto humans from the chiropteran order of mammals? Or is that the wrong question? “It is the right question,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s a good answer for it yet.

The small town of Gunnison, Colorado, lies at the bottom of the valley carved by the Gunnison River into the Rocky Mountains. It is now crossed by the Colorado stretch of U.S. Highway 50, but in 1918, the town was mainly supplied by train and two at best mediocre roads. When the 1918–19 influenza pandemic reached Colorado as an unwelcome stowaway on a train carrying servicemen from Montana to Boulder, the town of Gunnison took decisive action. As the November 1, 1918, edition of the Gunnison News-Champion documents, a Dr. Rockefeller from the nearby town of Crested Butte was "given entire charge of both towns and county to enforce a quarantine against all the world". He instituted a strict reverse quarantine regime that almost entirely isolated Gunnison from the rest of the world. Gunnison became one of the few communities that largely escaped the ravages of the influenza pandemic, at least in the beginning – in an instructive example of the limited human patience for the social, psychological and economic disruption of quarantine, adherence eventually waned and the front page of the Gunnison News-Champion's March 14, 1919, issue reports that the influenza pandemic got to Gunnison, too. Nevertheless, Gunnison had a very lucky escape – of a population of over 6,900 (including the county), there were only a few cases and a single death.

How we spend our time has changed a lot in the past few decades. Our ability to get almost any question we want answered instantly on Google is perhaps chief among them. Compare this to the days when you’d need to drive to the library and hope you could find a published book that had the data you needed. Add to this the saved time resulting from instantaneous global communications, and the ability to find the exact product you need and order it online, having it delivered the very next day. And of course, as of the Pandemic of 2020, there’s the acceptance of connecting with someone over Zoom, rather than spending an entire day flying from LA to New York for an hour-long meeting.

The last plague before COVID-19 occurred over a century ago when there was little man-made wireless radiation, no man-made satellites or widespread electrification of homes and it lasted two years. Factoring in the environmental exposures from modern technologies, this pandemic may last much longer.

I believe that Thanatos and Hades will bring a worldwide pandemic, which could be Ebola but could also be a new, engineered disease. Ordo ab Chao, Order out of Chaos is the watch phrase for those in power who seek to transform the Earth into One Governed Body. A worldwide pandemic would serve their purposes by eliminating large portions of the population (Thanatos is given power to kill 25% of humanity), and it would pave the way for strict controls over commerce and travel.

In business your advantage over the competition is largely dependent on what you know and do that the competition does not know or practice, which ultimately sets your brand apart.

Over the joke known as coronavirus Let it be shown I chose Jehovah-jireh So fire up the wires in the mire of the Father of Lies While high above, the other side in love with lives With flying colors hovers oh He comes and flies And covers skies

Trying my very best to avoid falling into a fatalistic mood. It's scary because there is so much information coming at us from dozens of sources we don't know who or what to believe. Yes, take precautions, but will this help? Live your life as usual, but will this help? Have faith, but will this help? I definitely don't have an answer and the ones that should, it seems don't know better either! What I do know is stressing over something completely out my control is futile. This fear of the little known is only heightening hysteria. Handle it the best way you know how but stop, take a breath, make a plan, roll with the changes and ride this out. It's already in motion. Now we just have to decide if the situation controls us or we control our response to it. I checked on my mom and Dad. Made sure they are ok and told them I love them. Dont let fear make you lose sight of who and what is important. When life gets rough all we have is each other. What would happen if the person you love was taken from you today? That is so much more worthy of your emotions than stressing over a sickness most people don't even understand yet. Stay safe friends and fam. Pray for us, and we'll pray for you. We'll get through this. It will be hard and we may come out battered and bruised, but we are fighters!!! Peace beautiful people.

The Divine Feminine Tao Invites Us to Act The Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching portrays the Tao as “mother,” “virgin,” and “womb.” She is the “immortal void” who endlessly “returns to source” to renew life again and again. Quoting from my own translation of Poem 6 (Anderson, in press), the Tao is The immortal void Called the dark womb, the dark womb’s gate From her Creation takes root An unbroken gossamer That prevails without effort. From her “dark womb,” all life flows. To align with the Tao as mother, virgin, and womb is to discover her path to peace and wellbeing with ourselves, each other, the earth, and the natural world. At a time in history when human greed and aggression are out of control and threatening life as we know it, her message to us is also a warning. The great message of the Tao Te Ching is the ordinariness of peace and wellbeing that arises from spontaneous action that seeks no gain for the self. This is to enact the path of wei wu wei, meaning to act without acting or do without doing. Wei wu wei does not mean doing nothing, not thinking, not traveling, not initiating projects, not cooking dinner, not planting a garden in the spring, and so on. To the contrary. For in leaving self-gain aside, our actions arise naturally and spontaneously to meet concrete situations and events without plotting or maneuvering in advance or expecting to be liked, appreciated, or rewarded for what we do. Aligning with the Tao is to seek what is lowest and most needy like a mother might act naturally and spontaneously on behalf of a child in danger. Quoting from my translation of Poem 8 (Anderson, in press): The highest good is like water Bringing goodness to all things without struggle In seeking low places spurned by others The Tao resembles water. In so doing, we attend to what matters most—not tomorrow but right now. Per the situation, our actions may be swift or slow, but they will in time resolve obstacles at their source in the same way that water carves out canyons and moves mountains. What matters most will vary for each of us. This is wei wu wei in action. Over time, enacting this feminine path to peace will impact all our relations with others, including animals and other species, each other, our families and communities, the conduct of governments, relationships between nations and peoples, and with planet Earth. The wisdoms of the Divine Feminine Tao may be applied to our personal initiatives and our response to personal and modern crises, including meeting the challenges of the current coronavirus pandemic. Wei wu wei invites us to act spontaneously and naturally like water, determining its own course and leaving self-gain aside.

In the days leading up to the moments when we found ourselves choking on disbelief while watching streamed images of corpses being loaded into freezer trucks, emergency room attendants scrambling to save lives, nurses sobbing frustration over feeling overwhelmed and abandoned, and U.S. citizens on the march to take control of their own fates, Americans witnessed something foreboding. It was the formation of a dominating political culture which would prove fatally lacking when put to a test of ‘unprecedented’ severity.

The people at the front are young, energetic, and incredibly brave. There’s a Black girl, in her twenties, skinny as a rail, with a black kerchief over her face. The kerchief is useful in both pandemics and the fog of tear gas. She wears skinny jeans and a black T-shirt with “Black Lives Matter” on it. Some white adults are as offended by her choice of wardrobe as she is by their overall indifference. She’s opposed by much larger men, outfitted like extras in Mad Max or RoboCop. The only thing threatening about her is her mouth and her willpower. On Facebook, the police and their family don’t even create original slogans, but instead co-opt hers by posting things like “all lives matter” and “blue lives matter.” It seems to be their way of saying that her “Black life” doesn’t matter. Whites who favor the protesters have to justify their leanings, like they’re traitors to a race war that they didn’t start and don’t believe in... This girl is intelligent and talented, someone who should be leading this country into the twenty-first century. Instead, she’s out in the street risking her life because she dares to be dissatisfied.

The people at the front are young, energetic, and incredibly brave. There’s a Black girl, in her twenties, skinny as a rail, with a black kerchief over her face. The kerchief is useful in both pandemics and the fog of tear gas. She wears skinny jeans and a black T-shirt with “Black Lives Matter” on it. Some white adults are as offended by her choice of wardrobe as she is by their overall indifference. She’s opposed by much larger men, outfitted like extras in Mad Max or RoboCop. The only thing threatening about her is her mouth and her willpower. ...This girl is intelligent and talented, someone who should be leading this country into the twenty-first century. Instead, she’s out in the street risking her life because she dares to be dissatisfied.

Since the election, he’s figured out how to avoid such questions completely; White House press briefings and formal news conferences have been replaced with “chopper talk” during which he can pretend he can’t hear any unwelcome questions over the noise of the helicopter blades. In 2020, his pandemic “press briefings” quickly devolved into mini–campaign rallies filled with self-congratulation, demagoguery, and ring kissing. In them he has denied the unconscionable failures that have already killed thousands, lied about the progress that’s being made, and scapegoated the very people who are risking their lives to save us despite being denied adequate protection and equipment by his administration. Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans are sick and dying, he spins it as a victory, as proof of his stunning leadership.

Trained as a sociologist, I’ve always been more disposed toward structural, macro change targeting policies and institutions over more diffuse cultural transformation that directly engages individuals. I tend to wince at self-help-style books, trainings, and gurus. But in trying so hard to push back on individualistic approaches to empowerment, I went to the other extreme for a while, losing touch with the importance of everyday decisions and actions—what my colleague Imani Perry calls “practices of inequality”—as an essential part of social transformation. Commenting on the many forms of racism that resurfaced during the pandemic, Imani tweeted, “That white male doctor who strangled and assaulted a black girl child for ‘not social distancing’ is also a sign of what African Americans confront in the health care system. It’s not just ‘structural’ racism folks.” This was a needed punch to my disciplinary gut, as I had been trained to critique “the system” and “systemic inequality,” as if these were divorced from everyday human decisions and actions. After all, the doctor, not “the system,” made a choice to violently assault a Black girl child. Yet at the same time, we can uphold unjust systems without physically attacking another person; that, for me, is the risk in highlighting the most obvious cases of brutality: it can let us off the hook. Ultimately, then, this is not a book for those interested primarily in policy, however important policy remains. Rather, this is a call to action for individuals to reclaim power over how our thoughts, habits, and actions shape—as much as they are shaped by—the larger environment.

I worry that we have lost much of our community spirit, and I pray often that we can find it again. I felt the loss of this spirit when I heard about all the fighting over wearing masks during the COVID pandemic.

Though the pandemic was now over, it had left behind a population worn down. People were tired of being self-disciplined, of self-isolating. Of social distancing and wearing masks. They were exhausted, shell-shocked, from months and endless months of worrying about their children, their parents, their grandparents. Themselves. They were battered and bruised from losing relatives, losing friends. Losing jobs and favorite haunts. Tired of being isolated and driven near crazy with loneliness and despair. They were tired of being afraid.

Alan noted that the Sunday service is the queen for the pastor, a powerful tool that we can become overly dependent on, which can, in turn, reduce our imaginations of what ministry and church can look like. With the arrival of the pandemic and the inability to meet in person came an opportunity. The queen was off the board. Some pastors fell into despair and frustration. Others held their breath until they could regather. Some imagined the moment as persecution and conspiracy. Alan, however, doesn’t think like a Taylorist and is deeply attuned to the dynamics of complex systems after years of studying networks. What Alan was doing for pastors was reframing the moment as an opportunity. A chance to let the pressure push us into adaptation, to seed creativity in a moment of challenge.

During the pandemic, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house, terrified I would find myself standing in the doorway of an ICU room, watching the doctors press their whole weight on the chest of my mother, my sisters, my children, terrified of the lurch of their feet, the lurch that accompanies each press that restarts the heart, the jerk of their pale, tender soles, terrified of the frantic prayer without intention that keens through the mind, the prayer for life that one says in the doorway, the prayer I never want to say again, the prayer that dissolves midair when the hush-click-hush-click of the ventilator drowns it, terrified of the terrible commitment at the heart of me that reasons that if the person I love has to endure this, then the least I can do is stand there, the least I can do is witness, the least I can do is tell them over and over again, aloud, I love you. We love you. We ain’t going nowhere.

That free time is one of the biggest barriers to activism was, in a way, proven in the summer of 2020, as the protests over George Floyd and the slew of other Black lives lost became the most attended protests in American history. Up to twenty-six million Americans participated, a number that would be unthinkable were it not for the converging COVID-19 epidemic and the unprecedented amount of free time that accompanied it.

why target “rigid forms of individuality”? Is the problem today not the opposite one: the prevalence of over-flexible forms of individuality ready to accommodate to ever new situations, living under permanent pressure to “reinvent” themselves again and again, experiencing every stable form as “oppressive”? Plus is it not that the pandemic is so traumatic precisely because it deprives us of fixed and reliable daily rituals?

My mother had said, “Hunger, disease, war, warming—these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.” She looked around the table. “You’re all here with me in Shenzhen, trying to do your part to solve crop failure, which might be a step toward solving hunger and famine. Trying to be part of the solution.” She leaned forward, suddenly energized. “If more people were like us, imagine what we could accomplish. New crops to feed the millions going hungry. Stopping pandemics from raging across our world. Ending most disease and all poverty and all war. No more mass extinctions. Clean, renewable, limitless energy. Spreading into the solar system.” Twenty years later, as the hot water beat down on my back, I felt a chill run through me. “So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked. “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.

I am wary of the emerging new consensus around MMT. Of course, I understand that when rates are near zero or negative, governments can increase spending and debt, boosting national economic growth, without facing ballooning debt-service costs. But that magical thinking cannot last forever. Gaping deficits today are causing debt ratios to rise despite those low prevailing interest rates. Absent a powerful and lasting level of economic growth, some sort of event will eventually lance the worldwide debt bubble. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed us close to the brink. The next shock is likely to push us over.

Unless we are prepared to see these events – the Jesus-events, the messianic moment – as the ultimate call to penitence, because they are the ultimate announcement of the arrival of God’s kingdom, we will be bound to over-interpret other events to compensate.

The victory over cholera was only a beginning. With the growing and profound knowledge that many diseases are caused by microscopic organisms and that the spread of disease can be prevented, the Western world was transformed. It took years for the change to be complete, but the result was a vigorous public health movement that emphasized simple but powerful measures like cleaning up water supplies and teaching people what now seem to be basic lessons of health and hygiene—keep flies away from food, wash your hands before handling food, give your babies milk, not beer, quarantine the sick. The results were dramatic. In large areas of the world, many of the killer diseases seemed tamed, or even vanquished, and deadly epidemics seemed to be relics of the past.

Our brains are wired to overly consider rare threats and under-imagine potential benefits.

Only 13% of people in households making over $100,000 were laid off or furloughed, compared with 39% in households making less than $40,000.

Worldwide, the total number of people who live in extreme poverty dropped from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 650 million in 2018. On one crucial metric, the progress has been immense: the mortality rate for young children dropped 59% over the same period.

The issue is not the issue,” meaning the real conflict is not over any particular matter or dispute. “The issue is power.

hospitals were overwhelmed with patients, and more. Suddenly digital transformation projects slated to take place over several years were happening in days or weeks. It was the great digital acceleration, not by choice but by existential necessity driven by the largest global pandemic in a century.

Harley Filben: "People know the government has a vaccine. Riots everywhere. " JC Denton: "The same corporation that makes Ambrosi also manufactures the virus. Quite convenient. The virus came over a superfreighter previously owner by Dowd." Harley Filben: Yeah, most of Majestic 12 is just hand-me-downs from the Illuminati. Huh. We knew about Ambrosia, but the virus... that's news. They're infecting people on purpose, huh?

Trust me … as a lifetime award winning insomniac, I know that success doesn’t happen during or over nights. There’s a story behind the glory. We can write it or read it.

Purpose is simply the art of knowing what you are supposed to do. Action over words. Focusing on concrete objects.

When the sun has risen and set over happy days, will we let the night stealthy steal all known ways? @reenadossauthor

The pandemic also exposed one of the biggest myths about remote education—that it could ever replace classroom work for kids in the early grades. I’m a big fan of online learning, but I have always thought of it as a supplement to, not a substitute for, the work that young students and teachers do together in person. (In the United States, we mostly use the terms remote learning and online learning interchangeably, but many other countries provided lessons over the radio, television, and e-books as well as online.)

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to COVID-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic COVID-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching COVID-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.” The New England Journal of Medicine, “Universal Masking in Hospitals in the COVID-19 Era,” May 21, 2020. * It is the immemorial tactic of a dictatorial regime to accuse its opponents of what it is doing.

I also couldn’t help noticing how often news reports about some modeler’s latest findings would leave out important nuances and caveats. In March 2020, Neil Ferguson, a highly respected epidemiologist at Imperial College, predicted that there could be more than 500,000 COVID deaths in the U.K. and more than 2 million in the U.S. over the course of the pandemic. That caused quite a stir in the press, but few reporters mentioned a key point that Ferguson had been very clear about: The scenario of his that made all the headlines assumed that people wouldn’t change their behavior—that no one would wear masks or shelter in place, for instance—but of course that wouldn’t be the case in reality. He wanted to show how high the stakes were and demonstrate the value of masks and other interventions, not drive everyone into a panic.

If Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader who, before the coronavirus pandemic, presided over an economic boom, reoriented America’s opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in record time. Instead, when historians write about the Trump era, they will do so through the lens of January 6. They will focus on Trump’s tortured relationship with the alt-right, on his atrocious handling of the deadly Charlottesville protest in 2017, on the rise in political violence during his tenure in office, and on his encouragement of malevolent conspiracy theories. Trump joined the ranks of American villains from John C. Calhoun to Andrew Johnson, from Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace.

Being a true leader, as opposed to a competent manager, requires a willingness to get your hands dirty. I have said before that I do not expect anyone to do a job I cannot do myself. While this is clearly unrealistic as a company grows and expands, the perception of being willing to step in and assist must remain. The weight of leadership includes staying calm while others panic and coming up with solutions rather than joining the chorus of complaints. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly helped distinguish the leaders from the managers. Leaders are prepared to take responsibility when things go wrong, even if the true responsibility lies with someone else. Leaders are visible. Leaders have a vision, even if it is only short term. I don’t really believe in long-term planning. I make up the rules of the game based on one-year plans. This means I always retain visibility and control. Five years is too long a time to have any certainty that the objectives will be met. Leadership is not a popularity contest, but it also should not inspire fear. Leaders earn respect and loyalty, recognising that these take a long time to earn and a second to lose. A leader is not scared of collaboration and listening to the opinions of others, as well as accepting help when it’s needed. Leadership is not a quality that you are born with, it is something that you learn over time. I was not a leader in my Coronation days, and I am the first to admit that I made a lot of mistakes. Even at African Harvest, as much as I achieved financial success and tried different techniques to earn respect, I never truly managed to deal with the unruly investment team. But, having built on years of experience, by the time I hit my stride at Sygnia, I was a leader. Within any organisation of substantial size, there is space for more than one leader, whether they head up divisions or the organisation itself. There are several leaders across Sygnia weaving the fabric of our success. I am no longer the sole leader, having passed the baton on to others in pursuit of my own dreams. To quote the Harvard Business Review, ‘The competencies most frequently required for success at the top of any sizable business include strategic orientation, market insight, results orientation, customer impact, collaboration and influence, organisational development, team leadership, and change leadership.’ That is what I looked for in my successor, and that is what I found in David. I am confident that all the leaders I have groomed are more than capable of taking the company forwards.

When we try to guess what our societies will look after the pandemic is over, the trap to avoid is futurology, which by definition ignores our not-knowing.

a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done—Greta Thunberg has made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis for what it is: part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over the economy. Third, we should rely on science, but without simply accepting it as the agent of decision-making. Why not? Let’s return to Habermas, with whom we began: our predicament is that we are compelled to act while knowing that we don’t know the full coordinates of the situation we are in, and non-acting would itself function as an act. But is this not the basic situation of every action? Our great advantage is that we know how much we don’t know, and this knowing about our not-knowing opens up a space of freedom. We act when we don’t know the whole situation, but this is not simply our limitation. What gives us freedom is that the situation—in our social sphere, at least—is in itself open, not fully (pre)determined.

The tragedy is that a pandemic such as this one has long been predicted by those studying zootonic diseases. Approximately 75 percent of all new human diseases come from our interactions with animals. COVID-19 is likely one of them. They start when a pathogen, such as a bacteria or virus, spills over from an animal to a human and bonds with a cell in a human. And this may lead to a new disease.

OVER THE PAST two generations, America has suffered a quiet catastrophe. That catastrophe is the collapse of work—for men.

The problem was a crazy problem. It wasn’t going to have a non-crazy solution. Still, she’d sort of shocked herself. She’d never had the slightest interest in business. But if she wanted to save the country, she’d need to become an entrepreneur, and create a company—though in business, she quickly learned, she couldn’t talk like that. When she said she wanted to build a tool “to save the country,” people just smiled and thought she was goofy in the head. But when she said things like “I’m going to create a data-based tool for disease prevention that companies can use to secure their supply chains,” serious business types nodded. “Five smart people have replied with confusion when I said the company was to save the world and protect our country,” said Charity, after her first attempts to explain her vague idea. “Then when I said, ‘We’re going to do private government operations, like Blackwater,’ their eyes lit up and they said, ‘Oh wow, you could take over the world.’ ” She’d entered the private sector with the bizarre ambition to use it to create an institution that might be used by the public sector. She’d already hired twenty people, among them public-health nurses and some of the team at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub responsible for genomic sequencing, including Josh Batson and David Dynerman. Joe DeRisi had signed on as an adviser; Carter Mecher was about to. She’d raised millions of dollars in capital. Venrock, a leading health care venture capitalist, had taken a stake in the new company. As a local health officer, she hadn’t been able to get the tens of thousands of dollars she needed for some new disease-stopping machine. In the private sector, people would throw tens of millions at an idea: if she failed, it wouldn’t be because investors wouldn’t give her the money to try. The Public Health Company, she’d called it.

Emergence and spillover are distinct concepts but interconnected. “Spillover” is the term used by disease ecologists (it has a different use for economists) to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of another. It’s a focused event. Hendra virus spilled over into Drama Series (from bats) and then into Vic Rail (from horses) in September 1994. Emergence is a process, a trend.

Various studies estimate that somewhere between 70 million and 430 million people will be pushed back into extreme poverty over the next few years. The most essential inequality—between the very richest and the poorest humans on the planet—is now growing again and at a rapid rate.

For every Covid death we would estimate another four deaths over two to five years, and that is how we plan body storage. You see extra deaths for domestic violence and obstetrics, delayed or missed oncology diagnosis, no admission to A&E, sepsis and suicide.

It’s vital to remember that the daily counts on the news of the ‘28-day’ death figures do not represent deaths that happened in the last 24 hours, but those newly reported. Figure 11–1 shows a clear weekly cycle: the daily figures tend to be higher on Tuesdays and Wednesdays because of reporting delays over the weekend. This has led to some dramatic differences in England: there were 560 deaths reported on Monday, 18 January 2021, jumping to 1,507 the next day. Since all these numbers are released at around 4 p.m. each day, they become ‘news’ and so are given prominence by journalists, regardless of their relevance.

You might be thinking: Okay, great. I definitely have problems in my life and relationships, but how do I overcome them? Where do I even start? When you encounter challenges, adversity, or conflict, you must engage your core. I’m a lifelong athlete. Every sport I train for has one common need: a strong core. It helps prevent injuries. It gives you stability that makes you less likely to fall over, and it makes it easier to get back up when you do. Thoughtfully Fit also has a core that is central to everything you do in the model. It always comes back to control and choices: What do you control? What are your choices? For example, you can’t control what other people do, but you can control your thoughts and actions. You may not be able to control angry customers, the effects of a global pandemic, the results of a presidential election, or decisions coworkers make, but you do control how you respond. And you always have choices in how you respond.

In the midst of a deadly pandemic, somebody very powerful wanted a medication that had been available over the counter for decades, and known to be effective against coronaviruses, to be suddenly but silently pulled from the shelves—from Canada to Zambia.

The dominant narrative over this time period remained that the White House pressured the CDC to subdue certain reporting. The record shows political actions certainly played a role in the suppression of some critical information. But there was another problem afoot. The CDC didn’t have all the pertinent information in the first place, or the ability to collect it in a reliable fashion that would enable timely reporting.