Patriotic Duty My Eye

Rough Rider Teddy must be rolling in his grave as he looks down upon these poseurs gathered in the Roosevelt room. For crying out loud, every one of them is double vaxxed and totally boosted. And they have issued orders to force the same upon more than 130 million of their countrymen—allegedly to prevent the latter from becoming walking vectors of disease and killers of their neighbors.

Yet if the Vaxx is actually a spread stopper, why do they sit there in their masks? What’s the need to protect Biden from Fauci when the sainted doctor is armed to the teeth with vaxxed-in antibodies? And why is Biden festooned with the medical equivalent of Depends when he’s already got the accident-prevention protection of the Vaxx?

Or does he? That is to say, if it doesn’t work to stop the spread, the benefit is only private and not public and hence there is no earthly reason for mandating it against the will of millions of citizens who fear that the risks outweigh the benefits. And if it does stop the spread—despite the manifest evidence to the contrary—-why all the face mask virtue signalling on live TV?

In short, this “photo op” is worth a thousand words. It’s a live action illustration of what’s been wrong since the beginning in March 2020. Namely, the predicate that one-size-fits all social control mechanisms—lockdowns, closures, distancing, masking, vaxxing—must be preemptively and harshly employed by arms of the state in order to stop the spread of an aerosolized airborne virus which cannot be seen and cannot be stopped.

Indeed, the latest argument for mandatory vaxxing—-that it prevents not transmission and infection but just a serious course of the disease—makes the picture patently absurd. What are these cats afraid of then?

The real contagion at loose in the world—especially among the western nations which noisily congratulate themselves as model liberal democracies to be emulated by the more benighted nations inhabiting the purported darker corners of the planet—is a virulent outbreak of statist authoritarianism. 

That is, a definitely not Black Plague virus of the type that has challenged mankind o’er the ages has become a universal excuse for the wholesale cancellation of civil liberties and property rights like never before—even in times of world war.

Take the pathetic case of the United Kingdom. It is governed by a Conservative Party that’s traitorous to the cause of liberty and led by an unkempt Donald Trump wanna be who has assaulted the essence of liberal democracy to such a sweeping extent that his most authoritarian predecessors  (i.e. Winston Churchill, among others) scarcely dreamed of it and the Donald himself couldn’t hold a candle to it.

BoJo, in fact, is right now hauling out all the tools of public health authoritarianism in response to what amounts to a run-of-the-mill winter flu among the British population.

And that latter proposition is not debatable. Not when you compare the peak January data, when virtually no one was vaccinated compared to 80% of adult Brits today, with the 7-day rolling averages through last week. Thus,

• The test rate last week was 18,810 per million or 121% higher than the 8,500 rate at the January 2021 peak.
• The case rate last week was 1,138 per million or 30% higher than the 875 per million recorded at the January 2021 peaks, but–
• The death rate last week of 1.64 per million was down by a god-is-apparently-smiling 91% compared to the 18.21 rate at the January 2021 peak.

Of course, peek under the covers and what you have is the same old, same old. Not only is the Omicron variant far more transmissible and massively less lethal than earlier variants–for the inherent reasons that sensible virologists and epidemiologists have explained ad infinitum—but the propaganda contagion of the state’s Virus Patrol appears to be even more virulent.

That is to say, as the government, the BBC, the Guardian and their mass media ilk have stirred the fear pot one more time, the UK testing rate has also skyrocketed and is now well more than double the rate of last January at the previous winter season peak. Thus:

Alas, the public health machinery has so effectively stirred the fear quotient among the populace that the positivity rate has fallen dramatically. Compared to a 10.8% rate in January 2021, the current rate is just 6.0%.

Obviously, what is happening is that more and more asymptomatic and completely healthy well people are getting tested in response to the drumbeat, which testing surge has generated the predictable wave of new “cases” and new measures of propaganda and control from the Virus Patrol.

And remember, folks, the UK is allegedly governed by “conservatives”, which gets us to what’s coming down the pike from Sleepy Joe and the crypto-socialists who actually move his lips.

As we learned, they are fixing to launch a massive new round of free stuff—this time in the form of 500 million home testing kits to be mailed out to Americans just like so many unrequested mail-in ballots, meaning that we have surely come full circle: Until March 2020 under the prior regime of private medical practice based on doctor-driven testing and treatments tailored to one-at-a-time patients, we are now to have the equivalent of a one-size-fits-all testing regime, delivered by the government-run post office!

As it happens, however, America has already done nearly 800 million tests, yet has some of the worst WITH-Covid mortality statistics in the western world. So we are at a complete loss to comprehend how more government-mediated “testing” will accomplish anything constructive.

Then again, the chart below tells you everything you need to know. Despite all the panic in New York City and other hotbeds of Blue State orthodoxy, the American public is not panicking enough to keep the Virus Patrol in business. As of the latest 7-day data, the US testing rate is 3,380 per million (= 1,000X the per 1,000 rate shown in the chart below).

Now, that’s actually down by 40% from the 5,670 rate per million at the January 2021 peak, and, even more to the point, it’s just 18% of the 18,810 rate now being posted among the semi-hysterical population of the UK.

To be sure, even at the more modest US testing rate rate shown below, the positivity rate has fallen from 13.3% during last January’s peak to just 10.8% at present. Therefore, to keep the scam going the US needs at hell of a lot more testing—especially in the Red states—in order to get a lot more cases.

As it is, last week’s US case rate of 365 per million was down 52% from the peak January rate of 757per million, and can’t hold a candle to the Brits. The latter currently are lugging a case rate of the aforementioned 1,138 per million or 3.1X the current US rate.

If we were of the tinfoil hat wearing persuasion we’d be inclined to think that Biden’s minions are trying to goose the Red States into a testing and cases panic in order to keep the faltering argument for his misbegotten vaxx mandates alive.

Indeed, why on this day is there another fusillade of fear and admonition streaming from the presidential bully pulpit when we are dealing with a variant that has so far produced only one-death and a 1.7% hospitalization rate among the infected (compared to 19% at the comparable stage of Delta) in largely unvaccinated South Africa (26%), where it apparently originated?

As to the surge of US cases—again largely asymptomatic or just mildly ill—where’s the beef that justifies another presidential call to arms? As dramatized by the chart below, the 7-day case rate in the US as of December 20 was just 420 per million. That was still well below the 495 per million rate reported on September 3rd and far, far below the 757 per million rate reported at last January’s peak.

As for South Africa, which brought us this latest Covid brouhaha, it basically says to America’s authoritarians in government and Karens on the streets “oh, just shut up and sit down!”

Here’s the current South Africa data and it reminds once again that Biden’s teleprompter scripters have no idea what they are talking about. Between November 11 and December 19, the case rate in South Africa exploded from less than 5 per million to 388 per million or by 85X. Meanwhile, the death rate has barely budged from 0.48 per million to 0.55 per million. That is to say, it was a rounding error before and remains one now.

At the end of the day, of course, there is no case for mandates on anything—from lockdowns to masking and vaxxing—because the Covid just isn’t the Black Plague.

After 22 months of counting every death in America with the remotest Covid connection—including postmortem testing of the human residue of motorcycle crashes—the annualized mortality rate for the population under 50 years of age is about 500 per million—-the same figure as for traffic accidents and other unintentional injuries. That is to say, for the 211 million Americans who are not in the higher risk, immune system compromised older population, the Covid risk is the same as the risks inherent in everyday modern life that we have long ago learned to live with.

Alternatively, for the population under 65 years of age, the survival rate for the estimated 110 million Americans (40%) in that cohort who have contracted the virus since day one (i.e. February 2020) is 99.87%; and if you take the healthy sub-population without significant underlying comorbidities, the risk of death is virtually nil.

So here we are with another public hysteria, fueled by another speech from the White House, promising yet another mobilization of the public health apparatus of the state, including use of the defense production act to commandeer the manufacture of hundreds of millions—nay, billions before its over—of test kits that will only fuel the hysteria.

That’s pretty scary. And even more so is Biden’s renewed attack on the 60 million unclean Americans—overwhelmingly in the younger, low risk cohorts—who have exercised their constitutional liberty and have chosen not to take the jab:

Biden sought to draw a clear contrast when describing how the omicron surge will affect the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, issuing a dire warning to 60 million unvaccinated Americans.

“How concerned should you be about omicron, which is now the dominant variant in this country and it happened so quickly. The answer is straightforward: If you’re not fully vaccinated, you have good reason to be concerned……Omicron is serious, potentially deadly business for unvaccinated people,” Biden said

Sorry, Joe. But it’s none of your business what people chose to do about a vaccine that does not stop transmission and infection from this latest mutation; and it is most certainly not the “patriotic duty” of Americans who think the risks are not worth the benefits to take the jab on your say so.

In a word, we are in the midst of the greatest and most fraught science experiment of all time, starting with the attempt to completely reconstruct all patterns of normal interaction, the closing of vast institutions on grounds that they are not essential, and now ending with more than 11 billion shots having been administered already around the world. 

The private benefit of the vaccination for the elderly holds up but rather than even acknowledge the rapidly fading risk/reward equation for much of the population—most especially the children—the powers that be trotted out a teleprompter reader in his dotage to stoke public hysteria.

The only real patriotic duty under these circumstances, of course, is to adopt the words of the other Joe from West Virginia and utter a loud “I’m a no!” when it comes to Biden’s mandates.

A version of this piece appeared on the author’s site.