A self-fulfilling prophecy is an interesting concept.
In general, it’s defined as any situation where the referencing of, or actions taken concerning a future event, directly or indirectly cause the event to occur. Think someone who is so anxious about a test that he can’t sleep or focus so he is up all night and then fails the test because he's exhausted. Think someone who is so worried about his house burning down that he installs 56 fire alarms throughout his home which causes an electrical surge that starts a housefire. Think Macbeth.
With those examples in place, allow me to be obnoxious and start this article with a guarantee:
I guarantee that if the government ran a consistent media campaign stating that a massive wave of sickness was going to sweep across the nation in 2025 and there was nothing we could do about it, we would see record breaking hospitalizations due to this sickness in 2025.
More importantly, I guarantee the above statement would remain true, even if what the government led media campaign stated was totally made up.
Do the above two paragraphs bother you? Do they make your hair stand on edge due to the unstated implications you are drawing from them?
They shouldn’t. Because the implications you are drawing are wrong.
I am not suggesting in any way that Covid-19 isn't real or that it can't be serious for an incredibly small percentage of people. I have never on this website suggested any such thing. My only point of contention concerning Covid-19 has always been that its ramifications have been drastically exaggerated. This is a point I still stand by, but that has nothing to do with the guarantees I made above.
Hypochondria is defined as “abnormal anxiety about one’s health, especially with an unwarranted fear that one has a serious disease.” Often it is a term used to describe someone who is constantly worried that their health is failing, even when it is not. People suffering from Hypochondria often work themselves into a sickness by ruthlessly researching and re-researching all the different ailments under the sun that they could potentially contract.
Let me repeat this again just in case you missed it: I am not trying to insinuate that Covid-19 isn’t real or that people suffering from it are making up symptoms.
I am, however, absolutely stating, unabashedly, that the amount of media coverage and fear mongering done by the media concerning Covid-19 has unquestionably increased the number of people who believe they suffer from it, and the number of people who check themselves into the hospital under the guise of it.
Some will immediately hate me for saying that. They’ll say it’s inaccurate. They’ll say it’s cruel. They’ll say I’m diminishing those who seriously suffer from Covid-19 to mentally unstable people. Rest assured, that’s not what I’m trying to do at all.
All I’m saying is that a nonstop media campaign about an invisible illness that vaccines can’t stop from spreading absolutely influences the response to and health of huge swaths of people who are constantly bombarded by said campaign.
My best defense of the previous statement? Four simple words: How could it not?
A huge aspect of physical health is mental. Anyone who has taken a Psychology 101 class can confirm that the research on this topic is already in. Study after study suggests that people who are happy, confident, and fulfilled are physically healthier than those who are not. This is not groundbreaking information by any means, but I do think it tells us something really important about the consequences of the media’s never ending crusade to extend and enhance the true ramifications of Covid-19.
If you constantly tell a child that he is weak and that sickness is everywhere and that he can’t avoid contracting and/or suffering from a certain illness, Psychology tells us that child will suffer a worse fate when confronted by that illness compared to a child who is constantly reassured that he is strong and healthy and has nothing to worry about...even if all other circumstances are identical.
And this psychological truth doesn’t even require some hypothetical example of a child. We can easily demonstrate the significance of the mind when it comes to sickness using the examples of any healthy person who has gone through the Covid-19 era.
Be honest. Since March of 2020, how many times have you thought to yourself, “Uh oh, there’s a tickle in my throat, this could be it!” or, “I’ve been coughing more than usual lately, it could be the Corona Virus!” Everyone in the world has been doing that, and no one in his right mind could blame them.
Every single day for a year and a half the media has run story after story about people getting sick with Covid-19 or people getting hospitalized with Covid-19 or people dying of Covid-19. Not a single day has gone by where it wasn’t a top three news story. And I get it. The media writes the story people want to read about and based on how Covid-19 was initially and wrongfully presented, people want to read about it most.
But you can’t possibly suggest that the inundation of media coverage hasn’t influenced at least some people who either aren’t sick or are barely sick to consider their illness more serious than it really is due to all they have been told about it. You also can’t tell me that this coverage hasn’t influenced some people to check themselves into the hospital due to minor symptoms, despite the fact that had those identical symptoms occurred in 2015 they wouldn’t have thought twice about them.
And that’s how Covid-19 has become the ultimate hypochondria inducing, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Call it the greatest psychological study of all time. Call it a worldwide control group experiment. Call it a naturally occurring observation on how media inundation affects physical health. Call it whatever you want. The bottom line is that the media’s handling of Covid-19 has without question influenced the way people assess their own individual health and the degree to which people fear this invisible, unstoppable, and often totally unnoticeable virus.
Until the media stops its active campaign to constantly regurgitate stories about the 1% of people who experience serious side effects from Covid-19, the health of a massive amount of people who are at all susceptible to hypochondriac-like responses will be influenced negatively.
And that’s just the thing. If the campaign is aggressive enough, if it lasts long enough, and if its dominance of the media airwaves is pervasive enough, just about everyone in the world is somewhat susceptible to this hypochondria on some level.
Most people who have contracted Covid-19, both vaccinated and unvaccinated, have experienced little to no symptoms from it. Had the media or some test not told them differently, they wouldn’t even have been able to distinguish this “deadly novel virus” from a similar bug they caught in 1997. Despite this, many of these same people are still FAR more fearful about their health than ever before, and FAR more willing to think the sky is falling due to the constant media bombardment which tells them it is.
Look, I’m not suggesting the media stop covering Covid-19. I’m not suggesting Covid-19 isn’t real or can’t be serious in statistically rare cases. I am suggesting the media must start covering the disease more accurately in terms of how it affects the VAST majority of people. Not just because the media is overtly exaggerating the true dangers of the virus, but because it is propagating a self-fulfilling prophecy which sustains the "pandemic narrative," even though the health issues the prophecy is based on are often more psychosomatic than real.
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