I’m not really a big fan of Shakespeare. Too many daggers and bodkins before me for my taste. I think Romeo and Juliet involves two warring factions and some people end up taking poison. At that level it sounds pretty much like covid.
Covid was a bit different, though. The two young lovers who would rather die than be torn apart by their families’ political differences represent a quite different human response than that witnessed during the Clown Show of the Century™
During the covid wars we saw that a Romeo would likely have poisoned his Juliet for not wearing a mask. Our societies were fractured, and for what?
There are many tragic tales of family breakdown because of different viewpoints during covid. They’re very sad. Some grandparents lost contact with their sons and daughters and their grandchildren because they didn’t want to get injected with the most safe and effective substance ever known to mankind.
How did this happen? There was only one way it could happen. To understand what that is, can you imagine cutting off your grandparents because they refused to get the flu jab?
Maybe now, now that many people have had their perception of health and disease so utterly warped, we could imagine this, but before covid?
The only way this could have happened was if, attached to covid, there was a level of fear about it that dwarfed our normal response to infection with a respiratory virus.
There’s really only one graphic we need. In world terms the UK was quite badly hit with covid during 2020 (if we are to believe the stats from places like Our World in Data). If you looked at other places like India or the Philippines, for example, their per capita deaths were a fraction of ours here in the UK. Africa, a place not noted for its overall health infrastructure, fared even better. So the UK stands as a good example of a place that suffered covid consequences at the high end of things.
So, the covid year should stand out like a sore thumb, or an autogynephile’s salami of delight in the ladies locker room. 2020 should look like the year of catastrophe, right?
That being said, it should be really easy to pick out the year 2020 from the years 2001 - 2020 on a chart of deaths? I mean, c’mon man, we were facing an existential crisis, an unprecedented deadly virus, that meant we had to close the world for a while.
You can see here how easy it is to pick out the year 2020 from the two decades arranged in random order
In case you’re having difficulty (isn’t it obvious which one is 2020, he said with Niagara-levels of dripping sarcasm?)
That’s right. The year of doom, the year in which we were all told to cower indoors behind our masks for fear of this unprecedented and deadly virus, comes in at 9th place when ranked against the previous 2 decades1.
You don’t need any fancy analysis, or more degrees than a rectal thermometer, to know that there was something grossly out of line between the data and the official narrative.
Now, I’m not one of those who thinks that covid was some sort of ‘hoax’ or some kind of re-branded ‘flu’. I think there was a novel(ish) virus that could have serious consequences for some. People in the UK were getting quite seriously ill at an unusual time of year for that sort of thing (I know some). But in terms of overall impact, as sad and tragic as it was for some, we were always looking at something around the flu-level of threat, overall.
Flu isn’t something we should just ignore, but neither is it something we lose our minds over.
Covid was a watershed moment for many. It broke things across the board and, to this day, I still have no idea what ‘they’ thought they were playing at?
Governments threw away any pretence of ‘rights’ and went gaily goose-stepping over the people they were supposed to be serving - all in the name of ‘protection’ and the greater good. Or at least that is one way of looking at it. The problem is that the response was so out-of-line, so cack-handed and heavy, that many of us find it hard to believe there weren’t some other agendas at play.
Trust in so many things took a nose dive. In one sense this is a good thing - it’s good to know, DOGE-like, when you’re being shafted. But overall this loss of trust is not a good thing (albeit thoroughly deserved). It’s not a good thing that we can’t trust our governments, our institutions, our scientists, our media, any more. Had they been doing what they were supposed to be doing in the first place none of this loss of trust would have happened.
There are many, many, such examples to choose from, but here in the UK one example is sufficient to illustrate the levels of deception (and possible corruption). When the ‘vaccines’ were first developed we were told they would be for the elderly or otherwise vulnerable. This reassurance quickly took a plummet down the ages until there was significant pressure applied to vaccinate young kids.
The issue here, as you all well know, is that kids were at almost no risk from covid. The mortality risk for kids was practically indistinguishable from zero. From the official ONS (Office of National Statistics) data in the UK2 we had 6 ‘covid’ deaths in the age range 0-9 as of 9th April 2021. If we accept these as covid deaths (which we shouldn’t without question because of the very lax way of attributing deaths to covid) this translates to a mortality risk estimate of 1 in every 500,000 infections.
You’d need to look at other data to confirm, but we must regard those 6 tragic deaths as most likely coming from the cohort of children with serious comorbidities. This pattern was also found in the US where I believe it has proven impossible (?) to find a single example of a previously healthy child who died from covid.
For healthy kids, then, covid vaccination was pretty much all risk and no benefit.
Parents were being heavily manipulated to get their kids vaccinated - not for the benefit of the kids themselves, but for the benefit of adults.
What kind of sick inversion is this? We’re not Hamas - we don’t use kids as some kind of protective shield. Or at least we never used to until the Covid Crazy™ took over.
Yet, at this stage of the game, it was widely known that the covid ‘vaccines’ did not prevent re-transmission. So here we have kids being pressured (via their parents) to get injected with something that was of no benefit to them, and that didn’t even work to protect others!
The manipulative deception applied here is truly sickening, and it’s hard to see it in any other terms except evil.
Once again, we must appeal to the wider context - the level of unnecessary fear that was purposely whipped up over covid. Without that wider context, nothing else would have mattered. They could have banged on about asymptomatic wotnots and masks and screens and sanitizers and distancing and one-way systems in shops and test and tracing till they were blue in the face, but without the fear no-one would have taken it seriously.
The 9th most deadly year in the decade 2001-2020
For this we were told, many times, we would need to build back better
We lost any semblance of sanity and balance
It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that this was largely a psy-op to get people vaccinated. Anything that questioned the necessity of vaccination as a way to ‘get us out’ of the batshit crazy response to covid was ruthlessly quashed (Ivermectin, Vitamin D, etc). We were told, endlessly it seems, that whatever this appalling shite actually was (they called it a ‘vaccine’) it was safe and effective.
Neither of those things turned out to be true
Colour me fucking surprised
The damage our cretinous response to The Great Cough of Calamity™ has wrought is widespread and severe - and not just in bleak health or economic terms, but in more ‘intangible’ things too. Polls showed, for example, that many people thought kids should be removed from parents who refused to get them vaccinated. Or thought that the unvaccinated should be sequestered away from the virtuously vaccinated3.
There are many people, still, who would, in the event of another ‘pandemic’ like this, beat the crap out of someone not wearing a mask4. This despite the almost overwhelming evidence (much of which existed before covid) that masks simply do not work to control the spread of an aerosolized respiratory virus5.
We fractured our society for the 9th most deadly year in two decades
I don’t know whether at some point in the future we’ll be able to heal these wounds, but it’s not looking good. We still have ‘doctors’ pushing this mRNA gloop and we still have people who think the covid response didn’t work (which they acknowledge) because we didn’t do enough of it.
These people are like PornHub addicts - it’s always faster, harder, longer with them
Many people, myself included, want justice. Justice for all of the deliberate lies we were told by our governments and ‘experts’. Justice for all of the unnecessary damage that was done. Realistically, we’re never going to get it but if we don’t, the wounds will keep festering and never heal.
And if your counter is that “things would have been worse” if we had not locked down etc, then I have only one word for you. Sweden.
The data here is for England & Wales
The logic here is somewhat less than impeccable. The safe and effective stuff that is only safe and effective when everyone has been given the mark of the beast some? Erm, OK.
Police forces across the world became particularly good at this
It’s actually obvious from the physics that those surgical masks cannot possibly work to mitigate spread
"And if your counter is that “things would have been worse” if we had not locked down etc, then I have only one word for you. Sweden."
Sorry? Anyway, they are working on fixing this. And in the USA, they are targeting the Amish right now, trying to force-vaccinate their children. Since Amish children don't have higher mortality rates than other comparable groups of children, but have significantly lower rates of ailments such as ADHD and Autism, there's only one real reason:
Remove a control-group that by virtue of existing proves the capitalistic cult of Covid and by extension commercial vaccines wrong, and evil.
Substacker "Epimetheus" of Die Fackel (the name of the stack) has been running a "best of Covidiocy" focused on Germany and Austria (or Greater and Lesser Covidistan has he sometimes calls them) for a week now. Recommended if you want to compare continental loons with British ones: https://fackel.substack.com/
Your mention of fear brought to mind one of the singularly best delves into what and why fear is, I cannot recommend it enough, because even though he looked at it from a writer's point of view, Lovecraft's treatise on the nature of fear is bang on the money in the psychological and sociological aspects, and how fear is not just a glandular response to immediate stimuli but a much deeper societal and cultural notion as greatly embedded in our psyches as are anger and love:
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx
Sample:
"Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand—and the universe teemed with them in the early days—were naturally woven such personifications, marvellous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part."
For which our forefathers invented rituals, to call for boons and to ward off ill fate. Totems, dances, chants, temples, sacred groves, certain garbs and vestments, and so on. Mitre or mask, they both have the same effect on a virus.
I am more sceptical than you with regard to it really being a thing. But certainly, there either was as an agenda behind it, or it was quickly created and then jumped upon by a sinister elite, from military people via the MSM to the many grifters.
And while, as with all wars including the currently prepared for, I can see their rationale for creating fear and (ab)using it, I still cannot excuse most of the public for falling for it -again!, and for embracing Girardian scapegoating wholeheartedly -again!
The public positively wanted it all after a very, very short while, even demanding it FROM these elites when they still hesitated, demonstrable especially so in the UK.
I still remember that episode of the 83 year old woman from Barnsley accidentally allowed to speak common sense and demonstrate integrity and dignity on TV, who was not just immediately vilified for that display, but whom they also tried to publicly humiliate and reeducate again on TV shortly thereafter.
I actually briefly and naively harbored some hope at the time that this might be a turning point.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-barnsley-pensioner-bbc-anti-lockdown-viral-b1221765.html
And the public had and have far weaker excuses for falling for it, wanting it and enthusiastically practising it than previous generations, who had no knowledge yet about Nazism, communism, LeBon, Bernays, Orwell, Ash, Milgram, Stanford&co, or, in the case of the currently prepared for war, of the Covid psyop.