The Covid End-Game

The balance of forces at the fag-end of the Covid era

And we all thought Wagner’s The Ring Cycle was overly long!  Well, the Great Covid Show still ain’t all over yet because the Fat Lady in the tragi-comic Covid opera is still singing, for getting on to nearly three years now, thus knocking Herr Wagner’s interminable opus into a cocked hat for tedious length.  The loud-voiced histrionic Covid divas straight from public health central casting are still warbling away, despite growing audience fatigue.

Thankfully, however, they are on half-lung power and reduced to reprising ever-feebler versions of the original show’s greatest hits.  There are no full-dress lockdown encores in store whilst the continuing medley of mask mandates and vaxx variations are not quite hitting the heights of the earlier shows.  More and more of the audience have stopped listening to any of it and are treating the Covid arias as white noise whilst shifting restlessly in their seats and looking anxiously at their watches.

To the dismay of the impresarios who brought us the original Covid blockbuster, there is no new production clamouring to take its place.  Monkeypox (Covid - the Sequel) has been a box-office flop - there is no dramatic death-ticker to keep the audience gripped with tension whilst the casting has failed to generate wider engagement beyond the special interest group found in what the US CDC defines (coyly, to avoid charges of homophobia) as “spaces like back rooms, saunas, sex clubs, or private and public sex parties, where intimate, often anonymous sexual contact with multiple partners occurs”.

Whilst Ukraine the Brave! did open to a flurry of positive reviews, it, too, has delivered disappointing returns to the promoters (NATO Enterprises) as audiences appear unconvinced by the bona fides of the purported Good Guys whilst the sanctions surcharge on the price of a ticket is proving most unwelcome after the out-of-this-world cost of the Covid theatre season ticket.

The Mask lives on

Through the relative lull of the full social distancing orchestra, however, comes the annoying, single-note solo of The Mask like the ear-assaulting vuvuzela that ruined soccer a few World Cups ago.  The utterly useless and unhealthy mask is the now slightly shop-worn symbol of the power and dominance of the public health caste, a self-important clique of technocrats who, faster than a democratic debate, more powerful than an elected government and able to leap a clinical trial protocol in a single ‘emergency’ bound, haven’t hesitated to act out their superhero fantasy when given half a chance by ‘Covid’.  The mask still remains the most visible reminder that ‘the pandemic is not over’, as the Lord Protectors from Public Health constantly remind us, and, thus, that their orders must continue to be obeyed without question. 

Yet, even the mask is struggling for oxygen (play-on-words intended) being largely confined to gigs for the health, aged care and disability ‘settings’.  Public transport, too, is deemed fair game for a mask mandate.  The notorious mass transit variant lurks there, don’t you know, targeting the bare-faced for whom a dozen minutes on a bus opens them up to imminent doom whereas they are safe to spend a dozen unmasked hours in shopping centres or offices and the like (amazingly adaptive, this new virus).  Something about transport must excite the mask mandaters because the airplane, too, has its own ‘virus of concern’ that must be defended against by a talismanic piece of cloth.  Truly, ‘Covid mask science’ moves in mysterious ways so just have faith in the Covid religion, peasants, and do as your Covid priests tell you.  And, if you still ‘get Covid’, well that’s just a ‘test’ of your faith.

For a somewhat muted reprise of past police-state glories, the Covid panjandrams in the state of South Australia are even deploying “compliance officers” from the Health Department to conduct spot-checks on buses, trams and trains to publicly shame any mask dissidents by ‘educating’ them on the wonders of the mask and handing them their blue badge of obedience.  I haven’t jousted with one of these goons yet but am tossing up between saying ‘Sorry, but I don’t do pseudoscience’, or ‘No thanks, I’m not a slave’, or ‘I’m not a trained seal’, or ‘I can’t hear what you’re saying – you’ll have to take your mask off’ – the Mexican stand-off option.  The ‘public health’ maniacs know that without the mask, there is no visible pandemic and all their authority and media fawning is gone.

Outside these limited precincts, however, the masketeers are in retreat.  The Covid authorities in South Australia have been reduced to pleadings and recommendations – all short of an actual ‘mandate’ - for retail, entertainment and educational spaces, urging business owners, venue managers and universities to voluntarily implement their own mask policies as a prerequisite for public access.  Well, lead balloons have gained more altitude than this foray into mask-mandating by stealth.  Only one of the state’s six higher education institutions has gone for it but everyone else has filed the ‘helpful’ advice in the bottom drawer.  Without the threat of fines, none but the fully brainwashed or terminally fearful are bothering with the wretched things.

Other Covid culture holdouts

Besides the mask, a few other facets of Covid culture still thrive in habitats favourable to the virus craziness.  Medical practices have been in the vanguard of the Covid frenzy and they are still waging a guerilla campaign against medical science.  Magazines have forever vanished from waiting rooms and pens are segregated into sanitized and used, whilst chairs are still spaced according to a made-up degree of separation.  Apparently, the medical profession still hasn’t got the memo that fomite (surface) transmission for a respiratory virus is non-existent, or that any respiratory virus/aerosol particle will circulate at will regardless of any magic metric of ‘social distancing’.  I hope the medical industry will get well again one day but we should never look at anything to do with health in the same uncritical light again – any medical practice that makes a song-and-dance about compulsory mask-wearing or showing a vaxx passport to enter its portals or any of the ‘social distancing’ palaver may as well be hanging a ‘we do voodoo science here!’ advertising shingle outside its premises.

Insane testing procedures, under the banal rubric of ‘health and safety protocols’, continue to decimate elite sporting teams for absolutely no reason at all as fit, healthy athletes are stood down because they ‘got Covid’ i.e. ‘tested positive’ with a test notorious for false positives, which can’t tell coronaviruses apart and which can not diagnose illness or infectiousness.

Junk results from positive tests also require workers to isolate from work and life – at their own expense, including any sick leave credits.  In South Australia, police officers will come calling unannounced to make sure such people do not leave their homes.

Medical freedom-fighters face persecution

AHPRA, the Australian government licensor for medical practitioners, still remains a danger to health professionals and their patients.  From the beginning of the Covid policy disaster, AHPRA has warned doctors and nurses that if they question any government public health directives on Covid, they will be deregistered and lose their license to practice.  If they publicly speak out against the lies and statistical flummery behind the engineered Covid panic, or the (cue hollow laughter) ‘safe and effective’ Covid vaccines, or the government’s bans on proven (but, crucially, vaccine-disqualifying) therapeutic treatments – well, then their practices will be dramatically raided by police pour encouragér les autres.

Despite many medical professionals being willingly enlisted in the Covid lunacy, the Australian government has effectively gagged the entire medical profession in order to ensure control of the government’s political narrative that there was a deadly pandemic on the loose and that all the government’s bat-droppings crazy policy responses to it were absolutely essential, saved countless lives and did no one any harm at all.

Yet, the great Covid retreat gathers pace

Elsewhere, however, many battalions of Covid stupidity and authoritarianism are in retreat.  The Covid authorities have decided, for political reasons, that the ‘emergency’ is largely over and they have dispensed with most of the pointless performative theatre.

Gone, for example, is contact tracing (and the associated farcical QR Code ‘sign-in’ ritual), a concept that was always utterly bonkers for a respiratory virus and which existed solely for showing that the authorities were doing something to ‘keep people safe’ (some of the now-demobilised contact-tracers have probably been redeployed to new fronts such as the aforementioned public transport mask ‘compliance officer’ squads where they can again feel important about themselves).

Vaxx passports have been largely abandoned in the general community and noisy Covid signage has largely disappeared.  Expensive failures like the Australian government’s ‘Covid Safe’ app that was supposed to tell you if you came within thirty paces of a diseased person, have been mothballed.

On the legal front, political pragmatism is starting to win out.  In the state of Victoria, which was the epicentre for violent medical authoritarianism and which holds the world record for the longest lockdown (262 days), people (including a 78-year-old pensioner nicked for ‘incitement’) who were arrested and jailed for opposing the unscientific, economy-destroying and freedom-killing restrictions of the state Labor government are quietly having their charges dropped in the run-up to the state election in November.  Not only would proceeding with the criminal cases make the government look bad for unleashing egregious police violence but the judicial process of ‘discovery’, when the government would have to reveal the scientific basis (or, rather, lack of it) for its lockdown and restrictions policies, would make the government look like the power-drunk, scientifically illiterate authoritarians they were.

Sizable out-of-court settlements (up to a million dollars) are also being quietly paid out as hush-money to a number of victims of police brutality (a news photographer who was pepper-sprayed in the face, a man who was head-slammed into the concrete, etc.) to also help ensure the electoral survival of the government at the polls (Labor leads with 59% of the vote but bad Covid-related PR could make the contest uncomfortably tighter for Labor).

Heroes of the Covid Resistance

It is non-compliance with the Covid Reich that has helped to turn the political tide.

The non-compliant include those few medical practitioners who obeyed their conscience and ethical principles instead of raw government power.  Dr. William Bray, for example, is a Queensland doctor who gave up his medical licence in order to expose the lies and deceit behind the Covid fraud and to warn the public of the dangers of the mRNA Covid ‘vaccines’.  He has gate-crashed the July national conference of the Australian Medical Association (the doctors’ guild) in Sydney, a confab which had featured the evil Covid lunatic, Anthony Fauci (‘America’s doctor’!), as an online guest (which shows just how much medical credibility the AMA has) and which was focused on such weighty, woke matters as ‘cultural safety’ and ‘gender equity’ as if the damage caused by the Covid vaccines, and government censorship of medical debate, were of no consequence to medical practitioners.

There are other, still practising, medical dissidents who have formed the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS) as a counter to the sell-out AMA and which is opposed to Covid censorship of the medical profession (the US has a sister organisation, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons).  These are green shoots that need nurturing in a profession that has failed its greatest ethical and scientific test yet.

Also on the trade union front in Australia, RED Unions (to which the AMPS is affiliated) has formed in opposition to the collaborationist union leadership which has (with the occasional exception of the miners’ and the seamen’s unions) been foursquare behind the government’s disastrous policy response that saw the unraveling of so many people’s worlds, including job loss from lockdowned businesses, harmful mask mandates for workers and deadly jab mandates.  The RED Unions group consists of thirteen trade unions, some of them pre-dating Covid, covering nurses, teachers, doctors, police officers and transport workers who are on the front-line of the no-jab-no-job mandates.

These rival unions have flown the workers’ rights (and human rights) flag for those employees faced with unwanted participation in forcible medical experimentation through the Covid jab as a condition of employment.  RED Unions claims 17,000 members and its membership dues are also lower than the traditional unions, partly because it does not funnel members’ dues via affiliation fees to the Labor Party (whose state governments have been directly responsible for no-jab-no-job mandates in their states).

A similar union movement, independent of government and bosses, exists in England, too, where Workers of England is a pole of attraction for those who are opposed to Covid vaxx passports and mandates in the workplace.  The Covid-compliant, woke Left has, of course, pilloried these new unions as not ‘proper’ trade unions and for being 'far right', the tiresome and now politically meaningless term of choice which the Covid Left always uses to disparage the freedom movement.

This is ironic, considering how the ‘proper’ trade union movement has climbed into bed with the lockdown/pharma junta and which went along with all of the job loss, wage-cutting furlough, the germ-collecting rag on the face, the forced jabbing and the spiraling inflation and interest rates from wasteful pandemic response spending which will be paid for by the working class.  Projection, I think the Freudians call it.

If the working class had had a more democratic, independent union movement, then much of the Covid nonsense would never have got the toe-hold it did amongst the working class.  As a (now retired) four-decade-long rank-and-file union activist and workplace rep, these rebel unions are another promising development – not just against Covid authoritarianism but for the future of a less bureaucratic, more member-controlled trade union movement.

In professional sport, the sole player in the Australian Rules football competition who held out against the jab coercion, the Carlton Blues’ Liam Jones, will return from premature retirement to play, unperforated, in the league whose bosses have now dropped their jab mandate which locker-room talk had revealed to be extremely unpopular amongst the players.  In the women’s semi-pro league, the one resistante, the Adelaide Crows’ Deni Varnhagen, will also return unpunctured (she is also waging a legal battle against the jab mandate in her profession of nursing).  Unlike many of their jabbed colleagues, they can truly say, with Edith Piaf, je ne regrette rien.

Finally, we should honour those few, way too few, amongst the head-bashing, rubber-bullet-firing police who, during the authoritarian derangement which overtook the country, quit their jobs in disgust at what they were ordered to do on behalf of the quasi-fascistic Safety Regime.

And last, for giving great heart to everyone who did not comply with the jab tyranny – Novak Djokovic, my new, all-time favourite tennis player who has remained unjabbed at some professional cost.  Ace tennis player.  Ace human rights icon.

The future of the freedom movement

For the freedom movement, the prime focus must be on the jab now – the unethical no-jab-no-job mandates that still exist (Australia’s two main supermarkets, for example, will still not employ the unjabbed), the federal government’s continuing propaganda for more boosters and the official cover-up of the damage that has already been done to so many Australians and which may lie as yet undetected in all who have been jabbed.

There are mounting signals of historically unprecedented vaccine damage from official adverse reaction databases (a pharmacovigilance tool specifically designed by past medical authorities to detect any safety signals during pharmaceutical product rollouts), all cause deaths databases showing up to 20% higher than normal mortality congruent with the jab rollout, data from insurers (life, medical and disability), reports from pathologists and funeral directors, the lengthening list of athletes falling like flies, personal anecdotes from family and friends, the outbreak of ‘sudden’, ‘unexpected’ deaths in fit, healthy people, and studies like the following which finds that, following the Pfizer mRNA jab, almost a third of teenagers in Thailand aged 13-18, none of whom had any pre-existing illnesses, suffered non-trivial cardiovascular adverse effects manifesting as changes in their cardiac health bio-markers, including the usual suspects of pericarditis and myocarditis, but also tachycardia, palpitation and heart inflammation (most of these were sub-clinical but such injuries usually have poor long-term prognoses - there is no such thing as a ‘mild’ heart injury going forward).

Yet, medical authorities, jab-spruiking politicians and the vaxx agit-prop media have turned a collective blind eye to all this vaxx damage because any acknowledgement of it would make all of them look bad due to their fevered promotion of liability-free, hastily produced jabs as the path out the ‘pandemic’ that they conjured up out of thin evidence.  Those who have been jabbed, either against their will or who have been socially engineered (i.e. brainwashed) into it, and who have suffered harm because of it, will be the necessary allies of those who have refused to ever get on board the dangerous jab jalopy.

At a deeper level, however, the main issue that needs to be addressed is how our political culture has fundamentally changed, perhaps irretrievably, for the worse because of the ‘Covid’ policy debacle.  Australia, like much of the rest of the world, has just been put through a test of our tolerance for despotism.  It proved to be a very low bar, indeed.  Scared witless, we were putty in the hands of self-proclaimed saviors who abused the trust that too many people had placed in them.  Fear made nearly everyone surprisingly malleable, ready to hand over their body and their rights, their common sense and ethical principles, to a Fear Regime which sprang up overnight.

All those institutions (from both the left and right of politics, the corporate and state media, human rights groups, the medical profession, academia, businesses, the trade union leadership, etc.) that collaborated with this massive authoritarian assault on freedom and science need to have a good hard look at themselves.  We should be unsparing in our criticism of them for the Covid policy catastrophe they caused and we should redouble (or resurrect) our scepticism towards everything these elites have to say on all medical matters (not just Covid ‘vaccines’) - never take them at their word, read widely (but with discernment), suspend reflex dismissal of those they readily malign (like ‘anti-vaxxers’), keep an open-mind, think for yourself and take personal responsibility for your own health as much as you can, and always check for the corporate hand of Big Pharma in everything to do with your health.  You’ve only got the one body – treasure it and never hand it over to the state out of unthinking fear.

 “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”

For two terrible years, the balance of forces was almost wholly with the medical totalitarians.  It was a distressing era for all those who were not prepared to cede their intellectual integrity and bodily sovereignty, their basic humanity and critical thinking faculties.  Despite the recent pivot by political and medical-bureaucratic officialdom away from Covid hysteria with the repeal of many restrictions and a winding-down of pandemic theatre, it can still be depressing to reflect on what we may have permanently lost, how easily cowed our fellow citizens can be by elemental fear, and the battles that still need to be waged against the jabs and their ugly sister, the mask.

Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist intellectual and Italian Communist Party activist who was a ‘guest’ of Mussolini’s fascist prison system from 1926 to 1937, got it right on how to approach a seemingly unhopeful political situation with his strategic orientation of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”.  Gramsci popularised the phrase (borrowed from the leftwing French writer, Romain Rolland) to combine a grim, but realistic, analysis of the powerful authoritarian, fascist trends of the 1930s with a more optimistic, activist commitment to the potential for turning the tables.

Today, biomedical fascism still has a strong upper hand through jab mandates, masks, censorship, a tight rein over heterodox doctors, ideological reservoirs of popular acceptance of the virus hysteria and policy panic, ‘emergency’ powers rolled into normal legislation, and entrenched Big Pharma corruption of medical science and their capture of the health bureaucracy.  This pessimistic outlook is not hegemonic, however.  The freedom movement has forced a relaxation of the authoritarianism and more non-compliance can only force the destructive Covid forces into further retreat.

As Jacob Riis, (the late 19th century American Danish immigrant, carpenter, journalist and urban reformer) aptly put it:

“look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before”. 

Persistence pays off.  Keep chipping away, Covid freedom-fighters.

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BONUS!!  A Reader Poll

What, to you, has been the absolute worst thing about the Coronamania policy disaster, whether the policy most damaging to you personally, or the policy that really turns your stomach, or insults your intelligence, every time you think about it.

The five options below (Substack limits their poll responses to just five) are the ones which have most grated with me from a groaning smorgasbord of toxic stupidities that should never be forgotten.  There are many others that did not make the cut but which have also done my head in – ‘Experts’; the political fling with the police state; school closures; border closures; ‘asymptomatic transmission’; sanitiser goo; vigilantism and snitching; the silencing of dissent -  but the five that made the cut are enough Covid stupidities to be going on with.  Click on the one you have hated the most from the shortlist below but if anything else has really got your goat, please take a minute to mention it in the Comments.

Thanks for reading.