Those familiar with the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will know that the number 42 is the ‘Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything’; it necessarily follows that it must also be the answer to today’s ultimate question, how to end the covid pandemic. Dr No has spent the New Year break trying to get to the bottom of this cryptic answer. Perhaps it means the pandemic will end once BoJo has done his 42nd presser? Or the Milk Curdler posts a twitter thread that is exactly 42 tweets long? The problem is that no one knows what question Deep Thought, the supercomputer in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, was programmed to answer, and without knowing the question, how can one hope to make sense of the answer? Let’s see what we can come up with.

Writing in the BMJ last month, David Robertson and Peter Doshi came up with a paper with a title very much to Dr No’s liking: The end of the pandemic will not be televised. This captures the idea that the pandemic won’t end with a bang, or even a whimper; rather, one day we will wake up, and it will be gone. There will be no grand declaration, because there is no firm scientific definition of when a pandemic officially ends. This tells us something important: the end of a pandemic is not a scientific event, but a societal event. Society decides that enough is enough, and languor, even ennui, sets in. Society reaches saturation point: the pandemic no longer shocks and stupefies; instead, it becomes an unwelcome but essentially normal part of life, in effect, just another flu like illness, dreadful, even fatal, to some, but for the vast majority, no more than a tiresome nuisance. It reaches not so much biological endemicity, as social endemicity.

This in turn tells us something else important about how pandemics end: the decision-making process is not rational, let alone scientific, but emotional. Just as fear and loathing fuel pandemics, so too does recognition and pragmatic acceptance dampen pandemics. We have to make the emotional decision that, however much we may dislike, even detest, the pandemic, we cannot allow it to destroy so many good things in life. Friendship, togetherness in all its forms, education, the arts and even sports have taken a never before seen battering in the face not of the virus, but of our reaction to the virus. We need the emotional intelligence to be able to weigh the cost of the pandemic against the cost of our counter-measures, and so to know when enough is enough, when the self-inflicted wounds caused by the counter-measures are too high a price to pay. We must avoid at all costs that most awful of medical outcomes: the operation — all the counter-measures — was a great success, but unfortunately the patient — society — died.        

This brings Dr No to his final, and perhaps most important point, in this first post of 2022. No official commercial or establishment body is going to end the pandemic. It is not in the slightest in their interests to do so. The pandemic fast-tracked New Year’s honours for a whole host of previously unknown public health goons lackeys and stooges. Big Pharma’s laugh as it heads to the bank is so loud it can be heard from space. Those in government who want to foist a despotic digital dystopia on the rest of us are not going to give up hard gotten gains, oh no. If none of these bodies has any interest in ending the pandemic, than that can only mean one thing: it is up to us, each and every one of us, to show some emotional guts, and end this collective madness. It is not too late, Dr No suggests, to make that your 42nd New Year resolution for 2022.     

Comments

  1. Peter Hickey Reply

    I have a slightly different take on your conclusion “No official commercial or establishment body is going to end the pandemic” I would amend it slightly to say “No official commercial or establishment body wants to end the pandemic”

    However, the narrative is now becoming so nonsensical and difficult to uphold, plus more and more people are starting to realise what’s really going on, that they may well be forced to do so in a vain attempt to save face. All it will take is for the WHO (to whom all governments are beholden) to say the pandemic is over and it will be gone.

    However, so much harm has been done to the world throughout this saga that ending it alone will not be sufficient. The public must ensure that those who are responsible for those harms are fully held to account.

    However, I can’t help but agree that “they” have so much at stake in prolonging this charade and pushing this despotic digital dystopia onto the majority, that they won’t give up easily and we all do indeed need to show some emotional guts, and end this collective madness.

  2. Ed P Reply

    Off topic, but Deep Thought was working in base 13 and converted to base 10 for its questioners. Thus 42 (in base 13) and 54 (in base 10) are the same.
    The absurdity of prolonging this scamdemic over what’s now a bad cold is astounding, even for the hapless goons in charge.

  3. dearieme Reply

    Would it be going too far to say that the UK Covid epidemic started as something roughly as bad as an atypically bad flu season, or a little worse, and is ending as a spate of bad colds, or a little worse?

  4. H W Tsudnim Reply

    Most players such as “scientists”, government and mass media types, will clearly be reluctant to face a proper coroners post mortem on the Covid saga.
    But I think there may be another factor, the large number of people who were cowed by SPI-B in the UK, and equivalent unscrupulous psychologists elsewhere, will find it very difficult to admit the state of fear they were so gently nudged into. Severe embarrassment will make them want to keep their eyes averted for many years to come.

  5. Misa Reply

    I’m sure Dr No will recall how the the thinkers and doers of Golgafrinchan arranged for the dispatch of their unwanted hairdressers, management consultants and public health experts, only to be wiped out by a nasty virus.

  6. Tom Welsh Reply

    “Big Parma’s laugh as it heads to the bank is so loud it can be heard from space”.

    Presumably led by their grands fromages…

  7. Tom Welsh Reply

    One prediction seems safe enough: no one who was in a position of power will ever admit to having been wrong about anything.

    They will have “acted on the best advice”. Although I still cannot for the life of me see how someone who freely admits to being ignorant and clueless can know enough to tell the “best” advice from the worst.

  8. dr-no Reply

    Tom – ‘ I still cannot for the life of me see how someone who freely admits to being ignorant and clueless can know enough to tell the “best” advice from the worst’ – this is a very important point. It’s the negative feedback loop that leads to hellish government by incompetence. OMG => commission worst case scenarios from scientific stooges a la Medley => OMG^2 and so on. The ministers know they can’t know what the best course is, so they discretely delegate the decision making to their scientific goons, having first tied their hands by ordering only worst case scenarios be considered. The goons are then excused from any responsibility to produce balanced advice, and anyway are off the hook because advisers advise, ministers decide. It’s a variation on Balint’s collusion of anonymity, where all those in positions of authority refuse to take responsibility.

    The only way, in our dreams, out of this hideous trap is to have leaders with both guts and the competence to make the best use of independent advisers from across the field, and ask for their balanced view of what is the best course of action. Giving such advice is extremely common – it lies at the heart of almost all professional activity, and so is an ‘every day competence’ – but it fails in government. given a narrow choice of selected advisers, and a pre-rigging of the advice based on worst case scenarios.

    Doesn’t anyone in government understand this???

  9. John Bowman Reply

    ‘ They will have “acted on the best advice”. Although I still cannot for the life of me see how someone who freely admits to being ignorant and clueless can know enough to tell the “best” advice from the worst.’

    Isn’t ‘best advice’ defined as that which supports the policy already decided? And don’t we now know that the goon-squad who are asked to produce ‘the science’ start with ‘what’s the policy?’ and then work backwards to manipulate the computer models to provide ‘the ‘science’ that justifies the policy?

    As to the end: The Virus is dead! Long live the Virus!

    It has now been widely acknowledged, even the Fauci creature is on video explaining that viral load in the respiratory passages of the vaccinated is just the same as in the unvaccinated and therefore they are just as likely to spread the virus.

    But rather than torpedoing the campaign to vaccinate to stop the spread, it just gives ammunition to justify mask mandates for all. The question why do vaccinated people still need to wear masks is now easily dismissed; whereas before the promise was get vaccinated, take off the masks.

    It is also now being recognised that triple boosted are more likely to be infected and therefore spread the Omicron than ‘fully’ vaccinated, half-vaccinated or unvaccinated, that then justifies another lockdown.

    The viral stage of the panicdemic may be over, or nearly, but the political and arse-covering phase has a way to go. It will no doubt as Dr No suggest, slowly fade away. And to that end, the deciding factor is the 2022 November mid-term elections in the USA. The ruling Party and Let’s Go Brandon is now as popular as a rattle snake in a lucky dip, and they are already repositioning adopting the position of those who spoke out against CoVid policies… yes we really were against closing schools, yes we knew PCR Tests were inaccurate, of course we knew vaccines would not stop the spread or stop people getting the disease… and so on.

    And just as when the USA sneezes the World catches a Cold, when the USA stops sneezing the rest of the World will recover from its Cold. I expect instructional are already on the way to the WHO.

    I predict the same for the Net Zero/Climate change scam, it too will peter out but only after the ruination of our economies and evident lies are exposed makes its continuation a liability to its political proponents.

    • Tom Welsh Reply

      “Isn’t ‘best advice’ defined as that which supports the policy already decided?”

      Very likely, John. As in “policy-led intelligence/research, etc.”

      When I worked in the computer industry, long ago, it was generally understood that an organisation’s leaders would call in expensive consultants when they had decided on a course of action that would certainly be unpopular, and perhaps divisive. They would tell the consultants what to say, the consultants would take six or nine months writing a report to say that – with masses of fancy-looking “evidence” – and then the leaders could carry out their cunning plan, blaming any harmful effects on the consultants. The latter didn’t mind, as they were busy banking their huge fees.

      If we were serious about democracy”, I would like to see political parties made illegal – with a prison sentence for starting one – and every MP elected on the basis of his/her personality, track record, and proposed policies. Then when a problem arose, the MPs would be forced to work together (or coopt experts) to find a solution.

      People tend to say such a system would be unworkable; for instance 9they claim) it would slow government down too much. Great, says I – slower government (and if possible far less of it) is just what we need.

      Just imagine how much better the past two years would have been if government had not believed there was an epidemic. Doctors would have got on with their jobs, and the molehill would not have been built up into the Himalaya.

      https://dailysceptic.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BOB200920_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq-3EWhlPdPNfJnMxiEPBacu6SOiYUky09MjoYJ2J6f5g.jpg

      • djc Reply

        Consultant: a shield and a sword. Paid to be sharp, paid to be blunt, paid to take a beating; no matter, so long as it pays.

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