Jeffrey Tucker: How to be sick with intelligence and dignity

Writing with a second bout of COVID—yes, it’s annoying but I’ll get over it—I’m thinking about all that we’ve forgotten about sickness over the last four years, and also what we’ve learned and relearned.

It’s been a very strange time, when ruling class interest groups all decided to get together and utterly panic the world’s population over a respiratory virus that is not fatal for the overwhelming majority of people. Whole economies were wrecked, and lifespans are falling, not because of the virus but because of the way governments have responded to it.

All those early months I wanted to scream what was obvious but apparently unthinkable. I wanted to say: everyone is going to get this eventually, so deal with it. Our immune systems will adapt as they have since the beginning of time. Let’s all get healthy and prepare and otherwise go about our lives.

We shouldn’t be flattening the curve, which only means prolonging the pain, nor slowing the spread. We need to get back to normal life sooner! Panic and freaking out is the worst-possible response because it only creates more suffering.

I don’t think I ever wrote those exact words, simply because the obvious seemed unsayable at the time (probably still is). That’s because the elites had other plans. They wanted us to stay in frenzied fear until the November election so that they could say that President Trump lost, plus the shot would be ready just after. It was cruel and vicious, a plot of unspeakable evil, the worst use of public-health powers in history.

It left the world’s population with massively degraded immune systems. That’s what happens when billions “socially distance” and hide from infectious agents. We fall apart physically, culturally, and psychologically. And then we get sick, and that sickness spreads. The viruses thus breed and greet an immunologically naive population and cause devastation.

The devastation is only increased with a population that has been mass vaccinated with a shot that trains the immune system against one strain that no longer exists and hence makes us more vulnerable to everything else. It’s like the perfect storm: lockdowns, social collapse, and mass vaccination with a deprecated formula.

It’s not possible to construct a more perfect recipe for population-wide suffering.

But wait, wasn’t this virus different from all others? That’s what they told us but the evidence was lacking. It was obviously highly transmissible, which generally means not very lethal (a dead host cannot spread a respiratory infection). To get around this problem, people like Deborah Birx invented the lie that it was a weird “silent-spreader” with a long latency period of two weeks. This turned out to be complete rot: the latency of COVID is not unlike the flu or any other coronavirus.

The lies were spreading even faster than the virus. And it made everyone slightly nuts to the point that we forgot what our parents and grandparents taught us about common infections like this. I’ve frequently recalled how my father trained me to think about getting sick.

When I was a young kid, I came home one day for class (maybe this was 3rd grade) and announced that some kid—let’s call him Jimmy—gave me the flu. My father immediately corrected me. Viruses are very clever and come at us from the most unexpected places and exploit holes in our immune system that we didn’t know we had.

It’s cruel, unscientific, and flat-out wrong, he said, for anyone to pretend that we know precisely who gave us a bug, much less blame others. We do not know for sure. We can casually say, “I got this from this or that occasion or person” but there is no way to prove our random speculations. So just give up the track-and-trace and treat illness as something that happens and work through it bravely.

Getting infected works as training for the immune system, he said. It makes us stronger. So we should embrace our suffering with good cheer and find ways to enjoy ourselves so long as it lasts. I used to play board games and watch TV, which my parents would not normally allow.

To underscore the point, he was always faithful about buying me what he called a “sick toy.” It could be anything: a chess set, a truck, a treat, a milkshake, or a pet turtle. Whatever it was, it was always a delight. And he never failed. This way when I got sick, my thoughts turned away from my suffering toward excitement that I knew my father was going to give me a present!

If you think about it, this is a brilliant psychological tactic. Kids don’t like to be sick. We cannot go out and play with friends. It is confusing and disorienting. The promise of a “sick toy” turns sadness into opportunity.

There is a wonderful practice, born of deep knowledge of immunities and illnesses. Nothing is gained by being mopey and negative. Just get through it with a smile and, if possible, welcome the time as the best path toward becoming a healthier and stronger person.

Given this history, you can imagine my own shock when the entire U.S. establishment was throwing people into a panic about illness and telling people to avoid it at all costs, feel sad and miserable, and just wait for your vaccine. Fauci was even asked about natural immunity and said that we didn’t have evidence either way. What poppycock! We’ve known about this for 2,500 years.

In those days, there developed two teams: Team Vaccine and Team Natural Immunity. There was exaggeration on both sides. Natural immunity is powerful—the best of all possible worlds—but is not sterilizing for a lifetime with a virus that is forever mutating. Ironically, the arrival of the vaccine actually drove more and faster mutations, making matters even worse.

Unvaccinated people I know have now had it or some form of it several times. It’s true and possibly even more so for those who took the shot.

The vaccine never stood any chance of stopping infection and much less transmission. As a wise epidemiologist whispered to me very early on: there is simply no way a vaccine can come close to granting protection against disease that natural infection does, however imperfect the latter might be.

Everyone knew this in 2019. It was deleted from our brain solely for the purpose of industrial promotion.

As Senator Rand Paul often pointed out, all vaccines that work (unlike the fake one for COVID) are based on natural immunity. It is a way of tricking the immune system to respond with exposure and build protection. This is basic virology.

It got so crazy that even the World Health Organization (WHO) changed its definition of vaccine. The final version even trashed natural immunity, saying that a vaccine builds herd immunity through pharmacological means rather than through pathogenic exposure. They further said that herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from pathogens, not exposing them to them. The WHO completely discredited itself with these pronouncements.

Despite all the years of insane experiments by governments, wild attempts to game and control the microbial kingdom, what are we left with? They completely and utterly failed to achieve what they promised and left wreckage in their wake: bloated governments, ill-educated youth, high inflation, declining lifespans, and so on. Disaster all around.

And in the end, we aren’t consulting Fauci and his cohorts when we get sick. We are trying to recall what our parents said, thinking back on grandmother’s chicken soup, getting bed rest, dragging ourselves back into the sun and outdoors, and depending on the glorious and magical immune system that God and evolution gave us, interacting with the pathogenic world around us. In other words, we are left with reality instead of the dangerous fantasies of the people who ruled our world only recently.

I’m fine with the reality of sickness. It tells us a story of the complexity and difficulty of life itself, and the promise of the world to come, and why we must always prepare. The word “prepare” is associated with the season of Advent, which is now upon us. That was our job in this season in the “before times” and remains our job today. The “great reset” in fact reset nothing about the old wisdom of how to deal with sickness and regain our health.

 Republished from HERE.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.

Jeffrey A.Tucker’s interview with David Leis on Leaders on the Frontier can be seen here.