A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pandemic

Join me on a trip down memory lane to a time when sharing life-saving information got you death threats.

As I may have mentioned at least a half dozen times, I’m traveling this week and my writing time is seriously limited. Instead of going completely off the grid, I decided to dig into the archives and recycle an essay I suspect lots of you can, unfortunately, relate to.

I posted the piece below exactly two years ago today on my personal blog (remember those?). Much has changed; probably more hasn’t. Case in point: the skewering I took this week at the hands of a substacker named Sage who a) has had me entirely confused with Jenny McCarthy [and ironically, whose substack bio is, “I won the spelling bee in the second grade,” hahahaha], and b) has taken conspiracy theorizing to a whole new level by spending her (?) days “exposing” anyone claiming to be fighting the narrative as a grifter, controlled opposition, or both. Anyone but her (?), of course. As much as I hate to give the gal (?) any publicity at all, the whole thing serves as a depressingly apt illustration of what Covid has done to all of us.

So without further ado, please enjoy this ode to the old, unjaded Jenna.  

Before Covid, I was probably best known for three things: I wrote a bunch of mostly funny books, I’d given a few TED talks, and I liked cats and profanity (equally and a lot). Never once, not even in a drunken stupor or a blind election-inspired rage, did I blog or post publicly about politics, religion or anything even slightly more inflammatory than back-up snow boots. I had no interest in exposing the seedy, slimy underbelly of our government or its regulatory agencies; in fact, I can’t imagine a single circumstance that could have inspired pre-Covid Jenna to invoke the phrase “our government or its regulatory agencies.”

I miss pre-Covid Jenna, and not just because she was super skinny.

Super skinny pre-Covid Jenna, blithely blogging about her closet purge

Then the pathogens hit the fan and I was stockpiling Charmin and shopping online for cute leopard print masks and spritzing my mail with bleach before bringing it inside the house.

But even back then, when Covid was super new—novel, if you will—and decidedly scary, things weren’t adding up to me. The masks that might/did/didn’t work and could get you kicked off of a plane unless you remembered to bring a giant sack of sunflower seeds; the selective shuttering of businesses (because restaurants were “essential” but bars were not, one liquor-only lounge I frequent changed the name of their house margarita to “frozen adult fruit cup” and magically, was able to stay open); the coordinated worldwide coverup of anything resembling scientific discussion and debate. None of it made a scrap of sense.

I dipped my toe into the tumultuous Covid waters with masks. See, there were studies showing them to be as ineffective as Fauci initially claimed they were, but the media was ignoring them. Why, I wondered? People needed to know these things! There was new information, and I had a fair number of followers. Why wouldn’t I share it? You’re welcome!

I was surprised at how enraged some people became by this suddenly dissenting data. Even though the CDC had waffled back and forth a half dozen times on mask efficacy at this point, a large group of people I knew had glommed onto “life-savingly-effective” and weren’t about to budge.

I celebrated their free will and continued to research. I stumbled, almost by accident, upon a news interview with Dr. Tess Lawrie*, a consultant to the World Health Organization and director of The Evidence Based Medicine Consultancy in England. The topic was “vaccine hesitancy” and the interviewer, Mark Dolan, was clearly confident that Lawrie was going to assure him and his viewers that anti-vaxxers were a big bunch of tin foil hat-wearing Trumpers.

*The original interview, of course, has been scrubbed from the Internet, but I did find the above replacement clip that features a majority of it.

“I’m double vaccinated and confident of the safety of the vaccine,” Dolan boasted, all but banging on his chest as he did. “[But] do you think there’s any concern about misinformation around the vaccine that can cause vaccine hesitancy when there’s no reasonable reason to be afraid of it?”

Lawrie smiled and laced up her gloves, but it was clear she wasn’t going to go straight for a knockout punch. “I’ve looked at the evidence and data and I think there is reason to pause,” she replied casually, wiping the smug look right off Dolan’s mug. Lawrie went on to roll out horrifying statistics of deaths and adverse reports numbering at the time in the thousands.

Dolan tried desperately to nudge the vaccine bullet train back onto the rails.

“This, though, is relatively normal, is it not, in relation to vaccinations–” Dolan stammered. Lawrie swiftly cut him off.

“Not at all, actually. It’s not normal. If you take a vaccine like the tetanus vaccine, which has been around since 1968, there are only 36 deaths attributed to it on the World Health Organization’s database, whereas there’s seven thousand deaths reported against the Covid vaccine in just a few months…” She went on to call the death toll “unprecedented in the history of medicine.”

This, I was confident, was important information to share! A world-renowned expert expressing—gasp—a bit of common-sense hesitancy to the greatest medical experiment ever conducted in human history.

So I posted it.

The backlash was swift and furious. I was ignorant. Willfully spreading misinformation. A MAGA hatter; a conspiracy theorist. Someone commented that when I got Covid (I’d already gotten Covid at this point, BTW; natural immunity FTW!), they hoped I planned to stay home and die and not take up a precious hospital bed.

If you know me at all, you already realize this wasn’t the stifling smackdown it was intended to be; it was a challenge. A literal wake-up call. If more people knew what I knew, I was sure, they’d be singing a very different tune; one that sounded remarkably like, “You can stick your New World Order up your arse.”

Alas, while my supporter base quickly grew, dissenting “friends” were barking at, blocking, and unfollowing me left and right. “Maybe you should take your fingers out of your ears, and stop the temper tantrum of a little girl who obviously feels that her daddy didn’t love her enough,” one wrote in response to my support of Joe Rogan’s narrative-rocking interviews with Doctors McCullough and Malone. Because clearly advocating for free speech and scientific debate and questioning corrupt agencies are undeniable signs of deep-rooted pathology borne of paternal neglect. I mean, sure, this ram lamb (Don’t laugh! That’s an actual term for a male sheep!) could have responded with respectful disagreement followed by some solid data to support his contrary opinion, but why even go there? Everyone knows bullying, blaming, and gaslighting are how you win Covid arguments!

Here’s the thing: The truth is out there, just waiting for folks to find it. But you have to want to find it—and not just be armed and ready to bludgeon the messenger who’s knocking on your door trying to deliver it. Damning DoD data reveal unprecedented and disturbing spikes in everything from cancer to miscarriage after Covid vaccination. The European Medicine Agency’s safety committee announced this week it is reviewing reports of menstrual irregularities following vaccination (that post would have gotten you banned from social media six months ago), all while continuing to claim this does not necessarily imply future fertility issues, even though the actual definition of the menstrual cycle is “the regular changes in the activity of the ovaries and endometrium that make reproduction possible.” But because mainstream media remains muzzled when it comes to reporting anything anti-narrative, we messengers remain the scary “fringe minority” in many minds. You know, like the 50,000 truckers who raised millions of dollars (twice!) to show Trudeau and the world who really runs a country.

Super fringy.

Fortunately, I’ve found a wise tribe of truthers who, like me, will forever take a hard pass on vaccines, masks, and passports. Much to the “boost me baby one more time” side’s ire, we’re welcoming new members daily—and plan to cap membership at infinity.

To the other folks—the ones who will continue to jab themselves and their children with experimental poisons for the rest of ever; the ones who champion censorship and wholeheartedly if inexplicably support pharmaceutical profit-machines; and especially the ones who despise me but clearly can’t resist my blog and will surely show up to call me names without ever sharing a shred of evidence to back up their positions—I say, good luck with that. Really. I support your freedom of choice and as hard as it is to do, I wish you well.

I tried.

I guess what they say is true: Living (well) is the best revenge.

p.s. Pre-Covid Jenna also wrote (and starred in, alongside her hunky hubby) this trailer for her book, If It Was Easy They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon. It’s still her favorite thing ever, and you may or may not get to peep her in the bathtub. I hope you enjoy. :)

Don’t forget to submit your heartfelt or hilarious essays for consideration in my anthology, Yankee Doodle Soup for the Fringy, Tin Foil Hat-Wearing Conspiracy Theorist’s Soul. It’s going to be epic. Click here to review the submission guidelines.