Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

The rise in murders, driving deaths, and overdoses cost tens of thousands of young Americans their lives. More than 155,000 people in the United States died of those causes in 2020, compared to about 120,000 in 2019.

In May 2020, The Lancet, a top medical journal, published a paper that purported to show HCQ not only did not work but might actually be dangerous. “Antimalarial drug touted by President Trump is linked to increased risk of death in coronavirus patients, study says,” the Washington Post reported.13 Independent researchers quickly raised questions a

Those civil liberties and practical concerns were the main reason the Times had published its article. As it explained, “On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases…. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate an

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

Covid deaths globally, which had ranged from thirty-five to forty thousand a week since the spring (more than one million human beings die each week of all causes), began a steady climb that lasted through January.

May 20: In an interview headlined “Leadership during Crisis,” Fauci tells the Washington Post, “I don’t think we should be that concerned right now about how long they’re effective. I think they will be effective long enough that we will get to the point where we are not going to be necessarily worrying about a surge.”21

The lab leak theory quickly became so toxic that Facebook actively censored it.35

Two Vanity Fair headlines on stories written by the same author summed up the woke media’s incoherence. On October 7, “Trump’s Rush to Release a COVID Vaccine Has Americans Worried.”11 On December 18, “The White House’s Incompetence Is Apparently Holding Up ‘Millions’ of COVID Vaccines.”12

Unverified second- and third-hand horror stories were regularly retweeted tens of thousands of times, especially if they included information about young people becoming ill and dying. Many of those stories would later be proven false, but far fewer people saw the retractions or corrections.

Yet, by March 9, when Italy imposed its first lockdown, the country had suffered only about nine thousand coronavirus cases and five hundred deaths. With one of the world’s oldest populations and harsh northern winters, Italy regularly suffered severe winter flu epidemics. In the winter of 2014–2015 and again in 2016–2017, influenza and other flu-l