It could be the most diabolical disclosure ever made. The lives of billions were wrecked for nothing.

Public health experts have conceded that COVID may be a permanent part of our lives. A pandemic has become endemic. They locked us up, to give the virus nowhere to spread – something never tried before.

We expected to get back our lives before too long. It didn’t work out that way. The freedoms of movement and association and revealing the face – all fundaments of civilization – have not been fully returned, unless you live in some select part like the State of Texas or Florida or, who knows, in Timbuktu. We must now learn to live with a mutating virus for as long as we live. Many of the professors who experimented with protocols, who made a prison yard of the globe, have said it.  

Yet these lords of lockdown are not contrite. Saying 'sorry' is not in their vocabulary. Collateral damage is not the remit of virologists or epidemiologists or public health officials. Of politicians, we don’t even speak, because a politician who stoops to apologize has ‘lost it.’

All the devastation, paralysis, and permanent harm to the fabric of society haven’t tickled one conscience. Indeed the experts take comfort in believing that the experimental protocols gave valuable pointers for handling pandemics down the line. They tested the new protocols on human guinea pigs.

Heed for example South African Professor of virology, Barry Schoub, who effectively said here that eradication of the virus isn’t a realistic probability, and containment would appear to be the most realistic vision for the future.

‘Containment.’ By means of? Schoub is cagey about when he and his COVID councilors and policymakers might leave the stage and allow the hoi polloi to get on with their lives. He omits bad omens about that when he scapegoats the virus for devastating the world. Of course he’d do that, working alongside the most corrupt politicians on earth. A pandemic of mental illness, they’d have you believe, had nothing to do with their try-out interventions. It was the virus. People caught it and lost their minds.    

The 19th-century pundit Dorothy Thompson could have warned us. 

“When liberty is taken away by force, it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished by default it can never be recovered.”

The ‘no regrets’ of COVID czars are more unforgivable because they turned a blind eye to the obvious catastrophe. Laymen like me saw the peril from the word go, yet the experts could not? A medical journal published a comparative study of how different pandemics were handled in different ages. The experts had only to learn lessons from it. 

The big one, if not the difference accounting for the socio-economic meltdown, is the new role of unelected health officers.

In previous pandemics, there were no mandated closures: Not of schools, not of business, not of border posts. The reaction to COVID-19 was quite distinct from the ‘leave it be’ approach in 1968, 1957, or even to some extent 1918. There was no praying to get back to normal because there was never a departure from it.

As a threat to public health, COVID is closer to the 1968 Hong Kong flu or the 1957 Asian flu, never mind the 1918 Spanish flu. According to data from the CDC and elsewhere, an American younger than 40 in 1918 was more than 100 times as likely to die of the Spanish flu than an American younger than 40 in 2020 was to die of COVID-19.

In the Wall Street Journal, the Hoover Institution’s Niall Ferguson quotes someone’s recollection of pandemics in the 1900s.

“There was nothing unusual about finding yourself threatened by contagious disease. Mumps, measles, chicken pox, and German measles swept through entire schools and towns; I had all four…. We took the Asian flu in our stride.”

So governments allowed the people to live with, and through, pandemics. Is it not exactly what the experts now concede: we must be prepared to live with COVID! Israel’s health minister was clear about it; COVID is here to stay. The government there is taking steps to allow us to live our daily lives with coronavirus in the background. So tell the 580 million (the UN’s higher number of desperately poor people from the time lockdowns began): O.K., feel free to get back the lives you lost for an experiment that failed.   

Socrates the Greek knew what he was about. In Plato’s Republic, he didn’t want doctors to rule. Philosophers or poets would better govern society. They at least tried to understand politics and society. They also ministered to the human soul. How different from doctors, concerned with the physical body. And Greek philosophers celebrated courage in the face of death. Fear of the grave did not deter Plato’s Socrates and Homer’s Achilles from their noble missions. Today’s officials and experts are wimps promoting risk-aversion behaviour. They’ve turned fear and hypochondria and cowardice into noble virtues.

They also corrupted science. If science wasn’t already subservient to politics pre-COVID, it certainly is now. The same crowd claims the high ground: ‘We follow the science.’ The ‘Neanderthals’ who follow their human rights, electing not to get jabbed, are ‘anti-science.’

About this divide, we must observe some particularities. First, it is more a political divide than a medical one. The righteous ‘followers of science’ tend to be progressives while the ‘Neanderthals’ are liberal and conservative. The vaccination debate reeks with politics. In a debate, candidate Kamala Harris swore never to be jabbed with any vaccine that was associated with President Trump. If that one statement did not make for vaccine skepticism, nothing did.

Pouring fuel on this fire, a political card was played by Pfizer. After promising news of a breakthrough in late October, Pfizer fell silent on the eve of the Presidential election, The announcement came after the Nov. 3 election.

Incoming Joe Biden put his own political stamp on the vaccine issue. He lied on CNN that no one had been vaccinated before he entered the White House. In point of fact Biden had been vaccinated, live on TV, back in December. Not only that; the Biden crowd abused COVID protocols to rig the voting system.  

So vaccines were merely the last of other remedies reducing medical science to political gamesmanship. The day after the CDC endorsed mask-wearing, President Trump announced, “I won’t be doing it personally.” From that moment, the mask became a symbol of civic virtue; as a journalist put it, ‘a sort of Black Lives Matter flag that could be hung from one’s face. For many it conveyed a tripod of virtues: I’m unselfish; I’m pro-science; I’m anti-Trump.’

Fools step in where angels fear to tread. Fool medical scientists have been as oversupplied as the different vaccinations. They pressed those who already had the anti-bodies from catching COVID to get jabbed. That was because they were not sure how long natural immunity would last. Well, what about vaccine immunity: how long does that last? This too hadn’t been proved.

But the mixed-up messaging got worse. Anyone who chose not to be vaccinated was derided as a Trump supporter, a deplorable, a white resistor, etc. When the Delta variant led to a new surge of infections, even among the vaccinated, who got the stick? The unvaxxed. They were ‘super-spreaders, “as if the over 100 million adults still not fully vaccinated were red-state rubes who packed honky-tonk bars and motorcycle rallies.” in the phrasing of essayist Victor Davis Hanson. “Yet the reality was quite different.”

What was the reality? Two million illegal aliens will, courtesy of Joe Biden, will cross the southern border.  They’ll have legal impunity, but not vaccinated immunity. They won’t even be tested for COVID. A recent breakout of infections, among the vaccinated, in Princetown, Massachusetts, wasn’t due to alt-right Neanderthals. The super-spreader event was the annual gay pride celebration where thousands swarmed clubs, bars, restaurants, and hotels.

To fall back on expert advice is to assume that public health is clean. It isn’t. Public health is burdened with platforms and agendas, with party and personal power plays.

Experts got the world into the mess it’s in. Now they’ve got their sights on mandatory vaccination. If they get their way a passport will divide people into first class and second class citizens. The one group will be allowed the rights which, by all the laws of God and man, they were born with. The second-class people will have the rights endowed on them confiscated.

Now here’s the thing. The same crowd who want to jab you against your will, insists on a woman’s right to abortion. It’s her body, they assert (Actually being the fetus’s body, they are not following the science). Your body, however, they are prepared to violate with jabs.

The bad don’t always slouch around in dark clothes and have tattoos. As often as not they wear white coats, and have ‘professor’ on their business cards.    

Steve Apfel is an economist and costing specialist, but most of all a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. His blog, ‘Balaam’s curse’ https://enemiesofzion.wordpress.com/ is followed in more than 15 countries

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

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