Early on I did the little bit of work needed to understand COVID posed no meaningful danger and of course tried to warn family and friends not to fall for the manipulative politicsl narratives. Only two listened. I was shocked by how easily most were fooled.
Might be worth noting that little bit of work was simply looking at IFR data on the CDC Website. For a 60 year old IFR was .5% but footnotes said 94% of the fatalities were people with one or more compbidities. Do the math, it means only a 3 in 10,000 chance of dying for reasonably healthy 60 year olds, which is not a risk you change your life for. BTW, the risk for healthy youngsters was 0!! Later I learned the CDC data was badly skewed (as Sharyl noted), meaning real risk was even lower.
I had the same sad experience. COVID caused a rift with family and friends. I was sternly told NOT to discuss anything about COVID with one branch of the family and complied in order to maintain the important relationships. I still say that if people were able to do basic math (numerators/denominators: deaths/population, etc) and ask basic questions, people would have been able to see the light. Has the overuse of calculators, lack of basic math skills, and dearth of basic logic training in schools made people unable to analyze things? Is it the strong need to be in with the in crowd all the time? I will never understand. Politics 100% played a big role and continues to do so. How do we get people to focus on the subject instead of politics?
You guys are hitting upon a subject that is near and dear to my heart. In fact, a couple of subjects. First of all, politics--the enchantment with being "on a team" or identifying with a cause--is damned-near endemic to our species. That's one piece. Secondly, basic numeracy is lacking pretty much across our whole society. I could give a couple examples, but suffice it say this. Almost no one you know is going to calculate an IFR or believe you when you state one based upon even the most trivial mathematics! Put those two things together, and we have what we had. Politicians who can't add driving fear in a populace that can't add to the benefit and glee of industries--pharma and government and/or public health--based upon both fear and lack of numeracy.
You're right. Some in my family wouldn't listen because they wanted to believe a particular political narrative. I haven't been a member of a political party for decades and could't care less about partisan politics, which also upsets some of them.
All one had to do was calculate the percentage of a percentage. I suspect some I know would find that grade school math difficult...tragically.
This. "I haven't been a member of a political party for decades and couldn't care less about partisan politics..."
Among the commonalities among us "covid iconoclasts," that is likely on the list. (That, plus "The CDC is FoS and has been so for decades." That one might be just on my personal list, though!)
Yep, both parties are corrupt and extremely self-oriented. As to falling into line with a political narrative, not only did my husband and I not do that, we actually made up our own minds concerning "vaccination" independently of any spiel coming from an actor, a politician/political party, or Safeway offering 20% off groceries after the shot. I think that really blew them (parents) away. And these were the same 2 people who would ask, when I was growing up, if everyone else was jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, would I do so, too?
I agree; politics and The-Taking-of-Sides (that is, being On-the-Right-Side) is paramount to far too many people. The extensive Covid lockdown caused serious drift in my family, and the politics of the whole thing was a big problem with my parents. They swallowed the narrative, hook, line, and sinker (Dad, late 80s, Mom, late 70s at the time). At one point, probably somewhere in 2022 when we could finally be in the same room together, my parents asked my husband and I (we were in our late 50s at the time) if we would have gotten the "vaccine" if Trump had been re-elected. At the same time, with no hesitation of thought, my husband said "Absolutely not" and I said "Not on your life." Since when does who's president decide what kind of medical decision I make?! And now? I only wish Trump had been re-elected back then, because maybe my mom would be alive today. She died Jan. 2026, after 5 grueling years of dealing with 2 bad reactions to 2 Covid shots. And you know the phrase we heard quite often during this rotten period?--"We've never seen anything like this before." Ha. My dad still gets boosted and says he's "safe." I don't mention anything and just keep my mouth shut. Getting into a fight about how everything went down, both the Covid narrative and my mom, is just not worth it with a 91 year old who won't listen.
Yours is another tragic story in this morass of tragedies and loss that people don't really want to talk about anymore. So much loss for some but not all. I lost friends but managed not to lose a business unlike others although our family dynamics are changed. You might enjoy a recent podcast with Mike Rowe interviewing a data scientist named L. Todd Rose who has analyzed the difference between what people tell pollsters and what they actually believe as revealed by online searches. There is much more concordance between D's and R's and "Left" and "Right" on specific issues than we are led to believe. But if you look at what his studies have revealed regarding beliefs about President Trump, you see that there are genuinely extremely polarized views deeply held within the two D vs. R camps. Political opinion is modern religion for many people and like religion it is difficult to discuss with others. This does not serve any of us well. Anyway, if you get a chance, please check out the Todd Rose interview because it is very interesting.
So I am stopping at a rest area one evening on my way home from a fishing trip on the coast. One other car is parked by the facilities. I walk in without wearing a mask to the empty stall next to a guy wearing a mask. I am doing my business when the guy starts tapping on his mask, pointing to my bare face and shaking his frowning face. I ignore this, finish my business, zip up and turn to him and say this “I am happy you agree with me.” In a muffled voice he asks what am I talking about. I say that If masks worked then we’d both be safe if only one of us was masked. I thank him for wearing his and wished him a pleasant evening. For all I know he still may be standing there.
Trump should have fired Fauci from the start and made Dr Scott Atlas head of the Covid response. This was a colossal failure of the Trump admin which cost him precious campaign support and voter confidence.
PROSECUTE FAUCI. He deserves to be imprisoned, fined and barred from anything have to do with medical and public health practice. He is not a scientist but a lousy self-aggrandizing liar. He should be stripped of his pension as well. He is a deceiver and all his lies must be exposed publicly. Americans want accountability.
Given what we know now, I'm about 95% proven to know none of these perps took any shots. It was all theater for the little people.
DoD paid for it. Fauci has made more per year than the President for decades b/c he agreed to use NIH for bioweapons research, and he deployed the operations against us with Swine Flu, AIDS, and a few others. If a person understood the playbook from AIDS, anyone could predict each move.
Dallas Buyers' Club. Outlaw inexpensive treatments, kill them with AZT.
COVID 19. Outlaw inexpensive treatments, kill them with jabs and the hospital protocol of vents and "Run-death-is-near."
Tucker Carlson's recent interview of the CIA whistleblower was quite revealing. A picture emerges of the blob seeking an October surprise to unseat Donald Trump. China seems to have been a collaborator in the process. Whether the virus exists is irrelevant. What we call the common cold and the flu were easy to interpret as Covid. What really mattered was the blueprint from the Wuhan lab for the purported sequence of the virus which was used as the basis for the vaccine's design. The heavy lifting of proving there was a virus was left to the devices of propaganda and lies, and a fraudulent PCR test. It's almost as if someone made a call to Xie and said, "We need an outbreak, and make it convincing." It set the stage for the lockdowns, the hospital protocols, and the vaccine rollout that have done all the damage. Fauci was the mouthpiece pushing all of it, but the blob was working behind the scenes night and day to craft the narrative. Trump's disastrous decision to shut down the economy for two weeks to flatten the curve was his undoing. It's what the blob wanted, and it culminated in the continuation of the fraud with the installment of Biden and his auto-pen for the next four years. The vaccine's impact on the health of millions of Americans continues to contribute to excess deaths that stubbornly remain above baseline, and will likely be with us far into the future.
I was on a first name basis with 16 people who died after receiving the COVID “vax”. I will never forgive or forget the evil duplicity of those who pushed and profited by it.
Sharyl - I really salute your honesty and integrity. You’re one of my heroes and I pray more like you come around.
Here’s something to consider. Besides being a medical disaster, the Covid fiasco was also one of the biggest scams ever. Look into it and you’ll find that all these experts, leaders, administrators, and a hell of a lot of others were bending the truth for one reason - THEY WERE
MAKING A FORTUNE. The total of funds that poured out prompted the lies, the shady reporting, the needless deaths and everything else. Even the face masks foolishly pushed as some form of protection made lots of ambitious people filthy rich.
If you research it you will find just how low greed can get. We are talking about billions that flowed like water into the hands of those with zero moral compass and a lust to make a quick buck. And the government rewarded them and turned these slimes into heroes.
07/27/26: If only O.J. Simpson had kept a diary... thank you, Sharyl. 5-4-3-2-1 Fauci (age 85) goes into the Robert Mueller "I'm senile" defensive mode. August 15, 2026: Poor Fauci.
Just the shortness of the research and the use ofRNA should have sparked alarm. People are easily frightened why would anyone consent to having every cell in their body taught to make a protein that is part of the virus they are trying to avoid.perhaps mandatory biology and epistemology in schools would help develop a more aware public.
Great article and book. When we take a few steps up the ladder, it is clear that covid has not been the only false influence campaign accompanied by easily debunked falsehoods that employ censorship and cancellation strategies to silence rational criticism. At a minimum, we can use covid to help identify similar strategies in other areas (gender ideology, BLM, CRT, DEI, climate, green new deal, censorship in general). Can we connect dots between those campaigns and the Covid campaign?
Was it just big Pharma money or did people of disparate agendas join together in the con? It sounds very tin foil hattish to ask this question, but how can we avoid the question? Especially since these other con jobs notably accelerated at the same time. All based on a kernel of truth but manipulated to push an unrelated agenda accompanied by censorship or cancellation for any who rationally challenged them. If there are dots to connect, it's time we do so.
Early on I did the little bit of work needed to understand COVID posed no meaningful danger and of course tried to warn family and friends not to fall for the manipulative politicsl narratives. Only two listened. I was shocked by how easily most were fooled.
Might be worth noting that little bit of work was simply looking at IFR data on the CDC Website. For a 60 year old IFR was .5% but footnotes said 94% of the fatalities were people with one or more compbidities. Do the math, it means only a 3 in 10,000 chance of dying for reasonably healthy 60 year olds, which is not a risk you change your life for. BTW, the risk for healthy youngsters was 0!! Later I learned the CDC data was badly skewed (as Sharyl noted), meaning real risk was even lower.
I had the same sad experience. COVID caused a rift with family and friends. I was sternly told NOT to discuss anything about COVID with one branch of the family and complied in order to maintain the important relationships. I still say that if people were able to do basic math (numerators/denominators: deaths/population, etc) and ask basic questions, people would have been able to see the light. Has the overuse of calculators, lack of basic math skills, and dearth of basic logic training in schools made people unable to analyze things? Is it the strong need to be in with the in crowd all the time? I will never understand. Politics 100% played a big role and continues to do so. How do we get people to focus on the subject instead of politics?
You guys are hitting upon a subject that is near and dear to my heart. In fact, a couple of subjects. First of all, politics--the enchantment with being "on a team" or identifying with a cause--is damned-near endemic to our species. That's one piece. Secondly, basic numeracy is lacking pretty much across our whole society. I could give a couple examples, but suffice it say this. Almost no one you know is going to calculate an IFR or believe you when you state one based upon even the most trivial mathematics! Put those two things together, and we have what we had. Politicians who can't add driving fear in a populace that can't add to the benefit and glee of industries--pharma and government and/or public health--based upon both fear and lack of numeracy.
You're right. Some in my family wouldn't listen because they wanted to believe a particular political narrative. I haven't been a member of a political party for decades and could't care less about partisan politics, which also upsets some of them.
All one had to do was calculate the percentage of a percentage. I suspect some I know would find that grade school math difficult...tragically.
This. "I haven't been a member of a political party for decades and couldn't care less about partisan politics..."
Among the commonalities among us "covid iconoclasts," that is likely on the list. (That, plus "The CDC is FoS and has been so for decades." That one might be just on my personal list, though!)
Yep, both parties are corrupt and extremely self-oriented. As to falling into line with a political narrative, not only did my husband and I not do that, we actually made up our own minds concerning "vaccination" independently of any spiel coming from an actor, a politician/political party, or Safeway offering 20% off groceries after the shot. I think that really blew them (parents) away. And these were the same 2 people who would ask, when I was growing up, if everyone else was jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, would I do so, too?
I agree; politics and The-Taking-of-Sides (that is, being On-the-Right-Side) is paramount to far too many people. The extensive Covid lockdown caused serious drift in my family, and the politics of the whole thing was a big problem with my parents. They swallowed the narrative, hook, line, and sinker (Dad, late 80s, Mom, late 70s at the time). At one point, probably somewhere in 2022 when we could finally be in the same room together, my parents asked my husband and I (we were in our late 50s at the time) if we would have gotten the "vaccine" if Trump had been re-elected. At the same time, with no hesitation of thought, my husband said "Absolutely not" and I said "Not on your life." Since when does who's president decide what kind of medical decision I make?! And now? I only wish Trump had been re-elected back then, because maybe my mom would be alive today. She died Jan. 2026, after 5 grueling years of dealing with 2 bad reactions to 2 Covid shots. And you know the phrase we heard quite often during this rotten period?--"We've never seen anything like this before." Ha. My dad still gets boosted and says he's "safe." I don't mention anything and just keep my mouth shut. Getting into a fight about how everything went down, both the Covid narrative and my mom, is just not worth it with a 91 year old who won't listen.
Yours is another tragic story in this morass of tragedies and loss that people don't really want to talk about anymore. So much loss for some but not all. I lost friends but managed not to lose a business unlike others although our family dynamics are changed. You might enjoy a recent podcast with Mike Rowe interviewing a data scientist named L. Todd Rose who has analyzed the difference between what people tell pollsters and what they actually believe as revealed by online searches. There is much more concordance between D's and R's and "Left" and "Right" on specific issues than we are led to believe. But if you look at what his studies have revealed regarding beliefs about President Trump, you see that there are genuinely extremely polarized views deeply held within the two D vs. R camps. Political opinion is modern religion for many people and like religion it is difficult to discuss with others. This does not serve any of us well. Anyway, if you get a chance, please check out the Todd Rose interview because it is very interesting.
Thanks for the recommendation. Politics is my dad's religion, that's for sure.
So I am stopping at a rest area one evening on my way home from a fishing trip on the coast. One other car is parked by the facilities. I walk in without wearing a mask to the empty stall next to a guy wearing a mask. I am doing my business when the guy starts tapping on his mask, pointing to my bare face and shaking his frowning face. I ignore this, finish my business, zip up and turn to him and say this “I am happy you agree with me.” In a muffled voice he asks what am I talking about. I say that If masks worked then we’d both be safe if only one of us was masked. I thank him for wearing his and wished him a pleasant evening. For all I know he still may be standing there.
You are my hero! (I never had the guts to do anything like that, despite knowing masks were lunacy.)
Trump should have fired Fauci from the start and made Dr Scott Atlas head of the Covid response. This was a colossal failure of the Trump admin which cost him precious campaign support and voter confidence.
Trump definitely deserves his share of the blame. His inability to realize the incompetence of Fauci and Birx was a major failure in judgment.
One thing became apparent early on with "Dr. Fauci":
He is a liar.
Excellent, work Sharyl!
FauXi and ALL of the cronies involved in the Covid Crimes Against Humanity must pay a very heavy price for them.
PROSECUTE FAUCI. He deserves to be imprisoned, fined and barred from anything have to do with medical and public health practice. He is not a scientist but a lousy self-aggrandizing liar. He should be stripped of his pension as well. He is a deceiver and all his lies must be exposed publicly. Americans want accountability.
Walensky, Collins, and Dr Birx among others should be prosecuted as well.
Given what we know now, I'm about 95% proven to know none of these perps took any shots. It was all theater for the little people.
DoD paid for it. Fauci has made more per year than the President for decades b/c he agreed to use NIH for bioweapons research, and he deployed the operations against us with Swine Flu, AIDS, and a few others. If a person understood the playbook from AIDS, anyone could predict each move.
Dallas Buyers' Club. Outlaw inexpensive treatments, kill them with AZT.
COVID 19. Outlaw inexpensive treatments, kill them with jabs and the hospital protocol of vents and "Run-death-is-near."
We need tribunals, guilty verdicts and hangings.
By the way, love and respect your work, have for decades. We need recognized, elite journalists to break these stories, reveal the democide.
Nuremberg 2.0 required, except make everyone pay.
Exactly.
Preemptive pardons are the most ridiculous things that we were ever sold as lawful.
Tucker Carlson's recent interview of the CIA whistleblower was quite revealing. A picture emerges of the blob seeking an October surprise to unseat Donald Trump. China seems to have been a collaborator in the process. Whether the virus exists is irrelevant. What we call the common cold and the flu were easy to interpret as Covid. What really mattered was the blueprint from the Wuhan lab for the purported sequence of the virus which was used as the basis for the vaccine's design. The heavy lifting of proving there was a virus was left to the devices of propaganda and lies, and a fraudulent PCR test. It's almost as if someone made a call to Xie and said, "We need an outbreak, and make it convincing." It set the stage for the lockdowns, the hospital protocols, and the vaccine rollout that have done all the damage. Fauci was the mouthpiece pushing all of it, but the blob was working behind the scenes night and day to craft the narrative. Trump's disastrous decision to shut down the economy for two weeks to flatten the curve was his undoing. It's what the blob wanted, and it culminated in the continuation of the fraud with the installment of Biden and his auto-pen for the next four years. The vaccine's impact on the health of millions of Americans continues to contribute to excess deaths that stubbornly remain above baseline, and will likely be with us far into the future.
I was on a first name basis with 16 people who died after receiving the COVID “vax”. I will never forgive or forget the evil duplicity of those who pushed and profited by it.
Sharyl - I really salute your honesty and integrity. You’re one of my heroes and I pray more like you come around.
Here’s something to consider. Besides being a medical disaster, the Covid fiasco was also one of the biggest scams ever. Look into it and you’ll find that all these experts, leaders, administrators, and a hell of a lot of others were bending the truth for one reason - THEY WERE
MAKING A FORTUNE. The total of funds that poured out prompted the lies, the shady reporting, the needless deaths and everything else. Even the face masks foolishly pushed as some form of protection made lots of ambitious people filthy rich.
If you research it you will find just how low greed can get. We are talking about billions that flowed like water into the hands of those with zero moral compass and a lust to make a quick buck. And the government rewarded them and turned these slimes into heroes.
just reading this excellent piece gives me PTSD. I want assurance that we will NEVER go through this again!
07/27/26: If only O.J. Simpson had kept a diary... thank you, Sharyl. 5-4-3-2-1 Fauci (age 85) goes into the Robert Mueller "I'm senile" defensive mode. August 15, 2026: Poor Fauci.
Just the shortness of the research and the use ofRNA should have sparked alarm. People are easily frightened why would anyone consent to having every cell in their body taught to make a protein that is part of the virus they are trying to avoid.perhaps mandatory biology and epistemology in schools would help develop a more aware public.
Great article and book. When we take a few steps up the ladder, it is clear that covid has not been the only false influence campaign accompanied by easily debunked falsehoods that employ censorship and cancellation strategies to silence rational criticism. At a minimum, we can use covid to help identify similar strategies in other areas (gender ideology, BLM, CRT, DEI, climate, green new deal, censorship in general). Can we connect dots between those campaigns and the Covid campaign?
Was it just big Pharma money or did people of disparate agendas join together in the con? It sounds very tin foil hattish to ask this question, but how can we avoid the question? Especially since these other con jobs notably accelerated at the same time. All based on a kernel of truth but manipulated to push an unrelated agenda accompanied by censorship or cancellation for any who rationally challenged them. If there are dots to connect, it's time we do so.