Day 655: COVID as Mass Hysteria

I have no doubt that COVID-19 is the greatest threat to humanity we have ever faced; not because of a virus; … but because of our response to it.

Fired ethicist Professor Julie Ponesse

Technically, today's topic is Mass Formation rather than mass hysteria (h/t Mark Wauck), but that only makes it worse:

Free-Floating Anxiety is the most painful psychological phenomena to experience and leads to panic attacks. In this state of unfocused anxiety the mind tries to connect it’s anxiety to something, an “Object of Anxiety”. The next piece of the puzzled is a strategy to deal with this Object of Anxiety.

So when these pre-conditions are highly present within a population and then the media provide a narrative which indicates a focal-point for this anxiety while at the same time describing a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety then all the anxiety connects to this object of anxiety.

If a large segment of people are willing to follow this strategy to deal with this object of anxiety no matter the cost, then in a second step people start a collective & heroic battle with this Object of Anxiety and in that way a new kind of social bond emerges & with that a new kind of “sense making” or purpose. Suddenly life is all directed towards battling this Object of Anxiety. This creates new sense of connectedness with others in the Mass-Formation.

In other news, New Jersey reports a mysterious increase in MIS-C cases among children in the past week. COVID cases didn't rise, so it's a complete mystery what could have happened. The article suggests "variability" or "luck" to explain "the biggest jump in a week that we’ve had in quite some time."

PlagueBlog suspects Mass Formation may be a factor, as there are already 43 or 44 reports of MIS-C associated with COVID vaccines in VAERS this year, and only two other reports, ever, for other vaccines. (One of the 44 reports is significantly typoed but is clearly about COVID, just not so clearly about a vaccine.)

P.S. There are so many challenges to the federal vaccine mandate that the circuit courts held a lottery to see who'd hear one, and the sixth circuit won. While possibly not as slap-happy as the fifth circuit, it's a relatively conservative court where the mandate may fare ill.

P.P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percentage point today.