Pandemic malarkey

We are facing a crisis of governance much larger than COVID. The US is experiencing the fastest rate of inflation since 2008, and consumer prices have increased by 5.4%. Here in Sri Lanka everyday consumer needs and staples are becoming dangerously unaffordable. This is a global phenomenon – Pix by Shehan Gunasekara

Deception Inc.

It must be dawning on all but the most wilfully reality averse that too much of this pandemic has been a Trojan horse. The aim, globally more than locally, being to terrify us while other agendas are advanced. 

There are many deceptive slogans with noxious titles like ‘Build Back Better’ and other chirpy banalities beloved of billionaires and bankers, to camouflage what is a Molotov cocktail of factual evasions and perversions as a front for a desperate financial bailout for a dysfunctional financial system with perhaps a dash of social engineering thrown in. 

Somebody described this as the ‘Good Slave Code’. Namely: stay at home when told, stand apart as instructed, wear a face muzzle when ordered, go out only when permitted, socialise only when allowed, desire to be tracked 24/7, spy and snitch on anyone not in the cult, vote against your own self-interest, be subservient to authority even when they don’t know what they’re doing and their tactics are misfiring, obey without questioning the sheer futility of ‘locking down’ or seeking to ‘immunise’ via therapeutics that clearly don’t do so (non-sterilising “vaccines”). 

Last year a seasonal respiratory virus of high infectivity but low pathogenicity passed across the world and sadly took with it, people who were very old, who were already very sick and many who were in the last months of life. We added to their numbers by massaging death certificates such that anyone who tested positive through an admittedly unreliable, non-diagnostic PCR test was called a “COVID death” and financial/insurance incentives were given for this chicanery. 

And while, of course, we sadly lost people outside the vulnerable demographic (overwhelmingly those above 65 with multiple chronic illnesses), in terms of overall all cause mortality, there was statistically and numerically nothing to see. Seasonal viruses do this every year, they have since the dawn of time, and will continue to do so as we march forward through successive generations. 

In 2020, except for a few hot spots, there was no sustained increase in overall mortality compared to the past. And even in those few hot spots, essentially the US and Europe, we do not have to go very far back to find equally lethal years when adjusted for age and population size. If we were to put aside the somewhat farcical track and trace system which, for the first time in recorded history, anointed as a ‘case,’ people who had no symptoms, the whole charade would have fizzled out. 

This is bolstered by inaccurate, fickle PCR tests which actually measure nothing (they amplify what is there, they don’t diagnose) but are a wonderful tool to generate the perception of a crisis. And WHO has played its role by changing all the pandemic norms (up until 2019 they were anti-quarantine, anti-masking, anti-lockdown) and suggested measuring disease impact with a blithe disregard for common sense, by saying any death within 28 days with a positive test was due to COVID. The presence of COVID-related symptoms were not even required.

Dial back the incessant misery porn, the flashing of anguished last hours as if that justifies the reality avoidance, or the suggestion that we are all potential biohazards, and there really is nothing there. That did not stop the removal and stripping of our most basic and inalienable rights. As a commentator wrote, “Thank you, Government for protecting me from a flu by completely destroying my livelihood, my job, my income, my family’s prospects, my healthcare, my freedom to choose and liberties.” 

The rights we once took for granted include to work, to earn, to associate, to hug, to worship, to bury our dead with dignity; essentially to live our lives as we see fit. We saw the abridging of our right to speak, to protest, to push back against this tyranny. We had a front row seat to unearned vilification of experts who followed the facts rather than the orthodoxy -- censorship, character assassination and banishment from work and the public sphere. Our children and the young were locked up, stripped of a crucial phase of their development, denied their education. They were kept from being children, from playing outside, to living out their precious aptitudes for life and self-expression. 

The poorest and most marginalised were plunged into greater poverty, pushed into literal starvation with their lives essentially foreclosed. And this due to economic fallout from epic overreaction and because it was somehow ‘breaking news’ that poverty kills. 

Healthcare systems abandoned people in acute need laying the groundwork for future health and medical catastrophes. We have seen people in despair, inflicted with loneliness from isolation, from stoked fear (though anxiety and fear are indicated by the CDC as the second most lethal comorbidity). Cancer diagnoses have been delayed; people had crucial treatments cancelled, literally dying while waiting for elective procedures. 

In the UK estimates are 200,000 to 500,000 extra deaths from the areas covered by the NHS, not caused by COVID, and that’s assuming the lunacy of lockdowns is now done and largely over with. Over 40 published papers have shown that lockdowns backfire and have no positive impact on public health while causing evidently disastrous consequences across the spectrum of our lives. 

The winter of our discontent

So, the puppet masters of our pandemic circus are anxiously seeking to make the upcoming holiday season awash with foreboding and terror. The ‘New Normal’ masses are ready to have mass hysteria ladled on them once more, by a now, largely imaginary apocalyptic virus—the same one we’ve been flogged into mass hysteria over, the past two winters. Is there possibly a no-go zone beyond which mindless fear mongering simply collapses on itself? 

Note that the Western world has been transformed into a faux medical dystopia where, in some parts of this embattled globe, ‘health purity papers’ have now to be flashed to enter a café to placate some officious, medically illiterate bureaucrat, for the cosmic privilege of getting a cup of coffee. Those refusing to get experimentally ‘vaccinated’ for an emphatically unexceptional virus that causes at most mild to moderate symptoms in about 95% of those infected (in fact, very often no symptoms whatsoever, with an overall infection fatality rate of 0.1% to 0.5%) have the pleasure of being systematically segregated, stripped of jobs, denied medical treatment, ‘demonised’ as dangerous, fined and otherwise persecuted.

Lest you think this is an overstatement, the front page of Australia’s Courier Mail newspaper showcases as ‘Public Enemy Number 1’ an unvaccinated border jumper from the Gold Coast who somehow freaked out Southeast Queensland into a new COVID crisis. What did he do to spark such terror? Apparently, he “spent 10 days infectious” in the community with the Delta strain.” Given that the ‘vaccines’ do not stop infection or spread, this really is the height of national public health dementia. The real crisis is between the governing bureaucracy’s ears. 

So, the purge is on! The unvaccinated infidels and heretics are hunted by fanatics drunk on ill-informed dogma, dragged before the Inquisition of nitwit laws and misguided mania. Last evening, we saw a mother and daughter sitting adjacent in a restaurant full of otherwise maskless people. However, the restaurant had tables well-spaced-out and presumably mother and daughter spend time in close quarters at home every so often. While the daughter was enjoying dessert, the mother was virtue signalling while sitting masked next to her daughter, eyes exposed, clear gap between the face and mask, when clearly any offending nano particles would hardly have been deterred. This, though, pales before New York’s Mayor DeBlasio vying for the “Fall Fascist” award, declaring that unvaccinated five-to-11-year-olds should not be allowed to access places of business. This, though overwhelming medical evidence indicates children do not spread COVID in any appreciable way nor are at any risk from it! 

Fact free fascism is also on display in “New Normal” Germany where popular footballer Joshua Kimmich is publicly excoriated for refusing to submit to ‘vaccination’ and profess his faith in the new COVID theology. Though Colin Powell was 84 years of age and riddled with cancer, ‘news’ outlets in the US blame his death on the unvaccinated. The fact that the jab may have precipitated his passage dare not be spoken. 

Australia is planning to imprison people and fine them $90,000 for not wearing a medical looking mask of no use whatsoever or attempting to worship at a Synagogue or other such heinous crime. Again, I am not exaggerating, Australian news reports “Melbourne Synagogue rule breakers climbed roofs to dodge police, fines grow.” The moral queasiness of calling it a crime for Jews to be out in public without permission on a holy day to their community seems to be irrelevant.

In Florida, despite valiant efforts by Governor DeSantis to remove mask mandates and ban any suggestion of ‘vaccine’ passports, and with an open, flourishing State since September 2020, fanatical school staff tied a medical-looking mask to the face of a non-verbal Downs Syndrome girl with nylon cord for over six weeks before her father discovered what they were doing. Words fail at the sadistic child abuse we see paraded before us masquerading flimsily as public health. 

And the idiocy mounts. A Dr. Huntington in Australia (where else?) rushed his needlessly ‘vaccinated’ son into an emergency room with what he dares to call ‘totally manageable myocarditis’. I wonder if the child had any say in having his heart permanently scarred for life (as Dr. Ryan Cole has persistently clarified, there is no such thing as ‘mild’ myocarditis)? The ripple effects and ramifications on this poor youngster’s life by an imbecile who claims it is ‘manageable’ when he is not the one who has to manage it, don’t bear thinking about. 

Mass hysteria mounts

Realists suggest that the coming winter is crunch time. The ‘New Normal’ has to be embedded so that the ‘apocalypse’ can be dialled down. This is because only the most brainwashed acolytes of this fanaticism would go with another year’s extension of “viral doom”. Most of the brainwashed are not closet totalitarians, they’re just misguided, everyday folk with diluted critical faculties, punch drunk on fables of national rectitude. They will go along with almost anything to avoid being ostracised or being punished by someone in authority. 

But even they have a limit to the level of absurdity they can perpetually accept. The level and duration of unrelenting bosh and cognitive dissonance eventually is wearing down even their credulity. And it is only those who will not bend their knee or accept the new theology, or kowtow to the required medical conformity, that are standing in the way of the ‘sheeple’ being able to get their reward for: following orders, wearing the Petri dish bacteria accumulating masks, getting jabbed by experimental gene therapy to be gifted with ‘manageable side effects’, and ever ready to present ‘obedience papers’ to anyone who demands to see them. Surely, surely, they must be allowed some semblance of the old normal now? 

The reality addicts won’t let them have their way, and the requirement that everyone virtually has to submit to being ‘vaccinated’ and have some scannable certificate of ideological conformity in their smart phones or tattooed on their epidermis, seems to be getting more remote. Surely, we could at least enthusiastically wave Black Rock banners and recite ‘the Covidian creed’ or whatever other ecumenical dogma is taken to be mainstream these days. 

As C.J. Hopkins writes, “Seriously, the point of this entire exercise (or at least this phase of the entire exercise) is to radically, irrevocably transform society into a monolithic, corporate campus…” He forecasts an “…endless maze of perpetually monitored, ecofriendly, gender fluid, ideologically uniform…” adherents, subsidiaries of the prevailing order. Unwavering conformity to the valueless values is the mantra, egged on by a pathogenic bogey man. 

As I write, Melbourne is in open revolt. The police have withdrawn, the chief executive is making himself scarce, and the world gapes in awe. Other cracks are forming. With 86% fully ‘vaxxed’ and record infections, Singapore has conclusively proved again that the ‘vaccines’ cannot stop infection or end the pandemic. Even Bill Gates admitted in a recent interview that they do little to nothing to stop infection. 

With Singapore’s case fatality rate increasing, they’ve also even disproven the notion that cases have become decoupled from severe outcomes. Fully open Florida continues to have the lowest case rate in the entire United States whereas ‘Vax Pass’ central, New York, has daily levels over 3X higher on average. And Vermont, with the highest ‘vaccination’ percentage in the USA has a new case rate over 7X that of Florida. 

Coming attractions

Fortunately, we are dealing with Machiavellian manipulation not Stalinism. It is not publicly viable to round people up and shoot them (except with rubber bullets if they dare show up in public maskless defying lockdown). The aim is to wear us down, to subjugate our senses, break our spirits, to coerce and to harass until we hand over our autonomy willingly. 

And if this winter of evident discontent with this nonsense continues to escalate, their narrative is in trouble. NHS England is in panic, distorting data. Despite record ‘vaccination’ there are 14 times the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 than there were this time last year! There is intense pressure to no longer report how many more are in hospital and dying ‘vaccinated’ vs. non-vaccinated in the UK. The public declaration is egregious in saying it may undermine confidence in ‘vaccine’ effectiveness! Damn the facts, full steam ahead!

Once more, back to Germany where the ‘Epidemic Emergency of National Importance’ which has been the legal pretence for enforcing C-19 restrictions is due to expire in mid-November. Of course, cases (positive tests) are now skyrocketing in Germany. However, if they don’t swell to the necessary level, they have a plan B to justify maintaining the restrictions indefinitely even in the absence of a pseudo epidemic. It will, though, now take more than the standard repertoire of manipulated and misleading statistics, repeatedly incorrect dire projections, distorting photos of ‘death trucks’ and non-overflowing over flowing hospital wards, or even frantic attacks on efficacious early treatments by claiming animals also benefit from them… this gibberish is now dated. 

There is a growing working-class revolt. We see this with care workers, police and fire fighters, and airline pilots, people thronging streets, organising strikes, walkouts, ‘sick outs,’ and other forms of civil and not so civil disobedience. Such demonstrations have now taken place in Paris, Manila, all across the Netherlands, Italy, Port-au-Prince, Prague, Beirut, Hong Kong, Baghdad, London, Barcelona, Budapest, Santiago, New Delhi, Jakarta, Buenos Aires and many more. 

We are facing a crisis of governance much larger than COVID. A model of real growth and expanding benefits for all in the West had morphed into a reality where the rich got richer by impoverishing the less wealthy. The March 2020 lockdowns shifted the balance of power away from the growing tide of populism back to billionaire oligarchs and large corporations. As millions filed for unemployment and hundreds of thousands of small businesses closed in the US alone, the Fed provided unlimited purchases of corporate debt and securities. 

Essentially, C-19, among other things, stopped a nascent workers’ movement in its tracks. Ideologically authorised protests were allowed to rampage through city streets. Other forms of public expression were essentially banned. And the farce has been flashed across too many screens since. Political potentates and the ultra-wealthy maskless at fancy events surrounded by masked servants, about 164 million people worldwide falling into poverty with a six-fold increase in those suffering from starvation while tech giants continued to see record profits. The US is experiencing the fastest rate of inflation since 2008, and consumer prices have increased by 5.4%. Here in Sri Lanka everyday consumer needs and staples are becoming dangerously unaffordable. This is a global phenomenon. 

Staffing shortages in the developed world have been exacerbated by ‘vaccine’ mandates. New York’s healthcare workforce has been reduced by 34,000 workers, and a ‘vaccine’ mandate exception is being offered to truckers to deal with supply chain emergencies. The supply chain crisis is itself further aggravated by China’s energy crisis, the long-term effects of lockdowns and a vast shortage of truckers which in the US have left nearly half a million containers and cargo vessels at California ports. Some school districts are having to resort again to remote learning due to food shortages. And since, inconveniently, we are still far away from full automation or a rent only economy or self-driving vehicles, the power of people disaffected, aggravated, campaigning to preserve autonomy, is proving a powerful counter narrative force. 

Let us repeat grounded solely on data: asymptomatic spreaders are a demonstrated statistical fiction, natural immunity provides long-term robust protection from reinfection or sickness. If treated early, virtually no one need die of COVID 19. Below 65 and without multiple chronic illnesses, the recovery rate is over 99% globally. That we would destroy our civilisation over these facts is nothing short of damning. 

A matter of faith

The late great Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, spoke about how to live joyfully in a profoundly broken world, “If faith in God means anything, it means humility towards oneself and love of neighbour and the stranger.” We need through our actions to create greater hospitality for such faith. 

Faith in one another allows us to risk the vulnerability of love. Faith in our possibility as a human family to do better, paves the future. We want to have faith in a science that actually tells us how things are, not as a servant of agendas. And we need living faiths that help us believe in how things can be. Time to leave our viral fascination and panic dogma behind. It’s time to get back to living with faith in the light of collaboration, enterprise and fresh possibility.