The Biden Administration has announced that its insane vaccine requirements for government employees and international travellers will finally end on May 11th, when the American pandemic state of emergency expires. The WHO has likewise declared that COVID-19 “no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern”. Three years and two months after it all started, the last remaining participants in the Covid circus are finally folding up their tables and going home.
It’s worth asking why now, because by any objective measure, there has been no virus activity worthy of the words ‘pandemic’ or ‘emergency’ for a very long time. The answer seems to be the failure of Corona to return in the winter, as long-absent influenza succeeded in suppressing Corona infections (in accordance with my prediction), and the increasing disinterest of the public in obtaining official test results has put all virus statistics in the toilet. They’re ending it now, in other words, not because anything on the ground has changed, but because they no longer have any hope of the scary headlines necessary to keep the machine up and running.
As in the beginning, so in the end: The pandemicists will give you always and forever the maximum virus suppression and the maximum vaccination that is politically possible. Not what is prudent, or what has any hope of achieving anything, or what has evidence in its favour, but simply the maximum that they can give you, for as long as they can give it to you. That is a reason in itself, never to let the pandemicists anywhere near the levers of power ever again.
The pandemic may be over, but there is no stopping the vaccines. Thanks to the incredibly stupid contracts that the EU concluded with Pfizer/BioNTech, we are drowning in them, and some of our less prosperous neighbours to the east have had enough:
With the Covid vaccination campaigns concluded, the European Union is sitting on an enormous vaccine surplus – and hundreds of millions more doses are expected to arrive this year and next… Because they are not needed, EU member states have been trying for months to retroactively adjust the contracts, without much success.
One country has now lost patience in the face of the tough negotiations, and is venting its anger. The Polish Health Minister Adam Niedzielski on Tuesday sent a letter to the “shareholders of Pfizer” [which] says that the delivery of hundreds of millions of doses planned by Pfizer despite a “stable epidemic situation” is “completely pointless”.
