As the UK continues to roll out it's impressive Covid vaccination programme, you could perhaps be forgiven for thinking you could drop your guard, focus on the future and leave the strings of control in the hands of those elected to take care of us.
You couldn't be more wrong.
Such is the progress on reducing deaths and cases of Covid that we are in danger of falling into the "Zero Covid" trap, a false goal with enormous costs for society, notably for the young. On social media, this impossible, undesirable goal is promoted by Independent Sage; a hard core, left wing extremist group of scientists who have an impressively big voice right now. Given that their very existence is questionable as Covid ceases to become the threat it once was this it is perhaps understandable. Indeed they are now having to crowdfund to continue their "work", so it's understandable they need to shout loudest. But I believe they have become victim to the very fear they have created & promoted, and this fear risks causing untold damage to society, and the younger generation in particular. Some, like Deepti Gurdasani have persistently clamoured for children as young as five to be masked. She has constructed detailed infographics detailing measures schools should implement to contain the threat children posed - in any other time she would be investigated by social services as the fringe radical she is, her brand of fabricated illness and the demonising of children is extremely disturbing. As a lecturer in machine learning, it beggar's belief that people have given her air time, responded and permitted her to escalate fear, but it fits with the current narrative and has been permitted to continue unchecked.
The deliberate control of the population by inducing disproportionate levels of fear has been written about by Laura Dodsworth, in a highly readable book "State of Fear". It's a concern Lord Jonathan Sumption, former Lord Chief Justice, has voiced many times- that we are sleepwalking into authoritarian control based on false legitimacy from the premise that government decisions are for our benefit. Driven by the fear and panic deliberately created by government we have acquiesced to a level of control over our lives previously considered the remit of authoritarian regimes like Russia and China. Even SpI-B, the behavioural advisory subgroup which reports to SAGE have admitted the excessive use of fear to control the population was regrettable and "totalitarian", yet still it continues.
Now once again the Zero Covid brigade are focussing on the "threat" posed by children, or more precisely the escalating number of positive tests for the Indian variant in school children in the official report from Government this weekend . But there are numerous problems with viewing the positive tests reported in Bolton and other areas (where the Indian Variant is a concern) as "cases" and even as threats, and plenty of well qualified scientists are pointing this out far better than I could. My issue is CONTEXT - or complete lack thereof, and the implication of this obsession over "cases" in children.
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| Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash |
Context
First, as an anonymous molecular biologist working in the Moderna labs points out, all 300 000+ variants of Covid known to us respond to our vaccine arsenal. ALL of them. The WHO backs this up, as do many recent scientific reports. Even the PHE data on the Astra Zeneca vaccine demonstrates that a single dose offers more protection against the Indian B.1.617.2 variant of Covid than any flu jab does for flu. The variant has been known in England since March 23rd 2021 and as Meaghan Call points out England's case numbers for B.1.617.2 have been persistently flat, with only a few minor outbreaks. Context matters.
