Rob them of their problems, or you’ll get their solutions

More thoughts on why SARS-2 must not be, cannot be, special

During the vaccine roll-out, a curious thing happened to establishment messaging. What had been a unified front demanding the harshest non-pharmaceutical interventions politicians would tolerate, devolved into two factions. Some figures, particularly those adjacent to Zero-Covid, began entertaining a mild degree of vaccine scepticism, and claiming that an indefinite regime of lockdowns and masking remained the best way forward. The vaccinators, meanwhile, insisted the vaccines represented our only path back to ordinary life and our prior freedoms. In those early months, if you started noticing that all was not well with the vaccination campaign, you ended up drawing fire from people who said you were just playing into the hands of the lockdowners.

Now, Team Lockdown has been totally routed, and Team Vaccine remains ascendant, but this essential dynamic is still worth pondering. It arises from accepting a deeper, unexamined premise, namely that Corona is a problem to solve.

One of the most important things we can do, to keep the vaccinators and the lockdowners and all the rest of these turbulent malevolent lunatics at bay, is to undermine this premise wherever possible. This is why I like to insist, periodically, that SARS-2 just isn’t that special.

I know some of you have had a hard time with Corona; I was pretty sick myself. I get that no few people have suffered lasting injuries. I’m not proposing to deny the truth or to downplay clear risks, but I am arguing that the only way forward, is to insist that Corona is a seasonal respiratory virus that behaves like a lot of other seasonal respiratory viruses. We must avoid giving in to the past two years of risk amplification and decontextualised studies, that present negative Corona outcomes in isolation from the risks posed by many other pathogens. If there is Long Covid, there is also Long Influenza; mutations and variant strains are common throughout the world of viruses; SARS-2 is no more deadly than past pandemic flus; all successful viruses have immune-evading properties; the common-cold coronavirus NL63 also uses the ACE2 receptor.

If we give in here, and allow Corona to assume the wealth of ambiguous, scary, ominous properties that two years of speculation have lent it, we are very close indeed to accepting that Corona is a problem, and then we have lost.

The epidemiologists and the medical bureaucrats are an immensely powerful cabal, totally beyond anyone’s oversight or control. They stalk the earth with a bag full of terrifying, life-altering solutions, looking for problems just like Corona. They cannot declare problems on their own; they need some degree of social and political consensus that a problem exists. Once they have that, though, they’ll be free to deploy whatever solutions they have in their bag. At that point, we’re just along for the ride. Nobody will get the chance to tell them to focus on treatments instead of preventing infections, or to give natural immunity a chance, or to distribute vitamin D supplements, or anything else. It’s totally fine to point out all the obvious solutions that they’re neglecting, but short of removing them from power, there’s no scenario in which they listen to any of us and try out different, more reasonable policies.

Sometimes, in our circles, you encounter arguments that embrace the uniquely high risk and strange properties of SARS-2, precisely to condemn the lockdowners and the vaccinators for their failure to actually treat disease. I think this is ceding the war to win a battle. It’s desperately important, to insist that Corona is an ordinary virus, and that it is not special, and that with a few exceptions like smallpox, most contagious respiratory viruses can’t be contained and just aren’t a big deal. We have to rob the pandemicists of their problem, or we’ll never get out of this.