You would expect that after months of insistence that we, as a COVID-afflicted nation, adhere to the words of medical experts in general and specifically the guidance from the World Health Organization, there would be more than scant coverage of the latest announcement from WHO. Their spokesman, Dr. David Nabarro, has come forward to make a stern announcement to the leaders of the nations across the globe to back away from the practice of locking down our societies.
Nabarro was rather direct in telling the politicians to stop using the lockdown method as a means to control the pandemic within their nations. “Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer. We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus.’’
The closing of our society in numerous areas has become a point of contention in many states, becoming a political factor in a time when many politicians have been seen using the pandemic as means of flexing some of their unelected political muscle. Just in Michigan we are seeing a state Supreme Court striking down the numerous executive orders Governor Gretchen Whitmer has imposed on her citizens. The very fact that she has instituted over 160 of these orders is a telling statistic.
The glaring aspect of this recent announcement is that the WHO has been regarded as the gold standard in medical advice dispensed to address the global outbreak. WHO has been used as cudgel with President Trump, who has correctly noted how that organization has been showing a high level of fealty towards the communist Chinese leadership – a glaring issue considering ground-zero for the outbreak was in Wuhan – and that they have also been contradictory at times in its advice. Case in point is WHO now turning 180 degree with their lockdown advice.
It has to be regarded as rather revealing how the politicians and the press members who had relied so heavily on the words of WHO doctors are now completely silent as they contradict the desire of these same players to keep us in a state of social and economic paralysis. Just look at the ever-shifting standards that were forwarded in order for us to reopen the country. First we needed a two-week down time to halt the spread, then that became a need to stay quarantined until the infection curve was flattened. Next was the call to blunt the second wave of infections.
Each one of these professed thresholds was met with scientific data, and each time the pandemic goalposts were moved. Next the call came for the need to have a vaccine, and when it was announced that a few could be soon arriving the "experts’’ have called for those to be submitted to lengthy testing and trials before we can open our doors once again. What is apparent is the desire by many leaders and news delivery agents to keep us under control.
The unintended reality that gets revealed is that those shrill voices calling for us to adhere to the sacrosanct words of the medical experts are now in a position of opposition to those same physicians. Look at the reaction to President Trump’s positive test and how he quickly returned to work. The media scorched his personal care physicians, they began calling doctors who cleared him as "liars" who cannot be trusted, and have even gone to the lengths of saying a major medical facility should be defunded, all over political hackery on their part.
After months of insistence that doctors be listened to, suddenly in October, medical experts are now viewed suspiciously and should be ignored. Little surprise then in this feverishly reactive time that the WHO recommendation to suspend lockdowns is also roundly ignored.
It became deeply ironic that the people who were barking the most about the administration and conservatives politicizing the pandemic are those same who now reveal themselves to be driven more by politics than the advice of medical experts. If only there was a vaccine for their TDS affliction.
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