Another day, another doom and gloom TV conference and another set of COVID restrictions. The press today is full of that news, of “Partygate,” and of the connection between them. There is much talk in the news of the restrictions being another Boris Johnson “Dead Cat” strategy to get his own and his government’s cynical disregard of the devastating and useless regulations, which they themselves imposed on the rest of us last Christmas, off the hook.
So the press concentrates on this, not wrongly, as a domestic political issue and, perhaps, the end of Johnson’s political career. Conservative Party members are, it seems, resigning in their thousands. Conservative MPs are chanting “Resign.” Boris is seen as floundering to extricate himself from his total incapacity for telling the truth, and I see no reason to doubt that interpretation.
But…
Let’s keep our eye on the global ball. Britain is ramping up panic over the Omicron variant even as it appears to cause little or no serious illness here or at its South African origin, seems to be susceptible to all the old vaccines, and coincides with deaths and hospitalisations continuing to drop. But the same is true all over the once-free world, and yet Omicron is everywhere the excuse for universal vaccine passports, compulsory vaccinations and the other measures which look for all the world like “Great Reset” policies rather than any real attempt to manage COVID.
The new measures are certainly entirely irrational. To give just one example, in an apparently libertarian concession, lateral flow tests used for screening the asymptomatic have been permitted as an alternative to vaccine passports. Yet the news from South Africa is that LFTs don’t become positive in Omicron until 24 hours after symptoms commence. As for vaccine passports, we all know that viral load and transmissibility in the vaccinated approach or exceed those in the unvaccinated, and the whole basis for the panic is that Omicron is more transmissible. The whole passport system is entirely useless for hindering Omicron.
But let’s add another example. Boris said in his presentation something to the effect that “You can’t argue with exponential growth.” He’s clearly learned nothing about viral epidemiology and Gompertz curves in the last 2 years, nor twigged that in this case, it may be an exponential increase in testing for the already prevalent variant that is happening. But worse than that, his advisers, such as the ever-hovering Chris Whitty, are as clueless. This should not surprise us, given Scott Atlas’s revelations about the total lack of interest of Anthony Fauci and his team on the US Task Force last year in analysing the scientific literature. Science has no place on the world’s public health agenda.
Yet despite the familiar, and increasing, incompetence, hidden in what mainly seems to be a cobbled together set of useless measures is the same ratcheting agenda against human rights. Remember that for months, sceptics saw the mention of a Plan B “in case of unforeseen emergencies” as a way to soften us up from the previous assurances that the return of our limited freedoms was irreversible. Then we heard rumours of an “in extremis” Plan C, which was widely seen through as a typical Spi-B tactic to make Plan B seem a mild alternative, and therefore as a sure sign that some excuse would be found to implement Plan B… and then Omicron was picked out from the myriads of other variants for Stardom. Conspiracy prediction once more fulfilled.
And now we have a “kind of Plan B” which looks like a fudge – but which still introduces into many situations the vaccine passports that in the spring were unconstitutional, and were the one really sinister element of Plan B. They’ve slipped in almost unnoticed in the political coverage.
But worse than that, in his rambling address yesterday (or so I hear – I couldn’t face listening to it) Johnson followed the lead of a junior minister the other day in hinting darkly that compulsory vaccination might be necessary in the future. Given that trends in the important data have no bearing whatsoever on new restrictions, there is bound to be some excuse in a month, or maybe two, for the government regretfully to decide that mandatory vaccines and concentration camps in the Australian mold are “the right thing to do.” Like evolutionary theory, absolutely any situation will provide the evidence required to confirm the need.
Government incompetence and a cunning higher agenda are by no means incompatible. Suppose that the introduction of vaccine passports was indeed nested within a strategic Plan B based on whatever the globalist agenda is, with mandatory vaccination as the next stage. Even a panicky “Dead Cat” strategy to save the Conservatives’ bacon (to mix metaphors) would surely include the elements that were the main motive for engineering a Plan B in the first place.
We should probably have moved beyond the stage of thinking that this sounds too much like a conspiracy theory: compulsory digital identities, vaccine mandates, cancellation of the Nuremburg Code and compulsory isolation are already being rolled out across Europe. A real democratic government would have been protesting against such political over-reach, and playing the Brexit card by trumpeting how fortunate we were to get out of the EU’s clutches.
Our government’s total silence on the abrogation of liberty abroad reveals it to be a dictatorship in waiting at home. Even if the whole government collapses, it is set to be replaced with an identical opposition lacking even the fig-leaf of pretended libertarianism.
