Remember “flattening the curve”? It seems like a lifetime ago that we were told that the only responsible approach to the Wuhan plague was to delay the spread of infections so that our hospitals and ICUs wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Jacinda Ardern even held up a helpful cartoon graphic for we dimwits out in voter-land.
The BFD
Well, somewhere along the way, without any official proclamation, let alone anything representing a democratic debate, that all changed. Now, inexplicably, it’s become “Psychotically counting new cases and never lifting restrictions until after they reach zero” – which is as good as saying, “never”.
It’s almost as if, having got a taste of absolute power, politicians and bureaucrats are determined to cling to their new autocracy with unswerving tenacity.
The only hope they’re dangling in front of a house-arrested citizenry is “We’ll let you out once there’s a vaccine”.
As University of Edinburgh professor Mark Woolhouse has said, that doesn’t even deserve to be dignified as a “strategy”. “That’s a hope not a strategy,” he says.
As if to underscore just what a desperate hope it is, the leading candidate for a vaccine has been set back.
Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nick Coatsworth has played down the news that the frontrunning AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine has been paused, saying it “reinforces” that despite the accelerated nature of vaccine developments safety is at the forefront of everyone’s mind.”
He said it was unclear at this point whether the adverse reaction that sparked the pause was attributable to the vaccine or not, noting it was “standard process”.
And there’s the problem: by “standard process”, it takes on average 10 years to develop a vaccine. The record to date was four years, for a mumps vaccine in the 1960s. 20 years of intensive research has still failed to produce an HIV vaccine.
If the panicked COVID restrictions we’re already labouring under keep up the economic wrecking for four years, let alone 10, the weary survivors will be too busy cannibalising their neighbours to care about a vaccine.
But still an imminently available vaccine is being dangled in front of us by governments plainly keen to keep the populace meekly subdued for as long as possible.
The Australian government announced a deal on Sunday to purchase and manufacture millions of doses of a COVID-19 vaccine using the AstraZeneca technology.
Dr Coatsworth seemed to suggest the government had no advance warning of the pause in the trial[…]
However, he said he was not concerned about the delay, noting that minor complications were common and the government would reap the benefits of having multiple vaccine candidates.
“With the information that I’ve got at the moment I’m not worried,” he said.
At the same time, Coatsworth furiously denounces the merest suggestion that hydroxychloroquine is anything less than a veritable cyanide pill.
While it is only proper that the vaccine trial be halted while adverse reactions are studied, this only highlights the futility and destructiveness of the official responses to the Wuhan virus. While government Pollyannas chirp that a vaccine is totally just around the corner, ordinary people are struggling more with the devastation, economic and psychological, of the pathological bureaucratic tyranny of lockdowns.
If a vaccine is rushed to market some time in the next few months, ordinary people will be completely entitled to be suspicious about its safety. In any case, even a few months may be too late for our teetering economies and collective mental health.
Lockdowns are a strategy for tyrants – and increasingly fractious citizens can ill afford to indulge official delusions about an imminently available vaccine for much longer.
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