Worst of all, by early April 2020 we had strong evidence the coronavirus essentially did not spread outdoors—and thus that making people stay inside was not just pointless but counterproductive.

Thus knowing the exact genome of Sars-Cov-2 enabled the scientists to model the structure of the entire virus—and most important, the spike proteins that stuck to its surface. They almost immediately realized that the novel coronavirus was a serious threat. Its spike proteins merged with a receptor found on the surface of many human cells. The

these new diseases are stubbornly unknowable. They exist without cause, course, or cure. They are nothing more or less than their self-reported symptoms. They are metaphor as illness.

The discovery of an accurate test was seen as a major breakthrough, giving authorities worldwide a chance to track the virus. Only later would the risks of using a test that could be tuned to find tiny amounts of virus become clear. But by then, PCR testing had become standard worldwide, despite its flaws.

And the United States has markedly more Covid deaths in people under sixty than other advanced nations for one simple reason: our sky-high rates of obesity, especially morbid obesity.

Essentially, the natural origins theory went something like this: Lots of coronaviruses exist. They regularly mutate and trade pieces of their genomes with each other. An intermediate host will be found sooner or later, even if some of the obvious candidates haven’t panned out.

In all, more than a quarter-million Americans died from drug overdoses, alcohol, traffic accidents, and homicides in 2020, a rise of over fifty thousand. Those deaths primarily occurred in younger people.16 Even excluding traffic accidents, the rise in deaths of despair in people under fifty—not the total number, but the increase from 2019 to

In response, doctors tried dozens of therapies. The first to gain wide attention was an anti-malarial drug called hydroxychloroquine, or HCQ.

No matter that it drew its world-changing conclusions on the thinnest possible evidence. It quickly went viral.