MY mother isn’t an eavesdropper, but sometimes you can’t help yourself. On a day out in the Home Counties, she found herself momentarily next to two sets of parents who were catching up on pleasantries and gossip. After getting out of the way the terrible difficulties one of their sprogs was having as a newly trained doctor – yes, our hearts bleed – the tone became suddenly more serious:
‘Did you hear? Henrietta’s daughter got Covid at school.’
‘Oh, gosh!’
‘Yes, and then the whole family was infected!’
‘Oh, no!’
‘I know. Even the grandmother. She’s 87. Very frail.’
‘Oh, my God! Are they okay? That’s so awful!’
‘Yes, they’re all fine.’
Being decent people, they were naturally wearing masks during the chat. One has to in the midst of a deadly pandemic, after all. That the family in question had all been struck down with this terrible disease but were all completely fine afterwards did not seem to register.
During other pandemics – I can’t be certain, I wasn’t there – perhaps things were different. Were a family to be struck down with buboes, they would probably have needed more than a few days of watching Netflix (or whatever the medieval equivalent was) to get back to digging turnips.
It was a conversation that could have happened only in the barmy days of 2020-21. In previous years, few would have feasted on the news that a family had come down with a mild cold.
But now the madness grows apace, like some noxious invasive weed choking the few remaining vestiges of societal common sense.
Sajid Javid has recently announced that he is in favour of mandatory vaccination for all NHS staff. At present, more than 100,000 of the organisation’s workers have not submitted to jab demands. That they surrender to this dictatorial instruction is seemingly more important than making sure that ‘Our NHS’, forever on life support and perpetually in a state of imminent collapse, has enough staff.
As ever, whether they have antibodies after previous infection is never brought up. Either you submit or you are fired.
This is because, as New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern, darling of the liberal Left, recently admitted: the goal is to create a two-tier society, in which the vaccinated are granted the privilege of leading a normal (or so they say, goalposts are forever shifting) life, and the unvaccinated are demoted to second-class citizens.
Freedom, once assumed to be the natural condition of our societies, must now be bought through explicit fealty to the apparatus of the 21st century pharmocracy.
Again, it cannot be about the virus. If it were, negative tests or immunity after infection would be part of their plan. There is only demand: Obey!
