#BTColumn – They divide and rule

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados TODAY Inc.

by Jasmine Yearwood

The joint government and mass media campaign to instill fear in the populace, and turn neighbour against neighbour has been overwhelmingly successful globally.

Barbadians, have been divided between those who choose to exercise their freedom, and those who tut-tut with derision and personally blame them for the government imposed restrictions on theirs.

Perhaps, though, instead of tut-tutting at people living their one, precious life as they should, we need to take steps to deprogram ourselves and hold those truly responsible for the current situation accountable.

Here are some inconvenient facts that our overlords don’t want us to know:

Peer-reviewed research has found that the infection fatality rate for COVID-19 turned out to be orders of magnitude lower than the initial estimates that prompted the hysterical lockdowns in the first place:

“Global infection fatality rate is approximately 0.15 per cent with 1.5-2.0 billion infections as of February 2021.” – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/eci.13554

For context, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health in the United States puts the infection fatality rate of the flu at 0.1 per cent. –

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/top-federal-health-official-says-coronavirus-outbreak-is-going-to-get-worse-in-the-us.html

Scientists like Dr. Ronald B. Brown, liken the overestimations on COVID-19 infection mortality rate in testimony made to the US Congress at the beginning of the pandemic which prompted the world-wide mass hysteria, to a metric conversion error at NASA which catastrophically doomed a $125 million Mars space mission on September 23, 1998. That is, case fatality rate was erroneously conflated with infection fatality rate.-

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7511835/

The above information suggests that even if every single man, woman and child in Barbados became infected, an estimated 450 would unfortunately die.

While that sounds like a lot and each death is a tragedy, COVID-19 deaths should be understood within the context that about 2700 people (nine per capita) normally die in Barbados every year, predominantly of the same health conditions that are at least a contributing factor in pretty much all COVID-19 deaths. – https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN?locations=BB

http://www.healthdata.org/barbados

The most vulnerable among us should take the public health advice about protecting themselves as well as take care of their general health by reducing stress (turn off the panic-stoking media) and get some exercise. But for the vast majority of us, the threat has been dramatically overblown and we are likely going to be fine and develop natural immunity, which has been found to be enduring by peer-reviewed research, despite what media and governments doomsayers might say. –

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting-immunity-found-after-recovery-covid-19

Further good news is that peer reviewed research has even suggested that some people don’t even need to have been infected to develop T-cell immunity. –

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22036-z#Abs1

Lockdowns were an unprecedented overreaction to a disease that is less dangerous than others we had been living with prior to 2020. They were a mistake. They not only devastate the economy and people’s physical and mental health, but they diminish trust and voluntary cooperation between the public health authorities and citizens.

It is obvious that when you punish entire populations with home imprisonment for the prevalence of a disease, people will be incentivised to hide the prevalence of that disease by not getting tested and hiding being sick, to avoid further lockdowns.

“Draconian and intrusive pandemic control may also undermine a country’s surveillance capacity – people who show symptoms might choose to shun public health authorities for fear of quarantine or stigmatisation.” – Yanzhong Huang, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Global Health Studies (2009)

https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/h1n1-virus-varied-local-responses-global-spread

The reality is that governments and the media have a massive incentive to keep you fearful, ignorant and directing your ire at protocol-breakers and truth-tellers so you don’t cast a too-examining eye toward their catastrophic errors in judgement and manipulation.

This quote from Lord Sumption (former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018) is apt:

“The ‘sunk cost fallacy’ is a well-known source of distortion in human decision-making. A decision is made which has destructive implications. The limited benefits and immense collateral damage gradually become apparent.

It is next to impossible for those involved in the decision to change their minds.

No one wants to admit that it might all have been for nothing, even if that is the truth. They have invested too much in the decision to reverse out of the cul-de-sac.

So they press on, more to avoid blame than to serve the public interest. This is what has happened to governments across Europe and to the dug-in body of specialists who advise them. Their recipe is simple: if lockdowns haven’t worked, there is nothing wrong with the concept. We just need more of them.”