30 Questions for a Narrative Believer

Do you (or did you) believe the COVID narrative? If so, would you be willing to answer some questions?

All I ask is that you honestly engage with the questions. I promise to listen attentively and respectfully.

Your responses may help me and many others answer questions of historic importance.

If you would like me to consider publishing your answers in a future post, please share them in the comments. If you would prefer to keep them anonymous, you can email them to me by signing up for my newsletter and replying to the Welcome message. Feel free to selectively respond if you don’t have time to answer them all.

Thank you for sharing your time and thoughts.

Note to My Readers

I need your help gathering responses. Can you please share this widely and ask friends, family members, coworkers, and other narrative believers to take this opportunity to relay their perspective?

With the holidays coming up, this could offer a meaningful way to connect and help you understand each others’ experiences and viewpoints. You could record audio or video of their responses as you ask them and then send me transcripts of their answers if they are willing to share them publicly (I can retain anonymity as desired).

I realize there are a lot of time-consuming questions here, and you may try the patience of your subjects if you try to go through all of them. The first question alone could prompt an hourlong conversation. To save time, you may wish to select the ones you think are most appropriate for the particular party.

If you’re part of a church or other group, you could see if it would be possible to set up discussion groups, and people could take turns answering questions, maybe over multiple sessions.

Get creative! Feel free to add your own questions (share in the comments if you’d like) and simply use this article as a springboard for deeper conversations.

While asking questions, try to avoid being confrontational or judgmental. We want participants to reflect on their feelings, thoughts, experiences, and behavior without fear of backlash. This may open up avenues for healing dialogue as you process the past three years together.

For inspiration, see the story Marion shares about the “clearing” exercise she participated in during a recent retreat.

30 Questions

1) What is your overall perception of what has occurred since COVID entered the scene nearly three years ago, and how has your thinking evolved on the following topics over time (if it has)?

a) lockdowns
b) social distancing
c) masking
d) school closures
e) COVID vaccines
f) mandates
g) vaccine passports
h) natural immunity
i) early treatment protocols
j) free speech vs. censorship
k) individual rights vs. social responsibility
l) the role of governments, agencies, and influential figures in public health policy

2) How did you arrive at those views? Did you find you felt one way about a topic initially and then it changed—and if so, how did it change and why?

3) Were you in agreement with most of the people around you, or did some of your friends or family members see things differently? How did you work through those differences, if any?

4) Do you tend to consume a range of media representing diverse viewpoints, or do you pretty much stick to a few trusted sources? If the latter, what do you consider reliable sources of news and information?

5) Which of these media do you consume, if any (please share the specific outlets you turn to most often):

a) television
b) newspapers
c) magazines
d) radio
e) mainstream news websites
f) social media
g) newsletters

6) Which search engine(s) do you use? Do you trust sources like Wikipedia and sites that present themselves as fact-checkers (e.g., Snopes)?

7) If you had heard the views of the many scientists, physicians, and other qualified experts presenting data, research, expertise, and informed opinions that contradicted the narrative being promoted by mainstream media, would you have thought twice before accepting what the pundits were saying?

8) Did the use of namecalling (e.g., “anti-vaxxer,” “conspiracy theorist,” “right-wing extremist,” “misinformation spreader”) cause you to automatically dismiss and avoid evaluating certain sources for yourself?

9) How many COVID shots have you had? How many are you willing to get—and how often? Do you think once you and your loved ones received the injection, you experienced a “buy-in” effect and could no longer evaluate the risks objectively?

10) Does it concern you that vaccine manufacturers have zero liability should recipients experience any potentially debilitating or even lethal side effects? This is thanks to emergency use authorizations, and, once those expire, the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act, which shields pharmaceutical corporations from responsibility for damages if the product is added to the childhood schedule of vaccinations.

11) Did you research the vaccines, masking, and other COVID protocols, or were you too busy attending to your daily life and work responsibilities? Did you feel overwhelmed by competing information and decide you had no choice but to trust certain experts to help make important decisions for you?

12) If you did research, how many hours did you spend researching the mRNA injections, for example, and what form did that take? How does that compare to the amount of time you spent researching a home, car, or other major purchasing decision? Did you perform a cost-benefit analysis?

13) Think back to early 2020 just after the pandemic was declared and the first lockdown was instituted. How did you feel? Were you fearful? Did you think the extreme measures were an overreaction? Do you remember anything like that ever happening before? Did the measures make sense to you in light of historical responses to similar threats?

14) If you have children, what has this experience been like for them? How did they react to masking, social distancing, lockdowns, school closures, and vaccination? How were they affected on psychological, emotional, and physical levels?

15) Do you know anyone personally whose death was attributed to COVID? Would you have felt less afraid of catching COVID if you had learned the death tallies and case counts were intentionally exaggerated through mechanisms such as:

a) counting deaths with, not just from, COVID (e.g., people who died from comorbidities, old age, and other causes such as car accidents but who tested positive for COVID);

b) running the PCR tests at such a high cycle rate they yielded numerous false positives;

c) financially incentivized administration of protocols known to cause death such as remdesivirventilation/intubation, and midazolam; and

d) the smearing and suppression of early treatment protocols now understood to achieve up to a 92-percent reduction in COVID mortality rates?

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