There follows a guest post by George Santayana, the pseudonym of a senior executive of a pharmaceutical company, who says it all went wrong when the focus of public health changed to be about minimising COVID-19 at all costs.
A few months ago, I heard a discussion on the Today programme about the lifting of ‘Plan B’ restrictions in care homes. What was most notable (and depressing) about this was the casual way the contributors talked about the impact these restrictions had had on the care home residents and how the endless cycle of COVID-19 testing and resulting constant trickle of positive results meant that effectively some homes were in permanent lockdown. Meaning that frail, vulnerable people were effectively locked in their rooms for days, if not weeks, on end, with relatives unable to visit and staff close to breaking point. What was so tragic was the matter-of-fact way in which this was discussed. The ‘we-had-no-choice-ness’ of the conversation and the fact that although it was obvious that this was cruel and inhumane, what else could we do? And to give the contributors their due, they didn’t really have much choice as they had to either follow COVID-19 guidance or shut down.
But it got me thinking, how did we get here? How can it be that the very people we were aiming to protect from COVID-19 became victims to policies that essentially resulted in their incarceration, swapping the risks of a significant respiratory infection for the realities of a miserable, isolated existence? How did we get to the point where we had to destroy living in order to save lives?
I think the answer to this question goes right back to the beginning of the pandemic and the shift in public health policy that occurred in the first few weeks of COVID-19 hitting our shores.
When COVID-19 emerged as a significant new human disease, it was inevitable that lots of people would get ill and that some, unfortunately, would die. Chris Whitty said as much at the beginning. Given these facts, what should have been the public health response? Simply put, it should have been to minimise the impact of COVID-19 on the health and wellbeing of the population. An aim that while recognising the seriousness of COVID-19, doesn’t make it a special case but instead something to be managed within the broader context of overall public health. By considering this broader context and recognising that there are other health needs within the population, attention would focus on achieving the ‘biggest bang for the buck’ and in protecting those most vulnerable. We’d anticipate beefing up of necessary medical support and, for the longer-term, investing in the development of new treatments, including vaccinations. There would be advice and guidance, but government would most likely be promoting a ‘keep calm and carry on’ approach, especially once it became clear that the disease was not significant to a large segment of the population. As we learned more about COVID-19, so our approaches would evolve and become more refined.
Broadly speaking, this sort of thinking is what sits behind proposals like the Great Barrington Declaration and other focused protection initiatives. Ironically, such approaches have been criticised for being ‘discriminatory’ because they would have resulted in vulnerable people shouldering the burden of restrictions. But judging by the discussions about care homes I heard, it’s difficult to see how much more burdensome they could have been. But this is an aside.
The trouble is that strategies which focus on minimising the impacts of COVID-19 are balanced and mean accepting that some people will inevitably die of COVID-19. It is this point that makes them politically extremely challenging. Something I suspect that the newly minted public health experts at No.10 armed with a whiteboard and a few marker pens probably realised fairly soon into the pandemic. And so, whipped on by a generally scientifically illiterate media crying ‘for something to be done’, an opposition poised to jump on any misstep and supported by dubious computer modelling and highly vocal computer modellers predicting corpses piling up in the street, the Government altered the original public health aim from ‘trying to minimise the impact of COVID-19’ to ‘trying to minimise the impact of COVID-19′. A goal that is politically much easier to state and build policy around.
Although superficially similar (and of course one way of minimising the impact of COVID-19 is to minimise the amount of the disease), these two aims are profoundly different because by making the goal the minimisation of COVID-19 elevates COVID-19 to a unique position amongst diseases and disorders. It places COVID-19 and its reduction/elimination above everything else. In effect we turn a new coronavirus infection into Space Plague; a disease unknown to man against which any measures are justified as long as they might reduce the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Almost everything that has happened during the pandemic flows from this apparently simple change in public health focus.
To illustrate the impact of this change in focus you only have to look at lockdowns. Under the broader public health aim, the question would not be whether lockdowns reduce the amount of COVID-19 in the country, but whether they are effective at reducing its impact. Answering this question means seeing whether lockdowns stack up against the twin needs of having a positive balance of benefit and risk and being cost-effective. Taking each in turn.
To understand the balance of benefit and risk of lockdown we’d not only consider how many COVID-19 infections and subsequent deaths might be avoided (the benefit) but its negative impact on non-COVID-19 health and wellbeing (the risk). As is now becoming clearer and clearer, the negative impacts of lockdowns are profound, broad, long-lived, and given that almost every person under lockdown suffers from a loss of quality of life to some extent, probably vastly outweigh any positive benefits. So, from the perspective of an impact on public health and wellbeing, lockdowns clearly fail the benefit/risk test.
Looking now at the cost-effectiveness of lockdowns. From a purely pounds spent point of view the costs of lockdowns are eye-watering – for example, think of the billions spent on keeping healthy people off work. But analysing the cost-effectiveness of lockdown is not just about the money spent on it but recognising that with finite resources (and resources are always finite) spending money on one thing means not spending it on something else, the so-called lost opportunity costs. For lockdowns, the lost opportunity costs are staggering; all the treatments we didn’t do as we tooled up the health service to focus only on COVID-19, all the cancer screening visits missed, all the operations cancelled, all the R&D pounds and dollars redirected to COVID-19 that now won’t be spent on other diseases. The lost careers, the lost businesses and livelihoods, the lost years of schooling, the lost visits to loved ones, the lost opportunities for millions of people both young and old. These are the true costs of lockdowns and goodness only knows what they really are and what their impacts will be in the long-term. So, again, lockdowns spectacularly fail to meet the grade.
When you look at lockdowns in this way, it is hardly surprising that the original pandemic plan dismissed them as an unviable approach and groups like the WHO originally didn’t support their use. From a public health perspective they simply create more issues than they solve. But the trouble is that the modified public health aim of ‘minimise COVID-19’ queers the pitch because COVID-19 cases and deaths count above everything else. So, just like the discussion that I heard on care homes, it isn’t that we’re blind to the side effects or the costs, it’s just that compared to the goal of minimising COVID-19 they are deemed unimportant. Is it any wonder that sceptical voices failed to be heard? The arguments against lockdown aren’t really about how effective it is at ‘limiting the spread’ or reducing deaths due to COVID-19 (probably not very as it turns out) but how much harm and damage it does in meeting this aim. But if we only focus on a singular aim as important, then who cares about the other stuff?
Lockdowns, masks, screening, social distancing, self-isolation, school and business closures, travel restrictions, vaccinations of healthy youngsters etc., etc. – all are valid whatever the cost or collateral damage as long as they might reduce COVID-19. It’s this COVID-19 monomania that also justifies the use of dubious psychological fear tactics to ensure compliance and is why we came to obsess over COVID-19 screening results and deaths in isolation from all other diseases or causes of injury and death. It’s how we ended up with a disease whose only symptom might be two lines on a testing stick, but which then demands that healthy people suffer days of self-imposed, isolated existence.
All medicine is about the balance of benefit and risk. There’s a good reason why ‘first do no harm’ is part of the medical mantra as it recognises that medical intervention has the real potential to make things worse rather than better. Non-pharmaceutical interventions shouldn’t be immune from this kind of thinking – why should they be? Why shouldn’t we look at the mental, physical, and financial misery caused by things like lockdown and weigh these up against the perceived COVID-19 benefits? This isn’t putting money over lives, it’s recognising that non-COVID-19 suffering is as equally important as COVID-19 suffering.
I wouldn’t want to be a politician facing the challenges of COVID-19, as there are no easy decisions. There is no ‘zero deaths’ option that sets the clock back to pre-COVID-19. Regardless of what is done, some people will suffer and no doubt this suffering will be writ large in newspaper pages, social media posts and websites. COVID-19 might be the cause of this suffering, but it doesn’t mean that should be the sole focus of our efforts to reduce its impact.
Finally, I am fearful that the Public Inquiry will also be skewed by assuming the special status of COVID-19 and accepting the false prospectus that the aim of policy should have been to ‘reduce COVID-19’. If this happens, it will inevitably conclude a ‘should have been faster and harder’ outcome. No doubt there will be acknowledgement of the harms caused, and being caused, by our response to COVID-19, but ultimately, rather like that discussion on the harms to vulnerable people in care homes, they will be simply written off as ‘we-had-no-choice’ and an acceptable price for the greater goal of trying to minimise COVID-19.
I still feel all of this hangs over us like the sword of Damocles and it will only take enough bleating in Boris’s ear for us to move back into restrictions and mandates.
But today I’m going to enjoy the sun and maybe head to the pub for a few beers with friends. If lockdown has taught us anything, it is to not take things for granted and enjoy life when and where you can.
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How did we get here?
When every western country did the same things at the same time, when they all gave themselves emergency powers, to do things previously against plans for respiratory virus, then some form of control or orchestration was in play.
“How did we get here?”
“Once in a Lifetime.” Talking Heads.
I couldn’t resist. Apologies for being facetious.
Poignantly, I reckon I’ve missed the window of opportunity to get behind the wheel of a truly large automobile.
Yes. That’s what I was going to point out. My own considered opinion is that the activities of Jeremy Farrar’s CEPI were central to the sudden change in various governments’ approaches.
Although CEPI’s newly crafted plans (with their focus on minimising the immediate impact of the new pathogen during the first 100 days after its emergence, during which time they would develop diagnostics, vaccines and treatment protocols) were aimed at dealing with a much more lethal agent than the relatively innocuous SARS Covid-19, they exaggerated the apparent threat in order to provide a test-bed for their ideas.
Since their overall approach had already been nodded off by the WHO, enormous pressure was then brought to bear on any governments that failed to implement their policies. It’s all documented on the CEPI website (https://100days.cepi.net/100-days-mission-accelerating-diagnostic-test-development-and-deployment-to-prevent-a-future-pandemic/)
Since their overall approach had already been nodded off by the WHO, enormous pressure was then brought to bear on any governments that failed to implement their policies.
Some of that ‘enormous pressure’ proved to be terminal.
That ‘enormous pressure’ will soon become official policy when sovereign nations sign off health policy to an unelected, Gates’ funded, Davos led, global organisation.
https://dailyexpose.uk/2021/12/11/plague-laws-a-global-pandemic-treaty-and-a-new-world-order/
“During the 41st session of the Corona Investigative Committee Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger, a whistle-blower from the WHO, said the rules under which countries work with WHO virtually put WHO in charge of all rules and formal edicts – with Bill Gates unofficially as part of the executive board as if he were a member state.”
We need constantly to question the narrative that being wealthy makes someone a bona fide know all without doing any hard graft of the experts in the field, or being gifted in similar fields with transferable skills or having the extreme flair of the semi-polymath.
Several famous people spring to mind as not being polymaths; Bill Gates is certainly one. And many of those who lay claim to vast areas of expertise due to being loaded have the emotional IQ of a bluebottle..
Ferguson’s ‘then we realised we could’ remark is significant.
What he said was ‘Then we realised we could get away with it.’ A significant difference.
That’s what I meant but yes, you are quite right.
Indeed.
Do we think he was he ‘getting away with’ rolling out life-saving medical care?
Or ‘getting away with’ the massive Covid scam parameters, ‘the public were buying it’, like the pcr test, asymptomatic spread, masks, quaratines, propaganda, falsified data, falisifed studies, illogical inconsistencies, censorship etc?
It would be funnier if it wasn’t so egregiously harmful.
Wait until they destroy our money and try to impose their Digital/ Medical/Green Vax passports!
Check out what Johnson is signing us up to at the Gates ‘owned’ WHO!
I attempted to discuss that with family and they said I read too many conspiracy theories…
I am the only unvaccinated member of the family and have been sceptical from the very beginning. Now some of them are slowly changing their minds but couching it in language that suggests they too were sceptical but that isn’t true. I don’t and won’t forget being ridiculed about things which were true.
Spot on. A comment that justifies piano wire and a lamppost.
I agree and worse than that, he admitted it and a lot of people don’t seem remotely bothered either
So is his remarkable history of failures, and his Gates’ funded employer.
Where is Ferguson? Why has someone not arraigned him, and the remainder of SAGE, on the matter. Sir Chris Whitty has been whittering, seemingly revitalised after his outburst within a month of SAGE being “stood down”. Arraign him!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4MkcfJA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8BkzvP19v4
Social conformity and reduced responsibility are strong motivators to the weak or unaware.
Cowardly and intellectually and morally lazy people who spend their lives replaying and reciting what others tell them, without reflection or consideration of any kind, are a disgrace. They are a disgrace to Life.
Their cowardice and compliance enable tyrants and marginalise those who try to live their lives with honour.
Today, they are the ones who do the tests, wear the masks and take the jabs – not with reluctance as ones compelled, but with a sense of moral superiority; shaking their heads with disapproval at those who do not.
If their children and grandchildren have any hope of a future fit for human beings, it is no thanks to them.
https://ourdecisiontoo.com/Issue/there-s-nothing-left-to-do-but-go-our-separate-ways/320/
Thanks, CA – but no thanks. They piss me off mightily, but I like and love quite a lot of them …
Quite – this article is perseverating once again as if the last two years of clownish deceit never happened. The Toby Young “cock-up” hypothesis has been disproved a million times over – perhaps it serves a useful purpose for debate but beyond any reasonable doubt it was all pre-meditated, part of a global coup d’etat run from the UN, WEF, Gates, Rockefeller, Black Rock etc, etc And the clowns go on cocking it up.
Toby Young is now so far out at sea in his self- deception – “not waving, but drowning” ( Stevie Smith)
But everyone knows all this. I could barely read the article because this rationale has been imprinted on the insides of my eyelids from reading this publication the last couple of years.
But does that mean it was some “cockupspiracy” that governments all around the world all of a sudden decided to implement in lockstep (exactly as the Rockefeller’s Operation Lockstep said they would)? Where did bureaucrats get this simultaneous spontaneous boldness to abandon decades of public health policy?
Oh well, I guess it will all come out in the inquiry. Like the Leveson Inquiry that really cleared everything up. Then it’s “back to normal” and “never again”.
Except you may have noticed that the world is now on a trajectory towards something else. A “war economy” is allowing the government and central banks to remake the world in their image. The money printing and enforced shortages will mean that we’re not going back to normal for a long time, if ever.
I still can’t understand how members of our elite, our Oxford educated journalist class that would go out of their way to found The Daily Sceptic, can be so wilfully blind to the broader agenda. It’s called Agenda 2030 and it’s coming up at warp speed.
Exactly. And as you rightly point out everything that is happening is ‘hidden in plain sight,’ with Rockefeller’s Operation Lockstep and Agenda 2030.
A pointless article which adds nothing to our situation.
Yet another pointless DS article.
I find the absence of contributions from UK Column, The Corbett Report, and The Last American Vagabond particularly telling.
Fully agree, but at least there’s about 20% of us who saw it for what it was/is.
Hopefully that’s enough to stop the bastards.
I still can’t quite understand how practically every country imposed the same restrictions at more or less the same time – with digital ID, sorry, vaccination as the only solution.
Must just be a coincidence.
And never forget they’re still out jabbing kids – to protect them for the greater good. Lol.
https://ourdecisiontoo.com/Issue/there-s-nothing-left-to-do-but-go-our-separate-ways/320/
If it had a name to it, I might have bothered reading it. Anonymously, it’s just more noises off.
We got here because public policy in this country is run by a certain type of bed-wetting, woke, middle class elite. These people have lots of qualifications but virtually zero common sense. They also talk a great game on compassion, caring society etc but in reality that were happy to throw old, frail people under a bus.
Not just this country. It would appear pretty much every country.
And they are in secure, well-paid employment, living in decent houses with gardens and able to afford all the latest shiny toys – and mostly with families so they weren’t alone. They claim empathy, but the way they evangelised for the Covidian Cult showed that in reality it’s only themselves they care about (the ‘work from home’ lark suited them down to the ground!).
They didn’t give a shit about the elderly person in some grotty care home who saw nobody for months. Or the single mother and her kids living in a tower block and having to exist on the dole because the zero-hours contract work she was on had disappeared. Or the isolated single person who ended up self-harming more than ever. Or the many other people who were badly affected by it all.
Yes – none of those policies could have been universally imposed if our press, medical and scientific institutions and journals, regulatory bodies, international bodies and government bureaucracies hadn’t been at least “consolidated” or, perhaps better, “captured.”
You can’t quash all dissent in such a situation without a centralised top-down power structure. And those don’t arise from panicking over the science.
Probably wise to recall the context of when this all started,
against the backdrop of the shenanigans of late 2019 they didn’t have much political choice but follow the herd and go into lockdown.
in hindsight they should have ignored sage but by that time the nhs had already killed many and the headlines where all gloom & doom.
as we saw from December 2021 it’s not all BJ’s decision and he needs to keep his cabinet happy too. So long as cabinet is comprised of wise people we should be ok.
There is an extraordinary amount of fortunate timing for cetain parties isn’t there. Its clear it came from the lab, but on demand or by accident? Its a daunting prospect.
Given how far the Chinese went to deny, lockdown and unsuccessfully contain it covid was Definitely an accident.
They where clearly mucking with something they didn’t understand. Not that the west understand either.
im sure the west have more of a handle on it now than the Chinese.
not sure why they let people have the mRNA jabs though. Clearly it’s flawed.
And the “fortunate timing” continues, with the war in Ukraine diverting attention right at the time when a larger number of people (although by no means a majority) are starting to question the Covidian bollox they’ve been fed for the past two years.
You mean you think this wasn’t all intentional? The Bond-film-like naming of organisations such as Sage / Nervtag / Spi-B? The Bond-esque villain without the white cat – Klaus Schwab? The repurposing of flu / cold to stand in for frightening viruses? The vaccines for kebabs / for vouchers to brothels? The never ever wanting there to be good news? The lockstep / goose step synchronicity of their decisions? The sudden end of the pandem- whatever and it’s replacement with a phony war? We’ve been had. For what? Think all Bond movies ever – for power and money but mostly for money. The dollar is on the brink of collapse – and the billionaires billions are at risk. Bring on a pandemic and a war to necessitate a new digital currency and their billions are secure. They haven’t hidden anything and they’re definitely laughing at us for still believing it at this point.
In March 2020, in this country it all felt a bit like an episode of Doctor Who.
Or an episode of Derren Brown – I’m still waiting for him to appear and confirm it was all a set-up.
Or Kenny Craig.
It’s March 2022 now and the whole of Finland is still in face masks in the shops and on public transport. And no sign of it ending – none.
Most countries were doing the same, the governments were all talking the same, acting the same with a few tweaks here and there, if it looks like a lockstep plan…..
How did we get here?
Over the course of a week in early March 2020 the entire Western health and medical establishment uniformly changed tune, as if all contacted simultaneously by a message from god, or hypnotised by something strangely gripping that had occured, in unison, behind the scenes, in a week? Curious wasn’t it Geroge.
We had long held pandemic preparedness plans that ruled out contact tracing, forced quarantining of the healthy, shutting businesses and schools, mass testing (absent any physical symptoms or diagnosis no less) etc, and we chucked it out the window. Wholesale. No thank you decades of wisdom, we won’t be needing you.
The Swine Flu scandal of a decade earlier, perpetuated by the same cast of characters, using the same set-up, the same techniques to overclock the models and overstate the leathality, was all geared towards getting the WHO to hit the medical R&D ‘Jackpot’, by declaring a Pandemic, automatically unlocking level 42 grants, funding and orders, as exposed in the excellent documentary TrustWHO in 2016, and leading to a bungled vaccine that did far more harm than good and wasted governments millions. Sounds familiar.
(I look forward to the next installment of the womans documentary, perhaps called TrustWHO 2: Total Bongo-Bongo-2 (or Universal Social Justice Soldier: Narrative Unjudged). The WHO calling a Pandemic is presumably what the Drostens and Fergusons live for. They fudge their way through until, Yahtzee! Perhaps moonlighting to model other intangible, unquantifiable abstracts that can’t be verified (or if they are they miraculously fail upwards into a promotion?), or make predictions to cross examine post-retirement.)
Only in 2019 they had far more levers to pull, as technological tools for propaganda disptach and surveillance could open doors and prolong the grift previous scandals just couldn’t reach.
Like Swine flu, Sars-Cov-2 wouldnt be hemmed in by pesky facts or truths, the entire pandemic was based on a test for which there are no constants. The swab alters, the test kit alters, the primers and agents alter, the genes screened alter, the Ct is altered, and then theres no diagnosis, no symptoms even required. A perfectly healthy individual who naturally fought off the virus a month ago but has dead viral debris is, in the 2020 pandemic scandal, an infection.
Suffice to say, every single one of our instituions jumped on the grant, funding and R&D bandwagon, played along, with an abundnce of caution you understand cough cough, on the side of caution, with regret, to play it safe…
Cue fake studies, with fake data, in fake news journals like NEJM and the Lancet. A collusion of corrupted or weapons-grade stupid health officials to malign the thousands of just and right Drs, Profs and clinicians who promoted our preparedness plans and even GB Declaration. With the assistance of Big tech and Big media and Big intel. Big lol.
Basically an orgy of lies, from a group of known medical con merchants… for money, status, power and for minnions to appear virtuous.
Then other parties realised the “unique opportunity Covid presented”, to co-opt the situation, to “never let a good crisis go to waste”, real or imaginary, cut in with numerous complimentary pursuits, like novel mRNA inoculants, digital IDs, demonstrating WFH can offshore far more western jobs etc.
And they’re all incentivised to keep the covid gravy train going.
Thank god they crafted the entire edifice out of falsities they control, and not emperical truths, ‘cos with bogus data it can be tourtued enough to confess to anything.
“We had long held pandemic preparedness plans”
which apparently we had to throw out because it was for flu – not coronavirus – at least that is the line they are taking.
I think the architects of our lockdown should be forced to write pandemic preparedness plans for flu, coronavirus, plague and anything else we can think of. It gives us something to throw away when the time comes
A preparedness plan for Zero Carbon would have been wonderful 20 years ago. Still essential today.
If, of course, prepared by honest people with IQ scores bigger than their hat size.
Brilliant take down.
I was too lazy to do all the work you have done. I read the article before commenting and reading your excellent piece – says it all.
Tip o’ the hat.
Conspiracy Corner, do we know whats really going on in China? Well, no, but we know their stats are a nonsense, and they happily lied to the world about the virus and who knows what else.
There are some critical twitter accounts, but ever the uber sceptic (EK?), are they real or more propaganda?
https://nitter.net/songpinganq
https://nitter.net/truthabtchina
If our ruling classes want to emulate totalitarian Chinese social credit systems perhaps deliverance, somewhat counter-intuitively, comes from China? If the Chinese were to revolt en masse, as they have done during every previous dynasty covering millenia, this would likely make our ruling class think twice if not demolish their designs. No hard feelings guys, its a fugazi.
The younger generation in China also have much easier lives than their ancestors, who worked their fingers to the bone, but the youth don’t fancy boney fingers. A trend of ‘lying flat’ or not working as hard and cruising through life with junk food delivery and devices as entertainment is growing. Eventually this would be expected to snap one way or another, like pro-democracy Hong Kong ’19 times ten?
by special request
Superb
shamelessly stolen from order-order
The Smiling Assassin
How does one respond to drivel such as this? Are DS putting this crap up just so that we BTL can have a discussion? Where has this guy been living these last two years?
Depressing.
Perhaps website visitors should strike until Toby provides some sort of no win no fee scheme whereby he doesnt get our viewing stats until digital IDs are binned?
In general my health status will no longer be of any concern to the ‘state’. I neither want to interact with the ‘state’ nor will I expect anything from it. I will make my own health choices and decisions from now on. Plus, I would like all my National Insurance ‘contributions’ back, primarily for breach of contract and non-fulfilment of agreed service (this is of course tongue in cheek, but that’s how I feel).
None of this means a jot to the bedwetters who always, always, always default to ‘we had no choice’ nonsense.
It all went wrong when evil powerful people around the world coordinated in a Big Lie that Covid was an emergency
A brilliant article – thank you.
So how do we ensure that the public health inquiry looks at how we could have minimised the impact of covid 19 rather than minimising covid 19? I know we can write to try to change the terms of reference but fear those voices will be invisible and will be ignored.
Anyone fancy starting a petition?
This article would have use, if it was written in March 2020.
Drosten’s PCR test made it all happen. Without the ability to define asymptomatic people as disease vectors there is no ability to enforce the rest.
Drosten is up to his neck in Gates/WEF connections.
How did we get here?
Easy. Firstly. We, The West, have a scientifically illiterate Political and Media elite. Secondly we kow tow to the rich. Thirdly and most importantly Follow the Money.
Shows just how quickly mass formation hypnosis can develop in susceptible minds. Those who dont question dont think. They are trying to create a world where we are spoon fed what is right and wrong so we dont have to worry our silly little heads.
Pretty much.
I’d add that there appears to be a reluctance in politics to discuss second-order effects — the things that happen because of a policy that aren’t related to the immediate policy goal.
I think that this is because they can spin a policy agenda that minimises discussion of the second order effects (therefore they ‘don’t exist’), they can focus their success-criteria on one half of the equation (thus meaning ‘success’ is far more likely) and because they’ll probably be gone before the second order impact is felt and that can be someone else’s problem (or they can blame a new bogeyman, eg Russia).
You see this all the time, from local government up to international scale politics. Of course, the problem isn’t that they do this, but rather that the public lets them.
Bill Gates says having an electronic tattoo on each person will become part of everyday life
https://unitynewsnetwork.co.uk/bill-gates-says-having-an-electronic-tattoo-on-each-person-will-become-part-of-everyday-life/
David Clews
Despite this most people attended demoes and Stand in the Park are acting as if everything is back to normal.
Saturday 26th March 1pm to 3pm
Yellow Boards LONDON
Junction Victoria St/Bressenden Pl
London SW1E 5NA
Stand in the Park Sundays from 10am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens
(Cockpit Path car park free on Sunday)
Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
“Bill Gates says having an electronic tattoo on each person will become part of everyday life.”
Yet another story putting the lie to the suggestion that Lord Bill of the Gates of Hell is a philanthropist. Not content with destroying the livelihoods of thousands of computer software engineers he now wants to take over all the tattoo parlours.
This man has no shame.
Nothing beats being wise after the event.
Convid was only the key, ‘for the the globalist Party of Davos to enrich themselves and impoverish the masses by rampant taxation and inflation to destroy any savings. By printing money at the public expense to hand to the already rich so they can continue to buy assets – largely shares and property – and skew the market even further for the globalist establishment elites against the masses whom they wish to reduce to serfdom. The rigged system on show for the world to see’.
If it wasn’t orchestrated, it surely developed immediately into solely an international pi**ing contest about a few, objectively questionable if not meaningless, statistics.
There is a similar argument to be made for the vaccination program. The public health justification went from “we need to get people vaccinated to protect them from getting sick” to “we need to get people vaccinated”. Vaccination numbers became the metric rather than the metric being whether people were getting sick. Now nobody cares about the actual infection rate or adverse events, and everything is justified that forces people to get vaccinated.
I can imagine a process similar to this one is what Germans went through after WWII, asking themselves how their country was taken over by Nazism and driven to a catastrophic world war and attempted genocide.
And I can imagine that they employed the same evasive tactics as this article to intellectualise and explain away the whole thing, as a set of systemic circumstances.
The real answer is in the heart of every individual who allowed it to happen. The question people need to ask themselves is: “how did I come to allow this?” Was if fear, was it desire to conform, why was I unable to stand up to and resist what is obviously wrong?
It’s not a question about society, it is a question each individual needs to ask himself about his own character and his values.
Exactly.
One of the best “antivax” comments I’ve read .-
If you’ve ever wondered how so many ordinary decent people just stood and watched as Germany descended into Fascism – you do now.
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
It did no go wrong, it went exactly according to plan – until people begin to wake up and accept this, they will not understand what is happening now and even worse, what will be happening next.
This is not a time to look backwards but a last chance to try and prevent what is to come
https://ourdecisiontoo.com/Issue/there-s-nothing-left-to-do-but-go-our-separate-ways/320/
It had been here for at least three months or so before the paranoia started.
I still feel all of this hangs over us like the sword of Damocles and it will only take enough bleating in Boris’s ear for us to move back into restrictions and mandates.
Me too. I’ll start to feel relieved once the free testing is also gone. Until this has happened, we’re all basically just prisoners who got out early on unknown probation terms. We can all be imprisoned again at a moment’s notice and there’s nothing which can be done about that.
I do not see that the Government got it so wrong. Governments never get big decisions right in the first place. They always follow the main thinking. In the past that was the electorate. Who usually understand better than Government what they need. Over the last 40 yrs or so Government has grown bigger and more withdrawn into bureaucratic decision making. I believe they wanted to control the population and they wanted to destroy economies because they knew the present spending, taxing, spending cycle had to end.
They did not give a thought to the emotional toll or the societal toll they would create.