ALMOST two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus still has the world locked in mortal combat. Cases and deaths are both on the rise again, despite 8.3 billion vaccine doses administered to a world population of 7.9 billion.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The new Omicron variant was notified to the World Health Organisation on November 24 after three weeks of puzzling test results in South Africa, and is already confirmed in 57 of the world's 195 nations.
Another example of why "living with COVID" is a lot easier to say than do. Some 16 million COVID detections in the past 28 days, and 4.3 million in the week to December 5, up from 2.5 million a week in mid-October.
IN THE NEWS:
Fatalities are rising again to hit 55,000 last week.
The official total is 268 million cases and more than 5.2 million deaths.
Against this black wall of death and suffering, the tug of war continues between commerce and public health, between conformity and rebellion, between the majority who - reservations or not - have taken the jab, and a vocal minority who don't want to be vaccinated, and who still see the whole COVID deal as an autocratic conspiracy designed to either depopulate the planet or to keep us in chains.
A fortnight ago, a crowd that police put at 3000 and the organisers said was 6000 gathered in wet and windy conditions at Foreshore Park for a Millions March Against Mandatory Vaccination protest.
That's a big Newcastle crowd by any standard.
Getting people out a second time for the same reason is a pretty hard ask in this neck of the woods, so it will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow at a Reclaim The Line rally at the same venue at 11am.
And I am interested, because even though the virus is a real and obvious threat, the protesters have some fairly basic truths on their side when it comes to the way that governments everywhere have responded to the crisis.
China's first Wuhan lockdown was met with the broad response that it wouldn't happen here.
That we were too democratic for that.
But it did happen, and quickly, and with less opposition we would have predicted beforehand.
Told what to do, most of us do what they say.
We walk around in face-covering masks that hide more of our faces than a burka ever did at the height of hysteria about Islamic terrorism.
We walk the streets, phone in hand, ready to tap the app to log into wherever we are going. As we head to an election, expect endless reminders of what a marvellous job the government has done in keeping us safe.
I can cop all that.
But what worries me - and what I've heard from tomorrow's Reclaim The Line rally organisers - is the way that debating or discussing the official line attracts such a hostile response from the powers that be.
There are differences because a Google search on a mobile phone provides far more alternatives than the local library ever did, but if banning alternative views from social media in the name of "truth" isn't 21st century censorship and book burning, I don't know what is.
Maybe people would be less suspicious if it didn't seem as though COVID crowd control arrived pre-prepared.
A few weeks back I picked up some magazines from the "free" shelf outside Leigh Rice's bookshop in Beaumont Street, Hamilton. New Dawn, Uncensored and Nexus.
Alternative news to their readers, conspiracy rags to their detractors.
Flicking through one, I noticed the mock-up - reproduced above - of a "mandatory vaccine checkpoint", with "vaccine enforcement" officers holding people down to be jabbed.
I checked the cover. It said 2016.
Feeling slightly disoriented, I flicked back to the article.
Suddenly it made sense.
A story about the movie Vaxxed, which Robert De Niro had been pressured into pulling from his Tribeca film festival. I hadn't taken much notice at the time.
Nor did I know until then that De Niro had a son, Elliot, born in 1998, who according to his father had "changed overnight" after his mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccination.
The Vaxxed story was not an isolated example.
Scratch beneath the surface and there are all sorts of worrying things about COVID - including the research links between the US Centres for Disease Control and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, pegged by those who believe in the bioweapon theory as the likely ground zero.
I haven't read News Corp journalist Sharri Markson's book - What Really Happened In Wuhan - A virus like no other, countless infections, millions of deaths - but I have seen the hostile reaction it has generated.
What I did read, though, and in our Newcastle Herald on Thursday, was that Australian government agencies had undertaken a pandemic "stress test" in early 2018 that found "significant concerns not being, or not able to be, addressed".
I did a double take when I read they used a "pandemic style outbreak commencing in China" as their model, but as I type these words, I realise that will be because that's where the first SARS outbreak came from.
Not because they knew in advance.
That would be crazy. And irresponsible of me to even think it.
Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:
- Bookmark: newcastleherald.com.au
- Download our app
- Make sure you are signed up for our breaking and regular headlines newsletters
- Follow us on Twitter
- Follow us on Instagram
- Follow us on Google News