This year I learned that the longer I stay at home, the more homeless I look. Nor do I enjoy working where I live. The pandemic has renewed the prospect of my retirement as a topic of conversation in our household, because watching the sausage being made via low-resolution cameras while déshabillé and unbathed is all faintly ridiculous, as well as unwelcome. I am grateful that my work is such that it can be done from home to sustain my continued employment and that of my colleagues, but a practical alternative for me is to do something more interesting with my time than to be a straitened practitioner of my art; the latter frankly a state of affairs merely amplified by present fortunes. I reflect on Herzberg and his Hygiene theory and believe that the job satisfaction indicators have largely been lost to me: I enjoy being not dissatisfied, which should not be read as a ringing endorsement. If I am to die, and I am, I would rather it not be of the plague at home whilst composing yet more fodder to be shoveled into the maw of the Ernst & Young juggernaut that has been placed before me to receive the offerings of an inventive mind asked to mimic a pinhead. One comes to envy the dogsbody.

Lesley retired a few months before the diagnosis of Patient One in the United States, and we have been heartened by the results of this experiment superimposed over our lives that answered the question of whether we could knock around the house together 24/7 without friction — not that there was much doubt, but, as the years pass, one makes acquaintance with the humor about retired couples and the allowances they make to live peaceably together and hopes to avoid any such trauma. The pandemic did, though, squelch her plans to gallop into her retirement with a vengeance, constraining her activities to those things that can be done from home, while exacting a toll of vexation.

Being surrounded by morons, credulous simpletons, and self‐absorbed assholes throughout the ordeal of a pandemic is nothing new in human history, but neglecting the instruction of those past tragedies makes the failures of our day more lamentable, particularly for a civilization that has landed atomic‐powered robots equipped with lasers on extraterrestrial soil that are presently conducting reconnaissance on its behalf. People ought to know better. In Padua, Italy, during the Bubonic Plague outbreak of 1576, for example, a pamphlet was circulated widely in the city, proclaiming the conspiracy theory that wicked ones were spreading the disease intentionally with infected clothing and poisonous ointments rubbed on door handles and knockers.¹ During the Spanish flu of 1918, folk remedies included cotton bags containing camphor, worn on a cord around the neck.² During the 2003 SARS outbreak, there were numerous folk remedies, all of which were ineffective. These included diets of turnips, vinegar, kimchee, or spicy foods, and even smoking cigarettes.³ There were reports from China that some people had hired sorcerers, lit firecrackers, burned fake money, and practiced other magical rituals to protect themselves. A rumor spread there about a miraculous child who could talk at birth and prophesied that green bean soup would prevent infection, which led to a sharp increase in the sale of mung beans.⁴ As of December 15, there have been over 70 million cases and 1–6 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide,⁵ yet churches are suing to stay open instead of voluntarily doing what is in the best interest of the public (telling us everything we need to know about those churches and their values). On May 18 this year during a roundtable with restaurant executives and industry leaders, the current president of the United States acknowledged he was taking hydroxychloroquine – an antimalarial drug also used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis – as a prophylaxis against COVID‐19, saying, I’m taking it – hydroxychloroquine. […] Right now. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, I started taking it. […] Because I think it’s good. I’ve heard a lot of good stories,⁶ a choice almost certainly inspired by rumbustious halfwits who insist that hydroxychloroquine prevents COVID‐19, despite considerable evidence available at the time that the drug has no preventive value as a COVID‐19 treatment, some of which evidence the president called phony and false, and indeed after the president’s own FDA had cautioned against the use of the drug for COVID‐19 outside of hospitals or clinical trials, given the risk of dangerous heart rhythm problems. Our head of state is an equivocating lunatic.

In his seminal work, The Psychology of Pandemics, the author, Steven Taylor, PhD, advances a clinical explanation for some of the behavior that is prominent today in our communities and institutions, writing, Psychological reactance is a motivational response to rules, regulations, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening one’s autonomy and freedom of choice. The perceived threat motivates the person to assert their freedom by rejecting attempts at persuasion, rules, regulation, and other means of control. […] Thus, a message that threatens the person’s freedom – such as a health warning to get immunized – can induce psychological reactance, which in turn can motivate the person to restore freedom by such means as derogating the source or by adopting a position that is the opposite of that advocated in the message. These are people who refuse to wear a mask but demand access to ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug used to treat head lice, promoted by prominent conservative media figures and politicians as an effective treatment for COVID‐19, despite the lack of scientific evidence showing any such thing.

We spent Christmas this year taking care of ourselves and directing our goodwill toward socially distant family and friends. Our zest for peace on Earth was hampered by the cohort of the population that we would prefer to see fired from a cannon into the Sun, they who froth about their freedom to do as they please, waving their idiot red hats around, proud of their oafishness, their vanity, their truculence, their cruelty, and inviting the devil to take the hindmost. The new year to come may be the advent of changed circumstances for me as I choose whether to collect my winnings and call it a career: the pox will remain upon us.

Update March 29, 2024

Of all the newsworthy events on the subject of coronavirus in the last few years, this one notably tickles me, and I cannot resist calling attention to it here, in part because I previously mentioned ivermectin and moreso because it is a neat bit of grudge settling.

Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug used in paste form to treat heartworm in large animals, particularly cattle and horses. There is also a human form of the drug, used to treat, for example, roundworm, but not approved for use in the treatment of COVID‐19. The drug has nevertheless been seized upon by the gullible and those who profit from them as a treatment for the virus.

In 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in its role as a regulatory body, was making use of social media and legacy platforms to dissuade people from using ivermectin as a treatment for COVID‐19, many of whom it realized were self‐medicating with the horse paste version of the drug. The FDA famously posted an item to social media that admonished, You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it. The post included a link to an FDA web page titled, Why you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID‐19. In reply, three doctors who were administering the human version of ivermectin to claimed thousands of their patients as a treatment for COVID‐19 sued the FDA, alleging that the FDA posts were an overreach of its authority and interfered with the individual practice of medicine by those doctors.

Eventually, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided the case in favor of the doctors. The court explained in its ruling, FDA is not a physician. It has authority to inform, announce, and apprise–but not to endorse, denounce, or advise. The Doctors have plausibly alleged that FDA’s Posts fell on the wrong side of the line between telling about and telling to.⁷ The case was remanded to the district court for action.

The FDA agreed this week to delete the offending posts to settle the matter. Snake oil is now available for purchase in the lobby.