The slippery slope

We have to look past fear and onto meaningful activities, ambitions and goals that raise us up as we serve our families and societies. Nothing less will allow us to step off the slippery slope of C-19 delusion and really help both turn the corner and turn the tide – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

Let us start by acknowledging how pointless and largely nonsensical COVID ‘mitigation’ measures are. In many areas of the United States there are no mask requirements now, many tens of thousands are merrily packed into arenas, dining indoors, walking through crowded indoor malls, gathering for conferences, working in offices, enjoying face to face conversations with not a ‘face nappy’ in sight. However, in that same city Uber drivers require customers to wear masks, take photos of themselves wearing masks and upload it onto the Uber app before their next ride – clearly a pointless pantomime. 

There is little rhyme or reason, most hotels even in cities without a mandate will still have signs ‘Masks required in public spaces’. But as you look behind the desk, you may see the hotel agent’s liberated nostril peeking over the parapet of this pointless totemic shield, or sometimes the mask dangling on the chin outright. And as a maskless guest meanders past and as such ‘signs’ stockpile, relief floods you, for sanity has prevailed. But there are still plexiglass dividers! These are known to actually make things worse by aggregating residues from exhalations and collecting pathogens. But exhaustion usually quells the desire to interrogate further.

The confusion mounts as a running store in one mall doesn’t require masks, yet the same store in a different mall will do so, probably due to the psychological profile of the respective managers. To be specific, Starbucks at Downtown Disney in Anaheim California lets you enjoy your entire experience there without a mask. Yet a nearby Starbucks also in Anaheim demands you wear a mask to the counter and while ordering. But once you are seated, the masks can be flung away. If you ask about the inconsistency, confusion and surprise are usually not far behind, because we have trained an entire populace not to question such absurdity.

Flailing authoritarianism

Like others, I salute Singapore’s desire to stop mass testing the symptomless, focus on those with symptoms and let C-19 become endemic. However, an unvaccinated Singapore had sailed through the pandemic with a mere 35 or so COVID ascribed deaths which now in a very brief period has jumped to 246 and climbing. The mild mortality was true from the beginning of the pandemic almost through spring 2021. 

To enable the transition to treating COVID as endemic, Singapore doubled down on mass vaccination and masking (including high filtration masks) at no cost to its citizens. These are even available for free from vending machines. The “masks” continue to magnificently misfire. Today Singaporean cases are skyrocketing, swelling from five cases per million to roughly 580 cases per million, an 11,500% increase! 

Adjusted by population, the equivalent in the US would be 190,000 cases per day despite the mass jabbing and uninterrupted mask mandates. We see Australia as another cautionary tale where pointless mass testing, unrealistic obsession with preventing every single COVID case and the impotence of high vaccination rates to end the ‘pandemic’ coalesce along with the world’s longest lockdown in Melbourne to showcase a COVID basket case rather than a COVID success story.

And it’s not just ‘cases’. Amongst those requiring oxygen supplementation in ICU, just under 50% in Singapore were fully vaccinated. I almost hate to use the incantation ‘Sweden’ yet again, but new deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Singapore have now considerably outpaced those in Sweden. Of course, you will not hear from any of these floundering citadels of COVID orthodoxy (Singapore, California, Australia) any data-based self-doubt or mea culpas, despite how persistently they may get it wrong. Instead, gaslighting via proclamations, swooned over by an adoring press. And there is hysterical outrage against anyone who 

points this out. 

But all this is making less and less sense. Why spend billions on COVID testing even after the FDA has said some of the key test kits in wide use should be destroyed, “Place them in the trash.” And after the EUA of the original PCR test has been withdrawn? 

Why press ahead with vaccinations that do not stop spread of transmission especially for youngsters who are not at risk by the virus but are at clear risk of being damaged by the vaccine? We are also stealing from them the natural privilege of lifelong immunity which would be bestowed by their naturally recovering from an infection from which they statistically have no risk. And why are we restricting healthcare? In the UK, waiting lists for treatment including for cancer sufferers break all records. Recently it was reported that there are 5.6 million people waiting for initial treatment! 

So, almost overnight we turned the whole world upside down, making it seem normal to destroy livelihoods and liberties, somehow acceptable to focus all attention on one illness at the expense of others that kill many more, coercing people to get unproven medical interventions or else run the very real risk of losing the right to work, or the freedom to study or travel. The Nuremburg judges must be turning in their graves! 

The teetering planetary economy

We have to face some sobering financial testimony. Already back in August 2019, Black Rock, the world’s most powerful investment fund, warned of an unprecedented response being needed to avoid a dramatic downturn. Monetary policy was exhausted and fiscal policy would not be enough. A way had to be found to inject massive amounts of money while avoiding hyper-inflation. Parallels were made with the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and more recently with Argentina and Zimbabwe. 

A massive downturn followed in the repo markets (repurchase agreement: essentially collateralised loans). They are the main source of funding for traders in most markets especially derivatives. The Fed in September 2019 pumped as an emergency response, hundreds of billions of dollars a week into Wall Street. This was an early warning sign of potential devastation. 

By October 2019 a global zoonotic pandemic was simulated by something called ‘Event 201’, a strategic exercise at Johns Hopkins in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Read it and you will find a virtual playbook for everything that has transpired since. 

By January 2020, The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting was discussing not only the economy, but the executive order signed by Donald Trump to develop a five-year national plan for agile and scalable vaccine manufacturing technologies, particularly for an influenza pandemic that could spread rapidly and cause high rates of illness and death, due to lack of prior immunity. 

By the end of January Wuhan was under lockdown, ‘miraculously’ the PCR test is ready to go and ignoring all intervening data to the contrary and without aggregate numbers to justify it in the slightest at that time, by March 2020 WHO designates C-19 a pandemic, and disaster follows. 

Joining the dots

So, the narrative that emerges, if we look at all this without bias or distortion, was that a mechanism was needed. And lockdowns had their medieval cobwebs scrubbed off them to oblige, enabling the global suspension of economic transactions.

This would allow first The Fed to flood ailing financial markets with freshly printed money while deferring hyperinflation and second, a mass vaccination program which could digitally encode humanity for various purposes would emerge and be clung to even after its scientific pretentions had been shattered. 

Lockdown suspended most business transactions, draining the demand for credit. Essentially, a massive bailout says economist Ellen Brown, “under cover of a virus”. We will be grappling with how to reimagine our economic arrangements for some time as such desperate measures can only prolong the agony of a global economy hostage to money printing and the artificial inflation of financial assets. 

E-commerce and big tech take over life, the proliferation of the pharma dollar, ‘a rescue’ for a much-disparaged plastic industry by producing millions of face masks and gloves each week which end up in the oceans (ignored completely by the green ‘new dealers’) ensues. 

And all this happened, we are to believe, ‘naturally’ due to a pathogen from which 99.8% recover and for which abundant efficacious early treatments abound? Does anyone sanely believe that a global, rapacious, insatiable, 24/7 money-making machine allowed itself to be suspended over this? 

Let us also recall that the WHO is a pharmaceutical cartel. It primarily markets private products worldwide at the most profitable rates possible and is not a custodian of public health per se. A litany of public health problems stem from abysmal working conditions, poor nutrition, air, water and food pollution and rampant poverty. None of these ‘pathogens’ are on the WHO’s list of humanitarian concerns, nor are you hearing of any “emergency response” here.

A glaring example, the number of children dying of hunger and poor nutrition annually is close to 3.1 million. A child essentially dies from hunger every 10 seconds. Why is this not a crisis the world is agonising to resolve? 

Instead, what matters for the clique that directs the health emergency orchestra is feeding the insatiable profit-making machine. As the military industry needs wars, the pharmaceutical industry needs diseases, the more ravaging the better. Big pharma spends three times as much as Big Oil, twice as much as Big Tech on lobbying. Therefore, mass vaccination programs subsidised by public funds are the Holy Grail. 

It is not just here in Sri Lanka but globally, that early COVID treatments have been discouraged, suppressed, sabotaged or banned. As the FDA confesses, emergency vaccines are only possible if there are no suitable approved and available alternatives. And the widely-used early treatments are inexpensive, safe, and readily available. This is all heresy to the pharma religion. The pharma dollar is there to replace the petro dollar so the United States can continue global monetary supremacy. Only thus did the sheer unsubstantiated fabrication of the ‘asymptomatic spreader’ get punted so that we could inject ‘experimental vaccines’ with increasingly worrying adverse effects and unprecedented death stats into everyone, including children. 

So, the agenda simply is an epidemic risk, presented to promote fear and submissive behaviour, perhaps a combination of lab tampering and diagnostic reclassification. We have an epidemiologically ambiguous virus spreading where the impact of respiratory or vascular diseases in the elderly and immunocompromised is high. Intensive care units in so-called “advanced” countries had already been compromised, preceding the arrival of COVID. And so, the vulnerable are bundled together in inadequate hospitals and care homes with a high risk of sepsis and using misguided protocols that did more damage than good (the use of ventilators being among them). 

We were all told that abdicating civil liberties should be volunteered to protect society. This allowed coercion to seem almost a conduit for altruism. And when enough people weren’t dying to fill the narrative, we pivoted to manically tracking ‘cases.’ To do so we had to conflate positive tests with cases and, for the first time in history, called it a “case” even when someone had no symptoms. 

Anchoring it all

And so, this medically tottering, ethically debased, mass delusionary exercise rests of course on the PCR test. This was fast-tracked through a completely unconvincing two-day peer review, and manufacturers were ready, as if aware of the foregone conclusion. This was of course on commission from WHO. Ignore the fact, that the PCR test literature itself says it is not to be used for diagnostic purposes, something now confirmed by WHO. And the EUA it was given explicitly excluded “mass testing” of asymptomatics. On that too, the WHO has now come around, as stated on their website.

As explained by its inventor, and by countless scientists since, the test “amplifies” what it finds, whether it be debris, or fragments, and so requires a low amplification setting to have a chance of intersecting with high viral load. The higher the “cycle thresholds” the more false positives. Even though Fauci is on inadvertent record indicating that “swabs above 35 are useless” and the public health school of Harvard puts that back to “settings above 30” leading to as many as 85% false positives, throughout the first year of the pandemic, assays of 35 and above were regular. 

To this day in Sri Lanka, no one can answer if we have a nationally audited setting and what it is. By choosing how many we test and availing of the “sensitivity” of the swab, you can almost turn the pandemic on or off. Which is why the real number should be “excess mortality” (there currently isn’t any in the bulk of the world) from all causes.

The reason we have such laboured opening and reopening therefore may well come back to the economic impetus. And fortunately, people are emerging from this stupor and realising this doesn’t make sense and hasn’t from the outset. Remember, vaccines were going to give us freedom? Except they don’t stop reinfection or spread. And so, the way to freedom is inundated with variants. And if “case counts” (positive tests with make-up) keep climbing, we can shoo everyone inside again, and keep the “fictitious capital” printed from flooding and overheating the real economy. The other option would be to normalise interest rates, and this obscene juggling act of the contagion spectre allows a postponement of the “tapering” of monetary stimulus. It will end…unlikely as we wish.

Transcending safetyism

Coming back to us, the individuals who here in Sri Lanka and elsewhere have to support our leaders in getting our collective heads out of the pandemic noose.

The paradigm we must wean ourselves off is that every accident, every death is preventable, or should be. While the value of life is noble, we have become caricatures of this concern. This is a recent mania, we would otherwise never have moved forward as humans, as explorers, as entrepreneurs, as visionaries, had we been in thrall to this fixation.

If we go to accidents on streets, no one accident is inevitable, but the fact that there will be accidents, probably is. Even machines taking over won’t insulate us, as they too fail, or fail to predict all the variables. And the glories of our human innovation, is we are at times prone to being distracted by what interests us, at times irresponsible, zany. We “opt in” to live fully, not just to dodge some percentile likelihood of death.

An author I was reading pointed out his mother smoked avidly, and lung cancer took her at 69. Would she have liked to have another decade and no smoking? Who knows? There are cultures where people eat and drink as celebration. We recall times when parents drove home from the beach a tad tipsy, with kids, singing exuberantly (not perhaps ideal for focused driving). Helmets were for football fields and bodybuilders had gym memberships, reminds this author. We have doubtless evolved in some of these areas, and some for the better. However, that generation achieved grand things, and weren’t found cowering over a quasi-influenza strain that primarily kills those who are beyond life expectancy.

World Wars and Depression taught a rollicking generation that life is uncertain, and to wallow in it. As early as Thomas Aquinas, we were reminded to discipline our fears. Disease, injury and death punctuate and accentuate life, painful as they are. While not wishing to court danger, we do need fortitude. Sri Lanka abounded in this during the civil war, and in the ’90s when I was here, helping companies cope with the tragic aftermath of a devastating bomb for example, a few days later, everyone dove back into life. And tourists kept coming. Life was bigger than our challenges and uncertainties.

The doomsday rhetoric of COVID perils has held sway. Idiotic statistics such as the same number of Americans dying from COVID as from the Spanish Flu have been “reported”. First, the US population is three times what it was then. Second, those were primarily the young, that pandemic did not track normal mortality. Third, those death certificates had no issues fiddling with “from” and “with,” that contagion was clearly the primary cause of death, which is how all death certificates were filled out until recently. Moreover, globally the Spanish Flu caused 50 million deaths from a far less populous world, and the US did not bear the brunt as the epicentres of World War I were where much of the impact congregated. Much, but not all, India lost close to 20 million people. And the world continued on, carefully, discovering belatedly the benefits of ventilation, sunshine and open air, but “freezing” the planet was never contemplated.

Sri Lanka has to epitomise enterprise. In a listing of the seven deadly sins, we have “sloth” to translate the Greek word for despair, the inability to rouse oneself. Well, we need to jolt ourselves fully awake and say, no more silly lockdowns, we cannot “lock in” an airborne virus. We say “yes” to all viable treatments, including focused vaccination where it makes sense. We will not hoard biological survival, while stealing education from our children and potentially enfeebling them. What will their lives be? Who will run our society tomorrow or lead us forward if we continue to infantilise not only their immune systems but their aptitudes? 

We must desire grander things and believe ourselves capable of them. When healthy desire (which is purpose led, not ego fired) sputters out, we reach apathy, a true human psychological and emotional cesspool. That weary word our popular culture echoes is, “Whatever.” Well, “whatever” is to step forth into the invitation of our humanity, to be bolder than a viral strain. We have to look past fear and onto meaningful activities, ambitions and goals that raise us up as we serve our families and societies. Nothing less will allow us to step off the slippery slope of C-19 delusion and really help both turn the corner and turn the tide.