We used to have a democracy, long ago, with institutions robust and whose advice, although not always reliable, was reasoned and open to scrutiny. We had excellent epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists carefully preparing reports displaying methods, workings and conclusions, citing references numerous. One such example was “Potential Health Impacts from the COVID-19 Pandemic for New Zealand if Eradication Fails” by Professors Wilson and Baker, along with Doctoral degree-holders Telfar-Bernard and Kvalsvig, published March 23rd, 2020, just before lockdown. The good Doctors and Professors duly and responsibly provided scenarios, adding riders where deemed necessary, such as this from the report in question (Underlining mine):
Imagine their surprise upon being told it wasn’t scary enough, to do another, but to make the new one more hair-raising; and being given just twenty-four hours to produce it, ensuring it was ready before the witching-hour of midnight March 24th; there were justifications to be had in the dim halls of power.
My, oh my, they must have worked through the night, assuming this and assuming that, how the computers must have hummed as they fed in the changes, but, may the Good Lord bless them, they did it, and on March 24th, our last day of our relative freedoms, brought forth into the world “Potential Worse Case Health Impacts from the COVID-19 Pandemic for New Zealand if Eradication Fails” with not enough time left to redact the ‘confidential’ watermark:
Gone are the riders, gone are the ‘unrealistic’s.’ References now point gingerly to a ‘previous report’, but in it is a brand new victim count along with ghoulish references to numbers dead from the century-and-more historic Spanish flu of 1918 and, believe it or not, World War One. I have no idea why cross-references were not made with the victim-census of London’s bubonic plague outbreak of 1592-93 which was lower, far lower, than our team’s new potential COVID-19 Kiwi Kill-count. I can only presume it was an oversight due to time pressures.
They may have thought, our intrepid crew, that, if not a hand-shake, perhaps an elbow-tip was due them; alas, t’was not to be. Because, while they were working, a new bloke rode into town; a lightweight lap-top jockey not weighed down with facts or burdened with experience but possessing very scary numbers – his data told him so.
In a heartbeat new bloke got the gig; he, let’s call him Soros Guy, would ride shotgun, be proclaimed an ‘expert’ and provide the scary numbers without so much as a reference, let alone a reality-check. Boy, oh boy, the beers must have gone flat at the planned academic knees-up; usurped by the pretender from profession ‘economist’, a calling designed to make Tarot-card reading respectable again.
So: just like that, Soros Guy joined Facebook Friend within the special-people circle. Soros Guy fudges the numbers while Facebook Friend decides when lockdown begins and ends. Democracy and Transparency were elbowed off the table by the new oligarchy members but, hey, Covid was always going to bring victims and, let’s face it, they were both in very poor health anyway.
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