3+ years of Covid, and the One Weird Trick that never came
Covid global health emergency is over, WHO says.
Of course, for most part of Western society, Covid "has been over" for well over a year. Nevertheless, this formal announcement offers opportunities to appraise the entire “Covid period” – assuming this is really the formal endpoint, that there is nothing further coming on to make it a current event again.
I’ve long planned to write a longer text on the Covid era in Finland. What fascinates me was how large the entire issue loomed for approximately two years – and how small it seems now. No-one cares about this topic anymore. Well, apart from those who have made it a part of their identity to care, and of course those who must deal with it in their daily work. For the rest, caring is at the level of “I got Covid.” “Oh.”
And the lack of interest is not just on a personal but on a societal level. I watched the Finnish election debates, and the dire financial/general status of the health care system was frequently discussed. However, there were few, if any, mentions and indications that the Covid crisis and the decisions made during this period might have had anything to do with it. Many of the arguments could have been repeated in any of the pre-Covid election debates, with only a few alterations.
Currently there seems to be little demand for Covid measures of any kind, beyond a diehard zero-Covid brigade that keeps shouting to the wind that Covid, the disease, is still circulating, that “Covid is not over.” And in a sense, they are right! The same disease as before still exists. There is a jarring difference in the response then and now.
It is easy to blame it all on a global conspiracy. I might have done it myself, had I not had numerous discussions with politicians and health professionals to consider otherwise. In lieu of those discussions, conspiracy seems too *easy* an answer – and why would the conspirators would foment Covid panic for two years and then switch it all off?
Many conspiracy theorists wove grandiose narratives about how vaccine boosters, vaccine passports, lockdowns or masks would last forever and ever, a mark of the elite lording over their cattle. And yet they did not. And if the supposed purpose was to get people to accept surveillance measures or centralization of business, well, at most Covid just accelerated ongoing trends.
Of course, the simplest explanation – the one that eventually convinced me to stop worrying about Covid – is that the measures just did not do that much. The vaccines blunted the edge of the disease, though they did not meet all their promises.
However, when it comes to stopping Covid on its track, the sole approach that seems to have worked, for some time, is closing the borders extra hard and then stomping down proactively whenever there’s a sniffle somewhere – the approach of China, Australia, and New Zealand, one a tightly regimented authoritarian society and two island nations with a long tradition of strict border controls.
Nothing lighter than that worked, and even those approaches were only durable for a time – first Australia and New Zealand and then China had to end their policies. There was no One Weird Trick, a straightforward way to make Covid go away in any society, a border-controlled island or not, and still at least a *mostly* liberal democratic society.
I believe that much of the response coming in after the initial panic can be explained by the search for that elusive One Weird Trick. The governments certainly did, after feeling the initial high of the all-in-the-same-boat feeling of Spring 2020 and the relative normality summer 2020, and after they then got worried that they were in for a long slog of a lockdown after lockdown after Covid "returned" in autumn/winter 2020/2021.
Likewise, as far as public health authorities were in charge, one of their main goals was simply trying to take the burden off their workers. Nurses and other professionals were particularly horribly overburdened at the start of the crisis but without matching bonuses or pay increases, since the future budgets of those institutions had also, for obvious reasons, gone completely up in the air.
The only way to placate the workers they had at this point was lobbying for restrictions in hopes that it would somehow reduce this burden of work. However, increasingly as the crisis went on, this was also countered and balanced by businesses lobbying for reopening, including vaccine passports as a partial mean of reopening.
The Western governments were not really trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was", with as little permanent re-engineering as possible.
At the same time, they felt they could not just do nothing, or many people might die, and they would get blamed for it. They then got fixated on the idea that there is One Weird Trick they can do to make it go away. And there sure was a viable candidate for One Weird Trick: the vaccines.
The initial promises about the vaccines, right after the concept of Covid vaccines was introduced, were quite modest and in line to what we actually got; not a miracle cure, not an infection-stopper, just something that would avoid severe disease in many cases. At some point the hype cycle got out of control and the governments and everyone else started believing that the One Weird Trick really was here, just vaccinate everyone and Covid is over, and no large lockdowns or other such measures are needed any more.
Even after the initial vaccine hype cycle, there was another one over the Covid vaccine passports, but even here the tone was already different. The vaccine passports were presented less as a pandemic control measure as a measure to run pandemic control measures down for most of the population, only leaving the denigrated minority to suffer from the measures.
The furious hatred against the anti-vaxxers and Covid-skeptics was then anger at those responsible for the One Weird Trick not working. Politicians, media, ordinary citizens; what they felt was that the vaccines would really work as promised if everyone just were responsible and got the vaccine, or if the vaccine passports and mandates were just made strict enough to *make* them be responsible.
It was initially easier for public opinionmakers to blame a small, already-hated group (antivaxxers were a popular target for disdain even before Covid) than to admit that there really was no One Weird Trick. Thus, it also followed that once it became really clear the vaccine really was not what the hype cycle promised and the passports and mandates were not a fix, everything just died down.
In Finland and elsewhere, this coincided with Omicron – the one variant that, for many (including us), really was the first one to get them sick; hardly anyone could avoid it, even if they had avoided earlier ones. And really, for many, the fear of Covid was the strongest when it was still a personal mystery; once you had it, far less mystery remained.
After all this died down, people started to forget. At least in Finland, this process was bolstered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which then became the huge global thing to worry about. One news cycle died, another one got going – and thus the circle of society keeps churning on.
Image: Midjourney 5.1, with the prompt “a picture for a substack post about the pandemic, and how there never was One Weird Trick to solve it”.
Came here and discovered you thanks to your recent comment on Western Russia fans at "Edward Slavsquat," a comment that was quite lucid and struck me as spot on. Here, you are asking an excellent question that the anti-covid-measures conspiracy theorists have unfairly downplayed : 'Why would the conspirators would foment Covid panic for two years and then switch it all off?'
Now, in answering it, we see things differently.
You think that much of the response coming in after the initial panic can be explained by the search for that elusive One Weird Trick.
As early as April 2020, ministers of health spoke openly how the lockdowns and the masks are tentative measures, while the only final solution is to come from vaccines. Vaccines for a respiratory infectious disease. That's something, a category of thing that has never existed, and medics thought it is impossible. So, rather than being one weird trick after another, but a number weird tricks employed in combination.
Also peculiarly, but in a different way, by April 2020, the online world was swarmed with many professionally done videos of dancing "nurses." It was mightily strange. Especially given that the videos' provenance remained obscure to this day.
If we were dealing by a despairing and frightened establishment, aiming at calming the populace, how come it otherwise promoted fear 24/7, breaking the very basic established standards of conduct during pandemics and epidemics that were in force for decades.
For something the death rates of which were obviously quite low from the get-go in early 2020 (viz. the 'Diamond Princess').
While the extreme theory about permanently re-engineering society within a several years was shown to be wrong, all that happened was very successful if there was an aim to stupefy the public, i.e. anesthetize it, very convenient for the establishments everywhere facing major crisis and war prospects.
You described how that was accomplished.
Also, while it has not served a social re-engineering blitzkrieg, it was useful if such an re-engineering is envisaged in the longer term.
In any case, there were so many odd things in the responses. Maybe much of them can fit your theory, and I just failed to see how.
> Many conspiracy theorists wove grandiose narratives about how vaccine boosters, vaccine passports, lockdowns or masks would last forever and ever, a mark of the elite lording over their cattle.
This isn't quite the steelman version of the argument. That would be "countries will get used to the idea of lockdown and reintroduce it at hair trigger when something scary arrives". And I'm not sure if this version sounds so far-fetched. I have no idea how e.g. the German state will react the next time a respiratory illness with the stats of Covid comes along; all I see is that the pre-covid "lockdowns are not the answer" WHO consensus has eroded, whereas an infrastructure for fairly strict control of the populace has been established in several Western countries. And except for Italy, I haven't seen a Western government pay the electoral price for being too strict. Courts in Canada have rubberstamped governance by emergency order and debanking protestors. Courts in Germany have agreed that you can use curfews to keep people from partying. Good luck having a liberal democracy with these incentives.
I'm fairly angry at the anti-establishment Right too, for wasting their momentum to fight the vaccines instead of hammering the lockdowns. But I expect less from a loose cluster of internet celebrities than from a government with a PhD at every post.