30 Sept 2021
The current pandemic primarily affects the elderly with comorbidities, of which obesity related diseases play a big part. The governmental responses were mostly to lockdown entire populations instead of a targeted approach of protecting the vulnerable.
At first lockdown, I was shocked that there wasn’t a massive coordinated effort underway to get us into the best possible health we can be, to prepare for the pandemic. With 2 out of 3 people either overweight or obese, this seemed like a common-sense thing to do. Things such as, a massive fully funded campaign led by personal trainers and the community to encourage exercise, incentives for weight loss, and most importantly a nutritionist led community response to get us eating healthier. We had time free. Once we discovered that low Vitamin-D levels also played a big role in outcomes, a drive to get these levels routinely tested freely. Not only would there have been a lot less deaths, we’d feel great and it probably would pay for itself by reduced health system costs over the coming decades.
For grinding the world to a halt for what seemed like a bad flu that thankfully only severely affected a small portion of the population, it was clear to me that woke culture had spread to the majority of people, and was most likely looking to cancel itself. Critical thinking was no more. I asked myself, if I was 70+ years old, how many of my younger neighbours that are in school would I be comfortable with asking them to put their lives on hold for a year or two for me? My answer is that I would struggle to ask one person, and would not.
Experimental vaccines were developed in record time, foregoing the usual thorough testing traditionally expected by people. There are no long-term longitudinal data and an incomplete adverse event risk analysis. Therefore, every person should be able to decide for themselves, whether they will choose the risk of infection for their age/gender/comorbidity level vs. the risk of an experimental vaccine. It is a personal decision. A democracy’s role should be to educate and provide the best possible uncensored data in a non-censored way for us to make this decision, not force it upon us. I love well tested vaccines where the benefit far exceeds the risk.
Most democracies have become authoritarian instead, by forcing experimental vaccines by way of warning to remove livelihoods of large sectors of our populations, placing people under home arrest, instigating a massive censorship campaign that stifles doctors from finding additional therapies to help people from dying, restrict movements, and as in the case of Australia, extreme hostility by police enforcing home arrests. Australia also went as far as banning Ivermectin and delaying at-home rapid antigen tests to 2 years into the pandemic stating that it would dissuade vaccination, which could have been used by the vaccinated as well for the best possible outcome. If this is how we have to encourage people to vaccinate against a bad flu, perhaps the bad flu wasn’t the threat we thought it was at the start of the pandemic. Perhaps it’s an excuse for an ill-intentioned power grab.
How did we get to the point of where we are willing to give up freedom of making educated individual decisions based on collective data and education, censor any physicians from talking about their findings of what works and doesn’t, and forcing home arrests in a style sending chills through my body of what may be next? I think there has been a decade long zombification driven by divisive algorithms of social platforms that optimise for their greed using ourselves as the product like a casino slot machine feeding us dopamine hits. An additional reason could be that after 3 decades of the internet, we’ve become so efficient driving smaller personalised businesses that we don’t have the time to properly validate a source of information, seek out news rather than it being streamed to us in an echo chamber or divisive way, or pause to consider other facets of that information. As a result, our newly established information diet matches that of our obesity epidemic.
In our new authoritarian regimes (leaving aside if there was any intent of a virus leak that moves the world towards the CCP’s aspirations to conspiracy theories), how can we become democratic again? It doesn’t start from the top, it can only start at the grassroots, bottom up. Trust in current governments is at an all-time low, so perhaps it needs a reset and rethink. We need to tune our information diets to start thinking critically again. It is time for us, as a largely silent portion of the population, to start speaking up, to organise to redefine how we want our societies to be democratic. Perhaps it’s long overdue that we create direct democracies rather than representative democracies. Freedom is worth fighting for.