There was never any good reason for the Covid pandemic to last so long and to be so destructive. The science of epidemology is well advanced and its students have long been in place in the public health services of most countries. If correct measures had been applied early, covid could have been eliminated in a few months with minimal social disruption and loss of life.
Now covid has been dug in so well all over the world that it will take years to eradicate it. However, all the tools are in place to do so. They just have to be employed.
Some hysterical commentators claim that the virus will always mutate faster that we can adapt vaccines for it. It is worrisome that the virus seems to keep developing more virulent strains. It is also becoming clear that having been infected once does not confer immunity; in some places with poor health structures, many people have now had the virus several times.
However, we now have the mRNA type of vaccine which can be adapted quickly to any mutations. So far the existing formulations have worked against all strains. However, a new strain from Tanzania seems able to evade vaccine induced antibodies and will provide a test for the new vaccines.
Vaccines are not an ‘end all’. To end the pandemic, transmission must be shut down. This requires strict but well thought out and administered systems of detecting and isolating cases. This requires well organized and resourced governments capable of administering such systems.
There have been two things preventing such measures. One is the poor state of health systems in many countries due to austerianism and local poverty and corruption. The other is that there are powerful interests which do not want the virus eradicated.
I have noticed for some time that there seems to be a three way fight over how to respond to covid. This corresponds to the three most salient forces in western society; the financial oligarchy, the industrial oligarchy, and civil society.
The financial oligarchy profits from owning investment property and lending money. They also like to control things like pharmaceutical companies. They are in favour of coopting rather than suppressing the public and so they try to own all forms of mass media but have not gained full control of the internet.
The financial class, also called The Rentiers, want to use the pandemic to create a permanent market for vaccines. They also want to push through new forms of social control. Toward that they try to introduce various kinds of vaccine passes or cards which require people to give much more information than is relevant for control of disease.
The Rentiers have wanted the pandemic to be controlled, but only in ineffective ways. Lately their thinking seems to be shifting. They seem to be realizing that the pandemic is too dangerous to play around with in this way and really must be eradicated. They are also better able to wait out a pause in the economy so as to deal with a pandemic.
Sections of the Financial elites are now promoting a reorganization of the World Health Organization (WHO) to be better able to organize pandemic response world wide and to do more to encourage states to deal with it properly within their borders. They are encouraging vaccine companies to drop their more grandiose expectations of profit and to waive patents so the vaccines can be manufactured everywhere. Several countries seem to be actually encouraged to “crack” the formula for the most successful vaccines so that they can be produced locally and at cost.
The second side to this is the industrial oligarchy. These are the more classical capitalists, who make their money by owning the means of production and hiring people to use it to produce goods for exchange. The cheaper they can get people to work the more profits they make.
Their systems are not set up to deal with any sort of crisis. There are no redundancies and no reserve stockpiles. There is no contingency planning to pause production of nonessentials, while maintaining the supply of essentials, then start up again where they left off. This should not be difficult.
Their mentality is unable to conceive of an interruption of profits, or of paying workers to stay home. To them, workers are expendable. This is why they do not support coopting public discontent, but suppressing it.
Thus they refuse to accept that the pandemic is a real problem. The virus should be left to run through the population, “culling the weak and unfit”. They talk about the population developing a “herd immunity”, though this idea is for cattle kept in an isolated and enclosed area, not for a dynamic population and definitely not for humans.
From the start, their organizations set out to sabotage all attempts to deal with the pandemic. They had some of their bought academics develop the “Great Barrington Declaration”, (GBD) a plan for “forcing open“ the economy in the face of the pandemic. They mobilized their internet army of right wing fanatics to attack pandemic measures using bogus “civil rights” claims, and by harassing all elements of the public health infrastructure.
This kind of people, a small minority everywhere, have been able to obstruct the will of the great majority who want an intelligent plan to protect the public from the pandemic. They have made the pandemic far longer and more destructive than it had to be. In the end their behaviour has cost them more money due to ongoing supply chain disruptions from covid than if they had simply allowed a short global lockdown.
The covid war has come to be a war, not on the virus, but on the GBD conspiracy. GBD seems to be starting to lose. The financial capitalists are starting to link forces with the third side in this fight, civil society.
‘Civil Society’ means; the human race and the civilization it has created, the infrastructures which maintain civilization, and the educated and capable people who manage these infrastructures. Capitalists and other oligarchs hate the idea of civil society, but are as dependant on it as anyone else for their survival and well being. Within civil society are the scientists, doctors, nurses, and administrators who run health care systems.
Health care professionals are building new networks from local to global, and obtaining new funding, to mobilize the fightback against the GBD/covid plague. In most of the world, the numbers of covid infections is starting to decline. Where they are still rising, it is because the GBD/covid plague has staged some sort of coup against civil society and “forced open” the economy, under the jingo of “living with covid.”
The massive disinformation campaign against anti-covid measures is failing in most places. People have seen how “herd immunity” works. They have seen what does work. There is a growing recognition that strict pandemic measures actually intrude least on people’s freedom and do the least harm to the productive economy.
The GBD/covid conspiracy has fought against lockdowns and travel restrictions. It has fought against masking mandates. Now it is fighting against vaccination mandates and vaccination cards.
GBD/covid plague has been frustrated in its campaign to infect as many people as possible. The last great pool of unvaccinated people are schoolchildren. So the plague is trying to force open the schools without proper health measures in place and the race is on to get the vaccines to the children before GBD/covid does.
The real motivation behind the right wing business fight against pandemic measures is baffling. It is something deeper than just economic motives. It may be that the community response required in fighting the pandemic is threatening to them.
The war on GBD/covid has certainly created a new kind of attitude among the public. They have become less materialistic and more community minded. They want a simpler way of living.
Government institutions all over the world have been shown to be completely inadequate to deal with a crisis. Also, to be not really democratic or focussed on the public welfare. Capitalism has been shown to be an unsuitable way of organizing an urban/technological economy.
Much like going through a real war, societies will to come out of the covid experience with changed institutions, and changed attitudes and priorities. In a few years people will be talking about living in the post covid era.
Yet the war is still to be won, so I will end this piece by making clear what will be needed to decisively end it. The people behind the GBD conspiracy must be taken on directly. Their ability to mobilize an Internet and street army must be removed.
This has to be done so as to minimize interference with people’s real rights, but it must be done, and it can be done. To start with, committees must be established to monitor government at every level and jurisdiction and to oversee the CBD/covid fight. Politicians serving the aims of CBD/covid must be removed from office and arrested. The people organizing the disinformation campaigns must be tracked down and arrested, their funds confiscated.
The courts must be fully used. Laws governing the ability of government to use extraordinary powers during pandemics and similar crises have long been in place in western countries.
Courts have a long history of supporting this power. When people obstructing pandemic measures have been taken to court, the courts have usually come down hard on them. Yet governments are weirdly reluctant to lay charges.
A vaccine mandate must be strongly enforced. There is always a minority of people who will resist being told to do something until there are consequences for further resistance. No doubt when their mommies told them to come in out of the rain, they sat in a mud puddle and kicked.
Finally, it must be understood that this is not about civil liberties. Lockdowns and mandates inconvenience the poor more than the rich, but that is a problem of inequality which cannot be immediately dealt with by public health measures. It is social inequity that is the civil rights problem, not pandemic measures.
The true injustice in the struggle with covid is that a small minority are imposing their ideas on everyone else. The vast majority of people support public health measures. GBD/covid is using intimidation and deception to impose their ideas, while hiding behind a bogus claim of ‘liberties’.
The socially based response required by the covid pandemic is a threat to these few people because it does not square with their ideology, or disrupts their dominance and control over others. The answer to them is to take them on and defeat them. I have now said enough.