In my column in this week’s Spectator I have tried to answer the question of why the global elite became such enthusiastic supporters of the heavy-handed, statist approach to managing the coronavirus crisis — stay-at home orders, business closures, face masks — and passionate opponents of less draconian alternatives, such as those set out by the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. First, I summarise the explanation that my friend James Delingpole favours:
It’s because these 21st-century robber barons are making money out of the pandemic. According to Robert Watts, who compiles the Sunday Times Rich List, more people have become billionaires in the past year than at any other time in Britain’s history. The combined fortune of these Masters of the Universe has grown by more than a fifth, and the rest of the 1 per cent haven’t done too badly either, thanks to massive government expenditure. Across the developed world, central banks have pumped money into the economy, boosting asset prices and further enriching the plutocratic elite. What’s not to like?
But while I think that’s a factor, I don’t think it’s the whole of the story. I think it’s also because being in favour of non-pharmaceutical interventions is a high-status indicator, a way of advertising that you’re in the same club as tech titans like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and eminent public health scientists like Anthony Fauci and Neil Ferguson.
That’s a term coined by a doctoral student at Cambridge called Robert Henderson. In an article for the New York Post, he defines ‘luxury beliefs’ as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class”. The example he gives is the belief, prevalent in the 1960s, that monogamy is outdated and marriage a source of patriarchal oppression. That doesn’t cost the rich anything because most of them are brought up in bourgeois two-parent households and enter into stable, monogamous marriages. But as the credo of sexual liberation trickled down to the working class it has wreaked havoc, leading to illegitimacy, crime and poverty.
This is where Delingpole goes wrong, I think. The reason Davos Man has outsourced his opinions on the pandemic to the World Health Organisation is not because the policies recommended by Tedros Adhanom enrich him. Rather, it’s because they cost him nothing. He can just as easily work in the shepherd’s hut at the bottom of his garden as he can from his corner office. His children are provided with a full timetable of lessons via Zoom, courtesy of their private school, and if he feels like a holiday abroad he can charter a private jet. Becoming a cheerleader for lockdowns is a way of signalling that he is among the tiny elite of successful people for whom there is zero cost associated with them.
Worth reading in full.
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The short answer is No it is not time to start the Dangerous New Virus!!47 game afresh. It’s time to end it.
A thorough and interesting article covering the origins of Omicron. Was it the result of a lab leak in S. Africa where virology/vaccine research was taking place?
https://www.stopgof.com/english/omicron-origin/
This article isn’t awful, but I don’t think it’s really a good fit for the Daily Sceptic readership. If it appeared in the Guardian then maybe TDS could have a an article about that. That would be mildly newsworthy.
The principal problem with this article is that it accepts the ‘Covid was really dangerous’ lie. A quick look at the footnotes to that FT chart should make the problems with it immediately obvious. The statement that Covid once was 20 times as lethal as the flu is arrived at by comparing all deaths where Covid was mentioned AT ALL on the death certificate (most likely massively overstating Covid deaths, with infection data from the ONS (quite possibly massively understating infections). That then is compared to IFR for regular flu – which the footnotes suggest might have been done properly (who knows of course).
No, this is the biggest lie of all and the one that we must keep challenging as everything that followed flowed from it. Expecting the average person to understand the reasons why vaccine coercion and lockdowns both don’t work and are morally unacceptable, even in response to a truly lethal virus, is too ambitious.
Separately, I’m quite happy for people to believe that Omicron is the much less lethal end state of Covid. It provides and ending of sorts to this story. I don’t want people to believe that Covid is still out there hiding, waiting to kill us all.
Indeed. Only 6000 people out of 130k deaths classified as Covid deaths in England&Wales had Covid as the only cause on their death certificate.
And that is an official figure, likely still overestimating the real one in light of the prohibition of autopsies and other dynamics at play here.
My first thought when reading the headline was, is it time to accept that CoVid 19 is not CoVid 19?
CoVid = abbreviation of Coronavirus Disease = Common Cold.
The ‘19’ (2019) was to give the pretence that it was a ‘novel’ disease caused by a ‘novel’ virus, instead of the same disease that is caused by a number of viruses, including other ancient coronaviruses, of which we have another rather mild variant.
It should have been called JAC… Just Another Coronavirus.
Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the internet suggested it stood for.. ‘Certification Of Vaccination ID – (AI = 1,9)? They’re kidding!!!
Unfortunately the regulators behind the Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and the Big Pharma have no incentive to lose the extraordinarily profitable EUA. Pesky safety trials to ensure a new product is safe and effective are simply not profitable, and as there is no liability then unsafe and ineffective is just fine provided it is highly profitable.
Of course there could have been no EUA had there been any safe and effective treatments like ivermectin and HCQ…. hence the cheep effective treatment bashing by Big Pharma lackeys.
Is it time to start building a gallows yet?
And the Times muppets will not allow their journalists to properly investigate this conflict of interest. Probably for similar reasons.
My conclusion to this article is actually that it shows what a colossal mistake it was (almost certainly a deliberate one) to allow PCR tests to define the disease.
If COVID is a set of symptoms then you can’t declare someone has a disease just because of a test that indicates the probability of the presence of viral material.
We’ve spent 2+ years calling COVID many things that were not COVID.
Is Omicron not COVID? Almost everything that was called COVID since March 2020 hasn’t actually been COVID. Start with that.
Yep. PCR is a gigantic fraud, even without the ones instituted on top of it like non-standardization, arbitrary higher/lower CT for vaxxed/unvaxxed, non confirmation, single snippet search etc. that were all known by June 2020 the latest.
But a very profitable and absolutely essential one to create and milk a plandemic.
I read yesterday that thousands of tests got an EUA, but none has gotten full approval yet, to prevent liability issues.
What else does one need to know?!
Even worse, we’ve spent 2+ years calling people in perfect health ‘infected’ or a ‘case’ (as in an ill patient) when they were no such thing.
Let’s just go back to what we have done for decades and start calling respiratory ailments what we have always done – a cold when mild, a flu when worse. I find the point that a flu virus is far worse than a cold virus moot, as we now know one and the same virus can be a mild cold for some and can lead to weeks of bed rest and pneumonia for others. As generally we did not test for viruses, who knows how many of us in reality did have a flu virus but called it a cold as we were not ill enough to think otherwise.
And yes, above all, let us stop with testing people who are clearly not ill. Having a sniffle or a sore throat is not being ill, it’s being under the weather. The one thing Fraudci was right about (although it was in a vain attempt to try to hide that his pet poison was not working as advertised) is that people should only test if they are admitted to hospital. In someone that ill it may be worth knowing what the exact virus is, for the rest, stay home, have some Lemsip, get some rest, have some Vit D and C and move along.
PCR became the disease. It is a first in medical science that a laboratory reagent to detect a pathogen is a disease.
There can be no disease without symptoms. Being infected is not disease. Daily we are infected with a variety of micro-organisms which we don’t notice because they are innocuous, in insufficient quantity to cause affect, or our immune system bumps them off quickly.
Maybe all this is merely an artefact of testing for a “virus” which has only been characterised by computer simulation of a random sequence of nucleotides apparently found in patient zero (thank you China).
All the rest is a farrago of an intrinsically dodgy PCR/LFT regime?
There is clearly something going round but we have not achieved herd immunity because there is an insufficient reservoir of immune people, ie the had covid but never jabbed.
Unfortunately covid or whatever will continue to circulate due to the vast number of people jabbed with a none sterilising gene based product.
This is evidenced by the jabbed getting repeat infections, despite, or rather because of the jab. There is scientific evidence of VAIDS, OAS, and ADE.
See G.V.Bossche.
Yet we are still jabbing and jabbing kids.
Criminal and madness.
Me thinks Omicron was the wild version, created by leaky mass gene-therapisation against the original man-made bioweapon.
And the only really interesting question left is whether that bioweapon was released accidentally or intentionally.
If it carries on at this rate, ‘The Science’™️ will discover the Common Cold.
Must admit I am partial to Hobgoblin…
Maths teacher in the year 2030. “Today children we are going learn about the dangers of Mathematical Modeling and how it destroys society”
Omicron was never Covid-19 and neither were any of the other variants. Covid-19 is the serious hyperimmune state that may occur following SARS-CoV-2. The same syndrome occurs after other viruses and spontaneously. Different types of SARS-CoV-2 have different risks for Covid-19. Omicron simply has a lower risk. Using the terms SARS-CoV-2 infection and Covid-19 interchangeably, as continues to be done, is clinically and scientifically inaccurate.
One has to wonder whether lab leaks are more common than is being made out. No one has looked back at the sudden emergence of HIV/AIDS in the late 1970s, in light of COVID-19, for starters…
Dr Hope-Simpson was a sceptic who questioned medical orthodoxy. He studied chickenpox and shingles, showing how immunity conferred by natural chickenpox in childhood waned with age; the two conditions were known to be related, but the nature of the relationship was unclear. He showed that a virus could lie dormant in the human body for years or decades and reappear in another form. Later, the single virus responsible for both diseases was identified and isolated by Thomas Huckle Weller.
Hope-Simpson’s career-long interest in the transmission of respiratory viruses was equally inventive. He questioned the theory of person-to-person transmission being enough to explain the simultaneous appearance of influenza in places far apart. He proposed that influenza epidemics during winter may be connected to a seasonal influence, perhaps a lack of vitamin D, as outbreaks in temperate latitudes peak in the month following the winter solstice and disappear the following spring/summer. As the virus mutates, it becomes less virulent and more infectious until the outbreak ends.
Hope-Simpson describes the course of the COVID-19 epidemic pretty well so far, although this virus took longer than flu usually takes to “burn out.” Most respiratory viruses mature and change their character during an outbreak that begins suddenly and then gently subsides.