The Reckoning

2022 will see countries opening up completely, while politicians scramble to get on the right side of history before everything blows up. But what about the perpetrators of this hideous crime?

It is 29 January 2022, and 39% of Belgians want the country to open up completely. That is quite a large number for my adopted home country, where people usually like to follow the rules. The average Belgian (particularly in Flanders, where I live) doesn’t like to make a fuss, and there is a general aversion to what I call “exaggeration culture” - speaking a little too loud, complaining a little too much, publicly expressing dislikes.

Yes Brussels, its melting pot capital, has seen the biggest demonstrations in Europe in recent weeks. Experts are outdoing each other to be the first to claim that the CST (the humorously titled “Covid Safe Ticket”) has seen its best days and should be abolished. Government, meanwhile, is holding firm. While they are no longer able to claim they are acting “in the name of science”, a removal of the offending Ticket still seems a distant dream.

And yet it seems near certain, in the wake of the UK and Denmark’s abolishing all the Covid rules, that most European countries will ultimately follow. It seems that after almost two years of daily doom messages and incessant fear mongering focused mainly on children, the story is quite simply no longer sustainable.

The curious thing about Omikron is that it acts like a magnifying glass for the Covid charades, pointing out as it were the absurdity of most restrictions to the previously gullible population.

Lately, a couple of things have become evident even to the general public:

• The quarantine and isolation rules (the first referring to “risk contacts” and the second to those testing positive) create more problems for the functioning of society than they solve

• A positive “case” doesn’t mean someone is sick

• Vaccines do not prevent one from getting the virus at all

• Vaccines do not prevent one from “spreading” the virus (though most Belgians wrongly still imagine this to happen through close contact transmission)

• The Ticket is therefore useless

• Hospitals are full of patients “with Covid” that go there for different reasons initially

All of this, of course, has been true since the beginning of the pandemic but it required a lot of knowledge and interest for the general public to understand this - Omikron is making it easier.

This long-awaited sea change must force us to reflect on what has lead us here - a bizarre conundrum that seems almost impossible: the most polarized science in history.

Strongly different viewpoints are not new in science, obviously: Pasteur and Béchamp, flat Earth vs round Earth, transmission of AIDS - history is full of the most eminent scientists debating complex matters, and while the truth often turned out to be somewhere in the middle, quite frequently, to put it simply, one side was right, and the other was wrong.

What happens with Covid, though, is altogether more curious, and I am not sure we will ever fully be able to prove which side is right on which point. That is alright but what we are seeing is something that seems impossible mathematically. Let me explain.

Imagine an experiment where you line up ten billiard balls vertically on each side of a line drawn in the sand. Both sets of balls are equally polished and attractive, with no particular reason to choose one over the other. You then let ten people choose their favourite ten balls, always having to select either the ball on the left-hand side or the ball on the right. What you would expect is that each person would pick a couple of balls from the left, and a few from the right, and it would seem statistically impossible for them all to pick the same balls. Except, of course, if one group decided to pick all ten balls from the right-hand side, and the other group all ten balls from the left-hand side.

Imagine, then, that with each pair of two balls, the participants would have to solve a scientific riddle, a set of complex facts that lead to a conclusion which tells you which ball to pick. The riddles would be similar but only remotely connected, so it would be perfectly possible to solve one riddle and pick the right-hand ball, and for the solution to the second riddle to be the left-hand ball.

You see - it would be extremely weird for one participant to conclude that for each riddle, the right-hand ball would be the correct solution, or vice-versa.

So what’s that to do with Covid?

Well, in the Covid narrative, there are a number of disputed items that are scientifically complex, and essentially, each one has two possible conclusions:

• Asymptomatic “patients” can infect others / or not

• Quarantining seemingly healthy people is a good way of containing the virus / is nonsense

• PCR tests are a good way of determining who carries the virus / or not

• Social distancing can keep us from making each other sick / or not

• Masks work to reduce viral transmission / or not

• There is no other effective treatment / there is, like Ivermectin, for example

• Lockdowns have saved millions of lives / lockdowns have destroyed millions of lives and saved no-one

The curious point being, just like for the billiard balls, the scientists and politicians that have dominated the narrative in the last two years, have chosen the left-hand side each time. And the lockdown sceptics, a growing group of scientists, amateur scientists, and laypeople, choose the other option EACH TIME.

That is of course completely incomprehensible - if there is scientific uncertainty, why wouldn’t there be millions of people who end up with a mix of answers. However, in reality it is most difficult to find an expert who does not believe in asymptomatic transmission yet claims masks work great, who is a firm believer in social distancing yet also promotes Ivermectin. Why?

I have been banging my head against the wall to understand this conundrum so many times, and after two years, the only conclusion that seems to make any sense is a frightening one: One side must be right on all points, and the other side is making everything up. It’s the only explanation for the polarization and lack of nuance in this debate.

To find out which side is right, one has to look at the defectors, and here, the trend is crystal clear. Since the turn of the year, hundreds of scientists, politicians etc have been scrambling to get on the side of the lockdown sceptics. PCR tests are no longer hailed as faultless and cloth masks are no longer being promoted - the desperate implementation of medical masks just a way of avoiding the humiliation that would come with admitting that masks were pointless all along. Most countries are shortening or even abolishing quarantine periods. Lockdowns are nowhere to be seen, even with case numbers and hospitalizations rising.

The sceptics, then, were the ones who got the science right all along. Our governments and their “experts” were wrong from Day 1. The fact that they have not been nuanced, that they picked the left-hand billiard ball every single time, simply proves that they lied.

So what are we going to do with them now, when we go back to normal? Will we hang them from a pole, tie them up on the market squares, cover them in paint and feathers? Will we force them to flee to hideouts in the Argentinian woods like the Nazis? Will we destroy the lives of those who have taken our jobs, locked up our kids, let our grandparents die alone in desperation?

Once the scale of the deception becomes clear, the devastation so obvious, no-one can guess what comes next. If the big reckoning indeed begins, then there may be repercussions far worse than what we have been living through. Unprecedented civil unrest, assassinations, mass murder.

The truth is, nothing can ever make up for the lost two years, the biggest crime in the history of medicine.

Perhaps the best remedy would be to go out and hug strangers in the streets, dance on rooftops, let the children play, and celebrate life in all its strange shapes and colours? Remember the last time you laughed and couldn’t stop? I can’t either.

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linin-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

(Albert Camus, The Plague)