I think "The New Normal" could become a contender. Like I said, that whole insane ordeal felt more like a drill or simulation, even though the coof was still a real disease.
It's a very weird one. It could have been a test run for how much control you can force upon the population, but I also can see how much of the response was just population dynamics and people being stupid.
In the very early days, most governments said it was nothing, and the more conservative people got a bit spooked and thought the world was ending. Governments and whorenalists leaned hard against that, calling everyone a Nazi who was scared of people coming into their country, especially Chinese, and laughed everyone who avoided contact.
Then something changed, and suddenly the Coof was the end of the world as we know it, and collectively governments and whorenalists swung around to proclaim that everyone not falling in line was a Nazi and mass murderer. See Trump, who in the early days promised the vaccine, and the Left refused the vaccine made by Drumpf. Then when it was "ready", it was absolutely non-negotiable to get it.
Maybe the shift happened because someone decided to take the opportunity to see how far they can push the population. Personally, I go by the "don't assume malice when incompetence is sufficient as an explanation" rule whenever possible, and I think the shift happened because when the Coof was actually pretty dangerous in the eary days, governments all around panicked and did whatever they could to look like they have things under control. It was a feedback loop of stupid people and stupid politicians and dangerous "scientists" who gained capital from the whole thing.
But I'm not opposed to there being more nefarious purposes behind it all. I don't think most whorenalists were actively told what to write, those "people" naturally fall into lockstep because they're scum. "The Science" had to fall in line because it was their reputation on the line. But some politicians might have seized the opportunity to see how far they can go.
And now they know.
Years later I still see the occasional article about "there's this new variant that could be dangerous this summer", and the occasional person with a mask on the train, but the former is something most people don't give a shit about, and the latter might be an adoption of the asian practice of masking up when you're sick yourself, which I don't disagree with.
But the whole thing is being memory holed, true. I don't think there's much active research into vaccine side effects, no active research into actual vaccine efficacy, no attempts at reconciliation for jobs lost or massive government overreach. We had police chasing down kids sledding down mountains, police cars running over lawns in parks to chase down people who were out too close to each other.
It was a shitshow and there will be no repercussions for anything. Many kids had their developments stunted or at least adversely affected by the lockdowns, and there's nothing done about it. And some people are still psychotic about the whole thing. Either still masking themselves and their kids up being afraid of the apocalypse, or having given themselves chronic fatigue syndrome or whatever in their Post COVID panic.
