photo #8837187

Remember those “COVID death clocks” that websites plastered on their homepages in 2020–2021? Giant ticking counters, blood-red numbers climbing in real time, set to ominous piano notes and heartbeat sound effects, like a cheap horror movie trailer. They weren’t tools for “raising awareness.” They were psychological warfare, pure fear porn designed to keep millions in a permanent state of panic while the models behind those counters were off by orders of magnitude and the goalposts kept moving. (Whatever happened to the early concept of herd immunity?) Those tickers kept people masked alone in their cars, destroyed small businesses, and turne neighbors into informants? Those death clocks weren’t about science. They were about psychological warfare against an easily manipulated population.