A Path Will Rise to Meet Us
By Charles Eisenstein | December 17, 2021
The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.
– Mohandas K. Gandhi
I once read an account of bullying in rural America in the early 20th century. The narrator said, “If a victim did not stand up to them, there was no limit to how far the bullies would go.” He described them tying another child to the train tracks as a train approached (on the parallel track). There was no appeasing the bullies. Each capitulation only whetted their appetite for new and crueler humiliations.
The psychology of bullies is well understood: compensation for a loss of power, reenactment of trauma with roles reversed, and so forth. Beyond all that, though, the Bully archetype draws from another source. On some unconscious level, what the bully wants is for the victim to cease being a victim and to stand up to him. That is why submission does not appease a bully, but only invites further torment.
There is an initiatory possibility in the abuser-victim relationship. In that relationship and perhaps beyond it, the victim seeks to control the world through submissiveness. If I am submissive enough, pitiable enough, the abuser may finally relent. Other people might step in (the Rescuer archetype). There is nothing intrinsically wrong with submission or what improvisational theater pioneer Keith Johnstone called a low-status play. There are indeed some situations when doing that is necessary to survive. However, when the submissive posture becomes a habit and the victim loses touch with her capability and strength, the initiatory potential of the situation emerges. The bully or abuser intensifies the abuse until the victim reaches a point where the situation is so intolerable that she throws habit and caution to the wind. She discovers a capacity within her that she did not know she had. She becomes someone new and greater than she had been. That is a pretty good definition of an initiation.
When that happens, when the victim stands his ground and fights back, quite often the bully leaves him alone. On the soul level, his work is done. The initiation is complete. Of course, one might also say that the bully is a coward who wants only submissive victims. Or one might say that resistance spoils the sought-after psychodrama of dominance and submission. There is no guarantee that the resistance will be successful, but even if it is not, the dynamics of the relationship change when the victim decides she is through being a victim. She may discover that a lot of the power the bully had was in her fear and not in his actual physical control.
Until that shift happens, even if a rescuer intervenes, the situation is unlikely to change. Either the intervention will fail, or the rescuer will become a new abuser. The world will ask again and again whether the victim is ready to take a stand.
Please do not interpret this as a cavalier suggestion to someone in an abusive relationship to simply “take a stand.” That is easier said than done, and especially easy to say in ignorance of just what sort of courage would be required. In some situations, especially when children are involved, there is no way to resist without horrible risk to oneself or innocent others. Yet even in the most hopeless situations, the victim often learns a certain strength that she didn’t know she had. Because submission often leads to further, intensifying violation, eventually she will reach her breaking point where courage is born. In that moment, freedom from the abuser is more important than life itself.
The relationship between our governing authorities and the public today bears many similarities to the abuser-victim dynamic. Facing a bully, it is futile to hope that the bully will relent if you don’t resist. Acquiescence invites further humiliation. Similarly, it is wishful thinking to hope that the authorities will simply hand back the powers they have seized over the course of the pandemic. Indeed, if our rights and freedoms exist only by the whim of those authorities, conditional on their decision to grant them, then they are not rights and freedoms at all, but only privileges. By its nature, freedom is not something one can beg for; the posture of begging already grants the power relations of subjugation. The victim can beg the bully to relent, and maybe he will—temporarily—satisfied that the relation of dominance has been affirmed. The victim is still not free of the bully.
That is why I feel impatient when someone speaks of “When the pandemic is over” or “When we are able to travel again” or “When we are able to have festivals again.” None of these things will happen by themselves. Compared to past pandemics, Covid is more a social-political phenomenon than it is an actual deadly disease. Yes, people are dying, but even assuming that everyone in the official numbers died “of” and not “with” Covid, casualties number one-third to one-ninth those of the 1918 flu; per-capita it is one-twelfth to one-thirty-sixth.1 As a sociopolitical phenomenon, there is no guaranteed end to it. Nature will not end it, at any rate; it will end only through the agreement of human beings that it has ended.2 This has become abundantly clear with the Omicron Variant. Political leaders, public health officials, and the media are whipping up fear and reinstituting policies that would have been unthinkable a few years ago for a disease that, at the present writing, has killed one person globally. So, we cannot speak of the pandemic ever being over unless we the people declare it to be over.
Of course, I could be wrong here. Perhaps Omicron is, as World Medical Association chairman Frank Ulrich Montgomery has warned, as dangerous as Ebola. Regardless, the question remains: will we allow ourselves to be held forever hostage to the possibility of an epidemic disease? That possibility will never disappear.
Another thing I’ve been hearing a lot of recently is that “Covid tyranny is bound to end soon, because people just aren’t going to stand for it much longer.” It would be more accurate to say, “Covid tyranny will continue until people no longer stand for it.” That brings up the question, “Am I standing for it?” Or am I waiting for other people to end it for me, so that I don’t have to? In other words, am I waiting for the rescuer, so that I needn’t take the risk of standing up to the bully?
If you do put up with it, waiting for others to resist instead, then you affirm a general principle of “waiting for others to do it.” Having affirmed that principle, the forlorn hope that others will resist rings hollow. Why should I believe others will do what I’m unwilling to do? That is why pronouncements about the inevitability of a return to normalcy, though they seem hopeful, carry an aura of delusion and despair.
In fact, there is no obvious limit to what people will put up with, just as there is no limit to what an abusive power will do to them.
If the end of Covid bullying is not an inevitability, then what is it? It is a choice. It is precisely the initiatory moment in which the victim—that is, the public—discovers its power. At the very beginning of the pandemic I called it a coronation: an initiation into sovereignty. Covid has shown us a future toward which we have long been hurtling, a future of technologically mediated relationships, ubiquitous surveillance, big tech information control, obsession with safety, shrinking civil liberties, widening wealth inequality, and the medicalization of life. All these trends predate Covid. Now we see in sharp relief where we have been headed. Is this what we want? An automatic inertial trend has become conscious, available for choice. But to choose something else, we must wrest control away from the institutions administering the current system. That requires a restoration of real democracy; i.e., popular sovereignty, in which we no longer passively accept as inevitable the agendas of established authority, and in which we no longer beg for privileges disguised as freedoms.
Despite appearances, Covid has not been the end of democracy. It has merely revealed that we were already not in a democracy. It showed where the power really is and how easily the facade of freedom could be stripped from us. It showed that we were “free” only at the pleasure of elite institutions. By our ready acquiescence, it showed us something about ourselves.
We were already unfree. We were already conditioned to submission.
In Orwell’s 1984, Winston’s interrogator O’Brien states: “The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.” The Covid era has seen endless indignities, humiliations, and abuse heaped upon the public, each more outrageous than the last. It is as if someone is performing a psychological experiment to see how much people are willing to take. Let’s tell them that masks don’t work, and then reverse it and require them to mask up. Let’s tell them they can’t shake hands. Let’s tell them they can’t go near each other. Let’s shut down their churches, choirs, businesses, and festivals. Let’s stop them from gathering for the holidays. Let’s make them inject poison into their bodies. Let’s make them do it again. Let’s make them do it to their children. Let’s censor their first-hand stories as “false information.” Let’s feed them obvious absurdities to see what they’ll swallow. Let’s make promises and break them. Let’s make the same promises again and break them again. Let’s require authorization for their every movement. Wow, they’re still going along with it? Let’s see how much more they will take.
I have written the above as if the bullying powers were a bunch of cackling sadists delighting in the humiliation of their victims. That is not accurate. Most people staffing our governing institution are normal, decent human beings. While it is also true that these institutions are hospitable environments for martinets, control freaks, and sadists, more often they turn people into martinets, control freaks, and sadists. These individuals are more symptom than cause of the generalized abuse of the public today. They are functionaries, playing the roles that a systemically abusive drama requires. Causing suffering is not their root motivation, it is to establish control. The quest for power doubtless finds justification in the idea that it is all for the greater good. Yes, they think, it would be bad if evil people were in charge of the surveillance, censorship, and coercive apparatus, but fortunately it is we, the rational, intelligent, far-seeing, science-based good guys who are at the helm.
Through the absolute conviction by those who hold power that they are the good guys, power transforms from a means to an end. As maybe it was to begin with—Orwell dispels the false justifications of power when he has O’Brien say:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’
The theme resumes on the next page:
He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?
Thus it is that the privation, humiliation, and suffering of those they dominate is pleasing to the controllers. It isn’t suffering per se that pleases them. They may even consider it a regrettable necessity. It pleases them as a hallmark of submission.
Covid-era policies cannot be understood merely through the lens of public health. In an earlier series of essays I explored them from the perspective of sacrificial violence, mob morality, dehumanization, and the exploitation of these by fascistic forces. Equally important is the perspective of power. Seeing Covid through the lens of rational public health, of course we should expect the “end of the pandemic” quite soon. Seeing through the lens of power, we cannot be so sanguine, any more than the bullied child can hope the bully will stop because, after all, I’ve done everything he told me to.
The bully doesn’t want the victim to do X, Y, and Z for their own sake. He wants to establish the principle that the victim will do X, Y, Z, or A, B, or C, on demand. That’s why arbitrary, unreasonable, ever-shifting demands are characteristic of an abusive relationship. The more irrational the demand, the better. The controllers find it satisfying to see everyone dutifully wearing their masks. As with O’Brien, it is power, not actual public safety, that inspires them. That is why they roundly ignore science casting doubt on masks, lockdowns, and social distancing. Effectiveness was never the root motivation for those policies to begin with.
I learned about this too in school. In the senseless, degrading busy work and the arbitrary rules, I detected a hidden curriculum: a curriculum of submission.3 The principal issued a series of trivial rules under the pretext of “maintaining a positive learning environment.” Neither the students nor the administration actually believed that wearing hats or chewing gum impeded learning, but that didn’t matter. Punishments were not actually for the infraction itself; the real infraction was disobedience. That is the chief crime in a dominance/submission relationship. Thus, when German police patrol the square with meter sticks to enforce social distancing, no one need believe that the enforcement will actually stop anyone from getting sick. The offense they are patrolling against is disobedience. Disobedience is indeed offensive to the abusive party, and to anyone who fully accepts a submissive role in relation to it. When “Karens” report on their neighbors for having more than the permitted number of guests, is it a civic-minded desire to slow the spread that motivates them? Or are they offended that someone is breaking the rules?
It is uncomfortable for those who have knuckled under to a bully to see someone else stand up to him. It disrupts the idea of powerlessness and the role, which may have become perversely comfortable, of the victim. It invokes the initiatory moment by making an unconscious choice conscious: “I could do that too.” To resist the abuser asks others if they will resist too. It is far from inevitable that they will accept the invitation, yet the example of courage is more powerful than any exhortation.
Today a wave of resistance to Covid policies is surging across the globe. You’ll see little mention of it in mainstream media, but thousands and tens of thousands are protesting all across Europe, Thailand, Japan, Australia, North America… pretty much anywhere that lockdowns and vaccine mandates have been applied. People are risking arrest to defy lockdowns and curfews. They are walking out of jobs, losing licenses, enduring forced closures of their businesses, sometimes even losing custody of their children because they refuse to comply with vaccine mandates. They are getting kicked off social media for speaking out. They are sacrificing concerts, sports, skiing, travel, college, careers, and livelihoods. Under compulsory vaccination laws in Austria, they will soon risk prison.
Some people have much more to lose than others by speaking out, refusing vaccination, or engaging in civil disobedience. As someone who has relatively little to lose, it is not my job to demand other people be brave. It isn’t anyone’s job. We can, though, describe the reality of the situation. That fosters bravery, because it isn’t only external fear, force, and threat that breeds submission. In an abusive relationship the victim often adopts some of the abuser’s narrative: I am weak. I am contemptible. I am powerless. You are right. I am wrong. I need you. I deserve this. I am crazy. This is normal. This is OK.
When the victim internalizes the abuser, I say that the bandits have breached the castle walls. I know well what it is like to be a fugitive in my own castle, dodging the patrolling invaders to protect my secret sanity.
My understanding of the bullying victim comes from direct experience. I was among the youngest in my grade and reached puberty quite late. At age 12 I was a scrawny 4’10”, 90-pound weakling among the hulking adolescents of my former friend group. Their cruel jokes and torments were mostly not intended to cause physical pain, but rather to assert dominance and humiliate. Fighting back was not much of an option—the ringleader was literally twice my weight. When I tried to fight back, the gang looked at each other with amusement. “Uh oh,” they said, “Chucky’s getting mad! Did your daddy tell you to stand up to us, Chucky?” The next thing I knew, I was on the floor in a submission hold, surrounded by a chorus of mocking laughter. That was what happened when I resisted. Yet submission didn’t work either; it appeased them for a day or perhaps a few minutes or not at all. It was an invitation to further violence. In this difficult situation, I internalized the abusers by taking on their opinion of myself as pathetic and contemptible.4
In this case, literally fighting back was futile. My initiatory journey took the form of stepping into the unknown of finding new friends—a frightening prospect in the cacophony and chaos of the junior high cafeteria. Exiting the role of victim doesn’t usually mean physical combat or legal combat, though it might. Invariably, it means refusing to comply with violation or humiliation. In real life it could be blocking a caller, getting a restraining order, or simply running away. It cannot be a mere gesture. It must be determined and sustained until the old role no longer beckons.
It is worth noting that none of my abusers were particularly bad people. Nor were those who joined in the laughter, nor those who stood by in disapproving silence. They went on to become solid contributing members of society, good fathers and husbands. There was something in the confluence of our biographies that called them to the role of abuser, enabler, or bystander at that moment. The abuser-victim drama issues a powerful casting call. An abusive spouse may no longer occupy that role in a subsequent marriage. The roles allow each actor to discover—and possibly integrate and transcend—something in themselves. So it is society-wide as well. What will the functionaries of our abusive, degrading, oppressive system become when the drama ends? Already a lot of them are getting sick of their roles. The victim does the abuser no favor by prolonging the drama.
Earlier I wrote that often, the point of courage comes when the pain of submission grows intolerable. The erstwhile victim reaches a breaking point and throws caution to the wind. The abuser may still wield the outward apparatus of power, but no longer does that power have an ally within the victim, who becomes ungovernable. A lot of people are reaching that breaking point now. Powering the aforementioned wave of resistance is a hurricane of fury brewing just offshore of official reality. If you want to get a sense of it, subscribe to the Telegram channel “They Say Its Rare.” It displays without comment Tweets from vaccine-harmed individuals and their friends and families. Thousands upon thousands of Tweets, raw, outraged, and indignant. Most of these people will never comply with vaccination again no matter what the pressure, nor will many of their friends. Perhaps this partly explains low public uptake of boosters. (That and the fact that the first two shots did not deliver the promised rewards of immunity or freedom.)
The drama continues. The bully does not relent at the first sign of resistance. On the soul level, the bully serves his purpose only when he provokes real, sustained courage. As resistance grows, so grows the coercion. We are very nearly at a tipping point. The scale is evenly balanced—so finely, perhaps, that the weight of one person may tip it. Could that person be you? Whatever reasons you have to comply, to stay silent, to keep your head down—and they may be very good reasons indeed—please do not accept the insidious false hope that someone else will take the risk if you do not.
What can one person do? Will it matter if I resist, if too many others do not? Five percent of the population can be locked up, locked in, or locked out of society. Forty percent cannot. Will you resist and risk being one of the five percent? Safer to wait and see, isn’t it. Safer to wait until after critical mass has been reached, and join the winning side.
Of all the lies of a controlling power, the key lie is the powerlessness of its victim. That lie is a form of sorcery, coming true to the extent it is believed. All modern people live within a pervasive metaphysical version of that lie. In a Newtonian universe of deterministic forces, indeed it matters little what one person does. It is wholly irrational for the discrete and separate self to be brave, to defy the mob, or to stand up to power. Sure, if lots of people do it, things will change, but you aren’t lots of people, you are just one person. So why not let other people do it? Your choice won’t much affect theirs.
To refute that logic with logic would require a metaphysical treatise that reclaims self and causality from their Cartesian prison. So I won’t use logic. Instead I’ll appeal to Logos—the fiery logic of the heart. Something in you knows that your private struggles and the choices of just-one-person are significant. Furthermore, something in you knows when the time has come to make the choice, to be brave. You can feel the approach of the breaking point. It may feel like, “I’ve had enough. Enough!” It may be a calm clarity. It may be a leap in the dark. Probably you recognize the moment I’m describing; most of us have gone through some life initiation of this kind, bursting out of a cocoon of fear. In that moment you know something significant has happened. The world looks different. That is because it is different.
An abuser, whether a person or a system, offers an opportunity to graduate to a new degree of sovereignty. We claim by example what a human being is. When made at risk, such a claim issues forth as a prayer. An intelligence beyond rational understanding responds to that prayer, and reorganizes the world around it. We may experience this as synchronicity, which seems to happen with uncanny frequency just at those moments where one takes a leap in the dark. She leaves the abusive spouse in the dead of night with nowhere to go. Yet she is not reckless, because she knows It is time. She steps out into nothingness and Lo! Something meets her foot. A path invisible from the starting point opens with each step along it.
So it shall be. The world will rearrange itself around the brave choices millions of people are making as they trust the knowledge, It is time. If you join us, you will be witness to a most marvelous paradox. The transition to a more beautiful world is a mass awakening into sovereignty, far beyond the doing of any hero, any leader, any individual. Yet you will know that it was you—your choice!—that was the fulcrum of the turning of the age.
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Estimates of Spanish flu deaths range from 17 million to 50 million. The global population was somewhat under 2 billion. In terms of life-years lost the contrast is even more stark. In the US in 1918-1919, 99% of casualties were among people under 65 years of age, and half were in people age 20-40. The median age of death with Covid is around 80.
Many experts now agree that Covid will never be eradicated, but will remain endemic for the foreseeable future.
The resemblance of school to lockdown society is uncanny. In school, one’s movements are subject at all times to authorization. A hall pass is given for essential functions. And the top authority, superseding even the principal, is the doctor’s note.
Some readers may suspect that I and my defiance of Covid orthodoxy comes from unprocessed trauma from my youth. Maybe I’ve been playing out my own psychodrama on the projection screen of current affairs, projecting abuse onto a benign public health system and its dedicated doctors and scientists. If you are tempted to discount my analysis on these grounds, please consider that I am not unaware of this possibility.
Stunning Covid data from Denmark
By Alex Berenson | December 18, 2021
The Danes are now publishing extremely detailed daily data about Covid cases and hospitalizations – not just about Omicron, but all Covid variants.
And, in news that will surprise precisely no one who has been alive the last two years, they paint a picture entirely different than what the media claims.
Omicron – which continues to appear significantly less dangerous though more transmissible than earlier variants of Covid – has been used as a cover for vaccine failure.
Most new Covid cases in Denmark occur in people who are vaccinated or boosted – and that is true for both Omicron and earlier variants. More than 76 percent of non-Omicron Covid infections in Denmark are in vaccinated people, along with about 90 percent of Omicron infections.
Further, only 25 of the 561 people currently hospitalized in Denmark for Covid have the Omicron variant. The Danes do not provide an exact number for patients in intensive care with Omicron, saying only that it is fewer than five.
Perhaps the most stunning fact about Omicron and Denmark is that its rise actually parallels a marked slowdown in the growth of Danish hospitalizations and intensive care patients. Those rose roughly fivefold between mid-October and late November, as the Danes left the happy vaccine valley. Since then they have barely budged, rising about 20 percent.
Danish Covid hospitalizations over the last three months: note that the rise predates Omicron.
The Danish data also show that people with Omicron are both less likely to be hospitalized than those with other variants and released from the hospital much more quickly – in line with what South African health authorities have reported.
On Friday, for example, the Danes reported that the total number of hospital patients with Omicron since the epidemic began reached 77, up by 20 patients from Thursday.
But the number of Omicron patients currently hospitalized rose only by eight between Thursday and Friday, from 17 to 25. Thus 12 out of the 17 Omicron patients on Thursday appear to have been released overnight.
Compared to Monday’s report, the trend is even more clear. The number of Omicron cases has roughly tripled, but the number of people hospitalized has barely budged, from 14 to 25.
About the only reason for concern in any of the Danish data is that Omicron still appears to be preferentially infecting younger people – though not people under 15, who are more likely to be unvaccinated.
Overall, though, the figures out of Denmark largely back those from South Africa – and make clear that the reason that Europe has seen a massive rise in cases and hospitalizations this fall has nothing to do with Omicron and everything to do with vaccine failure.
Omicron Today
Top Science News this Week
Robert W Malone MD, MS | December 18, 2021
Below are five articles that stand out as being among the most important regarding Omicron this week.
Published in: Eurosurveillance Volume 26, Issue 50, 16/Dec/2021
Denmark, as of December 9, 2021. Denmark has one of the highest RT-PCR testing capacities in the world and screens all positive RT-PCR tests with an Omicron-specific PCR – allowing screening for Omicron.
There have been 785 SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant cases identified in Denmark. The earliest Omicron cases in Denmark occurred before South Africa announced the emergence of this variant. Most cases were fully (76%) or booster-vaccinated (7.1%); 34 (4.3%) had a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection. The majority of cases with available information reported symptoms (509/666; 76%) and most were infected in Denmark (588/644; 91%).
One in five cases cannot be linked to previous cases, indicating widespread community transmission.
Nine cases have been hospitalized, one required intensive care and no deaths have been registered.
Highlights:
· 1.2% of cases have been hospitalized
· 0.3% in intensive care
· 0% deaths.
· 76% were fully or booster vaccinated, 14% not vaccinated
· 4.3% had previous SARS-CoV-2 infection
· 91% have no travel history, 9% reported travel
My take: this study is important because although there are studies and spokespeople from South Africa stating similar results, the Danish population in terms of age, body weight, life expectancy, etc. is more similar demographically to the US population. This Danish study suggests that Omicron will affect the American population similarly.
Covid-19: Runny nose, headache, and fatigue are commonest symptoms of omicron, early data show
Published in: BMJ 2021; 375 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n3103 (16 December 2021)
This College of London study shows that the top five symptoms reported for omicron infection are runny nose, headache, fatigue (either mild or severe), sneezing, and sore throat. This study is in line with what the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and European countries such as Spain and France had all updated their advice. The authors recommend that the National Health Service should also amend their advice on Omicron.
This study is important because it is more evidence that 1) symptoms are more mild and 2) more evidence that Omicron has evolved to infect the upper respiratory system more readily than the lower respiratory tissue (see my earlier substack article on this topic).
Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant: Unique features and their impact on pre-existing antibodies
J Autoimmun 2021 Dec 13;126:102779. doi: 10.1016/j.jaut.2021.102779. Online ahead of print.
Highlights
•Phylogenetically SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant is closely related to the Gamma variant.
•There are a total of 46 high prevalent mutations throughout the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant.
•Twenty three of the 46 mutations, which is more than any previously emerged variant belong to the S protein.
•Twenty-three of the 46 mutations are a markedly high number of mutations than has been previously reported for the S protein of other emerging variants.
•A significant number of mutations are at the antibody binding surface of S protein.
BMJ 2021; 375 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n3104 (Published 16 December 2021)Cite this as: BMJ 2021;375:n3104
Data from South Africa’s largest private health insurer suggest that omicron is spreading faster than any previous coronavirus variant and showing signs of immune escape, with both vaccinated and previously infected people more at risk than in previous waves.
More than 90% of newly sequenced infections in South Africa now involve the omicron variant, and as it displaced delta.
This data has not been peer reviewed.
Pre-release of preprint from HKUMed: this paper is currently undergoing peer review
This papers shows that Omicron appears to be associated with three broad characteristics: Vaccine escape (resistance), increased viral replication and reduced disease. In contrast, the preceding dominant variant (Delta) is also associated with vaccine escape, increased viral replication, and increased disease severity compared to preceding dominant circulating variants.
My take: This study presented the data that allowed me to formulate the hypothesis that Omicron may have now evolved to replicate more in our upper respiratory airway, and less in the deep part of our lung tissues due to shifts in receptor specificity. In other diseases, like influenza, replication in upper respiratory airways is associated with less severe disease.
A week of life under the Ministry of Fear. This time, we locked ourselves down.
By Laura Dodsworth | December 18, 2021
Last Sunday evening, Boris Johnson interrupted the nation’s TV viewing with an announcement about the new Covid-19 variant. “Fighting Omicron is the most important thing we can do,” he said. It’s early days, and in the absence of clinical data or indeed any rise in hospitalisations and deaths, it remains to be seen if this is true.
We were left in no doubt about how to fight – get boosted. In retrospect, the triadic structure of previous press briefings (“Hands, Face, Space” and “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives”) was the ultimate in sophistication compared to the frequent repetition of “boosted” (eight times), “booster” (eight times) and “vaccination” (four times) in one short speech.
This past week exemplifies nearly two years of life under the “Ministry of Fear”, as Sir Desmond Swayne MP termed it. Amid a Tory rebellion, he delivered a tirade in the House of Commons on the day that MPs voted on Covid Passes, the expansion of mask mandates and compulsory jabs for NHS workers. He accused the UK government of “twisting the fear lever” and unleashing “the dogs of war”.
He is not alone. Andrew Bridgen MP said that, in his opinion, “the most dangerous epidemic sweeping the world and sweeping our country is an epidemic of fear”. I agree Pandemics come and eventually go, but our basic psychology is here to stay. The UK government has relied upon the use of fear, nudges, behavioural science techniques and propaganda to subliminally encourage people to comply with the regulations, as I set out in my book A State of Fear: how the UK government weaponised fear in the Covid-19 pandemic.
These techniques work so well that, this time, we have essentially locked ourselves down. Without so much as a new law, statutory instrument, or prime ministerial request, Nativity plays, office Christmas parties and pub bookings are cancelled. Stocks of lateral flow test ran dry. People queued for eight hours for their boosters. The media enthusiastically obliged with a new “tidal wave” of articles and programmes prophesying catastrophic cases and demonising the “selfish” unjabbed. Journalists asked for more restrictions, sooner.
I spoke to Swayne who told me he believes the fear is driven very much by the doom-mongering scientists on SAGE and Independent SAGE whose worst case scenarios necessitate action, and then “the media hams it up”.
One of the government’s early concerns was that some people actually understood that the risk from Covid-19 to their demographic is low, hence fear was leveraged to ensure everyone feel at risk so that they would follow the rules. Similarly, last Sunday, Johnson acknowledged that “some people” would believe Omicron to be less severe than previous variants – and at this point there is little clinical data to prove Omicron will be more serious or able to evade our natural immunity and vaccine-derived antibodies – but he warned “scientists cannot say that Omicron is less severe”. Essentially we were told to ignore the lack of scientific evidence and instead embrace fear and follow instructions.
So, how to convince us of a threat, before the threat has actually manifested? By using the same methods they have honed throughout the pandemic, including the use of big scary numbers, advertising, subtle messaging, alarmist language and the most punitive fines since the Dark Ages.
I dedicated a chapter of my book to the metrics of fear – daily death tolls, the reproduction number, cases and worst case modelling. This week’s numbers have crumbled like icing sugar.
Sajid Javid estimated that there were 200,000 infections, which appears to have been a back of the envelope calculation, based upon assumptions and extrapolations. Dominic Raab said there were 250 people in hospital with Omicron, when there were 10. Dr Jenny Harries, head of the UKHSA, warned the Omicron variant is “probably the most significant threat” of the pandemic and we should expect a “staggering” growth rate, but her dire warning was juxtaposed with acknowledging it’s too early a stage to be clear about the clinical severity.
These speed-generated pessimistic numbers and contradictions give the rational mind whiplash and leave you vulnerable to fear. As Swayne put it, “It’s designed to make your flesh creep. Even if you then ameliorate it, the first scary bit is out there.”
To lay the groundwork, masks were re-introduced as a “softening up exercise for Plan B,” according to a government advisor who sits on a government Covid taskforce. He anonymously confided that, “Masks are a behavioural psychology policy. We need to stop pretending that it’s about public health. Nudge is a big thing in government.” Masks turn us into walking billboards advertising danger.
I have already argued that the whole point of the Winter Plan was Plan B and Covid Passes. The government has not provided convincing scientific evidence for vaccine passports, but they are widely understood to be a ‘tool’ to drive take-up. Now, fines of up to £10,000 can be imposed for falsifying Covid Passports – a life-destroying amount designed to strike fear into your heart.
The advisor shared internal documents with me that show Covid Passes were ready to go in early November. Worryingly, they also show that government is also working with analysts to see whether “mandatory vaccination would hit the right target or not”.
The government has launched new advertising campaigns. One TV advertisement, intended to encourage ventilation has frightened children. One father wrote to tell he had complained to his MP and the Advertising Standards Authority because the “sinister black mist” snaking out of people’s mouths terrified his four and six year old in the ad break of a Christmas film. His daughter had nightmares and was still crying about “germs” the next day. He is angry about the “intentionally fear-inducing piece of Gov media forced in their face”.
Martin Kemp played the part of Santa Claus preparing for Christmas by getting his booster jab in a government advertisement. Santa has a long history of being enlisted for propaganda purposes from Soviet space missions to selling World War Two US government bonds. Even Tesco got in on the act this year in their festive ad, making Santa brandish a Covid Pass QR code to enter the country. However, this badly misjudged public mood and #BoycottTesco trended on Twitter.
Press and social media ads have returned to the red and yellow ‘danger’ style chevons, although they feature smiling younger people presumably boosted against Omicron. The “O” in boosted is golden and enlarged, presumably to echo “O-micron” and also evoke the circle of protection Johnson wants the booster to deliver. The people are surrounded with a warming Ready Brek-style glow.
I warned in The Telegraph in October that I would not be surprised to see ministers on television, urging us to follow restrictions in order or to “save Christmas”, once again. I’ll be on Santa’s ‘Nice List’ for getting that right.
Some polls are used as both a nudge and a spoiler of public policy. When you see a result such as 76% of Britons want to see the return of compulsory face masks in shops and on public transport (Yougov) you are meant to identify with the group and imagine yourself in the majority – “ah yes, that is what I think too!” The poll was also a signal to seed the idea of the ensuing policy change. This mutually influential relationship between polls and policy is especially clear in the case of questions such as “If someone has had two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, but it has been over six months since their second dose, would you consider that person to be ‘fully vaccinated’?” (also Yougov) which should have nothing to do with public opinion.
Polls don’t always go the ‘right way’ though. Good Morning Britain ran a Twitter poll which asked “With Omicrom cases doubling every two days, is it time to make vaccines mandatory?” After 89% of 44,533 respondents voted no, the Twitter poll was pulled. Presumably it was not the answer that GMB wanted and, curtain pulled back, they knew that we knew it.
There is less fear in the air this time despite the “tidal wave” of fear-mongering. Redfield and Wilton Strategies latest research into public attitudes found that 81% of people plan to have a normal Christmas and New Year and feelings of safety in public have only marginally declined. Once you have seen the nudges you cannot un-see them, and fear cannot be sustained indefinitely.
When the government resorts to fear and hyperbole to gain compliance, it shows what they think of us. We are emotionally kettled rather than treated as responsible individuals with agency. As a Nudge Unit report said, we have a “powerful tendency to conform” and the government relentlessly exploits this human feature. I suspect that this time, the government is keen to address concerns that it has not acted swiftly enough in the past, and believes the strong warnings are in our best interests. Perhaps Ministers are themselves in thrall to the anxiety-inducing steep-lined graphs.
10 Downing Street released a nugget sized version of Johnson’s Omicron announcement on Youtube, with a tight crop and dramatic music. The selected few dramatic sentences could have been borrowed from a disaster genre ‘B’ movie. I’m not sure if Youtube comments are more or less valid than Yougov, but they are certainly revealingly scathing about “fear inducing language”, “Orwellian passports” and NHS queues.
I think there is a sense that people will do quite a lot to have a normal Christmas and get life back to normal, but fear of Covid and trust in the messaging are running out, just like those lateral flow tests.
Omicron scare tactics
By Joel S Hirschhorn | December 17, 2021
What is the public to believe about omicron variant? The usual nutty pro-vaccine media are making a lot of fear-mongering noise about omicron.
Here are some things to keep in mind.
A very new medical research article provided compelling information that COVID vaccines are not effective against omicron. The article concluded: “The Omicron variant presents a serious threat to many existing COVID-19 vaccines and therapies.” The only data coming out is on the ineffectiveness of the vaccines. There are no data on whether ivermectin and natural immunity are equally ineffective.
This too was said: “The scientific community has chased after SARS-CoV-2 variants for a year. As more and more of them appeared, our interventions directed to the spike became increasingly ineffective. The Omicron variant has now put an exclamation mark on this point.”
Here is a really important point to keep in mind. Omicron may look like it has high transmissibility, but this may have much more to do with the ineffectiveness of vaccines than with the intrinsic nature of this variant!
See my previous article on omicron that showed research indicating intrinsic low transmissibility relative to delta, and similar to other variants:
Consider these relevant omicron facts.
In South Africa, with only 26% vaccinated, despite omicron, not only has there been no surge in COVID deaths, they are the lowest they’ve been in 18 months. This, after more than three weeks into omicron in South Africa. If screams about a surge were accurate, it would have started by now. And doctors there say the omicron cases are far less severe than presumably delta.
Fewer than 1 in 50 people with confirmed omicron cases are being hospitalized in South Africa – which suggests that the actual hospitalization to infection rate is far lower still. Why? Because so many people with omicron have such mild cases they don’t bother getting tested.
South African scientists announced the discovery of the Omicron variant on November 25. Since then, the country has had more than 230,000 Covid-19 cases, but just 377 deaths. And as of this writing, none of those deaths are confirmed to have resulted from Omicron.
The UK as of now has reported 1 (1!) omicron death, and it was “with” the virus, not necessarily from it. If there have been deaths globally from omicron, they have not been reported
When you read about mounting COVID cases in the US just remember that there normally has been a winter surge in cases. Cases can also be easily manipulated by public health agencies by running PCR tests at high cycles, creating false positive. Keep your attention on deaths in people where there has been gene sequencing to confirm omicron. Ugly and corrupt political forces controlling public health agencies have every reason to create a surge in cases so that fear can be maintained and the public made receptive to getting vaccine and booster shots.
Be patient, do not go crazy over omicron. Keep doing the many good things to maintain a healthy immune system, such as taking vitamins D and C, zinc and quercetin.
Plus, a new medical research article on ivermectin concluded that it really is very effective as a prophylactic, a genuine alternative to COVID vaccines.
Why Have They Done This to the Children?
BY BHASKARAN RAMAN | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | DECEMBER 17, 2021
Around the world, there has been widespread fear and anxiety since the beginning of the pandemic. While some fear is natural, we are now into 21 months, and yet fear levels have hardly abated. The mainstream narrative on Covid-19 goes: “Covid-19 is a danger to everyone, and all must socially distance and lockdown until we can eliminate the virus.”
This narrative keeps everyone in constant fear of fellow humans. It treats children more as virus carriers than as adorable, innocent, normal children. Is this narrative accurate, or is it based on disproportionate fear?
In trying to talk to friends and colleagues who believe this narrative, I have been called a conspiracy theorist by many. After all, so many public health authorities in so many countries tell us this narrative. How can it be possible that so many authorities in so many countries are wrong? How can so many scientists be wrong?
The spirit of scientific inquiry demands that we look at things from first principles. It cannot be based on: “how can so many people be wrong.” There are several easy-to-see indications that much of the world’s response to Covid-19 is indeed disproportionate fear rather than a rational response.
Below, I list five such obvious indications, all in the context of children.
(1) Starving already malnourished children: The first indication of the hugely imbalanced response is that the lockdown response, based on the mainstream narrative, starved already malnourished children.
In India, malnutrition among children has been a huge problem for decades, directly or indirectly responsible for killing nearly 3% of infants, about 2000 preventable deaths per day. Yet, the lockdown narrative chose to shut schools and mid-day meal schemes, starving millions of already malnourished kids: they are not yet back to normal after 21 months!
(2) Labeling children as dangerous disease agents: The second indication of imbalanced response is that children have been deprived of a normal childhood, play, socialization and education. In many cases they were even blamed for the death of the elderly.
Even if it were indeed true that children could spread a virus, this is hardly the way to treat them: for several months and years, with no end in sight. And evidence is overwhelming that schools do not contribute much to Covid spread, and some research even indicates that exposure to children may be protective on average, against Covid-19.
In India, it is even more absurd that almost everything is normal for adults: restaurants, malls, movie theatres, crowded events, crowded buses and trains and flights, etc.; while at the same time schools are not open, and even where open, normal activities are not permitted for kids!
(3) Covid-19 vaccines for kids without long-term safety data: The same mainstream narrative also pushes for Covid-19 vaccines for kids, when there has been no pandemic for kids anywhere in the world (e.g. Germany, Sweden, data from various other European countries). Rolling out kids’ jabs without long-term safety data is medical malfeasance, and yet another indication of the disproportionate response to Covid-19.
(4) Vaccine mandates for kids: Some parts of the world (e.g. CA, NY in USA) have announced mandated Covid-19 vaccines for school kids. This adds to the above medical malfeasance.
(5) Vaccinating kids without parental consent: Some parts of the world (e.g. UK, Switzerland, Philadelphia/USA) allowed kids as young as 11 or 12 years to get vaccinated without parental consent. Performing a medical procedure for a child, without parental consent, should be unthinkable. This is another dimension of the above medical malfeasance and disproportionate response.
Ethical dilemma vs treatment of kids in our Covid response
There is a classical thought experiment used to illustrate ethical dilemmas. Should the person standing next to the lever “do nothing” and let the train kill five people, or should he push the lever and be explicitly responsible for the death of one person? It is a dilemma because there is no necessarily “correct” answer.
It is instructive to compare this dilemma with our Covid response: we have victimized kids and robbed them of a childhood, with no benefit whatsoever to show for it! Continuing the same response even after knowing that Covid poses miniscule risk to kids, would be deeply unethical.
Getting out of mass psychosis, for the sake of our children
Due to unidimensional focus on Covid-19, driven in no small part by a profit-motived media as well as social-media echo chambers, disproportionate fear has now reached levels of mass psychosis.
Our children are our future, as Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya has reminded us of the obvious recently. There has been no pandemic for children anywhere in the world. Yet their lives have been upended and futures ruined, not by the virus, but by our disproportionate fear-based response.
It is each child’s constitutional as well as birth-right to have a normal childhood. It is high time the public comes out of disproportionate fear of Covid-19, and high time that health authorities start taking evidence-based steps, rather than fear-based steps. The future of our children is at stake.
Bhaskaran Raman is a faculty in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. Views expressed here are his personal opinion. He maintains the site: “Understand, Unclog, Unpanic, Unscare, Unlock (U5) India” https://tinyurl.com/u5india . He can be reached via twitter, telegram: @br_cse_iitb . br@cse.iitb.ac.in
CEOs of two major airlines question the need for mask mandates
By Steve Kirsch | December 16, 2021
Why masks are important
Masks are an easier win. Everyone HATES wearing masks (well, almost everyone… there are people who are convinced it is protecting them).
Winning on masks shows people that the authorities got it wrong. If we show the public that the CDC is making us do things that are nonsensical, it erodes trust in the CDC. That make the next argument (that the CDC got it wrong on the vaccine) easier to win because the CDC is no longer infallible.
Top CEOs say masks are useless
From the story in Blaze News on December 16, 2021:
CEOs of two major airlines spoke out and questioned the necessity of masks on flights, CNN reported.
American Airlines CEO Doug Parker and Southwest CEO Gary Kelly both made related remarks during a Wednesday Senate hearing on the financial support the airline industry has received amid the ongoing pandemic.
Masks are required on all American airliners per order of the federal government.
Both Parker and Kelly said that they don’t believe masks make much difference when it comes to tamping down the transmission of COVID-19 and that advanced air filtration systems on airliners make them one of the safest places to be with regard to coronavirus infections.
We are finally moving in the right direction! What they said was true. That’s a great start. But is anyone listening?
I just updated my “Masks don’t work” article
I’ve updated my “Masks don’t work” article to include new research our team did which independently validated the work of UC Berkeley Professor Ben Recht who showed the Bangladesh mask study, hailed by mainstream medical experts as proving once and for all that masks work, actually proved that masks do not work at all. See new bullet point #10. You will love it if you are into statistical analysis.
The author wanted to remain anonymous so he doesn’t get attacked by his peers for telling the truth. You just can’t be too careful nowadays… telling the truth can get you fired.
The 5 signs you DON’T have “Omicron”… you have a cold & a PCR test
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | December 15, 2021
They are determined to make the “Omicron Variant” appear as frightening as possible, that means getting as many cases as possible, which means flipping all the way to the front of the Covid playbook.
Enter “The 5 Signs You May Have Omicron Covid”, an article in the Metro yesterday, and repeated in spirit across dozens of other outlets.
For those of you feeling morbidly curious, here are the five signs of Omicron:
- scratchy throat
- Fatigue
- mild muscle aches
- dry cough
- night sweats
The astute reader will no doubt pick up that these are the symptoms of every single one of the common cold viruses that infect millions of people all over the world every single year.
It’s just the old Simpsons joke about “mild hunger, occasional thirst and tiredness at night”, only they expect us to take it seriously.
The odds are you’ve experienced these symptoms at least once or twice in the last year or so. This does not mean you had Omicron. It does not mean Omicron even exists.
Rather, it’s just a ploy to get you to follow government guidance and, in the words of the article:
“order a free PCR test as soon as possible”.
The government site for ordering PCR tests has already shut down due to millions of requests. We have repeated, ad infinitum, that these tests are scientifically meaningless, and return huge numbers of false positives.
Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of PCR tests are being done on people with nothing but mild cold symptoms as we speak, and in these nasal swabs lies the incipient “Omicron wave”.
That is why Sajid Javid is going on TV saying he expects cases of Omicron to “dramatically increase” in the run-up to Christmas, because they are going to make it happen.
Then they’ll probably have the Prime Minister announce new restrictions… just after Parliament adjourns for the Christmas break, so they can’t be reviewed or voted on.
It’s the same old trick, again and again and again. Hopefully, people will stop falling for it soon.
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From the Archives
Neocons confess: “We did 9/11-anthrax”
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | September 6, 2014
As the 13th anniversary of the crimes of September, 2001 approaches, the neoconservatives are shrieking from the rooftops – and effectively confessing that they were the real perpetrators of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. (The neocons, you may recall, openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in September, 2000 – and got one exactly one year later.)
Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of “radical Islam” and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year’s propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.
When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and “terrorism” in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and “doth protest too much.” … continue
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