#eugyppius

If you peer deeper, you’ll generally find this: The vaccinated remain substantially protected against serious illness or death, but the unvaccinated are entering the hospital and dying at very high rates indeed, as if to compensate. Thus Israel has maintained the same case fatality rate of around 0.7%, before and after mass vaccination. If this is just Delta being more dangerous, then we would expect countries with lower vaccination rates to be enduring truly staggering mortality right now, but they are not. In heavily vaccinated countries, Delta is raging with a rare fury among the unvaccinated, but in lesser-vaccinated countries it is doing nothing unusual. This means that the efficacy statistics are broadly unreliable. The exact reasons don’t really matter: Either the vaccines have the power to change the whole picture, or they don’t.

None of this should surprise us. Vaccines against coronaviruses have been used in animals for decades, and none of them work very well. Generally they begin to fail after a few months. Despite their technical sophistication, our mRNA and vector vaccines against SARS-2 are no different. They had some success when they were first rolled out, but if anything that probably made things worse. They effectively killed off the older Kent lineage and reduced the overall genetic diversity of SARS-2. Cases plummeted in the United Kingdom and Israel, and Delta emerged victorious from this bottleneck event. When newly vaccinated Icelanders travelled to the Delta-saturated UK for holiday, they did not even enjoy an initial period of protection against infection. They brought Delta back to Iceland, where the new strain circulated among vaccinated and unvaccinated at nearly the same rate.

In a world where the symptomatic mostly stay home, Corona is locked in a balancing act. It can’t make people too sick too soon, or its hosts will remove themselves from circulation and infect nobody. Delta is more aggressive than prior strains, probably to the point of disadvantaging itself in containment-happy countries. The more aggressive, earlier replication allows it to get the jump on immunity in the vaccinated, however, who can also tolerate more virus replication with fewer symptoms. Together with ordinary antigenic drift, this would seem to be the mechanism that has brought Delta to prominence. We are probably justified in calling this phenomenon a weak Marek Effect. Our universal vaccination campaigns worked just well enough to speed up the evolutionary processes that are always and everywhere optimising Corona.

It is impossible to believe that this failure was not foreseen. The scientists who developed the vaccines knew for sure how things would play out. That’s why they concluded the trials after three or four months and vaccinated their controls. It’s why they have been talking about boosters from the very beginning. It’s why, if you listened carefully, you never heard Zero Covid sloganeering coming from Team Vaccine. Only the comparative morons on Team Lockdown ever talked like that.

Our politicians and our new public health dictators, on the other hand, remained oblivious to the limited potential of the vaccines. They continue to insist on universal vaccination and green passes, while it is obvious that these will do nothing to influence the course of the pandemic. It is worth asking why, because when you think about it, you can see that the vaccine roll-out came with an inbuilt exit strategy. The vaccines arrived most everywhere in the spring, as Corona was going out of season anyway. Policymakers immediately claimed declining infections as a victory for the vaccines, but they failed to take the next step and declare the war won and either discontinue their case counts, or at the very least exclude the vaccinated from infection and mortality statistics. Instead, they deployed half measures, devising new regulations that exempt the vaccinated from testing most of the time, while failing to shut the door on the pandemic and maintaining numbers that are just reliable enough to reveal the futility of their policies.

This was the second time our brave health dictatorship failed to use the obvious, purpose-built exit ramp of seasonality. The first was in Spring 2020, after the entire West (with the exceptions of Sweden and Belarus) bought into mass containment and Corona infections collapsed everywhere in April. Establishment scientific voices had by this time spent two months denying that there would be significant seasonal effects, on the basis of some superficial modelling studies. As with the vaccine roll-out, denying seasonality allowed them to declare a policy victory. As with the vaccine roll-out, the stage was set for everybody to say that they had defeated Corona, fold up shop and go home. This is, you will note, exactly what China did. They tightened official testing criteria, declared the pandemic over with and never looked back. Western countries, though, kept the ball in the air all summer long, just as they are keeping the ball in the air now.

Governments are both more powerful and more paralysed than they have been at any other point in history. Powers have diffused throughout the realms of bureaucracy. By distributing power in this way, occupational classes ensure loyalty and unanimity across the whole of the civil service, academia and the press. The consequence is that states have become profoundly and permanently demobilised, incapable of acting according to coherent strategies. Over and over in Corona, we see clear hints of strategic thinking in certain quarters – the exit ramps are among the clearest signs – but these are always overridden by the broader momentum of countless thousands of nameless, faceless optimisers and hystericists who sit on hundreds of boring pointless committees performing the same iterative destructive acts of governance over and over.

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A few countries, or perhaps even a few prominent politicians or public health pundits who do not have their heads up their asses, could change everything. Everyone who is not crazy needs to start insisting on the same simple message:

Eugyppius

Eugyppius

I’ve covered a lot of speech crime indictments here at the plague chronicle. Before Covid, these things hardly ever happened. Occasionally you’d find the odd article about a dumb tourist who was cited for throwing a Nazi salute in public or something, but that was it. The whole area just didn’t matter. The German state acquired a kind of political Long Covid from the pandemic. Its agents learned from their virus repressions that they could get away with a lot more than they ever thought, and they also learned to view ordinary people as their adversaries. A third thing happened too, in that lockdowns moved a lot of discourse to the internet, and the German elite discovered for the first time that they and their policies suffer a popularity deficit there. To explain this, our baffled and offended if powerful social media naifs borrowed the malevolent concept of “disinformation” from the Anglosphere. They began whining and crying and beating their breasts and clutching their pearls about disinformation. None of them did this so hard and so insistently as the Greens, because the Greens represent the views of the German political elite, and as an elite they feel entitled to scold, control discourse, and tell other people what to do.  That’s my potted history of how we got to this world, with pensioners being sent to jail for typing the wrong three-word phrase on the internet and YouTubers being fined thousands of Euros because some computer programme hallucinated into their banal complaints about poor internet reception a contextually incoherent Nazism. If you’re unlucky enough, you can get nailed for literally anything, and we only hear about a tiny minority of these cases. For a lot of people, the summary judgements they receive from the court are embarrassing, baffling and not worth the trouble. Those who can will just quietly eat the fine and try to get on with their lives.

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What is happening resembles classic “totalitarian” political tactics only superficially. The DDR employed literal bureaucrats and secret policemen whose job it was to censor speech according to defined standards and to punish or intimidate those who said inconvenient things. An analogy would be the farmer who decides there are too many rabbits eating his cabbages, and so he goes out and shoots them.  Modern Germany just can’t go out and shoot rabbits, and the reason has nothing to do with liberal democratic freedoms. We can’t even build bridges. Over a century ago, the Kingdom of Saxony required only two or three years to build the first Carola Bridge over the Elbe in Dresden. The SS destroyed that monument in 1945 to slow the Soviet advance, but the DDR needed only four years to build a replacement – the one that finally collapsed in September of last year. Today, in the best Germany of all time, we will require at least ten years and almost certainly more to build our third Carola Bridge. That is a very rough scale of how much ability the state has lost in the space of just a few generations.1 The sclerotic, hyper-managerialised state that cannot build an uncomplicated 500-metre bridge across a river also finds censorship really, really hard. And so it has signed over this project to a whole world of NGOs, many of which now devote incredible resources to policing the internet all day. We once had a farmer shooting rabbits, and that was bad enough if you happened to be a rabbit. Now we have an obese, bed-ridden, day-drinking farmer who can no longer fit through his front door. To solve his rabbit problem he has deputised a lot of autonomous agents, like the myxoma virus, to get rid of the hated rabbits instead. This means he’s no longer in control of the process at all. The censorship happens all on its own, and for reasons of its own too. It’s just something that a growing number of state-adjacent organisations do now, because there are institutional interests (jobs, funding) behind it.

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