Covid hysteria rises again in Britain…
… and Ross Clark worries that it will never really go away. A slice:
There is zero chance that the Covid picture will be looking any different next week than it does now. Numbers of omicron cases will continue to rise – obviously, because it is out-competing delta and is on its way to constituting virtually 100 per cent of cases. That will generate panicked decision-making. As for evidence from South Africa that omicron cases identified so far appear to be relatively mild, that will be put aside until we have more data. The bad news, in other words, will be amplified with gruesome worst-case scenarios; the good news will be dismissed until a later date.
If we are going to do lockdown again this year, when most of us are fully jabbed, there is little reason to think that it will become anything other than a perennial fixture on the calendar. We have become prisoners of NHS ICU capacity. Even before Covid, the NHS complained of being close to bursting point every winter. Add in a novel, endemic virus and it will tip the whole system into overload every year without fail.
Take the proposed policy of reimposing a requirement to work at home. We now know that while this brought benefits for many it also brought significant costs. In particular it led to an increase in domestic violence and abuse directed at vulnerable individuals, as well as putting much greater stress on already vulnerable households and relationships.
A recent survey showed that 11 per cent of those working from home experienced domestic abuse as compared to 1 per cent of those continuing to work outside the home. This is a serious human cost which will be long-lasting or even permanent.
The harm done to the social and educational development of younger children is also now well established. Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, raised her concerns about the psychological stress and damage that social isolation and disrupted education was causing younger children, especially the most vulnerable. This, again, is something that will have persistent effects for many years.
I’m honored to have been interviewed by Jan Jekielek. (The interview took place on November 13th in Hartford, just before the Brownstone Institute’s inaugural event.)
But isn’t it wonderful that these children are suffering from something other than Covid-19?! And isn’t it also wonderful that what killed these adults was something other than Covid-19?! And wonderful, too, surely, is the fact that what will prematurely kill so many Brits over the next few years is something other than Covid-19!
Also decrying Covidocratic abuse of children is Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman. A slice:
Since the start of the pandemic, some media folk have continued to insist on making obscene comparisons between the number of Americans who have died with Covid and the number of Americans killed in various wars, as if it’s irrelevant whether one dies at age 80 or age 18. But there is one way in which Covid really is similar to combat. In both cases, aging policy makers demand disproportionate sacrifices from the young.
Fortunately children age 0 to 17 in the U.S. are always at comparatively low risk of death relative to their elders. When children have died in 2020 and 2021, the website of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in 99% of cases the kids have died from something other than Covid.
But that doesn’t mean they haven’t suffered greatly from Covid and the political reaction to it. Our masked and restricted generation of youngsters is hurting, as U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy acknowledges in a new report.
Covidocrats’ hypocrisy continues.
David McGrogan ponders the meaning of Covidocratic hypocrisy. A slice:
The truth of the matter is that, for all the flouting of their own restrictions by the ruling classes, the general public seem incapable of doing the mental arithmetic. They never seem to make the inductive leap: Boris Johnson and his cronies have all of the data, have all the latest updates from their team of crack scientists and medics, and they clearly do not think that Covid is much of a personal risk. It is starkly, uncompromisingly revealed by their actions. They aren’t worried about having Christmas parties. They aren’t worried about ‘super-spreader events’. They aren’t worried about killing their grandmothers.
The natural question that should follow is: so why should we worry? And yet nobody is prepared to ask this question: not the general public, nor the media, nor parliamentarians, nor pundits. The truth of the matter is that while people enjoy being outraged about Tory sleaze, they simply aren’t very concerned about the wider implications. They will grumble and grouse, but they will continue to wear their masks, continue to cancel Christmas parties, loyally display their vaccine passports when the requirement inevitably comes, and work from home when told.
Also writing on the Covidocrats’ hypocrisy is Spiked‘s Fraser Myers. A slice:
Should it surprise us that top government aides broke the Covid rules? Not especially. It is, after all, only the latest in a long line of scandals over Covid rule-breaches. Politicians, scientists and advisers the world over have repeatedly been caught flouting the very rules they helped draw up or enforce, ever since the first lockdowns in spring 2020.
In truth, our leaders have only ever performed adherence to the rules. They like to be photographed and filmed in their masks at a social distance, at stage-managed press conferences and photo-ops. But they are constantly being caught looking relaxed, unmasked and normal when they think the camera is not looking.
But while the Covid rituals are just for display for many at the top, ordinary people have been hit with the punishing fist of the state for breaches of the rules. A day before Downing Street’s Christmas party, police broke up a wedding of 40 or so people in Barking. The Met Police are currently prosecuting a gathering in Ilford held on the exact same day as the Downing Street bash. The fine for larger gatherings was, at this point, a life-ruining £10,000.
The hypocrisy isn’t the main issue here. It’s that the very basis of much of these rules is a contempt for the public. Apparently ordinary people cannot be trusted to use their own judgment. They cannot be given public-health advice. They must be ordered, under criminal penalty, to do as the government says. It never seemed to matter much that public compliance was consistently far higher than the government had ever expected. The guiding assumption throughout the pandemic has been that without government coercion, people would never resist the temptation to infect each other.
Nathan Edmondson casts light on the hidden victims of the South African travel shutdown. A slice:
The lightning-fast global travel restriction proceeding from the news of the Omicron variant has cast a pallor here and desperation is in many voices. After a year of loss of income, increased crime and destruction of communities, businesses and families in South Africa and surrounding countries were just getting back on their feet. The welfare afforded Americans and other first-world citizens when their livelihood was cut off is not an option here; there is no money to pay out, no bailouts for restaurants and “non-essential” businesses.
“We are punished for being first of the third world,” another friend tells me here. “We have provided research for pandemics around Africa for decades. We’re very good at this, and we identify this new variant and they shut us down for it.” You might think that next time, they simply won’t share the discovery with the world.
Laura Perrins calls for a defeat of “the vaccine passport psychos.” A slice:
Let us be very clear. Vaccine passports, whether in a limited form or a wider scale, have nothing to do with protecting public health. Ireland ran a vaccine passport scheme for nightclubs, and they have just closed the venues down. In many countries on the continent they are running very widespread vaccine passport schemes and their infection rate is higher than in the UK. What’s more, having a vaccine does not stop you from getting Covid, and it doesn’t stop you from spreading Covid, as the Prime Minister himself has said. So there is little to be gained from vaccine passports.
There is however a lot to be lost: they would be costly and difficult for businesses and venues to implement, and morally they are discriminatory for those who do not have the vaccine and oppressive for those who have been vaccinated. They must ‘show their papers’ to access venues. This measure should be opposed by all right-thinking people, both those who are unvaccinated and those who are.
Michael Fumemto has had enough. Here’s his conclusion:
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that a lot of people have gained a lot from a perpetual pandemic and therefore want it to continue. No. It’s time for this to end. We need to give this variant a new Greek alphabet name: Omega. As in “The last.”
Newman Nahas tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Passing off the canceling of society and sacrifice of children as the “cautious” thing to do has to be one the most monstrous frauds perpetrated in all of history.
