The post-Covid consensus
The Covid emergency is officially over. But we have little to celebrate.
Now that the US and WHO have both declared an end to the Covid health emergency, one might be tempted to think that the pandemic nightmare is truly, finally over. Indeed, for most people, it had already been overtaken by more pressing issues, ranging from inflation to war. But for those of us who maintained that the real nightmare was not the virus itself (which never a serious threat for the vast majority of the world’s population), but rather the governments’ dystopian response to it in the name of “public health” — the deployment of disastrous biomedical protocols, the upending of human life as we know it, the violation of citizens’ most fundamental civil rights, the state’s intrusion into the most private aspects of our lives (including birth, sex, worship, death), and even our bodies, the sweeping aside of democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, the militarisation of societies, the introduction of extraordinary measures of social control, the discrimination and stigmatisation of non-compliant citizens, the rampant use of propaganda and censorship, the massive transfer of wealth — there is little to celebrate. Not only do most people still subscribe to the Covid consensus, but vast resources are now being poured into consolidating the “accepted story” of the past three years — what we might call the post-Covid consensus.
Read the article by Toby Green and I here.
Best regards,
Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomasfazi
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
Thank you for your article! This is one of the best short summaries of neoliberalism - “the main problem is the way the role of the state has changed in recent decades, becoming little more than an enforcer of corporate priorities.” I doubt that much will be changed, but we must hope.
In the Netherlands Mark Rutte's government is rushing to anchor the Covid measures in permanent public health law so that they can be deployed at any time in the future, again, at will, without any form of parliamentary oversight; a blank check for public health officials. What makes it all so egregious is the haste: they do not want to wait for any kind of formal evaluation of what the impact, both short- and long-term, unforeseen and otherwise, have been. We all just have to Trust The Science®