I haven’t posted in a few weeks – still working on The English Family Anderson Chapter 4 which is not ready yet – but right now I want to share something I just read at the Tamera Peace Research and Education Centre. It was written in January this year and is filled with truth and rationality – something very hard to find in the current climate. I thought it would interest you too.

You can read the whole article here. [NB I’ve tried to change the colour of the paragraphs from the Tamera article but I’m not proficient in this new block editing thing so, rather than throw my laptop out the window, I will tell you that the paragraphs above the top image and below the bottom one are from me. The bits between the photos is all Tamera 😉 ]

For a year, Covid-19 has held the world in suspense. The infection with SARS-CoV-2 is evidently mild in most cases, but unfortunately not in all. … At the same time, we observe millions of cases of human suffering which aren’t caused by the virus, but precisely by the measures taken to contain it: The elderly, the vulnerable and the sick, who in many places become lonely, desperate and often enough have to die alone; the traumatization of an entire generation of children and young people, who are being inculcated with the fear of other people and the guilt of being themselves a danger to others and loved ones; an increase in psychological distress, mental illness and domestic violence, a rising suicide rate; and the medical undersupply of millions of people, because hospitals, medical practices and examination institutes cannot work as they used to, due to imposed Corona measures.

In addition, there are the unmistakable socio-economic consequences of the prevailing Corona policies. We are seeing an economic crisis and redistribution of wealth that has been unparalleled since the 1920s: countless small and medium-sized businesses have been driven into insolvency, while the super-rich reap unprecedented profits. While hundreds of millions of people become unemployed, while hunger and homelessness skyrocket around the world, large corporations are recording all-time high profits, especially in the digital and pharmaceutical sectors. Stock markets have flourished. Between April and July 2020 alone, in just four months, the wealth of billionaires grew by 27.5%, or US $10.2 trillion.

The economic and humanitarian consequences of the lockdowns have been particularly devastating in much of the Global South. In many countries, almost the entire informal sector came to a standstill virtually overnight, pushing hundreds of millions into extreme poverty, hunger and misery. The UN currently estimates that the number of people starving worldwide will increase by 83 million to 132 million as a result of the Corona measures alone. Last summer, the aid agency Oxfam predicted that by the end of 2020, up to 12,000 additional people would starve to death every day as a result of the measures alone.

Today, we know that the early hypothetical model calculations for Corona deaths, which moved governments in many countries to impose lockdowns and other drastic measures, were inflated. At the same time, many experts have voiced doubts over determining infection numbers by PCR tests alone, over the effectiveness of lockdowns, social distancing and mask-wearing and over the hastily approved new vaccines and their associated risks. Yet, to date, very few diverse expert committees have been able to review the effectiveness and proportionality of the measures taken.

The Corona virus has often been portrayed by the media and politicians as an unprecedented new phenomenon. Nevertheless, as with any disease, the same principle applies: Treatment measures must not cause more harm than the disease itself.

Fear has been the principle that governments and media in many countries have followed in responding to the Corona crisis from the beginning. Instead of providing prudent information, many governments fomented fear of disease and death – sometimes deliberately, as can be seen, for example, in an internal strategy paper of the German government, to “achieve the desired shock effect” and make people comply with the measures. Fear, however, is rarely a good advisor when it comes to managing crises. Unconscious fear causes polarization, disrupts communication and makes it hard to assess events in a rational manner. Fear often leads to protective measures that only intensify danger or even conjure it up. 

The Covid-19 measures are resulting in deep societal divisions, and meaningful communication between the different camps hardly seems possible. On the one hand, governments are trying to curb the spread of the virus with extensive information campaigns and restrictions, while on the other hand, thousands of renowned doctors, scientists and experts critical of the way Covid-19 is being managed are ignored by politicians, defamed by mass media and censored on social media.

A new vaccine that was approved within just a few months is proposed for billions of people, even though it normally takes 5–10 years to complete the necessary studies and testing phases to assess the extent of harmful side effects of new vaccines. With this, the pharmacologist Prof. Stefan Hockertz warns of “human experimentation.” Already now, there are more and more reports of side effects, some of them severe, from various countries. However, it is still unclear as to what extent the vaccine may actually contain infections. On December 29, WHO lead scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan admitted, “I don’t believe we have the evidence on any of the vaccines to be confident that it’s going to prevent people from actually getting the infection and therefore being able to pass it on. So I think we need to assume that people who have been vaccinated also need to take the same precautions.”

The Covid-19 measures raise deep ethical and social questions. In his essay, “The Coronation,” the author and visionary Charles Eisenstein writes, “What world shall we live in? How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? … Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? How much are we willing to live in fear?”

If you don’t trust pharmaceutical companies, or politicians, why would you believe anything they tell you about this or anything else? I haven’t heard anyone in the mainstream talk about ending animal farming to prevent future crises; or teaching people that plant-based nutrition will strengthen their immune system while an animal-based diet will compromise it. I wonder if that’s because pharmaceutical companies make nearly all their money from the medications they sell for the chronic diseases caused by consumption of animal products; the medications they sell (eg vaccinations) to tackle the avoidable infectious zoonotic diseases* like covid which emerge from the way humans treat animals; and the medications they produce for the farmed animals themselves**.

* Eating habits of humans have not only caused preventable epidemics but they have caused an array of ailments in every one of our body systems [Muyembe-Tamfum et al., 2012]

The World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, and the World Organisation for Animal Health got together to uncover the key underlying causes of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases . They came up with four main risk factors. These include the exotic pet trade, and bush meat, but number one on their list was the increasing demand for animal protein the world over. They blame the emergence of COVID-19, H5N1, SARS, Nipah virus, all these new deadly viruses, on over-consumption of animal products. [From a youtube video by Dr Michael Greger]

* * in the US more than 70% of antibiotics are used on farms