Over at Kiwiblog I see that one of the “experts” who has been advising the government on how to deal with the Chinese Lung Rot virus, is now saying that the nation would be taking huge risks if it went back to the Green stage of the Traffic Light system:

An epidemiologist is questioning if New Zealand should ever go to the green COVID-19 traffic light setting, saying it may be too risky. … Dr Jackson, from the University of Auckland, said New Zealand got its timing perfect – but told Morning Report people to remember “this is the worst public health crisis in 100 years”.

“I’m not sure we should ever go green,” he said. “It’s all about safety.”

Well, yes. If life is all about safety, and moreover safety defined purely in terms of one disease, then his conclusions are entirely logical and rational.

However, there are other factors involved, as he is about to find out from our heart disease and cancer treatment issues caused by C-19 restrictions, which could certainly turn out to be the ““worst public health crisis in 100 years”. Aside from those utilitarian concerns, life and living is about a lot more than just breathing.

Dr Jackson strikes me as a rather typical type among science PhD’s in that he appears to have Aspergers syndrome or some other shade of the spectrum of autism. Autistic people can be very smart. In fact they often are. But they’re also fanatics unable to judge between competing factors. It’s also one of the reasons why very smart people so often turn out not to be very wise.

I’d put Professor Baker in the same group. Back in September he said we may never be going back to normal, “with mask wearing becoming a feature of our lives for the foreseeable future.”

The thing is that Baker has been on this track for some time. Here he is in 2017 with a joint paper looking at the costs and benefits of border closures and challenging the then accepted view that closures have a limited role, if any, in preventing the spread of infectious diseases: Protecting an island nation from extreme pandemic threats: Proof-of-concept around border closure as an intervention

Here he is in 2015, arguing that Kiwis underestimate the seriousness of the flu, and that our actual flu deaths are not 300-700 per year but possibly as high as 10,000 per year if testing was done correctly.

In both cases C-19 has been the dream disease. Baker got his border closures and still has them, despite Delta and now Omicron “leaking” through them, which was actually the basis of public health (and the WHO) groups argument that they didn’t work. As regards the number of deaths detected via better testing, if we ran the super-sensitive PCR test against normal flu patients – as we have for C-19 – then we would very likely have 10,000 flu deaths per year.

Such numbers would thus justify the same sort of vaccine mandates for the flu that we’ve seen for C-19. That, along with mask mandates and lockdowns, would be an equally logical and rational conclusion, as opposed to the uncontrolled and messy optional system we’ve had for decades with flu vaccines.

Because Public Health and Safety – and autistic fanatics.

On the other hand there are some epidemiologists who have opposed a lot of this crap from the start, and until this event were regarded as experts in the field and provided a public voice. So Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health has bluntly said:

“Overall, I’d say that we’ve had a pandemic of fear. And fear has affected almost everybody, whereas the infection has affected relatively few. By and large, it’s been a very selected pandemic, and predictable. It was very distinguished between young versus old, healthy versus chronic disease people. So we quickly learned who was at risk for the pandemic and who wasn’t.

However, the fear was manufactured for everybody. And that’s what’s characterized the whole pandemic is that degree of fear and people’s response to the fear.”

Risch has authored more than 300 original peer-reviewed publications and was formerly a member of the board of editors for the American Journal of Epidemiology. But as I pointed out in this article,
Lockdowns: a nightmare of imagination, that makes no difference in our Lysenkoist times:

Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—“the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,”

It would be fascinating to see a TV debate between Baker and either Risch or Jackson (or both) on this and other topics around the Chinese virus – like giving treatments once you’ve caught the disease, an approach which has been largely ignored in case it damaged the drive for 90% vaccinations. In this too, history repeats itself:

Fauci told AIDS sufferers and their doctors not to use Bactrim, a cheap off-patent pair of antibiotics, as prophylaxis against PCP, a bacterial pneumonia that was killing AIDS patients with damaged immune systems by the score, despite knowing since the late 1970s that it worked to prevent PCP in Leukemia patients who, like AIDS patients, had wrecked immune systems.  Roughly thirty thousand Americans were shoved in the hole due to PCP infections during the years in which Fauci maintained that it should NOT be used.

Incredibly that was not Fauci’s only mistake on AIDS; earlier he’d publicly implied, in a prominent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that there could be casual household transmission of HIV.

I chose the title of this post from the book by Kazuo Ishiguro, which has been turned into a movie. I have a well-tumbed copy of his wonderful, elegiac early novel, An Artist Of The Floating World, which traces the bittersweet history of a Japanese artist living through the 1930’s to the 1950’s: plot-spoiler, he’s not a resistant hero and you as the reader begin to get a very different impression of him than from the narrative of his memories.

But I’ve not read Never Let Me Go or seen the 2010 film, because what I do know of it sounds too depressing – especially now. In an alternative history of Britain from the 70’s to the 90’s we are introduced to a world where people’s lives have been extended beyond 100 years. The story is narrated by a woman who is an orphan, raised with other orphaned kids in boarding schools and then sent to live in cottages on a farm:

One day, a new teacher, Miss Lucy, quietly informs the students of their fate: they are destined to be organ donors and will die, or “complete”, in their early adulthood.
…
They also hear rumours of the possibility of “deferral”—a temporary reprieve from organ donation for donors who are in love and can prove it. Tommy becomes convinced that The Gallery at Hailsham was intended to look into their souls and that artwork sent to The Gallery will be able to confirm true love where it is present.
…
In 1994, Kathy is still working as a carer, and has watched many donors gradually die as their organs are harvested. Kathy, who has not seen Ruth or Tommy since the farm, discovers Ruth, frail after two donations.
…
Two teachers tell them that there is no such thing as deferral, and that Tommy’s artworks will not help him. They explain that the purpose of The Gallery was not to look into their souls but to investigate whether the “all but human” donors even have souls at all; Hailsham was the last place to consider the ethical implications of the donor scheme. As they take in the news on their return journey, Tommy explodes in rage and frustration, and they cling to each other in grief.

Tommy completes his final donation and dies on the operating table, leaving Kathy alone, waiting for her donations to begin in a month. Contemplating the ruins of her childhood, she asks in voice-over whether her fate is really any different from the people who will receive her organs; after all, “we all complete”.

As I sit here contemplating the upcoming vaccination campaign for kids aged 5-12 I wonder if our children and grandchildren will be so accepting of what has been done to their childhoods so that their grandparents can be avoid being “complete”?