The “hysteria” surrounding COVID-19 is causing Americans to police themselves for lockdown and mask violations for fear their neighbors or relatives will turn on them – a situation “similar to communist China,” a California psychiatrist warned recently.
“They don’t need a police force. They don’t need a secret Stasi to go after the neighbor that isn’t wearing his mask on a park bench. We have families who are willing to do that,” Dr. Mark McDonald, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in West Lost Angeles, said during the Truth Over Fear Summit, a virtual conference on the coronavirus organized by broadcaster Patrick Coffin.
“We have office workers [who] will come by and mace you if you are not wearing a mask, and no one will come to your rescue,” McDonald continued. “In fact, they’ll probably applaud it.”
In McDonald’s professional opinion, the fear that the government and the media have instilled in so many Americans has “become so entrenched that it has reached a state of what I would call delusional psychosis.”
“Fear has become a new virtue. People are told that fear is good” or to “settle into” those fears and allow them “to control and constrain your life,” he said.
McDonald pointed out that while many Americans believe that everyone is equally at risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19, “it is a lie.” In fact, the only group of people at any risk of death from the virus (COVID, flu, or pneumonia) is those over age 70, particularly those with multiple comorbidities. Everyone else has at least a 99.5-percent chance of surviving the disease, and even the elderly have a 94.6-percent survival. Certainly not a reason to shutdown a country.
Despite the fact that such information is readily accessible, most Americans blindly, stupidly, continue to be unreasonably afraid of COVID-19 to the point that the “hysteria” is creating a situation of “group control,” whereby those who aren’t afraid of the virus nevertheless find themselves donning masks or social distancing in an effort to avoid confrontations with their panicked friends and neighbors, McDonald argued.
To illustrate his point, McDonald related a story of a passenger on a Delta Airline flight was hounded by flight attendants and passengers for not properly wearing a mask.
When the plane reached its destination, the passenger was “escorted off” and interviewed by a station manager. Two weeks later, he received a letter from Delta banning him from flights “in perpetuity,” or until the airline withdrew its mask mandate.
Moreover, he later told by the person he was traveling with that “all the passengers erupted into applause” after he was escorted off the plane, because “their anxiety was relieved.”
McDonald said he was “stunned” by this behavior on the part of passengers and crew.
“So the end result of this is a government which is using its own citizens as a de facto police force, very similar to communist China, that has a social point system in place where neighbor informs on neighbor, family informs on family,” he said.
“This has a terribly damaging effect on our society.”
Because of Americans’ “delusional psychosis,” McDonald refers to the space outside his home or office as the “outdoor insane asylum,” where he must assume “that any person that I run into is insane – unless the person proves otherwise.”
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