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Some Covid Links

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How can anyone read this short report from Charles Oliver and not conclude that hysteria over Covid has unleashed frightening, dehumanizing tyranny? [2]

The government of New South Wales, Australia, is giving children isolated because of COVID-19 restrictions a small amount of relief. Children will be allowed to form “friend bubbles” with two other children. Those children will be allowed to visit each other [3] in their homes. But only if they all live within 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) of each other, live in the same local government area, and all adults in their homes are vaccinated against COVID-19. Once inside a friend bubble, children won’t be allowed to switch to another.

And here’s further evidence of the reality of Covid tyranny in Australia [4].

But at least some Australians in high places are refusing to join the goose-steeping ranks of Covid tyrants [5].

David Rivkin and Robert Alt, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explain that Biden’s vaccine mandate is lawless [6]. A slice:

All this suggests that the administration’s statutory reliance on workplace safety is pretextual. OSHA was established to ensure workplace safety, not to act as a “work around” for achieving other political or policy objectives. In Department of Commerce v. New York (2019), the Supreme Court struck down an otherwise defensible census regulation because the Trump administration’s grounds for instituting it were pretextual.

Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter [7]:

Fact: Someone sitting in a room filled with COVID-recovered people faces a lower COVID infection risk than someone sitting in a room of fully vaxxed people who have never had COVID.

Lesson: Get the vax esp. if vulnerable, but nix the irrational vaccine mandates & passports.

New York governor Kathy Hochul inadvertently supplied evidence that anti-Covid has become a freakish religious dogma when she announced on Sunday that Covid vaccination is “from God.” Gov. Hochul called on her Brooklyn audience to be her “apostles” in encouraging others to become vaccinated [8].

Michael Tracey on Twitter [9]:

Harvard Business School just shuttered in-person classes due to an allegedly “distressing” surge in “cases” among its overwhelmingly vaccinated student population. Now all students must submit to “surveillance testing” three times a week. The cycle of elite stupidity continues.

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) [10]

Thomas Fazi decries Covid tyranny in Italy [11]. A slice:

How did Italy reach this point? Essentially, the Italian government adopted a textbook frog-in-boiling-water approach. The green pass was announced in mid-July, pretty much out of the blue, despite very few hospitalisations for Covid and a vaccination rate well above the European average. When they first came into force on August 6, they were initially limited to indoor restaurants, museums, cinemas and sports venues. Given that it was the middle of the holiday season, and that most restaurants in the summer offer outdoor seating (no green pass required), the impact of the measure was initially rather limited.

But that soon changed. On September 1, the green pass became mandatory also for medium and long-distance public transport, as well as for all school teachers, staff and university students. And just a week ago came the decision to extend it to all public and private-sector workers — a move that caught almost everyone by surprise.

As the rules became increasingly restrictive, opposition to the green pass started growing as well: thousands of people, who were largely vaccine-hesitant, started taking to the streets [12] in several Italian cities. Some demonstrators even went so far as to compare themselves to holocaust victims by wearing Star of David badges [13], like those worn by Jews in Nazi-era Germany, bearing the words “not vaccinated”.

Such comparisons are ridiculous, but the source of the protesters’ discontent is not. Covid passports — especially when so sweeping in scope — raise serious ethical and political issues. With these changes, we are effectively stripping citizens who haven’t broken any law whatsoever (in Italy, like elsewhere, Covid vaccines are not mandatory) of their basic constitutional rights — the right to work, to study, to move freely. That should give anyone reason to pause and reflect.

Robert Taylor writes that Covid has made Britain “a nation of hysterics. It’s time to get a grip. [14]” A slice:

But what’s happened to us these last 20 months? The pandemic has left us with a collective case of PTSD and an absurd, shared insistence that our lives are under constant mortal threat, leading to a knee-jerk dread that the world’s collapsing. It really isn’t. Or at least wouldn’t if we’d just calm down. It’s all rather un-British and troublesome. If we start running for the hills at something like this, how on earth would we respond to a real crisis?

No serious-minded person is surprised by this finding [15].

From an unsigned editorial in the Telegraph [16]:

New figures from the Office for National Statistics confirm a trend that has alarmed clinicians in recent weeks [17]. The number of excess deaths is far higher than would be expected at this time of the year and the coronavirus is not responsible.

More than 70,000 additional deaths above the five-year average have been recorded in private homes in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic in March last year. Of this number, just 8,423 – or 12 per cent – involved Covid-19. While some people continue to fixate on the rising number of daily Covid cases it is evident that another health crisis is unfolding connected to the lockdowns and the difficulties of accessing care.

(DBx: But remember, comrades: According to the gospel of anti-Covid, the chief purpose in life – a purpose that supersedes all – is avoidance of SARS-CoV-2. The fact that people are dying because of the lockdowns is of little relevance; the important reality is that these people did not die directly of Covid. For this happy outcome we owe perpetual thanks to the Great Covidocracy!)

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