What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

For the past fifty years or so the standard measure of normality adopted by the psychiatric profession has been couched in terms of an individual's adoption of the accepted norms of the society he or she lives in, the ability to comfortably exist if you like, within the mainstream spheres of beliefs and activities, holding to them in ones thinking and actions without too much question.

Simple example; if I go shopping today wearing jeans and a jumper, and a coat against the bracing cold - result normal, but only because this is the standard sort of dress that all around me, other people will be wearing. If on the other hand I dress myself in an Elvis Presley suit in combination with Coco the Clown shoes and a traffic cone on my head - result mad as a box of frogs, but not because of what I'm thinking, but because of the outward expression of difference from my fellow shoppers that is indicative of a different type of thinking.

This is all well and good as a definition, until the tricky situation develops where the societal thinking itself goes adrift - and then you have serious problems.

Take for example the situation in East Germany or Soviet Russia during the era of communism. At this point it was put out, became patriotically right thinking if you like, that to report on your family members if you spotted signs of deviant thinking or activity not in keeping with the socialist norm. To do so was considered what a good citizen would do - it became the norm. Another more egregious example is of course that of nazi Germany, in which the thinking of the general population, in response to all of the propoganda to which they were subjected, became anti-Semitic as the norm. Not to be a hater of the Jews became an oddity in itself.

So now, in such cases where a society becomes sick at its core (for whatever reason) we have the paradoxical situation (that we can see only from outside, as it were) that the psychiatrically defined normal individual is sick and the sick individual who does not hold to the societal norm in question is in fact normal.

But the key thing here is that the situation will only be seen for what it is from outside, and often with the value of hindsight. If the excessive malleability of a societies collective mind (and minds under stress *are* very malleable, especially when softened up by the use of fear propoganda) is pushed in the wrong direction by the state for whatever reason, then this paradoxical situation will develop with the most number of individuals being in the slightest bit aware of what is happening.

I have not the slightest idea how this all pertains to the situation we currently find ourselves in - but something in my gut tells me that it does. There is only one small concrete example I can give of the type of thing I'm talking about - that of the view, put out by Matt Hancock originally, but becoming more prevalent and widespread amongst the population ; that it is okay - one's duty almost - to report on your neighbors (or anybody else for that matter) in respect of breaches of lockdown restrictions. That we should become a society that regards this as the way we should be - a stepwise move in the direction of that Soviet situation I spoke of above.

Perhaps another example is that of a comment I heard an NHS doctor making a call to James O'Brien the other day, in which he expressed the view that people who publicly express views questioning the UK lockdown policy should be prosecuted for doing so on the basis that they are undermining the collective attempt to control the virus and thereby putting people's lives at risk. O'Brien, in fairness, did not suggest that this could or should be done, but he was clearly sympathetic to the idea and his reservations were practical rather than ideological in nature. I wonder how long it will be before this, to me at least, abhorrent suggestion (that it should be a criminal act to question Government policy) gains public traction, at which point it would be adopted "because the people want it".

Impossible, you think? Well, maybe so - but they are in the process of putting together the health passports that will divide us into a two-tier society (in our own eyes) as we speak, and I never could have believed that I would see this in my lifetime either.

So just maybe the stuff I talk about above has more relevance to us than we'd think at the moment and anyway, forewarned is forearmed remains as good a piece of advice today as it ever was.

[peter]

UK Minister for Business and Industry Nadim Zahawi (he who is in charge of the highly successful vaccine rollout) gave us an assurance yesterday that the UK Government has no plans to introduce a vaccine passport, despite reports to the contrary in the national media over the course of the previous days and weeks.

There has been speculation that such an item may be necessary in order to satisfy entry requirements into third party countries to which UK travellers might want to visit for purposes of either business or leisure. Zahawi, however, expressed the opinion that general practitioners could provide such proof of vaccination if it were required, negating the need for such a document.

This can, in my opinion, only be a good thing. There are simply too many ways in which such a 'passport' could be abused, could become a divisive element in our society, could become a victim of 'mission creep', to countenance such an introduction. Already, in one of the papers yesterday the idea was being mooted that the document could be introduced into 'specific areas' within the domestic arena, say in the attendance of large scale events and the like, which is exactly the kind of warning sign we should be looking for, and the thing has not even been introduced yet. It would effectively create a two-tier population, the holders and the non-holders, the latter being excluded from participation in potentially whole swathes of what were prior to Covid, normal lifetime activities, as its pernicious usage spread. Ultimately it would become an ID document in all but name, a backdoor introduction of what many less libertarian minded individuals have wanted for years, and what freedom loving people have railed against and thankfully the Government have avoided up to this point.

How long would it be, once introduced, before it became broadened to include other conditions, before it became something that the holding of would be under consideration in such areas as job applications or health insurance - it is naive to think that this would not happen, this is simply the way such things progress. And more perniciously, how long would it be before people themselves began to view the thing, the holding of or otherwise, as a measure of value. Not of practicality but of principle - the value of the individual themselves. We only have to look to the insidious effect of money on our psychology here as an example. Those with wealth in our societies begin to believe if they have not always done so, that their wealth is a measure of their value; they would no doubt cry out that this is unfair, simply not true, but like it or not it is so. Years of being deferred to, years of always having your path smoothed wherever you go have that effect - always. They come inevitably to believe, not that this is just a measure of their wealth, but of their worth - or that the two things become synonymous. Such would inevitably become the case with the health passport. They would leach into all aspects of our lives, influence all of our activities and actions and ultimately become the thing upon which we judged our merit, our worth in comparison to our neighbor.

And my fear is that Zahawi is not to be trusted. There are simply too many contrary accounts of what is being carried out in the darkened recesses of our corridors of power for their not to be some truth in them. What we are seeing here is (I believe) the classic trick of using political outriders to raise a topic that has been previously unspeakable, the shifting of the 'overton window' thereby (ie the moving of the frame of what can be considered to be in the normal range of what may be discussed), which shortly thereafter follows a change of stance of the Government of the day, to then do exactly the thing that in the commentary they had said they would not, on the basis of "the conditions have changed" or "the people want it". Seen in this light Zahawi's comments become, in the very act of denial, the first step in the act of introduction of that which is being denied.

I've got ten quid says that within twelve months they are introduced - who wants it?

[peter]

Going on holiday this year? Ta, but no ta very much!

New laws brought in by health secretary Matt Hancock now confirm that if you arrive back in the UK from one of the 'red-zone' countries deemed to be high risk in terms of Covid variants, you must spend 10 days in isolation in one of the designated 'issolation hotels' - those soulless airport hotels you have stayed in before flying in the past - incarcerated in your room under threat of a ten thousand pounds fine if you leave it.

If you lie on a declaration form, say for example failing to mention that you have been on a day trip to Portugal (a red zone country) while on holiday in Spain (not so) you risk a ten year sentence in jail (similar to the sentence for rape or manslaughter).

If you return from a country not on the red zone list, then you have to isolate at home, but must take, and pay for, tests on day 2 and 8 of your isolation. Priced at 150 pounds per test, the resultant cost of testing a husband, wife and two kids would be twelve hundred pounds against a holiday that would have cost about five hundred quid.

Clearly this has much less to do with stopping and/or tracking the variant Covid strains as Hancock claimed, but rather much more to do with discouragement of people going abroad at all. I think it would play better if the Government were to come out straight and say this rather than imposing ridiculously stringent restrictions that no-one could adhere to (spending 10 days locked in a room with two kids?) and punitive punishment that is clearly the stuff of totalitarian regimes. And this stuff, when once in place, will not be lifted quickly. The age of mass travel for the bulk of people is over; they were always going to find a way to pull this one off and Covid has given them the ideal opportunity.

And while we're on the law, good news to hear that the Law Commission has decided to abandon plans to extend the 'hate crime' laws into domestic settings - an extension it had apparently been seriously considering. I wonder if they abandoned them on the basis of the 'Orwellian' feel of the move, or on considerations of the practicality of policing the over-the-table conversations in millions of households up and down the country - the latter I'll bet! That such a thing could even be considered should turn us ashen, let alone that it should be done without so much as a squeak from our media who are supposed to be looking after our interests in respect of freedom of speech and the like. No good will come of it - we are sleepwalking into a place of nightmares.

[peter]

I am worn down by this but feel that I have no choice but to go on, to keep battering away on the same old drum in the desperate hope that someone else is listening - someone with more clout, more gumption, more energy...... someone who can take the baton from me and run with it... to get out there and spread the message....

This Is Madness!

That any good can come at a population level from the cumulative damage that all of this is doing to us on an individual basis; that the social and political, the psychological and emotional consequences of this can even begin to be proportionate as a response to this Covid threat, is the stuff of dystopian nightmare.

That we must somehow get back to the understanding that all we have is today, that this 'end justifies the means' policy of postponing our today in lieu of the false promise of a brighter tomorrow is a chimera - it doesn't exist. That what is sacrificed on the alter of this panacea is gone for good and all of the promises in the world will not bring it back. The lives ruined, the businesses sacrificed, the victims of all the myriad casualties that do not have the all-consuming Covid appellation attached to them - these things are gone for good. They won't come back "when restrictions are lifted".

Never has it been more important to understand that if we loose today, we don't save tomorrow - rather we loose everything, because today is all we have, all we will ever have.

[Avatar]

Ah, I'm glad to see you've been keeping up. Been disinclined lately I fear, but at least somebody is keeping the home fires burning, what?

Is it just me, or does this leave you with a foreboding of ill for the future in respect of freedom of comment? Would for example, my words above be regarded as something the police might want to look at with interest?

Eh, the freedom experiment has been found wanting by the securocrats and oligarchs Peter. The question remaining now is who will win in the end. "They have the guns but, we have the numbers..."

Remember, drastic social change against the rulers only occurs when sufficient numbers of people are willing to die in the attempt.

That said, simple social pressure has, at times proven effective to various extents.

Right now, I say it's still anybodies game.

Another name that some of you may have heard in respect to fairies is the term Siddhe and when you put the word together with the name Pict you finish up with the Pict-Siddhe, which is also encountered in Irish mythology.

I've always had an abiding fondness for Yeats' The Hosting of the Sidhe, which makes it clear that fairies were not jolly little folk. The Wild Hunt rides to take the tithe for Hell and woe betide any mortal in it's path... (Also highly recommended, Pratchett's Lords & Ladies. (And yes, that's what it is called. )

I have not the slightest idea how this all pertains to the situation we currently find ourselves in - but something in my gut tells me that it does.

Well, there's nothing like an external threat to bind people together, circle the wagons, and damn the non-conformist. And you can see why really. "Stand together or fall alone" is a perfectly reasonable proposition.

And I'm sure that if this particular situation was exhibiting (for example) the symptoms and fatality rates of Ebola, you would scarce find a dissenting voice, because that's a hell of a scary disease with very visible consequences.

The uncertain, perhaps even wishy-washy nature of the current plague leaves far more room for dissent etc.

Will this result in permanent social changes? Possibly so. Certainly some at least, and possibly significant ones. Smaller events have led to greater ones. However, it's also possible that this is only bad from the outside too. It's our own (selfish) judgement of what should be "normal" (no such thing these days apparently though, psychologically speaking) that leads us to decry the "new" normal.

I've got ten quid says that within twelve months they are introduced - who wants it?

No bet.

...designated 'isolation hotels'...

Which apparently you also have to pay for...seen people saying they trapped in foreign countries because they can't afford the isolation at home.

Never has it been more important to understand that if we loose today, we don't save tomorrow - rather we loose everything, because today is all we have, all we will ever have.

I certainly sympathise with the worn down feeling, much as I largely have no issue with the impact of this on my personal life.

The thing is, it's always the end of the world for somebody. The fishing village when the shoals are over-fished, the agrarian society when rainfall patterns shift. The livery stable when cars took off, the hedge fund broker when random people on the internet decide to play you at your own game.

Everything changes, nothing is forever. Our bad luck to be caught up in a time of changes, and our bad luck that we may not like some (or many) of them.

While on an individual level, the losses and sacrifices and tragedies are terrible to all those suffering them, on even a social level (let alone a species level) they're just more casualties in the war between the future and the past, as each struggle for a hold on the present.

They are piled high through the ages Peter, and will be for ages yet to come as a result of myriad decisions not yet made, including ones we might think we want. Our bad luck.

The Buddhists are right Pete, we must eschew all attachment to escape the wheel of samsara.

--A

[I'm Murrin]

Peter, your problem isn't with the restrictions. Your problem is with the lack of support provided to cope with them.

[peter]

Peter, your problem isn't with the restrictions. Your problem is with the lack of support provided to cope with them.

Isn't it the same thing Murrin?

But in any case you are wrong (albeit that I appreciate the good intention behind your post); I do not want help with being able to cope with lockdown - I want not to be locked down.

To put it into context I will outline the ways it has personally affected my life.

I miss not being able to go out walking in the various places of beauty in my locale. I miss not being able to go browsing in bookshops - a great part of the pleasure I get from life. I miss not being able to go with my wife for our two or three times a year to a good hotel and restaurant and enjoy a fine evenings dining in relaxed surroundings. I miss not having the chance to look at holidays abroad and occasionally take one, if I can afford to. I miss having my family come to see us once a week, or being able to go out with them.

That's it - the rest is of little significance to me. I can work as normal, being deemed to be an 'essential worker' who cannot work from home. I long ago discovered that friends are an encumbrance that I do not need, so have no problem with the proscription of that aspect of life.

Now not being funny, but there is no amount of counselling that is going to make up the shortfalls I have outlined above; drugs might do it - but I have no desire to be put into a zombified state of mental turbidity in order to get through this.

But this is entirely to miss the point of my postings anyway. I am simply of the opinion that lockdowns are not the answer to this crisis. Are you aware that the Government had a perfectly good plan in place for dealing with such a pandemic right up until the outset of this one, which had nothing of the order of restrictions in it that we see imposed upon us today. That this plan was jettisoned without so much as even being tried out, on the basis of following the totalitarian model as carried out in Wuhan by the centralist Chinese authorities, that Neal Ferguson let it slip that in a SAGE meeting it was discussed as to whether they (the Government) would be able to "get away with it" (his actual words).

We chose this method in preference to the other with the results we see today; that the list of people waiting over a year for operations in our hospitals would rise from fifteen hundred people to nearly a quarter of a million in one year - one year! (And this was not caused by hospitals being full due to Covid sufferers - it was caused by the NHS virtually ceasing to function throughout the summer and autumn of last year as a result of being put on standby to receive an influx of patients with Covid that never happened.) And this is merely the tip of the iceberg (as I have reiterated too many times above to bear repeating here).

No - my opposition has much less to do with my inability to cope with lockdown (though I readily concede that I'm struggling) that with my fundamental belief that the policy is misguided at best and actively counterproductive at worst. Unless the Government does a volta face on this (and let's face it - it isn't going to) we will be swinging into and out of lockdowns, with their attendant consequences, for ever and a day. The vaccines will not alter this - already the new variants are causing the efficacy of the ones we have in place to be called into question, and absence the entire country being vaccinated with a different shot every two or three months, they are not going to.

So either prepare for the on/off/on cycle of lockdowns to continue ad infinitum or (and this is far more likely) prepare for some verbal jiggery-pokery of the type we saw from the PM at the weekend, when he tried to justify the continuance of a vaccine program using vaccination types that were of unproven efficacy against what we are told will be the dominant variant in short order anyway.

Behind the scenes the Government will be aware of the intractability of the new variant strains in terms of the use of mass vaccination programs to deal with them, and they will be searching for ways to spin themselves out of the rabbit-hole they have dug for themselves.

And it's all such a pointless waste of time that could have been avoided by simply sticking to the original plans they had in place, prior to the decision to embark upon this quasi-marxist policy of heavy handed centralised authoritarianism.

[peter]

(Apologies for the double post guys, but I wanted to give each of the above posts the attention it deserved.)

Ah, Samara Av! I have learned in whatsoever situation I find myself therein (not) to be content! Enlightenment, alas, eludes me to date.

The thing about ebola (similarly to the SARS CoV-1 virus I'm thinking) is that its time interval between infection and development of the disease, combined with probably its high mortality rate makes it much easier to contain, track and eradicate. SARS CoV-2 on the other hand, incubates for up to two weeks (compared to two days for SARS CoV-1), only kills a fraction of the number of people it infects (CoV-1 kills ten percent) and many infected and infective people never develop outward symptoms at all (ie never develop the disease Covid-19). This makes tracking and tracing an exponentially harder business.

On the health passports, very embarrassingly for Nadhim Zahawi (UK Vaccines Minister) who told both Sophie Ridge and Andrew Marr on Sunday that the Government "have no plans to introduce a health passport", Sky news yesterday revealed a leaked document that showed that discussion of the option was to be carried out today in a select committee meeting on this and other subjects. Just to increase his discomfort, Zahawi was last evening to once again appear before Ridge in her program on lockdown lessons, and although I have not seen the program yet, it will be interesting to see how he answered the inevitable question she will put to him on his assurance given just a few days before, not apparently worth the air expelled in giving it

I think your ten quid is indeed safer in your pocket!

[I'm Murrin]

I think you're missing my point when you reply with consideration of only how it has affected you personally, when you're advocating ending the lockdowns for everyone, and when you've even specifically referenced businesses and jobs being lost because of the lockdown (which financial support from the government could have prevented).

[peter]

Entirely possible Murrin; I was trying to illustrate what for me personally the lockdown has meant, but I take your point. I'll re-read the previous posts and give the matter some thought.

[Edit; (A couple of hours pater) I did indeed misunderstand your post Murrin - sorry about that. In respect of help with dealing with the lockdown, Neil Fergusson told the following story. He said he was minded of a fight that he had seen in which Mohamed Ali, fighting one of his lesser opponents, had gotten the guy into a corner and literally pummelled him with a flurry of twenty-five or thirty punches. It was clear, he said, that the only thing holding him up was the punches and as soon as they ceased, sure enough, he slumped senseless to the ground. The point here is not that the help, furlough or whatever, is the only thing that is holding the economy up - it is that the very thing that is holding it up is doing further damage in equal measure, and if the help were greater so would the damage be. This is yet another of the rabbit-holes that this government has dug for itself. It can't continue with it - but neither can it stop. It has also been noted that never before has the entire economy been stopped in its tracks, while simultaneously created money spun out of nothing been pumped into the general populace (as opposed to being put out in the form of government bonds which record as debt) and which the consequences thereof are entirely unpredictable but cannot be good.]

However I see that in today's press the talk is of easing the restrictions and trying to regain some semblance of normality. This is good news indeed, if it manifests..... but in my own defence, if my output has seemed at times overly bleak and pessimistic, given what we have been through, how could it not be so? Stronger characters than mine have quailed under the onslaught of the pandemic - I engage in no self-retribution on that score, if I have been wrong. Time will tell, but never doubt that I do actually want to be so.


On an entirely different subject, George Monbiot in a recent YouTube post called "How Britain could become a Failed State" said that only a corrupt system could have allowed an individual as morally bankrupt as Boris Johnson to rise to the level of Prime Minister. In any normal state of affairs he wouldn't have made it onto the podium of mayor of London, let alone into high office or the top job itself.

I absolutely agree with this. Many have sought to compare him with the towering figure of Margret Thatcher, but make no mistake, Johnson is of a different breed altogether. Thatcher was a politician (though this is poorly understood) very much of the old-scool, radical in her beliefs certainly, but not in the way one should set about achieving them. She would be horrified at what we have witnessed since the referendum - the illegal closure of parliament, the threat of breaking international law in the House, the use of access and preferment to distort the media, the adoption of lies and obfuscation as central planks of Government policy, the puppeteering of politicians to serve the unknown motives of invisible donors...........these things would have been anathema to her and she would have been ashamed at what her party, at what the whole of Government and Westminster has become.

I have no understanding of how we deal with this situation, but I feel that the corruption is now endemic to the point where the two parties who have traditionally held the see-saw of power are beyond saving. Definitely time to start looking to some of the smaller parties, or perhaps better, getting some new ones up and running to start from a clean slate. I agree with Monbiot that we have to separate out money from our politics, to fund parties centrally but strictly (though such centralisation is becoming more unappealing to me as the days pass), and to return power to the hands of the ordinary people - the people so poorly served by the reign of the plutocracy, the elective dictatorship underpinned by subterranean interest that we currently endure. These are the very worst things we need in order to deal with our current situation and to reorder our lives going forward.

Great periods of stress can be the tilled soil from which new harvests can be reaped - but this will only happen if we make it so.

[peter]

For many people arriving at our boarders today, the five hour wait as boarder officials struggle to cope with the new face-to-face entry requirements of increased stringency (there's an irony for you - the pandemic has done away with e-gates demanding more human to human contact rather than less) is going to be the best thing that happens to them........... for the next 11 days.

Shuttled to souless airport hotels where they will be placed in bare rooms from which they are forbidden from leaving (security guards on hand to prevent this, and subject to up to ten thousand pounds fine if they do so) for this period, their food being left outside their doors in paper bags. Unlike those held in our prisons they are not allowed out for exercise, rather spending the entire time with only the small television to occupy the interminable days that are to come. If these circumstances were placed in front of any Court of Human Rights, they would be deemed unacceptable - indeed bordering on torture. In the most luxurious hotel suite in the world they would become a nightmare within hours; by the end of the first day you would be tearing your hair out and by the end of eleven days, bordering on stark raving mad. If anybody reading this has ever been in a typical airport hotel, they will understand that this is virtually akin to one of those medieval punishments that involve people being put into small holes in which they can neither lie down nor stand up. Solitary confinement is recognised the world over as being one of the worst things you can subject a human to, but in this case the alternative - having your wife and two screaming kids shut in there with you - would be worse. And for this you pay seventeen hundred pounds per person (why is that - these hotels are normally only forty quid a night anyway?)

You would have to be barking up a tree nuts to even contemplate it! The Government know this.

[peter]

So, between them, the Government and Heathrow f***ed up the first day of the new quarantine arrangements referred to above - where's the suprise in that?

Heathrow on it's own couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery and throw this Government, with it's record for screwing up everything it touches on top and I'd be thinking you had a perfect recipe for a turd-pie if ever there was one. People were kept (as mentioned above) waiting for hours on end. Arrivals from red-zone countries were mixed freely with those from 'safer' ones, crammed shoulder to shoulder in queues with no room to maintain social distancing. Officials sat at desks with no idea of what they were doing, only having received their new protocols a matter of hours before they were supposed to be able to operate them. By all accounts it was chaos.

And now they have, many of them, been shipped off to these prisons that are not prisons, where they will endure a period of incarceration that would have had Steve McQueen in the Great Escape, quaking in his boots. These poor bastards must be desperate to come into this country, that's all I can think, because nothing - nothing - would induce me to go anywhere at all under such constraints. They will emerge from their imprisonment in eleven days time older and wiser people indeed.

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A small stir has been made in the press about Amanda Holden's 'emergency' dash to Cornwall, to the home of her step father, after receiving a "distressing call". Reported by her (or rather his) neighbors as she was seen entering the house some two hundred miles from her own home (in complete contravention of all of the lockdown restrictions) the police are now investigating, but I have my doubts that any action will result. Similarly, today's press reports that Katie Price has taken a trip to a remote logg cabin for her birthday, again at a considerable distance from her own home.

This will be the order of the day now. Those who are used to being given a free pass to the front of life's queue (and you get used to it very quickly, and assume that it is your right that it will always be so) will not react well to any attempt to step on their sense of self-entitlement, and will simply ignore the rules to the degree they can get away with. As proscription against cross-border travel without valid reason and the like begin to bite, they will increasingly begin to ask what is the purpose of their celebrity status if they are not allowed to enjoy the fruits of their elevated societal status (not to mention the wealth it delivers) by ignoring the rules that apply to the common people as has previously been the case. Their clamour will become louder and their transgressions more egregious until a decision will be forced upon the media whether to stop reporting them, in order that the kind of two-tier society of the old Soviet Union can develop, one in which a strata of society at its top end enjoys luxuries and privilege not available to the rest (and of course the media cohort would themselves be included in this group). Or alternatively, the Government will be forced to actually do something, to actually visibly demonstrate that the restrictions apply to all, irrespective of social position. This of course would have to apply to the individuals who make up itself, so it might simply be easier to come to the kind of unspoken understanding with the press that it would be in both of their best interests if a....... compromise (shall we say) can be reached. "You don't look at our transgressions to hard and we won't look at yours," style of thing.

One Rule to Bind Them, or back-scratching compromise - what do you think?

[Avatar]

Wait, people have seriously compared Johnson to Thatcher? That's ludicrous. I mean, I'm no Thatcherite, (I highly recommend Sue Townsends "Secret Diary of Margaret Hilda Roberts" ) but BoJo isn't a patch on the Iron Lady.

The thing about ebola (similarly to the SARS CoV-1 virus I'm thinking) is that its time interval between infection and development of the disease, combined with probably its high mortality rate makes it much easier to contain, track and eradicate.

The key there is that carriers are only infectious once symptoms have already developed.

Anyway, one of the most interesting things about easing restrictions, I have found, is how it inevitably results in a spike of cases, which will no doubt continue until widespread vaccination is accomplished.

--A

[peter]

And beyond Av. Great quote from Neil Oliver - "We are in Series one, episode one of the Pandemic Box Set."

[Avatar]

Well, this may very well be true, as I mentioned elsewhere. And clearly as a species we have short memories.

--A

[peter]

And so it begins. Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi yesterday took what on the surface purports to be a disinterested approach to vaccination passports, saying that it was "up to businesses" whether they required their staff to get vaccinated or not. The response of some was to immediately begin to draw up 'no vaccine - no work' contracts that effectively demands that their employees provide proof of vaccination in order to be able to continue working.

So, it appears that Zahawi was telling the truth when he said that "Government has no plans to introduce vaccination passports" the other Sunday in interview with Marr and Ridge...... they have no need to. By his tacit signaling to business that they may take up the reins on this one without fear of Government interference, he effectively introduces the policy through the back door anyway, while simultaneously being able to hold his hands up and say with a wounded expression of innocence "Not me Guv!"

This is typical of the underhand nature of the Government we have elected to power in this country, with a PM that as George Monbiot recently pointed out, in no country that was not corrupt to the roots would have been given so much as a look in at the seats of power, let alone the top job. Because to create the conditions whereby the thing that you want to do, you simply organise the circumstances such that others do it for you, is the methodology of the snake - a whispered word here and a behind the hand bit of council there. Iago come forth and take your bow - your time is now!

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I hear that the kids have been arranging illicit meets on social media and gathering in groups in contravention of the lockdown restrictions, which the police having become aware of, are busting and suggesting that the parents of those thus apprehended be held culpable. I say good on the kids. Never mind the fact that which parents have ever been in full knowledge of what their kids are up to - under what set of beliefs did the Government decide that they had the right to co-opt and sacrifice the all to transitory joys of youthful life of the upcoming generation on the anvil of protecting the elderly who have already enjoyed the fullness of their own childhood in times past. I doubt very much if many elderly people could be found who would want this to be done either.

[I'm Murrin]

Young people die of covid too, peter.

[Avatar]

I mean, personally, I think a "vaccine passport" is not a bad idea in principle.

If, for example, being vaccinated meant that you could not catch it, carry it, and could not be re-infected with it, then it would be a perfect way to allow people to travel and congregate etc.

However, it is not yet known that this is the case, and with constantly mutating variants etc. so it's probably of limited use.

(Agree that the government is just letting business do it for them here though.)

--A

[peter]

Young people die of covid too, peter.

Absolutely agreed Murrin, but they die of drugs too. And road accidents and social media induced suicides and falling off their bikes - but we don't steal the precious years of their youth thereon (and this is not the reason for the lockdown policy). This policy will have a huge effect on them going forward, the consequences of which on their future lives is almost impossible to predict. Already a years worth of education is effectively lost to them - the idea that you can 'cram' them with extra work, increased school-day length and shorter holidays (seriously - this has been put forward) is an absolute nonsense. They will be a lost generation - the lot of them - and the damage resultant from the stifling of their socialisation skills at this critically formative time in their development will reverberate down through their lives in ways that will leave none untouched. This damage in toto will exceed the small number that will, yes, be tragically lost to Covid-19 by factors of the nth degree.

[I'm Murrin]

[citation needed]