Why didn’t they?

 When the “boosted” started contracting C-19 more than those not so “boosted”, should alarm bells not have been clanging? 

– Pic by Shehan Gunasekara 

But as the financial system rebounds, and yet everyday people continue to suffer, there is a tension that needs resolving. The only resolution is a new economy, a new social contract, and a new path with actual sustainable, institutionalised nation building. Given the stakes, “Why Wouldn’t We?” Yes, it’s hard, and we will have to take it milestone by milestone. But compare that hardship with poverty and self-destruction. And this way, we have a chance to pave a future worthy of Sri Lanka’s assets and potential blessings. We really must

So, here it is globally, and then locally as a “new year” beckons here locally and the themes of “rebirth” are rife in other traditions. 

We’re not out of the woods from the ludicrous last few years and the taint they’ve left on our ability to think, sift, sieve, and assess. We fail to revisit these at our peril.

So, we start with the scars of our pandemic panic and move on from there…or attempt to.

Group think

Why did governments, “public health” agencies, and “experts” immediately dash to stoking fear rather than assessing, analysing and debating data, as we have via responsible authorities for genuine crises in the past?

How did everyone globally end up speaking in rote unison, with the same talking points, the same aphorisms and vernacular, as if they had been handed the same script?

Why the fetish for flashing COVID numbers for years, even when it was clear it was a “non-event” in fatality terms (more than 4 million people roughly die per annum of respiratory illnesses), well before any “vaccines” landed?

Why did anyone think “social distancing” would suddenly be helpful with an airborne pathogen in circulation since 2019?

If people disagreed and wished to assert bodily autonomy, by what right were they demonised or ostracised or inhibited from being able to live and move around?

On what grounds, with a recovery rate for virtually every demographic of over 99%, was the world converted into an open-air prison?

Chart of coercion

We begin with “Isolation,” depriving victims of social support, creating an infatuation with “self” and fostering dependency.

Next “Monopolising Perception.” So, the immediate predicament takes over all other concerns or issues, information that does not comply with the narrative is eliminated, movement is restricted, choices are homogenised.

Next up is “Humiliation” whereby resistance is made “costly”, privacy is denied, insults and taunts are levied, you are excluded for having the temerity to think.

This leads to “Exhaustion,” where mental and physical faculties are eroded, and we just apathetically go along. Depression, despair and lack of will are byproducts.

Of course, “Threats” are abundant, as to consequences, physical and social for non-compliance. You are taking liberties with your own health, you are endangering others, and you must never be allowed access to anything but the prescribed, primary treatment, even if efficacious, cheaper alternatives abound.

And then “Occasional Indulgences” to reward acquiescence, while we experience “Omnipotence” of the State in determining where you can commune, what you can and can’t do, who you can visit and under what circumstances, and worse intrusions.

And then “Trivial Demands” are foisted, with “virtue signalling” rituals and pointless totemic acts like masking or taking booster shots based on variants that don’t exist anymore.

More curiosities

What was the mania to silence droves of the world’s most qualified doctors, or to ignore the most balanced, sane, sensible prescription, now overwhelmingly validated by experience, The Great Barrington Declaration (essentially, protect the most vulnerable), penned by three of the world’s most eminent specialists from Oxford, Stanford and Harvard?

In what universe did it make sense to shut down the planet for a disease with a demonstrably infinitesimal fatality rate and which even in that regard, almost exclusively affects those above the normal age of mortality (median global age 82)?

By what right did governments rewrite human rights and revise statutes or just ignore them to allow for the forced quarantining of healthy individuals on the “off chance” or due to voodoo modelling that continued to flop and fail?

After being wrong about every prediction, and after backing failed “vaccines”, why is anyone even “considering” giving the WHO any kind of enforceable oversight over pandemic policy?

What did Australians and New Zealanders think would happen when they finally “opened up?” And why has there not been the hue and cry expected when excess mortality has soared off the charts there?

Physicians refused to treat this eminently “treatable” illness with known treatment protocols, nurses jabbed children who never needed them with experimental gene therapy, rational dissidents were fired from college campuses and other institutions including hospitals and health boards, fraudulent and ineffective PCR tests set at no agreed global standard and masks (that did nothing due to the size of the nano-particles) became billion dollar industries while small and medium size businesses were being devastated and closed worldwide. Why did everyone act as if any of this was “okay”?

Harmful Illogic

When sunshine and fresh air and exercise naturally kill viruses and help us develop immunity and resilience towards them, why were we all locked up, movement inhibited, and which idiot thought outdoor transmission was a danger when there is not one recorded, corroborated instance of it – now shown again and again in sporting events, outdoor gatherings, protests and more, worldwide?

A Chinese review of over 3 million people failed to turn up one instance of asymptomatic spread. Front line doctors said “asymptomatic” once was called “healthy.” There are those who are “presymptomatic” and so, yes, some monitoring is wise. No asymptomatic spread was ever flagged with past coronaviruses either.

How did we keep changing definitions of “immunity” (to suddenly only refer to “vaccination” giving rise to it) and “cases” (to mean positive tests rather than symptoms) and COVID death (to mean tested positive within 28 days of death rather than killed primarily by the pathogen)?

Why did we keep putting infected patients into nursing homes where the population is the most vulnerable? And why did we deprive nursing home residents of visitation rights that even prisoners are regularly granted?

Since there were no new studies suddenly validating masking or lockdowns or updating necessary development protocols for new vaccines, how did we suddenly, and en masse, violate all the public health guidelines that were uniformly on hand through 2019 over a few clearly doctored videos out of Wuhan of allegedly frenzied people collapsing on the street?

Ventilators early on caused death, it was one of the reasons for New York’s catastrophic death toll. Why were they a continuing part of the treatment protocol?

And to cap it all

Virtually all COVID deaths could have been avoided by administering early treatment protocols that actually and practically, not theoretically saved tens of thousands and more (from the US to South Africa, the FLCC Alliance in the US for example, Dr. Shankara Chetty in South Africa for example).

And if we eschewed the fickle Fauci’s delirium in providing “treatment guidelines” that led the US to being in the top spot for number of COVID deaths per million through September 2021, and hovering near the top since, C-19 would have been a footnote in our lives at most.

Note the lark, HCQ and Ivermectin, Vitamin D and Doxy have no safety issues after billions of dosages (we can argue efficacy, but that’s a doctor’s call, not a government’s). But Remdesivir, which causes acute liver damage in COVID treatment and countless complications and has no demonstrable efficacy (acknowledged eventually also by WHO in the British Medical Journal), was being ladled out enthusiastically alongside “death by ventilator”.

$ 13,000 to admit a COVID patient, $ 3,200 to administer Remdesivir, $ 13,000 to provide it for a Medicare patient, $ 39,000 for a patient on ventilator…nothing in there needed, and nothing that could compete with letting virtually the entire planet recover from the equivalent of a median influenza strain…which Omicron eventually forced everyone to do anyway.

Disinformation campaigns against low-cost generic treatments were needed or otherwise the “Emergency Use Authorisations” for the untested “therapeutics” posing as “vaccines” would not have been possible. And all those “indemnified” adverse effects could not have been lavished upon age groups not considered at risk.

And the jabbing went on!

We can hardly feel comfortable with something rushed through tests, where the test group had none of the vulnerable population included, and where there is “zero liability” for “emergency use” when factually there is no emergency! Just look at the continent of Africa, or Asia pre “vaccines”. Why did the FDA want to hide the Pfizer clinical trial data from the public for 75 years? The judge thankfully disagreed.

When the goalposts moved, and kept moving, from “cure” (re the “vaccines”), to positive impact being stymied because of the “unvaxxed” , to then it losing efficacy every few months, to needing a booster shot (even though new variants have been “stressed” into being), to it doesn’t stop reinfection or spread (even Gates has publicly admitted this), and when the “boosted” started contracting C-19 more than those not so “boosted”, should alarm bells not have been clanging?

Physicians refused to treat this eminently “treatable” illness with known treatment protocols, nurses jabbed children who never needed them with experimental gene therapy, rational dissidents were fired from college campuses and other institutions including hospitals and health boards, fraudulent and ineffective PCR tests set at no agreed global standard and masks (that did nothing due to the size of the nano-particles) became billion dollar industries while small and medium size businesses were being devastated and closed worldwide. Why did everyone act as if any of this was “okay”?

And here’s a further litany of greatest hits from the great scam we all signed up to be petrified by: Cancers exploding in the injected, birth rates dropping all over the world, birth related injuries and defects are multiplying, a mushrooming of myocarditis and heart attacks, disincentives to report adverse effects, children/millennials/athletes suddenly dropping dead, embalmers finding mysterious wormlike strings in vaxxed corpses, life insurance companies paying out up to 163% more for 18-64 year olds and 258% (a more than once in a century increase) overall in 2021 over 2020, and these larcenous “jabs” are still somehow “legal”?

So, we need to recover our wits, and find the spittle going forward to never get taken in this way again. To never bow to, kowtow to, or so fetishize our national governments, that we play the obedient serfs, ready to hand over lives, our liberties, our economies, our families, our children’s future, due to some terrifying logos and jingles and ashen press conferences.

If no public “cost-benefit” analysis is debated or discussed, transparently data driven, we simply should not, must not proceed, or allow our “elected representatives” to.

National counterparts

And you see, faculties, when they are assaulted, keep us from being careful otherwise.

Here in Sri Lanka, nationally, the same clowns keep showing up to run the government with calamitous consequences.

Those financially endowed, publicly buy off officials and then we wonder at the rot of corruption and the erosion of our national fortunes. National reserves once looted, render us vulnerable. There is no national security otherwise.

We add scant value to exports, we borrow to import, we don’t deliver on projects, and survive on our geographical positioning and our relative goodwill.

Our public servants are inept, too expensive, and we have layers and tiers of people backstopping each other, though there is no shortage of capability or talent on this blessed isle.

Sri Lanka’s former Head of State recently had this to say, “The Government has declared bankruptcy – a very rare situation for any country in the world; the economy is in tatters; peasant agriculture and small and medium industries are struggling to survive, or have already closed down; tourism sector is at an all-time low; large industries are retrenching employees and new jobs will be a long time coming,” Kumaratunga said.

And yet this has all happened in plain view. Just take tourism when we at our height of 2 million tourists had Cambodia bring in 6 million regularly. So, even our standards are inward looking, and referencing what we did in the past, not what is a viable regional standard, or what is actually possible.

The advantages of a unified, pluralistic state, including our global standing, and our access to support on that basis, keep running into a cabal of those who insist we stay mired in yesterday’s convulsions and tragedies. And yet most Sri Lankans want unity and their voices need to be heard. And it may again be the youth to whom we turn. But they must articulate what they are ‘for’ not just what they are ‘against.’

The export of tea, rubber and coconut was doubtless attractive for the military might of the British Empire. But we need to diversify radically, even if we have added apparel into the mix. Diversify not only products but markets.

And surely anyone can see our attractiveness as a service hub, but then we need to upgrade language skills, improve educational standards, get IT skills embedded into the curriculum, vastly simplify bureaucracy and regulations. None of these require natural resources or hardware or vast imports. They do require transparency, public servants who are held accountable, a “scorecard” for what will make us economically attractive and compelling to investors and collaborators.

Why didn’t we head to the IMF before we defaulted, when our terms and manoeuvring room would have been much better? Did we think mass printing of money would not stimulate runaway inflation? Who believed that we uniquely had found a “solution” to organic fertilisers? With our population, how did we think a “domestic” economy as a way to balance our global forex handicaps was even sane? And everyone watched and it took a literal meltdown and an unprecedented outpouring into the streets, to remove the poster rulers of the disaster and bring in the current government, which for all of its challenges, at least has restored a measure of short-term solvency and stability to the country.

But sustaining that, and delivering on it and from it, is where the peril is, and short of reforming our ability to build reserves and create a renewed and effective public service sector (the two pillars of Singapore’s national focus for example), we will again careen towards the cliffs.

So we need to recapture our wits and identify the few necessary “must win battles” going forward now as the IMF and debt restructuring and donor support have been of late.

A fiscal deficit has to be routed. And we cannot continue to lurch towards recurring disasters with orgies of money printing and borrowing. If we are done with mass delusion for a bit, time to open the economy to domestic and international competition, ditching protectionism, improving market access via trade agreements and partnerships and more. All these have to play a central role. We have to inject and reward enterprise, nurture it here, attract it from everywhere.

Imagine that here the mental and emotional viruses are tribalism, ethnic rivalries, feudalism, entrenched public sector costs, and the treatment protocols are building human capital and providing it the wherewithal to be competitive, to leverage technology, and to build institutions of the flexibility and calibre that the 21st century demands.

Let us recall here in Sri Lanka, the IMF has provided a “breather”, a chance to re-set. It is not, cannot be, the solution. The solution is to re-imagine Sri Lanka’s economy, and that will require social evolution and political evolution as well.

The original question I posed was, “Why did they?” Greed, avarice, the results of too many banks engaging in speculative investment and needing to direct what has been the largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the elite on record. It was catastrophic and mass manipulation was the key.

Here, “Why Did They?” because elections became auctions, and supporters were doled out advantages that kept them quiet, and when finally, there was nowhere to lurch to, a “safe pair of hands” was sought, located and constitutionally affirmed.

But as the financial system rebounds, and yet everyday people continue to suffer, there is a tension that needs resolving.

The only resolution is a new economy, a new social contract, and a new path with actual sustainable, institutionalised nation building. Given the stakes, “Why Wouldn’t We?”

Yes, it’s hard, and we will have to take it milestone by milestone. But compare that hardship with poverty and self-destruction. And this way, we have a chance to pave a future worthy of Sri Lanka’s assets and potential blessings. We really must.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)