In 2010, having advocated for veganism in 2002, George Monbiot wrote: ‘I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly.’
Having just read Simon Faerlie’s book Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Monbiot acknowledged serious environmental problems with the prevailing model of cattle production, but complained that pigs ‘have been forbidden in many parts of the rich world from doing what they do best: converting waste into meat.’
Surprisingly perhaps, while rhapsodising on the efficiency of giving ‘sterilised scraps to pigs,’ he expressed no concern for animal welfare in feedlot production.
‘It’s time we got stuck in,’ he concluded, no doubt to the anger of genuine vegans who refrain from consuming animal products for ethical reasons, not simply because laboratory grown meat is more efficient to produce.
By 2016, however, Monbiot had ‘[re-?]converted to veganism to reduce’ his ‘impact on the living world;’ while in 2017he asked: ‘What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?’
‘There are plenty to choose from,’ he opined, but one he believed ‘will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk.’
Whatever one’s views – vegan or meat-enthusiast – on this issue, it is fair to say that Monbiot has been ethically vacant and that his knowledge of “the science” isn’t always up to speed, even by his own admission.
Corbynista?
Monbiot displayed a similar inconsistency and lack of staying power in his attitude to Jeremy Corbyn. In 2015 he hailed the Islington MP Labour leadership candidate as ‘the curator of the future. His rivals are chasing an impossible dream.’
By the beginning of 2017, however, he was tweeting: ‘I was thrilled when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, but it has been one fiasco after another. I have now lost all faith.’
That was just months before Corbyn’s high water mark: the 2017 General Election when the Conservatives under Theresa May were reduced to a minority administration reliant on the support of the DUP.
At least the surprising result gave Monbiot pause for reflection. He mused later that year on a crushing defeat for the liberal media which had ‘created a hall of mirrors, in which like-minded people reflect and reproduce each other’s opinions.’
He noted that ‘broadcasters echo what the papers say, the papers pick up what the broadcasters say.’ and how a ‘narrow group of favoured pundits appear on the news programmes again and again.’
Covidiocy
Having acknowledged “a hall of mirrors” in the media’s treatment of Jeremy Corbyn it seems surprising he wouldn’t consider that this phenomenon may have operated during the pandemic. Instead, we found full-blooded commitment to lockdowns and all that followed. The nadir arrived with an argument for what amounts to scientific censorship.
On first glance, his proposal for a time delimited ‘outright ban on lies that endanger people’s lives’ might seem proportionate in an emergency period, but this proceeds a passage in which he refers to ‘people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta, who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic.’
“and Sunetra Gupta”!!!
For anyone who has not heard of her, apart from being a published novelist, Sunetra Gupta is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.
In March 2020, Gupta and her colleagues posted a paper challenging the modelling of Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson which persuaded many Western governments to adopt lockdowns. Gupta’s paper argued that prior coronavirus infections would diminish the spread and posited a far lower infection fatality rate. Its predictions proved optimistic, but Ferguson projected a minimum U.S. death toll of a ‘best case scenario’ of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario that also proved inaccurate. It is fair to say that epidemiology is not an exact science.
Monbiot’s disturbing article conflated Gupta’s more optimistic assessment – which brought vilification – with denial of human responsibility for climate change and the role of smoking in lung cancer.
He also slipped in an attack on the Great Barrington Declaration that Gupta co-authored, misrepresenting proposals for targeted protection as championing ‘herd immunity through mass infection with the help of discredited claims.’ Presumably Monbiot would have consigned that document to the bonfire too.
Covid Expertise
A new paper in the British Medical Journal by John Ionnidas reflects on the echo chamber – generated by social media in particular – in which Monbiot operates. Ionnidas compared the social media following of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration to its rival John Snow Memorandum that advocated for the opposing view of continuing with lockdowns.
He concluded that both included ‘many stellar scientists’, but that ‘JSM has far more powerful social media presence and this may have shaped the impression that it is the dominant narrative.’
This paper is unlikely to inform Monbiot’s understanding of “the science” of COVID-19, which has been reduced to a political ideology. Thus, anyone questioning the wisdom of lockdowns and universal vaccination – with recourse to draconian laws if necessary – is essentially adopting “conspiratorial” “right-wing” ideas.
Rather than dispassionately assess the merits of lockdowns or medications via cost benefit analyses – as a critical journalist or scientist ought to – Monbiot blithely argues that the ‘anti-vaccine movement is a highly effective channel for the penetration of far-right ideas into leftwing countercultures.’
Notably absent is an acknowledgement that he, George Monbiot, could possibly err in his evaluation of scientific or political questions.
Monbiot’s views on COVID-19 are consistent with opinions expressed across most of a liberal media (including the Guardian) which has received hundreds of millions of dollarsin financial support from the Gates Foundation, arguably manufacturing consent for the status quo.
Monbiot is hardly a gun for hire, but operating within the hall of mirrors he previously acknowledged has brought an intellectual meltdown.
His diminished credibility as a commentator, and tendency towards divisive political tribalism, should be of concern to environmentalists; who also ought to be wary of the steady encroachment of philanthrocapitalism.
Feature Image: Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles
In response to COVID-19: how are we to explain people drawing starkly differing conclusions from the same data? To understand this requires a search for context and motivation.
In the second series of the Duffer Brothers Stranger Things, set not uncoincidentally in 1984, there is a critical scene in which the story reaches its conclusion. Murray Bauman, the experienced investigator and sceptic is confronted by Nancy and Jonathan, two of the series’ teenage characters. They present him with conclusive proof of events and happenings, apparently shattering all the certainties he had operated with until that point.
Pouring a large measure of vodka to steady himself, Murray contemplates what he has just heard before explaining to Nancy: “I believe you, but that’s not the problem… you need them to believe you… your priests, your postman, your teachers, the world at large. They won’t believe any of this.” He then clasps his drink close to his chest as if it’s a lifeline.
“You heard the tape,” Nancy insists, clearly frustrated.
“That doesn’t matter”, snaps back Bauman as he waves the glass in the air. People want to be comfortable, and this truth is uncomfortable. He takes another gulp of Vodka and grimaces. But it gives him an idea.
“The story,” he says. “We moderate it, just like this drink here, we water down the vodka … We make it more tolerable.”
The events that have unfolded since March 2020, when the pandemic began in Europe and the U.S., have been extraordinary by any standards.
After over seventy years of peace in the West, during which wars were fought on foreign lands, and apart from the occasional lurch to the left or right there has been political stability, democratic norms, a generally fair justice system and continuous growth in prosperity and education.
Moreover, infectious diseases have been all but conquered with new drugs and treatments. Combined with improvements in public health and nutrition we have seen life expectancy grow year on year in what appears a steady pattern. We have grown accustomed to continuous improvement in the standard of living and security. After seventy years of improvement, we have come to expect this to continue.
After such a prolonged period of peace even the idea of warfare – or it not being safe to walk the streets – is almost beyond our comprehension. Never before has humanity in the West been so removed from the terrors of war, the tyranny of oppressive regimes and the ravages of natural disasters or famine.
We get up each day expecting it to be exactly like the last and for tomorrow to be the same. We cannot contemplate a world that is not exactly like that of today.
Yes, we will have technological changes and workplaces will change, but fundamentally we expect everything to remain the same. Footballers will be paid too much money; screen stars will fall in and out of love with each other; war will break out in some far-flung land and a natural disaster will occur somewhere only to be forgotten and replaced in our consciousness by another somewhere else. Meanwhile, what really concerns us is reaching the gym on time after work, getting the kids to school and catching up on the latest Netflix mini-series.
So, what happened when we woke up one morning to a potentially fatal virus that was not happening on the other side of the world? By early March we had watched with indifference what was happening in China, but now it was here in our community.
Cases, first slowly but then steadily, began rising until on the March 11th 2020 we had our first death. Now it was for real; now for the first time in seventy years there was an immediate threat to our health and even our way of life.
We approached the pandemic within the paradigm of our world of seventy years of increasing prosperity and health. We believed we were invincible, that our medical community would protect us and that all lives were saveable.
For any illness there must be a drug. If we don’t have it today, we will have it tomorrow. We just need sufficient money and political will and it will be discovered. So, we laid down the challenge to the pharmaceutical industry to produce a vaccine, and all we needed to do was give them enough time to develop it, locking down hard until then.
In so doing, we revealed an aversion to risk and a failure to critically analyse the extreme, and erroneous, warnings on fatalities that were issued by politicians and scientists; strangely our media and politicians accepted the doomsayers and ignored optimistic assessments.
The WHO definition of health, as not just the absence of disease, but the physical, mental and social wellbeing of the individual, was ditched. We would get back to that once we found the vaccine and the virus was eliminated. The pharma industry took up the challenge and we sat at home watching Netflix until they told us they were ready.
Alternative approaches that involved natural immunity, and isolating the vulnerable as the Great Barrington Declaration advised, or applying early treatment with a range of therapeutic drugs were dismissed in a concerted attack by public health officials, doctors, universities, politicians, the media and in particular social media.
There was to be one response and no challenge would be allowed. Civil rights to freedom of movement and to bodily integrity were trampled on with barely a whimper in the mainstream media.
Emergency powers not contemplated since World War II were ushered through by the government without so much as a peep from the opposition or the media. Lockdowns were for the greater good; while the fear and panic that had been sowed ensured almost complete compliance and a demonisation of dissenting voices.
Compelling stories from reliable sources tell us of the more than reasonable possibility of the virus originating in the lab in Wuhan, but we don’t want to know. Valid alternative early-stage treatments, such as Ivermectin, shown to work in other parts of the world are not merely dismissed, but actively smeared.
Early stage VAERS data on vaccine safety, particularly in young males, is ignored based on thresholds that would have previously stopped approval of a vaccine. The fact that the vaccines have not passed long term safety trials is conveniently ignored.
Questions about how wide a spectrum of immunity is covered and the length of time immunity lasts is also overlooked. Boosters are unquestioningly accepted and used off-label, although no research exists on the possible impact to both short and long term health, and overall immunity. Public health concerns about the impacts of lockdown on society and other illnesses are forgotten. There is only one train leaving town and you are either in the vaccine carriage, or you are on your own.
So why did all this happen; why have we thrown away hard won civil rights; why have we allowed ourselves to be coerced into taking drugs, without what would normally be considered informed consent?
Why aren’t we desperately trying to investigate the origins of the disease? Why have we dismissed any and all alternative treatments? Why was the Swedish approach derided, and now treated as if it did not happen?
I guess it’s a case of too much, too soon. We craved the comfort of our old world so much that we accepted without question the solution offered; we were told this was simply “following the science”, as if “the science” was settled.
Once embarked on that path there could be no turning back. There could be no dissenting voices. There could be no alternative science. Voices straying from the perordained plan must be crushed at whatever cost.
So here we are now nineteen months later and it still not politically correct to say that perhaps we got it wrong. Most people are so desperate to return to our safe world, that to believe that, would be to recognise that we have been misled and badly informed throughout that time.
It would mean that doctors, much of the scientific community, public health officials, universities and the media have been participants or active orchestrators of the worst medical and public health mismanagement in modern history. That’s too much to take on board, the brain can’t compute, it overheats, dismisses, and attacks those who even suggest it.
So how will the story unfold? There is surely no question, but that the truth will out. As time passes we will acknowledge the errors. Then we will rue how it was ever possible for such catastrophic mistakes to occur.
I suspect posterity will not look kindly in particular on a medical community who, with a few honourable exceptions, sat back and watched the policies unfold. Who kept their head down and took the easy road.
As a society we invest in doctors, educating them and offering them considerable rewards. In return we expect them to look after our interests. We expect them to speak out on our behalf when they see injustice. After after what has just happened it may be difficult to regain that trust.
I wonder when will the serious post-mortem begin? When will data, evidence and outcomes start driving policies; when will marketing mantras and outright propaganda be left behind?
Will the story need to be watered down to become more tolerable? How much water do we need to add to the vodka?
Confusion and fear are to be expected in novel situations where experience is limited; this should fade as understanding grows. Such is the natural cycle. When governments employ behavioural psychologists to induce fears in order to control and coerce the population, however, we have to question their motives and methods.
Initially we were advised that a zoonotic virus crossed species: horseshoe bat to pangolin and then to humans, via the food chain. Ghastly images were shown nightly of a range of exotic creatures that Chinese people – portrayed in somewhat xenophobic terms because of their, to us, foreign tastes – supposedly enjoy consuming. This outbreak witnessed sagacious, and wealthy, heads knowingly saying ‘I told you so.’
And apparently we can expect much more, and worse, in the future because of the ways in which we live and eat. Last year any question of whether it could have come from any other source was shot down as absurd by dubious fact checkers, and freighted with conspiracy theory fairy dust.
This despite Wuhan containing a level 4 BSL laboratory, and three members of its staff being hospitalised in November 2019 with coronavirus-like respiratory symptoms. Furthermore, this same laboratory was conducting gain of function research into coronaviruses, through a grant form EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation funded by U.S. National Institutes for Health. This type of research using viruses was banned by the Obama administration as being too risky.
Weaponising
This same research is not far removed from the process of weaponising a pathogenic organism. So why did NIH fund this laboratory to carry out this type of research, and who else knew of the potential risks, and incentives, for finding a novel infective agent and researching possible treatments and vaccines?
The first we in the West learnt about any of this came from the videos on TV and social media of people dropping dead in the street – in hindsight clearly not coronavirus cases – and the Chinese locking down it citizens. Next there was Italy, with coffins being carted away by military trucks.
These were all carefully orchestrated publicity stunts, but who was responsible? Who decided to broadcast uncritically these sensational images? The world took note, a pandemic was declared and governments around the world, almost uniformly, imposed harsh and unprecedented restrictive measures on their citizens.
In Britain the initial plan was to protect the vulnerable, through cocooning, whilst awaiting herd immunity in the young. But there followed a swift turnaround in the face of public outcry. In Europe only Sweden resisted the clamour to lockdown and was pilloried in the international media. ‘Sweden has become the World’s Cautionary Tale’ declared The New York Times in July, 2020.
The British government’s approach was strongly influenced by the epidemiological modelling of Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson, of previous forecasting fiascos. For example, he predicted three to four million deaths from Swine Flu in 2009, which ultimately resulted in less than 300,000 global fatalities.
Ferguson’s Imperial paper predicted 500,000deaths in the U.K. in an unmitigated scenario, and on March 20th, told the New York Times that the ‘best case outcome’ for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario. As of June, the U.S. has seen just over 600,000 deaths, and the U.K. 127,945, in circumstances where the attribution of death to Covid-19 is often deceptive.
Further doom and gloom laden scenarios was provided by Professor Christian Drosten, head of the institute of virology, Charite university hospital, Berlin, while alternate modelling provided by Professor Michael Levitt, Stanford University and Nobel laureate was ignored.
Dorsten’s main contribution to this story is his paper ‘Detection of 2019 novel corona virus by real time RT-PCR’ outlining the basis for the widely used Drosten-PCR test that has been criticised for multiple errors, and the haste with which it was published. This test is now the most widely used diagnostic test for Sars-CoV2.
This is despite its invenor Kary Mullis’s – Nobel laureate for chemistry for his work with PCR – stating unequivocally ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick’.
There are a number of criticisms of the Drosten method in that he reportedly developed it using partial genetic sequences provided by the Chinese, in conjunction with sequences from other corona viruses. Furthermore, the test which according to Kary Mullis is a quantitative test, is not reported to clinicians this way.
Instead a qualitative result ‘detected’ or ’not detected’ is reported without giving the cycle threshold, even after the WHO suggested physicians should be given this figure. The significance of the cycle threshold harks back to Kary Mullis’s ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick.’ Even Dr Anthony Fauci of the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has stated that at ct values of greater than 35 it is unlikely that any live virus is present in the patient.
Why then did Irish laboratories use ct values as high as 45? And why did we go from testing inpatients with PCR, knowing the false positive rate, to the community setting and especially the asymptomatic, given asymptomatics are often ‘false positives’, leading to an inflated ‘case’ count.
One has to wonder if the state’s spending of an estimated €400 million on PCR testing has been a case of noses in the trough not wanting to avoid the public smelling the coffee. Who were the people with vested or conflicted interests in this issue?
Churchillian Speeches
Most Western governments, including Australia and New Zealand, paraded their respective Prime Ministers before the cameras to make speeches of Churchillian gravity, implicitly likening the threat of Sars-CoV2 to World War II. Leo Varadkar even paraphrased Churchill in his first speech to the nation -’never will so many ask so much of so few,’ before imposing unprecedented draconian lockdown measures, based on fear.
Along the way we have heard words of caution from notable academics including Stanford Professors John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya, as well as Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University. But these voices were hardly ever heard on Irish mainstream media.
These authorities cautioned that measures would disproportionately hurt the poor and vulnerable; that severe illness was mainly confined to a recognisable cohort, and that there was no evidence for the efficacy of lockdown measures.
Nobody listened. Instead the government closed schools, prevented people from earning a living, stopped all cultural and sporting activity, prohibited religious worship and confined travel to within five kilometres of home.
For months elderly people languished alone in nursing homes and hospitals, some dying alone; women gave birth without their partners; funeral rites were severely curtailed, as basic civil rights were completely ignored in response to an illness with an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.05% for anyone under the age of seventy years.
Every night the state broadcaster became the government’s harbinger of doom with the recitation of nightly death tolls. What purpose other than ratcheting up of fear did this serve?
Through the diligent questioning of Michael McNamara TD, however, we know that the reported mortality figures included anyone testing positive in the previous twenty-eight days with a PCR test, no matter what their underlying condition. Deaths unassociated with Sars-CoV2 were obviously irrelevant.
They turned out to be very relevant as the CSO annual death figures of 6.4 per 1000, which were little different to previous years, and even less than 2013. Why then, when death figures dropped, did reporting switch to the spurious concept of ‘cases’, defined by a positive PCR test? Why did the Irish government shamefully enlist the services of RTE in terrifying the nation, and why did the state broadcaster acquiesce? Answers on the back of a postcard…
Disproportionately Affected
The message ‘we are all in this together’ was a big lie. The disease disproportionately killed people over the age of eighty, especially those in nursing homes, many of whom were needlessly infected after being transferred to hospitals with testing withdrawn at the height of the pandemic in spring 2020. The obese, those with diabetes, chronic heart and lung diseases are also disproportionately affected.
Some people find it hard to believe that when Care Home residents were in the greatest need for testing and diagnostics, testing service was pulled from the entire sector for 3 weeks, to preserve test supplies for the general public. Most died in Homes many/most were not tested. pic.twitter.com/EFi8XsRqER
These pre-existing morbidities are more prevalent among lower socioeconomic groups in society. So we were clearly never all in this together.
Civil servants, including politicians and the medical profession, those working in IT and for media corporations, could easily work from home, but nearly half a million people had to stop work for the duration, especially those in the tourism and hospitality sectors. These are mainly young people, and like children, most would only have been mildly effected by the virus. So why were they forced to suffer unnecessarily?
Moreover, why did small retail outlets have to close for months on end, while off licenses and fast food chains were deemed essential services?!
States of Fear
The kind of Propaganda devised by Sigmund Freud’s grandson Edward Bernays who infamously made it fashionable for women to smoke, was evident in the government’s manipulation of the figures, and the media’s delivery. Bernays wrote in Propaganda (1928) ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.’
A host of celebrity scientists appeared, many with Conor McGregor levels of empathy, only better elocution, a gentler demeanour and less tattoos. Trite experiments were undertaken on popular TV shows, where we found dour funereal forecasts from infectious disease experts, who were invariably wrong in their predictions, and inane squeaking from a misplaced neuroscience.
This is a brilliant blog post which should be ready by every journalist covering Covid-19. It takes aim at several ubiquitous experts who have made wildly inaccurate predictions and who have not been held to account for those predictions. https://t.co/1QgEahaxfH
All of these ‘experts’ sang in unison. Dissenting voices were heard briefly and infrequently. Some lost their jobs merely for disagreeing with the bull-in-a-china shop approach taken by the HSE/NPHET/government.
In her new book States of Fear Laura Dodsworth outlines how the UK government used behavioural psychologists, probably via their Nudge unit, to control the population through the deployment of carefully selected ‘experts’ and repetitive messaging on news broadcasting.
This was substantiated in the recent testimonies by Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson. ISAG were also familiar with scaremongering techniques, as intercepted emails highlight their tactic of targeting and discrediting individuals, and keeping fear ramped up as a tool in their ZeroCovid campaign.
To quote Bernays again ‘there are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realised to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scene.’
Using this sinister playbook, between them NPHET, ISAG and the government managed to sow a level of fear, suspicion and division in society that may take years to unravel.
Flatten the Curve?
Despite all the hype around flattening the curve to save the health service at the beginning of the pandemic, and the use of draconian measures to do so, alas nothing was done to treat patients at home.
Several readily available, cheap and relatively safe products, were hypothesised to have positive benefits in the early stages of a Sars-CoV2 infection, but there were systematic efforts to steer physicians away from these.
The ICGP guidelines for GPs on the treatment of early Sars-CoV2 amounts to do nothing, and wait for patients to get better, or if they fall really ill send them into hospital. Some doctors in the USA lost their licenses for prescribing these medications, and others in Ireland faced censure by the Medical Council.
According to physicians like Peter McCullough, Professor of Medicine at Baylor University, Texas in conjunction with AAPS (The association of American Physicians and Surgeons), and separately Dr Pierre Kory of FLCCCA (Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance) Sars-CoV2 was empirically treatable, especially in that first week before the patient became very unwell.
https://vimeo.com/560523610
So, despite a concerted effort to vilify them, they treated their patients. Why did Irish GPs, save for a few, fail to do so?
In doing nothing did many patients needlessly died? With our widespread application of lockdowns and our disregard for focused protection measures, as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration (which has garnered 850,000 signatures, including 43,000 from medical practitioners) coupled with our refusal to at least try and treat patients, have we done a great disservice to our patients?
Perhaps one of the main reasons for the concerted campaign to ensure that no other treatments were deemed suitable for the early treatment or prevention of the disease was the FDA criterion for an EUA (emergency use exemption). No such exemption would have been granted to a product in such an early stage of development, without animal or human study data, except in what are deemed to be extraordinary circumstances.
€26 billion – the amount Pfizer expects to earn this year after producing the first Covid-19 vaccine – might buy a lot of scientific validation, and political influence.
The undue haste with which these vaccines have been rolled out demands sceptical enquiry, especially in relation to two particular cohorts: pregnant women and children. As clinicians we generally exercise extreme caution in these groups.
So why is it that for a condition with an overall IFR of 0.15% have we discarded this caution? Linking vaccination status to the right to work, travel, attend cultural and sporting events is divisive, coercing those who wish to exercise a degree of caution and/or exercise autonomy over their health.
Without the questionable concept that is asymptomatic spread, there is no justification for vaccinating anyone in low risk groups, and certainly no justification for using bully tactics.
Despite all these glaring questions, there has been a deafening silence from the medical profession in Ireland, and those that have spoken out have been quickly silenced. Is this how we are going to deal with complex issues in future? Adopting binary, categorical approaches without nuance leaves no room for debate.
RTE have paid lip service to the notion of an informed debate, hosting Martin Feeley and then later pitching Professors John Lee and Sunetra Gupta into debate with hand-picked stalwarts.
Moneybags
In Ireland today scepticism is viewed as a contagion to be eradicated, with compliance seen as the perfect state of health. As a nation we must ask: why have so many been so quiet; why has fear replaced reason, and groupthink taken over once again?
One must question the role of doctors ‘stuffing their mouths with gold’ as Aneurin Bevan put it in relation to British doctors at the inception of the NHS. A quick look at the 2019 PCRS payments to GPs shows a healthy €85 million in government expenditure. This, however, mushroomed to over €200 million for the same period in 2020.
Some were clearly making a killing during the pandemic. And whose idea was it to advise doctors not to see patients face-to-face during the pandemic? If a doctor won’t see you who will?
Further to this windfall will be vaccination payments at a cool €60 per patient. Is it any wonder GPs want everyone vaccinated?
There may even be boosters for variants required for everyone on the planet! The media should be asking the question: who is benefitting from this Monty-Pythonesque situation?
Certainly any government with the slightest authoritarian bent, which it transpires appears to be most Western ‘democracies’. It really is worrying how little opposition there has been to Chinese-inspired lockdowns, with opponents dismissed as a far right fringe – even by the apparently left-wing opposition – despite the obvious damage these policies have done to the poorest, who were also least protected by the measures.
Why did so many European governments fall into line so quickly, when even a passing familiarity with EU politics would indicate that it can take years for Member States to agree on the number of legs that the average cow possesses?
If you intuit that something is just not right, and baulk at jingoistic phrases like ‘the new normal’ and ‘build back better’ ask yourself cui bono or ‘who benefits’, and don’t let the fear of being labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ dissuade you from asking reasonable questions.
