Pandemic Fatigue

How a piece on Health turned into something else

Sorry about this rather late rumination that was supposed to shine a brilliant light on the malaise of our personal health and its public aspect, the ‘health care system’, both showing severe signs of strain, stress and fatigue.

Let’s begin with my personal situation: I haven’t even got ‘it’, Covid-19. Though at my advanced age, 81, I am in the high risk group while healthy, vigorous and active and without ‘underlying conditions’ or obesity. Though my mental and emotional health is shaky, I am physically healthy thanks to intermittent fasting, a healthy Keto diet, and until they barred me, swimming at the local YWCA.

How you view me and my health choices depends on how you view health in general. I take the view once sacrosanct with the old feminists: my body, my choice. I take every precaution, do not haunt crowded bars (!) but, if you’re looking at me through a statistical lens, I am as good as dead: 81 and not vaccinated. In this hysterical country, one can’t even die on one’s own terms anymore. I am getting a lot of grief about my choices, smeared as an evil ‘anti-vaxxer’ and a burden because I will ‘inevitably’ end up on a ventilator, costing thousands of precious dollars that could be spent on other, more deserving patients. The BC government has now made vaccination passports, kicking in next week, mandatory for access to just about everything except the grocery store and clinics. And our sainted Public Health Care Doctor, Bonnie Henry, has gone on record that there will be ‘no exemptions’ for people for whom the vaccines are deadly. I guess she has forgotten that way back at the beginning of this pandemic, she urged us all to ‘be kind’.

She can get away with this because there is a continuing ‘state of emergency’ in this province though how they define ‘emergency’ is unclear. There are no overwhelmed ICUs, bodies are not piling up in the streets and even the old seem to be dying mostly of natural causes. What’s going on here? Well, you know that old thing about lies, damned lies and statistics. Yeah, it’s still true because most people have no training in how to interpret stats, massaged for a particular purpose. It’s also more comforting to believe the ‘official story’ and I do not blame anyone who does. The pressure to do so is absolutely crushing; however, finding things out for yourself, laborious, time consuming and deeply disturbing. I won’t bore you with all the stuff that I have listened to, read and thought about, suffice it to say that it consumes a big chunk of my time when I’m not out walking, exercising or swimming.

Meanwhile, the BC government has simply decided that having power feels good, and nobody protested when they extended the state of emergency recently. Masks are back, and the vaccine ‘passport’ is coming soon. The BC Civil Liberties Association, which used to be a loud voice for freedom in this province, said and did nothing. But here’s the thing: historically, governments are loath to relinquish power once they grab it. I come from a background where this was the first move towards autocratic rule: Nazi Germany. I know, it’s getting stale, this trotting out of the evil Nazis, but Hitler first declared a ‘state of emergency’ and then proceeded to dismantle what was, indeed, a democracy. Because with such extraordinary powers come extraordinary delusions of grandeur and control. When I look at Horgan, our premier, I see someone who might just enjoy such flights of fancy.

I grew up in a society that destroyed itself by simply going along to get along (my family), not questioning authority and supporting a ‘strong man’ who was going to put an end to the endless squabbling of the parties of the Weimar Republic. They also believed every word of the slick propaganda emanating from the party because they wanted to. Until it all fell into an abyss, until it crashed into the cellars I spent a lot of my childhood in, listening to the bombers overhead. Fortunately, I came to Canada at the age of twelve and never looked back. Back then, I could taste the heady scent of freedom, of optimism, of no longer being an ‘evil German’. It was thrilling to be a young immigrant in a young, free country. I spent the next half century obsessing about my second language, English, which is how I came to be a writer. It was all good, as they say. I was truly grateful to be a Canadian citizen.

Until now. Now I am living in a Canada every bit as dystopian as the Germany I escaped from so long ago. A place that has successfully scared its population literally to death, every day, for 20 months. A place where ‘infections’ are presented as identical to illness. Anyone who has paid attention knows this is a false equivalence. Where we still send people ill with Covid, but show few symptoms, home. If you’re lucky, you won’t be calling them again, but if not, you will be in the hospital, very ill, about ten to fourteen days later. During those days, you didn’t get any monitoring or treatment. And that is what is driving deaths; the lack of early treatment with a variety of drugs that do work. (No, I am not getting into the debate about Ivermectin, please refer to Matt Taibbi for clarification). The ‘authorities’ have declared that the only thing that works on Covid are the vaccines.

Of course, this is a lie amounting to medical malpractice. Just ask Dr Peter McCullough, a highly trained researcher, editor of two medical journals with hundreds of cited papers to his name, and incidentally, a practicing doctor in Dallas, Texas. He has made a lot of noise about the inexplicable retreat of American doctors from Covid treatments, testifying to the American Senate and talking to anyone who will listen about the treatments that are available, including high doses of Vitamin D3, among others. (Michael Lewis has written a damning account of the CDC in his Covid chronicle The Premonition, A Pandemic Story). I just wish I had a doctor like McCullough, willing to go to bat for his patients when all the major US federal health agencies and my own Canadian ones have utterly failed to do so.

Here in BC, finding a doctor is worse than the needle in haystack thing; there simply aren’t any. Like thousands of other seniors, I haven’t had a doctor in seven years, but I am getting enormous pressure to get vaccinated. That, they can do here. But anything else is somehow ‘subversive’. No wonder people are beginning to believe in a vast Conspiracy between Big Pharma, Big Government and Big Money. It basically makes sense to think that way though I have always resisted that line of thinking myself. The fraying of the vaccine promise isn’t helping. Papers published in Israel, which is ahead of every other nation in terms of vaccinations, are rather troubling. Apparently, the Delta variant, while mild, doesn’t respond to the current vaccines. And they wane too quickly. After 4/5 months, you need a booster with debatable benefits. Then probably a few more, which is nice for Pfizer et al. Nobody knows the long term consequence of messing with your immune system, repeatedly. And oh yes, natural immunity is thirteen times more effective and more complete and long lasting than any vaccine currently available. But you need to treat Covid early and you need a doctor. (As an aside, do not for one minute believe that healthcare on the ground in Canada is a lot better than what you get in the States. It’s hard to make comparisons between systems so different, and maybe I should do an entire post on that soon).

Here in BC, as in the rest of Canada, nobody is paying attention to vaccine news that doesn’t fit the preferred narrative, so we’re just going to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Some of my friends are not sympathetic to my views, and I am fighting about everything related to the pandemic with one of my sons. It wears me out. It throws me into despair. I want this to end. I pray that people out there re-discover their love of freedom, abandoned when they were manipulated into a place of deep fear. I want my country back. I want my rights back. Because right now, for me and many others like me, the thrill is gone, baby. And the question I am asking is this: is this forever, is this indeed the ‘new normal’?