The notion that we would lock down our society until a vaccine is introduced to counter a virus with a 0.3% infection fatality rate and near-zero risk for non-immunocompromised individuals was shockingly insane. Then we were told that even after a vaccine is in place, the social control will not end because the vaccine will not fully work against COVID-19 for all people. Now, we are beginning to see that because indeed COVID-19 is not that much different from a pandemic flu, the flu itself will now constitute the new threshold for social control and panic in perpetuity. In other words, the totalitarianism that we blissfully accepted in March is here to stay forever, unless we reclaim our sovereignty.

“[Arizona] State officials Monday laid out a plan for ‘aggressively’ combating the upcoming influenza season as the COVID-19 pandemic lingers, with the first step being to urge people to get a flu shot as soon as possible,” wrote the Copper Courier on Tuesday. “The state plans to increase funding for Medicaid recipients to get flu shots, combine flu-shot sites with coronavirus testing facilities, and more, while also advocating many of the same measures meant to head off the spread of COVID-19” (emphasis added).

The Arizona paper was reporting on a press conference held by liberal Republican Governor Doug Ducey and Arizona health department director Dr. Cara Christ, when they warned about “a perfect storm” of lingering COVID-19 mixing with the flu season in the coming months. They warned about mask-wearing and shutting down businesses that don’t participate in their unproven social control rituals. They also revealed that indeed hospitals get overwhelmed to a degree during the flu season and now that fact, which we always lived with every year, will be used to control our lives.

Folks, we have come full-circle. When this all began in early March, we were warned by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 was the worst epidemic in generations, with an infection fatality rate of 3.4% and a hospitalization rate exponentially higher that was going to swamp all of our big-city hospitals. As such, there was no way to compare it to the flu. Anyone who did was treated almost like a Holocaust denier.

Now, those same control freaks are comparing COVID to the flu! See, if they were right about the threat level of this virus, the contrast between it and the flu would be black and white. Talking about the perfect storm between COVID-19 and the flu would be tantamount to tethering the health care concerns of cancer to those of a cold. But now the truth comes out that this virus really is not that much different from a pandemic flu and that hospitals are always crowded at the peak of even a seasonal flu, much less a pandemic flu.

In July, Justin Hart, founder of RationalGround.com, which promotes a rational approach to the virus, posted on Twitter a series of articles describing emergency measures in various ERs throughout the nation during the 2018 pandemic flu. Yet the media coverage at the time wasn’t incessant, it never became political, and the politicians never gave any thought to shutting down our lives. We lived with it, and few people ever heard of the 2018 pandemic flu.

That is all about to change. Now the flu is the new threshold for perpetual mask-wearing, draconian regulations on businesses and houses of worship, and government mandates of every facet of our lives.

Those who said the fatality rate of COVID-19 was much lower than the WHO claimed were right all along. This week, Icelandic researchers came out with a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine pegging the fatality rate at 0.3%. Lest you think that this might be the result of luck in Iceland, an analysis of COVID-19 in Indiana published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Wednesday estimates the IFR in that state at 0.26%, right around what Stanford epidemiologist and leading lockdown skeptic John Ioannidis predicted long ago.

But even that number is extremely lopsided and almost exclusively weighted toward people with several known immunocompromising conditions. According to the CDC, 94% of those who have died from the virus had at least one serious underlying condition. For healthy people, especially those under 65, the fatality rate is really no greater than the flu.

Hence, the politicians have gone from “Don’t you dare compare this to the flu” to “We should be doing this for the flu as well.” In other words, there’s a reason why politicians and the media warn about a “new normal.” It’s not because COVID-19 will necessarily be with us forever; it’s because the tyranny of the government response had nothing to do with COVID-19. That was simply the perfect pretext because so much was unknown about it earlier this year. Now that everyone is conditioned to go along with the suspension of democracy for “public health,” it’s not even a political leap to use the flu as the next excuse.

Consider how low the threshold is to continue the current quasi-martial law policies and invasion of personal privacy and bodily integrity. One university after another is discovering hundreds of “cases” of COVID with zero hospitalizations. This happens every flu season, and the students usually get sicker with more disruptive symptoms than they have now, when most of them only know they are “sick” because of mandatory testing. Yet this is the new threshold to turn colleges into prisons.

As my friend Kyle Lamb observes, according to the Kessel-Cohen-Milgroom study that PCR tests have a median false positive rate of 2.3%, in places like New York where the entire positive rate is under 2.3%, that could mean the number of real cases may be close to zero – or at least low enough that nobody would notice without this testing regime and dashboard obsession.

As far back as October 2019, according to the CDC, at least 1% of emergency room visitors exhibited COVID-like symptoms (CLI), even before the virus was known in the U.S. A certain number of people always come in with fever, coughing, sore throats, and trouble breathing all year round every year, and most certainly during the late fall and winter. Those numbers existed before the discovery of this particular virus and will continue to persist forever.

At present, we are at the point in this COVID “epidemic” where the flu season, which is driven more by symptoms and not testing, more definitely disrupts people’s daily schedules with illness. As Lamb notes, “By this logic, the virus would never go away and emergency powers will be indefinite.”

And indeed, that is exactly the point. That is their plan … if we let them get away with it.