Wanted: a vaccine against ignorance and hysteria

With the strong possibility of some sort of workable vaccine against Covid seemingly weeks away, what I now expect to happen is that the government will fool people into thinking it is a panacea, in the same way they have fooled people into believing that the virus was on par with the bubonic plague, and that lockdowns, masks and quarantines were effective at reducing its spread.

Our masters would like you to think that the danger to us was, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 without the vaccine, but with a vaccine to be about 2; this is nonsense - in reality it will have gone from maybe 6.6 to 6.5, probably not even that. Going into a crowded room and being at risk of contracting a viral infection is roughly the same in 2020 as it was in 1939, 1977 and will be in 2045, but they’re hardly going to tell you that. It’s all about the optics, and fooling easily fooled people. Political parties have been promising all sorts for years; now they are promising stopping death.

Imagine all the lies of politicians you’ve heard over the years - and you know they’re lies, you’ve discussed that with friends - and squash them all into one MASSIVE lie. That’s where we are in 2020.

As we have seen this year, 21st century citizens are if anything more gullible than those who came before them (I'm not just including Covid reaction in that remark). So much for the glorious ideal of each generation being more worldly and wise than the last. Their culpability has helped to foster this hell, and when we finally do emerge from it, the scars will last for many years: you simply cannot come up with a more exquisite way of destroying the economic and social fabric of your country than through lockdowns. It’s no wonder they were never tried before to manage the spread of a virus: a) they almost certainly don’t stop the spread, b) the horrific damage they cause in many other areas is off the scale. 

This shamdemic, this Kim Kardashian of viruses - famous for being famous - did not even warrant such extreme measures. It has an IFR of roughly that of a bad seasonal flu, and unlike flu almost exclusively kills the very old or those who were very sick already. And yet governments around the world chose these lockdown policies, copied from the foulest totalitarian regime on the planet. I feel that the main question that needs answering is why did we get the scientists we got on Sage, such as Whitty and Vallance (aka Witless and Unbalanced), the gruesome twosome near the top of the decision-making process. (Apparently Vallance is a hard-left Labour supporter - late in March did he back the reversal of his previous mitigation strategy and twig that he could destroy capitalism through lockdowns?) Why did we not get the sensible scientists, such as those who signed the Great Barrington Declaration? Why did we get who we got? The answer to that question is absolutely key in understanding the government’s destruction of the country, and it’s a deep question. We need not so much a thorough public enquiry as the equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials, for the misery that has been inflicted on millions for no good reason.

When was the last time you literally jumped for joy? Properly felt ecstatic, managing to temporarily shrug the weight of existence off your shoulders? The accumulated happy memories that will have never been formed run into millions of hours. Things you would have done you have not done either because of lockdowns, testing (which rather than making things better, makes them worse, as interpreted by current government guidance) or other dumb restrictions imposed on people and businesses.

I’m watching Professional Masterchef at the moment (literally the only BBC programme I’ve watched for four or five months) and it’s a pantomime. It’s still a good show, the least dumbed down and least PC of the Masterchefs, but Covid rules have led to all sorts of changes about the number of people allowed in one room and how the dishes are tasted. It’s more theatre than science. If the competition had been conducted in exactly the same way as before, there would have been little to no difference in the number of London hospital admissions. You could be generous and say it’s actually quite sweet and kind that they do this sort of thing - but like so much we’ve seen this year, it’s all for effect. 

Most people are ignorant about most things. That’s not a nihilistic or nasty thing to say, it’s just the truth. What is worrying is that the ignorance goes right to the top. The latest lockdown utterly damns the PM: on being presented a graph showing 4,000 deaths a day his alarm bells should have well and truly gone off. This would be DOUBLE the rate that Brazil (population: 210 million) had at its PEAK. You only need to be semi-competent to think 'hang on, something's not right here'. Anyone could have seen it as scaremongering bunkum. And a prime minister DEFINITELY should have seen it as bunkum. But no, he didn't, he went ahead and ordered another catastrophic lockdown. He is not fit to lead this country; his actions are unforgivable.

But it’s also hard not to blame ordinary folk who seem totally unable to assess the evidence right in front of their eyes. Take masks. How can it not register with them that deaths plummeted when we didn’t have to wear masks - and virtually no [unmasked] shop workers got ill during the peak despite serving thousands of customers who were not masked. And then we had to start wearing them, and not long after that the government warned of a 'second wave'. So much for their effectiveness! Why are people so stupid? Why do people think that they might get ill from passing a stranger momentarily in the open air? The harsh conclusion you come to: people are stupid; governments know people are stupid; governments then exploit the stupid. The government could have highlighted the fact that open air transmission on the street is virtually impossible, but they chose not to.

Most people do not realise that their tea towels which they use to dry their dishes are covered with germs, and it would be better not to wipe the dishes at all. They don’t know that billions of bacteria crawl all over the skin all the time. They have no idea that there are more germs on their desk at work than there are on the surfaces in the office loo. They don’t know that there are more bacteria in the mouth than the anus. A lot of people are more nervous about the flight they are about to take than the car journey they took to get to the airport, despite the fact that their chances of death are far greater on the car journey than on the flight. People say “bless you” when somebody sneezes, despite having no idea why they are saying it.

With regards to this virus, a recent poll showed that the public think the average age of Covid death is 65 and that the virus is the UK’s biggest killer. In truth, the real average is 82.4 years (above average UK life expectancy), and in September Covid was the 19th cause of death in England and the 24th in Wales. Yet even when they are informed they are wrong, many will not believe it. 

One of the reasons why people are as pliable as soft wax is that most don’t have the time or inclination to properly study the data. How many people actually read, I mean properly: sit down and really go through the details of something. How much easier it is to get a snapshot from Twitter or Facebook or TV. People have lives, they’re bringing children up, they’re caring for elderly parents, they’re seeking a mate. They trust the government and media to deliver them salient and reliable information that governs their daily lives, and this is something that has been seriously abused by this administration, the state broadcaster and many other outlets.

It all makes me think: what has been the point in my reading hundreds of books over the last 40 years? Why did I bother with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, George Orwell, Matt Ridley, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and scores of others, because it’s only made me angry when I see that the vast majority of folk haven’t read widely and are blissfully ignorant about so, so much in life? Why didn’t I just stay ignorant, it would have been a lot less painful for me. Ignorance is bliss, they say, and I’m almost beginning to believe it.

Which is now what the government is depending upon, to get them off the hook. Lockdowns are the biggest scandals of all time, this land’s greatest ever political, moral, economic and health disaster. There’s no way, though, that they can ever let people know that they have had a year of their lives stolen for no good reason, that the death rate would have been no higher, in fact almost certainly would have been lower, if there had been no lockdowns, and no grotesque rules and restrictions that made daily life intolerable. That masks do nothing to stop microscopic viral pathogens but everything to limit the intake of air good for lung function; that travel quarantines imposed after the disease was endemic did nothing except destroy the travel industry and stop people from having psychologically beneficial holidays; that PCR testing was hopelessly unreliable and did little but give the government another excuse to ramp up the hysteria, while imprisoning people who were perfectly healthy and of no threat to anyone else.

It’s a tragedy that they will probably get away with all this. Ignorance and hysteria are a natural part of human societies. For many years after Darwin most people still believed in an almighty creator; years after Newton people still believed that the Earth was the centre of the galaxy. Creationism, astrology and homeopathy still have their supporters (there are even a few Flat Earthers). For years after this tragic debacle, most people will probably still believe that governments did the right thing in 2020 to combat this virus. It’s painful to realise that something you invested so much time in was cataclysmically wrong. 

I’ll end on a mildly optimistic note, using an unlikely source. The late Jimmy Savile’s reputation went from national treasure to loathed animal almost literally overnight, when his crimes were exposed. Maybe the crimes of our government will be exposed in such a speedy and effective manner. We can hope so, but the terrible damage will still have been done.