By Steve Apfel
It could be the most diabolical disclosure ever made. The lives of billions were wrecked for nothing.
Public health experts have conceded that COVIDÂ may be a permanent part of our lives. A pandemic has become endemic. They locked us up, to give the virus nowhere to spread â something never tried before.
We expected to get back our lives before too long. It didnât work out that way. The freedoms of movement and association and revealing the face â all fundaments of civilization â 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 donât even speak, because a politician who stoops to apologize has âlost it.â
All the devastation, paralysis, and permanent harm to the fabric of society havenât 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 isnât a realistic probability, and containment would appear to be the most realistic vision for the future.
âContainment.â 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 heâd do that, working alongside the most corrupt politicians on earth. A pandemic of mental illness, theyâd 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.
âWhen liberty is taken away by force, it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished by default it can never be recovered.â
The âno regretsâ 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 âleave it beâ 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, COVIDÂ 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 Institutionâs Niall Ferguson quotes someoneâs recollection of pandemics in the 1900s.
âThere 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 fourâŠ. We took the Asian flu in our stride.â
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! Israelâs 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 UNâs 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 Platoâs Republic, he didnât 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 Platoâs Socrates and Homerâs Achilles from their noble missions. Todayâs officials and experts are wimps promoting risk-aversion behavior. Theyâve turned fear and hypochondria and cowardice into noble virtues.
They also corrupted science. If science wasnât already subservient to politics pre-COVID, it certainly is now. The same crowd claims the high ground: âWe follow the science.â The âNeanderthalsâ who follow their human rights, electing not to get jabbed, are âanti-science.â
About this divide, we must observe some particularities. First, it is more a political divide than a medical one. The righteous âfollowers of scienceâ tend to be progressives while the âNeanderthalsâ 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 COVIDÂ 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, âI wonât be doing it personally.â From that moment, the mask became a symbol of civic virtue; as a journalist put it, âa sort of Black Lives Matter flag that could be hung from oneâs face. For many it conveyed a tripod of virtues: Iâm unselfish; Iâm pro-science; Iâm anti-Trump.â
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 COVIDÂ 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 hadnât 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 âsuper-spreaders, âas if the over 100 million adults still not fully vaccinated were red-state rubes who packed honky-tonk bars and motorcycle rallies.â in the phrasing of essayist Victor Davis Hanson. âYet the reality was quite different.â
What was the reality? Two million illegal aliens will, courtesy of Joe Biden, will cross the southern border. Theyâll have legal impunity, but not vaccinated immunity. They wonât even be tested for COVID. A recent breakout of infections, among the vaccinated, in Princetown, Massachusetts, wasnât 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 isnât. Public health is burdened with platforms and agendas, with party and personal power plays.
Experts got the world into the mess itâs in. Now theyâve 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 hereâs the thing. The same crowd who want to jab you against your will, insists on a womanâs right to abortion. Itâs her body, they assert (Actually being the fetusâs body, they are not following the science). Your body, however, they are prepared to violate with jabs.
The bad donât always slouch around in dark clothes and have tattoos. As often as not they wear white coats, and have âprofessorâ on their business cards.
