From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The development represents a vindication of those who for years were maligned as purveyors of harmful misinformation.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) quietly updated its federal COVID-19 guidelines to recommend treating the virus similarly to the flu, vindicating years of dissident opinion and undermining the original justification for drastically upending Americans’ lives in its name.

Declaring that COVID is “no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses,” the new guidance says COVID’s threat is now “more similar to that of other common respiratory viruses,” justifying the agency’s decision to issue a general “Respiratory Virus Guidance, rather than additional virus-specific guidance.” It admits that “states and countries that have already shortened recommended isolation times have not seen increased hospitalizations or deaths related to COVID-19.”

Accordingly, COVID-positive Americans are no longer told to isolate themselves for five days but instead simply stay home until one has gone a day without fever or symptoms, while masking and limiting close contact for the next five days (advice for both COVID and more routine viruses).

The Wall Street Journal, whose headline summarizes the development as “It’s Official: We Can Pretty Much Treat Covid Like the Flu Now,” noted that the climbdown does not “apply to health care settings, including nursing homes,” and the CDC still recommends annual fall COVID vaccinations, with the elderly boosted more often.

Medical experts who spoke with WSJ framed the relaxed guidelines as a simple adaptation to changing circumstances, but a report released last month by a Florida grand jury found that the government’s more stringent measures earlier in the pandemic were never justified. It concluded that lockdowns did more harm than good, that masks were ineffective at stopping COVID transmission, that COVID was “statistically almost harmless” to children and most adults, and that it is “highly likely” that COVID hospitalization numbers were inflated.

Yet those who argued as much from 2020 through 2023 were maligned from the highest levels of government and media as purveyors of “medical misinformation” so dangerous it necessitated censoring on social media.

A large body of evidence has found that mass restrictions on personal and economic activity undertaken in 2020 and part of 2021 caused far more harm than good, in terms of personal freedom and economics as well as public health, and that lives could have been saved through far less burdensome methods, such as the promotion of established therapeutic drugs, narrower protections focused on those most at risk (such as the elderly and infirm), and increasing vitamin D intake. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has called America’s COVID response measures as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” against which Congress, state legislatures, and courts alike were largely negligent to protect constitutional rights, personal liberty, and the rule of law.

Evidence has also shown that forcing Americans to wear face coverings in the presence of others was similarly ineffective, including the CDC’s own September 2020 admission that masks cannot be counted on to keep out COVID when spending 15 minutes or longer within six feet of someone. All told, more than 170 studies have found that masks have been ineffective at stopping COVID while instead being harmful, especially to children.

As for the COVID vaccines, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under former President (and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee) Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative, the public health establishment’s aversion to considering them anything but “safe and effective” has not dulled concerns that persist thanks to a large body of evidence affirming they carry significant health risks.

The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 37,231 deaths, 214,906 hospitalizations, 21,524 heart attacks, and 28,214 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of February 23, among other ailments. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).