PROTECTING OUR FREEDOMS AGAINST COVID-19

They say you should always listen to your gut. Well with every fibre of my being my gut is telling me that this pandemic strategy is dangerous.  Nevertheless it has been adopted by virtually every country in the world with a few exceptions. I may be right. I may be wrong. But is there even any serious discussion taking place on this level.

My concerns are – Is the strategy justified and when it’s all over will they give us back our freedoms.

The WHO denied in late January that the virus could be transmitted human to human. Many now suggest that they were in league with the Chinese, trying to spin what was happening to accommodate the CCP. Recent information suggests that five million Chinese left Wuhan before they locked it down yet we hear that neither Beijing nor Shanghai were seriously affected. Why have Milan and New York been so badly affected. The pandemic coincides with the signing of phase one of the trade deal with the US. This raises all sorts of questions from how contagious the virus is to what exactly have the Chinese been up to. Have the senior figures in the WHO become politically corrupted.

Estimates as to the rate the infection multiplys at range from of 2.5 people per day to 5.7 people per day? A very wide spread. How deadly is it? Is it seasonal? What are the long term effects. The modelling being done by the various government health authorities is inconclusive. One has to worry that they are now feeding their own narrative having adopted certain strategies at the outset. The most up to date research coming out of Stanford university maintains that the death rate will be less than that of the ordinary flu but it’s not yet conclusive enough. 

There is no modelling being done to try and calculate the illnesses or death rates which may result from the pressure being placed on families during the lockdown or from the ensuing recession. One GP in Ireland this week advised that he was already seeing more people with mental health issues including potential suicides than he is regarding the virus.

Think about an average family living month-to-month week to week. They depend on a regular cheque to pay their mortgage or to rent their house. They are now cooped up together. The kids aren’t allowed to go out and play. All this in and of itself creates serious pressure.

Add to that financial worries such as should he lose his job or she her job. We all know the consequences of financial stress on people post 2008. The number of suicides increased enormously and they only reflect the most extreme cases. The mental health issues emanating from confinement, financial stress, physical/mental abuse etc. will more than likely cause more deaths and place even greater strain on the capacity of our health system than those generated as a result of the virus. The damage to society as a whole resulting from these influences could be phenomenal but nobody is doing any modelling to predict the outcome. How can we make a valued judgement if we don’t evaluate the effect of one strategy versus the other.

The conversation is not being had on any constructive level that I can detect. The policy makers decided by virtue of a panic reaction to follow the model of Communist China. Unbelievable when you say it like that to think that the solutions adopted by the free world were taken without scrutiny of any kind from Communist China. It’s therefore no surprise that they are the kind of measures adopted by Stalin and Mussolini or in modern times Maduro. The politicians have positioned matters in such a way that their only risk is restraint. This enables and to a degree camouflages their authoritarian overreach.

Governments have washed their hands of it by appearing to hand the reigns over to the health gurus. These are the same gurus who’s job it was to plan for and prevent where possible these kind of pandemics. With the exception of a few such as Germany they were all ill prepared. Now these gurus are suddenly to be trusted without any questions being asked. In addition to not being prepared the WHO lied to the whole world in some kind of confused cover up. Confucius indeed!!

As a result our freedoms have been largely taken away from us and nobody is asking any questions about it. Some elements of the restrictions are being imposed by the over enthusiastic or power hungry. These are people who find themselves suddenly at the forefront of matters. Nobody ever heard of Dr. Fauci until a few weeks ago. Now they’re asking him who should play him in the movie. They should be asking him more searching questions regarding the WHO and his failure to have the US better prepared.

Do we really want to live in a world where we need permission to go out in the car or there is a permanent screen between us and the person serving us in the supermarket? Do we want to live in a world where people are afraid to shake hands or give each other a hug? Do we want to live in a world where when we see people coming down the street we think are they going to contaminate us if we let them get too close. The obvious answer is no. That then begs the question do we have to? Will we be better off as a result of these present strategies? How do we protect our freedoms from government overreach and their bureaucracies?

These freedoms may not sound like huge things to take away but they are, particularly if you don’t get them back. It will seriously damage the fabric of our society. Already people can sense an undercurrent of either discomfort or hostility or unfriendliness when they come across each other in the aisles of a supermarket or in the street. We are instinctively social creatures and the more you manufacture how we function the more damage will be done to society. Have all the laws in the world made people more or less honest? Less I would contend. If you make something a law it’s treated differently than if it’s a value. Seldom does it reduce the rate of occurrence. If it’s a law they only have to deal with the authorities. If it’s a value they have to deal with themselves. Governments increasingly don’t trust us and encourage us not to trust each other which allows them to justify their actions.

Those in power seldom give you back control once they’ve taken it. This is particularly dangerous now. Never before have we had such sweeping freedoms taken away from us. The suggestion by health authorities in the US that internal passports are being considered is an indication of what might be in store for us unless people speak up. I remind everyone of the security restrictions imposed in airports after 9/11 which are completely ineffective and hugely interfere with our daily lives. They were appropriate at the time to set the tone but once intelligence services got their act together in respect of profiling and intelligence they should have been abandoned as they are completely ineffective.  We have sheepishly accepted them because once again the irrational trumps the rational. As long as those in power can tap into our fear they can make us do anything. 

Never in the history of mankind have ordinary people enjoyed such freedoms as we have in the last 100 years. With this freedom of expression and freedom of movement has come a creativity which has seen society evolve and develop more in a 100 years than in the previous 1000 years. Today there is a trend in Europe and North America not to trust matters to ordinary people. Instead they are attempting to regulate anything they can think of so we won’t think for ourselves. It starts with the legislators and gets compounded by local authorities as they firstly interpret and then implement these regulations. They are even regulating speech. If that doesn’t signal to us that they have gone too far it means they have.

I believe this is a watershed moment. If the people don’t stand up and challenge the politicians to insure that our freedoms are returned to us then it will not happen. One day we’ll turn around and it’ll be too late. The concept of western democracy as we know it could be a distant memory to be replaced by authoritarian regimes and repression of the masses. Back to the Future.