Covid denialism and the revisionist history of the pandemic

Here’s a stirring apologia bouncing around social media right now:

The GOP has a lot Going for Them !!!

We were right about the lab leak.
We were right about natural immunity.
We were right about masks.
We were right about lockdowns.
We were right about the vaccines.
We were right about boosters.
We were right about them faking COVID numbers.
We were right about the deadly hospital protocol.
We were right about ivermectin.
We were right about evil Dr. Fauci.
We were right about the WHO.


Guess who was wrong about everything?

It’s important to recognize how this kind of lunacy gets intellectually laundered, as it were, by putatively respectable right wing propaganda outfits like National Review. Here’s NR’s editors more or less arguing that the anti-vaxxers were right.

Go figure, it turns out that natural immunity from a Covid infection is at least as effective at protecting you from reinfection with the virus as two doses of the vaccine.

That’s the conclusion of a meta-study that reviewed a total of 65 studies from 19 different countries, comparing how much a Covid-19 infection protected a person from subsequent reinfection and illness, and how that protection compared to getting vaccinated. The study was published in the Lancet and financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others. . . .

Since early 2021, as the country argued about Covid vaccines, the concept of previous infection was largely ignored, dismissed, or hand-waved away. Those who preferred not to get vaccinated, and who contended that they had sufficient protection because of a previous infection, were often treated as reckless cranks and lunatics. Some lost their jobs. And now, this study indicates, their instincts were right all along.

You know who has 100% guaranteed protection against re-infection from Covid?

Dead people.

And I see a lot of them, specifically the 1,450,000 excess deaths in the USA in 2020-2022 above expected mortality over those three years. Specifically, we should have seen about 8.7 million deaths among the nation’s population over this time, based on pre-pandemic mortality rates. Instead we saw 10.15 million.

In short, natural immunity against Covid worked great, subject to certain notable exceptions.

In case anyone is still interested in this terribly boring subject, the latest CDC data indicate that unvaccinated people in December of 2022 (the most recent month for which statistics are available) had a 1000% greater risk of death from Covid than fully vaccinated people. Among 65-79 year olds the increased death risk from Covid for the unvaccinated was 2300%.

Anyway, America is a land of contrasts, and it’s increasingly clear that the revisionist right wing history of the pandemic is going to be that it wasn’t really that big a deal and the Government seriously over-reacted to it (respectable National Review et. al. version), or the whole thing was totally fabricated from beginning to end (fever swamp version, which will be accepted as gospel by tens of millions).