The unspeakable stain of the Covid tyranny requires the very opposite of the “pandemic amnesty” that the craven poltroons at the Atlantic magazine suggested recently. That’s because the precedent was such a grave affront to constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity that those responsible should be exposed, hounded and shamed, and prosecuted where warranted, so that future power-grabbers will forever be reminded that tyranny cannot be imposed with impunity.
From the very beginning of the pandemic, there were legions of pedigreed epidemiologists and other scientists—many of who later signed the Great Barrington Declaration—who correctly held that viruses cannot be extinguished via draconian quarantines and other clumsy one-size-fits-all public health interventions; and that when it came to corona-viruses in particular, it was doubtful whether even vaccines—which had never been successful with coronaviruses—could defeat the latter’s natural propensity to mutate and spread.
In a word, from its earliest days, there was no reason for a sweeping intervention by the public health apparatus at all. Nor for the coercive one-size-fits all, state-driven mobilization of quarantines, lockdowns, testing, masking, distancing, surveilling, snitching and ultimately mandated mass vaxxing with experimental drugs developed under a dangerous multi-ten billion government subsidy scheme called Operation Warp Speed, followed by an open-ended Emergency Use authorization that shielded the pharma companies from any and all liabilities.
That truth from the earliest days was especially the case because in addition to decades of scientific knowledge about the proper management of virus based pandemics, there existed the screaming real time evidence from the stranded Diamond Princess cruise ship. The 3,711 souls (2,666 passengers and 1,045 crew) aboard skewed heavily to the elderly, but the survival rate known in mid-March 2020 was 99.7% overall, and 100% for those under 70 years of age. In short, just 0.19% of an elderly skewed population had succumbed to the virus. So the facts which were known to the White House (or certainly should have been) made absolutely clear that the Covid was no Black Plague type threat. Full stop.
From the beginning it was evident to independent scientists that the COVID-19 spread was an intensive but manageable challenge to America’s one-at-a-time doctor/patient health care system. The CDC, FDA, NIH and state and local public health departments were only needed to dispense solid information per their normal education role, not orders and sweeping regulatory interventions into every nook and cranny of the nation’s economic and social life.
We are now just over 30-months on from Donald’s foolish empowerment of Dr. Fauci and his Virus Patrol in mid-March 2020, and all doubt has been removed. If there were two countries on the planet which had diametrically opposite policy approaches with respect to the Covid, it was Australia, which degenerated into an outright public health tyranny, and Sweden, where officials kept their minds open to the facts and social institutions—schools, churches, shops, theaters, malls, factories etc–open to the public.
The graph below, which charts the incidence of confirmed Covid cases on a cumulative basis, tell you all you need to know: Namely, that lockdowns and other draconian social control and quarantine measures can temporarily suppress the spread—essentially by extinguishing human social interaction—but cannot keep the genie in the bottle indefinitely.
Thus, as of one year ago (November 26, 2021) Sweden had recorded 114,000 confirmed “cases” per million people versus just 8,000 per million in Australia, leading the Covid crusaders to say, “we told you so”.
The answer, of course, was not so fast. Either the province of New South Wales and other heavily populated regions of Australia were going to remain outdoor prisons forever, or the lockdowns would eventually be lifted and the virus would do what respiratory viruses do—spread among most of the population.
That’s exactly what happened, and one year later the results are crystal clear. The cumulative rate of cases per million in Australia soared by 51X to 407,000 during the next 365 days!
The green line in the chart above is so stunning, in fact, as to suggest that the gods of contagion had determined to punish the insouciance of the Australian Virus Patrol with malice aforethought.
By contrast, the cumulative case rate in both the US and Sweden barely doubled during that period, since the vulnerable population had long since been exposed, infected and (overwhelmingly) cured.
Moreover, it’s not as if the late eruption of cases in Australia was owing to the nation being suddenly over-run with anti-vaxxers, as if the vaccines, as promised, actually stop the spread, which they do not.
Still, the evidence shows that Australia led the vaccination rate parade, as well. As of late November it had administered 242 doses per 100 people or slightly more than the 237 doses per 100 in Sweden and 197 in the US.
Next, we will look at the death rate implications.