@wwaycorrigan
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To borrow from John Lennon — and many others besides — another year is almost over and a new one is about to begin.
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Peter Hitchens: always a hit (he's on the left, in case you're wondering!)
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Hitchens hit
This is always an apt time for reflection, for
taking stock of one's affairs, and for looking forward. I won't be
alone in being happy to see the end of 2021. While both personally and
in the world at large,
things could get worse, there's also plenty of scope for them to get better.
The
coronavirus pandemic yet again dominated the news agenda. And as much
as I've tried to avoid dwelling on it, this has been rather difficult to
do when containment measures directly affect one's life, whether one
agrees with them or not.
Thus, of the 57 blog posts I have (so
far) published here in 2021, 19 of them were related to the pandemic —
to be honest, I thought that number would have been higher. The
most-read one was The vaccine vexers — you can check out that "gem" at
https://wwcorrigan.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-vaccine-vexers.html, if you haven't already done so.
On the other end of the scale, the least-read post was
'Colombia's done OK, but prepare for a half-shut, half-open world for 2021' — Dr Bhattacharya.
That was a teaser piece for my podcast/YouTube interview with Dr Jay
Bhattacharya, co-author of the controversial Great Barrington
Declaration. The YouTube interview itself got much more engagement. You
can watch it at
https://youtu.be/ZSb8VnG4nPs.
Mentioning
my currently on-hold podcast (if anyone wants to sponsor its return,
I'm all ears!), my interview with the controversial but always
interesting English journalist, Peter Hitchens, has received the most
views,
https://youtu.be/Nuzm8OkYMyE.
On the opposite end, my chat with Miami-based Colombian journalist
Daniel Coronell didn't quite reach the same Hitchens heights,
https://youtu.be/ZsWTBwGXRXY.
Staying on the podcast front, this year did see the launch of Get Inglés (
https://caracol.com.co/getingles/) in association with Caracol Radio. Whisper it, but there may be more episodes to come.
'Making
life much more difficult for the unvaccinated, some of whom appear to
have better defences against covid than many vaccinated individuals, is
nothing less than coercion.'
Looking ahead to 2022,
while I intend to keep writing in some form or another — one can be
rather stubborn in that regard — I'll endeavour to post less content
about the pandemic, for my own sanity if nothing else.
Thus, allow me this blowout for now.
Raising's one ire-land
The
coming 12 months should see me make a return to my native Ireland at
some stage. It's been over three years since I last visited.
However,
from the outside looking in — and at a safe distance of over 8000 km —
the homeland appears rather lost and not terribly appealing. If the
Irish Government told its citizens to lock themselves in a dark closet
for a couple of weeks to avoid getting the cold, the majority would most
likely do it.
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To get the covid-19 vaccine or not to get it? That is the question.
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It's almost as if people think that there were no
dangerous infections floating around before this novel coronavirus and
its various mutations came on the scene.
It matters little to so many
that the risk of death, nay severe infection, is minuscule for the
majority of the planet. Any proportionality and rationality that had
once existed — I think it did exist to some degree in any case — has
been abandoned completely.
It does seem that some actually like
this sense of crisis and resultant government control which they follow
unquestioningly, 'doing our bit to save lives', when there's no strong
evidence that this is actually being achieved.
Indeed, the argument could be made —
and has been made — that it's doing the opposite. Prolonging the hardship and leading to more, what in normal times would have been,
preventable-for-a-time deaths (shocking as this may be to some, but we weren't immortal before this spiky virus started plaguing us).
I've
always said that to get anything close to a true picture of the
deadliness or otherwise of Sars-CoV-2, excess deaths over the period of
the pandemic and for a few years after need to be looked at.
Also,
considering the covid monomania which has seen health services across
the globe neglect other life-threatening conditions, all excess deaths
cannot be attributed to covid-19.
Some will go in the category of
being as a result of the disproportionate coronavirus-containment
measures. That's if such analysis is done in a fair, thorough way. It's
been easy to document covid-19 as the cause of death when it was but one
of a number of conditions that led to one's demise.
Alongside all that, the widespread failure to accept that some people have what appears to be
robust T-cell immunity to this particular infection has been extremely frustrating.
Making life much more difficult for the unvaccinated, some of whom
appear to have better defences against covid than many vaccinated individuals, is nothing less than coercion. It's also wrong.
One
can only hope that by this time next year we will have moved on from
all this, that we will have learned to live with covid in a rational
way. Right now, that seems like wishful thinking.
Yet, returning to Lennon, we can imagine a brighter future. I may be a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
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