The Highest Grossing Block-Booster of All Time

. . . One flu over the cuckoo's nest?

I keep playing the re-runs of 2020 and 2021 in my head, too, and I have no effing idea what’s going on either.

We started off with a sub-standard Kung Flu movie; people comically falling down in the street with ninjas in hazmat suits appearing miraculously out of nowhere to assist. Hugely popular with older folk - the younger generation just didn’t seem to get it too well.

The sequel, from director Sentin Quarantino, took the action in a Bollywood direction with a spicy Indian variant (re-named Delta for western audiences). The last in the trilogy tries to re-capture the make-believe magic of the original by bringing in a Transformers theme - it has all the same key elements, but despite heavy promotion and some initial excitement, it seems to be a much more muted affair.

Love the movies or loathe them, one thing cannot be denied. The trilogy has made Pfizer Studios the most profitable company in history.

OK - I’m not going to try to stretch the analogy too far here, but you get the point.

Someone, somewhere, somehow, has managed to convince almost all world governments that they need to inject the entire population of the planet with some goo, several times a year, in order to combat a disease that, even in its more virulent original variant, only kills fewer than 3 people out of every 1,000 infected - with most of those being older than average life expectancy.

Have we gone fucking insane?

3 deaths, in every 1,000 infections - and that’s the original variant, and without any early treatments.

We have closed the world for this?
We have put ourselves into massive debt for this?
We have closed thousands of small businesses for this?
We have destroyed the livelihoods and financial security of millions for this?
We have delayed diagnoses and treatments consigning thousands to early agonizing deaths for this?
We have set back the education of our children, maybe irreversibly so, for this?
We have caused a significant rise in mental health issues in children, in adults, for this?
We have become afraid of the air we breathe for this?
We have become afraid of each other for this?

Did we stop using plastic straws so that there would be enough space in the oceans for all the masks?

Here’s what 3 in 1,000 looks like

There have been several previous attempts to generate an exaggerated fear around disease outbreaks. Swine flus, bird flus, maybe one flu over the cuckoo’s nest - none of them really stuck. They managed to succeed with this one. I can only suppose they’d learned from their previous mistakes and played the fear creation just right this time.

But why?

Why have they pushed the fear so much?

I have tried to come up with “innocent” explanations, and I can’t.

For fuck’s sake, this disease is not something to be THAT afraid of.
Really, it isn’t.
They know it isn’t too. So why pretend it’s like some kind of Ebola-level threat?
Why spend billions worldwide on trying to convince people to be really afraid?

However tragic it is for the families affected by this, this has not been a particularly deadly pandemic. In terms of age-adjusted mortality, 2020 (no vaccines, deadlier variants) only comes in at a poor number 9 in the league table of death for the 2 decades 2001 - 2020 in the UK.

THIS IS NOT A PARTICULARLY DEADLY PANDEMIC

Lockdowns, masks, sanitizer, screens, one-way systems, social distancing - no discernible significant impact can be seen in the data

We did so much - and achieved so little.

So much for a disease whose impact only just registers in terms of age-standardised excess mortality.

Yet the whole world has ground to a halt - they’re bringing in systems of control and governance which will almost certainly be irreversible. They’re changing the whole citizen-state “contract” - entirely on the pretext that we’re in some “deadly” pandemic.

Many places are implementing some form of “health” passport, mostly in the form of “vaccine” passports. Some countries are even going in the direction of implementing severe financial penalties in the form of thousands of Euros of fines - for the “crime” of being vaccine-free.

My body, their choice.

And the “vaccines” are more accurately described as prophylactics; they neither prevent infection nor transmission. They do not do what vaccines are supposed to do - and that is to provide a break in transmission.

Vaccine “passports” are, in terms of any health benefit, about as much use as a chocolate teapot, or exhaust chutes on death stars.

I desperately try to avoid “conspiratorial” thinking (although I do enjoy a rollicking good conspiracy theory) but I have not been able to square the sheer magnitude and senselessness of the things we have done with any rational and evidence-based health response.

THIS IS NOT A PARTICULARLY DEADLY PANDEMIC

Is there not one sane national health advisory body in the world? Perhaps Sweden might qualify for that, and places like Florida or Texas. Most other places seem to have been caught in the grip of some mass psychosis.

Some of the wonderful writers and analysts on Substack that I follow are suggesting that it’s pretty much all over bar the shouting and face-saving. I hope they are right, but I’m not so sure. I think 2022 could go either way. We could see a doubling down, a sort of “we can’t let something like the last 2 years happen again and so we must keep up the vigilance and precautionary measures and make sure everyone is vaccinated” type of thinking.

If only we’d just “let it rip” - a strategy which could otherwise have been called “do what we do for flu” - we’d have had pretty much the same health outcome, but NONE of the negative impact of all the useless measures that were implemented.

But no. Our desire to signal our virtue, to demonstrate how much we cared about others, took over. The sensible “do what we do for flu” approach was flipped to become the (allegedly) inhumane “let it rip” epithet - and cast about like some mortal insult to indicate the utter moral turpitude of those who even appeared to advocate it. No matter that the measures actually caused more suffering overall than the disease itself.

Instead of managing our own risks in the way we saw fit, we’ve been encouraged to try to manage the risks of everyone else. The noble laptop class, largely insulated from the worst consequences of lockdown, could parade their great virtue on social media, generously letting the world know about the great sacrifice they were making for the good of others, how much they cared - and looking down their sanctimonious noses at those who questioned the necessity or efficacy of the measures.

The people who delivered their groceries, or kept their electricity going, or the small business owners who were forced to sacrifice their livelihoods for the good of others? We’re all in this together, right? Well, to misquote Orwell, some animals are more together than others.

How do we know the “let it rip” strategy would have been better? There are several examples to choose from, but I’d like to recall only a couple. You remember the howls of outrage when Texas announced they were going to relax the restrictions? The noble laptop class, the holy virtuous, frothed vociferously forth, declaring Texans to be “Neanderthal” in their thinking.

Nothing bad happened.

In the UK before so-called “Freedom Day”, there were similar howls of outrage from the self-righteous concernerati, including a letter signed by 1200 doctors and scientists warning of catastrophe.

Nothing bad happened.

At every stage, these virtue-signalling muppets have been WRONG.

All of the fear, fear, fear and more fear. None of it warranted.

Why? It’s a question I still can’t properly answer. Why was the fear pushed so much? Of course, if they hadn’t pushed the fear quite so much, the uptake of the Glorious Goo would have been so much less. Maybe there’s a clue there? I don’t know.

It’s one thing to make adults afraid - we ought to be old and wise enough to look after our own emotions and perceptions. But to foist this fear onto children has been utterly disgusting and reprehensible. We have utterly failed in our duty of care towards our kids. Adverts suggesting that kids will kill granny - like this recent one - are abhorrent and the product of truly nasty and sick minds.

This is not “concern” - this is nothing short of child abuse. How have we become so cheap, so morally deficient, so spiritually bereft and cowardly that we can use (and abuse) kids like this?

Remember all these things whilst Pfizer are lasciviously drooling over every new dollar that lands in their accounts. And remember that we did, and are still doing, all of this for a really quite unremarkable virus in terms of population-level impact.

Yes, it has been serious for a few. Very serious indeed. It’s pretty horrible if you get it bad - and people have died. No way to sugar-coat that at all, and I have no desire to do so. But the measures have not appreciably helped. These deaths would still have happened had we done nothing at all. But by doing “something” we have made things so much worse overall. The “cure”, which didn’t work anyway, has been much worse than the disease.

And here we are facing a lifetime of Get-Your-Goo if you want to have any kind of liveable life at all.

Erm, Happy New Year everyone

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