(without burning down the house)

I remember reading a story a few years ago about a man who was so afraid of spiders that in order to kill one, he burned down his own house.

When I think of the response of most Western governments to the pandemic, that story comes back to my mind. The monomaniac obsession with “corona” seems to have turned many people blind to the several problems caused by the “fight against corona”, including increase in suicides, depression, economic downturn, social atomization, accidents, not to mention other diseases. In many ways, the “fight against the pandemic” has been a disaster in itself.

Since February 2020 I (and millions of people) felt something was off about the measures taken by authorities, and the way they developed almost as if they had been planned in advance. In fact, some of the “solutions” proposed, already by March 2020, included “mRNA vaccines” (a technology that very few had heard of before) and “vaccine passports” (a novel idea but that has been in the works for a while). First considered “conspiracy theories”, they nevertheless came to be.

I’ve been writing about the corona pandemic for a while, but a lot of it has been on social media or on blog comments, and occasionally in articles that appeared in different sites (Off-Guardian, New English Review, among others) so I am now trying to unify them here under one single publication.

The thing about the pandemic measures, which includes the original “lockdowns”, the strange vaccination campaign with “boosters” every few months and the novel idea of “vaccine passports” to enter into a cafe or use public transportation, is how unusual they are, and yet, how comparatively few people complain about them or even see them as strange. Most appear to accept them as a natural response to a pandemic, even though they have not been tried in any pandemic before.

It seems to me that it is more an instinctive thing. Either you understand instinctively that something is wrong in the approach taken by most authorities, or you don’t. (This regardless of the actual disease of “corona”, which is another matter). But why? And is there a way to do things in a better way?

The idea in some of the next articles will be to explore it.