The Experts' "Zero Covid" Plan Was a Total Failure - " In America, the “experts” frequently spoke out in favor of zero covid, stating that lockdowns could eradicate the disease and that people would have to stay on lockdown until that time. For example, on April 2, 2020, Anthony Fauci endorsed this idea, stating that social distancing requirements could not be relaxed until there were “essentially no new cases, no deaths for a period of time.” Hawaii explicitly embraced zero covid and adopted a policy in 2020 based on the idea that public schools would never reopen until there was no longer any “community spread“ and “no new cases” were detected over a period of four weeks. Needless to say, those were totally unrealistic goals. They reflected only the plans of technocrats who were more concerned with living out their bizarre fetishes for lockdowns and border closures than with gaining a better grasp of the situation or with respecting basic human rights... In other words, the “experts” in America wanted to recreate Chinese despotism in America. They adopted a lockdown policy that had already long been rejected. Lockdowns were already expected to bring long-term side effects, such as surges in mental health problems—some of the worst of it among the young—now being reported by hospitals. The World Health Organization even concluded that lockdowns ought to be rejected because “there is no obvious rationale for this measure.” But perhaps the media and government officials were so successful at sowing panic in the general population in the spring of 2020 that the health technocrats saw their chance to try a new experiment in social engineering that they had previously considered unfeasible. Fortunately, though, by the middle of 2020, it became clear that lockdowns simply weren’t going to be tolerated by much of the general public. Most state and local governments in the US abandoned zero covid rapidly, although the usual totalitarians in the media bemoaned the end of the policy, insisting that the abandonment of lockdowns would drench the nonlockdown jurisdictions in blood. This was predicted for US states like Georgia and for countries like Sweden—where lockdowns were quickly jettisoned or not imposed at all. As time went on, it became obvious that the nonlockdown jurisdictions did not fare significantly worse than the locked-down ones. Some areas—Sweden, for instance—fared better. Some of the world’s harshest lockdown regimes—such as those in Peru, Argentina, the UK, and New York—also had some of the worst rates of deaths per million. For the zero covid crowd, reality got in the way. The zero covid mentality endures, however. The second wave of the zero covid mentality came with the idea that with universal vaccination covid would disappear. And, of course, once vaccines began to appear, it was hailed as a magic bullet that would ensure that the vaccinated would be unable to spread the disease. This ideology was expressed in a rant by Rachel Maddow, who back in March 2020 harangued her viewers with the “fact” that the “virus stops with every vaccinated person.“ She continued: “A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.“ This was all a complete fabrication... The only argument left to supporters of the vaccine mandate is that vaccines help against serious disease and death. That’s excellent, but it has nothing to do with public health because it’s clear the unvaccinated aren’t the reason the disease has not been eradicated... The politically correct version of the narrative also completely denies that the failure of vaccines to prevent the spread is even a significant factor in the spread of new mutations. The purveyors of the narrative still insist that only the unvaccinated have any responsibility in the continued existence of the disease... given his criteria, we should expect places with at least 70 percent vaccination rates to have halted the spread of disease, right? Not surprisingly, this has not happened. In Portugal, for instance, the fully vaccinated rate is at 90 percent. In Chile, it’s at 87 percent. It’s 75 percent in France. So, surely, the spread of covid has been stopped in all these places? The answer is no. New cases are raging in Portugal, Chile, and France, with all these countries hitting new highs in recent days."
From 2022
Slow the Spread? Speeding It May Be Safer - WSJ - "Policies designed to slow the spread of Omicron may end up creating a supervariant that is more infectious, more virulent and more resistant to vaccines. That would be a man-made disaster. To minimize that risk, policy makers must tolerate the rapid spread of milder variants. This will require difficult trade-offs, but it will save lives in the long run. We should end mask mandates and social distancing in most settings not because they don’t slow the spread—the usual argument against such measures—but because they probably do... social distancing and masking increase the risk of vaccine-resistant strains from antigenic shift by minimizing opportunities for the vaccinated and naturally immune to tailor their immune responses through periodic exposures to incrementally “drifted” variants. This is a familiar notion in virology. Take the rise of severe shingles cases over the past decade, partly a result of the widespread use of the chickenpox vaccine. Shingles and chickenpox are caused by the same virus. Before widespread use of the chickenpox vaccine, parents regularly updated their own immunity by getting exposed to chickenpox from their children, or from other adults who were exposed by children. But now that most children are vaccinated against chickenpox and don’t contract it, older adults suffer from more severe cases of shingles... Significant antigenic shifts may create new strains that are increasingly difficult to target with vaccines at all. There are no vaccines for many viruses, despite decades of effort to develop them. Will relaxing restrictions come at the cost of more hospitalizations and deaths as the next variant starts to spread? Perhaps, but it would reduce the risk of a worst-case scenario and greater loss of life in the long run."
From 2022
The Silent, Vaccinated, Impatient Majority - The Atlantic - "what looked like a risky move for Macron could prove to be a more politically shrewd calculation, not because of whom it alienates, but rather because of whom it doesn’t. In France, and in other democratic countries around the world, the unvaccinated make up a relatively small segment of the population. Macron and his peers in countries such as Australia and Italy have calculated that condemning this group could be more politically effective than pandering to it."
Yet another admission that vaccine mandates were political rather than about public health. And the left for once stopped quoting Martin Niemöller (notably, being a socialist, trade unionist and Jew [religion wise] are all within one's control)
The COVID-Risk Social Contract Is Under Negotiation - The Atlantic - "Some who won’t accept the vaccines or wear masks say they are simply asserting their rights over their own body. Morally, it’s more like choosing not to have routine safety maintenance done on your car. Refusing to wear a mask is less a matter of exercising a personal liberty than comparable to driving at 60 mph in a 40 mph zone. The point is that though it may be up to you what risks you run for yourself, it is not purely up to you what risks you impose on others. That has to be a matter of the social contract. We can no more accept personal choice about infectious-disease control than we can over speeding limits... Ultimately, few have the training and understanding to know what counts as a serious examination of evidence under conditions of patchy knowledge. The rest of us engage in confirmation bias, seeking out what we regard as the most credible voices that have defended what we are already disposed to believe."
From 2022. This aged very poorly
Dharma Sadasivan | Facebook - "I read with some interest "A Sudden Coronavirus Surge Brought Out Singapore’s Dark Side" by Megan K. Stack, published in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/.../singapore-coronavirus.html), as well as the response "How the New York Times’ put a racist spin on Singapore’s COVID-19 efforts" by Ivan Hong (https://medium.com/.../how-the-new-york-times-put-a...)... She reaches her conclusion on the axiom that a lack of individual freedoms is always, and under all circumstances, bad. This is wrong. A lack of individual freedoms is bad under many circumstances. But under *these* circumstances, where an effective large-scale, country-wide response is required to save lives and curtail the spread of a highly infectious pandemic, subordinating individual freedoms to protect the community is good because it saves lives and keeps people safe. You could put it down to the Confucian perspective of "society over individual" - a cultural notion that many East Asian countries like to cite to distinguish themselves from "the West", but there is also Western precedent for this. In times of emergency, the Roman Republic could suspend the Senate and appoint a dictator (without the negative connotations we now associate with the term) to resolve it. In respect of his "causa", the dictator's powers were almost absolute. Suspension of rights for the common good has historical precedent in both Western and Eastern cultures. Both recognize that sometimes, in unique circumstances, individual rights must be subordinated to the state to protect the community. So while individual liberties are good, the trade-off is that it makes it much more difficult to have a unified and collective response to an emergency. The US under Trump during COVID-19 is all the proof you need of this... Most Americans cannot imagine a world in which citizens would readily cede individual rights to the government, even if it is for communal good, because they have little reason to trust their government, and little faith in its efficacy. Meanwhile, most Singaporeans cannot imagine a world in which citizens wouldn't cede individual rights to the government in order to protect the community and save lives, because communal action is the obvious commonsense solution and we have little reason to distrust our government."
In retrospect this is ironic, given the overreaction to covid
Exclusive: Nearly half of Canadians think government spent too much battling the pandemic - The Hub - "Nearly half of Canadians fear the government spent more money than was necessary to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, according to exclusive polling conducted for The Hub by Public Square Research and Maru/Blue. Even among Canadians who think the spending was necessary, there is still concern about the country’s finances. Seventy-three percent of Canadians are worried about the levels of debt being piled up by the federal government as it fights the pandemic... In 2015, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau surprised everyone, including the competing parties, when he kicked off his campaign with promise not to balance the budget. Since then, Trudeau’s fiscal targets moved from a plan to eventually balance the budget to a goal of keeping the debt-to-GDP ratio steady."
From 2021 too. But before pre-Covid, Trudeau was already spending money on nonsense like a drunken sailor
‘The government is instilling fear in the public’ - "Lord Sumption: It’s certainly ironic that the vaccine has encouraged them to restrict freedom for longer, because they can say the end is in sight and we must hold on until we get there. They could never get away with saying the end is not in sight and we must therefore hold on indefinitely. What we have got at the moment is a desire to instil fear in people, notwithstanding the fact that the vaccine should be one of the greatest antidotes to fear. Sensible people should make their own judgments about the matter rather than listening to government representatives.
O’Neill: You have argued that it’s important to understand lockdown as a product of political decision-making. Politicians have said they are following the evidence and listening to the scientists. They have essentially outsourced decisions about the future of the nation to experts – who none of us ever voted for. This tendency to see lockdown as a product of scientific wisdom rather than political decision-making actually takes away from the reality of what we are living through. Decisions have been made on people’s behalf about the level of risk they should be able to put up with, the freedoms they should enjoy and the kinds of comforts they are allowed. Do you think it’s important to reiterate the political nature of what’s currently happening?
Sumption: The science on lockdowns is not monolithic. There are many scientists who disagree strongly with what has been happening. But this isn’t just a scientific question. It’s an economic question. It’s an educational question. It’s a moral question. You have to ask whether it is worth wrecking our economy, our children’s education and our social fabric in order to prevent deaths. That is a fundamentally political issue. Scientists can tell us that they think that the consequences of this or that policy will be X number of deaths, Y number of infections, Z number of hospitalisations. But they can’t say that we ought to have a lockdown – unless they are prepared to devote an equal amount of study to the collateral consequences of it. Many scientists have respected the limits of their functions. But take Neil Ferguson. I don’t know what he has done to study the educational, social and economic consequences of the course which he has advocated. But if he has not taken these things into account, he is frankly not worth listening to. Nor is anyone who is not prepared to study the problem as a whole.
O’Neill: Could this abdication of political decision-making and this use of science as a substitute form of authority have a long-term impact on how we understand the problems facing society? For example, look at climate change...
Sumption: Science tends to become a slogan for those who are making a case... In the context of climate change, people who say we must act instantly instead of over a period of time are essentially ignoring the social costs of acting instantly. We can achieve a great deal by taking action now – if we are prepared to pay a staggering economic and social price. On the whole, governments have taken the view that people are not willing to pay that price for an accelerated route to something that will probably happen in due course anyway. That is a sensible balancing of risks.
O’Neill: There is also a crossover between Covid and climate change when it comes to the difficulty of venturing a dissenting opinion...
Sumption: It’s not been a total clampdown, but there has clearly been a serious reduction in the space for debate. I get many, many emails, some of them from people in senior positions in politics and the health service, who say that they agree entirely with what I’m saying, but they don’t dare say it themselves. I hear from hospital registrars and consultants, pointing out things that are happening in their hospitals, about the misclassification of deaths or the long-term effects of lockdown on cancer diagnoses and other illnesses. I’m in a very privileged position. I have a platform because of my past status and career. I’m retired and I’m not beholden to anybody. I don’t need to worry about how many people disapprove of me. But if you have got a job, particularly if it’s a job in the public sector or in a business providing services to the public sector, you don’t dare speak out."
From 2021
We must never surrender to the New Normal - "In the first lockdown there was always a buzz, building after a while to a palpable sense of national expectancy, about a return to normality. Remember the cheers and memes when we found out the date pubs would reopen? Lockdown was seen as a temporary measure, and more importantly an unusual measure. Aside from a few comfortably off green types who loved the lack of airplanes and the disappearance of greedy shoppers, and some millennial socialists who fantasised that having the government pay everyone’s wages was akin to revolution, most people viewed lockdown as a thing that would end, not a way of life. The baleful impact of lockdown was partially alleviated by a shared desire for a return to the crowded, shoulder-rubbing, maskless days of old. Never had the word ‘normal’ seemed so thrilling. ‘Back to normal’ was the moral glue of a necessarily atomised people. Now, perhaps most tragically of all, that seems to have disappeared, too. Of course many people still crave a return to normality. But in the public sphere of commentary and politics, talk of opening up, of planning for the thrusting of society back into normalcy, is actively discouraged and even frowned upon. There can be no going back, some say. Ask the government for a timeframe for the restoration of normality and you’ll be branded a ‘Covid denier’ who wants to rush things to a potentially catastrophic degree. ‘We are not at the beginning of the end of this pandemic’, says Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis, ‘we’re just at the end of the beginning’. The ‘dream of going back to normal’ is a ‘huge distraction’, says a writer for the Guardian... In the first lockdown, the dream of normality was what kept people going; it was actively encouraged by some politicians and even some in the doom-laden media. This time, dreams of normality are treated as ‘dysfunction’, as a species of ‘denial’. What makes this concerted erasure of expectancy even more striking is that we are in the middle of the most impressive rollout of vaccination in human history... much commentary has turned against the aspiration to normality, against the dream of restored liberty. This illustrates the key argument spiked has been making since the very beginning of the Covid crisis. Namely, that the impact of this coronavirus on society, on our way of life and our view of the future, would be determined not only by the undoubted virulence and destructiveness of the virus itself, but also by the moral and intellectual health of society. There would be an interplay, we argued, and a potentially dangerous one, between this highly transmissible virus and the pre-existing cultures of fear and apocalypticism. The virus, we predicted, would not only activate but also exacerbate the late 20th-century, early 21st-century manmade culture of dread that views humanity as vulnerable and which treats every crisis that comes our way – from the manageable, like our slowly changing climate, to the very serious, like Covid-19 – as an apocalypse. What we are witnessing now in this new lockdown is a clearer, more frank assertion of these cultural morbidities, of these lingering fin de siècle forces. The current accommodation to lockdown, the creeping institutionalisation of lockdown as itself ‘normal’, speaks to a winning-out of the apocalyptic mindset, of the deeply ingrained view of humankind as constantly under threat from forces it can ill-control, and which it probably unleashed itself via its destructive globalised forms of production and organisation. With the growing prospect of Covid-19 dissipating, or at least being rendered seasonal and manageable by the intervention of human science, we can see more clearly the true force that informed the lockdown mentality and underpinned much of the fretful social discussions and interventions of the past year – not Covid (or rather, not Covid alone), but the culture of fear."
Learned helplessness from 2021
Down with the New Normal - "Their new normal — for this new era is entirely an invention of the out-of-touch expert class, not of democratic debate — sounds awful. Some seem determined to cultivate a world in which social atomisation is not defeated, but institutionalised. In which we will enter the social sphere not as citizens keen to engage with one another, but as vectors of disease, as possessors of dirty hands and virus-spreading breath, who must be kept apart. In which we will be actively encouraged to view others as a threat. That hug could be lethal; that lingering conversation could be a killer; that handshake was too wet and disgusting — scrub your hands immediately. The expert class is giving licence to anti-social, anti-human behaviour."
From 2020
Political correctness was never about good manners - "There lies a lesson for our current qualms over coronavirus. We’re all going to die one day. We can’t put it off forever. We will never vanquish the virus, just as we will never beat death."
Gulags Are for Artists Like Me - "I posted a snap from a friend and photographer at the Age newspaper. The controversial pic was of an elderly woman of Greek heritage in her 80s looking on to the militarised police response unfolding at Northcote Plaza in Melbourne’s inner north. I stated the facts as I understood them on a social media platform. Within a short time, I was inundated with a flood of opinions. I received multiple messages reprimanding me as a formal artist who should know better and “STOP it!” Someone even inboxed me that “artists like me should be sent to the Gulags!” But wait. Isn’t this the definitive role of the arts? Artists pursue their preferred medium from the various branches of creativity to express their ideas. As an artist, I was trained to question realities and view them through this lens to illustrate my opinion of the world. In the early 1990s, when I studied conducting in Eastern Europe, I met conductors who told me their experiences of artistic censorship. These musical giants of this era I studied under were in the winter of their lives of “conductor suppression.” I had never heard of this term which was used during the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc to ensure that orchestral conductors did not conduct with too much emotion for fear of provoking passion in the audience who may be incited to riot. The consequence which could result in being sent to forced labour camps known as Gulags... The Gulags were a system of Soviet labour camps, detention, transit camps and prisons that from 1918 until 1960 housed the political prisoners and criminals of the Soviet Union. This punishment wasn’t limited to conductors but included composers, novelists, intellectuals, visual artists and anyone that was considered a threat to Stalin’s political establishment. Artists have throughout the ages been subject to torture and forced labour... Journalists are not excluded from the arts. Those who abide by the principles of ethical journalism deliver daily narratives provided for us to interpret and question the unfolding events across the lands. Journalists serve as motivation or incentive for actors and civil society organisations. According to UNESCO, between 2006 and 2020, more than 1,200 journalists were killed for doing just that. For following their calling and being journalists. Nine out of 10 of these killings remain unsolved. There has been a disturbing trend in Australia, accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, that is, the erosion of many of the foundations of our democratic values with its checks and balances in a deliberate attempt by both Federal and State governments to block free press and impede informed and diverse debate. There have been concerted efforts to reduce transparency and limit public accountability so that governments can increase their power. This has led to arrests and responses which are disproportionate to the threats posed. The apparent fear instilled in many and the blind allegiance towards our government has led me to a determined investigation. Particularly, I ask why so many progressives are not questioning these tactics. Is it not a burden on their conscience? Could the rise of identity politics during the past two decades have diminished our empathy and compassion? Have we forgotten the raids on ABC journalists in Australia and the persecution of independent journalists by our allies? I personally know of mainstream journalists who have been threatened over the past few weeks for daring to cover police brutality towards innocent civilians. Even environmental activists, whistle blowers, and many ordinary citizens have are afraid of reprisals being made against them. Then we have the swathe of anti-protest laws which have been in motion from well before the pandemic. The excessive force we’ve witnessed against protestors is only the beginning of what is to come. As we move through to the other side of this pandemic we need to ensure that the right to assembly is restored to every citizen and on any view whether it’s Black Lives Matter, anti-lockdown, anti-green pass protests, and so on. Civil societies must be given this freedom to effectively advocate for human rights. This fundamental right needs to be granted to all people including vulnerable groups. Has anyone asked themselves why such overarching powers have been given to certain agencies? The Draconian measures we are experiencing essentially advance the interests and provide preferential treatment to big business with no regard for small to medium businesses. The role that journalists must play to uphold our democratic values is integral to democracy and social cohesion. Journalists hold governments and their agencies to account. This position is being compromised as our societies become more corporatised and our governments continue to advance large business interests through back door and offshore deals. A pillar to creating thriving democracies and peaceful societies is to ensure free speech, the free flow of information, and that journalists be given the opportunity to provide us with real news so we can make informed decisions... We all have a role to speak out at injustice and to preserve the rights of artists to illustrate the world as they see it."
From 2021
Meme - "TELL ME YOU'RE IN A CULT WITHOUT TELLING ME YOU'RE IN A CULT *woman in mask and vaccine bottle earrings*"
