The True Plague

Monday, August 17, 2026

We are, I think, going to take a very long time to truly understand just how harmful was the international response to covid.  I doubt anyone will every compile the statistics on lives lost due to medical treatments withheld because of covid-driven isolation – it would be too embarrassing.  How would you even go about measuring the learning loss due to the educational compromises?  And it will be some time before we truly feel the productivity loss created by that learning loss.  It is; however, the effects on character and spirit that frighten me most.

A new study reveals a huge problem with loneliness:

A study of over 135,000 adults found that a surprising number of individuals feel lonely often — and that some of the loneliest people live in urban areas, shocking the researchers. Not only that — but the COVID pandemic made it worse.

Of course covid made it worse!  Tell lonely people they have to stay at home and not interact with people and loneliness is going to get worse – why do we even need a study for that?  What interests me most; however, is how we came to such a place – a place where not only was such isolating advice given, but where it was taken and heeded.

I have reflected much on what a deeply broken man Anthony Fauci truly is.  It truly haunts me.  It has been my privilege to meet and interact with some of the most powerful people in modern time, presidents, near-presidents, and a few foreign potentates as well.  To be in such a position, to seek it to begin with, a person has to have enormous self-regard.  We are talking massive egos here.  Fauci most certainly had an ego to match – which makes his career path fascinating because he was quite content to stay several layers down on the federal government org chart.  Most egos that big are not content with a middle management job, no matter how powerful it is.

But Fauci had more going for him that just ego – he was a narcissist – to deeply pathological levels.  Google AI says:

A narcissist is a person who has an inflated sense of self-importance, a deep need for constant admiration, and a low ability to care about the feelings of others.

A massive ego is still capable of compassion (care about feelings of others), but it takes a narcissistic streak to care so little that you throw a nation – the world actually – into the kind of turmoil covid wrought.  This loneliness issue is just a single example – it takes a complete lack of compassion to tell a person that has issues reaching out that they live in a world where no one can reach out to them.  Fauci remained in middle management because it served his immense self-regard.  Better to be the top of his field than beholding to anyone.

This extreme narcissism was a social corrosive in two ways.  The first is the policy it produced, which will continue to be well analyzed.  The second is far more insidious; however.  Fauci was, for a period of time, one of, if not the most, seen person in media.  Furthermore, to this day, he is lauded by many.  He has become an exemplar and many will seek to follow his path – a pathologically narcissistic path.  And this at a time when our society suffers a near plague of narcissism.

Covid was/is about forces in our culture far deeper and more significant than just infectious disease.  They are forces beyond the realm of government to address.  They are spiritual in nature.  Only the church can address them.