One of the funniest genres of “elites being idiots” is the “I got COVID” announcement. These days it often is a “I got COVID…yet again” announcement.

We are treated to the “so what?” news that the Very Important Person was infected with a highly contagious airborne virus that everybody in the world will get at some point, just like a cold or flu. We are supposed to respond with shock, concern, and listen carefully to their wisdom from experience.

Then we are treated to the inevitable litany of “I was vaxxed, then boosted, then boosted, then boosted, and boosted again a week ago…” and I prayed my COVID prayers while masked, and Thank God I did or else I would have died… They would use incense during this incantation if they could smell it, but since they have COVID they can’t.

Finally we get to hear from the person who a moment before admitted that none of the things they did prevented their getting COVID lecture us about how we should do exactly what they did. Because it will save humanity and each of us as well.

It’s funny every time it happens. It is absurd.

It’s not that COVID isn’t still dangerous. It is for the slice of the population that it is dangerous for. These are the same people who got terribly ill from the beginning of the pandemic. For the rest of us, not so much. Kinda like the flu, which can also be deadly for a slice of the population, but for most of us is just a fact of life with which we have been dealing since birth.

We take reasonable precautions as with any endemic illness; we expect people to voluntarily self-quarantine while symptomatic, and expect to succumb some years and not others. Human beings get ill. It sucks, but is also inevitable.

Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post has made her entry into this genre of Mea COVID in a column published in the Washington Post last Friday. It was widely made fun of on Twitter and I wavered deciding whether to toss my opinion out there because it was getting enough ridicule without me adding to public shaming.

Obviously I decided to take a stab at it. Let me explain why.

For those not familiar, here is Parker’s biography:

Kathleen Parker writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. In 2010, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for “her perceptive, often witty columns on an array of political and moral issues, gracefully sharing the experiences and values that lead her to unpredictable conclusions.” A Florida native, Parker started her column in 1987 when she was a staff writer for the Orlando Sentinel. She joined the Washington Post Writers Group in 2006. She is the author of “Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care” (2008).

She has been widely described as a conservative, and was once claimed by conservatives as one of theirs. But she is better described as a member of the Establishment™ who is not Left-wing. We live in a world where Jennifer Rubin once qualified as a conservative, so ascribing the term to anybody in the Elite™ is more than a bit dangerous.

Put your masks back on, please, @kathleenparker writes. https://t.co/uQ835Nvfob

— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) October 28, 2022

A few things about Parker’s entry into this genre stand out, but the most revelatory one is the context within which she discusses the topic. She compares her current experience with COVID to an ancestor’s with smallpox.

CAMDEN, S.C. — There is a tradition in my family of retreating to the woods when illness strikes.

One of my Revolutionary War forefathers, Tarleton Brown of Barnwell, S.C., had to abandon the siege of Augusta in 1781 when he contracted smallpox and returned home, such as it was.

The British, alas, had preceded him, reducing his family’s home to ash and leaving both his father and little brother dead. His mother and sister miraculously escaped both the king’s army and “the Indians,” as he put it in his 1862 memoir, “Memoirs of Tarleton Brown: A Captain of the Revolutionary Army” — a 28-page pamphlet published in New York and “Written by Himself.”

Because no one in his family had previously had smallpox, Brown entered the woods and stayed there for 40 days, lying beneath a large oak and tended only by a Tory woman, according to another account. Once recovered, Brown returned to battle until the war’s end. (The British eventually surrendered Augusta.)

When Kathleen Parker got COVID, she took herself to family cabin in the woods to avoid spreading this plague, just as her ancestor had with smallpox.

Really. Because COVID is similar to smallpox in her mind. She went there.

None of us has experience with smallpox because it has been eradicated due to the development of a vaccine and a worldwide effort to vaccinate everybody in the world. Those of us old enough have a small scar on our arms from where they administered an attenuated live virus that gave you immunity to the smallpox virus. For those of you who don’t have such a scar, you have definitely seen it on somebody’s arm:

When the WHO declared smallpox eradicated the powers-that-be decided to stop vaccinating children, but prior to then almost everybody in the world received the vaccine. Billions of dollars and decades of effort were put into the project to eradicate smallpox, and it was done for no small reason: the most common variant of smallpox has a 30% mortality rate. And even if you survive, you are permanently disfigured with scars all over your body similar to the single one the vaccine leaves behind. It is a hideous disease.

Variola major is the severe form of smallpox, with a more extensive rash and higher fever. It is also the most common form of smallpox. There are four types of variola major smallpox: ordinary (the most frequent); modified (mild and occurring in previously vaccinated persons); flat; and hemorrhagic. Historically, variola major has a case-fatality rate of about 30%. However, flat and hemorrhagic smallpox, which are uncommon types of smallpox, are usually fatal. Hemorrhagic smallpox has a much shorter incubation period and is likely not to be initially recognized as smallpox when presenting to medical care. Smallpox vaccination also does not provide much protection, if any, against hemorrhagic smallpox

You read that right: if you caught smallpox your chances of dying were almost 1 out of 3. No treatment has ever been developed. This is why the government maintains a stockpile of the vaccine in case the disease is ever used as a bioweapon. It really is that bad. Bioweapon bad.

Kathleen Parker begins her reflections on COVID–a disease with a mortality rate far below the 1918 flu–with a serious comparison to smallpox. Early estimates during the period that COVID was working itself through the population like Death’s own scythe, the infection fatality rate worldwide was estimated to be about 0.5% (1 out of 200). It is much lower today as the most vulnerable to the disease were taken out relatively early.

If you got COVID in a modern industrial country your risk on average was 0.35%, making smallpox almost 100 times more likely to kill you.

Keep this context in mind as you consider this fact: Kathleen Parker–a columnist employed by one of the most prominent newspapers in the world–compared COVID to smallpox. Seriously.

Yet this is how far too many people honestly view COVID.  Given what we actually know from observing reality, this is utterly psychotic.

There is no other way to describe this immunity to reality. The definition of psychosis is: “a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.”

This is where the average member of the transnational elite is today–if you accept that they genuinely believe the things they are saying. Many, of course, don’t ever mean what they say, but most of the flaks in the MSM probably do.

Which means that they are psychotics, in real definition of the word. They are so disconnected from reality that despite all the evidence that is staring them in the face they still believe that the vaccines and the masks will, or should at least, prevent COVID from killing them. In Parker’s case she was never at great risk. She is relatively young, healthy, and has access to the best health care in the world. She is not old, fat, sick, frail, or living in squalor. Her risk from COVID would almost certainly be less than from going for a swim in the ocean.

But to a psychotic facts are irrelevant. What matters is that, no matter what happens, their conception of how the world works remains intact. The believed the indoctrination that COVID was an existential threat to humanity, and insist on maintaining that belief no matter what.

The COVID true believers remind of the people who led the Salem witch trials, who also went mad. COVID has become a mental stand-in for their feeling that the world they are living in isn’t behaving as they would like or expect.

Rather than take reality as it is and deal with it, COVID took the place of the Bad Orange Man as the explanation for all things bad. In fact, Bad Orange Man caused the COVID disaster, making him the sum of all fears.

Parker clings to her madness as do millions of others. They have assigned COVID magical properties and malign intent. Just as a psychotic would when they hear angels or demons urging them on to act out their madness.

The virus is getting smarter with each new turn, and our bodies and medicines are slow to keep up. What does this mean?

Nobody wants to say this, but I think it means masks are back in order in public spaces and especially in crowded areas. My contagion point was probably a packed art gallery I visited on Saturday, Oct. 15. By Monday night, I had a sore throat; by Tuesday morning, I felt like a plank — immovable with aches, fever, a headache that lasted a week and all the rest.

Today is Oct. 28, and I’m still positive, slightly stuffy, and wondering how much longer before the next variation swings through and isn’t so mild.

If I were you, I’d mask up and get all the shots.

Since it worked so well for her, perhaps we should. Either that, or invest in straitjacket manufacturers.