We had the right idea in the beginning, but somehow we lost our way.

Re-reading this article from March 2020 serves to highlight just how close we were to getting the Coronavirus response right… and only deepens the questions as to why we got it so wrong!

It’s not like this is the first time mankind has faced a pandemic, not even the first time in the modern era! But instead of trusting in what we’d learned the hard way from pandemics past, we decided to re-invent the wheel… we decided that we knew better… that we were going to do something entirely new and different and magically it would work so much better.

Now I’m not against trying something new, but at the very least we have to ensure that it’s actually achievable! Sadly the ‘elimination’ strategy employed by Australia and New Zealand, and the ‘Vaccination’ strategy employed by much of the rest of the Western World, has proven to be utterly foolish.

Here’s a brief and incomplete list of what we knew already… or aught to have known, right from the very start:

• Virus gonna virus. There is no record of a respiratory virus ever being eliminated via any strategy ever. It’s here, it’s going to spread, and no matter what we do sooner or later it’s going to spread here. We need to figure out how best to manage it, not try and avoid it forever. (to be fair, that doesn’t automatically exclude trying to avoid it for a period of time, which IS possible, but the idea that ‘covid zero’ is a SOLUTION is pure fantasy)
• Real life matters. If residents of London started just getting on with life after 2 weeks of the Blitz, then surely that tells us something about the importance of ‘normal life’ and the risks we are (or should be) willing to take in order to LIVE.
• Respiratory viruses don’t (or at worst, BARELY) spread outdoors.
• Masks with holes 10x the size of the water vapour carrying the virus, do NOT stop the virus. Sunlight and fresh air are way more effective than masks.
• Lockdowns aren’t worth it. If you can’t see this by now then… well I’m not going to try to show you the blindingly obvious.
• Protecting the vulnerable while aiding the less vulnerable to get herd immunity is a path THROUGH the virus.
• Locking down is a path that keeps us stuck IN the virus.

All of that was obvious and easily understood right from the start. And I’m not being ‘wise in hindsight’, here’s my video from March 2020 which articulated the same points:

So this is no ‘wisdom in hindsight’, the experts, by which I mean REAL epidemiological experts like John Ionnidis, were screaming from the rooftops, with all the data and evidence you could wish for… if only we were willing to listen.

And therein lies the rub! It was never in the interests of politicians and our bureaucratic medical ‘experts’ to listen to epidemiologists who told them to simply stay out of the way… no, that would never do! So instead they listened to the chicken littles like Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College in London, who promised them the disaster porn they so desired…

They ignored his long and macabre history of hysterical over-predictions of doom and gloom, and treated his latest predictions of doom and gloom as gospel…

Why? Because he had better evidence? Better data?

Don’t be silly. It’s because it suited them better. Neil Ferguson’s version of the future was exciting (at least for a public health bureaucrat) because it suddenly made them important… no, VITAL! Lives, perhaps millions of lives, perhaps the very future of civilisation itself, rested upon the decisions made by… them… in response to this looming disaster.

Make no mistake, we knew what to do in the beginning, but we’ve been too smart for our own good and turned Covid into not just a medical disaster, but an economic, social, political, and cultural one as well, and all because it was more beneficial to politicians and bureaucrats, than doing what we KNEW was right.

It didn’t have to be this way. Read that article from March 2020 and tell me we wouldn’t be better off if we’d just done what we knew was right back then?

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