We’re publishing a guest post this morning by Steve Waterson, Commercial Editor of the Australian. He is concerned that a myth is quickly growing in Australia that the country managed the pandemic rather well. As he points out, that’s only true if you ignore the curfews, the house arrest, no visitors, toilet paper battles, five-kilometre limits, an hour a day of exercise, closed borders, internationally and internally, closed pubs, restaurants, shops, parks, gyms, beaches and golf courses.
At a Sydney restaurant last month I found myself sitting next to a woman I’d never met before, the wife of one of the other guests.
We’d already endured the unattractive, passive-aggressive, American-style formulation of “I need you to check in”, from one of the staff, who then “needed” us to wear a mask for the five metres and six seconds between the entrance and our table.
My old-man mutterings about a time when people began such requests with “Would you mind …” or “Could I trouble you to …” were interrupted by my cheery new dining companion. “You shouldn’t really be complaining,” she smiled. “Australia has done better than anywhere else in handling the pandemic.”
Heroically resisting the urge to up-end the table, I made a few polite observations in response, until my wife gave me her “nobody needs another rant from you” look and piloted the conversation into more tranquil waters.
It’s barely two years since the Covid lunacy first infected us, but already its history is being rewritten. In newspaper columns and on television, opinion-laden pundits are patting the enforcers and the obedient on the back, reassuring themselves with this dazzling myth that we managed our pandemic with admirable wisdom and efficiency.
Lacklustre politicians are understandably keen to embrace and promote this view, starting with the Prime Minister’s mantra that we “saved 30,000 lives”. Did we, though? Figures emerging from the few places that didn’t impose life-changing restrictions on their populations suggest they made next to no difference.
At best we tacked an extra couple of months on to the lives of some very old people in nursing homes, then immediately cancelled whatever benefit that afforded them by turning their last weeks into a lonely, bewildering, miserable slide towards the grave when they were forbidden to see family and friends and were attended by carers dressed like astronauts. They’re mostly dead by now, but I trust they slipped away with a message of gratitude on their lips.
Have we forgotten what we went through? Is there a societal equivalent of the mechanism by which we suppress the memory of acute pain?
Before the narrative is embedded too deeply to remove, thereby permitting the same ludicrous weapons to be deployed when the next crisis occurs, perhaps we should remind ourselves of some of the highlights of our exemplary Covid performance.
Oh yes indeed, we got through the pandemic better than anyone else, as long as you’re prepared to ignore the curfews. The house arrest. No visitors. Toilet paper battles. Five-kilometre limits. An hour a day of exercise. Closed borders, internationally and internally. Closed pubs, restaurants, shops, parks, gyms, beaches, golf courses.
What else? No hospital or home visits to dying parents or children. No funerals or weddings. No holidays, reunions, gap years. No school or university. No jobs. Small businesses destroyed. A mental-health crisis. Surgeries and medical screenings suspended.
Then the impositions: carrying ID papers outside your home. QR codes. Contact tracing. Masks. Vaccine passports and mandates. Quarantine. Isolation. Protests forbidden. Monstrous fines. The thin blue line of pepper spray and truncheons.
That’s probably enough to be getting on with. Except to note that the whole mad exercise by now will have cost us almost half a trillion dollars. If that’s success, you’d hate to see what failure looks like.
And it’s still not over. Britain and other European countries, much harder hit than we ever were, are lifting all their Covid-related rules; but here, time ran out this week for hundreds of lowly supermarket employees who didn’t want to be vaccinated, punted from their jobs even as unvaccinated customers were flooding, maskless, back into their aisles. Their vaccinated colleagues in the retail sector, meanwhile, are recommended by state governments to continue to wear masks “to protect vulnerable people who must access these premises and services”.
This novel notion that ordinary citizens are obliged to make whatever sacrifices pop into our health bureaucrats’ twisted brains to save their vulnerable neighbours is getting a little sinister. There’s a small number of people I’d feel obliged to protect if they were in danger – family, a few friends, some of their less obnoxious children – but I assume, and expect, that everyone else will similarly see to themselves and their own. We pay substantial taxes to ensure the state takes care of those in genuine need, and my responsibility to the rest of Australia is to behave myself and do as little harm as possible.
It’s a shame if there are people so fragile that contracting Covid is a death sentence, but that’s life in all its savage unfairness. Perhaps I’m an unfeeling monster, but I’m puzzled that their frailty entitles them to have all 25 million of us accommodate their needs, rather than take the appropriate precautions themselves. Is it genuine selflessness that motivates the shoppers who continue to wear masks, or fear? Or even, as I’m starting to suspect, ugly faces?
When America’s doomed experiment of Prohibition ended in 1933, there were counties in many of the Southern states that dreaded the return of alcohol to their towns, and they are still “dry” to this day. The same appears likely to ensue in parts of this country, with vestigial, nonsensical regulations set to remain in force in perpetuity.
How else can we explain the lingering idiocy of the mask rules? In NSW they are still required in “high-risk settings”, such as on public transport. How sitting next to someone for five minutes on a bus or ferry presents a higher risk than sitting next to a stranger for two hours in a cinema defeats me, but it was never about logic, was it? In Victoria, masks are no longer required in most indoor settings, but you still face a fine if they catch you outside the house without one in your pocket.
Pity the poor politicians: it’s so very, very hard to let go, particularly if you’re a certifiable cretin. There are no density limits in our parliaments.
One consolation is that we’re not in freedom-loving Canada, where the measured response to the truckers’ anti-vaccine mandate blockade of Ottawa was to cancel their driving licences, freeze their bank accounts and seize their pets. With luck the truckers will never bring their semi-trailers to the capital again. It would be amusing to see how long the government could go without their maple syrup and poutine, eh? Or in PM Justin Trudeau’s case, without tins of shoe polish for when he’s putting on his party face.
Elsewhere, world affairs reveal how flimsy are the rights and institutions we take for granted, and put this fading disease and our response to it into perspective. Let’s hope we can one day rule a line under these two years of stupidity and focus on more important matters.
Should that day ever arrive, and you find yourself feeling unmoored, nostalgic for the days when ridiculous politicians and their lickspittle minions blew their meddling noses all over your private business, remember the Western Australia fun park has just reopened (the state was shut down for one case last year, but opens now with thousands of cases every day; but again, it’s not about logic, is it?).
Ignore the sneering insults thrown your way in recent months by WA’s profoundly unimpressive Premier, jump on a plane and head west for a taste of the golden era of government overreach, where lockdown remains a thrilling possibility!
Getting in couldn’t be easier: if you’re double-vaccinated, have a valid G2G pass, take a rapid antigen test, carry proof of vaccination, wear a mask everywhere indoors, you’ll be welcomed and encouraged to savour the touristic wonders of the state. My mistake, sorry: that only applies to people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela or any other dump around the world. Interstate Australians will be denied entry unless they can show they’ve had a third vaccine shot.
WA’s obstacle course is moronic, sure, but don’t expect it to disappear in a hurry. Instead rejoice in the inventiveness of our highly placed buffoons, who can be relied upon to deliver a series of comic masterpieces to lift our spirits in troubled times.
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“Long covid” seems to me to be an invention of covidians. Don’t see why the onus should be on us to prove it’s not really a thing.
Haven’t some people always suffered from poorer health than others, especially after they’ve had a nasty cold or flu or whatever? Is there any evidence that this tendency has increased since “covid”? If it has, how do we know it’s “covid” and not the “vaccines”?
Munchausen syndrome is a known thing.
So are Long Quacksines. They suffer from 1. Stupid. 2. Poisons in their blood stream. There, solved it for ‘the science’ ™.
Long covid = vaccine damage!
Tax payer funded employment is a good indicator for Long Covid.
Tax payer funded pretend employment might be a better description?
The ONS reported much the same a year and a half ago. ‘More than half of those who are suffering “from” long Covid might not actually have it.’ Not quite the same as establishing that they were not infected with covid at all, but close.
Daily Sceptic report, quoting the Daily Telegraph (16/09/21).
I’m glad I read this ‘stack from Paul Alexander because I am in complete alignment with his thinking presently regarding this whole virus scam. Agree with him 100% here;
”I think thus in some sense, there was NO virus, no pandemic, it was never a pandemic, ever, all of this was a fraud, we were fooled completely, nothing was correct! Asymptomatic transmission, equal risk of severe outcome if exposed. All of it. Everything was made up and a lie! There was NO virus, no coronavirus that caused a lethal pandemic, NO…and my thinking has evolved and I am reading and talking and studying daily! I do think there was some kind of release of something noxious, maybe even a respiratory type agent, even pathogen that was even circulating way before Feb 2020, and I do think a deliberate controlled multiple point release to give the sense that it is high infectious spreading across the world rapidly, all driven too by the fraud flawed over-cycled PCR test, the PCR test made the fraud pandemic and caused you to dive under your bed in fear. But it is and was all a lie! Complete!
I am near certain now! All we needed was common-sense. That is all. And Yeadon and Couey are over the target and I have saying this in different ways all along…”
https://palexander.substack.com/p/today-i-am-closer-to-a-combined-jay
I have to say that I have been on the same journey and tend towards making the same conclusion now.
Yeadon, Delingpole and now Martin Neil&co are just too convincing, and none of their observations and conclusions articulated in that regard over the last month requires to dive in or settle the futile general virus non-isolation/non-existence issue and debate.
It’s almost funny: after having been accused to be Covid-denier but not being one, I/we are now proudly and reasonably proclaiming to be one.
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/peek-a-boo-flu
Indeed, I saw that Peek-a-boo Flu article, and it was a real eye-opener! Viral interference happens, but it seems like it is more likely for flu, rhino, and RSV to block Covid than the other way around. Unless, of course, the lockdowns and antisocial distancing knocked out the competition just enough to pave the way for Covid to have an advantage and also select for the nastiest strains. That of course would be the exact opposite of victory, but would certainly explain a lot!
The only other explanation, of course, is that it was all one big lie all along.
Indeed, as time goes on, I am doubting even more and more that there ever was even any such thing at all. Iatrogenesis (in its many forms, both by omission as well as commission) alone can explain a good chunk of what happened, including excess deaths, and the rest can be explained by outright fraud and mass hysteria. Ok, maybe there technically was a virus (or viral clone or whatever) that they decided to call SARS-CoV-2. But by and large, it really wasn’t all that special.
A Bangladesh study found that just three nutrients in sufficient amounts (Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Zinc) would have ended or prevented the pandemic, whatever it really was. And just three tablets of azithromycin or doxycycline, that is, the pre-2020 standard of care for pneumonia, would have also saved countless lives as well, as a good chunk of the deaths were from secondary bacterial infections. Three nutrients, three tablets, three lost years we will never get back, and millions of unnecessary deaths as well. How will the powers that be ever live this down?
They cannot. That’s why they hustle out of Parliament with their fingers in their ears when Andrew Bridgen or Sir Christopher Chope speak..
I worked in hospitals and GP practices throughout the Hong Kong flu epidemic of autumn/winter 1968/69, when the NHS, the economy and schools weren’t shut down. This outbreak had a higher mortality rate than “covid”, so I knew from day 1 we had a scamdemic on our hands. Stupidly I thought the facts would out. Naively I didn’t take into account the impact of the hysterical propaganda generated by social media! They weren’t around in 1968/69 – thank god.
As some wag mentioned a while back, the absence of flu must mean that “covid” is a cure for flu.
Post Covid-19 Condition? So more like Long Lockdown Condition. Risk factors include lack of physical activity and loneliness.
Indeed, Long Lockdown is very bad, as is Long Jab Injury.
If you are locked up for months on end and fed bad news and doom and gloom you are not going to go around with a smile on your face and be happy with your lot in life. The snivellers are blaming the sniffle. It is always someone else’s fault.
This article is quite helpful for me to understand and to clarify the effects of the virus long term I recently had a bust up with a friend who accused me of being an ‘ableist’ and eugenicist, a) because I promoted the ‘myth’ of herd immunity, and b) because I cared not for those suffering from long covid or had died from covid. I tried to reassure her that the idea of herd immunity had nothing to do with eugenics, but she was having none of it. She seemed unaware or unable to consider the downsides of these ‘gene therapies’.
If anyone here can reassure me that the concept of herd immunity, which has always been the backbone of public health policy for most of my life, is still valid and I’m not going mad, I would be grateful!
Stay with your instincts. Herd immunity is completely valid. Or else the Black Death wouldn’t have stopped on its rampage. Gupta, Kuldorff and Bhattacharya were spot-on.
We just f’d with all that by imposing isolation, masks and pointless jabs. The denial of Natural Immunity (and by extension Herd Immunity) was a lie intended to coerce more non-jabbies to become jabbies. But ‘normal’ jabbing relies on the concept of Herd Immunity.
Doing the jabs, which aren’t sterilising so can’t stop transmission, in the face of ongoing epidemic just led to immune escape which breeds new variants.
Tell he she’s being a Conspiracy Theorist? She’s followed the wrong experts. I sympathize, my family and I are dancing around the same topic and there’s very little willingness to hear me speak.
Herd immunity to pathogens is something which occurs naturally over time as we and various pathogens evolve together. Through exposure we develop immunity to pathogens, since most are not fatal, and even where they are they are not fatal to all. The survivors then pass on the immunity.
If it were not so Humans would have died out many thousands of years ago – before vaccines! Instead we now carry millions of micro-organisms – bacteria and virus – of which we are unaware precisely because our herd has developed natural immunity to them.
The purpose of a mass vaccination programme against a particular pathogen is supposed to speed up acquisition of herd immunity without having to wait for it to develop naturally.
However this should never be done once the pathogen is active and circulating in the population because it encourages the dominance of new evolving variants against which the vaccine can cause no immunity. Worse, when the new variant infects, it may mean the immune system ignores it as it is trained to respond to the original version.
Thus is precisely what happened with CoV 2. The mRNA jollop provides no immune response to new variants, and a ‘distracted’ immune system leaves them unchecked to cause severe symptoms and fatalities.
However this should never be done once the pathogen is active and circulating in the population because it encourages the dominance of new evolving variants against which the vaccine can cause no immunity.
Evolution is not a directed process. Mutations may happen as copying errors during the process of cellular reproduction. Should such a mutation accidentally end up with the affected specimens being better adapted to survive in a certain environment, they’ll reproduce more than other specimens and eventually, the mutation will become dominant because of this. That’s all stuff which might happen if everything happens to fall into place by chance. There’s no pressure put onto anything. And nothing is encouraged here.
There’s also no such thing as natural immunity vs immunity acquired by vaccination or rather, all immunity is natural and manifests itself in response to infection, be they acquired purposely (due to vaccination) or accidentally. The outcome is exactly the same. If Crankdenbossche’s horror theories were true, they would have to apply to accidentally acquired infections as well, or, as you yourself put it, mankind, and for that matter, all other sufficiently developed life forms which can become infected and survive this, would long since have died out.
That the so-called covaxxes are products with a lot of dangerous side effects and no clear benefits is something that’s specific to them.
Regarding your penultimate paragraph,
i understand there is a difference, with regard to the mRNA injections…insofar as they are designed to produce appropriate antibodies towards the spike proteins, but do not also encourage T-cell production/activity – the both kinds of immune responses being required for full natural immunity.
Happy to be corrected if this is not the case, but have read this numerous times.
Your friend has fallen prey to woke Corona’s Witnesses who have retrofitted some of their Really! Bad! Thing! terms onto pandemic policies to sell them.
A so-called ableist (a thoroughly idotic term) is said to be a bad, non-compassionate person because he’s predjudiced against people with disabilities. This is said to apply to people who think it’s OK for infection surges to run their course because Some people will die because of this!! and it’s claimed that this is adequately described as disability of the immune system. Hence, if you say that, you must be in favour of killing disabled people!
The argument is basically the same for eugenicist: Some people will die because of the infection because it’s in their genes! When you accept that, you must be in favour of killing genetically inferior people!
Both of this is horseshit as both are instances of death because of natural causes which will eventually happen to all of us and accepting that deaths because of natural causes happen is not the same as advocating for causing deaths via unnatural causes. People who don’t want to admit the former are also a form of -ists, namely, fantasists.
Indeed. Also, their argument would imply that Mother Nature is SUPER ableist. Be sure to point that out to the Covidians.
A former friend and colleague compared me to Hitler for mentioning herd immunity and saying lockdowns were wrong.
I’ve long since given up trying to argue with covidians – I just think of them as enemies now who want to ruin my life, and I wish they would all just piss off and go and live on Planet Moron with other people who’ve forgotten what being alive entails. I don’t think there’s any hope of reconciliation or converging opinions; these are people who just conceive of life in completely different terms than we do.
The social contract whereby we have coexisted with viruses since time immemorial has been broken and may not be repaired in my lifetime. “The effects of the virus long term” (and in the short term for that matter) may be of interest to some experts working in the field of viruses and public health, but it should be of no interest to the general public or politicians, nor should it be a factor informing major policy decisions. We have far more important things to worry about. If covid existed all, it was profoundly unimportant and there was almost nothing sensible that could be done about it.
We’re under no obligation to prove our case. It’s up the covidians and long covidians to come up with compelling evidence that covid was a societal emergency – and they have completely failed to do so. They spent trillions of dollars and ruined billions of lives for nearly three years and counting and it all failed to make any bloody difference.
So true. When the Branch Covidians reflexively play the eugenics card or the ableist card, they are merely projecting. It is completely disingenuous of them to do so. Herd immunity has been known to be valid since the Athenian Plague of 473 BC. It is the ONLY way pandemics end, as there has never been a single (already active and established) pandemic that has ended via vaccination or lockdowns.
It is of course semantically unfortunate that the term contains the word “herd”, but you can also call it population immunity, community immunity, collective immunity, saturation, running its course, or perhaps even the title of a good Swedish song, “The Final Countdown”.
The partner of a friend was diagnosed by several doctors as having long covid, and nearly lost her job having been off work for months. Multiple drugs are prescribed and her symptoms included depression, weight loss, lack of appetite, insomnia, anxiety and fatigue. It turns out she was going through the menopause, which was eventually diagnosed and treated with HRT.
There’s probably no way of knowing, of course, but was menopause brought on by the vaccines (or maybe even the bug)? Or just because **it happens?
Anyone who knows anything about medicine will know that medicine is 50% science and 50% human psychology.
That’s why I attend lots of patients who are having Epileptic seizures but also lots of ‘patients’ who are pretending to have Epileptic seizures.
It is a recognised condition called pseudo seizures.
If Covid is BS then Long Covid is purified BS.
These are classic psychosomatic symptoms either already existing or caused by the brain acting on suggestion and confirmation bias.
The good news is, like Covid 19, you ain’t gonna die of it.
Its a form of psychosis which many people, being subject to constant mental torture by the government have been driven to, my sister is one such person. She believes there is something wrong with her health and has been haunting her GP’s surgery and undertaken every test known to man only to be told they cannot find anything wrong, unfortunately that hasn’t deterred her!
I feel sorry for your sister – and you. There’s no question something is wrong – whether it’s physiological or psychological is a different question.
For 23 years I had symptoms (which deteriorated), which no doctor or consultant could be bothered to collate & thereby diagnose…& I was sent away with “we can’t find anything, therefore it must be in your head”.
Eventually after another early sudden death of a very close relative – after another 10 years of asking for an appropriate test (expensive echocardiogram) I WAS diagnosed – with a serious hereditary condition.
it had been assumed I didn’t have it “because it’s rare”.
it’s not that rare actually, and a large proportion of those with it are never diagnosed (until too late, if then).
so spare a thought for people with rare diseases. They don’t have good or timely diagnoses in this country, generally.
Indeed, and that is unfortunate. The fakers well and truly ruin it for legit folks like yourself.
Thank you
There is no such thing as ‘Long Covid’. There is long recognised, post viral syndrome…which can follow any viral infection, but we don’t call it Long Influenza, or Long Common Cold.
There is Long Vaccine which can result in a condition called ‘Sudden’.
“Half of ‘Long Covid’ Sufferers Have Never Had Covid” and the other half never had ‘Long Covid’ – they had M.E./Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or vaccine damage or menopausal symptoms or something else.
Covid somehow managed to magically prevent people from getting flu for a couple of years. I suspect ‘Long Covid’ may have similarly somehow managed to magically prevent people from getting M.E./Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for a couple of years. It would be interesting to see the official figures for how many people have been diagnosed with M.E./CFS since 2020 compared to the numbers diagnosed with M.E./CFS in the years before 2020.
“Civil Servants are three times more likely to self-diagnose as suffering from ‘Long Covid’”
and there you have your answer. Okay, so some will inevitably have post-viral illnesses but the rest is psychosomatic or just swinging the lead – easy option for those with a steady income and pension deals (ie. Civil Servants)
And an ability to do hardly any worthwhile work, without any sanctions at all, but still climb the seniority ladder that leads to a taxpayer funded gold plated pension. Slithering Serpents the lot of them