Covid is Over

Gollum must let it go

CHAPTER 1 – Gollumus Equality

Covid is over. Covid is over and the craven Gollum is scrambling to keep hold of its precious source of control.

The boundless uncertainties of the future were shrunken by the pandemic. We were given a single source of fear—a spiky sphere—on which to project all of our bone deep existential pains about reality and our place in it. A certain weight was lifted from our shoulders by the narrowing of our options and the enforced focus on a single problem above all else. The future can be scary and a potent driver toward righteous distraction. The spiky sphere of fear, however, made life less complex for many of us by virtue of necessity. The blinkered worldview instantiated by the unknown dangers of Covid, quite strangely, initially provided a sense of control that served up a dark pleasantry I feel ashamed to openly divulge. This is why I can recognize Gollum’s cowardly drive to keep the ring of power that the spiky sphere of fear has become. As Lionel Shriver bleakly states in the Christmas ’21 edition of the Spectator:

“For the most part I’ve found the pandemics lessons on human nature to be depressing…Most people contain a kernel of authoritarianism that only requires the right circumstances to germinate…Most people delight in viciously demonising the outgroup.”

I am not saying that this novel pathogen from Wuhan is no longer a cause for concern. I am not saying that our loved ones will no longer get ill due to variants of this endemic virus. I am not saying that people will not die from the COVID-19 disease; I myself might even be one of the strikingly unlucky few young people who dies from the Wu Flu in spite of vaccination.

Neither am I denying or demeaning the reality on the ground in our hospitals. In many WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic—nations, of which my home country of Ireland is definitely one, our frontline medical professionals are asked to operate within a holy mess of a health care system. At least by reasonable 21st century expectations. Irish physician Seamus O’Mahony notes as much in his ruthlessly direct 2019 book Can Medicine Be Cured?:

“Ireland has one of the worst health systems in the European Union; acute hospitals permanently operate at over 100 per cent capacity, and 15 per cent of the entire population are on a waiting list to see a hospital consultant.” (pg. 124)      

This pandemic was quite literally an apocalypse: a disclosure or revelation of great knowledge. The state of our health care systems was made nowhere more clearly than when we saw a swollen and self-perpetuating 'non-essential’ class of hospital bureaucrat battle charging overworked and underpaid ‘essential’ vocationalists over the top of the trench from the safety of their kitchen tables. “If managers could solve the health crisis,” said Professor Michael O’Keefe in 2017 about the Irish medical system, “we would have the best health service in the world.”

In declaring that ‘Covid is over’ I am merely highlighting the long obsolete requirement for a top-down imposition of myopic control, for the supposed sake of public health, at the expense of facilitating a bottom-up management of mortal risk. This bottom-up management would be carried out by individuals who, in a sane and truly open society that acknowledged COVID-19 is just one sliver of the public health pie, would be informed and empowered by inspiring and trustworthy leaders rather than intimidated and enraged by neurosis and division generating puppeteers. But what might ‘informed and empowered’ look like?

By no means am I virologist or epidemiologist, but where has the rollout of free rapid antigen tests been since they were known by people like Dr Michael Mina of Harvard to be an accurate, cheap, and ultimately self-empowering tool in helping to detect contagiousness since at least mid 2020? Showing up as positive with two of these tests on Christmas eve just gone, to illustrate the point, allowed me to make the decision to cancel travel plans so as not to risk infecting others. I have been buying and using these tools for months now, but what if they were, as Mina had suggested, rolled out very early in 2020, long before widespread vaccination had helped to decrease disease severity? This was also a time when much more dangerous variants were doing the rounds than the common cold like Omicron, which South Africa seems to have done us a favour with. On Christmas of 2020, as another example, a close friend of mine was able to acquire these tests from a medical practitioner family member who worked abroad. He could then use a few of these tests himself before going to visit his sick father who had a serious COVID-19 worsening health issue. How much suffering and death could have been avoided in the first 12-15 months of the pandemic if individuals were informed and empowered with knowledge of their own contagiousness, every day, and for free, using this obviously useful tool?

We have also seen the use of temporary ‘bubbles’ by professional athletes so that they could train and compete, but where has been the use of similar tactics in trying to protect those in society most vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID-19? After all, an informed and empowered society would have stratified measures based on trying to optimally protect those most likely to suffer severe illness, while simultaneously trying to negatively impact those least at risk from the virus as little as possible. In his recent book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, Stanford Historian Niall Ferguson described how we have known since the first SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012, that corona virus outbreaks were nosocomial, “that is, they occurred in hospitals, suggesting that treatment of the sick, unless managed with great care, could end up spreading the illness.” (pg. 246) As such, could care home workers not have been given pay rises and provided temporary ‘bubbles’ for blocks of time? Measures that would have minimized the chances of these carers unknowingly bringing the virus into the facilities from the outside world. And could medical staff who were knowingly in contact with infected patients not have been provided similar ‘bubbles’? Measures that would have lowered the chances of their bringing the virus out to the world from medical settings. Could the countless empty hotels across Ireland not have been useful here?

Instead, we saw just two instruments being wielded by many WEIRD authorities of which Ireland is a prime example: blunt force restrictions on physical freedoms, and pointedly coercive vaccine measures. Not only have many in power found no shortage of gleefully compliant nails to bash with their authoritarian hammer, or malleable cushions to penetrate with pins that have come to signify far more than mere immunity status, but many of us have long applauded them for doing so. What warnings might this offer? In an October 2020 lecture delivered for the Cambridge Law Faculty, for example, former UK Supreme Court Justice Lord Jonathan Sumption notes how the willing subjugation to tyrannical public health measures sets a precedent that may have consequences lasting long after the pandemic:

“Our society craves security. The public has unbounded confidence, which no amount of experience will dent, in the benign power of the state to protect them against an ever wider range of risks. In Britain, the lockdown was followed by a brief period in which the government’s approval ratings were sky-high. This is how freedom dies. When societies lose their liberty, it is not usually because some despot has crushed it under his boot. It is because people voluntarily surrendered their liberty out of fear of some external threat. Historically, fear has always been the most potent instrument of the authoritarian state. This is what we are witnessing today. But the fault is not just in our government. It is in ourselves. Fear provokes strident demands for abrasive action, much of which is unhelpful or damaging. It promotes intolerant conformism. It encourages abuse directed against anyone who steps out of line, including many responsible opponents of this government’s measures and some notable scientists who have questioned their empirical basis. These are the authentic ingredients of a totalitarian society.”

Lord Sumption issued this warning before the UK and Ireland headed into prolonged winter restrictions, of which Ireland has accumulated some of the strictest and longest lockdown periods on Earth. And if I am to be brutally honest, as a bookish and calisthenics obsessed creative who had wonderful living situations, I had, for the most part, a great time during the lockdowns. This troubles me deeply. 

The remainder of this essay is broken into 3 themes: chapter 2 explores critiques around the big picture cost to benefit analysis for society of the lockdowns; chapter 3 explores some interesting issues around the vaccines including adverse events and the ethics of coercion; chapter 4 explores the sort of dystopian direction we may be headed before suggesting what we might do instead.

One thing I would ask of the reader, if they would be so obliging, is to recognize that I am a finite, limited, fallible, and irrational primate who is fumbling around in the dark like everyone else. After all, “while differing widely in the various little bits we know,” as Karl Popper notes, “in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.” (pg. 38)

CHAPTER 2 – Lockdown Heterodoxy

Brute force lockdowns were a tactic employed by the communofascist dictatorship in China. This is the very same regime that tried to cover up the pandemic from the start by censoring heroes who tried to raise the alarm like Dr Li Wenliang. These Gollumus restrictions on personal freedoms were then subsequently copied by many WEIRD societies who, after being embarrassingly caught with their pants down, panicked. According to the Executive Director for India at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Surjit Bhalla: “Lockdowns had never been implemented before, not even during the “extreme” flu epidemics of 1957-58 and 1961.”

I had never heard of the 1957-58 flu until recently, though I had been bombarded with references to the much worse 1918 Spanish flu since early 2020. This is quite interesting because according to Ferguson in Doom:

“it is now clear that, in terms of its likely fatality rate, the 2020-21 pandemic more closely resembles the 1957-58 pandemic than the much more catastrophic Spanish Flu…Unlike COVID-19, however, Asian flu killed appreciable levels of young people.” (pg. 216)

But even though they had never been employed before, did lockdowns actually work? Maybe, maybe not. In a late 2020 paper entitled Assessing mandatory stay- at- home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID- 19, Eran Bendavid and three colleagues from Stanford University compared countries that employed more restrictive measures versus those with less restrictive ones. They note:

“In the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain or the United States in early 2020 [compared to places that adopted less restrictive measures like Sweden and South Korea.]”

Surjit Bhalla of the IMF reached a similar conclusion. In a Nov of ‘21 report entitled Lockdowns and Closures vs COVID – 19: COVID Wins he notes:

“For the first time in human history, lockdowns were used as a strategy to counter the virus. While conventional wisdom, to date, has been that lockdowns were successful (ranging from mild to spectacular) we find not one piece of evidence supporting this claim.”

And so “if lockdowns were not essential to turning the tides of the epidemic,” as Professor of Statistics at Edinburgh University Simon Wood has pondered, “the question remains whether they were worth the collateral damage.” This question of “collateral damage” is an important one that Bendavid and his colleagues also raised:

“Because of the potential harmful health effects of [mandatory stay-at-home and business closure orders (lockdowns)]—including  hunger, opioid-related overdoses, missed vaccinations, increase in non-COVID diseases from missed health services, domestic abuse, mental health and suicidality, and a host of economic consequences with health implications—it is increasingly recognized that their postulated benefits deserve careful study.”

On top of the “collateral damage” noted above, other consequences of lockdowns included retarding child development—especially in already disadvantaged kids—through decreased schooling and utterly irreplaceable social interactions. Much less obvious yet existentially important impacts were also the removal of social oases like sport, performing arts, weddings, funerals, and other important sociocultural events. Social oases serve many purposes, not least of which is their provision of a deeply important first-person experiential softening of the brutally hard edges to life.

Finally, a nominee for the most perverse aspect of the continued use of lockdowns was highlighted by the authors of a strangely vilified epidemiological proposal called The Great Barrington Declaration (the GBD). The GBD has been signed by nearly 900,000 people at the time of writing. In a July of ‘21 piece about the lessons to be learned from Sweden’s anti-lockdown pandemic strategy, the authors of the GBD—Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—described how the use of lockdowns instead of a preferred policy they called “Focussed Protection”, “protected the 'non-essential' laptop class from the virus, while exposing the 'essential' working class and poor, regardless of medical vulnerability.” And these are all but some of the most obvious iatrogenic effects—unintended consequences of medical interventions—incurred by the lockdowns.

A very interesting side note here, is that humble discussion on the ideas proposed by the GBD was shunned from the outset by people in the highest echelons of the WEIRD public health community. While I was writing this essay, news broke about Francis Collins—director of the National Institutes of Health in the US, and boss of the more well recognized Anthony Fauci—stating in an email that there needed to be a “quick and devastating published takedown” on the GBD when it first came out in October of ‘20. On this despicably anti-scientific and dogmatic reaction by Collins, the admirably cool headed Professor Vinay Prasad of the University of Southern California wrote:

“Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, and I called for dialogue and debate among scientists without demonization in April 2020. I’m disappointed to see a few months later that the NIH director, a man uniquely positioned to foster such a debate, had actively sought to thwart and discredit scientists with alternative ideas to the pandemic response. His ad-hominem comment that the authors were “fringe” was unnecessary and unhelpful. In the weeks that followed, more and more mud would be slung against the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, as well as against scientists who held alternative policy views, and favored more and stronger restrictions. The vitriol ensured that the country would not have the dialogue it so desperately needed.”

That the initial reaction of Collins was to attack well supported good faith heterodoxy, rather than humbly engage with the ideas, and immediately seek to discredit as “fringe” three subject matter experts from some of the most prestigious academic institutions on Earth, is not only disappointing, but unbelievably bizarre for a supposed scientific leader of his credentials. This reactive authoritarian sentiment of Collins was much closer to the religious dogmatists of the Spanish Inquisition who persecuted heretics, than to the rationalist sceptics of the Enlightenment who gave birth to modern science.

It is worth noting, that such iatrogenic costs of lockdowns might have been totally justified if this pandemic was caused by an existential catastrophe level pathogen. One such example would be the H5N1 virus strain modified by a Dutch lab in 2011 to be transmissible between mammals; it has a 60% fatality rate. Considering the chaos caused by the current virus that likely has an infection fatality rate of much less than one percent—what we could almost think of as a minimal viable emergency—a pandemic with 60% fatality is truly incomprehensible. All of this collateral damage may have even been justifiable very early on in the first few weeks when there was so many unknowns, when we were caught so obviously unprepared for such a non-linear event, and when the fatality rates from our neighbours in Italy—the first WEIRD society to impose lockdowns—were suggesting upwards of 7%.

The net benefits of myopic lockdowns do, however, seem increasingly dubious when we see what happened in Sweden. Led by State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell (whom some Swedes have apparently had tattoos done of), Sweden stood out from the crowd in choosing to avoid copying the sort of lockdown tactics employed by the Chinese Communist Party, yet far outperformed most European neighbours. Sweden ranked just 18th out of 26 European counties in 2020 in terms of excess deaths when there were adjustments made to “account for differences in both the age structures and seasonal mortality patterns”:

“Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively. Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden.”

Lockdowns are, however, only one of two main instruments being wielded by our Gollumus instinct toward unrestrained control.

CHAPTER 3 – Vaccine Resistance

I chose to accept vaccination in the Spring of ’21. I did so due to my understanding of the risk to benefit ratio for myself and wider society at the time. What has been of the utmost concern though, is that since the summer we have seen increasingly prevalent techno-segregationist policies including the Gollumus use of QR Codes to demonstrate personal medical compliance. These policies punish and scapegoat the manifestly second-class citizens who chose to refuse vaccination. And as a student of war and genocide, of man’s inhumanity to man, it has also been particularly disturbing to see a growing sentiment of ‘shut up and do what you are told you selfishly demonic anti-vaxx scum.’

This othering of people presented to us by many of our WEIRD leaders and media figures as akin to un-pure heathens, is done, quite strangely, in spite of the fact that the vaccines are leaky. Here I am referring to the fact that the fully vaccinated can still reach the same peak viral loads as the unvaccinated, thereby being just as contagious, but simply for a shorter period of time as they can clear the virus faster. Furthermore, the dangers of severe illness are not equally distributed across the population which means the vaccines are not equally necessary, and no medicine is without its own potential for adverse events, including these Covid vaccines. This means the risk to benefit analysis varies between individuals.  

We have seen increasing emergence of people speaking out about their vaccination injuries. One such example is professional mountain biker Kyle Warner who had pericarditis—swelling and irritation of the thin, saclike tissue surrounding the heart—alongside other complications that have affected not only his athletic capacities but even his daily functioning. Another known adverse event associated with the mRNA vaccines, especially in young males, is myocarditis—inflammation of the muscle of the heart. Though most people recover from these heart conditions, early detection for both is paramount in order to prevent long term complications and heart damage according to the Mayo Clinic. And apart from anecdotal cases like Kyle Warner, evidence from large scale studies on vaccine injury, involving millions of subjects, has also been emerging.

A recent paper by Martina Patone of Oxford and colleagues was published in the journal Nature Medicine in December of ’21. It was entitled Risks of myocarditis, pericarditis, and cardiac arrhythmias associated with COVID-19 vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infection. Patone and colleagues had studied around 42 million subjects and, quite worryingly, found 50% more myocarditis occurring after the 2nd dose of the Moderna vaccine than they did in the age matched population who had contracted the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus:

“…in younger persons aged up to 40 years…we estimated the excess in myocarditis events following SARS-CoV-2 infection to be 10 per million with the excess following a second dose of [Moderna] vaccine being 15 per million. Further research is required to understand why the risk of myocarditis seems to be higher following [Moderna] vaccine.”

Thankfully, the same rate of injury for under 40s did not appear for the other vaccines studied by the Oxford group. Quite strangely though, this paper did not separate out the injury rates by sex. They were subsequently criticised for not doing so. Shortly after publication of the original study, Patone and colleagues responded to these critiques and requests around the lack of breakdown by sex and published a follow up paper. In Risk of myocarditis following sequential COVID-19 vaccinations by age and sex, they note that despite “more myocarditis events occurring in older persons, the risk following COVID-19 vaccination was largely restricted to younger males aged less than 40 years.” And how did this compare to the rate of 15 events per million when males and females were combined? Well, males under 40 who received the 2nd dose of the Moderna vaccine had 101 myocarditis events per million. This was compared to having just 7 events per million in those sub-40 males with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test. While I very much applaud their quick response to critique and request with provision of the extremely relevant sex breakdown, I am left wondering why this was missing in their initial publication.  

To be clear, this data does not definitely mean that the Moderna vaccines are, for sure, more dangerous for people under 40 than the virus itself; the COVID-19 disease can have much wider harms on the body than just myocarditis. What it does primarily suggest, however, is twofold. Firstly, and most obviously, the risk to reward ratio for certain vaccines differ for different cohorts, and public policy across certain WEIRD countries has already reflected this. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, for example, suspended the use of Moderna for under 30s in favour of other vaccines back in October of ‘21. Secondly, and somewhat less obviously considering our heated cultural moment, there are serious ethical issues with coercing people into getting the vaccines in any way; especially mandates which we are seeing in some WEIRD nations. The recent mandates in Austria, for example, seem utterly insane when we consider how little benefit may be gotten for the cost of driving further civil unrest and distrust of government and institutions. These coercive measures become even more questionably ethical when considering the cost to benefit ratio for younger males who, while at very low risk of severe COVID-19 illness, seem to be at the highest risk of injury from the actual vaccines (things get even more murky when we see how ridiculously mild Omicron seems to be). This risk breakdown by sex and age was confirmed by another huge study from Canada.

In a paper entitled Epidemiology of myocarditis and pericarditis following mRNA vaccines in Ontario, Canada; by vaccine product, schedule and interval, which also happened to have appeared in December of ‘21, a group of researchers published a study on data from nearly 20 million people. They presented overall rates of vaccine injury that match up quite closely to those in the 1st Patone paper: they had 297 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis that met their inclusion criteria, which, when divided across the total number of subjects, works out at about 15 injuries per million. Though, things do get far more interesting when we dig into the weeds. What the Ontario researchers did, which the Oxford researchers initially did not, was present a clear breakdown of incidence across sex and age. Firstly, they found more than 75% of these myocarditis/pericarditis injuries occurred in males with a median age of 24. Furthermore, they found absolutely stunning rates of myocarditis or pericarditis in the male 18-24 category after the 2nd mRNA vaccine. For the Pfizer vaccine, they reported 59.2 events per million; for the Moderna vaccine they found more than 5 times this rate with 299.5 events per million. This is 20 times the 15 per million overall average. The second highest reporting rate was then in males aged 12-17 who received the Pfizer vaccine and had rates of injury at 97.3 per million; more than 6 times the average rate. In the discussion section of the paper, the researchers claim that these rates are “in line with estimates from other passive surveillance systems and data sources” from other countries.

It is, however, vitally important to reiterate that even with these rates of specific adverse events, the benefits of the vaccines might very still end up outweighing the costs for many people. It just so happens that, as far as I am aware at least, such a detailed age and sex stratified cost-benefit analysis of vaccines and boosters compared to viral infection has yet to be published by the time of writing. And to reiterate another important point, this discussion gets even more important when we see that the new Omicron variant—which I likely missed Christmas with my family because of—appears to be akin to a mere common cold.

After encountering this data, it may seem obvious that open and honest public discussions may be required so to ease people’s understandable concerns should they encounter this information. Such discussions could also function to raise awareness of the symptoms so that early detection of heart injury is increased thereby decreasing the chances of long-term impacts. This is especially relevant at a time when boosters and vaccination of the very young are being pushed aggressively across the WEIRD world. The unwillingness to lend any credibility whatsoever to the concerns of the vaccine hesitant, or the dreaded anti-vaxx boogiemen, however, leave me in serious doubt such transparent discourse will occur.

What we have seen much of, instead of a policy of seeking understanding and an attempt to gain trust from the vaccine hesitant, is a consistent campaign of scapegoating and shaming with slogans like “pandemic of the unvaccinated” being used as justification for despicably coercive yet rose tinted measures. Measures I fear will have dire consequences not only on future elections which may have reactionary results, and institutional trust which may justifiably be lost due to poor leadership, but on the ability of WEIRD societies to deal with future emergencies of all forms because of an increased loss of faith in science writ large.

Furthermore, I feel the need to highlight that the increasingly denigrated, dehumanized, and demonized “unvaxxed” are not a monolith, and that some mainstream journalists have acknowledged this absence of unified reasoning for refusing vaccination. Irish Times writer Fintan O’Toole, for example, did so in a recent piece entitled The three anti-vaccine types – egoists, paranoiacs and fascists. This is an extremely disappointing tone to see from O’Toole. It is also one that will sew further division and mistrust. For such a highly regarded public intellectual to be so disparaging is unfortunate; people’s reasons for not getting vaccinated are myriad. From my research and personal interactions, rationale for refusing the jab ranges across a spectrum of reasonability from bizarre and totalizing-conspiracies that make Roswell UFO tales seem rather banal, to a general mistrust of authorities including government and Big Pharma, to simply feeling that their age and comorbidity status means they are willing to take their chances with the virus itself, to having underlying health conditions that fail to justify the risks of accepting the jab (I personally know two people in this last category).

At about 93%, Irish adults have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. It is from the 7% that remain unvaxxed, however, that we see a disproportionate amount of the intensive care unit (ICU) admissions here; about 50%. In a recent piece for RTE.ie, Mark Coughlan attempted to analyse this unvaccinated ICU cohort. He described how the median age for an unvaccinated ICU admission was 52 years old which compared to 61 for the vaccinated, and how only 1 in 3 unvaccinated had an underlying condition compared to 97% of the vaccinated having one. And possibly most interestingly, he described how about half of the unvaccinated in ICU were not born in Ireland. Coughlan then suggested that linquistic or cultural barriers may have been at play in terms of peoples understanding and trust of vaccine related messaging. While this was fascinating, there are some interesting questions that remain unanswered.

Of the Irish born unvaccinated and disproportionately young without an official underlying condition who end up in ICU, there are a few intriguing medical questions that I wonder about. One such question relates to the accessibility of formal diagnosis: how many of this unvaccinated ICU cohort are on the edges of society, or in other disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, that make it less likely any underlying conditions would have been detected, and hence highlighted on medical records, before they showed up in hospital with COVID-19? An example of such a co-morbidity may be anxiety disorders, which, according to the American CDC, have been found to be one of “the strongest risk factors for severe COVID-19 illness.”

There are also a few questions I have about this group that are more psychological than biomedical. For example, how many unvaxxed have totally understandable reasons to mistrust institutional impositions because of past mistreatment at the hands of the state? How many people simply do not trust that the profit maximizing pharmaceutical companies genuinely have their best interest at heart? Maybe some of these people heard about Big Pharma companies having done inhumane things in the past—such as a division of Bayer pharmaceuticals having “knowingly sold” medication infected with HIV—and so might have suspected that a similarly callous sentiment was at play in the development of these vaccines? In a brilliant essay exploring vaccine hesitancy in the US entitled Needle Points, Norman Doidge listed a whole host of other examples of unethical behaviour by Big Pharma. Doidge, a pro-vaccine physician himself, then highlighted how little trust people had in the US for the pharmaceutical industry pre-pandemic:

“As of a September 2019 Gallup poll, only a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Pharma was the least trusted of America’s 25 top industry sectors, No. 25 of 25. In the eyes of ordinary Americans, it had both the highest negatives and the lowest positives of all industries.”

And this mistrust, due to our hyper-Americanized media environment, may have also had some crossover here in Ireland. Such concerns about Big Pharma then receive quite a bolus of hyper-validating confirmation bias when we see a reputable place like The British Medical Journal (The BMJ) publish an extremely disturbing investigation into “data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial”:

“A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial. Staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were finding. After repeatedly notifying Ventavia of these problems, the regional director, Brook Jackson, emailed a complaint to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Ventavia fired her later the same day. Jackson has provided The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails.”

This kind of thing is not all that surprising though. As meta-research expert John Ionnidis writes in a 2016 piece for the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology entitled Evidence-based medicine has been hijacked:

“corporations should not be asked to practically perform the assessments of their own products. If they are forced to do this, I cannot blame them, if they buy the best advertisement (i.e., ‘‘evidence’’) for whatever they sell.”

In taking all of the above into consideration, I have many times wished I could turn back the clock and undo my own decision to be vaccinated. This desire to be literally un-vaccinated—have my vaccination undone—was not for primarily biomedical reasons. And even though I may end up choosing to receive a booster at some point, should it make sense for both myself and wider society, my deeply visceral resistance to doing so stems from an unwillingness to reinforce, through compliance with, an uncomfortably incompetent and increasingly totalitarian system that has consistently and unashamedly failed so many of the human beings it purports to serve. A good part of this resistance is due to what I worry is only the beginning of a totalitarian creep. 

CHAPTER 4 – Concerningly Doomed

At the risk of sounding like a neurotic dystopian who has consumed too much science fiction and totalitarian history, I have my concerns about the direction we are headed.

In Can Medicine Be Cured? Seamus O’Mahony notes:

“The current priorities of medicine – with the cathedral-like teaching hospitals and biomedical research at the top, and community and hospice care at the bottom – will have to be turned upside down. I am not optimistic that this will happen. Strong societal forces will almost certainly ensure that the current consensus prevails. These forces include the commodification of all human life, the over-weening power of giant international corporations, the decline of both politics and the professions, the sclerosis of compliance and regulations, the fetishization of safety, the narcissism of the Internet and social media, but above all the spiritual dwarfism of our age, which would reduce us to digitized machines in need of constant surveillance and maintenance.” (pg. 271)

O’Mahony’s prescient words were printed in 2019, and I am concerned that Covid has served to accelerate and deepen these trends. I am concerned that the continued use of repressive lockdowns that had dubious net benefit in terms of big picture public welfare—especially for the most disadvantaged in society, alongside Rubicon crossing techno-segregationist policies around passports and mandates for leaky vaccines that are far from free lunches in terms of injury risk, are marking a turning point in the WEIRD world. I am concerned that we are sleepwalking toward what Paul Kingsnorth has called a “Chinafication of the West, where we’re basically walking into a social credit system.” This is a set of systems that vary in format across China but are, according to Wired magazine, bound by the idea that “keeping files on companies and individuals could deter bad behaviour and encourage good.” What may have begun with copying the sort of drastic restrictions on freedom of movement implemented by a brutal dictatorship and was then followed by conformity signalling QR Codes in order to fully participate in society, may have created an opening for Gollum toward the sort of Orwell flavoured naughty or nice list employed by the communofascist Chinese government.  

With this possibility in mind, I am concerned that what may have started here as the normalization of the need to demonstrate medical compliance in order to participate in society, may eventually morph into some sort of scorecard based on how much petrol we use, or how many bovine farts our groceries are responsible for. The climate change conference at COP 26 was, after all, the only real reprieve we seemed to get from pandemic hysterics outside of the pitiful US presidential circus, and the George Floyd protests and riots that came before it. And then, in light of the identity obsessed Woke ideology that has been driving so much hatred, divisiveness, and reciprocal radicalization in recent years, and has been infecting institutions across the Anglosphere in particular—especially academia, I am concerned that this twisted social scorecard will also, at some point, be based on how screamingly “anti-racist” one is, or how unconditionally supportive of reality denying militant trans ideology we can virtue signal ourselves to be.

Do you think that Dr King was correct in his assertion that the content of one’s character is more important than the colour of their skin? Do you think that a person is a unique locus of both suffering and responsibility rather than a hollowed-out node at the centre of intersecting identity characteristics? Do you think that sex is objectively binary and that innate biological differences between males and females actually exist? Do you think that biologically male sex offenders with penises, such as Karen White aka David Thompson, shouldn’t be allowed to go to women’s prison where they could do more raping, just because they claim to be a woman? If you answered yes to any of the above, you may be considered by some to be a bigoted heretic. This is evidenced by the constant witch hunting and “cancellations” that have gotten people fired, or even into legal trouble, for daring to have opinions that rub against Woke orthodoxy. How long until pushing back against these Woke ideas has negative consequences associated with the compliance signalling QR Codes we have gotten so used to carrying around in our pockets? The Irish government already has, after all, introduced horrifyingly naive hate speech laws earlier this year.

In other words, how long will it be until the spiky sphere of fear ceases to provide a powerful enough lever of control for Gollum to pull on? How long until we find ourselves being judged by an algorithmic-deity who monitors our every move, and who scores us on how well we can comply with a vegan-centric and Woketopian upside-down world reflection of a Chinese communofascist totalitarianism that even George Orwell couldn’t have dreamt up? When I consider the sheer absurdity of the fact that I now need to prove vaccination to go to the pub for a pint—in spite of the fact that if infected I too can give the virus to anyone there, while unvaccinated friends of mine who could pass multiple antigen tests at the door cannot join me—such dystopic idiocy doesn’t seem too far-fetched. If this time last year, someone had suggested that such daft restrictions would be in place, I’d have thought it was them that were nuts. Surely if our societal leaders were so truly worried about the spread of contagion, then it would make more sense to antigen test people regularly—whether someone voluntarily chose vaccination or not—instead of relying on a proof of vaccination which, at best, might mean an infected vaccinated person could be just as contagious but for a shorter period of time? Alas, at least Covid is over.

Now that Covid is over, we can have serious discussions about why nearly all of our WEIRD politicians and institutions have failed to prepare for, or adequately respond to, a low probability, yet high risk and genuinely predictable gray rhino event in the form of this pandemic. According to Michel Wucker, who coined the term, this pandemic is a gray rhino we failed to see was ready to charge:

“The gray rhino is the massive two-ton thing with its horn pointed at you, stomping the ground and getting ready to charge — and, most important, giving you the chance to act. It’s the thing we avoid calling what it is…In this vein, we have seen…pandemics many times before and know they will continue to occur. If you cannot picture another one coming, you are wilfully blind…Could anyone have predicted when exactly the next pandemic would hit? No. But there have been many warnings that it was only a matter of time, and that the world was not ready.”

Many of the wealthiest nations on Earth had shambolic responses to this relatively benign and minimally viable emergency. This unsettling reality raises an obviously important question: how well might we cope with a genuinely existential threat level pandemic? Maybe one that could arise from something like the aforementioned H5N1 escaping from a lab? (This is quite a pertinent worry since there is ever mounting evidence that the current pandemic started due to a lab leak in Wuhan in 2019; far from the first of such incidents.) Alternatively, what about an intentional smallpox release, or deployment of any other lethal bioweapon which is only getting more likely thanks to increasingly democratized and exponentially powerful biotechnology? What about the many other gray rhinos that aren’t pathogens? What about threats to electricity grids such as solar flares? Or, threats to food security like a nuclear war causing years of blackened skies starving billions of people to death?

And since our WEIRD governments, with their supportive and supported institutions, seem to care so deeply about human suffering—as made evident by a willingness to sacrifice the wellbeing of the young, the imposition of paradigm shifting restrictions on personal freedoms through blinkered lockdowns, the unbelievably short sighted use of coercive measures for leaky vaccines, the weakening of already strained social fabric, and the destruction of vast chunks of economies—it only makes sense that we can now have serious discussions about why so many of our fellow Homo sapiens have been killing themselves. As Jamie Wheal notes in his recent book Recapture the Rapture:

“Diseases of despair—anxiety, depression, suicide—are rampant. One in six Americans takes psychiatric medications just to cope with the banality of modern life. To put this in harsh relief, the World Health Organization reports that more people today kill themselves than die from all wars and natural disaster combined. Think of all the hurricanes, floods, and fires and all the civil wars, terrorism, and military conflict that inundate our newsfeed. Put together, they don’t match the number of people choosing to leave this world because they cannot bear it any longer.” (pg. 19)

Unfortunately, this was all even before the mental health crisis sparked by the pandemic.

The mental health crisis caused by this may have seen more than 25% of an increase in major depressive disorders and anxiety disorders worldwide. In an October 2021 paper published in the Lancet entitled  Global prevalence and burden of depressive and anxiety disorders in 204 countries and territories in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Santomauro and colleagues note:

“In addition to the direct effects of COVID-19, the pandemic has created an environment in which many determinants of mental health are also affected. Social restrictions, lockdowns, school and business closures, loss of livelihood, decreases in economic activity, and shifting priorities of governments in their attempt to control COVID-19 outbreaks all have the potential to substantially affect the mental health of the population.”

This global data provided by Santomauro and colleagues adds validation to the early concerns of Irish clinicians like Professor Fiona McNicholas of University College Dublin. In a June 2020 Irish Times article, Professor McNicholas, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist , is quoted as saying that “We can see and we know that a tsunami of mental health issues are coming.”

The problem with increasingly widespread and quite predictable mental health woes, however, is that they are not as useful a tool of control for the clambering puppeteers in government and media. As H.L. Mencken, wrote more than a century ago:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

In this case though, the hobgoblin is now biologically real in its coronavirus structure, yet psychologically imagined as a catastrophic spectre, and it is adored for being so by the hunger for control embodied in a corrupted hobbit named Gollum.

With some sober reflection and honest introspection, one realizes that the role fulfilled by Tolkien’s Gollum is not representative of any single person. Gollum is a mythopoetic distillation of the ultimately corrupting desire within each of us for absolute power—the unbounded ability to impose our will on the world. The “long war” on Covid, as former Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has described it recently, has provided a target on which to focus our will, and attempt to control what seems an increasingly chaotic and complex world. But we must shake ourselves free from such a cowering mass psychosis. Such renewed clarity might allow us to shift our collective attention toward proportionately addressing the vast suite of problems that face humanity outside of this relatively benign pathogen. The entire future of our species and its descendants depends on it.

Should the Gollum within each of us all not accept the reality that Covid is over, and instead keep hold of that which insidiously festers corruptive rot, then we shall all join the fallen hobbit in fires of Mount Doom. Covid is over and the blinkered hysteria must stop.