"Pandemia" by Alex Berenson

Above: "Pandemia - How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives" Alex Berenson. 392 Pages.

In the book he declares that the government response to coronavirus was the worst failure of public policy since World War I.

I completed reading this book today.

I was suspicious about the government and corporate press driven hysteria surrounding the coronavirus pandemic early on. My first instinct said there was more risk wearing masks than not. I thought that oxygen deprivation, particularly living at high altitude like we do here in Park City, and germ recapture/retention, would be greater risks to wearing masks than trying to inhibit an airborne virus the size of which, relative to most mask options, was akin to a mosquito passing through than a chain link fence. There were also social issues to consider. Mask wearing facilitated wrongdoing without being recognized. I had known during years of motorcycle riding that wearing a helmet inside a commercial establishment was a no-no which risked me being mistaken for a masked robber. Moreover, it seemed absurd to me that kids were forced to wear masks at school... at least for those kids that could go to school. We knew early on that kids were at extremely low risk for suffering under this disease. We also knew that kids had a hard time wearing masks and that proper social development via watching facial expressions was greatly inhibited when a child wore a mask.

Forget about kids having to wear masks at school, school shutdowns in most of the country would result in unnecessarily lost educational development for millions of children. The effects of lost education would be seen in economic damage down the road. I was glad that Park City High School, which two of our grandchildren attended, and Cardin School, a private school in Salt Lake City, where our other three grandchildren attended school, stayed open, more or less business as usual. Not all Utah school children were so lucky. Salt Lake City schools were closed throughout 2020 with school children relegated to remote learning.

We learned early on that most coronavirus related deaths came amongst older people with high rates of co-morbidity. For most people, the death rates of Covid were in the range of normal flu... for children, lower death rates than the flu. Why then, I wondered, was the entire American economy shut down, when a focused strategy to isolate, protect and care for those few truly at risk, while keeping the economy running, seemed the sensible strategy?

During March of 2020, two months after the coronavirus scare was first raised in the United States, I did some calculations to determine how much I was personally at risk of serious illness or death as a result of coronavirus. I lifted the widely circulated Italian statistics on death rates and superimposed those statistics onto Summit County, Utah, where I was living. Without going into a lot of arithmetic here, based on what was happening in Italy, I calculated the number of deaths which could be expected for my age cohort in Summit County. Summit County had a population of forty thousand people. If the age distribution of Summit County followed the national average, then 13% of the Summit County population would be over seventy-five years old... about five thousand people. Based on the extrapolation of the Italy numbers, seven people, over seventy-five years of age, would die of coronavirus over the next year in Summit County. Seven people is not nothing. That would mean seven more Summit County seniors would die than would normally be the case.

Coronavirus was clearly a serious disease, particularly for those in my age cohort, especially the already health compromised. Still, I conjectured, seven out of five thousand, is still pretty slim odds of me or TIMDT dying from coronavirus. Also, Utah was widely known as a healthy state where large numbers of residents, including us, lived active lifestyles and where alcohol and drug consumption was well below the national average. We resolved to be careful, but it didn't seem to me that severe withdrawal from living an active life, even at our advanced ages, made sense given my risk analysis.

Feeling strongly that, at least on a national scale, government directives were excessively onerous relative to the true risk of the disease, I did not want to halt the active life we had been living since moving to Park City in 1998. I was delighted to learn that in Utah, negotiating a safe path between paying heed to Utah health directives and leading an active life, was very possible.

Prescient, enlightened, Utah, put forward a disease mitigation template that enabled and encouraged Utahns to be active... but, outdoors. Utah didn't do lockdowns like much of the rest of the US. Rather Utah, in mid-March 2020, instituted so-called "stay at home" orders. Masks were required in public places. All but grocery stores, liquor stores and gun stores were closed. We knew by April 2020 that the virus did not transmit outdoors. Stay at home really meant, "don't congregate in large numbers indoors." Summit County health authorities, to their credit, and counter to the national narrative (remember the closed beaches in California?), encouraged people to get outdoors, use the trails and go recreate in the nearby state parks.

Margaret and I took full advantage of the Summit County "get outdoors" guidelines, just the two of us, sometimes with friends and oft times with children and grandchildren During the spring and summer of 2020, we would go on an outdoor sightseeing, hiking, or picnic excursion somewhere in Summit County almost every day. I was surprised, that notwithstanding the positive Summit County get outdoors recommendation, we were often alone at the state parks. Some of my best local motorcycle rides that year were acting out MotoGP on I-80 between Wanship and Park City. But for the occasional eighteen-wheeler, the freeway was empty. I could lean the bike over at speed without encountering traffic. I also went shooting a half dozen times during this period at the Echo outdoor shooting range. Considering the sparsely attended state parks and the absence of traffic on the road, I surmised that most people in Summit County must have been staying indoors, ignoring their own county health department's encouragement to stay active and be with family outdoors.

The 2019/2020 ski season was shut down in early March 2020, but resumed for 2020/2021 ski season, once health authorities became comfortable with the no-coronavirus-transmission-outdoors science. Mask and table separation protocols were enforced, as for restaurants, inside the ski lodges. Staying outdoors, I skied most days the resorts were open during 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Summit County restaurants, retail stores, and all other businesses opened back up in mid-April 2020, after a five-week period of being closed. Restaurants with outdoor seating did fairly well. Notwithstanding the requirement that a mask had to be worn into the restaurant until we sat down at our table, we were frequent restaurant goers from mid-April through the remainder of 2020 and on into 2021. I went to outdoor events in the late summer of 2020 and through the remainder of the year: Speed Week at the Bonneville Salt Flats, The Duchesne County Fair, and a couple of outdoor concerts in Salt Lake City. During the fall of 2020 we started doing some limited indoors gatherings. We had a couple of dinner parties at home - no masks required - and attended several dinner functions at others' homes. As advised by local health authorities, we avoided large, indoor gatherings.

In October of 2020, I watched a Facebook video where the 2nd Counselor in the LDS Church Presidency, Dallin Oaks, advised LDS members to not congregate intergenerationally at Thanksgiving. Oaks and his wife urged grandparents to have Thanksgiving alone. I have great respect for LDS leaders, but Oaks' advice disturbed me. Considering what was already known about virus transmission and risk levels, but for the severely compromised aged, advice that separated families on the most important family day of the year, didn't seem appropriate for our family. We joined family and grandchildren in St. George for Thanksgiving. We told our kids we'd be happy to join... just make sure the kids don't have symptoms. The Koessler family didn't have symptoms; nor did we. We had an enjoyable Thanksgiving dinner together.

Above: TIMDT and Bishop with Koessler family. Image by Koessler. Thanksgiving. St. George, UT. 26 November 2020.

I was amazed at stories I'd heard about peoples' response, outside of Utah, to the coronavirus delirium. One grandparent acquaintance was not able to see his California based grandchildren for three years. His children would not even allow a summer outdoors encounter between him and his grandchildren, separated by fifty feet, on the lawn. I am aware of a senior couple, living in the northeast, that did not leave their home for three years. They told their housekeeping help, "we'd love for you to continue working for us, but you have to stay in the house with us until the 'all clear,' which could be well into the future." The couple lived for three years with the help of grounded housekeeping staff and deliveries to the home. There were other reactions to the disease that elicited behaviors that seemed downright rude. At one Park City dinner party we attended in the winter of 2021, a woman of a certain age, not the hostess, moved from guest to guest asking each if they had been vaccinated. Some outdoor encounters were outright bizarre. On a couple of occasions while walking local trails, an oncoming, masked hiker, seeing us coming, would jump off the trail and rush into the bushes, returning to the trail after we had passed.

2020 and 2021, the years of the most severe coronavirus scare, were some of our most active years as a married couple. When not doing daily outdoor excursions in Summit County, I rode eight thousand motorcycle miles in 2020. Because international travel was not an option during the coronavirus scare, we bought a Sprinter van, had it outfitted as an RV and put twenty thousand miles on the van during 2021. We, including our newfie, Freddie, traveled to the mid-west, the northwest, and to the California coast in the Sprinter, snuggling in the queen-sized bed, where TIMDT could use her own sheets. When we were at home in Park City, through most of 2020, we avoided large indoor gatherings. TIMDT and Mwah (sic) wore masks only for the mandatory ritual of entering a restaurant or doing grocery shopping, which we usually did early in the AM when few other shoppers were present.

Margaret and I received two Pfizer shots and a booster. We mutually agreed that we were old, and since we had less time to live and weren't going to pass on our genes to others, that we'd take the vaccines as an abundance of caution. Still, I was wary. I told Margaret at the time that a pregnant woman would be nuts to take this hastily delivered vaccine. Recent data tell us, much of which is reported in "Pandemia," that the risks of the hastily introduced, and increasingly ineffective, mRNA vaccines may be far greater than first advertised by US health authorities.

I have had two fairly serious sore throats since March of 2020, the first being December 2021 and the other, one year later, in December 2022. The most recent sore throat had been with me for five days. At TIMDT's urging I went to the IHC emergency clinic in St. George and asked to be tested for strep throat. The doctor returned with his diagnosis. "You do not have strep throat. You have one of those many viruses that circulates around in winter. Go home and gargle some salt water. You'll be well in no time." I was so glad to encounter a doctor for whom the overblown coronavirus scare did not cloud his diagnosis. For me, the absence of approved therapeutic solutions to coronavirus, rendered the need for a coronavirus test moot. So also, thought this enlightened St. George doctor. My sore throat went away during the next twenty-four hours.

Mid 2020 I listened to a podcast featuring Alex Berenson, author of "Pandemia." I was amazed. A former New York Times reporter, Berenson put forward positions on coronavirus that challenged US government health authority narratives. Kids weren't at risk. Masks don't work. Lockdowns are pernicious. Schools should remain open. Natural immunity is better than vax immunity. Vaccine mandates are unconstitutional. Berenson's position on coronavirus mirrored my own! But Benenson put solid data behind his declarations. Anyway, when I saw Berenson's book, published in early 2021, I snapped it up. It's taken me until now to read it in its entirety. Berenson continues to write on Substack about growing concerns about mRNA vaccine side effects, the most recent of his reports being a peer reviewed study about how mRNA vaccines cause autism in rats. Prenatal Exposure to COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 Induces Autism-Like Behaviors in Male Neonatal Rats: Insights into WNT and BDNF Signaling Perturbations | Neurochemical Research (springer.com).

"Pandemia" declares that our response to the pandemic has been wildly overdone, driven by a convergence of pernicious public and private interests. The government narrative, including lockdowns, social-distancing, vaccine mandates, school closures and masking were all declared to be based on science. None of them was. When legitimate scientists and epidemiologists challenged the government strategy - Bhattacharya and Atlas from Stanford to name two - with the aid of the toady corporate press, they were vilified by the government and censored by cooperative corporate media and social media platforms. Debate was suppressed during coronavirus. Censorship reigned.

Berenson, exiled from the New York Times, doubled down on coronavirus research, and presented his findings in "Pandemia." In his book he declares that the government response to coronavirus was the worst failure of public policy since World War I.

For a disease that many will never know and where most people are at no more risk than the flu (kids, less risk than the flu) the government instituted economically calamitous lockdowns, suppressed personal freedom, and stifled free speech on an unthinkable scale.

This book was a good complement to two other highly informative books coronavirus I have read which also highlight the overreach of government, legacy press, and social media. Each of these three books exposes government venality on a scale that should shock all Americans. The books are listed as links to book reports found on my website.

Coronavirus did bring out the values of federalism. While US government health authorities could issue guidelines, such guidelines do not carry the force of law. Health policies come under the authority of the states. I was glad for Utah's farsighted approach (at least as it affected us in Park City) to the coronavirus scare. During 2020 and 2021 TIMDT and Mwah (sic) were able to live an active lifestyle while paying fealty to modest controls over social gathering. Our grandkids, unlike a majority of kids in the US, were able to attend school. Utah's farsighted thinking paid off. Utah economic performance ranked third of all fifty states during 2020 and 2021. Utah death rates from corona virus were the third best of all states with a coronavirus death rate of 168 per one hundred thousand. Only Hawaii and Vermont performed better.
COVID-19 Death Rate by State | US News Best States