I refuse to use the idiotic phrase ‘post COVID’. A virus with a 98% survivability and that hasn’t infected the majority of people simply isn’t a turning point in world history. That it has been used as an excuse for totalitarian and authoritarian measures directed against the free people of the world might well be a turning point – the virus itself is not.

Australia has gone full totalitarian – which begs the question of why the heck we are assisting ANY part of their nuclear submarine program. Why should we treat Australia as a trusted ally while its acting like the Soviet Union – but with nicer gulags?

Oh right, Biden.

The supposed election of a complete incompetent somehow makes his insane policies okay – not. US foreign policy has always had its ups and downs – the people we put in the driver’s seat are human, after all – but it has been remarkably consistent despite changing administrations. Biden has thrown a monkey wrench (a spanner to you Brits) into that and it will have decades of repercussions – but tolerating Australia’s sudden lurch toward fascism shouldn’t be one of them.

Oh, right. Biden.

Back home – and really across most of the free world except for Sweden – people are talking hopefully about the future when lockdowns and mask mandates will be a thing of the past. Political leaders, on the other hand, are making very different pronouncements. We tried lockdowns and mask mandates – vaccine mandates, anyone?

The vaccines that governments worldwide threw billions into are beginning to fail and fail hard. It’s really stupid to get mad at the ‘vaccine hesitant’ when the majority of hospitalizations are among those who have been vaccinated. Evidently, a vaccine that is only effective for about six months doesn’t eradicate a disease.

Which we knew well before anyone outside China knew what a Wuhan was (admit it, you thought it was probably a dumpling). Literally, in the ‘it is a literal fact’ sense of ‘literally’, epidemiologists, public health and infectious disease doctors ALL knew that you couldn’t just vaccinate away a respiratory illness – and even to get it to nominal prevalence would require vaccines with a great deal of long term efficacy. Jenner’s work bore fruit in the late 1790’s – small pox wasn’t declared eradicated until 1980 (three years after the last wild case). And small pox remains the only disease ever eradicated by any means.

So no, no one who knew anything about disease control or epidemiology believed that a vaccine was a panacea. Good public health policy should have pursued both a vaccine AND prophylactic / presumptive treatment. Presumptive treatment is when a person who has been in contact with the disease but is not testing positive is given treatment – this is done because of the incubation period when the person is infected but doesn’t have enough virus or bacteria present to get a positive test (this varies greatly by disease). A treated person is unlikely to go on to develop symptoms or to transmit the disease.

You will notice that no one did that. All our proverbial eggs went in the vaccine basket – and yes, a LOT of people who knew better DID speak out. None of them were invited on CNN and a number were disinvited to YouTube.

When you are tossing around trillions of dollars it’s more than possible to do both things at once. The policy choices were being made by politicians who were advised by ‘public health officials’ – mostly career administrators who had MD after their names. Some of these guys are really good and really care about their work – they weren’t invited to the party, on CNN or anywhere else where good advice might get in the way of bad politics.

Some politicians legitimately followed what they thought was the best policy based on the advice they were getting from people who spent the last three decades pushing paper from pile A to pile B (oh heck yeah, I’m biased – personal experience does that sometimes). Some politicians were just doing ANYTHING so it looked good to the public and they didn’t get the political flak from a deadly pandemic – that never truly materialized (the prevalence and the death toll – as tragic as the latter is – don’t warrant the title). And then we had the self serving little weasels that didn’t want to let a good crisis go to waste.

You all know the result, increasingly draconian policies: lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Look up you favorite graph of the number of cases – do you see any sudden drops? No, just a bell curve, maybe a little sharp on the back side but that is exactly what we expect when a respiratory disease is running into summer. There was never the sharp telltale decline of an effective disease intervention. The C19 graphs pretty much look like textbook graphs of influenza cycles – higher initial numbers due to the novelty of C19 but otherwise nothing at all to indicate that all the policies implemented worked – or that any of them EVER worked.

The media highlighted every spike in a state that wasn’t sabotaging its own economy and only covered the greater spikes in Democrat controlled states after they were too large to ignore. This was just stupid – those states also have the largest urban areas and the highest population densities so they are exactly where we expected to see the highest numbers.

It’s just that the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of cases of the earliest 2019/2020 projections didn’t come close to fruition. That meant that the higher numbers weren’t necessarily as expected AFTER interventions were in place – which lead to the conclusion that the lockdowns, et cetera, weren’t actually working – and that little fact wasn’t one the legacy media wanted anyone to notice. Politicians just kept saying we had to do this stuff – and no one bothered to look at the efficacy of these interventions. Well, no one who was willing to admit that the interventions weren’t working.

Some idiot will complain that I’m antivaccine or that I don’t believe Covid is a real virus. So let’s get it over with. Vaccines do have their place and those in high risk groups should be vaccinated unless their doctor says otherwise. Covid is a real virus and for those who have severe reactions to it, it is a deadly virus.

But those two facts don’t contradict or disprove a thing I’ve said. From a public health policy standpoint this entire set of interventions have been a fiasco. They don’t work well enough to curtail spread nor do the vaccines prevent infection well enough to prevent hospitalization in many vulnerable patients. With no presumptive treatment, contact tracing is a useless exercise. With no highly effective clinical treatments the disease is killing people that would otherwise have been saved by those treatments.

And yes, if you can get a vaccine in under a year, you can get a treatment in that time, too. In fact, there are treatments – it’s just not curative ones as yet. That’s where we should be focusing our policy efforts – not on mandating minimally effective vaccines but on finding real, curative and EFFECTIVE treatments.

So what’s a post authoritarian world look like? Pretty much like the pre-authoritarian one – only with a lot of politicians and officials out of jobs and a large number of them facing trials.

Little wonder they’d rather mandate vaccines.