Last time I wrote about people’s need for certainty during the pandemic, and how this need for certainty was driving people to try to control others. As I was writing it, I thought about my neighbour who has very serious contamination OCD which causes her pronounced mental and physical ill-health. I realised how much of my neighbour’s private behaviour is currently being publicly replicated by people’s corona-fuelled madness.

I live in a flat in a house which has been split into 4 flats, which means that each resident shares a communal hallway. This is, of course, normal for the billions of people who live in flats around the world. What is not normal is that my neighbour’s need to control her environment causes her to lie about her neighbours, because our use of the communal hallway (i.e. accessing and leaving our homes) leaks into her plastic coated world. So she lies about us to try to control us by way of sanctions from the landlord. Her reason for doing so is to try to bring us into line with her needs and desires for the space she is forced to share on the rare occasions she leaves her flat. The problem is, her needs are not normal needs, they are the needs of a profoundly unwell person.

The enormous irony is that modern research is showing that OCD is likely caused by a streptococcus infection. So no matter how much my neighbour washes and sanitises and scrubs, she will never be clean because the pathogen is inside her. In fact, the research is showing that it is precisely the pathogen which causes her to obsessively clean, since it is impervious to washing, unlike other microbes. Therefore, her most likely route to physical and mental health is, perversely from her perspective, for her to encourage more bacteria into her life so that the beneficial ones can thrive at the expense of the pathogenic ones. (As an aside, Sea Moss / Irish Moss has been shown to do just this in respect of streptococcus.)

It seems to me that people suffering from acute COVID-fear are suffering from a type of OCD in one way or another. Terrible lies are told about unvaccinated people to try to get us to conform to the needs of their neuroses, just as my neighbour lies about others in the house. And also like her, given that COVID has a recovery rate of over 99%, the real pathogen is already inside you: your fear. Let’s not forget that the risk from COVID is disproportionately borne by the elderly and those already in poor health. You can’t do anything about age, but you can do something about your own poor or ill-health. So why won’t you empower yourself?

According to Oxford’s QCovid risk tool, my risk for COVID is negligible: 0.0017% risk of death. (And that’s not even accounting for my natural immunity, so it will be lower than that.) That is no risk at all from my perspective. I wonder what the risk score for being a cyclist in London is? For surfing? For scuba diving? For riding a quad bike through the Egyptian desert? For backpacking through Ghana alone? For wandering down miles of beaches in Jamaica by myself? For going out drinking? For enjoying walks through city nights? For lifting the heaviest weights I can? In short, what are the risks for doing just about anything that I enjoy? Answer: fuck knows, and I don’t care. Life’s too short to make it boring by removing every experience worth having because I am too afraid of what might happen if things go wrong.

The only body that any dose of vaccine has an effect on, is the body it was injected into. So why do you care if my virtually non-existent risk for COVID means I don’t want to take the vaccine? Moreover, even if my risk was higher, is that not my risk to take? I cannot understand why so many people are so concerned with other people’s bodies. What happened to do you?

You can all cocoon yourselves into your middle-class safety bubbles, just as my poor neighbour cocoons herself into her plastic coated house. Like my neighbour, you can scrub and you can mask and you can sanitise and you can lockdown and do all of the things you need to make yourself feel “safe”. But do the rest of us a favour and leave our bodies and lives out of it. Although, perhaps I should not be so surprised by “the lefts” willingness to oppress others, for as Arthur Koestler observed, the middle-class left-wing intelligentsia always betrays the working class they claim to stand with.

Now you have your new variant to panic about, a variant which looks like it might make your vaccines even less useful than they already are. I wonder when you will realise that everything you have done so far has done nothing to protect the genuinely at risk, and everything to harm the rest of us? When will you admit that, given that the vast majority of COVID cases are mild, at worst a medium case of the flu, that #teamnaturalimmunity is likely the only thing that will get us back to normal?

When I first started writing this, I felt very afraid. Afraid that so many people are happy for other people to lose their livelihoods or their bodily autonomy for no good reason. Afraid that what is happening in Austria, Australia, America, and Germany may happen here. This morning I feel less afraid as good people are speaking up. Please, read and understand the real enemy here. It isn’t a virus, it isn’t the unvaccinated, it’s the mechanisms of disaster capitalism at play.

Prof Toby Green writes about the left’s blindness to discrimination.

Dr Piers Robinson talks about the propaganda campaign being waged.

Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae (both registered nurses) highlight the censorship occurring.

Prof John Ioannidis on how the pandemic is changing the norms of science.

When I was studying religion at university, I came to the realisation that people who were religious had a need for certainty that I did not share. It seems pretty clear to me that vast swathes of the world have gone mad out of a need for the same thing: certainty. And it is precisely this neurosis which is driving them to (try to) control others.

It seems pretty clear to me that it is impossible to control a virus. Aside from the fact that they are a part of the ecology of the earth and our bodies at all times (what else would we “test positive” for if we swabbed for it?*), they are microscopic organisms invisible to the naked eye. Rationally, how do you think you can control something you cannot see? You can’t.

This is why everything that you are doing to try to control the virus doesn’t work, and that is why you are moving on to trying to control others. You will never control the virus because you cannot see it. You can see me though, and that is why you want to control me. I, and others like me, stand as proxies for the thing you cannot see and cannot control.

What you need to get your head around is that the virus is potentially everywhere, including in and on your body, and at all times. Whilst your body isn’t a hermetically sealed bag, attempting to control what others do to their body will have little to no effect on the “safety” and integrity of yours.

So the answer here is not to freak out and think you have the ability to control a microscopic organism that you cannot see, and which is designed to change and evolve to escape capture/death (much like us), because you don’t and you can’t. Any “control” you think you have, even the control of others, is an illusion. The answer here is to accept that viruses and other pathogens exist and to do everything in your power to ensure your own health by taking good care of your own body. For most of us, this first means taking care of our gut by only consuming nourishing foods and liquids.

You cannot control a microscopic organism, but you can control what you eat. You can control how much you exercise. You can control how much you drink, if at all. You can control whether or not you smoke. And by controlling those factors, you can control your own health baseline. That is because diet and exercise are the only simple and surefire preventative and proactive measures that you can realistically do to improve the long-term health of your body.

Once you know that you are as healthy as you can be, then maybe, just maybe, you can dial back your madness and your fear, take things more in your stride, and stop oppressing others. Maybe then you can remember that life is risk, and that’s why it’s interesting, because risk brings experience and reward.

Nothing in life is certain except death. (Taxes are no longer certain because of the rich.) You can never be certain where the virus is. You can never be certain if you will get it. The only thing you can do is to take better care of your own body and from there allow pragmatism to rule you, not fear.

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*Addendum.

Just read this in Martin Blaser’s Missing Microbes:

[R]esearchers recently found the signature of many pathogens (disease causing microbes) living peacefully in the nasal passage of healthy people. One, Staphylococcus aureus, is notorious. It can cause boils, sinusitis, food poisoning, and bloodstream infections. But it can also have a completely benign presence in your nose, just minding its own business. At any one time, at least a third of us, and maybe more, are carrying it.