Parades and Charades: The “Carnevale” of COVID
Updated: May 23, 2021
Originally published in Medium on March 7, 2021 before being censored
I recently read Thailand hopes to open for tourism by July stating they have vaccines, and that is a “game-changer.” Thailand has 84 deaths “ascribed” to COVID! What game changer?
They have roughly 26,000 “positive tests”, which in today’s incoherent times are called “cases”. For anyone having been asleep at the nomenclature wheel, a “case” in medical terms requires symptoms and medical attention. A “positive test” is the detection via a PCR test, via amplification, of some strand, bit of debris, current or past infection, or just an outright “false positive.” So, at times a live infection is pegged, at other times not. WHO has finally affirmed this as well.
Anyway, at 26,000 positive tests and 84 deaths, this is far from breaking news. So, in what way are the vaccines “a game-changer,” especially from a country not unduly allergic to infectiousness, where people come to partake of all type of sybaritic and sensual delights, and which never had borders closed due to AIDS, or any of the preceding pathogens prior to our current mania headliner?
And whatever has invaded the bucolic calm of the Thai psyche, it seems the sheer “presence” of something called “vaccine” is purportedly going to shoo it away. And we keep hearing this in the US too, “we have vaccines,” and wait for it, “that’s a game-changer.” Now, there are only a few problems with this statement, though I have to say I am making assumptions about the “game” that is being changed with such clear fanfare. If it is the panic game, and we can use the verbal token of “vaccine” with trumpets blaring, to have us natives boondoggled into feeling justified coming out of the domestic penitentiary, yes, sadly, that might work.
But if the “game” is real public health, unfortunately not. Just a quick smattering of verifiable clarifications re the vaccines to date:
None have been adequately tested, animal trials were bypassed.
Some use mRNA technology, which has never been deployed on humans before, which requires attempting to spark an “immune response” in your cells, and the larger ramifications of this may not be known for years.
The Pfizer and Moderna trials were done with a pool of roughly 200 people each at the time “results” were reported, meaning out of the 40,000 or so in the vaccine and placebo pools, those 200 were the number of people (again, roughly) that had at least one positive symptom and a positive PCR test. So, the ‘95%’ efficacy is premised on that small subsection of a larger but still very small population that tested positive.
The reason “experts” are telling the vaccinated to not fling away their masks and go tripping into the light fantastic, is that these trials were testing for “symptom suppression” and we have no idea if they have any impact on “long term immunity” or “lack of transmissibility”, both of which we know that those who have naturally recovered are well endowed with.
The trials had no “above 70’s” in their pool, though the median age of death globally is above 80! So those who are most vulnerable were never part of the trials. Why? How do the trials even have grounds for relevance without this?
Recent UK stats celebrating 80% reduction in hospitalization among old and infirm people, some with pneumonia and lung problems, again goes to the “symptoms”, there is no claim of future immunity, or anything else. And again, where the “80%” comes from, and how that’s assessed when citing a group of 460 elderly, remains elusive from the report.
If results show positive protection (jury is still out, with very troubling results coming out of Israel, the UAE, and various other jurisdictions who have massively “vaccinated” their population), their relevance anyway should be to the most vulnerable, the elderly and those with serious compounding comorbidities. Ergo, the “game” being changed is surely quite limited. Before vaccines, we have a 99%+ recovery rate globally below 65, and even above 70, roughly 95% already!
So, the quaking terror, the clamor for a salvific intervention has always been and continues to be, hard to fathom.
The real “game” that needs to change is the absurd sense that someone has to “authorize” us to believe we are healthy again, can live again, can gird our loins, and rejoin life again. The Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, in “liberating” the Lone Star State from the COVID panic porn mafia paradigm of perpetual fear through variously packaged “nonscience,” was clear, on point, and overdue only by several months,
“With this executive order, we are ensuring that all businesses and families in Texas have the freedom to determine their own destiny.”
What a shocking, provocative, giddying bolt of what once we would have said was incontrovertible, “unalienable” and woven into the fabric of the social contract undertaken with a free citizenry. Ah, those were quaint, nostalgic times. Alas, it takes some real rallying of rationality and stoking that fire in the belly, to reclaim them today.
The Mock Fantasy of “Denialism”
There is nothing more unnerving for people today, suckled on the narcissistic vanities of pop culture, than to be asked to interrogate their emotions, to challenge prevailing thought, to ask for intellectual credentials that can weather at least a little scrutiny.
So here are some things that generate frothing derision. Namely, allegations of “denying COVID” and “not following the science” and “not being a good Christian” or “putting others at risk” or “plunging into the ethical abyss of COVID skepticism” or “needing to be grateful to get back to normal life soon/eventually,” when our dread lords will it so.
The absurdities here are so glaringly irrational, so profoundly and extravagantly incoherent, it is hard to know where to start. So, best we start at the paradigmatic precipice we are being invited to jump off. And we must not.
The people who are on medical, ethical, philosophical, and moral quicksand are those crusading for COVID fetishism, not the rest of us, who are willing to let them have their new hobby, as long as they cannot insist we all surrender to their thought policing, and liberty annulling prescriptions and demands.
The Perennial Paradigm: I still get goosebumps:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”
Governments are created so the idea goes, to advance and protect these aims (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), and when government becomes subversive of these aims, it loses its legitimacy. Currently, those being branded “sceptics” are simply “rationalists” who hold to the sanctity and self-evident nature of these truths. And from these flow various clear ways forward.
For example, sticking to established public policy wisdom which, WHO included, until the 2020 debacle, was anti-lockdown and anti-masking. It demanded vaccines were properly tested. It didn’t claim “models” were a basis to invade people’s property, capsize their health care, destroy their educational prospects and economic wellbeing, impose isolation and despair, change how we tally deaths on death certificates leading to a vast inflation of “ascribed” deaths with clearly tenuous causation relative to C-19.
These are “rational” postures, including the belief that an “emergency” measure extending beyond a year into perpetuity is oxymoronic. And when it is reasserted on the basis of thresholds established by authoritarian whim with no corroborated triggering metrics, it is not, cannot rationally be called an “emergency” …it is not “emerging” in any way, shape, or form.
Mass acquiescence is not evidence, otherwise, every shameful “ism” in history would have unimpeachable credentials. The daunting and shameful exercise of state power on free citizens does not validate policies, no more than it did horrific wars like Vietnam, or earlier “institutions” like slavery.
Rationalists believe that when you have a clearly age-stratified disease, and this age band is in line with normal mortality, you protect those people, not lock up the overwhelming majority of the healthy, and essentially not at risk!
You certainly don’t destroy the livelihood of billions and allow no widescale option to consider the simple cost-benefit clearly and unambiguously. You also confront the challenge of whether “cost-benefit” can even apply on an extended basis when there are clearly other options, and those who are terrified or vulnerable can certainly be more sheltered, without inflicting despair and immeasurable damage on the 99%+ not at risk! Is this even a sane equation to have to justify?
I wrote a piece entitled Who’s the Sceptic? It shows the horrifying world view that must tacitly be endorsed by anyone who is a “Covidian” and in favor of blowing up the world over a statistically unremarkable viral strain and then thinking everyone else has to justify not swooning to the cadences of the doomsday march.
Asserting Life
Alastair Cavendish made his version of the above points recently on Lockdown Sceptics, arguing that he is himself not a “lockdown” sceptic any more than he is a “racism sceptic” or “rape sceptic.” It’s the wrong way around. “Lockdown” a penal concept dusted off from a misbegotten high school project and which historically has resonances of the Dark Ages, is evil because you are saying “COVID death prevention” is all that matters. And declaring or choosing who you consider more or less valuable to injure or keep alive on the basis of your own personal fears and preferences, is about as “evil” as it gets surely.
But that is the case here. To allegedly “save” the elderly and those besieged with comorbidities (already at risk), how can we say we are entitled to “kill” people dependent on businesses we are ruining or economies we are devastating, or those isolated, or emotionally fragile at heightened risk of suicide, or those with untreated illnesses as Mr. Cavendish so adroitly put it, “less fashionable” than C-19?
Everyone keeps dusting off the famed moral philosophy “trolley problem” to establish this. We can stop dusting off trolleys, it’s clear on the face of it. And this doesn’t even “save” our hallowed chosen (which truth be told for too many is myself posing as grandma), as lockdowns have been shown in multiple studies to have no beneficial impact on mortality, and as per the Oxford stringency index, the harsher the measures the worse the mortality results — we could dive into this separately (and have done in earlier articles), but those are the published statistics as we have them.
And for daring to flag this, sanctimonious dotards smear the Professor Carl Heneghans and Professor Sunetra Guptas, towering and evidently humane specialists, who, were this not an anti-rational cult, would not have their ideas or recommendations received in this way. This is a theology, and a crazed one, based on de-platforming, censoring, and asserting that “sceptics” (rationalists) have blood on their hands. But rational ideas don’t cause deaths, deranged ones linked to enforced policies do, and with them you hear the literal death rattle of societies, the foundations of a civilization undermined, over a madly extrapolated flu.
As someone wrote, people gave their lives for our rights and liberties, and now our ability to walk in freedom on a beach clearly threatening no one, or to sit on a park bench, needs “authorizing?” Who authorized that bloody authority?
So, let’s traipse through these accusations and see if any of them vaguely hold water:
“Denying” COVID?
No one “denies” a virus. We deny the “scam” the virus has mutated into, and the mind-numbingly obvious authoritarian and big pharma collusion evident when from “models” you shut down the planet.
Then when they prove incorrect, you keep it shut “until” the salvific vaccines (which aren’t) arrive, completely ignoring perfectly available treatments like HCQ and Ivermectin.
The first was used for decades to treat malaria, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. The conclusion that it had no impact came about as it was tested on seriously ill patients, but its efficacy is in the early stages, staving off that serious illness. Professor Didier Raoult from IHU-Marseille likened this critique to “the Marx Brothers doing science.”
Ivermectin has repeatedly shown its bona fides, most recently in Indian and Argentinian trials, and the countries in the world doing best in this “non-pandemic” (Asia and Africa’s numbers are so low, and the meaning of “pan”demic on its face so clear, it doesn’t work to now even call it that) are a fascinating confection of inconstant distancing strictures or mask mandates, and cheaply and readily available Ivermectin and similar remedies.
And the scammers swat away “Total Harm Minimization” initiatives such as those proposed by Yale University and later by The Great Barrington Declaration (there I’ve said the name that must not be spoken by the rabidly spooked), that suggest protecting the vulnerable by saying it’s “impractical.”
But how is it “practical” to stop life as we know it over a median respiratory illness which requires a constant PR campaign, censoring of dissent, police dictates to enforce obedience, rewriting of norms for death certificates just to get numbers up, rushed through “untested” tests like PCR at amplification settings that are all over the place such that fruit gets tested positive?
How is that more “practical” than 3–6 months of enhanced care for the elderly and vulnerable, letting everyone else not at risk, naturally develop immunity? Should that challenge not at least have been stress-tested alongside Armageddon?
So that rubbish is what’s being denied, not COVID.
And the poltroonish character attacks, the rhetorical swill being hurled at eminent researchers, epidemiologists, and virologists, shows the sheer shallowness and outright “panic” on the other aside.
Not “Following the Science?”
Whose science? Which science? There is not one plausible study showing masks work, 30 plus published studies (including in Lancet) demonstrating lockdowns have no demonstrated mortality benefit, multiple studies showing “asymptomatic transmission” is an uncorroborated dud (which should in any rational world, shut the entire Covidian mass hysteria sham down) including studies from Wuhan as well as Florida as well as an attestation by the British Medical Journal on this front. Infection Fatality Rate is around 0.05% based on WHO affirmed seroprevalence studies done by Stanford, PCR Tests are replete with false positives and demonstrated distortions amply documented… why is it sane to ignore all that?
And so, the onus is not on those wishing to live the normal lives their humanity and citizenship in free societies entitle them to, the onus lies with those wishing to claim we are in apocalyptic times and there is no remedy other than “borrowing” your autonomy temporarily without your consent. These are “rationality deniers” and “evidence sceptics.” Excess deaths, when adjusted for age and population, are far from unprecedented, anywhere, and in much of the world, there is no impact on excess mortality at all, particularly in those parts of the world that have undergone little of the mindless, frenzied COVID pageantry that has infiltrated the developed world.
Follow this science! The alarmist proclamations emanate from Europe and the US, the two most disastrous areas in the world re COVID results. So why are we asking for advice from there? Over 60% of the ascribed fatalities come from there; Asia with over 60% of the world’s population has less than 16% of the “ascribed” mortality. And if someone thinks there are multiple landfills in Asia and Africa with “hidden” corpses, perhaps they could organize a hunt for those, along with the WMD in Iraq that must be there somewhere!
“Being a Good Christian?”
When told to “love his neighbor” and wear a mask, commentator Steve Deace gave a pitch-perfect response, essentially saying as a Christian he didn’t wear symbols of a pagan religion; and loving his neighbor as himself, and knowing from evidence, masks were a sham, he wouldn’t bear false witness either.
“Putting Others at Risk?”
Life does that. I do so by driving a car, being on a ski slope, creating products that can be misused. But this really requires ethical constipation to assert. What do you call destroying education for children everywhere, retarding gains in medical health and economic solvency and life-changing education in the developing world, bankrupting businesses, and wiping out savings… this isn’t putting “others” at risk?
So those with the wherewithal to cower comfortably at home, can support inflicting indefinite measures on legions of others that undermine the viability of life as we’ve known it, due to unsubstantiated assertions by “the Marx Brothers” science squad?
Contortionist Fauci in the US whose Olympian scale self-contradicting vacillations are remarkable and the Prufrockian capitulation of the UK government to the Ferguson “Twilight Zone” prognostications being adhered to, is somehow less risky than healthy people opting to go for a walk as a family say in Vitamin D enriched sunshine and germicidal air, particularly when there are no known instances of outdoor transmission outside superspreader environments (and re the recent Superbowl in Tampa, not even there!)?
“Being Grateful for Eventual Normalcy?”
One, it’s inevitable, being human, we will be “grateful” to a degree. Emerge from isolation, from any stark horror, and of course, you are overwhelmed with gratitude. The first night you can walk wherever you wish, opt to make merry on a barstool, hear musicians play, exchange friendly cheer, these simple pleasures will seem surreal in their quotidian magnificence. I can say so, as I write from a jurisdiction, where this has happened, and months later, no horrors have befallen… on the contrary.
And yet, from another perspective, we have been stifled or outright stopped, because of subjugation, this is nothing to be “grateful” for, except insofar as experiencing relief. We cannot let anyone have us believe it is some sort of a gift to be allowed to go to school as if assumptions underlying being “allowed out” are not part of the same derangement that “locked us up and down.”
No, it was blatantly wrong, unmerited on any known facts as of today, and remains intrinsically untenable as a thesis, regardless, for any protracted period. And the gratitude, therefore, is to “life,” and its joys and glories, not these despotic dunces posturing as the people’s saviors in a grotesque parody of “leadership.”
Beginnings and Endings
And so, the parade of deception rolls repeatedly on, the charade of this being a medical rescue continues. And it all congregates into allegations that those who don’t wish to be ordered to starve, or have the temerity to wish to learn, or to embrace and comfort a loved one, who want what they spent their lives building up to matter and not be “ordered” into non-existence, who want to follow their dreams and manage their own risks, have leaped into some ethical abyss? As if the ethical high ground is maintained by those who believe a factually illicit subservience is somehow virtuous?
Perhaps the “Carnevale” can therefore take its distortions and head out of town, perhaps we can begin to mourn losses too encompassing in some ways to quantify, and in our hearts bury some dreams while hopefully exhuming and revitalizing others, haltingly if need be, but definitely, inviting the grace to resurrect some of who we were.
Perhaps we can when accosted, respond with a simple query:
“Are you recommending this happen every time there is a pathogen extrapolated to be terrifying?”
How then will anyone rationally move forward, knowing one swirl of a paranoid baton, and life ceases, and there is no succor, no way to demand that we retain the right to take the hero’s journey, of making our small but significant selves and stories matter, as a rebuttal to this “nonscience?”
Well, there is a way forward, and we must cleave to it. We keep debunking. It may be a shout in the storm, but it is what survives, humanity’s imperishable, indomitable, spirit, seeking fulfillment, being “filled full” of life’s challenges and stimuli. Our lives and how we live them can debunk this mania of humans devolving into lemmings. “We the sheeple” shall obey every bureaucratic assertion, every unsustainable playbook, as long as we are not asked to step forth into personal leadership and collective accountability and shared purposeful activism.
Well, there may be no fence left to sit on. Bend over for the anal swab or decide we will kindle anew that Promethean flame, rather than going up in the ashes of our own obliviousness.