Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
One of the more diabolical aspects of the protracted COVID ‘crisis’ in countries like the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, is the intellectually dishonest claim that Coronavirus in their countries is somehow different from the Coronavirus in other western countries.
It’s like there are two parallel universes now. While the Anglosphere continues to ramp-up its emergency ‘pandemic’ measures and mandatory mask and quarantine policies, their Scandinavian counterparts like Sweden, Norway or Denmark have already returned to life as normal; no masks on public transport (although Norway just introduced a new rule today advising masks on crowded carriages), no obsessive social distancing rules, no snap lockdowns, and certainly no draconian laws and threats of £10,000 fines made by government leaders, or holding the country hostage until a wonder vaccine arrives in the spring. The contrast couldn’t be more extreme.
Sweden’s success should be obvious to the UK and other lockdown adherents by now, but you wouldn’t know it watching the political coverage in the media. Since when did normal life become so threatening to certain western governments and their media adjuncts?
Why has normality not returned to the US and UK?
Perhaps the worst aspect of the new hypochondriac culture being aggressively promoted in the US and UK is how the state bureaucrats and schools are now targeting children and young adults with a relentless regime of restrictive and nonsensical health and safety policies. One of the main drivers of the school chaos in the UK has been the teachers/public service unions, who have seized on the crisis in order to leverage political power and carve out a platform in the national spotlight. Union officials repeated the fallacious claim that schools were no longer safe unless a whole new raft of new rules, regulations and government assurances were put into place. The list of issues and concerns keeps growing by the day and is now threatening to bring normal education to a grinding halt.
As a result of this over-the-top fear-based approach to risk mitigation, the lives of students and their families across the UK have been unnecessarily disrupted. In just the first few weeks of school, many thousands of students have already been removed from school and sent home and placed under under 14 day house arrest-quarantine order by school administrators – all because another student in school or a teacher had tested PCR positive for COVID.
Many schools are also ordering all primary, secondary and high school students to remain under house arrest at home over their half-term break, supposedly to “stop the spread of the virus.”
British authorities have even gone so as to demand that university students remain on campus over the Christmas break in order “stop the spread of COVID to their families back home.”
All of this is taking place at a time where hospitalisations and deaths due to COVID have dropped to near zero in the UK. In other words: the ‘pandemic’, if it ever was one, is now over.
GRAPH: Since May, hospitalisations in the UK have plummeted, as have deaths attributed to COVID19.
Still, neither school or government health officials will readily admit the fact that young people at statistically at near zero risk of any complications due to COVID. Likewise, nearly all teachers fall well below the well-established elderly age-bracket risk zone. In addition to this, UK officials still refuse to acknowledge that the PCR test is not only unreliable as a diagnostic tool for COVID, it also cannot rightly identify whether a positive PCR test is indeed a ‘case’ or even an ‘infection.’ This means that the entire mass-testing effort championed by governments is fatally flawed at source. This is not up for debate, it is a scientific reality.
By contrast, from the very beginning of the crisis, Sweden never closed its schools and only required its university-aged students to temporarily migrate to remote teaching online. The results for Sweden have been impressive – minimal or no interruption for millions of students nationwide during such a crucial stage in their formative educational years.