Inquiring into Covid Inquiries

There is no way of getting the truth about the pandemic officially admitted.

The covid pandemic was a signal event. It marked the end of the previous epoch as surely as the end of world war two marked the beginning of it. It rang the bell that the order which had been in place for 75 years had lost credibility, and thus ability to continue.

We are now in a transition era. That is as true in Canada as everywhere else, even if Canadians are mostly still clued out about it. The pandemic signaled like nothing else could have that we need a new way of running things.

Of course the old order is still holding onto power. It is doing everything to prevent people from drawing their own conclusions about it. As well, the various malignant forces which want to replace the present system with their own, are trying to drive people to false conclusions.

In this kind of environment, there is no possibility of a consensus emerging about the pandemic; how it came about, how governments responded to it, and even how serious it all was. We may never have a truthful account of it. It is the same way as, 75 years after world war two, people are still buying a completely bogus account of it.

A truthful account of reality is one of the most difficult things to achieve in this age. The problem is in the way certain ideas have been hammered into the populations of western countries in the past epoch. Truth does not matter; everyone is allowed to create their own reality.

The lesson from covid is that truth is what it is and it does matter. That is true of most crises but especially so of covid. People who knew what they were talking about had to be listened to, and they were not.

They still are not. They are still being harassed, deplatformed, and ‘cancelled’. Various ideological silos are trying to impose their own narrative of the pandemic onto reality.

Of course the worst thing about covid inquiries is that they tend to promote the idea that the pandemic is something which happened in the past. The full effects of covid are yet to be felt. The coming era may come to be called, “the covid age”.

Presently, there is a lot of covid inquiring going on. Recently the National Post newspaper called for an inquiry into covid. Being NaPo, its idea of an inquiry focusses exclusively on the ‘civil liberties’ trope, in connection to the covid response.

This has already been done. A group of Canadian righties last year held their own ‘citizen’s commission’ and determined what they were set up to determine. That is, the governmental responses to covid were ineffective and caused a lot of unnecessary inconvenience.

At least they did not throw up some more ‘covid is a hoax’ and ‘vaccines make you sick’ idiocy. But everyone with a clue is already aware of the inadequacies and abuses of the covid response. It was often used as a pretext to try to expand policing and surveillance powers.

Other countries have done covid inquiries. The United Kingdom has turned theirs into a huge production, launched in 2021 and scheduled to go on until 2026. It is organized into ten modules and has interviewed hundreds of people, from government ministers on down.

Of course this kind of thing is always a diversion. It carefully steers public focus away from the really important issues of the pandemic. The hope is that by the time the inquiry is done, covid will have become normalized and people will have forgotten the malevolent behaviour of government in establishing it.

Norway and Sweden have started similar inquiries of their own. Sweden was famous for adopting a eugenic attitude to the pandemic. The Swedish establishment only backed off from this when the economic harm caused by uncontrolled disease became too obvious.

Because of this, Sweden had one of the worse death rates in Europe. The Norwegian government was more prudent. Thus, its economy and society were less damaged.

In France, home of the Napoleonic code and Inquisitive legal system, some judicial inquiries are going on about the handling of covid. This was forced due to the complaints received by the courts about the negligence of the health minister in charge at the time of the initial outbreak. The present government of France is in a lot of trouble and may not be able to fully suppress this.

Some Britishers have asked us colonial Canadians why we have not started our own covid inquiry. Our response to the crisis was considered to be especially weak and fragmented. Of course, this is due to our especially weak and fragmented government system.

However, we actually did a lot better in the early years of the pandemic than many developed countries. We had a death rate of 1100 per million up to 2022. The UK death rate was 3000 per million in that same time period.

We did well because we sensible Canadians mostly listened to warnings about the pandemic. We got masked up as soon as we could. We got vaccinated as soon as they were available.

We also had reasonably competent messaging from the federal ‘Chief Public Health Officer’, doctor Theresa Tam. Of course she is still hated by the covid denial crowd, has been subject to all sorts of threats, but is still on the job. Alas, her position as a civil servant prevents her from more sharply criticizing the elected government’s handling of the covid crisis.

However, she produced a good report in 2023. She stated that, without any measures at all, the death rate in Canada could have been far higher. Urbanized countries which tried to adopt ‘let it rip’ responses to covid soon learned that this was not an option.

Tam reported a need for a much better emergency response system. All emergency handling must be built around public health.

Her bosses in the federal government seem only to be half listening. They timidly suggest creating a pandemic preparedness agency.

We were supposed to have had a good emergency response system in this country. It rotted away during neoliberal times.

We had a system for responding to pandemics, build around the local medical officers of health (MOHs) taking over the health system when necessary, and politicians stepping aside. Instead, the politicians swatted them aside and then proceeded to make a complete botch of the covid response.

So, we are unlikely to get any useful inquiry into the ongoing bungled response to covid. What we can get is the industrial capitalist/libertarian noise about the violations of their warped understanding of ‘rights’. We can also get the financial capitalist/globalist noise about how they handled the covid crisis perfectly and now everything is fine.

As a serious left barely exists in Canada, we are not going to get any kind of inquiry based in reality and social needs. There is no chance of a socially oriented citizen’s commission on covid management. However, to demonstrate what is missing, I will attempt below to approximate what such a report would look like.

A real covid inquiry in Canada would have three ‘modules’.

First, we need to look at where covid came from, and how we can eliminate airborne diseases forever.

Second, we need to look at what happened to our emergency response system, and how we can rebuild it.

Third, we need to look into the obstruction of the pandemic response by private interests, the exact motives behind it, such that we could not deal with it, and how to put a stop to the ongoing obstruction.

As to the first, it is well established that covid came out of a lab. Its release was not a deliberate act of the global establishment, which was clearly caught by surprise. Nonetheless, it was part of some kind of biowar experimentation.

Arrogant fools messing around with things they should leave alone are becoming an increasing threat to civilization. Biological experiments are becoming a bigger threat to human life than nuclear power. Equipment for gene sequencing is much too easy to get and there are no controls over this kind of experimentation. You might google Professor Raina MacIntyre for more on this subject.

The task for Canada is to engage internationally for bans on ‘gain of function’ research in microorganisms. There will be the usual resistance; denials, diversions, and disinformation. It will not be possible to stop bioweapons research until the globalists are disestablished everywhere, but the issue must be kept standing.

Meanwhile, all measures must be taken to make it impossible for airborne viral diseases to propagate effectively. This really should not be so difficult. It would require a campaign to clean the air we breathe, just as we once cleaned up the water we drink.

Eliminating water-born diseases in western cities also met with great resistance. It required changing the way things were done. But the changes were things which needed to change, and not just for disease control.

In these times, we need to start paying attention to our indoor and urban environments. We need to improve working conditions so people can take time off when they are contagious. We need our health system to be properly resourced, free from political interference, and directed by competent people.

As to the second, we had a reasonably good health emergency system twenty years ago. We were recognized internationally for how we handled the SARS outbreak in Canada in 2003. We were instrumental in containing that 2002 to 2004 outbreak, which could have become worse than the covid that came on us a generation later.

It is unlikely we could have stopped covid at Canada’s borders. It had already gone out of control worldwide. However, we really collapsed in 2020.

For example, we had large stockpiles of protective equipment (PPPs). Shortly before the pandemic, they were thrown out as outdated. They were not restocked.

In Ontario, there were stocks of PPPs. The provincial government refused to allow it to be distributed to hospital workers, giving out a set of ridiculous reasons. Such equipment had to be ordered from China.

We still had the essentials of a health emergency system. It was not ideal; the MOHs were of varying quality. But often they were well trained and up to date in epidemiology.

The problem was they were appointed by provincial or local politicians and could be removed at their whim. This was the result of health care being left to the provinces. It needs to be organized nationally.

The persistent pattern was for politicians to order the health system to act according to wrong and outdated ideas. Masks were discouraged at first. The useless ‘six feet apart’ rule, and the actually harmful plexiglas barriers, were promoted.

Quarantines became the main way to control spread but were bungled. There was no infrastructure in place to do them properly. They were a wasted effort and became an abuse of the public.

A quarantine needs to be done short, strict, and once. There must be a way to get food to people while they are isolated. Essential services must be kept running.

The point of the quarantine is to allow time for other measures to be put into place. Mainly, a test and trace system, and a vaccine pass system. There were botched and aborted efforts to put these in place.

The health system was slapped aside by some unseen hand which rejected more sophisticated approaches. This unseen force wanted only the crudest, “flatten the curve to prevent the hospitals from collapsing” approach. There was no concern with minimizing fatalities.

Everything was a gamble on quickly getting a vaccine, even if it was not a very good vaccine. Once most people were inoculated, it was assumed that the problem was solved and everything could go back to ‘normal’. As long as the disease had reached a manageable level, it did not matter if those vulnerable to the disease were effectively excluded from society.

The health system has been destroyed. We would be in great trouble if we were hit with another pandemic. However, the results of the long term effects of the disease will not hit for about two years yet, and could themselves collapse the system.

There is no will to fix the health system. There is no will to fix anything right now. People are very demoralized and government has been deactivated.

However, what needs to be done is clear. The health system must be nationalized. A national emergency response system, based on the health services, must be organized, funded, and empowered.

These parallel systems must be run by national health and emergency services authorities. They must be ‘ring fenced’ away from political interference. It must be made clear that, once the authority declares an emergency, regular government steps aside.

Toward this, the authority must have serious policing power. It is a given that in any emergency situation, about ten percent of the population will deny the problem. They will react hysterically against any effort to deal with it.

This becomes serious in the presence of organized elements looking to destabilize government and society. In this situation emergency authorities must have the competence, resources, and legal power to deal with it. The public must have a well placed confidence in them.

These authorities must have good communication skills. They must have plans in place. Above all, they must have special policing authority.

The people who want to use a health emergency to attack society must be identified and arrested. Funds and facilities used in the attack must be impounded. The key instigators must face long prison sentences.

As to the third topic, most of what needs to be said is covered in the first two modules. There is no moral justification for obstructing public health during a real emergency. The covid crisis really was an emergency.

There was no way of knowing how bad the disease really was. We still do not know its long term effects. In such a situation, we must let the authorities who are in position at the time deal with the situation as best they can, unless they are absolutely inadequate or malignant.

We review the response after the emergency has passed. We deal with possible abuses or excesses, and negligence or incompetence, at that time. We examine what went wrong and why, what was inadequate, what needs to be corrected for the next time.

What was really offensive about the anti public health rhetoric of 2020 to 2021 was not that it generally criticized the way the crisis was being handled. People denied that government had any right to act at all. Everything was an interference with narcissistic libertarians and their idea of ‘rights’.

Worst of all, they denied the precautionary principle. That is, we assume the worst until we know enough.

However, most of the deliberate effort to obstruct health measures was from political networks. This is where it would get too big for most covid inquiries.They would have to acknowledge that we live, not in a democracy, but in an oligarchy in which such networks are more powerful than government.

I have described in several articles how our oligarchy divides into two broad factions; the industrialists and the financialists. Reacting to the pandemic, the industrialists just wanted their workforce to back to work. The financialists have a Malthusian idea that the human population and its productive capacities should be restricted.

Industrialists thought the cure should not be worse than the disease. The cure for covid was worse than the disease for them. This was because they do not see the human costs as a problem but cannot contemplate even a brief pause from profit taking.

These industrialists thought they were better epidemiologists than those educated in that science. They decided they wanted everyone infected so that their human herd would gain ‘herd immunity’. Infectious diseases usually do not work that way, as we are learning.

In addition to the Malthusian ideas, Financialists with interests in the pharmaceutical industries find uncontrolled pandemics to be very profitable. They have total control over the health systems of many countries. They could make sure that outdated and wrong ideas about disease remained entrenched.

They could insure that health systems, especially in managing a pandemic emergency, were deliberately mismanaged. For example, hospital workers were forced to wear surgical masks instead of proper respirators. Key managers who stood up to this were got rid of.

Best of all, a new market for overpriced vaccines could be developed. It is always most profitable to sell an imperfect product that only works just enough. We are still being forced to use them.

Development and deployment of more effective vaccines is being delayed. It should be possible to develop shots which ‘sterilize’ most infectious diseases. That is, they reduce the transmission rate of the disease below its ‘R0’ so that it fades away.

This points us to two further key reforms which could be applied to insure we have no repeat of the covid fiasco. One is fairly simple; we need to start making our own vaccines. The other requires major changes to the financial system.

We need to create a publicly owned vaccine corporation. We need to develop effective vaccines in cooperation with other countries which have also created public corporations for this purpose. Of course this means the dissolution of ‘big Pharma’.

There is something very wrong with an economic system which cannot shut down for a few weeks to deal with a lockdown and quarantine. One which then has a lot of trouble starting back up again. It should not be a problem to simply write off a few weeks of profit taking, all the way up the line.

Something like a Basic Income would make it much easier for people to take time off work to deal with a lockdown or slowdown of any kind. If such a program were done right, it would provide the structure to compensate workers for lost incomes.

So, the conclusions of a proper covid inquiry would include the recommendations below. There is no chance they would be carried out under a regime of neoliberal capitalism. But they would be a good start point for thinking about the kind of institutions we need to create, when we get to the ‘post capitalist’ era.

We need a nationalized health care system, run by an independent authority.

We need an emergency planning agency, capable of organizing something like a quarantine.

We need the ability to quickly bring a test and trace system up and running.

We need to have in place at all times a system of vaccine cards. You do not get on an airliner or go into institutions like care homes or schools, without one. During virus alerts, you could not get into a stadium, theater, or restaurant unless your jabs are up to date.

We need prosecutions of people spreading disinformation about public health measures, or counseling non compliance with them.

We need to produce our own vaccines. We need safe and really effective vaccines.

We need to make incomes less dependent on employment, and make it easier for people to take time off work to care for themselves or others during sickness.

We need a financial system built on public banking, which allows businesses to be more resilient and focused on the long term, and less on short term extraction of profits.

We need a national indoor air quality standard.

We are not getting any of this any time soon. We are going to be living in the covid age for some time. Enough said.