5 years on from Covid – what did we learn and what was the true cost?
Five years on from New Zealand’s first Covid-19 case – have we changed?
It has been five years since New Zealand’s first confirmed Covid-19 case and for many New Zealanders memories of that day remain clear.
20 million lives lost.
Enormous economic damage caused by supply chain shutdowns that spiked inflation in a way that generated deep anger and resentment in many.
Disinformation and social media hate algorithms spawning demented realities from lonely people locked down under Covid.
And no clear idea as to where the bloody thing came.
5 years after Covid, we are all still left bruised and battered from the experience, culturally, economically and socially.
Some of our whanau have been lost down rabbit holes that the growing polarisation simply feeds rather than challenges.
After every major pandemic in human history there is social unrest…
“So when our Sickness, and our Poverty Had greater wants than we could well supply; Strict Orders did but more enrage our grief, And hinder in accomplishing relief.”
That’s how the British poet George Wither explained a spreading rebellion against social-distancing rules. Seeing quarantines and lockdowns as unfair and tyrannical punishments, people were taking to the streets. The year was 1625, the place was London, the disease was plague.
…The peasant revolt in the 1300s, the civil unrest in the 1600s and the civil disobedience in the 1900s. The strict measures required to snuff out pandemics always makes the lives of the poorest unliveable, we haven’t seen the full economic and social whiplash of Covid yet, especially amongst small business owners and those who were already vulnerable.
With the Republicans running everything in America, the laser focus on Faucci and the involvement of American research into gain of function technology that was being conducted in (lo and behold) the Wuhan Lab.
The reality I suspect is that neither China NOR America want to focus much on where Covid came from, because they both seem deeply involved.
Here was the original manner in which the original report was covered…
Intelligence report says US split on Covid-19 origins
US intelligence agencies have found no direct evidence that Covid-19 broke out from a Chinese laboratory, a declassified report has said.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said both a natural and laboratory origin remain plausible scenarios.
It noted most US intelligence agencies agree the virus was not genetically engineered or “laboratory-adapted”.
The origins of the pandemic have been a matter of bitter debate in the US.
“The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, as both (natural and lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting,” said the 10-page report.
Four agencies believe the virus was transferred from animals to humans, said the findings.
Two other agencies – the Energy Department and the FBI – continue to believe that the virus leaked from a lab.
The findings said the US intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory.
All US intelligence agencies agree that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon, said the report.
It said that the WIV and Chinese army had collaborated in work on coronaviruses for public health needs, although not on any infections that could plausibly have spawned Covid-19.
But the report also noted that scientists at the WIV have engineered “chimeras”, or combinations of coronaviruses, and used reverse genetic cloning techniques that could hide intentional changes.
The findings said that some researchers probably did not use adequate biosafety precautions before the pandemic.
…earlier this year the FBI responded to their Intel being dumped from the President…
FBI ‘found evidence Covid was lab leak but was not allowed to brief president’
The FBI found evidence suggesting that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak but were not allowed to brief the president, it has been claimed.
Jason Bannan, a doctor of microbiology and former senior scientist at the FBI, has dedicated more than a year of his life to discovering the origins of Covid.
But despite being the only US national intelligence agency to conclude that a lab leak was likely, the FBI and Bannan were snubbed from a National Intelligence Council briefing with Joe Biden, it has been claimed.
Biden had ordered an urgent investigation in May 2021 by US intelligence agencies and national laboratories to identify whether the virus had been transferred from an animal to a human or had escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
When Covid first erupted, I argued mathematically chances of a lab leak were a real possibility we needed to look at because the history of lab leaks was actually far greater and larger than many knew.
Because of the prevalence of these types of labs and with human error factored in, there is an 80 percent chance of a a dangerous pathogen escape every 12.8 years.
I was cancelled 3 or 4 times for making this claim by Woke Twitter because anyone asking deeper questions at a time of panic and fear tend to get knifed first and the latest report only highlights that neither America or China want to get to the bottom of the origins of Covid.
The deep suspicion of a lab leak is legitimate.
We know there were embassy cables warning Trump that the Wuhan Lab was a safety risk.
We know the lab was experimenting on the virus and that scientists have now cast suspicion on the virus having been tampered with.
We know US Intelligence picks up a pandemic in November.
We know lab staff suffered symptoms exactly like Covid a month before the first case in December.
We know that via a bizarre set of circumstances relating to the unique private military research budgets created by the Pentagon that America funded a Circus Freak Show of an organisation called EcoHealth Alliance.
If you don’t know who EcoHealth Alliance is, you best read this damning article in Vanity Fair that exposes how the American Military Industrial Complex accidentally funded the very type of dangerous experiments on the very exact virus that was released in the very exact lab where the breakout was next to…
Chasing scientific renown, grant dollars, and approval from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak transformed the environmental nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance into a government-funded sponsor of risky, cutting-edge virus research in both the U.S. and Wuhan, China. Drawing on more than 100,000 leaked documents, a V.F. investigation shows how an organization dedicated to preventing the next pandemic found itself suspected of helping start one.
…that article is so damning and so dangerously close to what may have actually happened it demands investigation.
Vanity Fair is not some fringe conspiracy theory rag, it has enormous credibility and reach.
The Vanity Fair expose clearly points to funding Fauci green lighted For EcoHealth Alliance to research the very Covid virus that is then leaked near a lab at the centre of the outbreak.
That at the very least demands some examination and not the usual screams of xenophobia from the usual and predictable defenders of China because this isn’t about China maliciously creating a bioweapon and attacking the West, it’s far more banal than that – underfunded Chinese labs with poor security and American Military Industrial Grifters who played with fire and unleashed Pandoras Box on the world!
Officially 7million died globally but all experts point to the far truer figure of 20 million deaths because of this clusterfuck of Democratic incompetence, corporate greed and One Party corruption.
No wonder no one wants to examine any of this.
While we ponder that, the next pandemic is brewing dangerously in America amongst bird and cow farms.
We were ‘lucky’ that Covid had a low mortality rate, the next pandemic could easily be far worse than Covid and if it is, our system will quickly become over run and shut down from the shear number of dead.
5 years after Covid and we still have few answers and less solutions.
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Thanks for that grim reading 🙁
Sadly NZ is not interested in the effects of the virus as we only want a public execution of Jacinda and Bloomfeild .We had a royal enquiry which the act led government is now sitting on till the second one run by the NZF river of filth party conducts the witch hunt .
It’s the delays that fucked Jacinda. It’s the delays that fuck anything up costing more and more.
It is grim but it is not new.
As a student I listened as Professor David Thompson, a world recognised expert on population studies, took us through the history of past epidemics and this showed that for all we now know about disease, we still have no real idea of why diseases become virulent and contagious at some times, yet mild at others.
For example; Bubonic Plague(the Black Death) is always present in Central Asia. it seldom becomes contagious. In Elizabethan England many people caught smallpox, relatively few died – about a century later it was lethal with few survivors. Malaria was widespread in Europe(called Ague in England) then retreated for no discernable reason.
What is self -evident is International travel spreads contagious disease. Bubonic Plague spread along the Silk Road and Ebola can no longer be safely confined to Equatorial African Forests because of modern air travel and migration.
What is also obvious is VACCINATIONS control major epidemics such as measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough and polio.
Good grief literally.
Can someone please explain though why American taxpayers money was spent in a Chinese Virus research centre to begin with?
Or what undercooked bat actually appeals to the tastes buds?
And I fear any new pandemic arising and the need for the proles to que politely for the antidote may see quite a different reaction from the previous round.
Yes thank you again Social Media.
With so much disinformation,,, from BOTH sides of the Covid debate, it is very hard if not impossible to reach definitive conclusion on much about Covid ….
Apart from the fact that largely due to our status as an Island nation it was possible for us to keep a world-wide disease/virus from spreading into our country. This is a indisputable fact which holds true whether you agree that the measures to keep it out were worth it or not….
This is a lesson worth learning and could be very valuable if something like the very deadly smallpox virus held in bio-weapons labs got lose….
If need be we can keep deadly epidemics and pathogens out of our country.
Be grateful and acknowledge this simple fact.
100% +
“And no clear idea as to where the bloody thing came.”
In Feb 2020 independent scientists who examined the virus stated it had a genetically engineered spike protein. It clearly came from a lab. Period.
There is a consensus it came from Wuhan. If intelligence agencies say there is no evidence that it was a bioweapon then misinformation means its a bioweapon. The funding of the research was secretive and murky because there has to be deniability if the funding is for a bioweapon.
And if all the media says it came from a wet market and anyone with a truth searching questioning view has to be cancelled thats a psyop.
What did we learn? About virology and global pandemics I’d say a lot. At the very least, its added to what the experts already knew about the spread and containment of contagious diseases. Misinformation and conspiracies aside, that’s the science. What’s not so clear are the socio-economic lessons. If there was another global pandemic tomorrow, knowing what we now know, how would the world respond? How would NZ respond? Fortuitously, at the southern tip of the globe we’d again see it all unfold but would leadership make the same decisions. Maybe? Sold publicly as ‘being kind to each other’ a cynics view would be that given the state of the public health system, on the modelling presented, rough times were ahead. Appears the capacity of the public health system is no better today. Lockdowns. Economic disruption (but some did mighty well, thank you very much!). Mandatory vaccination. Not to mention the macro-economics of it all. In a global pandemic NZ is not simply an island in the South Pacific watching it all unfold.