This year our family decided to do something a little off the beaten track for Christmas. We spent it at a casino.

We picked one of the big venues on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, figuring that food, fun, and fellowship along with a small foray into games of chance could make for an enjoyable holiday weekend.

And that happened. Nobody won anything at the tables, but the trip was enjoyable anyway.

Except we didn’t leave empty-handed. By Sunday, both my father and I had developed symptoms which seem a bit like the Omicron COVID variant which is now everywhere.

I’m waiting on the results of a COVID test as of this writing. But I wouldn’t be surprised — I might be a little surprised if it isn’t, frankly — to see this come back as Omicron. Symptom-wise, it checks the boxes: it’s a runny nose that produces a cough and a sore throat, it’s a headache coupled with body aches, chills, and a low fever, and there’s fatigue and some brain fog, mostly as a result of not being able to sleep much since Saturday night.

Until Saturday I actually thought it was the smoke of the casino floor, which I hadn’t been exposed to in a long while, that was affecting me. But after I spent Saturday night with a splitting headache and an inability to get remotely comfortable in any sleeping position I knew it was more than that.

So it’s Omicron. Or maybe it isn’t. Honestly, this isn’t really all that bad. I’ve had sinus infections and the flu that were worse.

And this could be the flu. As I’ve been moping around the house waiting for the garbage-can-punch cocktail of vitamin supplements, zinc tablets, flu symptom medicine, Aleve, Airborne, and nasal rinses I’m counting on does its work to drive this off, I ran across this shocking bit of news:

The U.S. flu season has arrived on schedule after taking a year off, with flu hospitalizations rising and two child deaths reported.

Last year’s flu season was the lowest on record, likely because COVID-19 measures — school closures, distancing, masks and canceled travel — prevented the spread of influenza, or because the coronavirus somehow pushed aside other viruses.

“This is setting itself up to be more of a normal flu season,” said Lynnette Brammer, who tracks flu-like illnesses for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The childhood deaths, Brammer said, are “unfortunately what we would expect when flu activity picks up. It’s a sad reminder of how severe flu can be.”

During last year’s unusually light flu season, one child died. In contrast, 199 children died from flu two years ago, and 144 the year before that.

The flu “took a year off,” dontcha know. This is how stupid and dishonest the government-media-medical complex has become as 2021 comes to a close.

There was no flu anywhere in America once COVID came along. And this COVID strain, which is now 85 percent of all the cases around the country but feels just like the flu? Coincidence.

I’m winging it with treatment of whatever this is because two years into the COVID experience there is still no recognized and publicized early-treatment protocol in the United States, nor is there even a publicized government study of the efficacy of treatment options (much less a study of natural immunity, while other countries have published comprehensive ones), and every time something shows a bit of potential as a therapeutic treatment it gets dumped on. The latest among them appears to be monoclonal antibodies, which have apparently been taken off the market here in Louisiana right before I’d be up for taking an infusion:

The State Health Department announced it is pausing administration of most monoclonal antibody treatments due to the current dominance of the Omicron variant. The decision comes as a federal decision was made that the treatment is not effective against the new strain, which now makes up an estimated 84% of Louisiana cases per LDH.

The two antibody treatments offers were studied and found to not help though who came down with the more resilient strain.

The state is receiving a shipment of a different monoclonal antibody treatment, sotrovibmab, which appears to have some effect against Omicron. So far only 228 doses have been delivered, with a steady increase in deliveries expected in the near future.

The feds don’t seem to be interested in any COVID treatments other than to crap on their effectiveness. In the case of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, a pair of ubiquitously common antiviral medicines, which have been around for decades and have been prescribed to millions of people for various ailments with nearly no reported side effects, doctors are having their licenses put in jeopardy for prescribing them for COVID — despite dozens of studies overseas indicating they’re as effective against bad COVID symptoms as Dr. Fauci’s precious vaccine is.

You can hardly get ivermectin in Louisiana. If your primary care physician is affiliated with one of the major hospital groups in the state and you ask for it, you will get a look as though you’d showed him kiddie porn on your phone. They’ve been terrorized into blind rejection of ivermectin and HCQ.

Now monoclonal antibodies apparently don’t work, either, despite an almost universal positive review given by people who’ve had the infusions.

It’s enough to make one wonder if they don’t just want you to suffer.

Because all along, the only thing these people have had to say is “get the vaccine.”

I’ve never been opposed to vaccines. I’ve been suspicious enough of this one that I didn’t take it, for a couple of reasons. First, the process to bring it to market was rushed, which suggested caution as a prudent approach to taking Pfizer or Moderna’s mRNA concoction. And second, I’ve never seen such obvious dishonesty from the government-media-medical complex as with the vaccines.

They don’t stop you from getting COVID. Nor do they stop you from spreading it. What kind of vaccine is that?

It reduces symptoms? Well, OK. By how much? More than monoclonal antibodies, HCQ, or ivermectin? What about budesonide or some of the other treatments the government-media-medical complex has dumped on?

The entire NFL and NBA are vaccinated. So are all of the NCAA’s football and basketball teams.

Monday night the Saints put on a completely fruitless farce of a performance in a 20-3 loss to Miami with 21 players and four coaches unavailable due to COVID. They were throwing players signed on Sunday night onto the field less than 24 hours later. Texas A&M had to pull out of the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl because COVID had wiped out so many players. COVID cancellations wiped out the Hawaii Bowl, Arizona Bowl, Fenway Bowl, and Military Bowl. The NBA’s schedule is a mess due to player unavailability.

All of these people are vaccinated, you know. They’re vaccinated and they’re in the best physical condition imaginable, and they’re skipping performances because they’ve come down with an infection they’re vaccinated against.

And once you’ve got it the government-media-medical complex wants you to take Tylenol. Or something. The same government dropped the ball on a plan to make at-home COVID tests available to the whole country. You can’t find an at-home test now that Omicron has flared up around the country; they’re all sold out.

You’ll be forgiven for thinking they like the idea of you suffering. The White House put out a message just in time for Christmas that foretold a “winter of serious illness and death” for the unvaccinated. This despite scant evidence that Omicron is responsible for hospitalizations, much less anybody dying of it.

If what I have is Omicron, I can say this with conviction: if this is what’s sweeping the country, we don’t have a public health crisis. Not anymore. And we’re hereby absolved of listening to any of the people supposedly in charge.

It’s been two years of unhinged, moronic incompetence ruining Americans’ lives with no evidence of an upside. We can argue all we want about what the true total number of COVID deaths should be, but what we know now is that “excess deaths,” an insultingly euphemistic term to describe the butcher’s bill from COVID lockdowns and other public policy disasters related to the pandemic, are through the roof.

From the CDC’s mortality report for 2020:

In 2020, a total of 3,383,729 resident deaths were registered in the United States—528,891 more deaths than in 2019. The number of deaths for which COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death was 350,831 (10.4% of the total number of deaths in 2020). From 2019 to 2020, the age- adjusted death rate for the total population increased 16.8%. This single-year increase is the largest since the first year that annual mortality data for the entire United States became available (2). The decrease in life expectancy for the total population of 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020 is the largest single-year decrease in more than 75 years (3). Age-specific death rates from 2019 to 2020 increased for each age group 15 years and over. Age-adjusted death rates increased in 2020 from 2019 for each race and ethnicity group for both males and females.

How much of that — nearly 200,000 more Americans dying in 2020 not of COVID — can be laid at the feet of our policymakers? Good question. It’s entirely reasonable to think the number is better than half, and nobody ought to be surprised. Ruin people’s lives with panic and tyranny and you’ll get bad health outcomes — suicides, drug overdoses, murders, heart attacks, strokes, you name it.

And after boasting he’d “shut down the virus,” our doddering fool of a president admitted defeat, dumped the problem on governors, and punched out for a vacation week in Delaware.

Omicron is, as best I can tell, potentially from personal experience, essentially a bad cold. It isn’t anywhere near as deadly as the toxic stupidity and malicious dishonesty of our ruling class. As 2021 becomes 2022, let’s make a national New Year’s Resolution to hold these idiots accountable for what they’ve done and to show them no quarter in the reckoning to come.