Mark Steyn on "COVID Forever"

 

Mark Steyn is always worth the read. From his website: 

A year and a half into this thing, how's it going?

From Canada's Globe & Mail, which is like The New York Times but without the jokes, it seems the New Normal is going to have to be cranked up a notch:

Overwhelming evidence now demonstrates that the dominant mode of transmission of SARS-CoV2 is airborne, yet mitigation strategies have not evolved with this knowledge.

Indoor environments where people are in close contact present the highest risk for transmission. Work-from-home should continue as much as possible, as it is premature to return to the office unless absolutely necessary. When indoor close contact is occurring, cloth or medical masks should be replaced with respirator masks, which provide superior protection through a combination of exhalation source control and inhalational filtration.

Respirator masks, huh? They're pricey but stylish - and your kids will soon get used to them.

[I did not know what a respirator mask was, so here's an image: 

- ed.]

On the other hand, from Iceland's top epidemiologist:

Þórólfur Guðnason sagði í Sprengisandi á Bylgjunni í morgun að vonbrigði séu að hjarðónæmi hafi ekki náðst með bólusetningu. Hann segir að einungis ein önnur leið sé fær til að ná hjarðónæmi, að leyfa veirunni að dreifast um samfélagið.

Which means more or less:

Þórólfur Guðnason said on Sprengisandi á Bylgjunni this morning that it is disappointing that herd immunity has not been achieved through vaccination. He says the only other way to achieve herd immunity is to allow the virus to spread through the community.

The great monolithic herd of public health commissars then took the tire iron to him, and Mr Guðnason has now walked that back.

Meanwhile, in America - or at least on Twitter - it's business as usual. Lars McMurtry is following the science:

The CDC should roll out a new program: Get the shot or get shot.

The unvaccinated need to be rounded up and lined up in front of open trenches, Their choice is simple.

America has had enough of their virus. We need to get back to normal life.

With or without them.

The bad news is that America can't dig open trenches, because all the shovels and excavators are made in China and the supply chain's a bit disrupted. The good news is that what Joe Biden calls "the pandemic of the unvaccinated" mostly involves the vaccinated giving the Delta variant to the un-, so Mr McMurtry may get his wish albeit a little more incrementally than he'd like.

My view is that the Icelandic guy is right - that is, before he was clubbed into submission. To recapitulate a pithy line from another apparently silenced researcher, stopping humans from being human won't stop the virus from being a virus. Whatever the original justification (ie, to prevent the collapse of hospital systems), maintaining lockdown after, oh, late April 2020 did nothing to the virus except retard the development of herd immunity and, in the absence thereof, enable it to incubate more lethal variants than it would otherwise have done.

What's the upshot? This medical prof from East Anglia now says "herd immunity will never happen". Well, whose fault is that? Quarantining millions of healthy people while setting a target of zero-Covid is a pandemic policy that no sane government has ever attempted.

Given that we're now being told we have to live with Covid forever, we could at least take measures to punish the Chinese biowarfare lab and its enthusiastic funders in America's diseased public-health bureaucracy for loosing this thing on the world.

Ah, but that's even less likely than open trenches...

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