from: https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2020/04/09/coronazombies-infection-and-denial-in-the-united-kingdom/
It’s a curious fact that, in every disaster movie that comes out of
Hollywood, whatever threatens Western Civilisation, Humankind or Planet
Earth typically starts with the United States of America, usually New
York, but sometimes Los Angeles. Whether it’s alien invaders, nuclear
war, the rise of artificial intelligence, terrorist attacks, a tsunami
wave, an earth-bound asteroid, environmental catastrophe or a deadly
epidemic, it’s as if the propaganda arm of the US state is preparing its
population for the disasters to come. Given that the majority of the
world-ending disasters threatening humankind are created or inflicted by
the US Empire while its citizens enjoy the fat creamed off the rest of
the world, you have to ask yourself: ‘Do they know something we don’t?’
The answer to that question lies in another type of disaster movie
not included in the list above, and that is the zombie apocalypse genre.
Recently resuscitated in such Hollywood hits as the remade Dawn of the Dead and replicated in the UK with 28 Days Later
— the movie that uncannily predicts the deserted streets of London
today — these films have prepared us for the coronavirus crisis. More
than that, they have rehearsed us in how to act out our roles — not as
heroes, unfortunately, but as the cast of millions who will play the
zombies in the film of our own reality. As the Public Health England announcement on Facebook and Twitter directs us: ‘Act like you’ve got it, anyone can spread it.’ And in this film, Coronazombies!
(rated U), what we have been infected with is not SARs-CoV-2, which
causes the coronavirus disease 2019 that has induced such fear and panic
in the British people, but that other virus we call the media, both
mainstream and social. In the slang of the Twittersphere, COVID-19 has
gone viral.
1. Infection
So, what can we do about it? How can we stop being coronazombies and
start being protagonists in our own film? This is the fourth of the
articles I’ve written about the coronavirus crisis since it reached this
country, preceded by COVID-19 and Capitalism, Sociology of a Disease and Language is a Virus,
so let’s start again by learning something new about SARs-CoV-2 — not
from Matt Hancock, our Secretary of State for Health, a 41 year-old
computer software salesman and former economics advisor to George
Osborne with a background in the housing market, but from Dr. Knut
Wittkowski, an epidemiologist who for 20 years was head of the
Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at the
Rockefeller University in New York City, and who has been modelling
epidemics for 35 years. It’s an unfashionable approach, I know, to ask
an epidemiologist about how we should react to disease, but bear with
me.
In an interview conducted on 1-2 April,
Dr. Wittkowski, like dozens of other eminent epidemiologists,
virologists, microbiologists and pulmonologists not working for their
governments, expressed the opinion that everything our governments are
doing in response to coronavirus is wrong. Not slightly wrong, not
questionable, not debatable, but the exact opposite of what we should be
doing.
For example, keeping people at home during a respiratory disease
epidemic, he said, ‘keeps the virus healthy’, while getting out in the
open ‘is what stops every respiratory disease’. This, he explained, is
why seasonal influenzas last the winter months and ‘end during
springtime’ — roughly, from November to April. Not only that but,
according to Dr. Wittkowski, it is not practically possible to contain
an air-borne virus like SARs-CoV-2. Keeping a population locked down
will only prolong the presence of the respiratory disease the virus
creates in the population. ‘I don’t see a good reason’, he said, ‘for a
respiratory disease to stay in the population longer than necessary’, so
we should ask why our Government is intent on prolonging it in ours.
Above all, closing schools and keeping children at home is the very
worst thing we can do, as it stops the development of herd immunity,
which short of a vaccine in 18 months’ time is the only way we will ever
build immunity to SARs-CoV-2. As Dr. Wittkowski reminds us, we don’t
have a vaccine against the common cold, just as we don’t have vaccines —
or we have vaccines that are not very effective — for many of the
dozens of other influenza viruses, some of them corona viruses, that we
suffer from every year, and which develop into pneumonia that kills the
very old and already ill in numbers far greater than those dying this
year. But even if we did develop one, the virus will eventually mutate
and we will, once again, have to develop herd immunity, just as we do
every year to every new strain of virus. ‘For some reason that we
haven’t fully understood yet’, Dr. Wittkowski observes, ‘humankind has
survived all sorts of respiratory diseases.’
The reality, he says, is that this is just another virus, the
mortality rate of which is nothing like as high in the UK as the flu
epidemics of 2014-15 and 2017-18. And it’s the opinion of numerous
epidemiologists around the world not working for their governments that
what we should be doing is developing our herd immunity as quickly as
possible, rather than shutting down our economy, isolating the already
vulnerable and the elderly when over 2.2 million people live alone in
the UK, sending home asymptomatic health workers that have a tested
positive for SARs-CoV-2 who could be treating those with pneumonia, and
all the other measures imposed by our governments.
You might be wondering by now why in China, where the outbreak of the coronavirus began in the city of Wuhan, the epidemic is now over
barely three months after the first deaths were recorded, and why, out
of a population of 1,386,000,000, they had only 3,330 deaths from
COVID-19. In the opinion of Dr. Wittkowski, it’s because the Chinese
people had an advantage — though not the one we might think. The Chinese
government didn’t know what they were dealing with, so by the time they
implemented the lockdown strategies that we are copying across Europe,
the extent of the infection with SARs-CoV-2 had already reached a peak
and tailed off soon after that — just as seasonal viral epidemics do
every year.
Unfortunately, because of the internet, by the time a few people in
their 80s with several pre-existing health conditions died in Italy over
a month later and subsequently tested positive for SARs-CoV-2, a
panicking public started demanding that their governments ‘DO
SOMETHING!’ So they did, and in doing so they have extended the viral
infection. Instead of developing herd immunity as we do every few years
to new viruses — of which 5-14 per cent are corona viruses — an immunity
that typically lasts around 2 years before we have to develop it again,
we have prolonged it. According to Dr. Wittkowski, who after 35 years
of modelling viral epidemics presumably knows what he’s talking about,
if our governments had done nothing this seasonal influenza ‘epidemic’
would already be over, and we, having developed immunity, would be able
to visit and look after our parents and grandparents, who until then
could have been separated from the rest of us for a relatively short
period of time compared to the open-ended shutdown we have now.
The result of all this bad advice — or rather, of governments
listening to advice that best serves their agendas — is that NHS staff
are being sent home after testing positive for a virus that the elderly
and ill patients they should be treating have already contracted,
placing further strains on our already under-staffed and under-supplied
health services. Our children, who are evolutionarily made to resist
viruses, will, when they finally and inevitably return to school, revive
the virus in a second wave of infection, probably occurring this
autumn, and which is, Dr. Wittkowski says in a damning indictment of
government policy, ‘a direct consequence of social distancing.’ And we,
who should be out in this spring sun developing the 80 per cent
infection-rate we need to create the herd immunity that will protect us
collectively from this year’s respiratory virus, are instead sitting at
home in conditions that encourage the prolongation of SARs-CoV-2 in our
bodies, and reporting our neighbours who break the government
regulations that are not only without any scientific basis but are
actually making this crisis far, far worse. Dr. Wittowski’s comment on
this situation is not lacking in the weary irony of the scientist
confronted with human stupidity:
‘We should not believe that we are more intelligent than Mother
Nature was when we were evolving. Mother Nature was pretty good at
making sure that we’re a good match for the disease that we happen to
see virtually every year.’
Meanwhile, across the globe, governments who have placed their
populations under lockdown for the foreseeable future are passing
legislation that is trampling all over our human rights and civil
liberties. As an example of which, on April 2 the Danish Parliament passed a new law
that makes it possible to close websites and impose fines or
imprisonment up to 8 years on anyone who publishes information about
COVID-19 that contradicts the government’s official line. It shouldn’t
be long till we follow suit in the far more authoritarian UK, so spread
this information while you can, because tomorrow it might be illegal. In
the meantime, get out, get infected, get well.
* Since publishing this article, the YouTube recording of the
interview with Dr. Wittkowski, which had over a million viewers, has
been removed following policy changes that make anything contradicting
World Health Organisation directives on the coronavirus ‘in violation of
YouTube community guidelines’.
2. Denial
But isn’t this all another conspiracy theory? How could the
Government of the UK, let alone those of the dozens of other countries
across the world, get away with this? Won’t I be claiming next that the
coronavirus was invented by the Chinese Government, or the US
Government, or the Illuminati, or some other secret society?
No, I won’t. Conspiracy theories rest on the purported truth of
unverifiable assertions; capitalism, whose workings are what I’m
analysing here, works by capitalising on crises, whether that’s the
attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 that justified the accelerated
rise of the surveillance state over the past two decades, the financial
crisis of 2008 that justified over a decade of fiscal austerity against
the poor, the expansion of the housing crisis in the 2010s that
justified the demolition and privatisation of council housing, or the
rise of Extinction Rebellion protests against climate change in 2019
that is justifying the expansion of capitalism into new markets. All
these crisis moments have been exploited by the UK Government to pass
legislation that further entrenches neo-liberal policies in our social,
economic and political structures, and the coronavirus crisis is no
different. Dismissing the exposure of such opportunism as ‘conspiracy
theories’ — as is already being done of any critiques of media coverage
and Government policies on coronavirus — is how liberals continue to
deny the brutal truth about capitalism.
What is different about this crisis is that the communication of the
lies about the virus — from its inception in Wuhan to its media
representation in Europe, from the changing reactions of our Government
to its spread to the replication of Government lies on social media,
from the concession of our political structures to new legislation based
on those lies to the universal obedience of our population to that
legislation — exactly parallels the way the virus itself has passed from
person to person, country to country, around the world. ‘Parallel’
perhaps doesn’t do the relationship justice. The silencing of dissenting
voices — and especially those speaking with the greatest knowledge
about the virus — has not, yet, been imposed by the UK Government or
police force or military. Instead, those voices are simply drowned out
by the blanket fearmongering of the mainstream press and the white noise
of social media. It is the algorithms that replicate the most read, the
most liked, the most-reposted and retweeted memes, ensuring the virus
of lies continues to replicate at an exponential rate across the
internet. Confronted with a supposedly exponentially-growing threat that
has no basis either in our scientific knowledge about epidemics or in
the empirical data it is producing, the collective fear of our
biological selves has turned what is a new strain of respiratory virus
with a relatively low mortality rate into a global disaster. The
disaster is real, and many tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of
thousands, of people across the world will die because of how we —
meaning both us and our governments — have reacted to this virus, but
the virus itself is unexceptional.
What is the evidence for this claim, and how can such a thing have
happened? To draw an analogy for readers more accustomed to reading on
this website about the failure of housing provision to meet housing need
during the UK housing crisis, in the year between April 2018 and March
2019 there were 213,860 new-build residential properties officially completed in England. Of these, 57,485 were classified as ‘affordable housing’. However, only
4,783 of these were for social rent. Affordable housing, therefore,
which the average person can’t in fact afford, made up 27 per cent of
all new housing, and social-rent housing, the most in-demand housing
tenure, made up just 2.2 per cent.
The immediate comparison to these proportions is that new-build residences are roughly numerically equivalent to the 232,708 people tested for SARs-CoV-2
in the UK as of 8 April 2020; affordable housing to the 60,733 people
who have tested positive; and homes for social rent to the 7,097 deaths
attributed to COVID-19. In remarkably similar proportions to housing
provision, positive tests for SARs-CoV-2 make up 26 per cent of all
people tested in the UK; and deaths attributed to COVID-19 make up 3 per
cent.
However, the analogy I want to make is between how Government-coined
terminology has been used to deceive the public about the reality of the
crisis — both the housing crisis and the coronavirus crisis. For years
now the UK Government, the London Mayor, our local authorities and our
media have got away with lying to the British public about what tenure
and cost of housing is being built in the UK with billions of pounds of
public subsidies and the privatisation of public land by calling
half-a-million-pound properties for shared ownership and other
unaffordable housing schemes ‘affordable’ — even when that lie only
constitutes around a quarter of what is being built. But the immediate
reality behind that lie is that just over 2 per cent of all new housing
meets housing need.
Even worse than this, just as the figures for homes for social rent
completed in the UK do not take account of the number of existing
council-rent properties either sold under right-to-buy or demolished by
estate demolition schemes, or the number of housing association homes
converted from social to so-called affordable rent — meaning the net
number of homes for social rent every year is in fact a considerable
loss and not a tiny gain — so too the actual deaths as a result of
coronavirus disease 2019 are still unknown and not reported in the
increasingly alarmist figures produced by the Government and
disseminated by the media.
In this respect, the deliberate failure of both Government and media
to distinguish between the rate of testing and the rate of infection,
giving rise to a hugely exaggerated mortality rate; between positive
tests for SARs-CoV-2 and cases in which the tested develop the symptoms
of COVID-19, with the former in a ratio of 8-2 or higher to the latter;
and between deaths with coronavirus and deaths from it, with the latter
constituting maybe 12 per cent or less of the former — parallel the lies
they have told about the UK housing crisis.
Until we establish the numerator in this equation by testing everyone
in the UK for SARs-CoV-2, announcing that the denominator of
60,733 positive tests gives us a certain percentage of the population
infected is mathematically impossible. And since percentages are a
mathematical equation, doing so, as the Government is every day, is
literally meaningless, and ideologically speaking a form of
disinformation — lying, to use a simple word. It is because of this that
the US statistician, Nate Silver, the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, in an article titled ‘Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless’, describes the UK as doing ‘the worst job’ of all countries in the world of detecting the true number of infected people.
In addition to this lack of testing, the UK Government is also not
distinguishing, even within the limited number of tests it has conducted
— about 1 in every 291 of the population — between those who have
tested positive for SARs-CoV-2 and those who have developed COVID-19,
the disease that is caused by novel coronavirus, and which only develops
severe symptoms in a tiny proportion of the population, and
overwhelmingly in the already ill and elderly. At present, everyone who
tests positive is assumed to have the disease, which from an
epidemiological perspective is a flat-out lie.
One of the principles of infectiology, according to Dr. Sucharit
Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes
Gutenberg University Mainz and one of the most referenced scientists in
German history, is precisely the distinction made between infection and
disease. In his Open Letter to the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, in which he questions the scientific bases to the lockdown of Germany, he writes:
‘An illness requires a clinical manifestation. Therefore, only
patients with symptoms such as fever or cough should be included in the
statistics as new cases. In other words, a new infection — as measured
by the COVID-19 test — does not necessarily mean that we are dealing
with a newly ill patient who needs a hospital bed.’
In response to his letter, Dr. Bhakdi’s university e-mail address was reportedly deactivated this week, and only reactivated again after protests.
Given the ongoing lack of information about novel coronavirus — or,
more accurately, the ongoing disinformation about it — not only in the
UK but across the world, at present it is hard to establish what
percentage of those testing positive for SARs-CoV-2 do not develop
COVID-19. But in Iceland, which due to its high level of testing has
registered the second highest level of infection per capita in the
world, and which unlike the UK and most other European countries is
testing people not showing symptoms, ‘about half of those who tested positive are non-symptomatic’, and the majority of those with the disease develop only ‘mild, cold-like symptoms’, with only 42 people out of 30,947 tested requiring hospital treatment. Last month the World Health Organisation estimated that, overall, ‘80 per cent of infections are asymptomatic or mild’; while new evidence has emerged this month from China indicating that 78 per cent of coronavirus infections do not result in symptoms.
Finally, and most disruptive of all for our understanding of the
seriousness and threat of COVID-19, there is no information from our
Government or almost every other government in the world about the
actual cause of death of the increasing number of people, most of them
in their 70s and 80s, whose deaths are being categorised as ‘corona
deaths’. In Germany, the Robert Koch Institute, the federal government
agency responsible for disease control and prevention, has even
instructed pathologists not to carry out autopsies on bodies
officially categorised as ‘corona deaths’. The reason for this
extraordinary and unique departure from standard procedure is supposedly
the risk of infection to doctors, even though such autopsies are
carried out as a matter of course for diseases such as HIV/AIDS,
hepatitis, tuberculosis and PRION diseases. In a letter to Dr. Bodo Schiffmann
from a German pathologist who wishes to remain anonymous — presumably
for fear of reprisals from the German state or those terrified by the
government propaganda — he writes:
‘It is quite remarkable that in a disease that is killing
thousands of patients all over the world and bringing the economy of
entire countries to a virtual standstill, only very few autopsy findings
are available (six patients from China). From the point of view of both
the epidemic police and the scientific community, there should be a
particularly high level of public interest in autopsy findings. However,
the opposite is the case. Are they afraid of finding out the true
causes of death of the positively-tested deceased? Could it be that the
numbers of corona deaths would then melt away like snow in the spring
sun?’
Meanwhile, in the UK as in most countries whose populations are under
government-imposed lockdowns, the qualification for a ‘corona death’ on
our Government websites is that COVID-19 is mentioned on the death
certificate as a ‘possible’ or ‘contributing’ cause of death, or that
the deceased showed symptoms ‘similar’ to COVID-19, or that the deceased
tested positive for SARs-CoV-2 before or at the time of death. One has
to ask what other life-threatening event justifying the house arrest of
over 2.9 billion people across the world would have such a loose definition of what it is we’re supposed to be threatened by.
As a result of thus systemic lack of accurate information, the only
reliable indication we have so far of how many official corona deaths
actually died as a result of the disease rather than with the virus in
their body is from the National Institute of Health in Italy.
On 20 March this revealed that, of 3,200 people who had officially died
with COVID-19, only 12 per cent of the deaths, 384 people, had a causal
relation to the disease. By this calculation, rather than 2.5 per cent
of people in the UK testing positive for SARs-CoV-2 before or after
dying of COVID-19, the figure is closer to 0.3 per cent. But in reality,
since we have only tested 1 in 291 people, and the vast majority of
those have been the already ill and elderly people admitted to hospital
with severe symptoms of COVID-19, the actual percentage of people
infected with coronavirus in the UK — which by now is likely to be a
large percentage of us — that are likely to die because of coronavirus
disease is likely to be an even smaller percentage still.
Lastly, it’s important to remember that we don’t die of SARs-CoV-2,
but of the respiratory diseases it can cause, which is why it
overwhelmingly kills the elderly or those with pre-existing health
conditions, why the death rates are higher in areas with high pollution
or high levels of tobacco smoking, and why it has had hardly any effect
on the healthy lungs of young children. We don’t have a vaccine for
SARs-CoV-2, just as we don’t have a vaccine for many of the viruses that
mutate into new influenza viruses every year; but we do have
antibiotics, which kills the bacteria in our lungs that causes the
pneumonia. As Dr. Knut Wittkowski explained in his interview:
‘We don’t die of the virus. We die of pneumonia. So, if we have a
virus respiratory disease — once the immune system has created
antibodies — the antibodies, or the immune system, kills all infected
cells, which destroys much of the mucosa. And bacteria can easily settle
on that destroyed mucosa, and then cause pneumonia. And it is the
pneumonia that is killing people, if it’s not treated.’
Attributing these deaths to COVID-19, therefore, is both
diagnostically inaccurate and factually misleading. Coronavirus disease,
when the symptoms become severe, can create the conditions in people
whose immune systems are weakened or who already suffer from existing
health conditions that can lead to pneumonia. Again, this is why deaths
attributed to COVID-19 are overwhelmingly among the elderly and/or those
with pre-existing illnesses, such as diabetes, cancer or a chronic
diseases affecting the lungs, heart, kidney or liver. In confirmation of
which, as of 8 April, when the NHS reported
that 6,483 people have ‘died in hospitals in England and had tested
positive for COVID-19 at time of death’, 5 of them were under 19 years
of age; 47 between 20-39; 465 between 40-59; 2,576 between 60-79; and
3,390 of them 80 and over. That means 92 per cent of all deaths in the
UK that tested positive for COVID-19 were over 60 years of age, and over
half were over 80, the average life expectancy in the UK. No
information has yet been released by either the Department of Health and Social Care or its executive agency, Public Health England, about what caused these deaths.
To try to put this in context, according to the Office for National Statistics,
which is semi-independent of the Government, in the week ending 5 April
last year, 10,126 people died in England and Wales, 8,544 of them were
over 65 — 84 per cent of the total — and 1,412 of them died from respiratory diseases. Over the same week this year, according to the National Health Service, 3,373 people in England died who tested positive for COVID-19, and 3,120 of them were over 60 years old — 92 per cent of the total.
At the other end of the age range, 5
children have died testing positive for COVID-19 in English hospitals
since March this year. Two were aged 19, one was aged 13, and another,
the youngest, was just 5. We know this because their ages were published
on the Department of Health and Social Care website and subsequently
listed on the Worldometer webpage for UK deaths.
In comparison, over the same 5-week period last year, 94 children
between the age of 1 and 14 died in England and Wales, though without
anything like the attention the former received in the UK press as supposed evidence that COVID-19 can kill anyone. Yes, it can, but so can being in a car accident, which 15-19 years olds have almost double the risk of dying from compared to the general population, without the Government feeling it necessary to prohibit them from getting in the back of a car or crossing the road.
Until even the official deaths with COVID-19 have peaked in the UK we
can’t accurately assess the severity of this influenza wave to previous
years. However, comparing SARs-CoV-2-positive deaths to overall deaths
this year, in the week ending 27 March 2020 — the latest for which the
ONS provides statistics — 1,534 people in England and Wales — including
those who died outside hospital — died where the underlining cause was
respiratory disease. Of these, 539 had COVID-19 mentioned on the death
certificate as a possible or contributing cause, or the deceased showed
symptoms similar to COVID-19, or tested positive for SARs-CoV-2. The
overall death rate for this week was 11,141, compared to an average of
10,130 for the corresponding week over the past five years. In
other words, in the third week of official deaths from COVID-19, in
both mortality rate and in deaths from pneumonia, the UK has registered
around 1,000 additional deaths among the over 65s.
By projecting this year’s total deaths and deaths from influenza and
pneumonia onto the figures for last year, the website InProportion2 has
shown not only that deaths attributed to COVID-19 up to 7 April amount
to only 20 per cent of the latter, but that the overall deaths this year
have not increased compared to the average number of deaths at this
point of the year over the last five years as a result of coronavirus.
In the chart the author has produced (below), the blue line
shows the number of deaths from influenza or pneumonia in 2019; the
orange line exactly matching it up to 27 March — the most recent figures
available — shows deaths from influenza or pneumonia this year; and the
red line shows the deaths in the UK reported ‘with’ COVID-19 up to 7
April. At this scale, the deaths attributed to COVID-19 appear
relatively few compared both to the deaths from all causes and to the
number of deaths that usually take place in NHS hospitals.
Finally, even with all the caveats to the accuracy of the latest
figures, the 6,483 deaths in England attributed to COVID-19 since March
2020, and the 7,097 across the UK reported as of 8 April, have to be
compared to the 28,330 excess deaths associated with seasonal influenza in England in 2014-15, the 11,975 in 2015-16, the 18,009 in 2016-17, and the 26,408 in 2017-18. InProportion2 has since published a chart comparing mortality rates in 2020 and 2018 (below),
and it shows that, as of 27 March this year, the total number of deaths
in England and Wales is significantly less than for the equivalent
period in 2018. Moreover, the deaths attributed to COVID-19 in 2020
amount to just 20 per cent of the deaths from influenza and pneumonia in
2018; and, even combined with the projected increase in deaths from
influenza and pneumonia this year, the death toll is only likely to draw
roughly even.
With all due respect to the families and memories of the 7,000 people
who have died this year from pneumonia, some other respiratory disease
or as a result of pre-existing medical conditions — some
of whose deaths may have been caused or accelerated by coronavirus
disease 2019, over half of whom were over the average life expectancy of
UK citizens — this is not an epidemic, except insofar as every influenza virus every year is an epidemic.
3. Coronazombyism
So, if coronavirus disease 2019 isn’t a killer epidemic, which all
the empirical evidence says it isn’t, what is happening? In January 2014
the Guardian
newspaper warned: ‘Britain is dangerously unprepared for a flu pandemic
that could kill as many as 315,000 people!’ In September 2017 the Telegraph
predicted: ‘NHS braced for worst flu season in history amid fears
overcrowded hospitals unable to cope.’ And in November 2018 the Daily Mail
tried to terrify us with the news that: ‘More than 50,000 excess deaths
were recorded across England and Wales last winter, official figures
show!’ Of course, these attempts at scaremongering were no more based in
truth than the lies the same papers and every other paper in the UK are
printing about the coronavirus now. So why have the latter caught on?
Why has the population of the UK been infected with this virus that has
turned us into coronazombies, ready to believe everything we’re told by a
Government and media that has lied to us repeatedly and increasingly
openly over the past twenty years and longer? Why, like zombies in a bad
film, are the normally mild-mannered British now ready to tear each
other apart for disobeying the newly imposed restrictions to our
freedoms? Why are we reacting with accusations of culpability,
denunciations to the authorities, threats of divine retribution and
zombie-like fury to anyone who dares even to question the Government’s
lies?
For dictatorships to work, laws are not enough, as there are never
enough police officers to enforce laws that a majority of the working
population doesn’t believe in. Historically, totalitarian regimes have
relied on the grudges of individuals, on the stoked prejudices of
communities, and on the sense of duty of members of society to an
abstract notion of a nation or people or religion to police the
population. Above all, they have relied on fear. To this end, the
Government of the UK and of many other countries is actively encouraging
its citizens to inform on each other for flouting the hastily-created
laws passed by parliaments or simply announced by Ministers on the back
of the media-created panic about coronavirus. When the government tells
us to ‘act like you’ve got it, anyone can spread it’, it is also telling
us to turn informant.
Just as happened after the assault with a knife on London Bridge last
December, when the National Police Chiefs Council offered members of
the British public ‘counter-terrorism training’
and casually announced that 350,000 people are already accredited as
Counter Terrorism (CT) citizens, so now new legislation is empowering
not just police officers but also community support officers to enact
laws that have been dictated by ministers — not debated in Parliament,
not scrutinised by parliamentary committee, not voted on by our elected
representatives in the House of Commons. At this stage of our
extraordinarily rapid descent into absolute obedience to whatever
regulations the Government imposes on us and whatever lies its media
outlets tell us, it is the general population that, in huge numbers, is
doing the Government’s work. Whether by spreading lies on social media
they haven’t bothered to verify or understand, or by reporting people
who disobey the Government to the police, it is ‘The British People’ —
as Tony Blair liked to call us when telling the lies that lead us to the
Iraq War — that are laying the foundations for governance by
dictatorship.
Surprisingly — although nothing surprises me anymore about the
political gullibility of the UK population — participating in laying
this road to dictatorship are many of the individuals and groups that
describe themselves as radical, socialist, anarchist, communist or in
some other way independent in their thinking and actions from the
ideology of neo-liberalism. Unfortunately — although fortune has nothing
to do with it — in their eagerness to turn media lies into a stick with
which to beat a completely indifferent Government, they have turned out
to be just as susceptible to those lies as everybody else. In this
instance, as in so many previous man-made crises, the so-called ‘left’
in this country is doing the work of our right-wing and authoritarian
Government. In their warnings against a threat that doesn’t exist, in
their lamentations for deaths that are no more numerous than usual, and
in their demands for stronger Government measures to curb the virus they
are in reality exacerbating, they, too, are infected with
coronazombyism.
So what is coronazombyism, besides the title of the film in which
we’re all acting out our allotted roles? According to epidemiologists,
virologists and microbiologists who have spent a lifetime studying viral
epidemics, the current lockdown of our societies and the economic
consequences of this are actually increasing the deaths resulting from
this new virus: by depriving our health services of workers who have
tested positive for SARs-CoV-2, by cancelling operations for
life-threatening conditions, by reducing life expectancy in the future
for people forced deeper into poverty. In addition, the further
reduction in funding for the NHS and the rest of the public sector as an
inevitable consequence of our radically shrunken economy, added to the
societal and psychological consequences from job losses and business
failures, together with the cuts to oversees aid for developing
countries justified by a reduced GDP in capitalist economies, will
continue to have a negative impact on the health and life expectancy of
millions of people for years to come. The Government responses,
therefore, and the role of the press and media in framing them for
public acceptance and implementation, are not external to, but a part
of, the virus. The two are, in a very real and consequential sense, in a
symbiotic relation to each other. In this infection of biology by
technology, of human consciousness by artificial intelligence, the media
virus has initiated a mutation in the coronavirus that has turned it
into something far more dangerous than influenza.
Through natural selection, a virus will always ‘choose’, so to speak —
although without agency — the host that best allows it to replicate
itself in greatest numbers. By keeping most of the Northern hemisphere
under house arrest during spring, when seasonal influenza usually ends,
governments have turned bodies that would otherwise rapidly produce
antibodies to fight off and develop immunity to SARs-CoV-2 into better
hosts, extending the presence of the symptomatology of COVID-19 in the
population, and preventing us from developing herd immunity on the scale
required to stop its replication. In the same way, the artificial
intelligence in the algorithms that determine what we see on mainstream
and social media exponentially increases the propaganda and lies that
tell us what we want to hear: at once frightening us into obedience to
new dictates and reassuring us that the Government is in control — but,
crucially, requires our help (the revived mantra of every crisis that
‘we’re all in this together’). Both systems, the biological and the
technological, the natural and the artificial, reproduce themselves,
independently of individual agency, as viral transmission through the
body politic — or better, the global host. This is the real, present and
future danger of coronazombyism.
The evidence of this is everywhere around us, and in a future article
I will look at the legislative consequences for us of coronazombyism.
But, as always, it’s to the USA that we should look for the stupidest
and most dangerous reaction to the coronavirus. President Donald Trump,
with typical military bombast, has declared that the fight against
coronavirus is a ‘war’,
and put the USA on a war-footing against what he calls a ‘foreign
virus’, declaring that the US will ‘defeat the invisible enemy’. So I
want to end with a quote from Julian Assange, about whose activities as a
journalist and publisher exposing the war-crimes of the USA, whose
innocence of accusations of rape invented by Swedish prosecutors under
US duress, and whose arrest, incarceration and torture in a British
prison, also under US duress, the entire press and media of the UK and
US has lied or been silent about for the past decade.
In addition to the life of a man the governments of the US, the UK,
Sweden, Australia, Ecuador and many others within the ambit of US
imperialism are quite blatantly and even openly trying to kill, one of
the greatest concerns about Assange’s extrajudicial imprisonment,
torture and trial is the watershed it represents in that chimera of
liberal democracies — the freedom of the press. Anyone who has followed
the lies on which every war of the Twenty-first Century has been started
— in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Libya — will know how long it
has been since this mythical beast was last spotted; but the openness
with which Julian Assange has been imprisoned, tortured and is being
tried outside of both UK and international law while the press and media
stay rigorously and obediently silent represents a new and, most
likely, irreversible sea-change in the relationship between the fourth
estate and the capitalist state over which it is supposed to exert a
degree of scrutiny on behalf of the public.
There are many other contenders — such as the UK-armed genocide in
Yemen, the silence of the UK media about the violent suppression of the Gilets jaunes
protests in France, or the anti-semitic slur campaign against Jeremy
Corbyn in the UK — but it could be argued that the first manifestation
of this new relationship is the transformation of SARs-CoV-2 from a
respiratory virus into a global crisis. In an interview with RT in May 2011,
when he was still free to do so, this is what Julian Assange said about
the assimilation of our press and media, both mainstream and social,
into the propaganda arm of the state:
‘One of the hopeful things I have discovered is that nearly every
war that has started in the past 50 years has been the result of media
lies. The media could have stopped it, if they had searched deep enough.
If they hadn’t repeated government propaganda, they could have stopped
it.
‘But what does that mean? Well, that means, basically,
populations don’t like wars, and populations have to be fooled into
wars. Populations don’t willingly and with open eyes go into a war. So,
if we have a good media environment, then you will also have a peaceful
environment.
‘Our number one enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the
number one enemy in everyone: not understanding what is actually going
in the world. It’s only when you start to understand that you can make
effective decisions and effective plans.
‘Now, the question is, who is promoting ignorance? Well, those
organisations that try to keep things secret, and those organisations
which distort true information to make it false or misrepresentative. In
this latter category, it is bad media. It really is my opinion that the
media in general are so bad, we have to question whether the world
wouldn’t be better off without them altogether.
‘There are some very, very fine journalists, and we work with
many of them, and some fine media organisations. But the vast majority
are awful, and so distortive to how the world actually is. The result is
we see wars, we see corrupt governments continue.’
I think it would be fair to say that whatever hope Assange once had
in the media has now been crushed by 9 years of progressively severe
lockdown, first under house arrest in the UK, then claiming political
asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy, and now in solitary confinement
without charge in Belmarsh prison. What hope remains lies with those of
us who still have, for the present, the freedom to understand what is
happening in the world, to speak the truth about it, and to act on that
knowledge, even under the threat of arrest.
Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing
Further reading:
Lockdown: Collateral Damage in the War on COVID-19
The State of Emergency as Paradigm of Government: Coronavirus Legislation, Implementation and Enforcement
Manufacturing Consensus: The Registering of COVID-19 Deaths in the UK
Giorgio Agamben and the Bio-Politics of COVID-19
Good Morning, Coronazombies! Diary of a Bio-political Crisis Event
Language is a Virus: SARs-CoV-2 and the Science of Political Control
Sociology of a Disease: Age, Class and Mortality in the Coronavirus Pandemic
COVID-19 and Capitalism
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