The Mainstream Media Owes Us All An Apology For The Mass Psychosis It Caused During The COVID Era

As the month wore on and the situation worsened, China continued to save face, insisting everything was under control and denying human-to-human transmission, a claim echoed by the World Health Organization at the time, before finally admitting the truth, almost a week after they already knew. 

By the time Wuhan was locked down, millions had already left the city for the Lunar New Year, dispersing around the globe and unknowingly spreading the virus that would soon be elevated to pandemic status. In late January, the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower who first tried to alert the world, died of COVID-19, which elevated people’s worries from “stoic concern” to “mass hysteria.” 

The Incomprehensibility of COVID Regulations

The moment COVID broke containment from Wuhan, China, the incomprehensibility of what was going on and what we should do about it began to snowball. China faced global backlash for censorship and for concealing crucial information about the virus’s origins. Trump accused the WHO of colluding with China and threatened to pull funding from the organization. “The early story of the pandemic in China shows missed opportunities at every step,” reported AP NEWS. 

“Under Xi, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades, increasing political repression has made officials more hesitant to report cases without a clear green light from the top.” This led to vast underreporting of positive cases, as China ignored signs of human-to-human transmission and set up tight criteria for confirming cases (beyond testing positive, samples had to be sent to Beijing and sequenced, and required staff to report to supervisors before sending information higher) and doctors continued to be punished for warning about the disease. 

From January 5-17, 2020, Wuhan conspicuously reported zero new cases just as Hubei’s two biggest political events of the year were taking place in the city. It wasn’t until the National Health Commission sent in a team on January 19 that the truth spilled out, and by the very next day China was forced to admit human-to-human transmission. But when the world asked questions, China slammed the door shut. No independent investigators got into Wuhan until January 2021, and even then the “joint WHO mission” was so tightly controlled by Beijing it only made things look more suspicious.

COVID was like one long bureaucratic nightmare in which we saw an inversion of priorities.

First, masks didn’t work, and you didn’t need them. Then, they were essential and mandated for entry into any public space. It went from “don’t wear masks” to “only wear cloth masks” to “actually surgical masks are better” to “only N95 masks offer real protection.” As it turned out, this constantly evolving mandate wasn’t being continuously updated in the face of changing science so much as it was a supply-driven optics campaign to conserve supplies for frontline workers like medical staff in hospitals. 

Anthony Fauci admitted they downplayed masks to prevent panic-buying and shortages, stating, “we were concerned about the PPE and masks being available for the healthcare providers.” 

After the harshest of lockdowns passed and restaurants were reopened, we existed in this Orwellian world of doublethink. Masks weren’t just mandated, they were a signal of allegiance to a certain strain of social and political thought. We became divided by mask warriors and mask resistors. The inconsistency of policy rendered these wars fruitless, as masks became increasingly performative—a social and political sorting hat that wasn’t really about protecting the vulnerable but about declaring your loyalties, either to public safety or to personal choice.

It was a haze of contradictory rules. “You must wear this mask in public spaces to walk to your table, but once you sit down, you can remove your mask to eat, even as you sit directly next to other diners,” the rules declared, with no sense of irony. The masks supposedly knew how to deflect the virus based on vibes. And the bizarre part is that the social (and often legal) enforcement of masks was most harshly enforced while walking alone outside or in certain parts of Australia, for trying to flee the area during a lockdown. Fanatical pro-maskers wore their masks while driving alone in their car, while anti-maskers frequently took photos of such people to make fun of them online.

With the exception of extreme travel restrictions in Australia and New Zealand, which lasted for multiple years, airports stayed open, and people sat shoulder-to-shoulder in poorly ventilated metal tubes soaring thousands of feet high in the sky while playgrounds were roped off with caution tape. Arbitrary lines were drawn around “essential” and “non-essential” services. Schools, small businesses, gyms, and churches were closed—sights of community, health, and productivity, were shut down, while, paradoxically, major retail and liquor stores, even casinos and strip clubs in certain states, remained open. 

Beaches were patrolled by drones while crowded subway cars ran as usual. In numerous places, especially in the state of California, outdoor activities were banned, even though evidence showed there was minimal risk of outdoor transmission. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” morphed into endless shifting goalposts. Nursing home residents were sealed off from family in the name of “protection,” as were newly expecting mothers, who were forced to deliver their babies alone, even without their partner, which then evolved into one support person, so long as they submitted to endless draconian safety measures that proved to be pretty futile in the end. We locked mothers out of NICUs, depriving newborn babies of the most basic human bond, subsequent studies of which have determined adversely affected the mother-infant attachment and the growth and development of the baby and may have led to irreversible problems.

The incoherence of the rules was dizzying. On some level, nobody really knew what we were dealing with. Not at first. In hindsight, most of it amounted to political theater: contradictory policies, moral panic, and a veneer of control covering a reality of uncertainty. In most places around the world, you needed proof of vaccination to do basically anything: to travel, to enter public venues, work, school, public transit, or to shop. In Australia, you needed to download a government tracking app proving you were vaccinated, and you had to scan QR codes before entering any business.

Regular people had to jump through hoops to be permitted to travel: submit to vaccinations, repeated testing, mask mandates, and adhere to long quarantines, while celebrities, politicians, and sports teams were exempt under “essential travel."

We were told, “If you’re vaccinated, you won’t get COVID” and “vaccinated people do not carry the virus,” only for the vaccines to prove largely ineffective against both transmission and infection. When this became anecdotally evident, the goalpost shifted: “vaccines don’t stop infection, but they reduce severity and hospitalizations,” then “vaccines reduce transmission,” to finally: “vaccines prevent fatalities from the most severe cases of COVID.” All the while, the risks of getting these vaccines and the exceedingly required booster shots of said ineffective vaccines were being downplayed with great effort by governments, scientists, public health organizations, and activists. We saw mass gaslighting over undeniable spikes in cases of post-vaccination myocarditis, side effects that cost countless lives for demographics who were at low risk for COVID, as well as disruptions to women’s menstrual cycles, which we were similarly assured were being imagined.

COVID was like one long bureaucratic nightmare in which we saw an inversion of priorities. We punished the least vulnerable to disease while having little effect on high-risk demographics like the elderly and immunocompromised, because vaccines proved ineffective, and masking and social distancing policies were inconsistent. We couldn’t keep the spread contained forever without the ability to eradicate the virus. We kept kids locked up in the home as they fell behind in crucial developmental years (the effects of which they’re still suffering from today), prevented people suffering from abuse from leaving their homes, from small business owners being able to make a living, from community organizers and churches being able to provide people with spiritual guidance, all while we made exceptions for the most vacuous activities: strip clubs and casinos. 

Special allowances were made for people participating in protests (riots) against police brutality and racism—crowds deemed “low risk” while schools remained closed for over a year in some places. Universities went fully remote but charged full tuition. Regular people had to jump through hoops to be permitted to travel: submit to vaccinations, repeated testing, mask mandates, and adhere to long quarantines, while celebrities, politicians, and sports teams were exempt under “essential travel." Don’t worry, though. At least they sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” to ease our burdens. And this continued far past the point that was reasonable. Far past the point we knew we were delaying the inevitable: reopening society, re-establishing some semblance of normalcy, and achieving herd immunity.

CDS: Covid Derangement Syndrome

Calling what we lived through “COVID Derangement Syndrome” doesn’t feel like an exaggeration. It was mass psychosis under high stakes: the perceived line between life and death, with a checklist of rules from governments and health agencies that were supposed to protect the vulnerable (and perhaps, for many, virtue signal how much you cared about the safety and well-being of others, regardless of their actual efficacy). 

Every death from COVID-19 is a regrettable tragedy, just as any other low grade outbreak we’ve had in the past few decades: swine flu, Zika virus, avian flu, SARS, but the way deaths were recorded only deepened distrust: serious pre-existing conditions collapsed into a single COVID tally, while the CDC blurred “dying with” and “dying from” the virus, forcing coroners to record COVID cases among gunshot wounds and car accidents. Layer that with constant backtracking, fearmongering, and heavy-handed online censorship, and it’s no surprise the public fractured into two camps: establishment loyalists and anti-establishment skeptics.

None of the aforementioned outbreaks ever came with a full-scale shutdown of daily life. Nobody was arrested for walking their dog too far from home. Nobody had to scan QR codes to buy groceries or flash proof of vaccination to see a movie. Nobody lost a job or was barred from school over a personal medical decision, one that carried real risks we were assured didn’t exist. Nobody was told funerals, weddings, or church services were too dangerous while casinos and liquor stores stayed open. Nobody had their social media posts flagged for “misinformation,” only to be vindicated later when the consensus shifted.

What we endured instead was psychological warfare on a scale we’d never seen: isolation that made people depressed, social ostracization that made open discussion impossible, social and cognitive delays in children that are causing them to fall behind in math, literacy, and communication, missing life milestones under arbitrary lockdowns and “safety protocols” that lingered long after they’d lost any justification.

What we endured was psychological warfare on a scale we’d never seen.

I’m not here to claim COVID was a hoax or that vaccines weren’t worth developing. I got fully vaccinated and even boosted. Choices that, in hindsight, feel about as necessary as the seasonal flu shot. I finished my degree entirely online and skipped my own graduation. I couldn’t leave the country even once international flights were reinstated because it would have meant indefinite separation from my long-term partner, as Australians weren’t permitted to leave the country for two entire years. 

I missed funerals, weddings, engagements, and births of my closest friends and family. I wore a mask in every public space for what felt like eternity, until I forgot what a comfort the subtle microexpressions of strangers were. I dutifully signed into businesses with QR codes and complied with every regulation. I was, after all, only a temporary resident in a foreign country, and I’m pro-assimilation. I wasn’t about to demand Australia bend to my autonomous American ideals, and I didn’t harbor personal anxieties about the vaccine anyway, though a personal friend ended up getting myocarditis immediately after receiving it despite being a healthy young man. 

I’d always been a rather pro-science, pro-vaccine person. But I wasn’t a droid who defaulted to “trust the science” even when the science was incoherent and conveniently changing every other week. And the thing is, it’s not even the science that was the problem. It was the bureaucrats, the societal hallmonitors, the NPCs in the media who parroted talking points unquestioningly and demonized anyone with a modicum of earned skepticism after so many backtracks and contradictions.

I didn’t appreciate being told hospitals were at max capacity and health care workers were heroes on the brink of collapse, while those same workers posted choreographed TikTok dances. The issue wasn’t staff blowing off steam on breaks, but the delusional insistence that we had to shut down the economy and plunge into a recession because hospitals were “overwhelmed,” a narrative their own behavior made hard to believe. I didn’t appreciate the harassment by pro-mask, pro-vaccine, pro-lockdown scolds whose opinions never caught up to the evolving nature of the pandemic. There are people who, to this day, continue to assert that you’re putting lives at risk by not masking, social distancing, or getting your seventh booster. 

Disingenuous Framing Riling Up the Masses

On social media, people speculated that COVID originated from a lab leak, not from the government’s official narrative that it jumped from animals to humans at a seafood market in Wuhan, China. Posts making such claims were removed or labeled as misinformation, only for the government to later recant and admit the lab leak theory was a plausible explanation. 

Whether social media posts questioned the cost-benefit analysis of long-term school closures, masking policies, vaccine efficacy, or side effects, anything that existed outside the mainstream social paradigm on COVID was flagged as misinformation or removed, sometimes resulting in account bans. There were approved narratives, and there were “disinformation campaigns” only for the mainstream media and general populace to catch up months or years later, and suddenly it’s not. 

YouTube and Spotify were removing Joe Rogan’s podcast episodes from the internet for raising questions about the risks of rushed COVID-19 vaccines without extensive long-term studies and discussing potential alternative therapies, such as hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin, even if only in the context of doctors discussing ongoing studies. The media started posting clickbait headlines caricaturing dissidents who were skeptical of far-reaching government mandates encroaching on personal freedoms and the medical industry. 

It’s one thing to dispute the efficacy of alternative therapies or to make claims about their promises being misleading, but the media leaped at the chance to propagate hysteria around early conversations about hydroxochloroquine, a decades old malaria drug that’s regularly prescribed to patients dealing with autoimmune disease. Despite being safely prescribed for decades, once Trump floated the idea that it was promising as a potential COVID treatment based on early studies, the media jumped at the opportunity, "Trump tells people to take dangerous, unproven drugs." 

If you deviated from the CDC or WHO's talking points in the slightest, even if it was based on legitimate medical knowledge or conflicting scientific research, you were branded as a bad actor spreading misinformation. 

Instead of disputing whether this is an effective medical therapy for COVID, they leapt at the chance to smear him as a quack by making exaggerated, bad faith claims that involved disingenuous characterizations of the actual medical therapies being discussed. Take ivermectin for example. It was disingenuously characterized as "horse paste" even though there are human-dose prescriptions. Despite this being easily verifiable information, literally everyone became inundated with the talking point that it was some animal medicine unsafe for human consumption.

In early 2020, Trump made an off-the-cuff remark speculating about disinfectants. Given their success at killing COVID on surfaces, he wondered aloud if they could be used internally in some novel way during a press conference. Should he have made this clumsy remark on national TV? Probably not, from an optics perspective. You ought to always err on the side of caution when it comes to even the suggestion of medical advice, because you say one thing and people hear another, and yet they run with it.

But for the media to dishonestly claim that Trump seriously advised people to start randomly "injecting Lysol" is just a straight up opportunistic lie. This made anyone even slightly skeptical, openly asking questions, or interested in the conflicting science a victim of smears that painted them as anti-intellectual charlatans selling snake oil as miracle cures. And while there certainly were plenty of those to go around over the unfolding years post-2020, to conflate asking questions (that weren't being given any coherent or consistent answers) with issuing direct, dangerous medical advice is exactly why trust in institutions is at an all-time low. If you deviated from the CDC or WHO's talking points in the slightest, even if it was based on legitimate medical knowledge or conflicting scientific research, you were branded as a bad actor spreading misinformation. 

Forgiveness, Accountability, Redemption, Oh My!

Though it’s fair to say society collectively lost their minds during the pandemic; that this hysteria went global, and ushered in government overreach that encroached on individual liberties, many have since relaxed their vice grip on the Hall Monitor of the Century badge, once the government, media, and health care industry stopped egging people on. That still leaves a lot of people who felt personally steamrolled by those encroachments (some who were outright harmed) harboring righteous indignation, even contempt, for the CDS sufferers who gleefully enforced this culture of paranoia and petty punishment. 

So, when academics and journalists suddenly laid down their arms and declared a truce, insisting “hey, let’s declare a pandemic amnesty!” I sympathize with the instinct to recoil. After years of psychological and legal warfare, the ease with which all that damage was just wiped away like it never happened, to suggest we should all just hug it out and move on felt less like reconciliation and more like gaslighting. COVID dissidents have reason to hold out, too. Without accountability, without true repentance, what’s to stop them from doing it again? 

The instantaneous reaction from the right was incredulity: “you’ve got to be kidding me.” Judging by the reactions to this article in The Atlantic by right-wing commentators, you could say most right of center thinkers considered this time to gloat and withhold forgiveness. In that article, however, Oster admits that many pandemic-era precautions were “totally misguided” but reasons “we didn’t know.”

While Oster does a commendable job calling out the various ludicrous protocols that many accepted as fact because they were the established orthodoxy at the time, she also repeats disingenuous smears like the idea that Trump advised people to inject themselves with bleach. Oster says "misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society." This may very well be true, though countless people have underlying, unconscious motivations unknown to them, and as David Mamet recently said to Bill Maher, “nobody ever did anything for a bad reason.”

I can’t help but roll my eyes when people intuit that their detractors are all monolithically motivated simply by malice. It’s what I find so unattractive about modern liberal politics. It requires so many bad faith assumptions about virtually all asserted “oppressions” that would make life much more simplistic in a cartoonish but unrealistic way, readily supplying faux moral superiority.

In reality, consequences matter more than intentions. But intentions aren’t irrelevant. You can negotiate with someone with a conscience, but not with a terrorist. People can turn a new leaf, reform after a lifetime of wrongdoing, and be forgiven for their sins. I think the knee-jerk reaction to refuse to offer forgiveness for misguided beliefs during COVID is the wrong approach if the goal is to create a culture that’s welcoming, not hostile to heterodox opinions. 

To paint a picture of exactly what I mean, just look at how effectively the left has cannibalized itself in the past few years, swiftly eroding all public goodwill for “woke” identity politics by refusing to allow people to evolve—perpetually punishing them for past thought crimes, clumsy statements, and offensive jokes. The reluctance to forgive and forget is so understandable, but the last thing I’d advocate for is forgetting. It’s not by forgetting but by course correcting, permitting evolution, genuine repentance, and absolution seeking that we achieve reform and a change in the tide of public opinion. Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson warns you never want to punish behavior you wish to see repeated.

Why We Should Offer Narrow Forgiveness

You can’t forgive what isn’t named or acknowledged. But the petty withholding of forgiveness in the face of genuine repentance is equally unproductive. When I come across articles expressing an evolution in opinion: how someone used to have COVID Derangement Syndrome and now recognizes the futility of their hysteria, or how they used to illogically hate celebrity dissidents like Novak Djokovic for embodying “science denial” when really they were falling for herd mentality, I feel pride, not anger. I guarantee you we’ve all had bad takes at one point or another, maybe joined movements that weren’t just misguided but unethical. How can we guide people off these fallen paths without offering them redemption? 

How can we guide people off these fallen paths without offering them redemption? 

However, there is a flaw in Oster’s line of thinking: “in the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck” and “getting something wrong was not a moral failing.” It’s not that this isn’t true; it’s just not the issue at hand. I warned about this back in 2022: that regardless of whether someone was right or wrong, well-informed or misguided, censorship, smears, and shutting down conversation would backfire. The real failure wasn’t in individuals misjudging the science; it was in the framework for seeking truth itself. 

Covidscolds built their case on censorship, ostracism, shaming, slander, and government overreach. We shouldn’t forgive those tactics. But people fall for corrosive tactics under "virtuous" motivations all of the time. Some were convinced dissidents were callously killing people, others turned out to have phobias as symptoms of mental illness. I’ve come to know some great, reasonable people who I was shocked to later find out played part in the COVID hysteria once upon a time. Forgiveness, it turns out, is a far more deradicalizing tool than “I told you so” when the apology is earnest.