Throughout the History of mankind, there have been episodes of various kinds and degrees of calamity and hardship, which inevitably caused severe torment and provoked widespread panic. Regardless of what you hear on the news or in conversations with friends and family members, Covid-19, or the kung-flu as I prefer to call it, is not one of such episodes. Notwithstanding, there has curiously been plenty of severe torment and widespread panic around this virus. Insofar as the kung-flu constitutes nothing more than another influenza-like illness (ILI), the agony and anxiety the world has been experiencing must have a source, or more, other than the virus itself. Overall, the excess mortality caused by the kung-flu (direct or indirectly) is mainly linked to the obesity levels and the aging of the populations of each country. As you can check out here, 2020 was, by and large, an outlier in terms of the mortality rate in the advanced countries of the West (Europe, North America and Australia and New Zealand). Albeit a result of several factors, it is pretty clear the overriding one is geography. Undoubtedly, neighbouring countries have had similar outcomes, with the glorified non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as masks and lockdowns, and other measures like contact tracing and large-scale testing turning out to be a complete flop in stopping the coronavirus' advances. By implementing these measures, policy-makers were just following the advice of the presumed experts on the fields of public health, virology, epidemiology, etc. If the scientists were stating the NPIs and the like were necessary to avoid a global rampage in the scale of the Spanish flu, who the hell are you to criticise them. For one, scientists do not all agree with each other. This idea of consensus has no place in any scientific endeavour. Just because the majority defends one position, it speaks nothing to its truthfulness. Moreover, with media outlets being profit-maximising entities (i.e. businesses), they always try to engage the most viewers possible to generate as much revenue as they can get. Thus, they have long ago realised the best strategy is to entertain, not to inform. Under this entertainment umbrella, besides spinning false narratives of collusion (Russian hoax) or insurrection (Capitol "invasion"), they also produce doomsday scenarios. While climate change and extreme weather events are usually these corporations' preferred themes, the flu season provides a nice change of pace. In fact, just lask week, Jason Kilar, who is the CEO of CNN's parent company, WarnerMedia, said "the pandemic and the way that [CNN] can help inform and contextualize the pandemic, it turns out it’s really good for ratings". In addition, as I referred on just a few paragraphs ago, the settled view on any particular matter could be completely wrong, even though it passed the scientific method's scrutiny. For a moment, try to remember the times you read a headline stating some study which claimed that a cup of coffee a day was bad for you, having a couple of days before read another headline about another study asserting that a daily dose of coffee was actually beneficial. Therefore, seeing that these two were both peer-reviewed papers, published on scientific journals, how does one know, especially a layman, which one is right? You simply have to look at the data yourself and come up with your own judgement. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the people would rather save the trouble of doing the work to stay informed, bestowing their independent reasoning faculties to those in the seats of power. Whether this makes me cynical or not, the harsh reality is that politicians are only going to hear and do what makes them more popular so as to stay in power. As a result, in times like these, our rulers are going to put forward policies that, in lieu of being aimed at solving or mitigating the situation, it has the intent to lionise them as heroes. This is not to say that they never try to provide solutions to problems, it just means that making themselves look like heroes is the top priority. In plain and simple terms, they have to be seen as indispensable. As all over the world we celebrate the one-year anniversary of fifteen days to flatten the curve, we have yet to acquire any data suggesting that the past year of life-destroying lockdowns and politicised behavioural mandates has done anything to keep us safe from the kung-flu. While lockdowns made a comeback in Europe and other regions, it is impossible to ignore the lockdowns' disproportionately deadly effects and the numerous studies demonstrating their futility. However, the media still retain their grip on the narrative that NPIs and other measures remain necessary to prevail in our fight against this virus. Government officials, in lockstep with big tech and nearly all major news outlets, have controlled the NPI narrative to such an extent that its proponents have simply sidestepped the burden of proof naturally arising from the introduction and continued support of novel virus mitigation strategies, happily pointing to the fact that their ideas enjoy unanimous support from the corporate media and government officials across the globe. Unsurprisingly, this seemingly impenetrable narrative rests on the critical assumption that NPIs, or behavioural instructions, have kept us protected against Covid-19. None other country than Sweden was the recipient of more rampant criticism on the response to the novel coronavirus. Since the middle of the summer, or even sooner, everybody started to acknowledge the Sweden response (or lack of one) had not been the disaster foreshadowed by the experts on television. Yet, the critics still claimed that they could have saved many more lives if the Swedish government followed the example of the other European nations, pointing out that its Scandinavean neighbours, Denmark, Finland and Norway, fared much better due to imposing those praised restrictions of people's liberties. Actually, contrary to what you have been led to believe, Sweden was, and still is, no less stringent than its neighbours. Be that as it may, a paper published in August outlines the factors which led to Sweden being in a worse position from the get-go, compared to its neighbours, as well as it defends the lockdowns and other procedures would be totally useless. By the time Sweden would hypothetically close its borders and encarcerate its citizens in their homes at the same time as their neighbours, the kung-flu had already been circulating freely, particularly in Stockholm, for about a fortnight, owing to "Sweden’s 'sport' break (sportlov), where families often go to Italy or Austria for skiing", Nevertheless, the two most important aspects they considered were the weight of the migrant population and the "dry tinder". About the former, it is pretty well established the people with darker skin, living in higher latitudes (outside of the tropics, where they are adapted to live), have a greater likelihood of dying from Covid-19 - this in mainly due to having darker skin that inhibits the production of vitamin D, which is extremely important to fortify the immune system. On the latter, the "dry tinder" aspect alludes to the fact that Sweden had previously had a couple of flu seasons milder than usual, unlike the other Scandinavian countries. Still, Sweden has endured far better than most of the other developed nations. Across the pond, among the few US states that did not impose statewide restrictive measures, Florida has been the most mediatic, maybe because of its size and importance. In light of everything our officials have babbled about how this virus spreads, it defies reality that Florida, a fully open and popular travel destination with one of the oldest populations in the country, currently has lower hospitalisations and deaths per million than California, a state with much heavier restrictions and one of the youngest populations in the country. While it is true that, overall, California does slightly better than Florida in deaths per million, simply accounting for California's much younger population tips the scales in Florida's favour. More specifically, Florida has zero restrictions on bars, breweries, indoor dining, gyms, places of worship, gathering sizes, and almost all schools are offering in-person instruction. On the flip side, California retains heavy restrictions in each of these areas. At the very least, Florida's hospitalisations and deaths per million should be substantially worse than California's. Those who predicted death and destruction as a consequence of Florida's September reopening simply cannot see these results as anything other than utterly remarkable. Even White House Covid-19 advisor Andy Slavitt, much to the establishment’s embarrassment, had no explanation for Florida's success relative to California. Slavitt was reduced to parroting establishment talking points after admitting that Florida's surprisingly great numbers were "just a little beyond [their] explanation". Still, do masks and lockdowns serve their stated purpose? As the graph above shows, they do not, considering only masks at least. All the same, to demonstrate that I am not cherry-picking, and in view of the fact a picture is worth a thousand words, here comes a barrage of charts - on the top left one, California is blue and Florida is grey. Daily new cases per 100k people; from John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center If it is not the NPIs that shape the course of the virus propagation, then what could possibly be? Seeing that similar patterns are formed among bordering and nearby countries and states, instead of legislative decree, case counts and mortality rates are strongly correlated with temperature and latitude, a concept known as "seasonality". Evidently, whereas varying degrees of behavioural mandates have had no noticeable impact on cases, thanks to seasonality, identical regions follow similar case growth patterns. For the firm believer in NPIs, these simultaneous and nearly identical fluctuations between cities within the same state and among states having similar climates are inexplicable. After accepting seasonality as one of the driving factors behind case fluctuations, we can start speaking of "Covid season" as pragmatically as we speak of "flu season" - this is after all the kung-flu. A helpful visual of what covid season might look like, based on the Hope-Simpson seasonality model for influenza, can be found here. As a bonus, Alabama recently came under heavy fire after thousands of maskless football fans took to the streets to celebrate their team winning the national college football title. FanSided, among others, was quick to label the large celebration as a "superspreader" event, and health officials were worried that the Alabama "superspreader" was going to result in a huge case spike. Here is what really happened. Miraculously, cases immediately plummeted after Alabama’s "superspreader" event and continue to dwindle to this day. If that did not suffice, Mississippi, Alabama's next-door neighbour, followed a nearly indistinguishable case pattern, despite hosting no potential "superspreader" events.
Moving on to the results begotten by those draconian policies, it is of paramount importance to note most of the excess deaths of last year were driven by our governments' measures. As Daniela Lamas, a critical care doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, has written in a Washington Post article, "[t]hough we have always known that the cost of this pandemic would be greater than the number of the dead, we are only beginning to understand its true magnitude. In what might be a final wave of this pandemic, we find ourselves treating patients who have avoided the virus only to succumb to its many unintended consequences — addiction, untreated disease and despair". However, it was not the pandemic that caused this single-minded focus, where Covid-19 is the only harm to be taken into account. Instead, it was the government-imposed policies enacted in response to the pandemic. Without surprise, a pathogen alone with such a narrow demographic impact cannot cause such devastation in so many. In reality, it has been the NPIs that locked people out of their workplaces, schools, hospitals, and churches, wrecking life for billions of people worldwide. "The long shadow of this disease is everywhere," Ms Lamas writes. Although it is a long shadow all right, the shadow belongs to government interventionism mainly, and, partially, the public panic fueled by media hysteria that led people to acquiesce to massive violations of their rights and freedoms. Sadly, the refusal by the media to report objectively and soberly the facts about the kung-flu and - like the link between obesity and the risk of dying from Covid-19 -, especially, the calamity occasioned by overstepping technocrats is keeping the public in the dark to this day, believing these actions to be absolutely necessary to control the spread of the virus and, consequently, to keep deaths at a minimum. In conclusion, that is the problem with all this absurdity. Our rulers act on the grounds the virus can be controlled. Unsurprisingly, and as I exposed on those graphs above, the kung-flu, once it reaches a territory unchecked in the middle of the Covid/flu season, it is impossible to stop its advance, no matter how stringent populations become. To draw a parallel with ancient times, our rulers are stealing from the playbook of the shamans. These measures are nothing more than modern versions of the rituals and sacrifices our ancestors performed to please the gods. In those days, in order to make sure, or try to, the harvest would yield enough food for the population, they would do things like the rain dance or slaughtering thousands of individuals, particularly virgin girls, to make the gods happy and, in turn, allowing the crops to be fruitful. On the one hand, if the harvest turned out to be a bonanza of food, the people would link that outcome to those practices, with the priests and rulers being exolted for their good leadership and superior intellect and powers (for communicating with the gods and knowing what they want). On the other hand, if the harvest became a failure, then the shamans and leaders would simply declare the sacrifices were not enough or that the gods disliked the offerings - perhaps the virgin was a bleeder. In this case, they would double down, triple down, and so on, until a generous harvest season would arrive. Obviously, they had to do this so as to maintain the illusion of having dominion over nature and, therefore, keep the people (happily) under their rule. In the end of the day, that is what this all boils down to: superstition. Whether one carries a shamrock or horseshoe for good luck, or someone else consults a clairvoyant, they both do it to have a sense of control in the chaos that is life. Nevertheless, going back to the present, the public is increasingly being more doubtful about the true danger the kung-flu has posed, in particular the actual death toll caused by the virus and not being a mere coincidence. In other words, they are beginning to question what is the real amount of individuals that died from Covid and not with Covid. Around the globe, ever more swaths of people are realising that lockdowns were pointless, unnecessary, and destructive. Those who hold positions of authority in politics, belong to the media or others who have been spewing fearmongering spatter through our screens for the past twelve months are bound to face a reckoning. Will the modern day shamans lose control of the situation? Are the people finally discerning the technocrats powerlessness and irrelevance? Let us not jinx it, though I am keeping my fingers crossed and kissing my rabbit's foot. To cap it all off, if the technocracy loses its grip in this field, could this sceptical stance expand into other areas, say the monetary, the financial or the economic ones? Sure, if that is God's will.
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AuthorDaniel Gomes Luís Archives
March 2024
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