The years of living with increasingly oppressive Covid restrictions and mandates is a tale of many villains complicit in tyranny and a few heroes of resistance. It’s a story of venal, incompetent politicians and brutish police – thugs in uniform – acting at the behest of power-drunk apparatchiks.
Medically idiotic, economically ruinous, socially disruptive and embittering, culturally dystopian, politically despotic: what was there to like in the Covid era?
- Billions, if you were Big Pharma.
- Unchecked power, if you were Big State.
- Power over the whole population of a state and fame with extended daily TV appearances on all channels, if you were a chief medical officer.
- More money and power over the world’s governments and people for the WHO.
- Template for action for climate zealots.
- Dreamtime for cops given free rein to indulge their inner bully.
But anguished despair, if you were a caring, concerned citizen who loves individual freedom and autonomy.
The existing frameworks, processes and institutional safeguards under which liberal democracies operated until 2020 had ensured expanding freedoms, growing prosperity, an enviable lifestyle and quality of life, and educational and health outcomes without precedent in human history. Abandoning them in favour of a tightly centralised small group of decision-makers liberated from any external scrutiny, contestability and accountability, produced both a dysfunctional process and suboptimal outcomes: very modest gains for much long-lasting pain.
In two World Wars, many risked their lives to protect our freedoms, but in the last three years, so many gave up freedoms to prolong lives. There evolved a co-dependency between the uber surveillance state and a Stasi-like snitch society.
Confronted by the coronavirus pandemic as a ‘black swan’ event, most countries chose the hard suppression strategy with variably stringent lockdown measures. There should have been more caution because of the history of failed catastrophist warnings from Professor Neil Ferguson, the Pied Piper of pandemic porn; the massive economic costs which also have deadly impacts; the draconian infringement on individual freedoms; and the availability of other more targeted strategies rather than the mythical ‘do nothing’ alternative.
The science-denying policy interventions inflicted devastating social, economic, educational, health and mental health costs, especially on young people in the long term even though they were at negligible risk of serious harm. It should not, could not possibly have been a surprise to any health specialist that as social creatures, human beings are scarred by social isolation enforced through state diktats promoting the message that humans are disease-ridden biohazards.
For the vast majority of poor people in developing countries, on the one hand Covid was rarely at the top of deadly killer diseases, on the other hand, lockdowns proved to be cruel, heartless and deadly. Their plight was neglected by the very people and countries that loudly trumpet their kind and caring credentials in being concerned about vulnerable and marginalised communities.
Among the most shocking developments as the pandemic dragged on was the degree of coercion and force used by some of the best known champions of democracy and liberty. The boundary between liberal democracy and draconian dictatorship proved to be virus thin. Tools of repression like unleashing heavily armed cops on peacefully protesting citizens, once the identifying traits of fascists, communists and tin-pot despots, became uncomfortably familiar on the streets of Western democracies.
Lockdowns destroyed the three ‘Ls’ of lives, livelihoods and liberties. Governments effectively stole nearly three years of our life. Pre-emptive press self-censorship helped to normalise the rise of the surveillance-cum-biosecurity state in the name of keeping us safe from the virus that is so deadly that hundreds of millions had to be tested to know they’ve had it. Canada’s Freedom Convoy laid bare the stark reality that lockdowns are a class war waged by the laptop class on the working class, by the cultural elites on the great unwashed outside urban centres, and by the virtue signallers on independent free thinkers.
Australia provoked international incredulity at the brutality of its authoritarian measures to “crush and kill the virus“. The defining image of the pandemic state of siege in Australia will remain the case of Zoe Buhler, the pregnant mum handcuffed in her lounge room in front of her children. The episode is the very definition of a police state. Having crossed that Rubicon, how do we walk Australia back? A good start would be criminal prosecution of cops executing dictatorial edicts and of the officers and ministers authorising such action.
Vaccines were initially recommended and subsequently mandated on the slogan that ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’, ignoring the admission implicit in the slogan that they do not protect the vaccinated. Opposition to vaccine mandates hardened with evidence of gaslighting on the benefits, denialism on the collateral harms, refusal either to conduct or else to publish the results of cost-benefit analyses, and banning of alternative treatment options. The policy conclusion is to lift mandates in public settings and prohibit companies from imposing them in most business settings, leaving it instead for people to make informed decisions in consultation with their doctors, without pressure on the latter from drug regulators. And take back all those who were fired for refusing the jab.
The longer the health authorities pushed COVID-19 vaccination, exaggerating its benefits, downplaying its rapidly waning efficacy, ignoring safety signals on its list of harms and banning alternatives, the more attention turned to the role of drug regulators enabling pharmaceutical interventions rather than acting as watchdogs on behalf of public health and safety. Health authorities and regulators shifted the balance decisively from being individual-centric in liberal democracies to the collective safetyism of technocrats and experts.
The WHO’s performance proved patchy. Its credibility was badly damaged by tardiness in raising the alarm, the shabby treatment of Taiwan at China’s behest, the initial investigation that whitewashed the origins of the virus, and by flip-flops on masks and lockdowns that contradicted its own collective wisdom developed over a century as distilled in a report in 2019. This makes it all the more surprising that there should be a concerted effort underway to expand its authority and boost its resources by means of a new global pandemic treaty and amendments to the binding International Health Regulations.
In reporting on Covid, journalists abandoned their cynicism towards official claims and instead became addicted to fear porn. A critical and sceptical profession would have put the Government’s and modellers’ claims under the blowtorch and subjected them to withering criticism for the magnitude of errors in their predictions. Instead, we went “from disinterested journalism to Pravda in a single bound“, as Janet Daley put it in the Telegraph. Indeed, all institutional checks on overreach and abuse of executive power – legislatures, the judiciary, human rights machinery, professional associations, trade unions, the Church and the media – turned out to be unfit for purpose.
We have had to relearn two abiding verities: once governments have acquired more powers, they rarely relinquish them voluntarily; and any new power that can be abused will be abused, if not today by current agents of state then sometime in the future by their successors. Like people with command responsibility when crimes against humanity are committed by foot soldiers, the highest level decision-makers need to be held to account. This is important to ensure misdeeds are punished, victims are helped to achieve emotional closure, and future acts of comparable malfeasance are deterred.
Will Covid illiberalism be rolled back or has it become a permanent feature of the political landscape in the democratic West? The head says to fear the worst, but an eternally optimistic heart still hopes for the best.
Ramesh Thakur, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General, is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute, and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. His new book, Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (Brownstone Institute, 2023), is out now.
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It is truly remarkable how keen governments worldwide are to ignore this.
I adore your sarcasm
I personally know 3 people who ended up in hospital having heart ops after the vaccine in 2021; it may be that they had underlying weaknesses which were exploited by the vaccine and that was a pattern I saw throughout 2021. Never before, never since.
To add to the heart cases I personally knew:
1 complete kidney failure (for 3 weeks until the effects of the jab wore off) stated by the hospital to have been induced by the jab
1 liver failure ( underlying condition which had been well managed until the jab)
1 pericarditis after the first jab, unbelievably he was advised he could have the second one, which he did and which predictably made him worse
1 man with copd who had spent 2 years completely isolated apart from getting the jabs, died from an undiagnosed issue with his heart (not copd as was expected) following 3 spells in hospital after the booster
1 x healthy 32 year old with a stroke
The thing is, most of these would be described as underlying conditions if they had died. So, as indicated in the article, the numbers dying from the jab must be much higher than this study suggests.
Yet people still refuse to believe it.
It’s not that they refuse to believe it. They do not want to believe it, for rather understandable reasons. To me it is quite clear that an ever-increasing number of people are indeed believing it and getting very concerned.
Fair point, and you are right, there is much more scepticism about vaccines generally now.
That may well be true, and if it is, we could be looking at further “side effects” caused by it – via other illnesses in the long term.
A friend whose husband has now had two serious heart attacks post jabs has finally accepted that there may, at the very least, be a connection and they won’t be having any more.
I have posted this before, a friend of mine died from a massive heart attack less than 24 hours after being “boosted.” He was at home and had no prior heart problems, working and fit. The coroner refused an autopsy on the grounds that his death was one of those things but definitely nothing to do with the “vaccine.”
Yeah right.
Not fully stabbinated until day 21…so based on the ‘rules’ the quacksines were not responsible, says the cult and religion of the vaxxgod.
They are paid agents of Pfzier the quacks, and they are fully indoctrinated into the mythical powers of Promethean Pfizer.
I’m not sure why the case of VITT is in the inconclusive 20. Surely, doctors have decided the death of this 38 year old man was caused by the AZ injection by definition?
As documented and predicted by Burkhardt, Bhakdi et al many months ago.
The autopsy data, together with the information that Moderna patented, in 2016, a 19 nucleotide portion of the SARS-CoV-2 genome encompassing the furin cleavage site, can lead to no other plausible explanation:
We are looking at pre-meditated murder.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.834808/full
Pre-medicated murder?
It’s murder alright. Mass murder.
I’m also keen to know how often the fibrinogen growths are found in sudden deaths, and are these curious structures ever found in unvaccinated cadavers.
I suppose we’re talking of a completely different finding; the report under discussion is concerned with myocarditis and heart damage whereas the growths may not necessarily be linked.
At least someone is investigating at last, and the reports are being published; thank God.
Maybe it’s just a matter of time until these things are analysed.
Next door neighbour found dead from a heart attack. Just heard a neighbour a few doors down (didn’t know him – a nearer neighbour told me) also died from a heart attack. Husband of a local acquaintance also died from a heart attack. This was all in the last six months.
A friend was in hospital for two weeks with myocarditis after being boosted. I understand he still gets tired walking up stairs and so on. This is the only one that is definitely the vaxx. He accepts that it must be, although as far as I know he just considers himself unlucky.
It pains me that all of these people will be forgotten victims, washed away in time, like tears in rain.
So the Covid “vaccines” don’t work.
They’re also killing people.
Masks don’t work.
Lockdowns don’t work.
Who knew?
One day perhaps we’ll also learn that humans aren’t causing climate change, nor is carbon dioxide bad for the planet and without it all life on earth would cease to exist. But hey, what do I know?
In other news, water is wet and the sun rises in the east.
Now that must be bad for humans!
We’re looking at the tip of an iceberg, as one of the commentators in JC’s YouTube entry said.
Is it possible that the political position about the balance between risk and benefit will move much? If it does, there could be almighty backlash against medicine as a whole, unless they make it clear that they are not monolithic, but actually real people that screw it up from time to time.
Isn’t it amazing that there are so many anecdotal cases of heart attacks, strokes, myocarditis and sudden aggressive cancers these days.
Funnily enough I don’t recall hearing about anything similar pre 2021 (when the mass jabbing started).
The interval between a cancer diagnosis and death seems notably truncated of late.
I can understand how a late diagnosis might explain this in part, especially for your average Joe or Jane who can’t readily get a GP appointment.
But for celebs like Kirstie Alley, surely this is unlikely?
And this morning I heard another new (to me) advert warning amateur athletes like half- marathon runners about heart attacks.
TPTB know about this alright; it makes their refusal to acknowledge or compensate even worse.
While I agree with your general points, I don’t think Kirstie Alley would have been injected: –
https://twitter.com/kirstiealley/status/1449459890817208326?lang=en
https://twitter.com/kirstiealley/status/1444631732347707398
I think we might have lost a fellow traveller.
The report does say in the final paragraph “Finally, we cannot provide a definitive functional proof or a direct causal link between vaccination and myocarditis.” Campbell does not mention this. Daily Sceptic rightly says that what matters is how often these deaths occur, and this paper offers no information about that. Nor does the paper or Campbell suggest that these deaths justify calling for the vaccine rollout to be terminated.
I’m profoundly sceptical of the Covid vaccine. Because I didn’t want to be divorced or lose students (I’m a language teacher) I’ve been vaccinated, twice, very reluctantly, but some time before my scepticism fully developed. If I could go back in time and avoid those jabs, I now wouldn’t hesitate to do so. But I don’t get it – the first line of the conclusion of the study referenced above is:
“Finally, we cannot provide a definitive functional proof or a direct causal link between vaccination and myocarditis.”
I’m certain that the vaccines confer virtually no protection, while causing great damage; but how does this conclusion support this article’s confident assertion that “Those Who Died Suddenly Were Likely Killed by the Covid Vaccine”?
I can never seem to find my way back to my posts, and any replies to them. If someone out there can help me with this, I’d be grateful if you use my email: illman.clive@gmail.com
Thanks.