Terrifying New Tortures

The other day, I unearthed dozens of cases of overt fraud and deliberate misinformation designed to stoke unjustified fear and mass panic for the purpose of tyrannical manipulation — that is to say, I scrolled through the headlines on my Microsoft News homepage. As usual of late, most of the major stories were about COVID-19, and almost all of these were presented with headlines signaling Armageddon. And also as usual, a thirty second perusal of the articles accompanying the alarmist headlines revealed that the “facts” being reported were tenuous, deceptive, and generally unrelated to the palpitation-inducing headlines. 

Here is one headline from that day which, while typical, is also a particularly amusing example of what passes for news regarding The Pandemic that Ate a Planet: “The One COVID-19 Side Effect That’s ‘Terrifying’ People.”

The article, pretending to be a news report, citing a few “experts” but little concrete evidence — and thus a perfect propaganda piece for mainstream dissemination — begins with this ominous information:

While most of us are familiar with the physical manifestations of severe COVID-19 infections, there is one neurological side effect of the virus plaguing hospitalized patients in an unimaginable and tortuous [sic] way: delirium. Early on in the pandemic, doctors started noticing coronavirus patients of all ages, suffering from terrifying visions—some that have continued long after their physical symptoms subsided. 

Hospitalized patients are “plagued” (clever) by this “side effect of the virus,” which affects them in a manner that is both “unimaginable” (actually, I can imagine it very easily) and “tortuous,” by which the journalist presumably meant torturous. Some patients — any tangible numbers on that “some”? — are having “terrifying visions,” and this unimaginable neurological effect is torturing “patients of all ages.” No one is safe from this terrifying torture! 

Reading that opening paragraph with my mind fully on — admittedly not the way it was written or intended to be read — my BS detectors were flashing red immediately. I had to read further to discover the catch. Needless to say, I found the explanation of these terrifyingly torturous visions, just briefly offered as though a mere inessential detail, more than halfway through the article.

Before I got to that inessential detail, i.e., the actual but suppressed point of the story, I got this amplification of why I should be terrified, in case I was not sufficiently frightened by the objective, truth-seeking language of that opening paragraph:

Delirium isn’t anything new, most commonly experienced by older patients with dementia. However, doctors maintain that coronavirus-induced delirium is next-level, impacting people of all ages without any previous cognitive impairment. According to reports from hospitals and researchers suggest that approximately two-thirds to three-quarters of coronavirus patients in ICU’s are experiencing them in some capacity. The New York Times reports that some experience “hyperactive delirium,” paranoid hallucinations and agitation, others have “hypoactive delirium,” internalized visions and confusion that cause patients to become withdrawn and incommunicative, while the unlucky ones experience both. 

In other words, COVID-19 is causing “people of all ages” to suffer long-lasting delirium and hallucinations normally associated with dementia. Now that is terrifying — or it would be, if we let our minds glaze over with panic as we are supposed to do at this point, rather than reading on to paragraph five, where we find this:

Why and how does COVID-19 provide the ingredients for delirium? According to experts, the recipe seems to include long stints on ventilators mixed with heavy sedatives and poor sleep. Other factors may include patients being mostly immobile, occasional restrainment to keep them from accidentally disconnecting tubes, and overall, being cut off from social contact due to the fact that their loved ones are not allowed to visit. “It’s like the perfect storm to generate delirium, it really, really is,” Dr. Sharon Inouye, a leading delirium expert, explained.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the precise cause of this “coronavirus-induced” neurological torture is…the treatment! In other words, the answer to the writer’s question, “Why and how does COVID-19 provide the ingredients for delirium?” is clear: it doesn’t.

Keeping people physically restrained, sedated, and lying on their backs on ventilators for long periods of time, completely isolated from all friendly social contact, i.e., forcibly restricted beyond all hope of ever being permitted the psychological salve of having a loved one enter the room to make them feel protected in their vulnerable state, and to reassure them that someone they trust is there to take care of them — if you treat frightened and weakened human beings this inhumanely long enough, and keep them drugged into irrationality so far beyond the recommended safe period of long-term sedation, lo and behold, they might start to have weird thoughts and scary visions.

Imagine that. This is what is passed off as reportage today. Medical professionals and their government overseers are actively and knowingly torturing their fellow human beings into stress-induced madness — much of it related to completely non-medical aspects of their “treatment,” such as the combination of social isolation and physical restraint — and then daring to call this a “coronavirus-induced” effect, and publishing reports about the results of their own cruelty as though this were a valuable contribution to science. 

“It’s like the perfect storm to generate delirium, it really, really is!” enthuses the (apparently seventeen-year-old) “leading delirium expert.” 

Meanwhile, the media reports daily on all the independent businesses and service industry franchises that are being run into financial ruin “by coronavirus,” though they cannot point to a single case of such economic failures — and resulting private family disasters — having actually been caused by the virus. In every case, what they call “coronavirus-induced” failures are in fact government-policy-induced failures, just as with the “coronavirus-induced delirium” that is actually induced by reckless or inhumane hospital treatment.

What is left of us, we humans? What has taken the place of our souls?


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