Nikiforuk - Let's Just Pretend It's Over

 


Andrew Nikiforuk pierces the curtain of political obfuscation on Covid-19.  His message - it's all horsecrap.


I come on behalf of many of Canada’s public health officials, along with our fearless political leaders. They have asked me to deliver some important news here on your screen in the form of a unicorn cat angel avatar, hiding my identity in order to protect my privacy and safety.

What I have been charged to say is this: We have completely lost the plot on COVID.

The plot, in case you forgot, was to control and reduce transmission of the virus so it wouldn’t kill lots of people, cripple citizens with long COVID, threaten the vulnerable, trash our hospital system and make more dangerous variants.

Please, don’t be alarmed, but it is time to voice the obvious. We have decided to surrender and give up for the public good. Let’s admit it. Everyone is tired and done with COVID. Even Jordan Peterson. Especially Jordan Peterson.

So the COVID nightmare is hereby declared officially over or almost over. We know this is the case because we signed a nondisclosure agreement with Mr. Omicron and company.

...As a consequence, we are now entering an era of Not That Big a Deal. Mr. Omicron was fast and mild for the survivors, and why shouldn’t the next variant be even faster and milder? Haven’t our predictions been accurate? Second thought: ignore that question.

You are probably wondering what’s taken public health officials so long to learn how to relax and to live with a continuously mutating novel virus that destabilizes the immune system, inflames the lungs, infects bone marrow, swells lymph nodes, lowers sperm counts, wreaks havoc with the blood clotting system, damages the heart, and attacks the brain in about one out of 100 people?

...Point is, an optimistic attitude is what’s needed in order for us to govern. Not a bunch of scientific facts in service of urging us to take precautions.

Some of you will remember that a couple of waves ago (I hope I can keep all these waves straight), our trusted officials instructed you to wear a mask, isolate when sick, get tested, avoid crowds and bend that dangerous curve.

Meanwhile our fearless leaders promised that a vaccine, and only a vaccine, would deliver us from the virus.

They repeatedly vowed that one or two doses would deliver us, magically, straight into the waiting arms of herd immunity and normalcy.

...So here’s the new pitch. Don’t worry about getting infected with Omicron. (Yes, it has killed 1,107 Canadians a week as of Jan. 24, but they were mild deaths).

We want you to hurry back to work, crowd those schools, forget about isolating while sick, and not bother with testing because we don’t have the capacity anymore.

Ten days, five days, no days, fun days, as we now say in the office.

...You do know there’s a big difference between pandemic and endemic? So go right ahead and celebrate that we’ve decided that COVID is now endemic. Rejoice!

What’s that? Evidence? There is no evidence supporting this endemic declaration.

...We look at it like this. Malaria is endemic and it killed 600,000 people in 2020. Hepatitis C is endemic and it kills about half a million folks a year. That’s puny compared to COVID which has killed about six million people a year and could even double that. But hey, that’s when COVID was a pandemic, not endemic.

Now evolutionary virologists will accuse our smart policy-makers of invoking the word endemic “as an excuse to do little or nothing.” They’ll also claim that evolution can change a virus as if transforming a house cat into a meat-eating tiger. But that’s exactly the kind of nuance and complexity we can’t tolerate anymore. Besides, who’s to say we won’t end up with a unicorn cat angel? Hope for the best!

These same pesky virologists also make over the top arguments in the usual journals like Nature: “Thinking that endemicity is both mild and inevitable is... dangerous: it sets humanity up for many more years of disease, including unpredictable waves of outbreaks.” Pure fearmongering. Why can’t they look on the bright side of life?

...Oops. Don’t blame us for not studying reams of historical studies predicting a strain of recalcitrant human nature might ruin our vaccine-only approach to getting us out of this jam. Instead, direct your anger at the vaccine hesitant.

...There are a few places on the planet that still cling to ways of thinking we find inconvenient and therefore outdated. If you lived in Japan, for example, you’d see a lot of public health messages telling you to “Avoid the three C’s: Closed spaces. Crowded spaces. Close contact settings.” Boring.

Be thankful you don’t live in Japan, or South Korea or Taiwan for that matter, where they rigorously employ drugs, masks, testing and tracing, ventilation and isolation. As a result, vaccines in those places are collectively more effective in suppressing the virus.

True, but if we were to follow that old-fashioned script in this country it might hurt people’s feelings. And giving people the blues is not good for public health.

And so, we stick by our mantra in Canada: Be kind. Be calm. Be safe.

Be willing to accept that your leaders have lost the plot.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded...
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more