We are now in full-on witch-hunt territory. Sikora, Gupta, Carl Heneghan, also of Oxford, and others are now routinely demonised. They must be silenced, the illiberal fanatics cry. The witch-hunters have helped to unleash hysterical abuse against sceptics. Gupta says she regularly receives emails calling her evil and dangerous. She has even wondered: ‘Would I have been treated like this if I were a white man?’ Of course, identitarians who normally stand up for women from ethnic minorities who are being trolled and harassed have nothing whatsoever to say about the war of words against Gupta, because to them she is scum. Well, she’s critical of the lockdown, so she must be, right?
Phil Magness maps 2020’s disingenuous Faucisms:
Also from Phil Magness is this set of facts topped off by a germane question:
The year 2020 demonstrated very clearly, unfortunately, the embeddedness of political paternalism in American society, in terms of both the arrogant presumption of those in government to impose nearly a comprehensive restrictive command and control system over the country, and the willingness of so many Americans to passively and obediently follow those in power down a road to economic disruption and destruction as long as politicians and government “experts” chanted the phrase “follow the science.”
The “science” has been found to be faulty and full of exaggerations and factual errors that have ruined the livelihoods and everyday lives of tens of millions of people. Shunted aside were any notions of “costs,” or “trade-offs” in the economic sense and meaning of these things. In the 20th century’s central planning tradition, a one-size-fits-all response was imposed on people, and with all the usual irrationality and arbitrariness seen in the actual centrally planned societies of the last century.
Many concerns have also been raised about the death count, with various public health authorities admitting to counting deaths as COVID when they’re not actually a result of COVID. For example, Ontario (Canada) public health clearly states that deaths will be marked as COVID deaths whether or not it’s clear if COVID was the cause or contributed to the death. This means that those who did not die as a result of COVID are included in the death count. You can read more about that and see many more examples, here.
Even so, they hesitated. As Ferguson says: ‘It’s a Communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.’
Aren’t those words ‘we couldn’t get away with it’ interesting? Is this the way in which public servants in a free country think of the normal limits on what they can do? I can only hope not.
But Ferguson and his friends then saw what happened in Italy, where a formerly free country reached for the weapons of repression and mass house arrest. And the rule of fear was so great that they got away with it. So we were next. Or, as Ferguson puts it: ‘And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’
They could. But they did not have to. They chose the Chinese way. And so they ‘got away with’ beginning a disaster which still continues. There is still no evidence that any of this Chinese-inspired repression has worked.
