In his The Shape of Things to Come, H G Wells describes “the curious sense of unconsciousness” of the calamity that was about to unfold in the summer of 1914. “The weather that August was exceptionally fine”, and countless Europeans holidayed with no notion that within a scant few years millions of them would be dead.
The same could be said for the Southern hemisphere summer of 2019-20. I vividly recall a family Australia Day gathering that January, where the vague news of an unusual disease outbreak in China was lightly discussed and forgotten.
Like 1914, the world of 2019 sometimes seems like another, long-gone world. Especially the freedoms we so took for granted. We have, with barely a squeak of protest, surrendered our livelihoods, our freedoms, even our body sovereignty, to a grim regime of dictatorial politicians and unelected bureaucrats.
Yet reading a newspaper report from early 2020 is a shocking reminder that it need not have been so.
The UK’s chief scientific adviser has said the government wants 60 per cent of the population to catch coronavirus to try and create “herd immunity” to protect against the virus becoming an annual crisis.
Sir Patrick Vallance told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme that he thought the coronavirus was likely to become an “annual virus” and that the strategy was to limit the impact on the NHS but not stop the virus completely.
Ah, yes: “flatten the curve”. Does anyone remember that?
Yet instead of, as was advised, learning to live with the virus, governments have fixated on the chimaera of “eliminating” the virus. Something “the experts” were expressly advising against, back in those sunny days of early 2020.
Sir Patrick told the BBC that the advice the government is following for tackling coronavirus is not looking to “suppress” the disease entirely but to help create a “herd immunity in the UK” while protecting the most vulnerable from it.
In such saner times, it was clear that there’s a very good reason why “elimination” is such a foolish strategy.
“If you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time.
“Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it.
As for lockdowns…
Sir Patrick said some of the social distancing measures put in place by the government, including self-isolating for seven days if symptoms develop, are “actually quite extreme”.
Sir Patrick said it was “eye-catching” to order the cancellation of mass gatherings and sporting events but that the chances of contracting the disease by attending such occasions are slim.
He told the BBC: “Mass gatherings do have some impact, it is not that they don’t do anything if you stop them[…]
He did not, however, urge people to stay out of pubs or social situations as a result, only repeating advice that those with symptoms should remain at home.
In fact, lockdowns make things worse, not better.
“The most likely place you are going to get an infection from is a family member, a friend, someone very close in a small space, not in the big space.
The Independent
So, what have governments and “experts” done? Cram families into small spaces, with no fresh air, little sun or exercise. By keeping only “essential” businesses open, they’ve also made certain that crowds of people cram into one or two locations, instead of being normally spread out.
Yet, as we saw in early 2020, it didn’t have to be this way.
So why did all this idiocy happen? Why were years of carefully thought out pandemic plans thrown out the window with indecent haste?
China. The Chinese Communist Party locked down its citizens and claimed to “eliminate” the virus — and the supposedly “free” world rushed to copy them.
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