Cav's Place

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine task force stated that mass vaccinations should end and COVID-19 should be treated more like the flu, now, at the height of the fifth wave, this sort of mindset is starting to spread among European decision makers, including calls for the public to accept that this virus will add to the overall suffering and death from now on as inevitable and to replace legal requirements with advice and guidance, just kindly asking people to think of how their actions might negatively impact others, as if that ever worked! And now even The WHO, in its latest meeting, allowed for isolation and quarantine to be scaled down and recommended reducing restrictions on mass gatherings and migrations and international travel, despite unanimously agreeing that the COVID-19 pandemic still constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern!

You’d think that, if humans would actually be intelligent creatures, capable and willing of using reason, we’d use this experience to improve public health, reducing the burden of disease, the overall suffering and death, by applying some of the measures used in case of COVID-19 to other easily transmissible and/or serious diseases instead of the other way around! That would definitely include free treatments and vaccines in case they exist, along with coordinated international efforts to rapidly develop more and better ones, which should be the rule anyway, and it’d also include testing, but in case of such transmissible diseases it must also include legal requirements for people to behave responsibly, avoiding activities and actions that carry a significant risk of infecting others and severely punishing those who’d be proven to have carried out such activities while infected.
And it was also a good opportunity to limit travel, and air travel in particular, implementing and maintaining permanent policies that would indeed also limit the spreading of various diseases, but have even greater benefits from an environmental point of view. And I could continue with reducing the need to commute and that of human interaction for typical day to day activities, leading to more automation, as long as it’s done in the right way and offers more control and freedom for people instead of taking it away, and working more and more from home where work will still be required, and most preferably greatly reducing the need for people to work in the first place, leading to that elimination of the need to “earn a living” that’s so necessary.

But, of course, what hasn’t always been sacrificed on the altar of the economy, of money? We keep sacrificing the entire world, the ecosystem and other species, along with countless human lives, in every sense of the term, so public health is just one aspect that’s already included in the “deal”, isn’t it? And why use this crisis as an opportunity to make things better when we could use it to make things worse, at least for the large majority, with the same rich and powerful likely to still be the only ones to benefit, as always?