Eradication of Covid Is a Dangerous and Expensive (Delusion) Fantasy

In my neck of the woods, it’s been admitted that more people have died from opioid and/ or fentanyl overdoses than died from/with Covid. And still the insanity continues. Ignoring real problems to focus on a desired and created crisis…

Expressing sensible, rational opinions such as those below are why Dr Jay Bhattacharya has become a pariah. (Outcast) Even though he pushes the vaccine! But that’s not servile enough for the fanatics.

Worth reading from 2021

Much of the pathology (pathological/collective condition) underlying Covid policy arises from the (delusion) fantasy that it is possible to eradicate the virus. Capitalizing on pandemic panic, governments and compliant media have used the lure of zero-Covid to induce obedience to harsh and arbitrary lockdown policies and associated violations of civil liberties.

Humanity’s unimpressive track record of deliberately eradicating contagious diseases warns us that lockdown measures, however draconian, can’t work. Thus far, the number of such diseases so eliminated stands at two—and one of these, rinderpest, affected only even-toed ungulates. The lone human infectious disease we’ve deliberately eradicated is smallpox. The bacterium responsible for the Black Death, the 14th-century outbreak of bubonic plague, is still with us, causing infections even in the U.S.

While the eradication of smallpox—a virus 100 times as deadly as Covid—was an impressive feat, it shouldn’t be used as a precedent for Covid. For one thing, unlike smallpox, which was carried only by humans, SARS-CoV-2 is also carried by animals, which some hypothesize can spread the disease to humans. We will need to rid ourselves of dogs, cats, mink, bats and more to get to zero.

The costs of any eradication program are immense and must be justified before the government pursues such a goal. These costs include a sacrifice of non-health-related goods and services and other health priorities—forgone prevention and treatment of other diseases. The consistent failure of government officials to recognize the harms of lockdowns—often citing the precautionary principle—disqualifies Covid as a candidate for eradication.

The only practical course is to live with the virus in the same way that we have learned to live over millennia with countless other pathogens. A focused protection policy can help us cope with the risk. There is a thousand-fold difference in the mortality and hospitalization risk posed by virus to the old relative to the young. We now have good vaccines that have helped protect vulnerable people from the ravages of Covid wherever they have been deployed. Offering the vaccine to the vulnerable everywhere, not the failed lockdowns, should be the priority to save lives.

Still unvaccinated and still living.