The definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results
“I just want things to go back to normal.”
How many times have you heard that phrase or even been the person thinking or saying it? I’ve given up on how did it happen and am more concerned about why did it happen at this point. I feel it is fair to say that our governments were never really too concerned about “flattening the curve” of Covid progression, or really meant “just three weeks” when we first ventured down the long road labelled Covid. We are informed that need to protect the vulnerable, and then protect our healthcare system, which is laudable considering the UK government has had no concern about irreparably damaging it in the past! I am not sure if anyone else has noticed but our governments have never made decisions based on what is best for people, if they did we wouldn’t have the wealth gap we do, not just nationally but globally.
I had originally titled this blog as the collateral damage of Covid, however, I feel this should more accurately be titled the collateral of our governments decisions. The damage so far is extensive and includes . . .
Free travel – I can understand this being monitored and limited at the start of the pandemic, however, with the advent of vaccines that were “our way out of the pandemic” things didn’t really improve. Even with vaccine passports being used as a coercive measure to force people to get vaccinated, travel restrictions were not lessened for the majority of people. I think it fair to say that travel and the travel industry represent an area that will be forced to change, if it is allowed to recover from the restrictions currently placed on it. From the perspective of the spread of coronavirus, the travel restrictions brought into place have done little to prevent it – as evidenced by exceptions for influential individuals and their entourage. So whilst we know they do not prevent the spread of Covid, we will continue to impose travel restrictions upon our industries and our people.
Coercion and the erosion of free will – Where do I begin? Manipulation of the media, selective reporting and methods of group persuasion have all been used globally to direct the population to do as they are being told. This has been done before, with disastrous consequences and led to the Nuremberg Code being written in 1947. I will include a section on Permissible Medical Experiments on humans:
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.
Under the umbrella of controlling Covid, these guidance have been quickly thrown under the bus by many global governments but not all, some have genuinely allowed vaccination to be a choice of the people, as it should be. There are many whose jobs, livelihoods, way of life are threatened because they choose not to comply with the pressures to be vaccinated. For those who are interested, I would recommend looking through the Nuremberg Code to see just how far many governments have come since the end of the second world war to not hold themselves accountable for their actions against the people who they are meant to serve.
There are those who would argue that the Nuremberg Code was not written with the understanding of modern medicine and its practices but to prevent war crimes. Personally I disagree, the Nuremberg Code was written to enforce a basic human right, to ensure it is individuals who make the decision about what is done to them from an invasive or medical perspective and in full understanding of what it is they are agreeing to. The problem is that we live in an age of unreliable information from many sources, understand your options and choices before you make them, after all, they are your decisions to make and not someone else’s. As a scientist, I am flabbergasted at the FDAs decision to approve the Pfizer vaccine, especially when one of the biggest challenges to the approval of medicines is efficacy (the effectiveness of a medical treatment) and its safety. The FDA has given its approval for a vaccine that we know becomes less effective over time and has serious side effects in some healthy individuals. There was a time when the FDA would only approve a treatment with that profile for end-of-life diseases, such as with late stage cancers and chronic pain conditions. It is disheartening to say the least.
Free speech – The rise of censorship over the last 12 months has been a clear red flag that whatever decisions are being made, there is no room for different or opposing opinions from the current narrative. We live in an age where the ability to express your own personal beliefs has been unprecedented – freedom of expression! What we are seeing is that such freedoms have very clear boundaries when they infringe or correct mainstream narratives about what is happening in the world: whether our governments are taking the right action for its citizens or how much money is involved in those decisions – in other words, that the actions of our governments remain transparent. I always love to hear spokespersons detailing how we are being “led by the science” rather than the truth which is “we are being led by the scientists whose opinions the government prefers the sound of”. One of the biggest groups under censorship is the scientific and medical community, evidence based opinions are completely side lined, deleted, or even warned as being a terrorist threat.
The truth is, it doesn’t really matter which advice or approach the government thinks will benefit it the most, the truth will work its way free and into the limelight, if there is any limelight left. The current vaccines have not been through the normal cycle of safety or efficacy testing they should have and those processes were put in place for a reason. The odds on there being a shortcut to making an effective and long lasting vaccine is a rather comedic approach when presented by the safety and governing bodies who reinforced the previous legislated guidance, it is as though they have decided that the last 50 years of drug approvals were done poorly. We are seeing that they were not.
Where to now?
I am not really sure where our journey takes us next, the approaches we were promised would save us appear unable to do so (doing something that doesn’t work twice an extra three or four times is not a solution), I’d like to think the voices that were squashed at the start of the pandemic may be the ones we need to listen to if we want to move forward. A political mindset has never proved the way forward to a medical problem, medical history has demonstrated this repeatedly. We need to find a way forwards that embraces our own rights as individuals as well as protecting the vulnerable, not trying to treat millions of people who are at negligible risk and at great global cost. If we reserved vaccines for the vulnerable, we could have reached more of the globally vulnerable population (as the World Health Organization is crying out for) and maybe assigned some of the leftover billions to help solve homelessness in our cities, or to make a dent into the number of people starving across the world.
Will we continue to implement lockdowns knowing they don’t solve the problem? Or continue to administer vaccines knowing they don’t prevent infection/transmission/hospitalization? And continue to ban travel for some groups knowing it does little to prevent transmission between countries? The evidence illustrates that these and other restrictions on everyday liberties do little to solve the problem, so you have to wonder why we keep repeating them if our aim is to stop Covid.
