There’s something ugly happening which even I find shocking. And if you read me regularly, you know that’s saying something. I’ve toyed long and hard with writing this post and putting it the way I’m going to. I’m going to give it to you straight, in five steps.
Every day that I go on Twitter — which isn’t every day, thankfully — a sight that’s spectacularly foolish and repellent greets me. No, not the bigots or supremacists or fanatics. In this case, it’s just
…doctors and scientists in positions of power…government advisers and so forth…who are politicising the pandemic. In an especially ugly way, which everyone should call out.
The pandemic is now being overtly politicised, even by doctors and scientists who have no business politicising a pandemic. This group of people is telling society three things.
One. It should “learn to live with the virus,” and throw caution to the wind, because Covid is now “just the common cold.”
Two. Because of that, society should aspire to reach the “endemic phase,” because then life will be “back to normal.”
Three. If there’s some death and illness along the way, so what? The pandemic is over.
All of that is flatly false. It is so false that it makes good doctors and scientists
more than a little furious at hearing over and over again, because it flatly unscientific and wrong.
All that is a shockingly embarrassing, unethical, and profoundly ignorant message for a public health professional of any kind to send.
It’s not just stupid, it’s obscene, and I don’t use those words lightly.
But who really has much shame left in our societies? Not those aspiring to power, anyways, which is what folks like this appear to be.
Let me spell out for you what it really means to “politicize the pandemic.” It just means to contradict, ignore, or deny the science. The science is unequivocal. There is no “debating” it. It is just a set of facts. The first several are bioscientific, and the next set are facts of social science. Let me quickly take you through them.
Here is the first set of facts, which are about the pandemic. This is most likely not the last variant. The variants will not magically cease. Covid is not “becoming the flu” or “becoming a cold.” None of that is remotely true. The scientific facts, for those who are interested, go like this. Coronaviruses are highly recombinogenic, which is why they mutate so hard and fast, and viruses don’t “evolve” towards less severity — that is a profound misunderstanding of virology. If they did, hepatitis and polio wouldn’t still be killers.
Next, the second set of facts, about vaccines. We are using a vaccine for Delta (Alpha, even) against Omicron, whose boosters wane after ten weeks, to less than 50% efficacy. Omicron can happily reinfect people, aka escape even the boosters. Add that up, and the virus going endemic already looks nothing like what these so-called professionals wrongly proclaim, which is la-la land life returning to “normal”: it looks more like people get Covid over and over again, and new variants keep on emerging, and systems just go on breaking, from healthcare to the economy to schools to universities to high streets.
But which people are we talking about who get hit by all this? Now we’re coming to the really ugly part of all this, the part which isn’t just stupid, but obscene.
Any sensible person should be able to understand that an “endemic phase” looks not an iota like the la-la land of “life returning to normal,” but more like endless waves of Covid battering societies like tsunamis, every season.
So who is that going to affect? Well, all of us. Have you had Omicron yet? You’re probably going to get it again. And again. And again. Even if it feels mild for you, because you’re a relatively healthy adult, there are many people for whom it’s not mild. Like who?
Like kids. Who are packing hospital wards to breaking point. Kids on ventilators, which are, by the way, life support. (And no, it’s not simply because under-5’s aren’t vaccinated.)
Or like elderly people. Did you not notice how just as Omicron hit, a wave of famous elderly people began to drop like flies? Not a coincidence, a pretty obvious relationship. Death rates are indeed beginning to rise. The South African story was a nonsense, because life expectancy in South Africa is…wait for it…just 64. So obviously it didn’t cause a huge wave of deaths in the elderly there…because there aren’t very many of them. In societies with elderly populations, though, the wave of death that rose at the beginning of the pandemic hasn’t really stopped one iota.
Go ahead and think about it for yourself. 2600 people died of Covid yesterday in America alone. The number last year was 3250. That’s a decline, but not much of one. The idea that somehow people aren’t dying of Covid anymore is a stupid, fatuous, and ugly myth. Sure they are.
People are very much getting seriously ill with and still dying of Covid, in huge and bleak numbers. They’re just people we don’t care about. Or at least people that our leaders are telling us not to care about, because their lives are now an acceptable price to pay.
Which people are those? The young, the elderly, the immunocompromised. They are what might simply be called “the weak.” They are the most vulnerable members of our societies.
Our leaders are now explicitly saying something very much like: “Only the strong should survive. If the weak die off? That’s perfectly acceptable.” They are saying with a shrug and a smile — not just politicians, but, more shockingly, doctors and scientists.
We should all feel contempt for doctors and scientists who are cavalier about human life this way. They disgrace medicine and science. They violate the oaths they take, and they demean centuries of thought and reason.
But I want you to really understand why you should feel that way, angry, contemptuous, disgusted.
The position that our leaders are beginning to take is indistinguishable from fascism and eugenics. “The strong should survive, and it’s acceptable if the weak perish” is a position that is indistinguishable from fascist eugenics.
I know that’s a strong claim to make. I don’t like sounding like Alex Jones. So please, pick a hole in it if you can.
I want you to think about this with me. The conservative side politicises the pandemic this way. It denied it existed, blamed it on China, goes on denying vaccines work, and so forth. But the liberal side now espouses an ethic of “let the strong survive, and the weak should perish, so life can go on for the strong as usual.”
These are just two forms of the same belief system, which is fascism. The conservative side politicises the pandemic in a strong way with fascism — but the liberal side is doing it too.
Do you really think it’s OK to say something like: “Well, it’s OK if old people die off, and if kids end up on life support, and if the already sick get sicker — that’s great! Life can go back to normal!”
It’s not acceptable. Not just because it’s morally monstrous, which it is. But also because it’s ignorant. Because it’s false.
What happens to societies which adopt…fascism…as the basis for governance? Well, they don’t survive very long. They tend to corrode from within. They implode in paroxysms of hate and violence and stupidity and rage. That is precisely where all this will end, too, because, of course, you can’t fight science with stupid, of which fascism is just a kind.
Let’s imagine that in the la-la land of the doctor-pundits who espouse all this, and the politicians who believe them, that life does go back to “normal.” For the latte sipping trophy mom and dad. Meanwhile, grandpa’s dying in the hospital, and little Johnny’s on a ventilator again this winter. Even if said latte-sipping mom and dad are OK with all that, society will still pretty much grind to a halt, its basic systems — healthcare, economy, schools, universities — all ground down into dust.
You can call all that “normal.” But I don’t want my kid to end up on a ventilator. I don’t want my one last living grandparent to die of a virus they didn’t have to get. And there are a whole lot more people like me that there are stupid enough to fall for all this. How do I know that? Because by now the people preaching these lines are laughingstocks around the world, like Rochelle Wallensky at the CDC.
You cannot force the idea that mass death and suffering are “normal” on a society — and have it not be fascism.
The end result of all this, by the way, is that it aids the actual fascists, the ones vying for power. Because the result is a vacuum, a state of total chaos. Joe Biden and his team have made a total, total mess of Omicron. Trying to gussy it up with minor-league fascism-lite isn’t going to save them. It’s just going to get Trump elected, as people turn away in disgust from such incompetence.
Eugenics is a dangerous word to use. I don’t use it lightly. When our leaders effectively say that “it’s OK for kids to end up in the hospital, it’s OK for elderly people to die, it’s OK for those who are immunocompromised or already ill to die off, too”…there is no other way to describe that position other than eugenics. None.
Think about it. Eugenics literally means “good genes,” from the Greek prefix “eu”, the same in “eudaimonia,” or “good life.” When our leaders say that the weak — the most vulnerable in our societies — are now acceptable casualties, they are treading on the very, very thin ice of fascist eugenics. Old people had no value in Nazi Germany, either. If a kid wasn’t tough or strong enough, what good were they? And the already seriously ill? Just liabilities.
This worldview, “we have to learn to live with pandemic, and that means being OK with it killing off the weak” is actual eugenics by any other name. It is effectively saying that society should be reduced to the herd of those who are the fittest, with the strongest genes, the greatest natural resistance or other traits which shield them, and that is what is morally and socially right.
Our leaders are overtly saying that the job of society is not to protect us — but to expose us and cull us. They are now openly saying that those who find themselves without the genetic or economic gift of protection are not worthy of protection.
But in that sense — did you catch that? — fascism is a self-defeating paradox. “The strong survive” is a foolish and stupid axiom to try to build a society precisely because it has something of Zeno in it. There is always going to be weakness and vulnerability. The job of society is to protect and shield it.
That brings to the socioeconomic lessons. Remember when I said there are facts of bioscience at play here — and also facts of social science? Facts which make this attitude — “let the pandemic rip!! We’ve got to learn to live with it!! — not just pseudo-intellectual, but obscenely foolish?
Those facts of social science are very, very simple. What is civilization? Civilization is not just collective action — even the Nazis had that. Civilization is what the Nazis did not have. It is the project, the endeavour, of nurturing every life, beginning with the most vulnerable. Nurturing every life to fruition.
As we undertook that project, little miracles began to happen. This life became a Galileo, despite the church accusing it of heresy. That life became a Michelangelo. This one, an Einstein, and so on. As we nurture every life, beginning with the most vulnerable, to fruition, so too the miracle of civilisation comes into being, and into focus. We are all better off that way.
Better off that way than the way the Nazis tried, which has recurred throughout history — treating the most vulnerable as hated subhumans, liabilities to be exterminated.
This is the most basic fact of social science that there is. Anyone who does not understand this simple fact and who claims to be an educated person is little more than a fool.
That goes double for the doctor and scientist pundits advising politicians to simply give up and let society “live with the pandemic.” Would these idiots have said the same thing during the Plague? What would they have said about smallpox and polio? If these malignant ignoramuses had been in charge then, we’d never have had vaccines for any killer disease in history. We’d still be learning to “live with” everything from polio to smallpox to tetanus to rabies.
Sound like civilisation to you? Or the idiocy of barbarism?
When I put it that way, hopefully it becomes a little clearer to you.
We have reached an incredibly dangerous point when our leaders are openly espousing what can only be described as eugenics because they are out of any other solution. It is flatly disgraceful that they are being advised to adopt eugenics by people who describe themselves as doctors and scientists.
Such people shame and disgrace science and medicine in the most obscene way that there is — and the gift of human knowledge itself. Ignorance, malice, folly, self-serving careerism — all these caused can be imputed. They have given up on the project of human civilization.
There is no lower shame, really, than that — and that is why we should all hold them beneath contempt.
