Yes. The Democrats have known for decades that they can control the general populace with fear.
Fear gets people to take the vaccines and fear gets them to wear the mask.
Fear allows them to close and restrict businesses.
I have noticed that people in my area have been habituated to go to Walmart during the Lock Down. So many other stores were made unavailable during the lock downs and did not have the products people wanted in quantities like Walmart. Now things are closer to normal, yet Walmart’s parking lot is packed and the smaller retailers lots are empty. It wasn’t that way before COVID.
It seems to me that COVID and the Lock Downs are being used to crush small and medium sized businesses. The restrictions on Ivermectin and HCQ to push the Vaccines. Yes fear is a tactic but control, power and profit is the purpose it serves.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
— H. L. Mencken