This is really interesting. The dancing nurses never made sense. 

Dancing nurses were never about the morale of healthcare workers or stress relief. They were a test, a sorting mechanism, revealing who would accept the contradictions and who would resist them. These videos on TikTok, which appeared simultaneously across all continents while governments declared medical emergencies, represented something unprecedented in the history of propaganda: the authorities showed that they could make populations accept two mutually exclusive realities at the same time.

What we witnessed was not traditional propaganda aimed at persuasion, but something more akin to what abuse experts recognize as gaslighting on a large scale. The psychological mechanism was elegant in its cruelty: it presented citizens with an apparent contradiction—hospitals that were both overcrowded and empty enough for choreographed routines—and then punished them socially for noticing it. Those who pointed out the inconsistency were labeled “conspiracy theorists,” while those who defended the videos unwittingly became pawns in the operation.

This essay explores how this technique fits into the broader context of psychological warfare described by researchers from Paul Linebarger to Michael Hoffman, from Peter Pomerantsev to Annalee Newitz. It examines how the “revelation of the method“ — which shows the audience the manipulation while remaining powerless to resist it — serves to discourage and fragment resistance.

The dancing-nurses were a test for the distortion of reality. Once populations accepted this initial contradiction, they were prepared for more: masks that worked, except when they didn’t, vaccines that prevented transmission until they stopped preventing it, two weeks to “flatten the curve” that ended up being two years. Each accepted absurdity weakened the public’s ability to trust their own observations.

https://voxday.net/2025/10/27/the-dancing-nurses-of-covid-19/