Sitting watching the news on the BBC (I have to do it just to have a rough idea of what’s going outside my bubble of one … at most a few more than one). And then comparing to all the other mainstream news outlets I currently have access to. I am compelled to think, I am actually watching Covid/Omicron show. Endless punditry and opinion. To be entirely fair to the BBC, it’s also Al Jazeera, RT, Sky, and even GB News (though the GB News take on things are more in line with my opinion, based on information gleaned outside the mainstream media … see links below).
What’s actually going on if you look beyond the demands for
more money from the government (nuanced reactive money to cover losses caused by
staff absence, not mandatory not by lockdown)? That’s a difficult question to answer. Let's say "My
business usually makes a £1000 a day … on Tuesday it only made £500. Can the government
make up the difference?" That is a slight oversimplification, and deliberately
so. It’s deliberately broad brush, because the sensible will immediately find
layers of complexity in the notion. It isn’t impossible to create measures, however,
it may be prohibitively expensive in terms of administrative overheads, unless
the tax system is used as the input-output buffer. Again, not impossible, but
whenever you add layers to systems, you lose clarity, and at this stage ripping
out a system and trying to replace it with something bespoke … again why?
Crisis end. This crisis is coming to an end (there is a massive caveat to that
further down).
Back to the question of what’s actually going on in the
wider UK as far as Covid-19-Omicron-Variant is concerned. Not much it seems,
100,000 infections plateauing, a lot of staff absence due to positive tests.
The result being a train timetable change in Scotland and a critical incident
being declared by Lincolnshire Hospital trust due to staff absence. Hospitality
is still suffering from staff shortages, and people are self-regulating themselves
away from socialising outside of their immediate bubbles.
I’m going to suggest that the pundits who are suggesting
there needs to be even more testing are not thinking clearly. The testing-for-Covid-industry is booming, and positive Covid tests that result in staff absence are
jerking the economy like an eager dog on a leash. Herd immunity and the spread
of Omicron are likely to be the key to ending the current `not really a crisis’
crisis. Yes, I wrote that and published it.
There are so many fronts to argue on, you spend the whole of the rest of your
life arguing the toss about your opinion and where you gathered your facts that
formed your opinion. My little voice mostly unheard in an unknown corner of the
internet is an irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t sit idly
by and be counted with the sheep and the useful idiots. So, to this end I’ll
leave this digital impression here as my personal testament, that I disagree
with the sheep and the useful idiots … never mind those in the pharmaceutical
industry who have realised that all their dreams have come true … for a while.
The sheep, I think just love the pandemic and being told
what to do. It’s easy comfort, you can signal your virtue and look like a law-abiding
citizen, shed non-friends and irrelevant social engagement by the expedient use
of plague … and you will be applauded for it … win win. Crack on, as your freedoms
are curtailed, and random uncertainty is introduced into your life, by other
well-meaning but misinformed partisans; or by petty bureaucrats in your
workplace, on the bus, the tube, the miserable whining hypochondriac who shares
office space with you and needs a drama to spread their own misery to anyone
else they can. Crisis perpetuators at all levels of society, a semi-hive mind driven
by a nebulous cloud of finger-wagging, fear of being different, fear of being
outcast, while simultaneously out-casting-self (it’s tail eating of the first
order, and would be hilarious if it wasn’t so frightening).
Useful idiots, those who have found a cause, a lever for
financial or political gain. Crisis perpetuators, who are using low-grade Machiavellian
machinations for their cause, and driving the fear of uncertainty, to create
uncertainty. Above them are the `Vile expedient arseholes’. Let’s throw the
broadest figures we can at the pharmaceutical industry, so we know what the
Borg Queen at the head of the collective is all about. Currently, $1000 dollars
per second are going to pharmaceutical companies, approximately $90million
daily for Covid related products. Lobbyist’s outnumber congressmen three to one
in America and it is estimated that the pharmaceutical industry has spent $266-million
dollars on lobbying since the start of the pandemic, and there is talk about
the pandemic rolling on until 2024. It’s 2022, the pandemic has been with us
for two years already. Do you want two more years? Do you want the pandemic as the world's president? Four years that’s a presidential term, that is how long the
pharmaceutical industry projects this rolling on for. Buy shares in big-pharma …
if you have £52 going spare for a Pfizer share.
Let us today be thankful, that our government is tracking
the optimistic line rather than kowtowing to demands for more restrictions, and
actually looks to be following the data, rather than the forecasts, which are
based on models, that have been designed around worst-case scenarios, and to a
greater or lesser degree have been consistently wrong (wide of the worst-case
scenario) since the outset of the pandemic.
In the beginning when the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) was
playing fast and loose with numbers and the truth, while the BBC amongst others
was ramping up the fear, and Covid variously moved from killing less than 1% to
killing more than 6% in periods measured in 24hours (the number of dead
relative to the number of hospitalisations in Wuhan). I was all over it. I
joined a group to dispel misinformation and to point people in the direction of
the right information. I was shitting bricks, this SARS (severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) could and likely would
kill me, so I believed. I still believe given my asthma and the medication I
take for it -Montelukast, an immune suppressant for a system that Covid attacks-
though I have found no papers looking at
asthma drugs and Covid outside those steroids used for severe asthma- that for
me Covid could be deadly. However, I have been double vaccinated and boosted, I
look after my health and fitness, I take care of myself (even in trying times).
I stay abreast of the actual science around Covid, not the media distillation,
or the projections from the models. And what I see now doesn’t bother me nearly
as much as the financial and social fallout from Covid.
Tangent: Note the public health messaging about looking
after your health, diet and fitness has slipped off the agenda. Many luminaries
of the scientific community and alternative media world have been asking this
question. Joe Rogan springs to mind. Could it be that unhealthy lifestyles and
the medicines that treat them would be an incentive for the pharmaceutical industry
to lobby against health messaging for the general public? Or are people
genuinely too lazy and too reliant on medicine to fix things after the fact? Rather
than mitigate problems with lifestyle choices?
Anyway, rant over, here’s some links to the Journal of the
American Medical Association. This is the source.
The front page for the journals Coronavirus recourse centre.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/coronavirus-alert
Now historic articles. January, February, March 2020.
1. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2760500
2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762997
3. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762688
The latest from South Africa (specifically regarding
Omicron)
4. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787776
Compare and contrast the content of article 2. Above with
the content of article 4.
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