I do not know about you, but it occurred to me back in March that there were two viruses gripping the country. One had inserted itself via the usual methods of infection. This was the one you really have to worry about when it comes to the illegal “test and trace”. The other seems to have involved a colonisation of the public imagination. The former seems to be dying away – (the Covid-19 prevalence, as I write, is about 0.002 per cent). The latter requires some vaccination which may never be available. How do you vaccinate against irrational fear?
To quieten the children (and because it has become addicted to power), the government threatened us with the slipper. It unleashed an avalanche of statistics: infection rates; community prevalence; mortality rates, all of that stuff that governments use when they conscript fear in the service of power. The Imperial College Frankenstein computer model – long discredited at this point – was jolted into life to convince the country that we were on the verge of a plague. It lurched into every household in the land. Arms outstretched, not knowing who had offended it but willing to kill anyone: young, old, frail, ill. A woke killer?
Turns out it was looking in all the wrong places. Covid-19 is not an equal opportunities killer and, tragic though it is for those affected, it is not a particularly effective one.
We now know that this was a fraud committed against the best intentions of the UK public. As in all frauds, stuff unravels over time.
The “theatre of the macabre” that was the daily news briefing had as its centrepiece the revelation of the “daily death figures”. It turns out that these were not any such thing. In a brilliant paper, released a few days ago, Professor Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford and Professor Yoon Looke, Professor of Medicine at Norwich Medical School pointed out that Public Health England have been significantly inflating the Covid death statistics by the following ingenious metric: if you have ever tested positive for Covid-19 and then you die, ipso facto, you died of Covid-19.
The sharp-eyed will notice that this makes it, technically, impossible to recover from Covid-19 And yet … many have. Including the Secretary of State who oversees PHE.
Even the government now acknowledges that the PHE death statistics are untrustworthy. Likewise, with the Office of National Statistics protocols, which seem to urge that Covid is a sort of default position. “It must be Covid unless proven otherwise”, the grim practitioners of this morbid alchemy announce. Few of us will escape. If Richard III had been found in that Leicester car park in March, then his relatives would have Covid-19 on the death certificate.
This matters for the following reasons. There are, at least, two ways of looking at a national emergency (and I will concede that this was one). Do you evaluate it in terms of what it does to us? Or in terms of how we respond to it?
The two things are intertwined. But the government decided to monkey the figures to rob us of our right of response. Lockdown was imposed -and then “justified”- based on a calculus of morbidity which even in its own terms has been shown to be rubbish.
I do not believe that the government manufactured a health crisis in order to clamp down on us – that is the way of a conspiracist. I believe, though, that they are exploiting the crisis to do just that. There is a Lockdown Sanhedrin emerging from this – a subset of the Cabinet – that is pushing at us all the time to see what it can get away with.
The sad thing is most people are going along with it. Despite the ever-emerging numbers which suggest that we are in the middle of a health-panic-Ponzi-scheme, in which fear is handed down from one layer to the other, but with no basis in truth.