Did All That COVID Angst Make Us Crazy?

We lost our souls during the “pandemic,” it’s time to get our humanity back

Three young girls and their parents were in the elevator when I stepped in. I smiled and said hello. No one responded. But all three girls looked terrified. They started whimpering. One hid her face behind her mom’s arm; another covered her nose and mouth with her hand; the third started breathing into her shirt.

“It’s okay,” the parents murmured as their daughters whined. “Don’t be scared.”

I can’t say for sure but I think they were afraid that breathing the same air as me would make them sick.

COVID-19 divided us

As the global campaign to lock people down, shut people up, cover people’s faces with face diapers, I mean masks, and make everyone very, very afraid took root in America, being fearful about COVID-19 became something of a liberal litmus test.

If you were afraid—very, very afraid—you were a good liberal who voted for Joseph Biden, cared about other people, and “trusted” the science.

(As an aside, whenever anyone says “trust X,” all I can think of is a teenage boy talking to a teenage girl: ‘You won’t get pregnant. Trust me.’)

If you were more interested in looking rationally and dispassionately at the infection rates in your particular city and state, as well as analyzing your own risk factors should you become sick with COVID-19, and thinking critically about things like mask-wearing and social distancing, you were a “selfish crackpot” who voted for Donald Trump and didn’t care about anything but your own right to bear arms and protest abortion.

That’s how the media and the White House, once Biden was elected, spun things anyway.

And the majority of Americans—including virtually all of my liberal-minded friends and family members—have been all too happy to agree. They’ve been virtue signaling and trash talking the “conservatives” for three years now.

And even when their own children, fiancés, and spouses have had devastating vaccine outcomes—including sudden death—they continue to dedicate all of their brain cells to defending the pharmaceutical industry.

Because, you know, big pharmaceutical companies have never cared about anything but the health of our country. And billionaires are not motivated by money.

Discriminating against folks who said, “No, thank you,” to Big Pharma

“You can’t come in my house,” my neighbor of more than fifteen years told me with a simpering smile on her face.

This was at a time when there were very few cases and zero deaths from COVID-19 in our town. She’d not asked me but just assumed, because I advocate for medical freedom, that I wasn’t vaccinated. And unvaccinated people were not welcome in her home.

Despite the sign on her lawn that read:

WE BELIEVE
LOVE IS LOVE
SCIENCE IS REAL
BLACK LIVES MATTER
NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL
FEMINISM FOR EVERYONE
KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING

“Let’s not,” my best friend said about taking a walk in the mountains together after I told her I’d be happy to stay six feet away (though I secretly felt that was absurd, as we were both perfectly healthy and neither of us had had any opportunity to be exposed to the virus) but that I wouldn’t wear a mask while hiking.

“My family wouldn’t like that,” she texted. “Rain check?”

She and I used to go walking once or twice a week. That was almost three years ago. We haven’t seen each other since.

“I just have a panic attack every time I go into the supermarket,” another friend said. “I think of other people’s hands …” here she paused with tears in her eyes and made a grossed-out sound, “…touching all the vegetables. Oh. My. God.”

“I can’t even pet their dog”

Another friend in Lansing, Michigan, who lives close to Michigan State University, tells me her family has faced nonstop unkindness from work colleagues, neighbors, and erstwhile friends.

This friend is a vaccine developer. She spends all day every day working on vaccines, reading science, and deciphering the intricacies of innate versus acquired immunity.

But she and her husband were forced to move to a different state after the discrimination they experienced became too extreme.

Because he chose not to get vaccinated, her husband wasn’t allowed to eat in the cafeteria with other employees, could no longer participate in luncheon meetings, and was told he would lose his basic employee benefits, including health insurance, if he continued to refuse to comply.

But when they moved to Lansing, Michigan, it wasn’t any better. There, too, they have been facing severe harassment from family members, neighbors, and even fellow church-goers.

“The neighbors came to us on our own property while we were just working in the garage one day just after the vaccines were mandated and asked us if we’d been vaccinated,” she explained to me via email.

“We don’t lie. Of course, we said, ‘No we aren’t and will not!’ My being a manufacturing engineer for vaccines, I knew not to take the vaccines since they’re still so experimental.

“Also, mandating the vaccine for people that had already had COVID? UNBELIEVABLE. Stats showed COVID behaved like the rest of viral pathogens—the only high-risk group were the elderly—so why the mandate?!”

But this decision to be honest with her neighbors turned her family into pariahs.

“We were branded Lepers by the neighbors and nobody comes near us in the neighborhood,” she told me. “Media has the neighbors so brainwashed I CAN’T EVEN PET THEIR dog through the fence.”

The hypocrisy leaves me speechless.

“Love is love,” except when it comes to loving people who don’t want a liability-free experimental injection.

“Kindness is everything,” except kindness towards people who don’t want a liability-free experimental injection.

“Black lives matter,” except the lives of black people who don’t want these vaccines.

Longevity researchers have identified nine powerful practices of people around the world who live long, healthy, happy lives. One of those practices is “finding your right tribe.” That is, being in community with people who are loving and generous and who have your back during times of need.

We let the pharmaceutical industry pit us against each other. We abandoned our right tribes. With its long tentacles in the government and the media, Big Pharma managed to turn families against each other, make neighbors act cruelly to each other, and scare little girls into believing they would die if they rode in an elevator with a stranger.

I’m not sure how we allowed this to happen. But I am sure that it’s time to stop letting big interests divide us and start acting with kindness again.

Related articles:
Does The World Really Need a COVID-19 Vaccine?
13 Reasons Why the CDC is Right and You Should Vaccinate Your Kids
It’s Not Hesitancy, It’s Thoughtful Consideration

About the author: Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science journalist and book author. She has taught post-colonial literature in inner-city Atlanta; appeared live on prime-time television in Paris, France; and worked on a child survival campaign in Niger, West Africa. To access exclusive content and support independent journalism, become a paid subscriber to Vibrant Life today.