Here’s an admission: In the first days of the pandemic, when everyone was panicking and you couldn’t get any toilet paper or hand sanitizer or face masks or reason or accountability, I was grabbing anything I could that I thought might be useful and that the other mopes in my town weren’t hip to yet. Zinc lozenges, vitamin D, a pulse oximeter; MERV 13 air filters, glycerol, fuel conditioner, and jerry cans; a 12,000-running-watt portable generator with a 50-amp junction box and a ten-circuit transfer switch; a short-stroke-piston-driven carbine with a low-power variable optic; 1,000 rounds each of 147-grain 9mm and 55-grain 5.56mm ammunition. That sort of thing.
Hell, at one point in March, I half-read a social-media post from an acquaintance singing the praises of an herbal supplement (called “forsythia”) as a homeopathic Covid cure, said “Eff it,” and threw a bottle in my Amazon shopping cart. It wasn’t until I’d been taking the stuff for a week that I realized the acquaintance’s “recommendation” was a mocking reference to the snake oil peddled by Jude Law’s conspiracy-theorizing quack character in the 2011 epidemic thriller Contagion.
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