There will be no Institutional or Scientific Solution

The pandemic keeps rolling along. The XBB strain is now upon us. Someone wants to christen it “Kraken”.

There is a focus right now on the removal of covid restrictions in China. This has various people very alarmed, for various reasons. It is impossible to know just what is going on in China now.

The Chinese government seems surprised at the rapid spread and strong effects of the covid virus. However, the effects of the covid flareup in China do not seem to be anywhere near as severe as it is made out in western media. It is being managed adequately.

Much western media reporting on the covid wave in China is ridiculous and offensive. Bodies are being cremated in the streets. Chinese people are somehow more effected by the virus.

The same people who sought to “minimize” the effect of covid in the west try to maximize it in China. It is a sniffle in North America but the Black Death in China. Anything goes to create negative impressions of China.

Nonetheless, the way the Chinese government has handled things is puzzling. They had to change their approach; the policy of quarantines was not working. It is not that this is a wrong approach in all circumstances, but you cannot do it forever.

The Chinese communist party was trapped by the failure of other countries to control the virus. The “lockdowns”, especially port shutdowns, created problems with China’s international trade. China was also being blamed for problems with global supply chains which really had nothing to do with its covid policy.

Civil unrest was growing in China due to the unnecessarily strict application of lockdown/quarantine by some local authorities. The time had come to take the risk of removing restrictions. However, they ended up having to open up quicker and more fully than would have been ideal.

They have the advantage of other countries experiences. Those countries have done best with covid, once quarantine became impossible, have been those who gave their population good information, refused to tolerate misinformation spreaders, made all mitigation measures easily available, then just let people use their common sense to protect themselves. In other words, the “here is what to do, do it or keep getting sick” approach.

The pattern of disease spread in China is similar to what has happened in other countries which have opened after giving up on quarantine. After a brief flareup, people learn that the disease is real, that what government is telling them is correct, and so they start cooperating with mitigation measures. The disease slowly subsides, well before the medical system collapses irreversibly.

One problem China has in coping with covid is that the medical system is not as developed as it needs to be, and as it is in many of its neighbours; Taiwan, Japan, Korea. It has been a poor country until recently and the medical system has not fully caught up. Many older Chinese are still suspicious of modern medicine, preferring the Chinese ‘traditional’ practise.

China is not hung up on collecting Covid statistics, and is not giving out case rates, death rates, and so on. This is probably for the best; many defenders of public health in the west have become obsessed with “tracking” the virus. These activities do not seem to lead to useful actions, but rather seem to promote ‘hopelessness’.

China is said to lead the world now. We must hope that it now takes the lead in what needs to be done at this stage to defeat covid. That is, to start looking into the accumulating evidence about where this Covid virus came from, why it is so distinctly virulent and destructive, and why it does not go away.

Further, to look at why there is such an interest among some of the global elite in actively propagating it. Also, why mitigation measures against the disease, and in fact airborne disease generally, is being so intensely resisted in most of the western world. In general, covid remains out of control in North America, Europe, and Australia, while most other places have it more or less controlled.

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Going into this subject in detail, of a divergent response to covid in Western countries, is outside the scope of this article, but it is where covid starts to get political. It is very hard to get this subject examined in an objective way; too hard for most people to think about. Yet it is very important to start looking into this topic because until we shut down the source of the disease and its variants, we will never escape from it.

The western countries cannot control the virus because their governments are being controlled by, or are incapable of adequately suppressing, powerful antisocial elements in their societies. Thus they are now the reservoirs of the disease, and the apparent breeders of these new and more powerful variants. Of course, western countries are the source of many things which have been causing damage to the greater world.

It has been clear for awhile that the covid virus was an artificial creation. The only discussion among any halfway serious people has been whether it was released by accident or purposely. This discussion has been rigorously suppressed in most forums.

It is also coming clear that the new and more transmissible variants are also artificial creations. This should not be a difficult concept; the “gain of function” research going on in various labs around the world has been a cause of concern for awhile. It is well known that the American military and deep state are maintaining a large network of biowar research labs in odd places in the world.

However, the most worrisome thing is simply in the way in which many members of the global elite talk about the rest of the human race. They do so quite openly, referring to us all as a virus on the planet. The earth’s population needs to be sharply reduced because we are too ‘ingenious’, and that is a problem.

Some of these people have bragged about having prevented “half a billion births” over an unspecified time span. Aid agencies they control have been chased out of countries after being caught doctoring vaccines with sterilizing drugs. Some of them control and fund the World Health Organization (WHO) and other institutions, which should be under public control, with public funding.

The home of these kinds of people are western countries; the “golden tenth” of the planet. The west is now losing control of the rest of the world and becoming isolated. It is beginning a sharp economic decline.

The threat to the world from artificial diseases will not end until there is political change in western countries. The private control of biomedical research must end and it must be placed under strict control. “Gain of function” research, deliberately creating more dangerous viruses, has no useful purpose and must end.

There is no scientific way out of the rogue viruses problem. Science is the problem in this case; especially its use by people with malign intentions. Attempts at quick scientific/technical fixes for covid has made things worse; for example, by making the virus more resistant to vaccines.

The only solution for The Virus is for people all over the world to change the way they do things. This is slowly being done in most parts of the world. This is not happening much yet in western countries, so rigorously dominated by oligarchic capitalism.

Serious political change must occur in these countries so as to end, not just covid, but other western based problems which are harming people all over the world. These western oligarchies are very dogmatic and militant. Necessary change in these countries, including in Canada, will come only through a great upheaval.

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The needed change is definitely not going to come about through naive and half baked activism, or any gradualist approach. It will come first of all, from a breakdown of these societies, which is coming. Covid is helping it along.

I have been involved in various forms of activism during my life. I have largely given up on that. All the important problems are the result of the kind of political and economic systems we live in and will not be resolved without a thorough shakeup of institutions in the western countries.

There are no simple institutional changes which will solve these problems. There is a great need among people to believe that there are. Usually they want to create some new institutions which they think will solve the problem.

Trying to explain to idealistic people that the change they want is not possible at the level at which they are trying to do it, is generally futile. I, and everyone I know with a sentinel or epistemic intelligence, gets quickly shut off as soon as we suggest a better approach. My most recent example has been my involvement with (WHN) World Health Network.

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Many people will perceive the following as me grousing about being bounced from yet another group for being ‘disruptive’. I cannot control people’s perceptions. It does not matter to me, because I have never seen any of these groups come to anything good.

WHN was for awhile a good place to hang out with on Slack and pick up interesting information and perspectives. It has become less useful as it has become ‘institutionalized’. I now find other, non institutional groups to be much more useful as the world under covid has evolved.

I had not engaged with WHN since I got into a snarkle with the groups “founder” over the Ukraine war. Other parties to this discussion were actually quite alarmed at his demeanor. This told me most of what I wanted to know about him.

I checked back into WHN recently, during a ‘new members’ orientation, to see what new ideas they have had. They seem only to be doubling down on ideas which are not working. The glorious founder talked about how old health institutions have failed.

Governments have failed to listen to public health advice, even from the groups appointed to advise them. New institutions are needed to more effectively protect the public. These institutions will take time to build up.

I asked the obvious question; how will these new institutions be more effective than the old ones in making government listen to them? This led only to the typical social media groupthink response. I got shut down. I checked out and will not bother with WHN any more.

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No one should lay any hope on WHN or any similar organization. It will be a wailing wall for people involved in public health policy who are being ignored and marginalized. Like most wailing wall outfits, it will impede the development of effective political movements for public health reform.

As covid is a political problem, political movements for public health reform are what is required. Our governments will never see the light; they must be made to feel the heat. The organized networks against health must be out organized and suppressed; their funds impounded, their operatives interned.

As long as ‘Brownstone Institute’ is allowed to operate, new institutes for public health will solve nothing. They will be neutralized as WHO has been, and as WHN seems to be becoming. Many web sites which were good earlier in the pandemic have now gone bad, promoting the ‘live with it’ mentality, though new and effective ones keep springing up.

I suspect that neutralization is what Mister WHN is really about. He seems to be trying to set WHN up as an umbrella organization for other, more local groups with a similar orientation. I keep running across him when I check out these groups.

This leads me to believe he is a power seeker or an agent for something. I have seen this pattern before. There is always this move to take control of new groups formed by disaffected people and to institutionalize them.

All these affiliate groups are in western countries. WHN does not have any coverage in the “90%” world outside the west. WHN and affiliates seem to be ‘wailing walls’ for people who formerly had some influence but are now frustrated at being ignored, and need ways to feel better about it.

Scientists, academics, and medical people tend to be very poor at political organizing and communication. Groups set up to challenge misgovernment tend to be taken over and neutralized unless they remain ad hoc and informal. Fighting covid means fighting the power structures which have an interest in there being no effective covid countermeasures.

Thus, fighting covid is a political fight. The people with the health related degrees can have only a supporting role. The new institutions which will better protect the public will happen when the political struggle is won.

Then we will first of all have governments committed to protecting the public. These can then build the institutions to carry out a true public health agenda. These are the prerequisites for eliminating infectious diseases.