At first, I wanted a good portion of this article to be a victory lap for making the prediction earlier this year that we would see a major pivot on how the media and authority figures would present Covid to the public.

Among other things, on January 2, 2022, I predicted “one of the largest mainstream media pivots in history in 2022, catalyzed by capitalism and common sense”:

But what I do want to say is that I’m predicting for 2022 that the media is going to make one of the biggest pivots on any topic it has ever made, on Covid.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” you’ll think to yourself. “After all, the media follows the truth, so what’s so tough about making a pivot on a story?”
Let’s get real. We all know that the media - both sides of the aisle - hates to correct itself, hates to pivot and hates to do anything but double down on narratives that it is being fed regardless of whether or not they are objectively true.
For 2022, I’m gonna make a bold prediction. The media, and maybe even politicians, are going to start to realize that the narratives that they have been pushing with regard to Covid, lockdowns, vaccinations and our economy are no longer being accepted at face value by their viewers.

As much as I’d like to go full Barry Horowitz and spend this article patting myself on the back, there are, unfortunately, some ugly lessons from the entire debacle that I think are more important to digest.

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If you haven’t heard this week, the CDC has dropped quarantine and social distancing requirements for people who have come in “close contact with an infected person.”

The Globe and Mail reported: “The changes, which come more than 2 1/2 years after the start of the pandemic, are driven by a recognition that an estimated 95% of Americans 16 and older have acquired some level of immunity, either from being vaccinated or infected, agency officials said.”

Greta Massetti, a CDC epidemiologist came right out and said it last week:

“We know that Covid-19 is here to stay. High levels of population immunity due to vaccination and previous infection, and the many tools that we have available to protect people from severe illness and death, have put us in a different place.”

I’d say the pivot is about two and a half years too late, but truth be told it’s more like 12 to 18 months too late. After all, I was one of the original voices that raised significant alarm about Covid from January 2020 all the way through early summer 2020, when no one else was paying attention to it. My main reasons for being alarmist about it, at first, were:

I simply don’t trust anything that China tells us
We had zero data coming out of anywhere else in the world about the virus
There were startling social media images ostensibly from China, appearing to show everyday randos just collapsing on the street, authorities welding people inside of their apartments and the government filling in driving tunnels with dirt - among other totally rational measures

Why China is still obsessed with disinfecting everything | MIT Technology Review — “Just a normal Tuesday, Ted. Nothing to see here. We do this *all the time.*” - Chinese government, circa January 2020 (probably)

The entire world didn’t catch on to the fact that Covid was even a news story until March 2020, nearly 2 months after I had been labeled a fearmonger for crowing incessantly about it and alerting my Twitter followers that I was taking pandemic precautions.

But in early summer 2020, I did a Periscope livestream at about the same time the market was plumbing its lows and Bill Ackman was proclaiming “hell is coming” on national television. The livestream was called something like “Being A Contrarian During The Time Of A Coronavirus” and it focused on stocks I’d like to be buying at the time - namely, I remember mentioning financials and some blue chip staples. I have no idea where the livestream went - I think it disappeared into the annals of history now that Periscope has become defunct. This photo of a fatter, bearded me drinking vodka is all I could salvage:

Quoth the Raven @QTRResearch

Proof it happened

Regardless, it was around that time we started to get data out of South Korea and Italy that helped round out a better picture of just how deadly (or not) the virus truly was.

After the summer of 2020 and after the Fed implemented QE-go-fuck-yourself-we-do-whatever-we-want, I went on a buying spree in stocks and joked that it would be a race to 4,000 between the SPX and the price of gold.

I returned to my normal jiu jitsu training routine, went about daily life without a mask and, for all intents and purposes, put the mental stress of the virus far behind me. It was in that 6 to 12 months that the generally public finally started to catch up to where those of us who were doing our own homework were about the virus in January 2020.

Then, as the government-led herd has a tendency to do, everybody overreacted in glaringly inefficient and overzealous ways, and we far overshot the mark to deal with Covid, and the objective reality of what the virus meant for us in our daily lives, in any reasonable fashion.

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Throughout 2021, the ugly economic effects of lockdowns begin to surface, not only with small business owners who were forced out of business, but also with major cities and municipalities across the United States turning into third world countries.

The United States became a reality distortion field, where the country came to a complete halt, but the Fed printed trillions of dollars to try and paper over what had become the corpse of our economy.

Coronavirus: US economy sees sharpest contraction in decades - BBC News

This genius strategy is part of the reason we are staring face down into the barrel of nearly double digit CPI.

The further into 2021 we got, the more the rhetoric ramped up, despite the fact that vaccines were on their way. More lockdowns and travel restrictions were imposed, despite earlier ones proving to be wholly ineffective. A Soviet-style propaganda campaign was launched to get everyone vaccinated.

Where you must show proof of vaccination in San Francisco beginning Friday

Those who didn’t obey were stripped of their normal everyday rights - some were even fired from their jobs.

Let us also not forget that after the vaccines were finally being distributed, after waiting about 12 months for them and hearing about how miraculous they would be non-stop, that it was only then that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on national television that she felt an “impending doom” about the virus.

“When I first started at CDC about two months ago I made a promise to you: I would tell you the truth even if it was not the news we wanted to hear. Now is one of those times when I have to share the truth, and I have to hope and trust you will listen. I’m going to pause here, I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom,” Walensky said.

New variants like Delta and Omicron were then peddled by mainstream media as reasons to continue to trust “the science”.

The public and the media became addicted to Covid hysteria.

Meanwhile, the same “science” that was informing liberal automatons like Rachel Maddow and Joe Biden that they wouldn’t catch Covid if they were vaccinated (sources here and here), was forced to double back on those claims.

As 2021 turned into 2022, I urged my readers that, if it was right for them and their family members, to consider the idea of enjoying a normal holiday season.

I had high hopes for the holidays in 2021, feeling like things were inevitably returning to normal as objective truths and reason regarding Covid sunk in deeper with anybody who had a couple of brain cells to rub together.

It was about this same time that mRNA inventor Dr. Robert Malone, M.D. and Dr. Peter McCullough both took to the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and offered up some much needed, iconoclastic points of view on the virus.

Heading into 2022, I was convinced that the media was going to be forced to shift its narrative on Covid. In January, I also wrote that I thought business owners would do away with vaccine and mask mandates as capitalism and common sense would dictate the most pragmatic path forward. I wrote eight months ago, in January:

As I alluded to earlier, I believe that a mass pivot is happening not only in the mainstream media, but among government entities tasked with overseeing the Covid response. In short, the powers that be understand that the citizens of this country have lost our patience with their bullshit and, with mid-terms coming up, it’s probably the only time over the last 2 years that anyone in government is putting the people’s concerns over their own priorities.
This narrative shift will do a couple of things. First, after this omicron wave passes, it should hopefully stir up a discussion about natural immunity that’s about 18 months overdue. Putting vaccine mandates aside, Omicron, given its extremely infectious nature and mild effects, may wind up acting like nature’s vaccine for almost everybody anyway. People will start to understand this concept and push harder on “the science” as to why it has conveniently ignore the topic of natural immunity - which has been proven to be more robust than vaccination - thus far.

The second thing this narrative shift is going to do is allow for momentum and media support of the idea to relax some mandates and begin returning some locations that have strict Covid protocols back towards normal. Such a relaxation of Covid protocols will then empower local business owners (the ones who haven’t been completely ground into dust by Target, Wal-Mart or Amazon over the last 18 months) to relax restrictions they may have in place. This is where capitalism and common sense will take over.

And as 2022 began to unfold, that’s exactly what happened. In fact, in my hometown of Philadelphia, it happened almost immediately when the city tried - for a second time - to impose mask mandates and business owners banded together, sued the city, and then basically told those in charge to go fuck themselves.

In other words, people finally had enough.

Once it became clear that the populace was growing disgusted with the way the virus was being handled by those pulling the strings, the CDC relented, and finally admitted this week that the virus is here to stay and that natural immunity - and immunity in general - had magically been achieved.

In some respects, it’s poetic that the CDC is telling us what we already know. After all, they’re “in charge”, right?

I honestly believe that they wouldn’t be changing their official stance if the public hadn’t already changed it for them. It has become increasingly clear that citizens simply aren’t interested in being mandated to take precautions that they don’t want to anymore. Those who want to, or need to, are more than welcome and are encouraged to. Otherwise, everyone else doesn’t seem interested in being deputized as part of a war that they are completely apathetic about fighting.

There are a couple great lessons to learn from this.

The first lesson is that the people truly do have the power. In some respects, it feels like the country made up the government’s mind for them. Philadelphia is a great example. The idea of mandates was causing more fights and civil unrest on a daily basis than it was preventing. Business owners - not just restauranteurs and small business owners, but also CEOs of airlines and executives of major corporations - became upset at how spurious mandates were affecting their businesses negatively. It became clear that the ends definitely didn’t justify the means.

The second lesson is also a great one to behold, especially in light of the Rube Goldberg-style caper that the rocket surgeons at the Federal Reserve are currently in the midst of executing: the government is usually late, usually overshoots the mark, and then fails to correct and re-align itself accordingly.

Nobody took Covid seriously in December 2019 or January 2020, which is when I first started reading about it. The signs were there: it was being mentioned on the Bloomberg terminal every day and it was even on the Fox News crawl every day. It wasn’t a major headline yet, but the information was there that China was reporting cases of a new coronavirus in Wuhan. Trust me, I know, because I spent an entire month making Busta Rhymes-themed “Wuhan, got you all in check” jokes before I realized the world may have stepped in some actual shit. Behold exhibit A:

Our government, led by President Trump at the time, failed to take action fast enough. When they did take action, I commended them for instituting a travel ban and getting the ball rolling on vaccinations while many on the left reverted to identity politics-themed games about whether or not it was racist to say that a virus had originated in China. Nancy Pelosi’s strategy at the time appeared to be to surround herself with as many Chinese people as possible. Go figure.

The caption under the photo, from February 2020, reads:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi toured San Francisco’s Chinatown Monday to send a message. She said there’s no reason tourists or locals should be staying away from the area out of fear over coronavirus concerns.

This poorly thought-out and horribly timed response to Covid is akin to the Fed’s response to inflation right now. I have noted many times that I think the Fed has hiked so much, so quickly, that we are going to be blindsided by the consequences in credit markets over the next two quarters.

The final lesson we can learn from this 180 degree about face by the CDC is that it' is okay to ask questions - even moreso when the narrative is being dictated by unilateral entities or overwhelming groupthink.

Sometimes the government gets things right and sometimes they get things wrong - but if there’s one thing we should have learned over the last two years, it’s that more outspoken dialogue and Socratic method about our response to the virus may have done us some good.

Instead, not unlike with the economy, the focus became micromanagement, control and silencing those who raised questions about the official narrative. And what good did that do? Precisely nothing, other than serving to make the lunacy of days past even more noticeable now that the CDC has relaxed its grip.

The Covid narrative - like any other narrative we are force fed - is like the free market. Eventually, over time, the majority is always going to arrive at the most pragmatic solution that is the most widely accepted. Whether that solution comes from a government mandate, a populace uprising or anywhere in between is moot. All that matters is that we eventually arrive close to best practices.

The recent CDC guideline change is exactly that. A small group of people will be horrified by the decision and will wonder how the agency could ever change course - but the majority of free thinkers will see it for what it really is: a long overdue and much needed return to reason.

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