Rintrah Radagast: "It should not be the job of government to stop viruses from spreading by rationing social interaction among healthy people"

Rintrah Radagast, whose fantastic essays on Corona I regret to say I’ve only found recently, comments wisely on yesterday’s post:

Whether SARS-COV-2 is a uniquely dangerous virus and whether or not lockdowns work to stop it from spreading are ultimately red herrings. The more important point is that it should not be the job of our government to stop viruses from spreading by rationing social interaction among healthy people. …

[W]hen the argument against the lockdowns becomes some esoteric theory like “Covid has been around since 2018”, “most of the deaths were caused by the ventilators” or “the herd immunity threshold lies around 25%”, we risk simply replaying March 2020 when the next virus shows up.

It’s similarly strategically useful that the lockdowns had no meaningful impact on the spread of SARS-COV-2, as it helped mobilize the critical mass that was necessary to make these lockdowns a form of political suicide, but it won’t be enough to cast the whole concept into the dustbin of history where it belongs …

Any opposition to what happened in March 2020 based on pragmatic terms risks maneuvering itself into a dead alley when the next virus mysteriously pops up a stone toss away from a BSL-4 lab, that happens to have a higher IFR, a longer incubation period, or some other variable that will resurrect the whole concept of endowing a technocratic cabal with the responsibility to ration social interaction.

Of course, Rintrah is right here.

One should probably distinguish between tactics and strategies. It’s a useful tactic in the moment to point out that SARS-2 interventions have failed. Masks, lockdowns and finally vaccines have not behaved as promised, they have not ended the pandemic. Attacking these failures is a way to end restrictions, but in the longer term it’s also a path towards destroying the credibility of the authorities who imposed these measures in the first place. They’ll fight for every inch of ground here, but we have some chance of hurting them, and there are not so few of us as you might imagine. People like Neil Ferguson and Christian Drosten will be heckled all the way to their graves.

I also think that the pandemic establishment (sit venia verbo), at least since the eradication of smallpox, has been running a fairly obvious scam: First, they accumulate advisory roles and funding by hyping the threat of anomalous, freak pathogens like Nipah, Marburg and SARS, which are so poorly adapted to human hosts that they cause terrible disease but get nowhere. Then, they take their newly won powers and deploy them against the viruses that actually infect people, which are so mild that nobody ever thought of asking the pandemicists for help with them. Since 1918, the truly lethal pandemic virus has remained elusive, a public relations fiction. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the disease bureaucrats jumped so hard on SARS-2. It was widespread, it looked superficially like one of those scary fundraising viruses, and it wasn’t an ordinary influenza. Opportunities like that don’t come along every day.

Experience shows that you can’t place prior restraints on government power. The best way to keep our states out of the virus eradication business, is to remove their ability to perceive or react to problems in this entire area, by shutting down the pandemicists. The public health offices, the departments of epidemiology, the virological institutes – one way or another, they have to suffer a long period of official neglect, minimal funding and obscurity. It is a monumental task, that I won’t live to see the end of. They emerge from this whole debacle more powerful than ever before.