{"id":15269,"date":"2023-05-24T15:10:52","date_gmt":"2023-05-24T14:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=15269"},"modified":"2023-05-24T15:10:52","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T14:10:52","slug":"covid-19-a-flawed-consensus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2023\/05\/24\/covid-19-a-flawed-consensus\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid-19: A Flawed Consensus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Covid is a nightmare from which we are still trying to awake. But whether the unprecedented response represents a singularity, or the beginning of an era of authoritarian capitalism, is unclear.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many of us remain incapable of distinguishing a reliable version of reality from lonely projections. Thankfully, telling insights arrive in a new publication: The Covid Consensus<\/em>: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor \u2013 A Critique from the Left<\/em><\/span>.<\/a> Authors Toby Green<\/a><\/span> (a professor of African history and culture) and Thomas Fazi<\/a><\/span> (a writer and journalist) navigate a path through the scientific thickets, to reveal the socio-economic and cultural factors that shaped the pandemic response.<\/p>\n

The temporary elevation of public health officials in many countries to positions of almost unfettered power led the Mozambique writer Pedrito Cambrao<\/a><\/span> to observe that \u2018the secular West has essentially turned science into a religion and scientists and healthcare workers into a priestly caste that cannot be challenged. (p.346)\u2019<\/p>\n

Media, new and old, brought unrelenting focus to a single challenge, while only rarely surveying accumulating evidence of collateral damage. As in Albert Camus\u2019s great novel, The Plague<\/em>: \u2018Rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.\u2019[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

Additionally, as I propose in this review, a \u201cleft-brained\u201d positivism appears to have informed the Covid Consensus that Green and Fazi define.<\/p>\n

Positivism is a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified, or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, but this can lead to a narrowing of perspective. Thus, long-standing challenges yielded to a singular metric, the waxing and waning of \u201cthe virus\u201d \u2013 as defined by the PCR test, a dubious diagnostic tool <\/a><\/span>that accounts for exaggerated mortality statistics<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

Positivism is identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions, according to Albert Camus, \u2018are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.\u2019<\/p>\n

Comte conceived of a hierarchical society that looks similar to what we witnessed over the course of the Covid Consensus:<\/p>\n

[S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience \u2018of action, of thought, and of feeling\u2019 would be given to the high priests who reign over everything.<\/em>[ii]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

In our time, technocratic rule relied on an underlying hysteria founded on a generally irrational fear of premature death, whipped up by social media in particular.<\/p>\n

Only once this dissipated \u2013 arguably when wide availability of rapid antigen tests revealed the widespread prevalence of basically harmless infections \u2013 was normality restored. As in Camus\u2019s novel The Plague<\/em>: \u2018Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.\u2019[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n

Questioning Authority<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The paucity of left-wing lockdown critiques, ignoring the plight of Global South, where more than one hundred million people fell below the poverty line (p.286), despite the minimal impact of the virus itself<\/a><\/span>, demonstrates an intellectual impoverishment in a broad-based movement that achieved extraordinary progress during the twentieth century, by questioning established authority<\/em><\/strong> in terms or wealth, gender and race.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the veteran Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris<\/a><\/span> observed that what went missing during the pandemic was an understanding that \u2018science and technology are not neutral\u2019.<\/p>\n

All too many who identify as left-wing, Green and Fazi argue failed to recognise, \u2018something much more profound than a straightforward conflict between left and right\u2019, but instead,<\/p>\n

a struggle at the heart of capitalism between the traditional press and business interests it has always represented (hotels, restaurants, high street shops) and the new corporate giants which did not require such promotion<\/em>.<\/em> (p.19)
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

A sympathetic explanation might trace broad left-wing approval for what were ineffectual lockdowns<\/a><\/span> to the accompanying state largesse. Below the surface, however, a huge transfer of wealth occurred to billionaire owners of giant corporations. Thus, the ten richest men in the world doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, <\/a><\/span>while supports to workers proved transient, and were based on unsustainable quantitative easing, which has, predictably, given way to inflation.<\/p>\n

Through effective control over online content, including outright censorship, and regulatory capture \u2013\u00a0including of the WHO<\/a><\/span> \u2013 the corporate giants successfully narrowed the Overton Window<\/a><\/span> of acceptable discourse. Dissenters from a dominant narrative were stigmatised as far-right, libertarian or conspiracy theorists.<\/p>\n

Importantly, statements of President Donald Trump were weaponised by architects of the Consensus. Green and Fazi contend that it was \u2018no longer possible for left-leaning progressives to question \u2018the science\u2019 since that is what Trump had done. (p.78)\u2019<\/p>\n

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A "strawman" conspiracy theorist appears to have been developed, especially by so-called fact checkers, to deter valid journalistic enquiry during the pandemic.https:\/\/t.co\/IvMv3c76Nw<\/a>@broadsheet_ie<\/a> @BowesChay<\/a> @PD03662439<\/a> @ciarasidine<\/a> @LiamDeegan3<\/a> @WhistleIRL<\/a> @FutureVisions5<\/a><\/p>\n

— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) February 12, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n