We need to stop doing covid . . . and do life instead
Life is a terminal condition. I can’t remember the exact saying, but it’s something like
What matters isn’t the amount of time you have in your life, but the amount of life you put into your time
We’re all heading for that last great adventure of life. Death.
We are born, shit happens, and then we die. Some people are luckier than others - definitely - but it’s all up to us to make the most of whatever we do have. We don’t get another shot at it.
Death, or rather the fear of it, has gate-crashed our party over the last 20 months or so - and it has long outstayed its welcome.
Of course, I’m not suggesting we should all go a bit crazy and take on any and all risk in the pursuit of happiness, but neither am I suggesting we should all stay in our homes, demand others keep us “safe”, and avoid anything that smacks of that worrying word, risk.
Somewhere along the way, we lost our balance, our perspective on things. Covid has deranged us - but it has also demeaned us. As a parent I had always assumed it was my duty, and a privilege, to shoulder extra burdens so that my kids could have the best start to life that I could manage.
Yet here we are, injecting millions of children with a vaccine they don’t actually need - and the primary justification seems to be that it will add extra bricks in the “wall of protection” - a supposed wall of protection for adults. Kids don’t need the wall at all - it sure as hell isn’t for them - their risk from serious covid19 is almost too small to calculate.
We have demeaned ourselves, as a society, by allowing this to happen. It isn’t the job of my kids to protect me. Isn’t it my job, as an adult, to protect them? When did we become so fearful that we’re prepared to sacrifice our kids so that we feel safer? When did it become “the right thing to do” to put the burden on our kids, to force them to wear masks, to socially isolate, to lay waste to their precious education - simply to make the rest of us feel safer?
One number you don’t see discussed very much in our, oh so wonderful and unbiased media, is the NNTV. This is the number needed to vaccinate. It’s an estimate of how many people we need to vaccinate to achieve some goal. It’s an important number. If we need to vaccinate 1 million people to save one life we might question the wisdom of our approach - even before issues of safety are considered.
It’s an uncomfortable realization that we don’t have infinite resources. It’s a realization that forces all sorts of really difficult and painful choices upon us. Choices I would not want to make. But these choices are made by health professionals all the time. Is our finite money and resource best spent treating X or Y? Or some combination? How do we make that decision? It costs money to vaccinate 1 million people. Would that money be better spent elsewhere? Would we be able to save more lives from something else if we did?
If you had a million dollars to spend, and that money could save one 10 year old, or 10 people in their 40’s, where do you spend that money? How do you even begin to make that decision? I don’t envy the job of those who do have to make these kinds of decisions.
The NNTV becomes even more critical when there are side effects to the vaccines. And whatever the dissembling of the official health bodies and the media on this issue, there are side effects a-plenty with these current crop of covid vaccines. They’re trying to downplay the extent - but even then they haven’t been able to properly hide the incredibly worrying increase in heart problems caused by the vaccines. The best they can do is to label them, inaccurately, as “incredibly rare”.
How many kids do we need to vaccinate in order to save one of them from dying of covid? I probably should figure out that number at some point - but it’s not small. How many of those vaccinated kids will end up with a heart complication that eventually shortens their life? And that’s just one of the side effects. I’m only focusing on that because it has become too large a problem for the officials and media to ignore.
All to protect adults.
I can’t help but wonder whether this is all part and parcel of the increasing trend towards safetyism we’ve witnessed over the last few years. Only the other day we heard about Terry Gilliam being cancelled. Some directorial role at the Old Vic, I believe. Apparently some of his remarks made people “feel unsafe”.
What did he say? Did he threaten the cast with a machete? No. He questioned some of the current thinking in society - thinking I will broadly characterize as “woke”. And this is enough to make someone feel unsafe? Shut the front door. What kind of spineless and witless wonders have we become?
The sort of person who does this perhaps?
Think about it. We’ve become so afraid of covid, so obsessed with it - we’ve lost ourselves. We forced non-essential businesses to sacrifice themselves and their employees on the altar of covid - whilst large supermarket chains stayed open and reaped the benefits. And now we’re prepared to sacrifice our kids on that altar - so that we all feel that little bit safer.
And make no mistake about it - the claimed benefit from any of our covid measures, including vaccination, is far from certain. On a whim and a prayer we introduced all sorts of rules and rituals, not because the evidence said they were effective, but because we felt they ought to be effective.
In a weird post-hoc way it was then claimed we were only “following the science” -whatever that nonsensical phrase actually means. Crappy study after crappy study subsequently appeared to (allegedly) justify all those measures. We sacrificed science on the altar of covid too.
One of the images that has stayed with me is of the socially-distanced funeral where a woman’s sons moved close to comfort her after the passing of her husband and their father. In stepped the covid-cowering official to separate them again. No matter that they’ve been offering their comforting embraces in the privacy of their homes. No - it’s far too risky to do that sort of thing in public, at a funeral.
The sheer inhumanity and senselessness of it all appalled me. A sick and twisted safetyism, wholly out of kilter with all that is good and decent and true and noble. We forgot what being human is all about. That grief at someone’s passing is part of life too - and throughout this whole shoddy and sorry covid debacle it seems too many of us simply forgot what living was all about.