The Year of Omicron

Last week, Christian Drosten – Germany’s Anthony Fauci – finally declared the pandemic over:

The head of virology at Berlin Charité, Christian Drosten, believes that the Corona pandemic in Germany has ended. “We’re experiencing the first endemic wave with SARS-CoV-2 this winter; in my opinion the pandemic is over,” Drosten said in an interview …

After this winter, the immunity in the population will be so broad and resilient that the virus can hardly be able to break through in the summer. The virologist said his only reservation was the possibility of another mutation. “But at the moment I don't expect that either …”

The virologist defended the measures taken to contain the virus: “It was never about stopping the pandemic, it was clear from the beginning that that was not possible. But if we had done nothing at all, we would’ve had a million deaths or more in Germany in the successive waves through Delta. So we had to reduce contacts.”

There are more than 83 million people in Germany, which makes it hard to imagine how a virus with (at worst) a 0.5% infection fatality rate ever could’ve managed a million deaths. Even harder to imagine, is that Drosten is mistaken and not lying about this. He and the other Corona astrologers will go to their graves exaggerating the risk of the virus to justify their actions, but with every passing moment fewer and fewer will believe them. All that matters, is that not even Drosten can deny it now. The Corona era has drawn to a close.

Importantly, it wasn’t lockdowns that ended the pandemic, and it wasn’t masks or mass vaccination or any of the other One Cool Tricks offered us by our technocratic solutionsists either. It was Omicron, a more contagious and less virulent Corona lineage that behaves like a totally different pathogen, and that rapidly displaced all prior strains. From the speed of the collapse of the containment regime in the first half of 2022, you gain some idea of how sick the apparatus already was, after two years of inflationary policies, wall-to-wall carpet-bomb propaganda, and an increasingly threadbare immunological mythology. Cleverer governments immediately ended the measures. Duller bureaucracies, like those native to Germany, took a lot longer, and boiled away much of their remaining credibility in their effort to keep the pandemic circus running.

What has ensued in the wake of Corona, above all, is the deafening silence of the press. This silence has persisted as international comparisons continue to reveal lockdowns as an abject health and policy failure; as mortality continues to rise across the mass vaccinated world; and as demand for the extremely safe and highly effective mRNA elixirs that were supposed to save us collapses. As if to fill the vacuum of their incuriosity, journalists have careened from one panic to the next, inflating a whole false Monkeypox pandemic already in the smouldering ashes of their faded virus craze, and hyperventilating endlessly about Putin and the end of democracy in Ukraine. Only the economic and energy crises unleashed by the sanctions they championed have failed to interest them.

The pre-pandemic world is gone forever. If the past year has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that much. Mass containment has permanently transformed our societies and our cultures. It has cemented the cooperative relationship between the regime and the press, and it has changed the content and the tenor of our media. Drama and panic have always sold newspapers, but our new era is characterised by an unending self-reinforcing cyclone of hyperventilation journalism, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. For the foreseeable future, I think, we will careen from one crisis to the next.

The pandemic has also changed politics. We have all learned that our alleged liberal rights and freedoms are quaint fictions, which will evaporate in the face of any false emergency. This is one reason that the unceasing hysteria of the press is so ominous, for it represents a continual attempt to restore those extraordinary conditions in which the managers wield absolute power. Under the pretense of emergency, everything is permitted. The government can seal you inside your home, forbid you from seeing friends, and outlaw all protest. It can banish all criticism from the media, and with a bit more hyperventilation, it can probably even force-medicate you. In the pre-2020 world, of course, our governments could do all of these things as well. What is different now, is merely that many more people know that they can, and approve nevertheless.

Finally, it is now clear that the pandemic has changed our society in dramatic ways. Anything that you do for more than a few weeks becomes a part of you, and in Germany we locked down for seven months, and endured the deranged paroxysms of the vaccinators for even longer. Surveys show that the Corona era has left people fatter, sicker, and suffering from far higher rates of substance abuse. Many report drastic reductions in the quality of their social life. Rates of loneliness and depression will be elevated for decades. All of this was predicted, but what’s more astonishing is the apparent disappearance of vast numbers of people from public life and the economy. Home office – which, particularly in the bureaucracy, is a euphemism for doing as little as possible while continuing to collect a salary – has changed the professional world in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

My life has changed too. Colleagues I once admired have totally discredited themselves in my eyes, and I’ll never get over it. My institute is now years deep into mask mandates and other tiresome rules that make working there an exercise in quotidian absurdity and humiliation. I would’ve left earlier if the home office provisions hadn’t provided an out, but increasingly I see that it’s time to leave forever. Attached to my residence in southern Bavaria is a small village commercial property, rented for a laughable sum to a hypervaccinated masking proprietress. I’ve ended the lease and taken over the space. My silence these past few days reflects the task of moving furniture and books into what will be the new offices of the plague chronicle. My posting schedule may stay a little spotty through the middle of January, but thereafter there’s every danger you’ll hear from me every day. I’m also planning a book.

Best wishes to all my readers for 2023.