Curing Australia’s Severe Covid Case of Short-Term Thinking

What are the most damaging thought crimes clouding our decision making during the pandemic, and how can we overcome them?

As my dad will remind me any time I criticise any aspect of how we have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic, decision-making is a delicate balance of risk. What are the foreseeable consequences of any individual decision in terms of the risk it mitigates in the immediate future, compared to potential additional risk in the less immediate future? Simples, right?

The dilemma of lockdowns is an excellent example that this risk equation is not, of course, simples. There is, as you are likely aware by now, a quite severe pushback afoot to the widespread policy of shutting down various aspects of society in order to ‘flatten’ the progress of Covid (see this particularly convincing and depressing effort). If I could summarise the core, non-emotional argument of anti-lockdowners: it is not that the data conclusively proves lockdowns aren’t saving lives, it is that the data provides no conclusive evidence that lockdowns do save lives. Taken to its ruthless end point, such data makes lockdown measures extremely difficult to justify given their very well known and severe negative impacts.

But that is what we know now. Regardless of your opinions about lockdowns now, few could fault the initial rush to close down various aspects of our society back then—such was the shock value of those doom-laden images of masked Chinese folk literally dropping dead in the streets of Wuhan from a mysterious and dangerous new infectious pathogen suspiciously adjacent to the plot of a movie/Netflix TV series. The risk, as it was conveyed to us at that time, justified unprecedented mitigation measures; the short-term benefits of ruthlessly flattening dat curve clearly outweighed any long-term social and economic consequences, especially as we were assured that said curve would only take a handful of weeks to be triumphantly flattened. 

The problem, I would suggest, is that such short-term thinking has continued to prevail in the proceeding months.  

We have come a long way from those times, now more than 12 months in fact. Not discounting the media’s constant obsession with conveying the most fear-inducing extreme of this situation, most parts of the world (with the notable exception of India) are emerging from the worst of the pandemic — at least to an extent that allows for some degree of holistic hindsight to be dished out. Are we now at the stage where we can shift away from our reliance on short-term solutions, and start to implement long-term decision-making? A shift that will inevitably require some degree of real or perceived ruthlessness; not to mention reckoning with some of the basic realities of this pandemic that we have been largely ignoring thus far.

Curing our addiction to short-term thinking requires getting to the heart of some of the deeper mental fallacies that we have been holding on to. So without further ado, here is a short list of contenders. Who will take the honour for the most severe case of Covid thought crime? Could it even be Australia!?

We Can Beat This Virus

Maybe we can start here: an agreement that it is unrealistic to think we can (or should) eliminate, regardless of the costs, a virus that the vast majority of the population will not be harmed by. That such a feat was — and among Zero Covid advocates, still is — touted as possible shows just how detached from scientific reality much of the debate around Covid has become.

It is, for example, slightly absurd and also hilarious just how detached from the reality of the rest of the world Australia has become. Here we are, desperately yet surely forlornly, clinging to the hope that we can keep this virus quarantined in cheap hotel rooms whilst eventually opening back up to a world that has almost completely integrated Covid-19 into its population. As this study in the mainstream-as-it-comes journal Nature makes clear (90%-of-scientists-surveyed clear), Covid-19 is destined to become endemic sooner or later, and this is nothing to be fearful of. Rather than thinking we can ‘beat’ this virus, really we need to find a way to make peace with it.

There is no easy way out of this. We, down-under, need to get to grips with this unavoidable reality at a psychological level; understand what its implications are (yes, that includes people dying, because we are not so special unto the rest of the world); and implement the measures that will allow us to most safely make this transition and join the rest of the world: back in brutal reality. 

Vaccine Immunity Is Better Than Natural Immunity

But what about the vaccine? Wasn’t that supposed to be our free ticket out of this Covid purgatory? Let’s take a closer look at the mindset behind our reliance on vaccine immunity to save us.

Rather than offering a path out of this pandemic, mass vaccination may actually end up representing one of the most dire acts of Covid short-term thinking: the trading-in of our inherent natural immunity and its long term protection from a range of pathogens, for a highly specific form of vaccine immunity — an immunity that provides an artificially-strengthened protection for one viral strain, but likely at the expense of protection from anything else.

Because this is what many prominent pro-vaccine experts are now starting to say — and if the pro-vaxxers are now starting to take the side of our natural immune systems, you know how far down the garden path we have been lead (bang). As I wrote about previously, perhaps the most prominent vaccine man to blow the whistle is Geert Vanden Bossche, who is (was, lol) so far up the vaccine pecking order that he once worked directly with Bill and Melinda Gates through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI). He compares the vaccines to a sneaky software update for our immune systems: one that appears to work better at first but that, once installed, will have to be regularly updated to remain functional (something Pfizer have now basically confirmed).

Perhaps less controversially, we also have Canadian Viral Immunologist Dr. Bryan Bridle, who puts it in more straight forward terms. Natural immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity: not in the immediate and specific sense, but in its overall capacity to protect from a broad range of viral variants. He even goes as far as saying that he would personally prefer to acquire immunity through infection rather than through the vaccine. 

Pretty convincing, no? Yet, despite these warnings, our mainstream narrative stays locked in its short-term addiction to superficial good news. It leaps gleefully at any incoming scientific evidence that these vaccines are providing immediate protection against the original strain of Covid-19, immediately declaring it as proof of ‘efficacy’ without giving any consideration to what effective and holistic immune protection actually entails. 

If this vaccine immunity starts to fail, whether it is for the original strain, a mutant variant, or another subsequent type of viral pathogen (which we have basically been assured will be part of our future), what kind of ‘effective’ protection will we be left with?

We Are Damaged And In Need Of Fixing

There is one particularly insidious type of psychological fallacy underlying our reliance on vaccine immunity, one that brings into question our innate ability to protect ourselves from destructive pathogens without external intervention.

Anti-nature counter-movements such as Zero Covid are the product of years of predictive programming in our news and entertainment, which have — deliberately or not — prepared us psychologically for this very situation. Through such propaganda, we have become conditioned to be innately fearful of biological pathogens such as viruses and their potential to wreak havoc on our pitifully ill-equipped bodies. This is despite the vital and largely positive role that viruses play in our health. As Dr. Zach Bush eloquently suggests: “if we choose to learn from, rather than fear, this virus, it can reveal the source of our chronic disease epidemics that are the real threat to our species.”

The nature of misinformation and propaganda is not just the hype designated to invisible bogey-man pathogens. It has also inflicted damage to the reputation of our own God-given immune systems, which can now only be restored via the intervention of the saviour science of vaccines. This reflects, in my humble opinion, a much broader anti-nature and anti-divine ideology that has infiltrated our failing consumerist culture. As someone with faith in intelligent design, I will always default to the position that our natural state is more than adequate at protecting us from any potentially dangerous biological agents in our environments, without the need for an entire industry to exist to save us. As this excellent essay points out: 

They would have you believe that you are damaged, and that only they can repair you. 

Well, I call bullshit on that very premise, and I invite you to as well.  

There Are No Effective Treatments For Covid Beside the Vaccine

Now, of course, we aren’t perfect — we can all get sick, some more so than others. So what happens then, regardless of whether it has been natural or vaccine immunity that has failed us?

This brings us to the issue of therapeutics. The tenacity of the Zero Covid ideology that underlies Australia’s current approach can mostly be attributed to the brutally effective campaign waged against potential therapeutic treatments. Where you stand on this issue fundamentally defines how you perceive our aforementioned risk equation. If we remain under the impression that to be infected by Covid essentially leaves us in God’s hands, bereft of any form of viable medical intervention aside from a ventilator (and a prayer), then of course it makes sense to avoid the risk of becoming infected like the plague we have been told Covid is. Brutally harsh lockdowns, combined with social distancing and masks, become our only safeguard against a timeline shift into viral-induced zombie apocalypse.

However, in contrast, if we know that there are in fact scientifically-proven therapeutics out there and easily available — treatments such as Ivermectin, which meta-analyses have now shown may reduce the risk of serious illness and death by up to 75% — then the whole risk equation that we are dealing with shifts dramatically. We could start making Ivermectin readily prescribed tomorrow if those who pull the political and medical strings of our country so wished — perhaps even the much maligned but also often effective-if-used-early hydroxychloroquine (which will forever hold a place in my heart). Combine this with zinc, Vitamins C and D, and other readily available health promoting measures that having growing scientific support, and we can make the most of our blessing of miraculously avoiding Covid to date — allowing us to fully learn from and make amends for the mistakes of other countries.

But we don’t: alas, we continue to rely on avoidance at all costs, until the day the medical miracle of the vaccine finally arrives, descending perhaps on a cloud, bestowing us lasting herd immunity from on high.

Australia is the Lucky Covid Country

This is not a thought crime in itself yet — there is little doubt that we have been incredibly lucky thus far — but one that has the potential to come into reality on our current mental trajectory.

As we hang tenuously to the original promise of the vaccine leading us, Moses-like, out of enslavement towards the promised land of herd immunity and international travel, Australia must soon face some difficult decisions. We could truly end up being the most fortunate nation of this pandemic, but we aren’t there yet, not by a long shot. It will take some bold thinking to make the very most of our fortune thus far.

Do we keep kicking the can down the road, jumping at every shadow of a potential outbreak whilst declaring anyone who suggests we need to allow this virus to run its course through the population a granny killer? Or do we buckle up, accept the current reality we find ourselves in, make the tough decisions that reflect this reality, and finally break from these remnant Zero-Covid shackles?  

Do we, most importantly, start putting immense pressure on those who would still deny that there are safe and highly effective — properly effective — therapeutics for Covid? Will we start doing whatever we can to make sure they are available for those most vulnerable among us, when such a reality hits?

There have been many crimes of short-term thinking committed throughout this pandemic, but if a nation — one that has for many decades called itself the Lucky Country — tragically and unforgivably forgoes the incredibly fortunate gift of delayed-onset Covid we have been granted; if we fail to learn from and make amends for the harsh lessons learned in other therapeutic-denying countries… before I run out of punctuation: it may be the greatest Covid thought crime of them all.