The Mythology of Covid

5 years ago, around about this time of the year, the world was getting the first rumblings of some new killer disease spreading in China. On 5th January 2020 the WHO, the World Hysteria Organization, published its first ‘Disease Outbreak News’ on this with the title Pneumonia of unknown cause – China

On the 23rd of January 2020 the first emergency committee convened by the WHO could not come to agreement on whether this constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

One week later on the 30th January 2020 the second emergency committee convened by the WHO decided that it was, indeed, a PHEIC.

The interesting insert into this timeline is the following (from Wikipedia)

Scientists from China first released information on the viral genome on 10 January 2020. That day the Malaysian Institute for Medical Research (IMR) produced “primers and probes” specific to a SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR test.

By the end of January 2020 several places around the world had developed PCR tests for this novel coronavirus.

From the same Wikipedia page we have this

The German nucleic acid testing protocol was published on the 17th. Another early PCR test was developed by Charité University hospital in Berlin, working with academic collaborators in Europe and Hong Kong, and published on the 23rd.

It seems that several places around the world were busy developing tests for this novel disease before the WHO had even decided whether or not to push the big red panic button.

Broadly speaking, you can either see this (rapid) process as scientists genuinely concerned about the possibility of some serious pandemic, or the first components of a dastardly plan to impose global control (with many variations in between).

But whatever way we choose to view this, January 2020 represented the first steps in the establishment of a grand narrative, a mythology, that was to change the world, and not for the better.

Since then the world has split into even more factions with the whole range between “oh my God we’re all going to die unless we wear 47 masks and never get within 6 feet of another human being ever again” all the way through to “viruses don’t exist and it was all faked or caused by 5G radiation”.

It seems almost unbelievable now when we recall the insanity that gripped so many in 2020. It was, however, an entirely engineered insanity. It was, even with the data we had back then, entirely unnecessary. It was all based on a mythology that, even then, many people knew to be almost wholly flawed.

The question remains - and it’s still one I can’t properly come to any firm conclusion on (right or wrong) - as to why? Why did the “powers that be” push the mythology so very much?

Many writers whom I respect enormously have eschewed the idea of some ‘conspiratorial’ component, preferring to ascribe the madness to human folly, inept bureaucracies, media scaremongering forcing politician’s hands and so on. I struggle to be so charitable. Whilst any individual component of the fiasco might have a seemingly ‘natural’ explanation, there just seem to be too darned many of them to think it was all just some almighty cock-up, a coincidental confluence of cretins. It’s one of those things I fervently wish to have gotten wrong, because I do strongly suspect a more malign explanation.

Very little about the whole progression from “pneumonia of unknown cause” to the near complete lockdown of an entire globe makes much sense - unless you want to be the next Michael Crichton and write science-fiction thrillers.

And many places went the science-fiction route. Here’s the kind of thing that happened in South Korea. It makes fuck-all sense from anything but a propaganda perspective.

What were these morons hoping to achieve with this pantomime, except to scare people into submission? I shouldn’t single out South Korea here, because many countries went full moron.

Far too many people went moron. In June 2021, 18 months into the whole clown show, I went with my daughters and son-in law on a self-catering vacation for a week. We all needed it. The owners of the cottage proudly proclaimed they were keeping us covid-safe by quarantining half the books in the place on a weekly basis.

They probably saved my life.

Billions were spent on trying to convince us all we were in the midst of some unprecedented deadly event. Why? We knew this not to be true. Even with the crappy data that was available (and categorising a death as a ‘covid’ death if it occurred within 28 days of a positive PCR test was an almost textbook example of how to collect crappy data) it was entirely obvious this was not some unprecedented existential crisis.

Why did ‘they’ do this, when they knew it not to be true? Why did they insist on making everything seem very much worse than it actually was?

It was a case of “Yeah, it’s kind of like flu, but we’re going to pretend it’s very much worse - so bad that we’re going to need to bring the entire planet to a grinding halt”

Here you can see the impact in England & Wales (quite badly hit by world standards), even with the crappy data that we had. Data that exaggerated the problem. It’s not my graph and I didn’t record who created it, but it’s consistent with my own analyses of the same data.

Not great if you were getting on a bit in life - but not even coming close to any kind of sensible threshold for “unprecedented emergency”. And remember, this data exaggerates the problem.

For this we upended our entire approach to disease management and upended our way of life and civil liberties. We caused far more damage by our response to covid than covid ever did.

If you even tried to suggest we might be overdoing things, just a tad, you were shouted down and exorcised from social media for your ‘dangerous’ views.

Yet almost everything we were being told about the virus and its impact and what we ‘needed’ to do about it was, effectively, a lie. It was misinformation (or dis- or mal-information) on an epic scale. An entire mythology was spun, created out of seemingly nowhere, and it was, to use a technical term, a steaming great pile of shit.

For a long time I thought I was crazy. As an academic I worked in an environment of trust and respect where the a priori assumption was that your colleagues knew what they were talking about - especially when it came to something outside of your own direct expertise. So how could I be, seemingly, getting things so wrong when it appeared that so many scientists were pushing the mythology?

I pored over the data. Did the calculations. Re-did them. Did them again. Did the analyses using different methodologies. I still came to the same conclusions. I couldn’t see what on earth I was missing. Maybe I’d just lost it. I read some of the studies supporting the mythology - asymptomatic transmission, masks, etc, etc. They were all profoundly shit - at least the ones I read were. Again, it was a case of doubting myself in favour of the assumption that these ‘experts’ must know what they’re talking about.

As more and more information leaked out through ‘back channels’ - that is, those still uncensored by Big Tech - it became increasingly apparent that if I was crazy, then so were an awful lot of people, many of whom had some serious scientific clout. I was at least re-assured that there were other crazies in the world - even if the media were still encouraging me to cower in abject fear and treat other people as walking bio-hazards.

In one perspective, this whole thing could be viewed as a very careful construction of myth upon myth in order to achieve some desired goal. It’s an open question (within this perspective) of what that goal might have been. Money? Global vaccination? Control? Establishment of some dystopian “built back better” society? Take your pick.

Another perspective would be that people got themselves worked up into a bit of a froth and everything spiralled out of control from there, but there was no ‘guiding hand’ behind it all.

Again, whichever of these two broad perspectives we might fall into, they each rest on the establishment of the mythology. The underlying mythology does not change - only how we might interpret it; nefarious or natural?

The myth upon which all else rests is that of seriousness. Who cares if anyone is asymptomatically spreading the shit out of the common cold? Once you have convinced people of the seriousness of the situation, then all the other myths can be constructed on its foundation.

An awful lot of work (and money) went into trying to convince us that things were massively more serious than they actually were. Why?

What’s the ‘natural’ or ‘innocent’ explanation for this?

By the time we had the data from The Diamond Princess and Italy it was crystal clear we were not dealing with an “unprecedented emergency” that would require a radical re-organization of our response to an infectious respiratory disease, a restructuring of our approach to global ‘health’. Yet we pushed the big red panic button until our fingers bled.

I have been unable to find a good explanation for this (which isn’t the same thing as saying that one does not exist).

In the early stages, at least here in the UK, the message was not to panic, that this was something we needed to be a bit cautious of (like flu, for example) but that we shouldn’t be losing too much sleep over it. Then something changed and we went full retard. I think this happened in other places too - it was as if some global decision had been taken to instil a sense of panic in the global population.

It was decidedly odd. Even weirder was, from around mid-2020, politicians and other ‘influencers’ talking about “building back better” and floating the idea of vaccine passports. Why would they do this when they knew this disease was at the flu-end of the spectrum?

It doesn’t add up, does it?

From any rational and correct analysis of the existing data, as crappy as it was, it should have been impossible to arrive at the ‘emergency’ conclusion. Yet we did. Except that it wasn’t a ‘conclusion’, as such, it was an engineered conclusion inconsistent with the facts. It was a deliberate strategy to make people believe this virus/disease was very significantly worse than it was (based on the existing data).

It was as if someone had said “this is the conclusion we need - now go to it”

When you couple all this with the near-instantaneous global rejection of the existing pandemic preparedness plans that had been carefully constructed by experts over the years based on data and experience, you have to wonder why? The UK’s own pandemic preparedness planning examined two hypothetical scenarios one of which was the outbreak of a novel coronavirus that was significantly worse than what happened in 2020. This plan explicitly rejected things like lockdown and quarantine (and also masks) - and yet it was binned without so much as a second glance. Why?

Overnight the supposed ‘efficacy’ of lockdowns became The Science™ without a single shred of supporting evidence, and without any acknowledgment this was a 180° reversal from the previous version of science (the real one - not the bastardized version we got in the media). And, one might add, without any attempt at any cost/benefit analysis having been done (or at least not publicly admitted).

How could this happen? And why?

The covid mythology spread like a malignant tumour - all generated on the back of the wholly fictitious ‘seriousness’ that was being promoted. None of us would have been remotely interested in things like lockdown, asymptomatic transmission, surface transmission, masks, or indeed the ‘vaccines’, had we not been convinced of the seriousness.

Yet the implied level of seriousness was a fiction, created out of nowhere, and wholly unsupported by the data. Why?

I do think covid was of some seriousness, particularly for the elderly and already unwell, but nowhere, anywhere, did it ever rise to a level of seriousness to warrant the draconian interventions that were enforced upon us - even if those interventions actually worked, which they didn’t.

So why did they spend so much time, money, and effort in trying to make us so much more afraid than we needed to be?

Hysteria, or co-ordinated hysteria?

In my view, the evidence is very much in favour of the latter - particularly when we consider the extreme efforts that were made to terrify us into submission - to generate a wholly unnecessary level of fear.

We can argue all day about the why, but I think it’s an established fact that they hyped everything up to absurd levels. They created an entire mythology driven by this fictitious ramping up of the severity level.

Although most people are a bit fed-up of the endless covid analysis that’s still going on (and understandably so) it’s still very important not to forget. Because whilst covid may have gone away, the total fuckwittery that was the covid response, hasn’t.

It will all happen again next time the World Hysteria Organization decides (or is instructed) to push the big red panicdemic button again.