Time to wake up to political manipulation over Covid 19

 

Public gullibility has been taken to new levels with the meek acceptance of outrageous actions by politicians and bureaucrats taken under the pretence of keeping us safe from a viral pandemic. Mandatory vaccinations and lockdowns have seen broad compliance but have shown little benefit.

Take a look at Sweden. Remember when it refused to lock down and news outlets gravely warned that half the country would die? You don’t hear much about Sweden these days because Scandinavia had the lowest excess mortality of any European country last year — approximately 785 per 1million people. By comparison, the United Kingdom had 1,657 per million excess deaths.

Sweden decided to do what other countries refused to: focus on protecting the most vulnerable while letting the vast majority who were not in mortal danger live as normal a life as possible and trust their sense of personal responsibility.

Politicians have learned learned a lesson from COVID, but it’s not what is best for the community , Instead, they have learned how gullible the community is and how far their power extends. They also learned that a pliable media will eagerly spread their propaganda without question.

James Allan, Garrick professor of law at the University of Queensland is very specific in his comments on the politics of the Covid response. “Vaccine mandates are a terrible mistake. They are illiberal. They segregate members of society, jettisoning equality before the law. To be remotely defensible, the disease against which they are aimed should surely be very lethal, like the Spanish flu or the Black Death. Yet Covid-19 comes nowhere near the level of lethality needed to justify what amounts to a huge inroad into the basic standards of a functioning liberal democracy.

If your inclination is to support mandates, remember this: for those who catch Covid-19 and who are not vaccinated, 99.7 per cent survive. For those under 50, you’ll get about one death for every 50,000 people who catch it. This virus is dangerous, but it is selectively dangerous. If you are over 80, or obese, or have a number of co-morbidities, then look out.

Of course all of those dangers diminish with widespread vaccination. But the question here is whether you wish to throw away the core elements of living in a liberal democracy to move towards soft despotism and soft segregationism – whether you support segregating certain people, thereby making it impossible for them to work or go to entertainment venues or do much other than eat – for a disease with that level of danger. I certainly do not. I think it’s disgraceful. And to be clear, I have been double vaccinated” Professor Garrick said.

I never imagined a day would come when almost everyone in the public-health hierarchy would be chanting “group benefits should trump all individual decision-making calls”. Yet that is precisely what the doctorly caste (and their enablers in the political class) are proposing, however they try to disguise it.

For that to make sense, first there needs to be clear evidence that unvaccinated people are considerably more likely to transmit Covid than the vaccinated. You won’t hear this in the media, but there is no such evidence. Indeed, most of the recent studies point the other way. A November Yale study concluded “clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons”.

One in the scientific journal Nature showed the effectiveness of vaccines in reducing transmission fades to practically zero after three months. In heavily vaccinated Germany, things were worse on all metrics in 2021 than in 2020, when there were no vaccines.

The facts are now clear that the gains (if any) from heavy-handed vaccine mandates (that would cost people jobs and severely affect dissenting students) are so marginal that they patently do not justify the restriction of liberty.

Moreover, once we have started down a path on which tiny gains in public health do justify the suspension of our liberties, that opens the door to many more restrictions in return for other supposed benefits. You have to have heroic levels of trust in government to think mandates are a good idea, especially now it is plain that the overwhelming benefit of the vaccine flows to those who take it for a few months per shot, and almost none to bystanders. Remember, Omicron was spread rapidly all over the world solely by the fully vaccinated and masked-while-flying travellers, as only they could travel internationally during this time.

Vaccine mandates amount to terrible, illiberal public policy. The government says it is against such mandates but it takes virtually no concrete steps to put its money where its mouth is, preferring weasel-word formulations about leaving it to businesses to decide.