The Gaslit Hangover.

I've been thinking alot about how America has changed since March of 2020. So I was pretty interested in two reports that came out this past week relating to the Covid pandemic.

The first is that the Lancet, one of the world's preeminent medical journals, has published a meta-review of studies that shows that natural immunity was at least as protective as two doses of mRNA vaccines.

The second is a report by the U.S. Department of Energy that Covid-19 "likely" emerged from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology -- the "lab leak" theory. While this is not dispositive proof, it is another indication that Covid most likely did not spontaneously erupt from a "wet market" in the same city as a lab that develops novel Coronaviruses.

Well, duh.

I mention this because the level of gaslighting perpetuated by the media and the government on these two issues was unprecedented. If you will recall, those who even dared to raise the lab-leak idea were called xenophobic, racist, and dumb. Nevermind that the U.S. government was actually funding dangerous "gain of function" research on novel coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. No, we were told, the virus came from a muscrat that mated with a possum and then was eaten by a fruit bat.

On the natural immunity front, it was even worse. It appears now that the decades of scientific research that proved that your body develops natural antibodies when you get an infection -- the very same reaction that vaccines are designed to promote -- were correct. What a shock! So it is noteworthy that those who pushed to consider prior Covid infections as akin to having been vaccinated were shouted down by the science industrial complex, which had an obvious and vested interest in getting people jabbed with an experimental vaccine that was rushed to market. Look what happened to those who decided not to get vaccinated -- shunned, fired from their jobs, treated with contempt. Oh, and Pfizer and the other pharma companies that are normally derided? They were lauded, and then they laughed all the way to the bank.

I am not desiring to be political here, nor am I questioning that there was a lot we didn't know when the pandemic began. I am, however, pointing out how Federal and state governments, aided by their media mouthpieces, were able to gaslight the public into ignoring long-held facts and common sense. En masse, many people seemed to lose their ability to think critically about what they were being told by obviously politicized and compromised sources.

Now, the public health establishment is trying to come back and say "nevermind", as if we should just move on. "Nothing to see here." Will we allow this to happen without addressing the violation of the public trust that occurred? What will happen when the next pandemic comes, which it most surely will at some point in the future?

Being a citizen has always required thinking critically about the relationship between us and our government. We need this now, more than ever.

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Ken Davenport is an entrepreneur and writer and author most recently of The Stoic Transition: A Guide.