Minimize Disease to Maximize Trade Throughout History

We know lots of official agencies and many governments are currently promoting hand washing but not masks, or they put wear a mask if you choose to at the very bottom of a list of options despite a well-fitting mask being the best way that individuals can protect themselves in public. Many are downplaying the risks caused by the upswing in cases because vaccines help us survive the illness, a bit, for a couple months each time we're allowed one. They're not letting the public know the important stuff: Covid is still here, still widely transmissible through people who appear to be perfectly healthy, still causing Long Covid (PCC) in 1 in 5 Covid cases, and we're about to resume hot-boxing classrooms with this brain-invasive virus. 

Unfortunately, all too many really trust that, if it were a problem, surely our elected officials would tell us.

But it's not like it's a new tactic for governments to minimize the threat of disease in a population. 

Cassandra Complex posted a lengthy tongue-in-cheek thread about how HIV/AIDS was initially reported. Here's a piece:

"According to the June 1986 issue of Playboy, AIDS is on the decline. Vanishing in fact. Have a healthy immune system? You have nothing to worry about! AIDS is hard to catch! . . . Of the 1/3 showing symptoms of infection, only two (!) men actually got AIDS--as distinguished from simply being infected with the virus, which, as we have seen, may result in no illness at all. The others had . . . flu-like illness. The CDC states, 'The fact that two thirds of men infected for over five years have not develop AIDS or AIDS-related illness is an encouraging indication that infection with this virus is not necessarily followed by rapid development of symptoms and death.'" 

Except, of course, infection was followed by death. And still is for people infected who can't access the cocktail of drugs that keep HIV from progressing. And they knew that by 1986. 

In 2018, the WHO explained why the HIV epidemic is not over with this bit of artwork from Keith Harding to illustrate:

Yup.

We have to keep talking about Long Covid and saying the words Covid and airborne and masks right out loud over and over to try to nudge the Overton window enough that it's part of our everyday awareness again or people will continue to become severely disabled and/or die.

Something I didn't realize until my recent research spiral into the AIDS crisis in the US is that many people had HIV in the 1970s, but it showed up like a flu - mild HIV. It wasn't notable until people started dying from in in the 80s. It incubated for a decade before coming back to kill by destroying the immune system.

Many studies indicate this is how Covid works, by targeting and destroying T-cells responsible for immunity.

And there is no drug cocktail available to all to keep it from progressing into full-blown Long Covid/PCC. Paxlovid reduces the risk by about 26%, which is something, except it's inaccessible for most people. I wouldn't be able to get it, and I'm a middle class white woman! 

This profits-over-people ploy goes way back:

In case it's hard to see the image, it explains that in the plague of 1710, the health commission at the time "attributed deaths to other diseases to safeguard trade in the city. Victims were not quarantined, and soon the plague spread." It killed 1/3 of the population of the city because they powers that be wanted to protect the economy!

Much more recently, we kept quiet about the Spanish Flu so our boys would keep on shooting people for another six months.

Governments have been using careful "messaging" for centuries to sway populations towards one action or another. Sometimes that's actually beneficial to the population, like pro-social campaigns to reduce discrimination. But, when it comes to silencing information around a harmful disease, no longer tracking cases or urging mask-wearing or other precautions, then it's absolutely genocidal.