Guest Post by David O’Reilly
Dr. Hector Carvallo’s discovery that ivermectin prevents COVID-19 is saving thousands of lives and helping open regions and cities of the world to normal life. So why is he constantly attacked?
The novel coronavirus COVID-19 was already looking dangerous in February of 2020. More than 75,000 cases had been reported in China, the death toll was approaching 3,000, and virologists around the world were warning of an epidemic—with no medicine to fight it.
Then, late in the month, Mirta Carvallo, M.D. a retired pediatric dermatologist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, heard a rumor. “Something’s going on with ivermectin in Australia,” she told her husband, Hector. Researchers at Monash University had reportedly neutralized the Covid virus in laboratory tests, she said.
A retired endocrinologist, professor of internal medicine, and former director of one of the city’s largest hospitals, Hector Carvallo, then 63, was instantly intrigued. An anti-parasitic medicine, ivermectin has saved millions in the southern hemisphere from the plague of onchocerciasis, or river blindness.
He and Mirta had prescribed it countless times for dermatologic ailments like scabies and rosacea, and he calls it “one of the safest medicines I’ve ever used.” Acclaimed as one of the most important medicines of the 20th century, ivermectin won its discoverers the Nobel Prize in 2015.
Within weeks—long before the Australians even reported their findings—Carvallo and a colleague would conduct the first human trials of ivermectin for prevention in the fight against Covid.
“I am not ashamed to say I cried when we got the results,” Carvallo recalls in a recent Zoom interview.
Alas, months later, “I cried again,” Carvallo says. That’s when medical authorities in Argentina—and soon others around the world—began their ongoing effort to suppress public knowledge of ivermectin’s efficacy and safety, and to question Carvallo’s results and attack his reputation.
It’s a story the world, and history, needs to know.
Soft-spoken and gracious, Carvallo speaks impeccable English, some of it learned watching the 1960s American TV medical dramas Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey that inspired him, as a small boy, to become a doctor.
Days after Mirta told him about the rumors out of Australia, he explains, he sat down with Roberto Hirsch, M.D., one of Argentina’s leading experts on infectious diseases, to mull ivermectin’s possibilities.
While little known in North America and Europe except as a veterinary de-worming medicine, ivermectin was known to inhibit RNA viruses in vitro, including dengue, Zika and yellow fever—apparently by blocking the virus’ ability to transport from a cell’s watery cytoplasm to its nucleus. But what happens in a petri dish doesn’t always happen in the human body. Could ivermectin be as potent against Covid, they wondered, as it was against river blindness?
And so, in early March—three months before the Australians would report in the journal Antiviral Research that ivermectin had effected a 5,000-fold reduction of Covid in vitro—Carvallo and Hirsch wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association about its exciting possibilities.
Noting ivermectin’s “virucidal properties,” their letter theorized that ivermectin could be a safe, potent, widely available and cheap prophylaxis against Covid, urgently in need of swift investigation. They further hypothesized that it could be efficacious against Covid infections in combination with a blood thinner to reduce dangerous hyper-coagulation, and a corticosteroid to reduce the hyper-inflammatory immune response that was turning Covid infections fatal in so many patients.
“But the editor of JAMA said he was not interested. He gave us no good reason,” Carvallo recalls with a shrug. “I was surprised. I wrote to say, ‘At least take it as a possibility,’ but we never heard back. So, we decided to form our own trials. We would replicate what the Australians had done in vitro, but we would do it in vivo.”
Instead of testing ivermectin against Covid in a glass dish, they would test it in the human body.
First, they approached the ethics committee of Eurnekian Hospital, where they worked, one of Buenos Aires’ largest. Their proposal: to administer weekly oral doses of ivermectin to about 100 of the hospital’s health care workers regularly exposed to Covid patients. (The doses would be about three times higher than is typically prescribed as an anti-parasitic, but there was ample evidence these were safe levels, Carvallo says.) One hundred other health care workers who chose not to take ivermectin would serve as the control. All participants would continue to wear masks and wash hands.
A lengthy randomized controlled double-blind study with placebos—the putative “gold standard” of medicine trials—would be unethical, Carvallo and Hirsh agreed. “If I had to post my hypothesis atop a pile of corpses, that’s criminal,” says Carvallo. Instead, theirs would be another classic form of medical research: An “observational” trial: no one would receive placebos, and the trial’s administrators would know who got the ivermectin and who did not.
The hospital’s administrators were “elated” by the proposal, says Carvallo, and Buenos Aires’ health office swiftly approved its protocols. A county judge signed off, too.
Unfunded, informal, and using donated medicine, the trial began in late April, with 131 subjects taking ivermectin and 98 not. Each person in the test group was given 8 mg of ivermectin per hundred pounds of body weight once weekly, along with several daily nasal spritzes of carrageenan, shown effective in reducing intake of rhinoviruses and other airborne pathogens.
A month later, Carvallo and Hirsch could scarcely believe the results. “Among the 98 who did not take ivermectin, eleven had contracted the virus,” he recalls in our interview. “Of the 131 [who received ivermectin], nobody had.
“Word spread quickly through the hospital, and the union representing our health care workers demanded the prophylaxis be given to everyone [on staff] who wanted it.” With so large a volunteer pool suddenly available, he and Hirsch undertook a second, expanded phase of the trial.
This time they recruited 966 more health care workers at Eurnekian and three other Argentine hospitals while continuing to treat the original 229 subjects. Beginning June 1 and continuing to August 1, they received weekly doses of the ivermectin/carrageenan protocol, while the 407 in the control did not. All continued to observe PPE guidelines.
At the trial’s close in August (ended because they’d run out of free medicines), 237 of the 407 participants in the control group, or 58.2 percent, were infected. Among the 788 patients treated with the ivermectin/carrageenan protocol, nose swabs and assessments of symptoms showed no evidence of Covid infection. “None,” says Carvallo.
By then they had launched an observational treatment trial of patients already infected with Covid, modeled on the protocol they had proposed months earlier to JAMA. Starting in June they enrolled 135 outpatients presenting mild Covid symptoms, and 32 inpatients with moderate to severe symptoms.
All were given ivermectin weekly, based on body weight and severity of symptoms, typically oral drops in doses ranging between 24 and 48 milligrams. All hospitalized participants received 4 mg of the corticosteroid dexamethasone by injection, and aspirin or a blood thinner depending on severity of symptoms. The most seriously ill were on ventilators.
After four weeks, none of the 135 outpatients required hospitalization, and one inpatient had died. That was an 82-year-old man, with severe co-morbidities, who had been admitted at the hospital in a desperate condition.
The 3.2 percent death rate for those on the IDEA protocol, as they called it, was one-seventh the then-prevailing 23.5 percent death rate for hospitalized Covid patients in Argentina, they later reported in the Journal of Clinical Trials.
In July, Carvallo and Hirsch submitted their preliminary findings to Argentina’s Ministry of Health. The rest they sent in August.
“A few days later I received a call at home from the health minister’s secretary,” remembers Carvallo, shaking his head. “He said I was not allowed to keep investigating ivermectin, or it would put my job in jeopardy. I was baffled. I said, ‘Why?’ and he would give me no answer.” The usually gracious Carvallo had harsh words for the health minister before hanging up.
“And that’s when I cried again, from frustration. I’m not ashamed to say I cried, because it’s true.”
A year and a half later, with the Delta variant on the rise—and reports of an even more virulent strain circulating in the Amazon rain forest—ivermectin still struggles for official recognition as an anti-Covid agent despite the large body of research in its favor.
In May, 2021, for example, the journal Antibiotics Review published a metanalysis of ivermectin showing that “100 percent of 36 early treatment and prophylaxis studies report positive effects” against Covid, with 26 of those trials reporting “statistically significant improvements.”
Yet three months later, in August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was still pounding the same drum it first pounded in June, 2020, when the Australian researchers published their findings.
“Taking a drug meant for horses and cattle to prevent or treat COVID-19 is dangerous and could be fatal,” the FDA warned in August. Carvallo calls the mockery and disinformation “very frustrating.” (But in this vacuum of official censorship of the drug, he still doesn’t want people self-prescribing ivermectin—not because it’s dangerous, but because they might take too low a dose or not at the proper frequency.)
Lately, the fight has become even more pointed. On September 2, BuzzFeed News published a long, critical examination of Carvallo’s ivermectin studies which, it said, “raised questions about how the study’s data was collected and analyzed,” they say. (You can read the BuzzFeed story here.) Carvallo disputes the story as medically uninformed, saying his was a legitimate observational trial.
“It’s not a matter of ignorance,” Carvallo insists of the backlash against ivermectin. “The NIH, the CDC, the FDA—they’ve all read the studies. They just don’t care, because there’s a double standard. The more expensive a compound is, the less quantity of evidence is required to get it approved. “But when a compound is cheap and available,” he says, “that’s another matter.”
He told BuzzFeed it’s only a matter of time before ivermectin is widely approved to fight Covid. “All truth passes through three phases,” he told them. “First it is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, then it is accepted as self-evident. We are in phase two now.”
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It’s very simple. Saving life is not the plan. Culling life is.
Exactly.
The medical profession has become a politicized racket where the medcorps have too much financial influence over doctors. The average person is considered too ignorant and incapable of understanding basic biology so they’re easy marks for corporate vampires eager to sustain an income stream, even if means killing their sources.
Several years back one of the kids got myocarditis in his teens. The heart specialists at UPenn couldn’t figure out what was causing it and he spent weeks undergoing tests in the ICU. Two heart attacks, an ablation, and one defibrillator under the skin later here comes the COVID bullshit -and the specialists are telling him to take the jabs, which he does, being the consummate college-educated idiot who knows more than a 56 year-old informed “conspiracy theorist” twice his age who helped pay his medical bills.
Now his condition is less favorable and he’s on medication constantly, a possible transplant recipient before age 30.
How unfortunate.
The medcorps do not have “too much” financial control.
They have TOTAL control.
Carry on.
The most insidious genocide in all of history will now proceed as planned.
In a nutshell
I’ve heard my own friends and family ridicule ivermectin. The bleating of the sheep. People so desperately want to be “on the right side,” that they’ll become a mouthpiece for anything that puts them in the *apparent* majority. objective truth simply doesn’t factor in.
The suppression of ivm is the telltale sign we are being duped for political purposes, even worse than lockdowns, masks or leaky vax’s
Ted Kaczynski was correct to some degree.
A mindless belief in technology without a corresponding advance in true knowledge that advances the human spirit is detrimental to society.
He was right up until he got going on to solutions. I have seen other geniuses do the same thing where they diagnose the problem correctly when others can’t see it, and then go mental on trying to solve it. The solving should be left to people closer to the land. There are trade-offs with specialization. Being unbalanced can be one of them.
That’s why, in spite of Ann Barnhart ‘s telling us we should buy it to give away, I’m keeping mine. They all think that a horse 🐎 medicine won the nobel prize. My nephew had an infection and needed meds, he asked me if I had any so I gave him a fresh bottle of fish flux, and later I asked how it worked. He said he tossed it because it was animal medicine. I tried to explain to him it was the same exact thing as cipro, same factory same bottle, the only difference was the label. He just gae me that vacuous look that the sheep get when the data you’re giving them doesn’t go along with the official media narrative.
So I’m not going to jump through a bunch of hoops to get Ivermectin to just have it tossed away because the idiots in the family were told by CNNSBC it is a dangerous horse de wormer.
Is the reason they can’t understand it to do with inflated ego? That thing gets too big and it needs lots of protecting, I think. I don’t know much about psychology .
Just sheep trying to act intelligent.
It’s always been Ivermectin. There will come a day when people like Fauci, Bill Gates etc. will pay for these crimes against humanity. F***ing bastards…
“Soft-spoken and gracious, Carvallo speaks impeccable English, some of it learned watching the 1960s American TV medical dramas Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey that inspired him, as a small boy, to become a doctor.”
.
Soft spoken won’t cut it in today’s world.
He should have watched Star Trek …. become a ruthless DESTROYER of Klingons, and then the Borg.
Regardless, God bless this gentle man for his courage and his godly work.
I live in Argentina and this piece is the first I’ve learned of this local (national) study. I’ve spoken with our local pharmacist, a very close friend, about ivermectin based on readings in English (here, PCR, etc.) and she has agreed to get me, maybe both of us, some. She was hesitant, but tomorrow I’ll be more insistant. I’ll have to point her to this study and if I can’t find it in Spanish, I’ll translate it and be done with it. Thanks!
Sorry to hijack the thread, but here an unbelievably good, hard-hitting essay.
Goolag-translated from German, with some corrections by me.
Coronism: The Fear of Freedom
Anyone who works on corona politics and panic media overlooks a painful basic problem of coronism: People wanted it that way. Something in people wanted it that way.
By Marcus J. Ludwig.
At the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 there was a new type of corona virus in the world. How it came into the world is unclear. Laboratory accident or wildlife market, an interesting question, but secondary as a fact. As the starting point of the fantasy, both were paramount: “bat” and “bioweapon” activated imaginative potentials that no typical seasonal respiratory disease could keep up with. Suddenly there was this spectacular pathogen in Wuhan, China, and the fact that the authorities there were taking extreme measures spread rapidly around the globe as an image, video, rumor and story. One waited in fearful anticipation of the arrival of calamity in Europe, in Germany, in one’s own city. One wondered whether passers-by would collapse on the street as if they had been pulled the plug, whether the shopping centers in Augsburg and Aurich, in Stralsund and Soest would also have to be disinfected by epidemic protection specialists in NBC suits.
The people were expecting the pandemic, already internally provided with all the iconic images that had accumulated in them through the consumption of thousands of disaster films. The unconscious matrix of possible scenarios was prepared, the souls were open to the dystopia, they anticipated World War C, which through Netflix and Co. had burned itself deep into their dream layers for a long time. People became preppers, bought the supermarkets empty, holed up in their own four walls and prepared for the state of emergency. Initially without instructions from above, still completely without the completely unsettled state on its part. They stayed at home, they withdrew, they kept their distance. And gradually began to feel the added value, the solemn meaning of the strange situation, in addition to the horror. They liked the film-ready formulas and motivational sayings of the solidarity community: “Flatten the curve. Stay at home. Follow the Science. ”
Psychopolitical win-win recipe
And the state followed the will of its citizens, the will for total security, the will for summer fairy-tale solidarity and sentimental exaggeration of the banal and knew how to give them what they wanted: They were allowed to stay at home, they had to stay at home, father The state promised to take care of them, to take over the guardianship for an indefinite period of time, it should certainly not fail because of money, and the project “Cohesion in a Crisis”, the project “Finally an emergency”, turned out to be a psychopolitical win-win recipe: Infantilism for the people, prescribed regression, finally being a child again, without a guilty conscience. And narcissism without regrets for politics, acting out the most arrogant illusions of grandeur, recognition for doing, for leading, for dictating and governing in an autocratic manner.
And the media? The cool, distant observers and rational analysts of current events? They didn’t want to spoil the game, but instead contributed their narratives to the best of their ability to stabilize the bizarre idyll. A journalist said in a journalists’ panel discussion: We will look back on this time in disbelief and wonder what superhuman achievements we have achieved there. – She meant the accomplishments of heroic home office parents who had to attend video conferencing while the homeschooling kids scurried around them asking for colored pencils.
These are scenes from the early phase of the “new normal”; since the establishment of this pseudoreality a year and a half have passed, and most people have meanwhile found their way out of the physical, social isolation, the physical alienation from the world – the Corona Biedermeier [‘style of plain/simple forms’ (of furniture etc.) 1815-1848; sometimes translated as “philistine”] became, despite all heroic dressing up, just too stupid and boring at some point.
On the other hand, many have not found their way out of the metaphorical “staying at home”. Out of the unreality, the mind’s outsourcing into mental safe zones, to infantile inaccessibility. And it is questionable whether the new-normal masses will ever find their way back into reality.
Victim of confirmation bias
An underlying, most fatal mentality problem is -in spite of all supposed modern rationality and enlightenment- that the majority of people cannot endure a state of limbo. The cognitive restlessness that arises in long-lasting situations of ambiguity urges them to make hasty decisions, they opt for a somehow acceptable, plausible, manageable “knowledge” without a reliable basis, and then almost necessarily fall victim to the confirmation bias. They cannot stand existence in a permanent hypothesis. And instead of looking for falsification possibilities, as we should have been used to since Karl Popper, they collect verifications: good, convincing reasons for the path they have taken once, which they then -the longer it was taken- no longer can leave without damaging their self-image. You would have to admit that you acted imprudently, prematurely, irrationally, that you were confused and intellectually wrong. After a week you’d forgive yourself for something like that, but after a year and a half it becomes difficult, for most of them impossible. Critical reflexivity as an antidote to the automatisms of the unconscious is a rather underdeveloped cognitive competence nowadays.
The will to anomaly
The majority of the people opted for the hypothesis that Corona is a killer virus. They made a question of faith out of the decision, and a dogma out of the hypothesis. They set up a reality that they could deal with, a room of reasonably safe comfort, decorated with moralism, applause from the balcony, triage horror, memorial-hour sentiment and statistical record values. And it wasn’t just fear that kept them there, it wasn’t just media-induced overconcern. It was pleasure too. The media served, activated and reinforced a mental disposition that had been there for a long time.
Anyone who works through the issues of paranoia politicians and panic media overlooks a large, painful basic problem of coronism: People wanted it that way. To be more precise: Something in people wanted it that way. Something in the masses wanted a state of emergency.
I well remember the mixture of fear and solemnity that was in the air in spring 2020, the affected-apocalyptic lust for the breathtaking, the conjuring up, the longing for global fatigue, the welcome of a force majeure that would help overcome a state of aimless floundering that has been going on for far too long. And the slogan “Corona as an opportunity” was astonishingly quick to surface. Not only among the world improvement elites, also among the silent millions who obviously urgently needed a long break from their wrong, at least questionable life.
Everyone who was once a child remembers this furtive relief with which one greeted an approaching illness, the fever, the infection silently cheered as the onset of fate; Everyone knows this auto-suggestive power, with which one has happily forced the immunological battle, the serious state has been confirmed by moaning and sniffling, as a justification against the world, against this imposition of: suppressing instincts, having to grow up, the reality principle, disciplining, submitting to rules, adapting to reality. You stayed in bed, you had to lie down when your forehead was hot and your nose was runny, every argument from parents and teachers had to fall silent before the symptoms that certified the state of emergency.
Corona hysteria is very similar -at least in the initial phase- to this childlike insistence on the ultimate argument that forces permission to regression. Here! Look! The thermometer shows it! Science says so! Follow the Science! It’s not working! Even if I wanted to, I am not allowed to! I can’t go to school, I can’t go out into the world, I can’t be subjected to these hardships, who can ask me to confront such a reality?! A reality that can no longer give one meaning, a world that has nothing left for me except consumption, which demands nothing from me but to function, to follow rules, to act out poses, phrases, gestures of role models, and if possible to credibly lie to myself about my uniqueness and irreplaceability.
Vita virulenta
I still assume that no one consciously wanted or even planned what was going on. None of this was insidiously brought about, no controlling authority looked at everything from above, from the outside and rubbed their hands with a smile. But: A lot of people apparently benefited from it, a kind of “secondary gain from illness”, otherwise the whole thing could never have lasted so long. (*)
It is obvious that politicians, the media, the pharmaceutical industry and scientists benefited from it. Many people benefited from the crisis, some financially, but most simply from the attention they received. People who until then had done their work quietly and calmly, as doctors, as mathematicians, as district administrators and mayors, as heads of health authorities, as harmless neighbors whom no one had ever noticed outside their offices, offices, laboratories, wards, suddenly sat on talk shows, suddenly stood in the spotlight and were important.
Then there were -but let’s switch back to the present tense here- then of course there are the many who are simply afraid, who are in a sense “innocent” fear, real fear of dying, of suffocating, of losing their one single life. They form the possibly incurable group of those who will also voluntarily maintain the habitualized hygiene rules “after Corona”. Who already fear the next killer virus with opinionated, fatalistic horror. With all these deadly scared poor souls who wear a medical mask alone in the wide corridor, alone in the forest, alone in the car, the constant alarmism of the media always has an easy time because it encounters a correspondingly receptive character structure: the malignant mixture typical of the time from ‘Having’-orientation, spiritual vacuum and fear of freedom.
Sure: Who wouldn’t be afraid of death, who -outside of depressive phases at least- didn’t want to stay alive? But the exorbitant fear of death that denies reality clearly has little to do with what Erich Fromm called Biophilia, real love of life.
Anyone who loves life, who is alive, who wants to promote growth and prosperity and who -emotionally matured- can enjoy what is natural and healthy, is incapable of compulsively focusing to such an extent on just-don’t-die, avoid-any-risk, so that in doing so he could lose his desire to live and shape life, and to build his humanness.
The grim greed for life, the pseudo-Biophilia, acts on today’s diagnosers of social character like the brightly made-up face of necrophobia, which in turn is only the passive side of a destructive necrophilia and has in common with it the fixation on death, dying, and lifelessness. The necrophobe writhes under the rule of death, he clings to life with a panicked look at the ever-present possible end. People with this unfortunate vulnerability found a quasi-religious life purpose in the pandemic and will therefore resist any “all-clear” for as long as possible. In combination with an often aggressively celebrated self-appreciation-solidarity, the result is the perfect picture of a semi-psychotic, moralistic Ersatz-religion. To put it less guarded terms: a narcissistic trash religion.
That is one side of the dynamic, the great, stabilizing driving and holding force of the epochal anomaly: fear and quasi-religious delusion based on a highly pathogenic social character: a nebulous threat meets an existentially anchorless, consumeristically dehumanized society, with psyches which for decades have been getting along with makeshift sense-making surrogates, and they makes the best of it: They throw themselves into the fog, and the world is suddenly gone, the compulsion to orientate themselves in openness, freedom and daylight is removed from them. Life is reduced to groping in the tiniest radius, carefully feeling for a railing through the meaninglessness between unlived life and final death.
It sounds perverse, but a great many people will be missing something when the pandemic is over. Their diffuse fear of existence had a specific name, even a beautiful, a splendid name. Their fundamental insecurity was justified from above. Their suspicions, their aversion to life, to the insidious, invisible, deadly Vita virulenta, were backed up by science. On a Freedom Day their mental framework would break away which for a long time quite effectively compensated for their existential fear of freedom.
The inability to regret
The other side, the other force that maintains the state of emergency, makes far fewer demands on the depth-psychological metaphors, I call it, quite trivially, revision resistance. Even more trivially, it could also be called stubbornness. And unfortunately not only politicians, media people, experts, judges, and other influencers of public opinion formation and judgment are affected; also millions of normal people who did not make their judgments recklessly, but in the beginning quite honestly endeavored to make their judgments, but at some point no longer questioned them, no longer submitted their convictions for review and therefore went further and further astray, step by step, and are no longer able to find their path out of epistemic excess.
This path would require a fundamental criticism of personal spiritual integrity and, if it were followed consequentially, it would necessarily go hand in hand with shocking emotions, with questions that do not let one sleep at night, with insights that threaten the core of one’s personality. The question of trust in one’s own intellect would often lead to a deep mortification of the self.
It does not take an outstanding knowledge of human nature to foresee that almost all persons, who can be imagined by names and faces in this context, will be incapable of such processes of self-inquiry, of revision, of active repentance. In any case, it seems inconceivable to me that we will hear any public confessions, pleas of guilt, declarations of resignation, or words of regret in the near future.
The inability to regret does not only affect those elites who would lose their job, office, career, reputation to the self-critical avowal of their irrationality, but also millions of know-it-alls, blockheads, dogmatists, slanderers, informers, refusers, marginalizers and haters.
They all have to answer for the greatest misjudgment of their life while they try to hold on to their delusional narratives, they have supported fatal decisions, ineffable value destruction and damage to lives, they have deaths on their conscience, they have turned the world unhinged. And I think most of them already know that in some bright corner of their soul.
Restoring a common reality
But there is now no easy way back for all these people who went off the rails, no possibility of correction without the most serious self-damage. You would have to admit the most shameful sin against the commandments of the Enlightenment. They ignored Kant’s encouragement to use their own reason, and now they have to stick to their story of the killer virus, they have to remain consistent against all evidence. It would take an almost heroic ruthlessness to fight your way out of self-shielding and admit what a horrible self-incapacitation and self-deception one has taken on for so long.
Will you ever be able to force them to come to this conclusion? You will have to, at least you will have to force them to deal intensively with reality. It won’t work without some kind of truth commission. A process in which at least the main actors of coronism are confronted with their destructive delusions, their excesses, their disproportionalities, their deliberate one-sidedness. No, it would not be about the satisfaction of thirst for revenge and righteousness. It would be a publicly effective act to restore a common reality. And without that, reconciliation is hardly possible.
However, it is to be doubted that the majority is interested in reconciliation, community or even society at all. Corona seems to have long since become part of the culture wars, the views on the pandemic have irrevocably been fitted into the common left-right coding.
Realistically, there won’t be much here that can be done at first. For the politicians in power now and in the near future, all correction options are a thing of the past. All time windows are closed, all bridges burned, they have to stumble forward on the path of hygienic totalitarianism, the all-responsible medical state, the selective scientocracy. Opposition forces hardly stand a chance in the political process.
A change would have to come from the citizens. From people who want to grow up and become rational. You’d have to want a completely different world. But somehow they want just this one.They want a world in which corona crises are possible. Or other crises. Simply anything that prevents them from a life in freedom, a life in real, humane, perilous freedom.
(*) It should be clear – but I say it explicitly to be on the safe side – that of course we are not talking about individual patients. Covid is undoubtedly a serious disease from which those affected will certainly not benefit. I am concerned with the illness of society, with the disruption of the social character, which is exemplarily (or unprecedented) visible in dealing with the corona situation.
Original:
https://empore.blog/die-unfaehigkeit-zu-bedauern/