The only demonstrable
result of government-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns has been
the destruction of national economies, the crippling of
domestic and cultural life, the suffering and death of
multitudes due to untreated prior medical conditions,
and the drastic rise in suicide rates. The lockdowns themselves
have seemed to do little to prevent the onset of the disease,
hence one lockdown after another has led to no discernible
effect—apart from the fact that the virus appears
to strike primarily a designated older cohort of the population
already suffering from comorbidities. A recent graph charting
the effects of repeated lockdowns in the province of Ontario
would appear to indicate that the lockdowns themselves
are super-spreaders. Texas Tech professor Gilbert Berdine
sums up: “After taking the unprecedented economic
depression into account, history will likely judge these
lockdowns to be the greatest policy error of this generation.”
The same applies,
mutatis mutandis, to the mask mandate, somewhat less destructive
but equally absurd. After touting home-made, cloth, and
sundry other masks for six months, Canada’s Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau and his Chief Public Health Officer
Theresa Tam have discovered that Canadians should be wearing
three-layer masks—a tacit admission that the single-
and double-ply masks we have been wearing for all this
time are patently inadequate. Apparently, no-ply also
works, given that our Minister of Health Patty Hajdu was
spotted at Toronto’s Pearson Airport unabashedly
maskless and happily smiling, like her American counterparts
Anthony Fauci at a baseball game and Governor Newsom of
California at his favorite restaurant.
In fact, masks
do not screen out (or keep in) viral microns averaging
100 nanometers in size; the weave of all masks, with the
partial exception of the medical N-95, is far too large
to repel the coronavirus particle, which varies between
60nm and 140nm. Further, masks may cause hypoxia and consequent
immune deficiency through the ingestion of one’s
own CO2. It gets worse. A 50-state-wide controlled study
showed that there is no correlation between mask mandates
and fewer cases. On the contrary, there is a reverse correlation:
non-masking states and counties did better than their
masking counterparts. There is no weeding around the graphic
evidence. One wonders if CO2 -forced immunity depletion
had something to do with this.
As for home
isolation and travel restrictions, they are not taken
seriously by our authorities. According to the Associated
Press, Denver’s mayor flew to Mississippi to spend
Thanksgiving with his family, after urging others to stay
home. A Pennsylvania mayor banned indoor dining, then
patronized a restaurant in Maryland. The governor of Rhode
Island was photographed at a wine tasting. The mayor of
Austin, Texas, flew to Cabo San Lucas on a private jet
after hosting a wedding for 20. It’s common knowledge
that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker & family have
blatantly violated his own travel ban. Michigan Governor
Gretchen Whitmer’s husband was caught attempting
to sidestep her shutdown.
Similarly,
Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator,
after declaring that anyone who traveled over the Thanksgiving
weekend should assume they were infected with COVID-19
and should limit celebrations to “your immediate
household,” traveled to her vacation home in Delaware
during Thanksgiving, “accompanied by three generations
of her family from two households.” These people
must know something the rest of us don’t. As IT
professional Alexander Scipio writes, the political, social,
and economic devastation we are suffering is not caused
by a virus “with a survival rate of well over 99%,”
but by a political and financial class—international
oligarchs—seeking absolute power via “a weaponized
virus from China.” But we go along with it, dutifully
obeying the mandates, as if we were characters in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream bewitched by fairies and spells. “Shall
we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals
be!”
“We
as a society are becoming ever less bookish,” writes
the great Theodore Dalrymple, which means we are becoming
ever less informed, ever less knowledgeable, ever less
educated. Indeed, we are on the whole ever more incurious
and credulous, which is no doubt the permanent condition
and status of the majority of human beings—except
that never in the history of mankind has the accessible
intellectual horizon broadened, at least potentially,
to the extent that it has today: university education
on offer for all, books readily available, libraries,
museums, theaters, concert halls (pre-lockdown) open to
the public, a World Wide Web and computers proliferating
as domestic items. And yet studies suggest that genuine
IQ is deteriorating, people are as gullible as ever, and
mob psychology and identity politics are increasingly
replacing the independent thought of the questing individual.
One might call it Twitteritis.
We are content
to remain in a low-information twilight zone and, just
as bad, to outsource common sense to our political betters,
their hired-gun health officials, and so-called “experts”
who can’t keep their stories straight. Thus, there
is an irresistible tendency, in the face of government
decrees with respect to COVID, to behave like lemmings
obediently surging toward the cliff, “willing to
obey the demands and commands of the world elite,”
writes Sucharit Bhakdi, Chair of Medical Microbiology
at the University of Mainz. He deplores the complete over-reaction
to a virus that could have been handled differently and
far more wisely. True, one must acknowledge those brave
souls who have marched and demonstrated against government
imposition of unconstitutional measures, but they are
small in number, regarded as dissidents, troublemakers,
and “spreaders” by the surrounding population
and disavowed by majority opinion.
And there
in a nutshell is the marrow-deep problem we are confronting.
We can expect our nominal leaders, with few exceptions,
to be incompetent, restrictively educated, partisan zealots,
profoundly unintelligent, and visibly hypocritical. The
spectacle of our politicians brazenly violating the very
rules they have sternly imposed comes as no surprise.
That is par for the course. But the public that should
be keeping our politicians’ feet to the fire are,
at least, equally undistinguished, as well as easily malleable
and fundamentally incurious.
I speak to
my neighbors, to people I meet in the public square, and
to our professionals, medical, legal, and otherwise. When
I point out certain obvious facts, I am usually met with
glazed incomprehension or outright condescension. When
I am informed, for example, that Sweden, which did not
lock down, is currently experiencing the same winter spike
in COVID infections as lockdown countries, and therefore
that not to lock down is a failing strategy, I wonder
at the incapacity for logical deduction. If the results
are the same, I reply, then why in heaven’s name
not keep the kids in school, allow bars, restaurants,
and small businesses to stay open, and preserve the economy
intact? No response. (Sweden, incidentally, remains one
of the few sane countries on the planet.)
