Sacrificing Goats
How can we be compelled to take action when we have no idea what we are doing...? A retrospective synopsis of a public health catastrophe.
“Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What does the scientist have to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!”
- Isaac Asimov
Of all the many misguided positions taken up in response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, I sympathise most with the claim that ‘action was required to prevent people dying’. As with so many other stances on this debacle, it perches upon a nest of errors. But it has the redeeming feature of incorporating a worthwhile principle: that we should act to reduce deaths when we can. What is obfuscated in this passion for acting are the two questions that actually matter - whether taking action was justified, and which actions might have reduced mortality. For I presume nobody would doubt, as a patently absurd ‘for instance’, that the appropriate actions didn’t include sacrificing a goat to appease this coronavirus.
It is far from clear that the necessity of taking action was ever established, except in the disturbing sense that terror was intentionally fostered, and fear demands abatement. Public health officials, influenced by the US Department of Defence, blatantly disregarded the long-standing principle that inducing panic is the worst course of action in an emergency. This in itself not only reinforced the impression that there was a major crisis, but also that it represented an unprecedented danger, one worthy of idle comparison to wartime. Reporters, having long since parted company from any commitment to the truth, carried water for authoritarian rhetoric whilst steadfastly avoiding any of the essential context, such as presenting COVID-19 deaths against other causes of deaths, or indeed against ‘all cause mortality’, since to do so would have popped this carefully cultivated bubble of dread.
In the 1957 and 1968 European influenza epidemics, well-informed citizens took of their own volition acts of caution that in 2020 were bizarrely deemed necessary for governments to hastily mandate and police to ruthlessly enforce. Yet oddly, while comparisons between the rate of fatalities consequent to infection show that these older viruses were slightly deadlier, the all cause mortality data for affected nations left absolutely no trace of their passing. This is not so for the SARS-CoV-2 incident. There are two viable interpretations: that our civilisation is no longer in any serious danger from respiratory epidemics, or that the surge of mortality during the years 2020 and 2021 can be attributed to the actions taken rather than the infection itself. Both these perspectives are strictly forbidden.
The existing ‘pandemic plans’ (formed in the sober absence of panic) rested upon the inevitability of some proportion of the vulnerable dying. If this sounds reckless, it was nowhere near as irresponsible as what was actually pursued. The early medical advice to treat the disease with ventilators was disastrously wrong, such that those places that ardently pursued this policy (such as New York) suffered their worst fatalities as a direct result. The later doctrine of ‘lockdown until vaccines’ utterly ignored all prior assessments warning of the enormous health damage (never mind the economic and social costs) associated with such a programme. As for the mRNA biotechnology, even on the basis of the data upon which these shots were hastily approved they ought never have been given to anyone younger than middle age, and ever-mounting evidence since suggests they shouldn’t have been administered at all.
Asimov warned that all pseudoscience was at its heart a security blanket. This is especially clear with community masking, a practice for which no reliable evidence of benefit existed, and for which zero suitable trials to establish efficacy were instituted by public health agencies. But at least the ineffectual masks were only roughly comparable to sacrificing a goat, which is to say, they merely reinforced the ill-considered panic. The other actions taken now look certain to have killed a great many people who, unlike those who died from the disease, were not otherwise at risk of dying. The greatest danger, however, was never from the disease or even the disastrous actions vainly pursued in an attempt to stop the elderly and infirm dying, like King Canute commanding the tide not to come in. It was that under cover of ‘public health’, scientific discourse would be supressed and democracy subverted. The vast and tragic irony of this catastrophe, for which humans are entirely responsible, is that far less harm would have been inflicted if all we had done was sacrifice goats.