I wrote a few months ago about how we are seeing the development of a perma-lockdown situation[1], where the decreasing efficacy of vaccines and the failure of measures like masks or social distancing to meaningfully dent COVID case numbers has led to the call for greater restrictions and lockdown-like policies from our increasingly-powerful medical networks. Now, with cases rising substantially in Europe, we are seeing this come to fruition. Austria has instituted a lockdown against the unvaccinated, with Germany potentially following suit. The Netherlands and Belgium have introduced partial lockdowns[2]. And in Gibraltar, where the population is near enough 100% vaccinated (with 40% having received booster doses), there are potential curbs on social activity on the horizon as cases spike.

This is entirely within the norm of the medical network’s maintenance of health powers. Now they’ve been given such wide-ranging capacities to intervene in everyday life, they aren’t going to give them up. Never mind that the deaths and hospitalisations in European countries remain low, because these will be replaced by other reasons for why we need to implement restrictions. The NHS is already using the excuse of winter and the effect of hospital backlogs[3] to urge greater compliance with masking and social distancing (even though these aren’t enforced).

The point of these though isn’t to prevent COVID caseloads or affect the development of a healthier society. The mask mandates in Scotland and Wales failed if we look at caseloads and death rates (with them staying similar to or going beyond England’s rates). Similarly, in Europe this isn’t about protecting the vulnerable or encouraging higher vaccination rates. It is instead about placing blame beyond themselves. The failures of health systems and the lack of pandemic preparedness are failures of government. But now, with vaccine passports and mandates, we scapegoat the unvaccinated as the real cause of the continuing pandemic, inducing fear that is directed away from failing vaccines or pointless and petty interventions.

This in spite of the fact vaccinated individuals can spread the virus[4], with similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. In spite of the fact most developed countries are reaching vaccination rates well above 70%. In spite of the fact that booster doses are having little affect in preventing caseload growth or transmission (despite their advertised efficacy). These facts show the inconvenient truth that interventions of any kind are limited against a highly-transmissible respiratory virus, and that ripping up people’s lives and keeping them constantly fearful of another lockdown doesn’t substantively help to stop the pandemic.

“While the vaccines don’t work as advertised, they are powerful pharmaceutical products and they have strange, unexpected effects — not only on the bodies of people who take them, but also on the dynamics of transmission and infection. Deranged medical bureaucrats, who refuse to abandon their dreams of controlling a highly contagious seasonal respiratory virus, have whole populations popping these things like aspirin. They could very well succeed in making Corona into the unprecedented public health disaster that the virus itself never quite was”[5].

Similarly, with lockdowns, medical bureaucrats and their networks of power have found a tool with many side effects that can give substantial control, and that receive large support, particularly from older age demographics[6]. Control not over the virus, but over the way we live our lives. And now that these extreme measures are being targeted at the unvaccinated in European countries, making people unemployed and limiting their access to services (with the vaccine mandates in America and Australia having the same effect once they come into full force), governments are creating a class of people with very little to lose. A large minority of people given limited life prospects are unlikely to remain docile for very long. But this won’t culminate in some kind of revolution, but instead in Rittenhouse-style events where people, trapped by the aggressive actions of empowered medical bureaucrats and their public supporters, are forced to lash out. The perma-lockdown will become a dangerous game to play.

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[1] https://thelibertarianideal.com/2021/10/09/perma-lockdown-and-the-pharmacy/

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59320515

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59249409

[4] https://www.riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/modern-day-censorship/we-are-not-in-a-pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated-says-british-medical-journal-editor-peter-doshi/

[5] https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/booster-doses-are-extremely-dangerous

[6] https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1460611159195897863