Covid Stockholm Syndrome
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/...kholm-syndrome/
The hostages have grown attached to their hostage takers.
July 26, 2021|
Will Collins

In the movie Die Hard, a nebbishy expert is trying to explain what he calls “Helsinki Syndrome,” the idea that hostages become psychologically attached to hostage takers, to a TV audience. The perfectly coiffed news anchor turns to the camera and interjects, “As in Helsinki, Sweden.”

Thirty years later, the satire is still pitch perfect: moronic but self-assured media personality intones obviously false information to a mass audience. As the Covid-19 era draws to a close, today’s audience has been conditioned to accept as fact alarmist headlines, many of which are purely speculative or simply detached from reality. Call it Covid Stockholm Syndrome. The hostages have grown attached to their hostage takers.

The media tropes that enable Covid Stockholm Syndrome have become tiresomely familiar: Globalization made the spread of worldwide pandemics inevitable. Even vaccines don’t provide 100 percent protection. New variants will start the whole cycle over again. The mantra that “We are never going back to normal” is repeated with the same deluded self-certainty as the Die Hard TV anchor’s pronouncements on European geography.

The propagators of alarmism are not interested in science but “science,” a free-floating morass of cultural signaling, political posturing, and amateurish crowd psychology. Hard science has actually fared quite well during the Covid era. The mRNA vaccines are marvels of modern medicine, developed on an accelerated schedule that would have been inconceivable only a few years ago. The best sources of information on Covid have often been virologists and epidemiologists on Twitter, who are admirably clear and forthright compared to their media interpreters.

The same could not be said of “science” and its allies in the media and the public health bureaucracy, to say nothing of the legions of scolds empowered by the pandemic.

The FDA’s abrupt pause on one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccinations is a case in point. Was it really a good idea to publicly announce a halt after six—six—health complications that may or may not have been connected to the vaccine?-- excerpt, rest at link above --