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Some Covid Links

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, infectious-disease physician Monica Gandhi explains that Covid-19 is becoming endemic – and thus eliminating all of the excuses used so far to upend human existence in the ‘fight’ against it. Here’s her conclusion:

Although SARS-CoV-2 has proved unpredictable, no virus in history has ever continued to evolve to higher pathogenicity. As we learned from HIV, mutations usually incur costs to viral fitness or render the virus weaker. No vaccine-preventable or immunity-inducing infection has ever raged on as a pandemic indefinitely. An endemic virus doesn’t require continuing isolation and other restrictions; defanging SARS-CoV-2 by stripping it of its ability to cause severe disease through immunity will relegate it to the fate of the other four circulating cold-causing coronaviruses. The key to this normalcy is immunity. With a highly transmissible variant driving up immunity in the unvaccinated and bolstering it in the vaccinated, Covid-19 will inevitably make the transition from epidemic to endemic.

Robert Freudenthal, a psychiatrist with Britain’s NHS, decries the damage to mental-health-care services – and to mental health – caused by lockdowns. A slice:

Furthermore, most mental health services, at least in the inpatient setting, have a multidisciplinary model of treatment, with part of the treatment consisting of groups, activities, family work, occupational therapy, and supported trials of periods outside of hospital prior to being discharged.

Yet most of these treatments were removed, and group programmes suspended, during the lockdowns, which placed severe limitations on what mental health treatment could be provided. This meant that psychiatrists and mental health services had to rely more heavily on pharmacology – as the other treatment options were suspended or restricted.

“Masks on planes should be scrapped – but it’s possible they never will be” – so argues Telegraph columnist Annabel Fenwick Elliott. Here’s her conclusion:

David Livermore, Professor of Medical Microbiology at UEA and a member of HART, the Health Advisory & Recovery Team remarks: “I think that the wide use of masks will continue, particularly on aircraft, until the reality of our present situation sinks in more widely; which is that vaccinations are blunting severity but not preventing transmission of the infection, that therefore most of us will catch Covid at some point and that, over a few years, the virus and our immunity will co-evolve to the point where it’s just one more sort of rather nasty common cold.”

He adds, optimistically: “Once that reality does sink in, then the pointlessness of masks will be clear and they’ll be abandoned as the unpleasant items that they are. I, personally, would gravitate to airlines that cease to insist upon them.”

Hear hear. Flying is already riddled with silly rules, despite planes being by far the safest form of public transport. I can’t see any reason why this latest assault on our comfort should persist, though it remains a worry that it might.

Phil Magness on Facebook:

At this point, mask requirements = the externalization of the costs of hypochondria onto other people.

The ranks of Covidocrats continue to feature large numbers of Covid hypocrites.

James Allan, writing from Australia, wonders why self-styled “human rights” advocates were overwhelmingly silent – and even, in many cases, supportive – as governments over the past 18 months violated human rights in unprecedented and calamitous ways.

And then ask yourself where it has been these past 18 months as government in this country (and to be fair in Britain, Canada, the US, but not Sweden) have made more inroads on citizens’ freedoms and civil liberties than at any other time in this country’s history. The retired top judge in Britain, Lord Sumption, has called these Covid lockdowns et al. ‘the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of [Britain]’ – it being at least as bad here, I’d say, if not worse. Lord Sumption made clear that he was referring to the state’s ‘cavalier use of coercive powers’, and the way ‘the British state exercised coercive powers over its citizens on a scale never previously attempted’. Again, I’d say it has been even worse here. Sumption summed it up in terms of ‘the ease with which people could be terrorised [by government and its handmaidens in the public health caste] into surrendering basic freedoms which are fundamental to our existence’. That seems like a pretty fair summary to me.

But notice whom you aren’t hearing pushing back against any of this despotism that’s been imposed in the name of a disease that has at least a 99.7 per cent survival rate (before vaccination) and one where the average age of victims is higher than the country’s life expectancy for both men and women. Who is it you aren’t hearing from?

On Twitter, BristolBlues shares a video that vividly reveals the nauseating hypocrisy and terrible cruelty of Australia’s Covidocracy. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Mikko Packalen on Twitter (referencing this item):

Stanford students on bicycles: 41% masked, 17% wear a helmet.

“There is an ironic logic to their decision: there’s no point in protecting your brain if you don’t plan on using it. At Stanford, nobody expects you to do either.”

Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter:

The long tail of the Canadian lockdown — higher heart disease and colon cancer deaths for years to come.

Some harm can be mitigated with appropriate intervention (end lockdown, speed up cancer screening). But vax mandate-induced staff shortages will increase queues for care.

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