Grandmothers and Weasels
Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs
There are lots of strange sayings in English, and this must rank amongst the strangest. What grandmothers do in the privacy of their own homes is probably something best left unexplored, but I’ve never known any grandmothers who seem to enjoy this practice - at least publicly.
Grandmothers, however, are not the only famous, or perhaps infamous, egg-suckers. Weasels are also supposed to be proficient at this, sucking out the innards and leaving a near-perfect shell behind. It’s the origin of that other saying; weasel words.
Apparently, the expression first appeared in Stewart Chaplin's short story "Stained Glass Political Platform" in which weasel words are described as:
"words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell".
It would seem that with the advent of SARS-CoV-2 we’ve been living in the age of the weasel. Experts believe, lockdowns work, you’re at risk, safe and effective, . . . we’ve all heard these phrases, and many more, often gleefully smashed together in a veritable orgy of weaselese.
Now I don’t think weasel words are necessarily all bad. I’ll probably slip in a fair few whilst I’m writing this. After all, if we had to pin everything down with extreme precision in our writing and speech we wouldn’t have time to discuss the weather - not to mention the tedium that would result.
But when you’re allegedly trying to convey meaningful evidence-based information, information of some importance, they can be very dangerous and disingenuous.
In the political sphere we can view the weasel method as a way of lying whilst telling the truth. “Currently, we have no plans to introduce another lockdown” . . . might be technically accurate today, but if you’re planning to introduce them in a week’s time you can safely say this in all truthfulness, because today, right now, currently, you have no such plans.
Alright - you got me. I am taking a rather perverse interpretation of the meanings of things in the above example - but you get the general idea.
I use this kind of technique too. When I am asked whether I’ve been vaccinated I invariably reply “yes”, because I’ve had quite a few vaccinations in my life - I just haven’t had the vaccine that my inquisitor meant - but that’s a story for another post.
There seems to be a general expectation in the UK right now that we’re heading for more Winter lockdowns and restrictions. We’ve certainly seen lots of calls for these things to be re-introduced, and sooner rather than later.
One wonders how, after some 20 months of these things being applied at various times, when something like 75% of the UK population has been vaccinated, we can still maintain the position that any of these things have worked in a meaningful sense. The vaccines are very effective, we are told, yet apparently not quite effective enough to be able to dispense with masks, lockdowns, distancing and passports, amongst other things. Indeed, the vaccines are so effective we will probably need them at least twice a year for the rest of our lives.
Astute readers will notice that I’ve expanded somewhat on the strict meaning of what weasel words are. What I’m really railing against is the appalling lack of precision and detail we’ve witnessed when discussing covid. Words like “work” and “effective” may not be weasel words in the strict definition of that phrase, but they have certainly been used in a weaselish way. They are part of a larger technique, the weasel method, that I’ve already alluded to. Weasel words themselves form only part of this larger category.
Politicians, Grand High Masters of the Order of Weasel, are particularly expert at using this methodology. The High Priests of Weaseldom, the behavioural scientists behind the scenes, the nudgers, cajolers and manipulators have earned their salaries many times over during the last couple of years. But, like the vaccines themselves, they have not proven to be overly effective. There’s still a joyous rump of dissenters. And, like my rear end during lockdown, this rump is growing as the fantasy promoted by the weasels hits the cold, hard, wall of reality.
Having already exceeded my daily quota of rhetorical flourishes, I’d like to try to bring things back down to earth and ground things in a modicum of cold, hard, reality. Covid19 can be a very serious illness for some. Overwhelmingly, however, those most affected are actually scuppered by their own immune response. The immuno-senescent, the immuno-compromised, or those whose blobby bodies, like mine, provide a more favourable terrain for viral replication are the ones hardest hit. If your immune system doesn’t get off its lardy arse quickly enough there’s a danger that the virus will have replicated to very high levels all over the body. By the time the immune system finally gets into gear it is faced with a massive army of invaders - and must mount a massive response. The body’s immune defences kill infected cells - and the more of them you have, the more of your own body you kill.
The good news is that for most, the overwhelming majority in fact, covid19 is not fatal. It’s not even serious for most. At more or less the end of the 2nd season of covid, up to April 9th 2021, there were a total of 2,596 registered covid deaths in the under 50’s in England & Wales. That’s just shy of 3,000 deaths out of a total population of just over 37 million people under the age of 50. That’s about 0.008% or 1 covid death for every 12,333 people in this age range. And don’t forget, there are considerable concerns over the raw data here. When anyone dying, for whatever reason, within 28 days of a positive covid test is classed as a “covid” death, we must be somewhat wary of taking the figures at face value.
Getting covid is very, very far from being an automatic death sentence. Even in the absence of vaccines our own immune defences worked very well. Less well if you’re old, or otherwise vulnerable. The majority of those deaths in the under 50’s were not happening to people who were healthy. The majority of deaths occurred for those who were already facing some other issues that lead to weakened immunity.
Now please don’t misunderstand me here. Statistics hide what are some very tragic instances for individuals and their families. Covid19 is a serious illness for some. Just like flu is a serious illness for some. It’s something we cannot and should not ignore. But we can’t run a national response on anecdotes, however tragic. We have to look at the bigger picture - and that means focusing on the statistics.
Just as we should not ignore covid19 or blithely dismiss it, neither should we completely lose our marbles and focus on it like it’s some sort of bubonic plague. There are many dangers we face in life. Some of those, like covid19, will mean our fleeting time on this beautiful planet comes to an end. Covid19 is not close to being the only thing we should worry about, should we be so inclined as to worry.
Yet, despite all this, despite the data, despite the fact that overall mortality in 2020 was lower than in 2008, despite the fact that covid19 looks to be around twice as bad (give or take) as a severe flu in terms of overall mortality per season, we’ve been right royally weaselled over the last 20 months.
Before the weasel mania struck I used to quite enjoy wandering round my local supermarket. My shopping list, mere guidance at the very best, was gleefully ignored as I succumbed to the lure of all the tasty delicacies on display. Although things have improved a bit, there was a time when shopping, if the shops were even open, was an obstacle course of perspex screens, one-way systems, queues outside, masks, sanitizer, even sectioned-off “non-essential” aisles in some places, and the endless public announcements telling us how we needed to be mindful of the plague. Such environments were described as covid-safe.
Covid-safe? What does this even mean? Two short words behind which are a multitude of weasels. The first weasel here tells us this thing called covid is so deadly, so devastating, we need to do all this stuff. The second weasel tells us that only by doing this stuff can we be “safe”. The third weasel plays on our emotions, subtly nudging us to believe that if we don’t do all this we’re endangering others. I’m sure you can spot more weasels.
Yet none of this is really backed up by the evidence - it’s marginal at best, with many conflicting and mutually inconsistent scientific papers and studies. These rules appeared out of nowhere backed only by our feelings that, whatever the science actually says, these measures jolly well ought to work.
Perhaps the most worrying thing right now is the very, very ugly sentiment that is creeping in all over the place, ably assisted by an army of weasels. This sentiment says that the unvaccinated pose some mortal danger to the vaccinated. Even Noam Chomsky, the darling of the libertarian left and someone whose views have always been worth listening to, is advocating that the unvaccinated be isolated from society. The primary weasel that has been played here, of course, is the emphasis on relative risk, rather than absolute risk. We are told that, according to the trials, the vaccines reduce your risk of catching symptomatic covid by 95%. What we’re not told is that your actual risk of symptomatic covid has been reduced by only 0.7%, at best.
The unvaccinated are, technically, a source of increased risk to the unvaccinated - but the increase in risk is so minimal as to be practically negligible. And let’s also not forget that if the vaccines were fully effective, the unvaccinated would present absolutely no risk at all to the vaccinated.
Of course, the mother of all weasels that has been played, the one weasel to rule them all, is that covid19 is such a deadly threat we need to do all this stuff in the first place. We need to take this weasel and throw it into the fires of Mount Doom, and get rid of it once and for all.
*I’m sorry to be so hard on weasels. I rather like them. Like those of us who try to remain sane in an increasingly insane world, I’ve given them a bad press here.