I was out chatting to some friends when the news filtered through that we had been handed our latest dose of house arrest. I have been handed this sentence for the crime of living nominally in Auckland even though I can not even see another house from my property. One of my companions commented, “Ooh, the line between medicine and politics has become very blurred, hasn’t it?” Yes, indeed it has.
Strategy and Tactics.
We are told that NZ’s strategy in all this is virus elimination, Zero COVID, if you will. There is your problem right there. Eliminating a viral respiratory illness is impossible. It can’t be done.
Jenner was taking an extra interest in milkmaids two centuries ago. (That’s where we get the word vaccine from, of course – vacca is Latin for cow.) The poster child of human intervention in infectious disease is smallpox, which was declared eradicated by the WHO (moving right along) in 1980. That’s nearly two hundred years after Jenner and his dairy workers. Smallpox is not a respiratory affliction and the eradication program took decades. The idea that COVID can be eradicated in a time frame that allows the country to survive as a viable entity makes the whole Zero COVID strategy even more absurd.
If the strategy is fatally flawed (and it is) then any tactic resulting from it is also dead in the water. Lockdowns don’t work – they are also wrong and cruel. There is no evidence that lockdowns reduce mortality from the virus.
States in the USA that had lax restrictions fared no better or worse than states that went the full Monty. In the UK the drop off in positive PCR results does not fit temporally with the onset of lockdown – and so on. Lockdowns are wrong; they are morally wrong. Corralling the healthy to protect an entire population is an experiment on a global scale. It is an experiment we have been enrolled in without our informed consent.
Masks are another totally unproven non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). Added to which they are totally dehumanising. Between them, lockdowns and masks have turned most of us into a fear infused community where not dying of COVID has become the only reason to exist. Spoiler alert: none of us get out of this life malarky alive.
What is being foisted upon us is not living, it is existing. Living is family, going to work, going to the footy, bumping (literally and figuratively) into someone in the street and being able to talk to them and witness their full range of facial expression – a vital part of interpersonal interaction.
We are being told to exist and not live – just stop it.
However, if lockdown is the strategy and the virus is the tactic, it all starts to make a bit more sense, I’m afraid. I have tried to convince myself that the loony tunes aspects of our lockdowns (supermarkets open, butchers not etc) were a result of government incompetence rather than malfeasance. I am now not so sure. You can go as far down the great reset, Global Economic Forum, Tripartate Commission rabbit hole as far as you like. I prefer to stay where I can still see the sky, as the deeper you go the more scary and depressing it becomes.
I said before Christmas that I was really scared of the mutant virus. I was not (still am not) scared of its medical threat but was really concerned about its political potential. Last night my chickens came home to roost. And I reckon we ain’t seen nothing yet. Mandatory masks are coming to a street near you.
1900 Sunday night as a medical announcement was a nonsense; as a political move, it was perfect.
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