To hear government officials and their public relations flaks who pose as the nation’s major news media tell it, the recently discovered COVID Omicron variant will turn our country upside down. Rampant fear among the populace, waves of holiday travel cancellations, a sharply rising COVID death toll…

Except none of that has happened.

New York State recently reinstated its public mask mandate for unvaccinated individuals, and the entire Left Coast has a public mask mandate for everyone, jabbed or unjabbed. Truth be told, there has been a rise in COVID cases in certain parts of the country, along with corresponding hospitalizations for those with preexisting conditions. But don’t break out your “The End Is Nigh” signs just yet.

Omicron has been identified as a highly transmissible but less deadly variant of COVID. Vaccinated individuals who contract Omicron may experience what seems like a bad cold or just a case of the sniffles, depending on the strength of your body’s natural immune response. So, there should be no cause for alarm.

As of this writing, there has not been a single death recorded in the U.S. due to the Omicron variant. Great Britain announced its first Omicron death earlier this week — or rather the death of someone who previously tested positive for Omicron. No other details about this case have been made public, so it’s entirely possible for this person to have died of a completely unrelated condition or mishap. But as with many hospitals in the U.S., apparently any person who tests positive for COVID in the UK who subsequently dies is counted as a COVID death, regardless of the specific cause of their demise.

The U.S. did just surpass 800,000 COVID deaths, again of all varieties.

Much to the consternation of the leftists trying to use the pandemic to control the populace, Omicron has had little impact on how people spend their days. AAA predicts that 109 million Americans will travel over the holidays, close to the pre-pandemic record of 119 million travelers in 2019. On top of that, a vast majority of the public simply isn’t that concerned about Omicron, or COVID for that matter. And who can blame us?

For close to two years, the public has been inundated with information, a lot of it wrong or politicized, about COVID and its potential impact on society. Leftists in government itching to turn America into a totalitarian state and their dutiful minions in the media and the so-called professional class spoke incessantly of doom and gloom. They used the pandemic as a reason to create top-down draconian mandates that all were supposed to follow.

We were told vaccines would stop COVID in its tracks. Then we were told that their protection is not total and only temporary at that. We were told to lock down in place; that all were susceptible. Then it turned out that COVID was most dangerous to the elderly and people with compromised immune systems and preexisting conditions. Kids could have stayed in school, businesses could have remained open, and the roaring pre-COVID economy could have continued rolling forward, even if temporarily slowed by a nasty virus.

When President Donald Trump delivered the promised vaccines at the end of 2020, Democrats openly ridiculed the idea and spread distrust. Then, when President Joe Biden said we should all get vaccinated, Democrats were suddenly wholeheartedly on board and launched a shame campaign aimed at anyone who didn’t comply. Biden even told late-night talk-show host Jimmy Fallon that getting vaccinated was “patriotic.” Biden also said that Bilk Back Better is paid for, he doesn’t pay attention to approval ratings, and the Republicans are bad people for stalling his agenda.

The public is not lazy, and it is not apathetic about COVID. It’s more to the point that the public has been fed so much Grade A fertilizer over the pandemic that people are not going to reflexively trust or do what the government tells them. And in a free-thinking society, no matter what crisis we may be facing, that’s the way it should be.