In the last week, some of the top spokespeople for lockdowns, and all that is associated with that policy of pathogenic control, have come out to defend them plus threatening more now that we are seeing seasonal increases in cases. It’s almost as if they have learned nothing.
Looking back, there is nothing terribly surprising about any of this. It’s a consequence of safety culture, arrogant elites, and a belief that powerful, rich, and intelligent people can manage the world better than the rest of us. We’ve been here many times in history, and it has always foreshadowed a long period of suffering.
While the CCP engages in active censorship of the misery Shanghai’s residents are currently experiencing, there are both immediate and long-term economic, psychological, and health consequences from this zero-COVID policy that may reverberate around the world.
There is a broader legal context for these extra-legal developments in mass surveillance of civilian populations. Since the war on terror began, Western nations have legislatively scaled up their increasingly intrusive networks of mass surveillance (often referred to with the euphemism “bulk collection”).
The supposed “experts” who claimed the airline industry would be undergoing massive turmoil never had the slightest chance of being right, because masks don’t work. Somehow though, I doubt the new Ministry of Truth will be coming after them for their “disinformation.”
Let us not forget those months when the haircut was illegal. When governments finally allowed them, it didn’t allow blow dryers and made customers follow arrows on the floor and use only “touchless” payment methods. That’s pandemic control in a nutshell. What a disgrace this entire period was to science, rationality, human rights, and freedom.
For the past two years, what Western governments have done to the next generation — all in the name of keeping them safe, of course — has been calamitous. Instead of trying to ameliorate problems for our children that were already clear, well-documented and steadily worsening over time, in March 2020 the authorities began to perform particularly gruesome social experiments on them. What kind of generation will result?
Two years into the Covid-19 event, there are no excuses left for perpetuating these harms, no possibility of denying their existence. It is past time that the staff, and staff associations, of international organizations found the spine to stand for the populations they claimed to serve, and demand that their organizations adhere to basic public health principles.
What’s stopping us in general, and public health authorities in particular, from finally putting an end to exhausting pandemic hysteria and reassuring everyone that we can move on? Who benefits from never-ending Covid?
These new digital surveillance and control mechanisms will be no less oppressive for being virtual rather than physical. Contact tracing apps, for example, have proliferated with at least 120 different apps in used in 71 different states, and 60 other digital contact-tracing measures have been used across 38 countries. There is currently no evidence that contact tracing apps or other methods of digital surveillance have helped to slow the spread of covid; but as with so many of our pandemic policies, this does not seem to have deterred their use.
Misuse of PCR underpinned the whole narrative. Its very high sensitivity and robotic acceptance as a gold standard created the illusion of many more cases (i.e. active infections) than were really present and prompted long quarantines, disrupting society and lives.
Finally we come to the biggest problem of all. What kind of society do we want to live in and build? Is it based on the presumption that freedom belongs to all and is the best path for progress and good lives? Or do we want the rights of the people always to defer to the mandarins in the walled-off bureaucracies who give orders and expect only compliance and no challenge to their rule?
