There has been some good news lately about COVID-19. According to Swiss Propaganda Research, the overall lethality of the outbreak is between 0.1% and 0.4% and thus up to twenty times lower than initially assumed by the World Health Organization. The Wall Street Journal likewise reports that “Current estimates about the Covid-19 fatality rate…could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.” The article explains that “If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well.” Based on the best statistics we have to date, the true mortality rate is in the order of 0.1%. The WSJ researchers, medical professors at Stanford, conclude that a “universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health.”
Moreover, many of the epidemiological models we are daily inundated with are flatly unreliable. The proper response should be data-driven, not model-driven. Yet lockdowns of varying degrees of severity look set to continue for the foreseeable future, with disastrous effect. A study released on May 4 by the nonprofit research institute Just Facts concludes that “the total loss of life from all societal responses to this disease is likely to be more than 90 times greater than [the loss of life] prevented by the lockdowns.”
Such deflationary Corona-numbers are generally hidden or scumbled in order to rouse and maintain the desired panic-effect intended to keep an economically-illiterate public fearful, docile, manageable, and subject to authoritarian control, acquiescing, as Jack Kerwick writes, “in a sort of internment that has been imposed by their governments upon them in the name of keeping them safe from getting sick.” Most ordinary people are subject, he suggests, to what Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem called “the curious, but quite authentic, inability to think.” Aside from those who do retain a certain acuity—obviously, the more, the better—it is only when people’s livelihoods are gravely threatened that pockets of resistance begin to form; otherwise, the tendency is to surrender to government propaganda and the graphic lamentations and grisly requiems of media sensationalism.
Interested parties know this, trading in fiction rather than fact, in suppression and manipulation of data rather than truth. Nothing profits the ruling class more than a dumbed-down and gullible electorate, unable to see through the fog of counterfeit news. For example, Cherry Medical Center Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, staged a fake COVID-19 testing and treatment operation in collaboration with CBS News. According to reports, hospital staff said “they were called off the floors where they were working and told to get in their cars and make the line look like it was wrapping around the parking lot. Nurses in the testing center were forced to pretend they were testing patients.” No surprise here. We recall that CBS used footage of an overwhelmed Italian hospital in a report about New York City hospitals. And too many people are prone to believe the marrow-deep duplicity of our official organs of information.
Such acts of deception are the global elite’s secular version of Isaiah 6:10 (Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed), quoted by Jesus (Mark 4:12 and Matthew 13:13). A political agenda with religious implications dwarfs all other considerations.
A hyperventilating media has now embarked on its next Apocryphal venture, to wit, to foment second- and third-wave hysteria that may keep us in limbo for the next 18 months. What we are presently undergoing is only a preview, apparently, of the combers of destruction to come in a flood of biblical proportions. We had better start building arks of prevention and staying below decks before the wrath of the great god COVID unleashes its avenging waters against the skeptical and unprepared.
Coronavirus Anxiety Costs More Lives Than the Lockdowns Save From COVID-19, Study Finds
This multiple-wave scenario is now blazoned across advisory and media outlets, and it looks like many are falling for it. It makes more sense to interpret the incidence of the disease as one wave with its inevitable rises and falls, but which should not hinder us from living with a degree of risk, taking common precautions, and bringing our economies and societies back to life again. All that is missing is confidence and conviction, writes Victor Davis Hanson—and, we may add, a basic understanding of the dynamics at work. There is an asymmetric relationship between public health and economic health, between a prophylactic lockdown and a deadly shutdown of the productive forces that enable a nation to survive and a people to flourish.
Nonetheless, wave hysteria, I suspect, will suit our morally compromised leaders’ purposes quite handily, assisting them in preventing people from returning to work and thereby rendering once-free citizens increasingly welfare-dependent at the expense of an enfeebled economy. Of course, economies have contracted everywhere, but in vital and productive countries recovery is only a matter of time. The U.S. economy is projected to shrink by approximately 5.9% but we know that under President Trump, provided he remains in power, it will ultimately recoup most of its COVID losses. In most countries, real GDP is slated to contract by staggering amounts—12% and more in my own country of Canada—while the tax base will necessarily dwindle and taxes spike alarmingly to cover the shortfalls. Fewer drivers, more passengers, and an open road—Hayek’s road to serfdom. For many nations, a return to previous levels of prosperity may be deferred indefinitely or may never come to pass.
Indeed, under the guise of a global emergency, Western democracies are insensibly being reworked into Soviet-style command economies and centralized one-party regimes. This is certainly the case in western Europe and in much of the Anglosphere—with the possible exception of the U.S., provided the Democrats are soundly defeated in the coming election and the Republicans remain resolute and unified. Single-payer Medicare systems and the Global Warming (aka Climate Change) movement are potent means of enabling Progressivist control of a nation’s economic life and of the habits and expectations of the public.
COVID-19, as many have noted, is the third and perhaps most effective and comprehensive pretext to establish a collectivist system of top-down control exercised by an illiberal managerial elite. Consider, for example, the aptly named Bill 6666 recently introduced by Illinois Democrat Congressman Bobby Rush, which would empower the federal government to test, monitor, and track—and possibly coerce—individual citizens, privacy rights notwithstanding. Demagogic politicians enjoy the backing of a powerful club of philanthro-Marxists—movers and shakers like George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and others. These are the Doctors of the Church of Political Absolutism. Some may look like right-wingers but they all skew left. The blueprint is fully adumbrated in Soviet émigré Alexander Markovsky’s eye-opening 2016 book Liberal Bolshevism, which exposes the extent to which the free market economies of the West are being pillaged, subverted, and transformed by a clique of Statist authoritarians.
COVID is the stalking horse of what is now called Democratic Socialism, a sobriquet for neo-Marxism. If we are not vigilant, we may find that we have lost the Cold War.
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David Solway’s latest book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House Publishing, 2019, London. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
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