The Continuing Silence on COVID

I'm not a socialist, but as a COVID-cautious person, I do agree with many of the sentiments expressed in this World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) article about how COVID has been minimized and ignored by our government. Remember Biden's infamous "60 Minutes" interview in which he declared the pandemic over and insisted that nobody wears masks any more.

Here are some excerpts:  

Ongoing COVID-19 surge heralds another winter of death.  "The latest winter wave of infections and hospitalizations takes place just eight months after the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Biden administration ended their COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations without any scientific justification. This initiated the wholesale scrapping of all official response to the pandemic, giving the virus free rein to infect the entire global population ad infinitum.

"A virtual blackout of any mention of the coronavirus in the corporate media accompanied the swan song of official reporting. From then on, if illnesses at hospitals or among public figures were referenced at all, it was always with the euphemism 'respiratory illness.'  The words COVID, coronavirus and pandemic have been all but blacklisted, and the facts about the dangers of the disease have been actively suppressed.

"Summarizing the cumulative results of this global assault on public health, the WSWS International Editorial Board wrote in its New Year 2024 statement:

    "All facts and data surrounding the present state of the pandemic are concealed from the global population, which has instead been subjected to unending lies, gaslighting and propaganda, now shrouded in a veil of silence. There is a systematic cover-up of the real gravity of the crisis, enforced by the government, the corporations, the media and the trade union bureaucracies. Official policy has devolved into simply ignoring, denying and falsifying the reality of the pandemic, no matter what the consequences, as millions are sickened and thousands die globally every day.

"In response to the latest wastewater data, there have only been a handful of news articles, most of which have sought to downplay the severity of the current wave and largely ignored the deepening crisis in hospitals.

"The official blackout has given rise to an extraordinary contradiction in social life. The reality of mass infection means that everyone knows a friend, neighbor, family member or coworker who is currently or was recently sick, or even hospitalized or killed, by COVID-19. Yet the unrelenting pressure to dismiss the danger of the pandemic means that shopping centers, supermarkets, workplaces and even doctor’s offices and hospitals are full of people not taking the basic and simple precaution of masking to protect themselves. Every visit outside one’s home carries the risk of being infected, with unknown long-term consequences.

"The real solution to the coronavirus is not to ignore it, but to develop a campaign of elimination and eradication of the virus worldwide. To do so requires the implementation of mask mandates, mass testing and contact tracing, as well as the installation of updated ventilation systems and the safe deployment of Far-UVC technology to halt the spread of the virus."