March 2021
The Political Pandemic : 1
Devastation as Salvation
| "The resurgence of diseases like tuberculosis, parasitic infections that were under control, malaria, huge numbers of people starving, kids starving around the world as a consequence of the global economic collapse we’re about to face, in large part because of the lockdowns. I think it’s an utter disaster for public health, a complete and utter disaster, the lockdowns." |
| - Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford University Medical School |
And so it all came to pass — with knobs on. Twelve-months later, the lockdown ledger reveals a debit column of physiological, economic, political and social lockdown-negatives too long to list, against a pitifully short credit column even when the most tenuous lockdown-positives are included. The latter are zealously argued by pliant consumers of the 24/7 propaganda that morphed a false (conveniently redefined) "pandemic" into a spurious "casedemic" of meaningless numbers; figures derived from polymerase chain reaction tests spewing forth 90% false positives due to inept methodology, technical manipulation and the simple fact that the PCR was not designed for the job at hand.
The True Believers
Chief among these Covid True Believers (Cov-TBs) are hordes of Aussies and Kiwis. Having rushed to make the apocalyptic "narrative" their own, they have emerged from their very lengthy incarceration Down Under to laud the house arrest of the healthy and offer incense and praise to its political instigators for having saved (they assert and crow) untold millions of lives. Virtue-signalling their heads off, they have taken to social media to mock the least suggestion that their reckoning is too simplistic. For them, lockdowns and the chronic fallout ("new normal") of brutal enforcement, government-sponsored snitching, ruinous personal social and economic costs, political power grabs, totalising legislation... all that Stasi-like sledgehammering to crack a viral nut "in line with seasonal influenza" (WHO, 5/10/20) — not to mention the vaccine-driven next-level mass surveillance and control it has set in motion — was worth it.
The lefties among them have even turned on "progressive" heroes who have dared to denounce lockdown orthodoxy. Feminist icon and former Clinton adviser Naomi Wolf for one was relentlessly attacked for tweeting on 9 November 2020 that had she known Joe Biden was pro-lockdown she would not have voted for him.
Setting aside how Ms Wolf could not have known or at least suspected Mr Biden's stance, her declaration turned her twitter thread into one long rant by indignant Cov-TBs. In decrying her perfidious apostasy they repeatedly revealed their own blind faith in the deceitful "narrative." Sniffed one smug Aussie:
"Unprecedented" is an overused and misleading term. You'll find there were plenty of lockdowns way back 100 years ago during the flu pandemic."
Wolf replied:
Quarantines, not lockdowns restricting free movement for both healthy and sick, but outside of police states, and never collapsing economy.
In Twitterland, where shouty opinion rules, directing her aggressors to the facts detailedin her "essay on historical quarantines" had zero mollifying effect. Trancelike, the True Believers pursued the magic mantra as if tweeting it often enough would placate the corona gods and make their fundamental error true.
Chanted another:
Unprecedented? Quarantines and lockdowns have been used to fight pandemics throughout history.
The student of "historical quarantines" repeated:
There has never been any case of suppressing entire economies and restricting free movement of whole societies in any free country in any past epidemic.
As she discovered, however, Covid True Believers are beyond such rational — evidential — reach. Chronically dumbed down, they're oblivious to the sinister cause and epochal effect of the unprecedented events transpiring before them: how they reflect the agenda of godless elites whose dystopian vision for mankind is not "conspiracy theory" but conspiratorial public record fact.
The Cov-TB's doltish attitude recalls surly teenager Lauren Cooper, the comic creation of comedian Catherine Tate. Preternatural levels of government mendacity and hypocrisy? "Not bovvered," is their Lauren-like response. Orwellian censorship and surveillance? Rushed, experimental vaccines? "Am I bovvered though?" But Covid's bio-lab origins... surely?! "Look at my face. Is it even bovvered? I ain't bovvered!"
They are too complacent even to concede the possibility of an ongoing exploitation of their blessed bug — which scenario they ignore as breezily as the bogus "casedemic" that papered over then built upon the original false foundation: the fake fatality rates that fuelled the official narrative they were not "bovvered" to scrutinise on their way to solitary confinement in the first place.
Sweden and T-cells
That's the thing about the perfectly brainwashed: they do not realise they're brainwashed. Just as victims of Stockholm Syndrome — who come to identify with their captor or abuser as a survival mechanism — do not appreciate the danger of the emotional bond they form with their oppressor.
Comically, Cov-TBs emerging from house arrest act like Stockholm Syndrome hostages even as Sweden itself provides living proof that crippling lockdowns were not at all needed to protect and preserve lives and livelihoods.
True, in not locking down their care homes the Swedes were as culpably (murderously) negligent as everyone else. That emphatically said, adopting commonsense measures with minimal effect on daily life has seen them through with similar or better results than lockdown countries — all without storing up the multitudinous problems kicked down the road and now facing lockdown nations in the long term; to include the ever-present threat of rolling lockdowns and ever-greater abuse of state and corporate powers on the least pretext of "elf and safety."
Having invested so much time and emotional energy in such a macabre beat up, the public health establishment and the politicians they advise discount the Swedish benchmark for fear of having to account for it. The following online interviews conducted in London last year by Julia Hartley-Brewer — one of TalkRADIO's candid, commonsensical hosts — provide a galling glimpse of these backstage mechanics of the Covid Pantomime. (Transcripts/bracketed clarifications mine; original speaker emphases.)
During a 28 October 2020 exchange, for instance, Mrs Hartley-Brewer was unable to extract a coherent response from Professor Paul Elliott of Gates-funded Imperial College (Vaccine Central), which influential institution had just published a study into falling antibody levels that was set to stoke still more unnecessary fear in order to exert even more vaccine pressure. Stuck in groupthink groove, Prof. Elliott repeatedly refused to address the vital role of T-cells (white blood cells, or lymphocytes) in Covid immunity:
Hartley-Brewer: You have no intention of answering my question. I'm asking a really, really simple question Professor, I'm not an expert, you're an expert. I don't pretend to be an expert. But Professor Sunetra Gupta, Professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modelling of infectious diseases — she, along with Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, and many others, say, well, it can't just be antibodies, there's T-cell immunity. This is widely accepted among experts in your field. Why is it not possible that a lot of people in this country and around the world have actually got, have already developed some level of immunity through T-cells, not just antibodies?
Paul Elliott: Julia, can I spell it out in words of one syllable. There is T-cell immunity but we are in the middle of a pandemic, so we are doing another study called REACT 1, which is looking at the spread of the virus in the population. The virus is spreading everywhere in this country, it's going up despite whatever immunity levels there might be. The facts are, the R value [i.e., Reproductive Value: the number, on average, who will be infected for every one person who has the disease] isstill above 1 and the virus is continuing to spread, at an alarming rate through the population. Not only in young people but right across the age range to the vulnerable people at older ages. So, just looking at the fact, we are not being protected from this virus.
H-B: Apart from the fact we're not all dying at the same rate.
Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewing Prof. Paul Elliot
from the TalkRADIO studio, London (screenshot).
These "R value"/antibody fixations and refusal to address T-cell immunity serve, of course, to keep the all-important "N value" — the number of minds emptied for every one person brainwashed by the "narrative" — on the rise! The only Covid curve they do not wish to flatten, without alternative media truth-seekers like the admirably direct and dogged Hartley-Brewer the "N value" would be much higher than it already (tragically) is.
Exasperated by comrade Elliot's unwavering adherence to the party line, she tried one last time to extract an honest, open, responsible, fruitful response, producing the ace in her pack:
H-B: Finally, can you explain Sweden, then? What's happening in Sweden?
PE: So what's happening in Sweden is that the infection rate is going up.
H-B: How many deaths are they having per day?
PE: I'm afraid I can't tell you.
H-B: I can tell you the figure, it's two. Two. A population of 10 million and 2 people a day die.
PE: I don't particularly want to comment on Sweden, I can only comment on what's happening in England.
H-B: Well no, but it is relevant. How on earth, given that we've not got these lockdowns and tier measures and all the things that are suggested by SAGE [the Scientific Advisory Group] and the others, in Sweden, and they're living largely free lives, not wearing masks, social distancing yes, some people working from home but going to bars and restaurants living their lives relatively freely — and yet, two people a day are dying. Yes, it's going up slightly, because of course it's Autumn, it's a respiratory illness. How do you explain that, in the context of: we can all possibly die from this virus because we haven't got antibodies?
PE: The situation in Sweden is different. The population density is different, the culture is different. In England, which is what we're measuring, the rates are going up, more people are going to hospital and more people are dying. And if they continue to go up, yet more people will go into hospital and yet more people will die. What we have to do is control this virus. We have to turn the R value down, and... are we all immune? No, we are not all immune....
H-B: No-one said we were all immune. No-one said that.
PE: ... because the virus is continuing to rise and we have to do something to address that. What we can do is public health measures until we get a vaccine.
H-B: I just find it absolutely extraordinary that someone as eminent and knowledgeable about this as you refuses to accept that... your explanation does not explain why in Sweden people can live a normal life and only two people a day are dying from this virus. If what you are saying is the case, and people do not have any T-cell immunity and there is no way of creating herd immunity in this way, then there'd be body bags all over the streets of Stockholm, and there aren't.
PE: The rates in Sweden are higher than their Scandinavian neighbours. Sweden is a very interesting case, they've taken a slightly different route, but at the end of the day they do social distance, they are taking care, and, you know, Sweden have their own issues to deal with. In England and the UK, I come back to the fact that the rates of the virus are continuing to increase...
H-B: We know that! They do that every Autumn. It's respiratory disease, and every respiratory disease the death rates and the infection rates go up every Autumn. Professor Paul Elliott, I know you've got no intention of answering my direct question. I'll give up.
Curious contradiction
Professor Elliott's studious evasion on T-cells was all the more curious in light of the fact that his Imperial College REACT 1 study answered Mrs Hartley-Brewer's query in simple, direct terms! Anthony Brookes, Professor of Genomics and Bioinformatics at Leicester University, underlined this bizarre contradiction in a subsequent discussion with Hartley-Brewer after she returned to the REACT 1 paper and its anti-herd immunity mantra:
Hartley-Brewer: Well let's take into account the Imperial College research that was published yesterday. I mean it's been all over the papers, Sky News and BBC publishing it ad infinitum saying, look, herd immunity won't happen, basically, you know, 95% plus of us won't have antibodies, even if you do get the virus and you have antibodies — again, not everybody who's had the virus [has antibodies]... I know people who've actually been tested positive for the virus when they've had it, then a couple of months later don't have antibodies — they're saying you're simply not going to keep your immunity. Herd immunity is therefore not a route we can try to go down as a way of dealing with the virus. We're going to have to wait for a vaccine.
We just had an eminent professor from Imperial College talking about this who declined, for whatever reason, to address any of my issues about T-cell immunity, which many eminent experts in his field say a large proportion of the country will have T-cell immunity to various coronaviruses anyway. Also, the idea that we look at countries like Sweden, well, they're seeing two deaths a day, an average death rate from coronavirus at the moment is two deaths a day, and they're not in the sort of measures we're in. How could we account for that in any way apart from some form of herd immunity?
Anthony Brookes: Absolutely. Let me first comment on Paul Elliott's interview with you. Full credit to Paul for the work they've done in this study. I'm very impressed with it on many levels. But I would just point out — so this is directly reading from their paper; something Paul Elliott and those put in that paper — let me quote those two sentences to you: "It is currently not clear what contribution T-cell immunity and T-cell memory responses will play in protective immunity during re-exposure As such, it is not possible to say with certainty, that the loss of antibody positivity would correlate with an increased risk of an individual being reinfected."
H-B: It's interesting he chose not to give me that answer even though it's in the paper he himself authored. [chuckling]
AB: Yep. And so that's the problem. I think...
H-B: No, no. Hold on a minute. What is the problem. Why aren't eminent scientists — I mean he knows his stuff, I don't know my stuff, I don't pretend to... I haven't even got Biology O level for goodness sake... I don't pretend, but I can listen and read graphs and statistics and see what other eminent people who do know what they're doing [are saying]. Why would he not make that point to me? Why are people so intent on telling us that we're all gonna die, basically?
AB: This is a great question. Different versions of that question are so fundamental to understanding our reaction to this virus. Why is everything over-exaggerated, over-interpreted? Why is fear promoted in the way it is? Why can't we look at things in a more balanced way? You know I think it's just a sort of group-think hysteria that's going on at the moment and has been for some time. And I think a lot of the researchers looking at this data, they're so tied up, they're working night and day, and it's perhaps sometimes hard to step out from that, and to look at what we know about other coronaviruses. To look at what we know about SARS-1 from 17 years ago. To look at the whole picture and try to integrate all of those different threads into predicting what's likely to happen going forward. They focus so much on the fact the virus is increasing, people are dying, and that's bad. And so we need to address that and stop that now. All these other considerations could be taken to say, oh, we don't need to worry so much.
H-B: And it doesn't mean "let it rip" and don't take necessary precautions, we're all doing that. It just means in, well, in perspective.
Indeed. And yet government spokesmen continue to portray anti-lockdown arguments as "let it rip" recklessness whose proponents will have the blood of tens of thousands on their hands — a literal charge made on BBC radio by a spokesman touting the second lockdown to a 'journalist' who accepted both the statistical lie and gratuitous smear without challenge. Thankfully, independent venues like TalkRADIO afford counter-narrative experts the time to argue their case against the falsehoods. Insisting "there's too much fear around," Professor Brookes made these additional vital points to Julia Hartley-Brewer during his 28 October interview:
Let me state some very basic facts. There's no spin here, nothing like the government cherry-picking and exaggerating, I'll give you the absolute numbers today, and people can take that away and make their own decisions about how scared to be.
In terms of people actually infected today, it's probably around 1% of the population. But the vast majority of those will have no symptoms, and if you're under about 65 it's less risk than regular flu. The number of people dying today, is the same as it would be any other year, in total. People dying of respiratory diseases today, it's about the same as it normally would be. The thing is, they'd normally die of flu and pneumonia. Those diseases are very, very much reduced this year and it's been replaced with Covid. The Covid deaths, just predicting from the charts and all the other considerations, will continue to go up from here. I actually agree with the government that it could approach the level of deaths per day we had in wave one. I don't think it will, I think it will top out at about two-thirds of that level in a couple of weeks' time.
The hospitals: they've increased their capacity beyond normal years. So they are less full in emergency care units than they would normally be. It's normally about 90-95%, they're about 85% this year. That's because they've increased the capacity. But they're in no way struggling to cope.
Clueless Cabinet
How starkly Professor Brookes’ clear, spinless speech contrasts with the partisan groupthink spouted by Professor Elliott. And how tragic that the latter and not the former dominates the establishment thinking which has translated into wrong-headed policy decisions and shambolic government strategies throughout the past year. Shaped by the sort of agendas and vested interests further detailed this month by Vanessa Beeley, this tunnel vision, the antithesis of true science, guarantees the embrace and consequent inflation of public health false alarms that have come to define Britain's inept and ruinous response to alleged emergencies over several decades.
The 1988 Salmonella travesty, to cite just one, is recalled herein by Richard North. Both his formal studies of our health system and his lived experience of it lead him to suggest that it may be in even worse shape today than it was back then. Sadly, what we have witnessed this past year suggests that he is on the mark. In this regard, the following extracts from two ministerial interviews conducted last September by our featured interviewer Julia Hartley-Brewer, parade the Keystone Cop befuddlement that defines the government's catastrophic Covid response.
- I –
On 28 September 2020 Hartley-Brewer grilled Helen Whately, Minister of State for Social Care. After Whately had reeled off her talking points, which naturally painted the government's handling of the Covid lockdowns in place across British universities in a very positive light, Mrs Hartley-Brewer pointed to policies at once self-contradictory and idiotic:
But is it tenable to lock down tens of thousands of students but not lock down our care homes? Young people who have virtually no chance of going to hospital, let alone of dying of coronavirus, being told to lock down in self-isolation for weeks on end, while our care homes are seeing an outbreak of cases. And the only measure I can tell from you is that your boss, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock is going to send 11,000 iPads for dementia patients to talk to their families. I don't know if you've been in any care homes lately but I'm not sure that's going to be much use. Is it really tenable to lockdown healthy young people while failing to protect the elderly?
When Minister Whately responded with more talking points which altogether missed the point when not falsifying it, Hartley-Brewer, speaking on behalf of all critical thinkers, became suitably sharp with her:
Helen Whately: You say students aren't much at risk. I'll say a couple of things. One is, although the vast majority of young healthy people get Covid as a mild case, we're seeing in some this thing called "long Covid", which means that after you've recovered you still unfortunately continue to get some really unpleasant health effects.
Julia Hartley-Brewer: Let's lock down a country because people feel unwell. This is an absurd argument.
HW: Well I think from some of the people I've heard from with long Covid, [you] literally can't get out of bed weeks later.
H-B: So lets lock down a country because some people can't get out of bed. Genuinely, is that our government policy now?
HW: No, that's not what I said...
H-B: Exactly. It's irrelevant. It's very very sad but it's irrelevant... There's lots of people who can't get out of bed right now because they're not getting cancer treatment, Helen, with all due respect.
HW: We are testing care home staff weekly.
H-B: That's a lie. That is not happening in most care homes. I know, I've got an aunt in a care home. She herself has had two tests the entire time, the whole six months. And the care staff have not been tested weekly. That's simply not true, minister.
Mrs Hartley-Brewer also raised the self-defeating pattern of constantly changing rules which were not afforded the three-week period needed to assess whether or not the measures actually saved lives. As for the 10 p.m. curfew, she rightly fumed that it was "utterly ridiculous in terms of saving no lives but costing many thousands of businesses their livelihoods. I mean, what scrutiny is happening, scientifically and medically, of government policy right now?"
Clearly unused to such frank challenges to her scripted message, the Minister was at a complete loss for words. "So, so, the, the, so, the...", she literally spluttered in response. The stammering personified her government's inability to provide hard evidence for many of its draconian Covid rules and measures, above all the shuttering of our churches, due to its reluctance to engage with eminent critics. Yet when it has entertained such expert contrary advice the outcome has been beneficial. On two occasions, Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford University, a noted critic, has managed to change official data-gathering and policy based on his research which identified flaws in the government's reasoning. Indeed, Prof. Heneghan found Boris Johnson's September 2020 mutterings about a possible second lockdown so inane he declared that "The Prime Minister may as well be using the planets to guide us."
Describing scientists advising the PM as "doom-mongering," Heneghan insisted at the time that the country was "well past the peak" of the pandemic, and not only was there "no evidence" of a second wave but a second lockdown might cost more lives. Like his fellow 'dissidents,' Professor Heneghan insists that so-called "second waves" are just "seasonal patterns" of viruses, including common cold coronaviruses (of which there are several), which take their seasonal toll of lives and do not justify lockdowns.
- II -
In an earlier 21 September interview with Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, who also extolled the "diverse" scientific advice the government is supposedly taking to make "difficult decisions," Mrs Hartley-Brewer again spoke up for the sorely misled and fed-up masses. "We're clearly not following science right now," she insisted:
It's quite clear the government is being led by the nose by the fear it's engendered in society. So people are terrified. The average person in this country thinks 7% of the population has died of Covid, when in fact the figure is 0.07%. People have been told to be terrified, so they are rightly terrified. And what a surprise, then they're asking the government to take action. Shouldn't the government, shouldn't the medical advisers, the science advisers, shouldn't the Prime Minister, the Health Secretary, your colleagues, and you, be telling the people to put things in perspective — to point out that more people are going to die of pneumonia and of flu this week, by a huge factor, than they are of Covid? And that the facts are, like in Spain, we've actually seen a plateauing in the deaths, and that we should actually be a bit calmer, looking at the facts, and stay calm until we know what we need to do?
After Mr Shapps subsequently dismissed the Swedish experience à la Prof. Elliott, Hartley-Brewer turned to the key question of false-positive tests, asking him if there has been "any conversation in Cabinet, that you are aware of, that you've been part of, about the false-positive rate? Eminent statisticians and eminent epidemiologists are pointing out the tests we are using in the community — not the Pillar 1 testing in hospitals, testing in the community — may well have a false-positive rate of... well, we're told it's below one percent by [Health Minister] Matt Hancock, which means that 9 out of 10 of the positive cases of Covid we are finding in the community — random testing, when anyone just puts themselves forward — will be wrong: they will not be people who've got coronavirus. We've got [a] huge number of cases, but actually, nine out of ten of those may well be false-positives. Has there been any discussion about this serious concern, in Cabinet?"
Mrs Hartley-Brewer grills Minister Shapps
The Minister immediately confused the random community testing Hartley-Brewer specifically referenced with tests strictly organised by the Office of National Statistics. She re-explained her question but Shapps did not address it. So she asked a third time if anyone in Cabinet had addressed the major problem of false-positives:
Hartley-Brewer: Has it been raised by anybody?
Grant Shapps: I haven't been involved in a false-positive discussion. But I'm not the Health Secretary and it's not been a general...
H-B: No, no. When we shut down our aviation industry. When we shut down our night-time economy. When we shut down people's ability to have any contact with their families with a 'rule of six' and with a possible lockdown, this is a matter for the entire Cabinet. We're not getting proper parliamentary scrutiny... is there any scrutiny in the Cabinet? Someone saying, hold on a minute, some experts are pointing out, and there's no statistical evidence these people are wrong, that nine out of ten, of the positive cases we are identifying, may actually be false, and we're basing an entire policy on false data.
GS: I don't think we're basing our entire policy on false data as you're suggesting there. I'm slightly confused by your figures but I'm going to go away and check them because you also said Matt Hancock said it's probably one per cent...
H-B: [Throwing up her hands in exasperation] But this is a policy that's been made by people who don't understand the statistics. I've got your phone number. I will send you the document to explain to you what this false-positive paradox is.
GS: Haven't you said to me, Matt Hancock said it's one in 100, you've told me it's nine out of 10?
H-B: No! This is the entire problem, Mr Shapps. This is the problem. People don't understand what this means. If the false-positive rate is below 1% — one percent — that means... when you have a very low prevalence in this country, and lot of people who aren't having symptoms are getting tested — this is really basic statistical stuff — it means the false-positive rate is nine out of 10.
Secrecy and crony capitalism
The affable Mr Shapps did finally promise to raise the point "specifically" in Cabinet. This, however, would be the same cliquish Cabinet of the same clubby Government that unlawfully failed to publish details of billions of pounds’ worth of coronavirus-related contracts, as recently ruled by the High Court.
The Government is required by law to publish the procurement of any contracts for public goods or services worth more than £120,000 within 30 days. Following legal action taken by The Good Law Project against the Department of Health and Social Care [DHSC] for its "wholesale failure" to disclose details of contracts agreed during the pandemic, Mr Justice Chamberlain ruled on 19 February that:
"There is now no dispute that, in a substantial number of cases, the Secretary of State (Matt Hancock) breached his legal obligation to publish contract award notices within 30 days of the award of contracts. There is also no dispute that the Secretary of State failed to publish redacted contracts in accordance with the transparency policy."
As well as missing the 30-day deadline, The Good Law Project claimed the Government was breaching its own transparency policy, which requires the publication of details of public contracts worth more than £10,000. A report on the ruling continued:
The judge said the Government spent "vast quantities of public money on pandemic-related procurements" last year, and that the public was entitled to see "who this money was going to, what it was being spent on and how the relevant contracts were awarded."
He added: "This was important not only so that competitors of those awarded contracts could understand whether the obligations … had been breached, but also so that oversight bodies such as the National Audit Office, as well as Parliament and the public, could scrutinise and ask questions about this expenditure."
The Government has awarded contracts for things like manufacturing PPE, Covid 19 testing and Test and Trace during the pandemic. Opposition politicians have accused ministers of running a "chumocracy" with contracts, with deals often given to people with family or business links to those in power.
The judge acknowledged the situation the DHSC faced in the first months of the Covid crisis was "unprecedented" as "large quantities of goods and services had to be procured in very short timescales."
But he said that the DHSC’s "historic failure" to comply with the obligations to publish contracts because of the difficulties caused by the pandemic was "an excuse, not a justification."
[metro.co.uk, 19/2/21]
The campaign group said the overall ruling was a "victory" for anyone concerned with proper governance and "proof of the power of litigation to hold Government to account." On the day of the ruling, one of its collaborators tweeted:
"This indictment of Government secrecy should spell the end of the culture of cronyism which has swallowed billions of pounds of public money during #Covid crisis."
Founder of The Good Law Project, Jolyon Maugham QC, has invited Mr Hancock to agree to publish the names of all companies awarded public contracts under a fast-track "VIP lane" and how much they were paid. He has also asked the Health Secretary to "commit to recovering public money from all the companies who failed to meet their contractual obligations" and set up "a judge-led public inquiry into the handling of PPE procurement."
Long lockdowns kill
Truly, one despairs of this clueless, unscientific, unaccountable, backslapping, largely closed shop dictating their politicised Covid narrative to hapless punters confined to barracks — which captive constituency of Covid True Believers are now crowing about Lockdown Salvation. For, if by now they are not at all bothered that the cure has proved infinitely worse than the disease, it is due to their mindless absorption of flawed assumptions, not data, decreed by governments crammed with ill-informed ministers dangerously out of their depth and, consequently, in thrall to the technocratic denizens of conflicted institutions.
This dysfunctional state of affairs, together with their slavish consumption of propagandistic corporate media, is why Cov-TBs reflexively attribute any and all positive news to lockdowns and quarantines, even as their confident assertions fly in the face of inconvenient facts denied or twisted by government and media experts who were dead wrong — which socio-political fact itself we will further elaborate in our concluding Part Two.
For now, simply consider the superior end results for a few of the U.S. states which, like Sweden and several other nations, either didn't lockdown or did so less strictly and not for as long. Florida lifted its lockdowns quickly and eased other restrictions early, compared to states of similar size, like New York, which stayed locked down longer and were slow to ease other restrictions. Specifically, its Covid-19 death rate of 144 per 100,000 residents is lower than New York’s 243 per 100,000 residents. Likewise Georgia has a larger population than New Jersey, yet its Covid-19 death rate of 159 per 100,000 residents is lower than New Jersey’s 262 per 100,000 residents. [The American Spectator, 3/3/21]
This is the pattern everywhere. So much for hysterical calls to "shut down or sacrifice lives for the economy." Another baseless mantra chanting another false choice that hides the fact that long lockdowns wreck, debilitate, and kill.
Meanwhile, medics and scientists who point this out — who actually "follow the science"; all the way to the healthy, affordable outcomes of countries and states who followed the Swedish course — must recant their heresy or be cancelled at the stake.
Yet the Cov-TB witch-hunters can't keep the heretics down! Their sacrilegious memes just keep on popping up to say it all:
