Conspiracy Theories Become Conspiracy Facts

 

• What is Now Known and Generally but Not Universally Admitted

  It will circulate throughout the world and keep returning with mutating variants. People who have been infected and/or vaccinated can contract and transmit it. Consequently we have little choice but to learn to live with it. What is important is to make sure the right policy lessons are learnt so that never again, neither for a novel coronavirus nor for any other infectious disease, do we go down the path of public policy insanity to lock up an entire city or country with the discovery of 1-10 cases and bring all social, cultural and economic activity to a shuddering halt – or give total power and control to sociopaths and psychopaths. Cost-benefit analysis is therefore an essential prerequisite, not an optional add-on.

• The Lockdown Files

  The last three years have seen lives lost in the millions with tens of millions more yet to be accounted for in the coming years, civilized lifestyles destroyed, previously inviolate freedoms shredded, civil liberties turned into privileges to be granted on the whim of bureaucrats, law enforcement officers corrupted into street thugs brutalizing the very people they are sworn to serve and protect, businesses destroyed, economies wrecked, bodily integrity violated. The daily drip-feed of revelations in the Telegraph is akin to watching with fascinated horror a slow-motion train wreck. Schadenfreude doesn’t come any more delicious. The files are littered with flippant remarks, mocking comments and contempt for citizens. A plan to lift restrictions were dropped after Johnson was told it would be “too far ahead of public opinion.” Consultants were paid over £1 million a day for more than a year on the totally ineffectual test and trace program, turning the scheme into the embezzlement of public funds to line private pockets. The ruling elites, when liberated from democratic accountability and media scrutiny, morphed seamlessly into morally cavalier and inhumane petty tyrants.

• Sociopath, Psychopath, or Both?

  Among the revelations about Hancock: More than 40,000 residents of care homes in England died with Covid. He rejected the advice because testing capacity was limited and, for political (PR) reasons, he prioritized reaching his grandiose, self-imposed target of 100,000 daily tests in the lower risk general community over protecting the care home residents, despite repeated claims of having thrown a “protective ring” around the homes. Case wished he could “see some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a premier inn shoe box.” Informed by Hancock that 149 people had entered “Quarantine Hotels due to their own free will,” Case replied: “Hilarious.” Hancock fought furious internal battles to hog the vaccine media limelight. Public health messaging was weaponized to normalize and sacralize spirit-sapping levels of social isolation. Elderly patients were forced to die alone and surviving family members were banned from saying final farewells and denied the solace of a full funeral. The instinctual libertarian rapidly morphed from a lockdown sceptic into a zealot.

• The Lockdown Files confirm that politics informed the policymakers in most of the key decisions on how to manage the pandemic. Interventions rooted in panic, driven by political machinations, and using all the levers of state power to terrify citizens and muzzle critics in the end needlessly killed massive numbers of the most vulnerable while putting the vast low-risk majority under house arrest. The benefits are questionable but the harms are increasingly obvious. The Johnson government in general and Hancock in particular revalidate Lord Acton’s astute observation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The UK, US, and Australia don’t need an inquiry strung out over years, focused on small details to the neglect of the big picture, with the tame conclusion that lessons will be learnt but blame cannot be apportioned. Instead we need criminal charges, and the sooner the better.

https://brownstone.org/articles/conspiracy-theories-become-conspiracy-facts/