A new year needs fresh leadership

The world needs to find its way forward. Lanka needs to address its forex crisis, definitively, decisively and transparently, navigating the distress, managing the volatility, but writing a new chapter. We cannot keep blaming a pandemic and ignore that ‘pandemic response’ globally has ignored cost/benefit and collateral damage to our collective detriment. And despite that, our neighbour, Bangladesh, not only was able to loan us desperately needed foreign exchange in the hundreds of millions but is set to grow roughly 6.6% per annum. 

Here in Lanka, there has been an impressive private sector rally, but we need a sustained playing field on which companies can credibly and reliably compete.

Let’s also be aware, Omicron is doing the global rounds, and may come calling. Let 2022 be the year that we dump the unreliable, and obscenely expensive, “non-diagnostic” PCR tests (as per their own literature) that were never designed for asymptomatic mass testing (also as per their EUA), and for which we have no audited national Ct (Cycle Threshold) standard, which means we are burning money to generate false positives that could just mushroom into the horizon. If we stick to treating the symptomatic, Omicron, will be a mild viral joust for virtually everyone, and perhaps a natural “vaccine”.

The last Lanka “surge” had testing jump up from around 6,000 tests a day to over 20,000. Not shockingly, “cases” shot up too (as we’ve dialled testing back down, daily numbers became more sane, and now we have a greater wall of immunity too). Deaths jumped too yes, but virtually all were elderly with multiple chronic illnesses. There has been no net excess mortality either in 2020 or 2021 to date. 

In fact, at the end of 2020 at the “height” of the pandemic with no vaccination, we had over 12,000 auto accident deaths and “ascribed” COVID mortality was only in the several hundred. So, we were “tutored” to panic, it was nowhere demanded by the facts. As testing has come down, so have “positive tests” posing as “cases” and “pandemic” mortality continues to be mild. Stop testing anyone who did not evidently pass from a respiratory virus, and we will avoid “perceived” COVID mortality inflation too.

Far more “lockdown lax” Bangladesh and Pakistan, have done vastly better than panic prone Europe on an infection fatality basis or deaths per million. Sweden today has virtually the lowest death case numbers in Europe, even now including its Scandinavian neighbours, and they never fully locked down, no mask mandates, and this was true when they had much lower vaccination rates as well.

So, if there is a sudden “positive test” surge here courtesy of Omicron, we need leadership that says the country’s solvency and recovery is far more crucial than the “optics” of mass panic, or further ladling in pointless money to Big Pharma. Omicron preferentially afflicts those “vaccinated” and “boosted”, proven not only in South Africa, but via meticulous mining of data in Denmark, and we see this being replicated in other epicentres too. 

Since it has been accepted by everyone, despite duplicitous commentary before, that the “vaccines” do not prevent re-infection or stop spread, but “allegedly” keep one from serious illness or death during the window before their efficacy wanes, and as Omicron explicitly is “mild”, stays essentially in the upper respiratory tract (rather than going deeper into the vulnerable part of our lungs), why would you “vaccinate” more in response? 

Utterly useless as it won’t stop spread, and virtually no one needs it to improve survival odds. Top up on Vitamin D3 and Zinc, and global doctors say, your immunological rally will be even more decisive.

So let’s “immunise” ourselves against positive test based “Omy” panic from now, so we don’t derail the comeback being staged by tourism, and the galvanising for productivity and competitiveness that other sectors have been and are now gearing up for. Let’s just announce (and ensure we mean it), “No more lockdowns.” Proven to be useless anyway with an airborne virus, successful mostly in imploding societies. 

Boris finds courage

Raw data from the UK may have emboldened Boris. The UKHSA (viewable online for anyone interested), shows vaccine effectiveness against infections down to minus 75% for 18–29-year-olds (the Omicron contribution, as it was minus 10% the week before). Among 30–39-year-olds, minus 98%, meaning they are twice as likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. In the 40-49 age group, a staggering minus 131%! 

So, if healthy younger people are being told by the “jabbies” to get jabbed to stop the spread, they may wish to review the data that shows the jabbed are doing the spreading! Someone suggested that if this continues, we may have to ask for proof of “non-vaccination” to enter public places.

Catastrophic cock-up or crazed conspiracy, Boris found the necessary gumption to say “no”, at least for now, to the heralds of outright nonsense. First, the learning curve, if there has been one, has been glacial. After all, Boris must know, facing a fifth wave, that the “nonsense” of face nappies and shutdowns has had the same effect as a rain dance on the weather (and I tend to give more credence to the latter). 

There is the economic toll of the self-destructive lockdowns, GBP 400 billion in the UK and climbing (the reckoning will not be pretty), collapse of thousands of shops, pubs and restaurants (all representing lives, fortunes, hopes and dreams) and the social impact on the most vulnerable. 

It is estimated tens of thousands of cancer patients may die needlessly due to delayed treatment, there is an unprecedented mental health crisis in the UK (and they are not alone, it is global), and education “experts” pontificate it will take at least two years for children to catch up on the schooling they’ve missed. Really? And what will they do with the upcoming two years? And who will dial them back biologically and emotionally to deal with the missed social and developmental opportunities? 

Sweden, again, has negative excess mortality for 2020 and 2021. Japan which barely locked down, has stayed open (except to visitors) throughout, with no real mortality surge at all. The US States, Florida and Texas, open and avoiding mandates and masks and lunatic lockdowns have prospered; and in terms of mortality, done as well or in most cases, outperformed the draconian Democratic ringleaders in California and New York.

And given the mildness of Omicron, South Africa having reversed the initial restrictions they imposed, banished contact tracing, and pointed out that Omicron seems actually to be having a protective benefit re Delta, it is hard to rend one’s garments and torch society – though Europe has shown a fascination for fact free fascism and self-destruction that is hard to fathom or account for, regardless. 

There is the wonderful line by John Maynard Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” What a quaint notion! And perhaps we can also be guided by the uplifting scientific sobriety of this observation from the Royal Society: “Nullius in verba”, roughly translating to, “Take no man’s word on it.” Democracies have to demand transparent data. “Experts” predicted (frothing with portents) that lifting restrictions in the UK in July would be catastrophic…perhaps to their grants, everything else stayed tame.

A not so “Omi-nous” prediction

If Omicron continues to displace Delta, mildly afflict the vaccinated and perhaps the naturally immune as well (curiously its lineage seems to go back to the early 2020 varietals), then despite the immoral infusions of spike proteins in a therapeutic scabbard, without properly informed consent, the transformation of COVID from asserted viral fire alarm to even more emphatically “mild” coronavirus will be complete. There are other human-infecting coronaviruses we seem not to give a hoot about after all, like hCoV-OC43. Anyone been tracking that recently? 

Now, “Omi” could become more pathogenic, especially if we keep “vaccinating” wildly and provoke another mutation. However, more likely, the viral scourge will increasingly peter out. The circus masters, the “new normal” Utopianists (a dystopian, humanity shrivelled “utopia” of their own dank imaginations) will cling to “rising positive tests” (posing as “cases”) to demand more jabs. As these fail ever more profoundly, the absurdity will swell, and “cracks” in the narrative will become more acute. Why attempt to stomp out a minimally symptomatic, highly contagious virus that is likely to confer greater immunity and elbow out more virulent strains?

However, liberal democracy has been shaken to its foundations, particularly in Europe, and in parts of the US, and authoritarianism has received a smug new coat of paint elsewhere, as martial reflexes were condoned rather than challenged. The new theocracy of the Covidian high priests and epidemiological “astrologers” (forget data, I have models!) has been worse than any inconstancy of the liberal democratic project. The magnitude of the failures, and their noxious impact on millions if not billions of lives, will again, require recovery, resilience, allegiance to facts, and the ability to make the future more meaningful than the recent past. 

Dumbest Policy of the Year Award

The prize has to go to the life annulling, recommendation of the “idiocracy”, the “vaccine passport.” It flubs it on logic alone. If “vaccines” worked, namely stopped spread and kept you immune, nobody would care if everyone is “vaccinated” as those who are, are safe. And if they don’t work in this way, who cares if everyone is “vaccinated” or not, as anyway the virus spreads, and you can get infected either way. Therefore, then, it’s a matter of your choice of therapeutics.

Should sanity make a return voyage through our collective consciousness, our prolonged mania for these “passports”, will be clearly recognised as a moral stain upon our credentials as ethical beings. Future generations will gape and gasp in awe at how such oppressive governmental intrusion was allowed over a median influenza strain…after billions of years of biological evolution had established a clear-cut blueprint for journeying from “epidemic” to “endemic.”

But regardless of your ideological attachments, at this point, any degree of intellectual honesty would lead to admitting these are an incoherent failure, and the failure is catastrophic. My old home of New York, that once great metropolis, the “world city” of the 20th century, is now a tragic poster child for the incompetence of everything from Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home debacle to the new Governor openly lying to justify mask mandates which must be a confession the “vaccines” are failing or largely pointless. To add insult to injury, recently (30 December) even on CNN, we heard “expert” confession that cloth masks can’t possibly work against an airborne virus.

Next up, courtesy of Mayor de Blasio, befuddled as ever, “passports” for virtually all indoor activities. Also, any child five or older has to show proof of vaccination to partake of any of these! The result? “Cases” are more than double the January 2021 peak, and daily deaths are double those in Florida. And the most vaxxed borough, Manhattan, has many more times the cases per 100,000 residents of the Bronx, or Queens, or Staten Island. Go figure!

Desperately masked, vaxxed San Francisco has seen a mere 253% increase in pointless “positive tests”, so either let’s ditch these obscenely priced non-tests or admit these policies completely backfire and are a disgrace in terms of outcomes, tear society apart, segregate people, and even the death rates are no better than the rest of the nation as well! It is the worst of times indeed!

So, groupthink meets rampant, unending, fact-free delusion.

And Omicron was the nail in the coffin. It was vastly more transmissible and less pathogenic than prior strains. 120,000 daily “cases” in the UK on 29 December, 18 deaths. No wonder Boris was able to gird his loins. With such mass spread, you practically cannot have the “carnival” of mass testing, quarantining, and whatnot. Nevertheless, one sees another holiday season destroyed in so many parts of the world. And for a change, here in Lanka, we find ourselves flourishing on that front, as battered Europeans come to Serendib for balm. And if we can “stay calm and carry on” we can finally avail of being on the outer fringes of this policy madness.

South Africa having let the news out before the media machine was ready, actually revealed the inefficacy of the vaccines. The mildness could not be ascribed to “vaccines” in a country only 27% vaccinated and Botswana obstinately refused to have COVID mortality over that key November to early December period at all (no COVID deaths)!

With Omicron’s global tour, displacing Delta to an extent, with clear negative vaccine efficacy, the hysterical containment nuts will likely get their experience of this virus they have fled from for so long. You know, the age stratified one, with a 99.97% recovery rate for those below 70 without chronic illnesses. And for everyone, abundant early treatments, still life saving despite vilifying smears (for the Ivermectin beneficiaries, just look at results in Indonesia, Mexico, key parts of India, Bangladesh, now Japan, and on the private treatment front lines in the US with numerous protocols that address the viral and then the inflammatory phases of C-19). And when nothing much happens to those shrieking for so long, even the propaganda hypnotic trance will start to sputter out. 

And as Omicron bequeaths us greater immunity, each day as protests continue to pour out into streets around the world, thronging cities with justified outrage, we sit partially redeemed…the human spirit is still alive.

Joy, hope and smelly orthodoxies

The great novelist, essayist, and courageous truth-teller, George Orwell wrote about Charles Dickens, 

“He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry – in other words, of a nineteenth century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

What a portrait of zeal and capability, of championing a code that we aspire to, even if we flail and fail as we seek to exemplify it. 

The gravitas oozing Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, passed away recently. His meditation below is profound and a remarkable antidote to the “anti-life” orthodoxies:

“There is the Jewish festival of Purim, when we recall the events described in the Book of Esther. It is the oddest of all festivals. There is rejoicing, which starts a fortnight before at the beginning of the Jewish month of Adar. 

There’s a celebratory meal on the day itself. We send charitable gifts to the poor and presents to friends. There’s riotous noise during the reading of Esther whenever the name of the arch-villain Haman is mentioned. And it’s the one day in the year when it’s considered a religious duty to drink slightly too much alcohol.

This might fit within the conventional parameters of rejoicing were it not for what the book of Esther records: the most drastic warrant for genocide in Jewish history, Haman’s plan ‘to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews — young and old, women and children — on a single day’. The plan was foiled. 

Yet it is deeply strange to regard an escape from genocide as an occasion for rejoicing. What I think Purim is, is not expressive joy but therapeutic joy: the joy that defeats fear. You conquer terror by collective celebration. Precisely because the threat was so serious, you refuse to be serious — and in that refusal you are doing something very serious indeed. You are denying your enemies a victory. You are declaring that you will not be intimidated. 

Someone once summarised the main Jewish festivals in three sentences. ‘They tried to destroy us. We survived. Let’s eat.’ Joy is the Jewish way of defeating hate. What you can laugh at cannot hold you captive.”

So, yes indeed, and in summarising such a compendium of wisdom, slaloming from evading the “orthodoxies” that try to shrivel our minds and souls and take away our freedom to sharing joys that should define us more than our anxieties, we come to poet laureate Seamus Heaney to paint our plight and our aspiration at the crossroads:

“History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.”

Years ago, that towering gentleman from Virginia, literally “father” of his country, George Washington said the fate of liberty and democracy were “deeply… finally staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Well, the experiment, for a time, happily flourished, and moved on, and was “entrusted” to the larger electorate of humanity. It is embattled today.

And it is to humanity we must now therefore turn. To pick up the cudgel of intelligent activism. To rally our faculties. To marshal our spittle, our outrage, but also our insight and our humour. We must see how far we have come, and how far we have fallen. Our wings got singed, but we can find better uses for the fire: it can be purifying, it must once again become Promethean.

The arc of history continues, despite so many corrupting and corroding digressions, to call to us, to challenge us, to demand our better selves. We need economic sanity. We need collective, creative dedication towards a national and international renaissance.

We need the “generous anger” extolled by Dickens, we need a joy for life’s aptitudes that transcends hate, we need to be attentive to opportunities to rescue, revive and extend both lives and livelihood, anchored both in science and mutual compassion. And we must renew that pact, again and again.