Professor Carl Heneghan is one of those people who have an amazing knack for cutting right through to the crux of a matter and explaining things simply, calmly, and clearly; and it is for these reasons, that I really, really recommend listening to this recent interview with him on why he spoke out against lockdown. There are two things he said that I wanted to comment on further: the first is the atrocious abandonment of the elderly; and secondly, the failure of a numbers-only approach to understanding complex social phenomena.
I was very lucky to get COVID very, very early on in the pandemic. I say lucky because before catching it, like everyone else, I was subject to high levels of fear about the virus, as it was so unknown and I have quite a bad history with the flu turning into pneumonia. So I was always grateful that I had gotten it early on so that I could step free from the fear of what might happen and know the truth: for healthy people like me, COVID is no worse than medium flu. So with my fear dissipated, I was able to think more clearly about what was unfurling and I came to the following conclusions: Lockdowns were a bad idea: we need(ed) to properly protect the clinically at risk (old people, immunocompromised people, etc.), and let everyone else catch the virus and move on. (What I now know to be called
Many things in life baffle me. Things like: why do people participate in a global capitalist system doing shit jobs they hate for a system which does not benefit them? Why do so many people wear such ugly shoes? Why are there no truly revolutionary people living in the UK? Why do so many women look like drag queens nowadays? Why does no-one care about (data) privacy? All baffling stuff. However, the Truly Baffling Thing which has occupied my thoughts most frequently over the last two years is: why, in the midst of a global pandemic which is disproportionately affecting the metabolically unhealthy, are people not making an effort to get healthy? Genuinely and truly baffling. It’s almost like people want to be ill and/or at risk.
A few years ago (well before COVID), I met a woman in the waiting room of the vets. She had been a community nurse during the time of the AIDS epidemic and she talked about the profound discrimination and stigmatisation that HIV+ people experienced at the beginning of the epidemic, even by other healthcare workers. I don’t remember all the details, but I remember realising that the stigmatisation and discrimination against HIV+ people, and those who cared for them, was way worse than I had realised. For a good while after meeting her, I would come back to her comments and wonder who I would have been at that time. Would I have been her or would I have been the majority who behaved so despicably and callously towards others out of a fear for their own personal safety? I’m pretty certain now that I would have been her, and not
I have no love for the NHS. By which I do not mean that I have no love of a nationalised health service, but rather that I have no love for what the NHS has become. Fundamentally, I believe that the NHS is not fit for purpose. In the main, my assessment of the NHS is not because of the medics and other healthcare workers employed by the NHS; my assessment is, almost exclusively, a criticism of the administration of it. It simply does not work.