Pandemic Notes 8; Will April be the Cruelest Month in Toronto?
We are now at the one year mark of the pandemic in Canada. There is a lot about it to write about, and much which should be said is not being said often enough. I will be saying it.
I believe we are now in the most dangerous point of the pandemic, even if we can start to see the end. It is likely to go on until into this fall and perhaps into next year. But it is now very clear who has made it much worse than it needed to be. A reckoning should come to them.
The misinformers
I think the worst thing about the pandemic has been all the organized and deliberate misinformation. This is the most powerful argument that could be made that freedom of speech cannot be absolute. I am beginning to think that even the concept of “Freedom of Speech” is misguided; another relic from an idealistic age which doesn’t pan out in the modern age.
I have recently send into the netisphere my “covid Notes 7.5”, expressing my disgust with one of the more obnoxious instigators of resistance to public health measures. If you haven’t read that, find it here; https://raccoon-34417.medium.com/pandemic-notes-7-5-on-dealing-with-cad3aa028d99 That was a kind of warmup for this post. So to the full symphony.
As I noted, there is really not much point attempting to get through to people such as Ehret. They are there to sell a message. It is their full time job and they are getting paid from somewhere to do it. The riffs they run have been well refuted a thousand times. They just keep on repeating them, as long as they are allowed a platform.
If you check into them a bit, the covid “deniers” all come from the same ideological place. It is all about the “libertarian” nationalist and industrialist narrative. It is tuned to different strata of society; Ehret is after the somewhat more urbane people and so tries to come across as more in favour of social provision.
Other blow holes direct the message at the edgier kinds of people. But the basic theme is always; capitalism good, socialism bad. The basic points are the same. So is the basic technique. Only the tone is really different.
Since the pandemic began, there has been a very persistent campaign to convince people to resist normal public health measures for dealing with a pandemic, and to put pressure on public officials of all kinds. The ground has long been kept ready for this messaging by long term framing campaigns. These are built mostly around anti-government paranoia and a warped understanding of civil liberties.
I am somewhat reassured and even gratified that in Canada this propaganda campaign has not worked with the general public. Resistance to vaccination is declining according to opinion polls. While the public is fed up with the criminal incompetence of government in dealing with the pandemic, there is no major trend toward defying the health rules and trying to “break out” of the lockdowns.
People are beginning to ignore the more ridiculous rules and restrictions and this is why they are moving about more. They now know more than the government boneheads about how Covid is transmitted and generally continue to take reasonable precautions. We cannot just stay in an ‘on and off’, poorly thought out semi lockdown forever.
Propaganda that manipulates emotions generally works only when it is not about something which really matters to people’s lives. When the aim is to create a self destructive hysterical response in people, as in trying to start a war, or inciting self destructive actions like “breaking out” of a quarantine, or destroying vital infrastructure, near total control of information is required.
In this case there have been strong counters to the “covid is a hoax” campaign. Some of it comes from rival factions of the oligarchy who love crises such as pandemics and have greatly benefited from it. Fortunately much of it comes now from the ‘real left’ media. These can also point out that the industrial/nationalist faction of the oligarchy has lost badly during the pandemic.
Ideological Warfare and its Casualties
Unfortunately, political factions these days have discovered that it isn’t necessary to convince most of the public. It is often more effective to just actuate a corps of true believers who are willing to do things like harass public officials, silence opposition speakers, or stage a good riot for the cameras.
We are seeing the results of that in the continued mishandling of the epidemic by governments all over the world. Sometimes these are hard right governments ideologically in line with the “profits over public health” drive of industrialist/nationalist oligarchs.
In other cases they seem to be manipulated by industrialist lobbyists. They do not seem to have the capacity to analyze what they are being told, or the backbone to take a clear stand in the public’s interest. Pandemic policy in these jurisdictions is a tug of war between the “force it open” faction, and responsible, qualified people struggling against the misinformation and to get across to weak leaders the consequences of letting things get to a point where the health system collapses.
In many cases, political leaders do the right thing at first, then after months of constant bullying, cave in to the corporates, leading to an explosion of the virus and the inevitable crisis that follows. Ireland seems to be a good example of this. On other cases, such as Australia, the country starts out listening to the “covid is no problem” nonsense and then sees the writing on the wall and adopts the “best practises” of its neighbours.
However, the most interesting thing is the behaviour of the other big faction of the world oligarchies, the financialists. Their own narrative control machinery is very good at generating delusions such as “global warming”. But they oppose the anti-lockdown crowd only in a limited way. These are the people who mostly own the vaccine industry and and have much to gain by letting the pandemic grow out of control.
In places where there has been no effort at all to deal with the pandemic, the results have been dire. It shows the sophistry of the right wing trope that anti pandemic measures do more harm than the virus. The worst has been in Latin America, where poor areas are often devastated. Some of the stories from there are reminiscent of the plagues of the middle ages, with rotting corpses in the streets and masses of people marching down the roads, trying to get away from the disease.
Of course it is the worst of incompetent government responses to the pandemic, medieval methods from medieval thinkers, which can often do more harm than no measures. In some Latin American countries, people have been locked into their homes and in danger of starving to death. They hang red flags out their windows, pleading for rescue.
The alternative to bad pandemic response is not no response from government, but a correct response. This requires a properly constituted government, set up to meet human needs, not the interests of an elite.
Vaccine vexations
We are now well into the next phase of the pandemic, the struggle to get people vaccinated before the contagion spreads further and mutates into ever more potent strains. The problems were predictable.
The rollout has been slower in Canada partly because we cannot make our own vaccines. We were once a big producer of them, but we can thank the Harper government for throwing our industry away for no good reason.
Now, we wait, behind the big manufacturing countries but ahead of the poor ones. We have to buy our way up in the line. We steal from the covax system, which was intended to insure that the “less developed countries” can at least get their health care workers and most vulnerable vaccinated. Oh, Canada.
In Ontario, the kind of bullshit has developed that is to be expected in our highly corrupt, clientelistic political system. People in Care Homes are extremely vulnerable due to the outrageous conditions in these homes, especially the private ones. They should have been the first vaccinated. Many are still not.
Hospital administrators are getting themselves vaccinated ahead of the hospital workers, the people “on the front line”; the same people who couldn’t get proper protective equipment last year. Police have now been vaccinated ahead of hospital workers.
The government has had a year to work out how to deliver vaccines. They still act like they are making it up on the fly. The logical thing would be for the vaccinators to go to where the people most at risk are at. In Ontario, this Monday the province has started a system of booking appointments for vaccinations at community clinics, but only for the age 80 and up bracket. We will see how this works.
It seems that for awhile the biggest concern was to figure out how friends of government can make money out of vaccination. Publicly run vaccination was being sabotaged to facilitate the idea some people in the government had that it should be run by pharmacies and other private operations for a fee, much like the system which is common in the USA. My feeling about it is they simply realized they could not get away with this in Canada.
An interesting development in Ontario is that we can now volunteer to be Guinea pigs for the AstraZenica vaccine, but only if we are aged 60 to 64. If we’re a year or two older, like me, tough luck. I have a sentimental attraction to the AZ jab and would like to get it, all things equal.
The tale of AstraZenica is instructive. It was developed through research done at Oxford university. The foundation holding the patents farms it out to AstraZenica. The original terms were that the drug would be delivered at cost until the whole world is vaccinated.
Then some Oxford officials had a conversation with everyone’s special friend Bill Gates and got told to “get on the team.” It seems AZ hasn’t been getting on the team well enough because a huge campaign has developed to throw shade on this jab. None of the allegations about it seem to hold water but in many places they are causing AZ to have a hard time getting into people’s shoulders.
All over the world there is clearly a lot of political maneuvering and infighting going on over which vaccine gets used. The Pfizer poke is often favoured. It is not the best choice; very hard to handle, very expensive.
Situation Now
From where I live, I think April will be the most dangerous month. We have a kind of “perfect storm” brewing. Four elements are converging.
One is the more powerful strain of the virus which is spreading rapidly in Ontario. It is starting to turn the case rate up again and most models predict that without an extension of lockdown it will peak higher than the first two waves we have had.
Second is the stupidity of the provincial government in starting to lift lockdown again. Some experts on epidemology liken the Bucket Head Doug government approach to “playing chicken with the virus”. It seems to me that the lobbyists the government is listening to have a “stress management” mentality toward dealing with the pandemic. They seem to keep pushing to see how much they can take back from pandemic measures before the pandemic starts running out of control again.
The third is just public exhaustion. It is really more like economic exhaustion. The economy and society cannot just stay indefinitely in what I have already described as an on and off, half-assed attempt at lockdown. People have to get out and start doing things again, while protecting themselves as best they can.
Over all this is the failure to get the vaccinations rolling. We are in a race between the new covid strain and the vaccines and we seem to have already lost. Right now there is not enough vaccine to give out. We will soon be receiving large amounts of them. It will become plain that the plan put into place will be incapable of getting it to people fast enough. It is incapable of prioritizing people in a logical way.
It could be said that there is no real vaccination plan. Perhaps the plan is still to deliberately mismanage a program and then open the way for private clinics and pharmacies to make money delivering the vaccines; much like the way they run health care anyway.
There is no public uprising about all this yet. The public is limited in what it can do about it right now. When the pandemic is finally over, is when the reaction would come; payback time.
There will continue to be a lot to write about regarding covid in Toronto, Canada. Fairly soon I will bring out the next of these notes, about what really should have been done, if we had a fit government. And, about what needs to be done next.