It started with a tight knot in the pit of my stomach that soon led to a feeling of overwhelming despair and ended up as a deep throbbing rage about what we’re all being put through again.
I’m sure many of you have felt that same mix of emotions these past 72-hours.
Much of it was sparked by the deja vu of a dreaded 5pm emergency Saturday evening press conference – like the one that saw the government unfathomably ‘cancel Christmas’ for millions of us last year thanks to Delta – where the fear and hysteria of a new Covid scariant was expertly whipped up.
Boris Johnson and Chris Whitty were this time the Three Wise Men. They were instead the Three Clueless Blokes.
None of them has any idea if the Omicron variant is more transmissible or – crucially – if it evades the vaccines.
However, there are no signs of any kind.
South African scientists that had found the phenomenon warned us against overreacting and to wait for more evidence.
It doesn’t matter!
The hysterical, new world was full steam ahead and there were many new restrictions.
On Saturday, Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty and Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Patrick Vallance at a Downing Street media briefing
Travel bans have returned (also for South Africa) as a bizarre punishment for their amazing science of warning the world.
Also mandatory are the use of masks in public transport settings and a ten-day self-isolation period for Omicron contacts. All travellers must undergo compulsory day two (PCR) testing, which includes home isolation while they wait for results.
Even then, the BBC, ITV and Sky News didn’t think Boris and the doomsday duo had gone anywhere near far enough.
It was my worst nightmare to see this hysterical response to a scary situation before the facts were known.
All warnings I’ve been giving for the last 20 months have come to pass: Scientists are in control. A return to normal will not be possible if they continue to behave like that.
In fact, I’m beginning to doubt if the normality I so desperately crave – a world where we make sensible decisions for ourselves, weighing up all the usual risk factors like we do every single day – will ever return.
A population of over 80 percent adults are double-jabbed. Another 25 per cent is triple-jabbed. Over 90 per cent have Covid antibodies, thanks to the brilliant scientific fact that natural immunity.
Dan Wootton (pictured) says he is feeling a ‘deep throbbing rage about about what we’re all being put through again’ with the Omicron variant
Covid-19 now has a 0.27 per cent fatality rate in the UK – meaning that for every 100,000 people who catch Covid, just three will die – and we have so many ways to treat it that we couldn’t imagine in March 2020.
Why accept it?
Why is the government claiming they can railroad democratic processes under the pretext of public health without providing the evidence?
At 4am tomorrow, the new rules that will govern our daily lives will be in effect. There won’t be any votes in Parliament. The actual time it takes for MPs in Parliament to discuss the new rules could be up to 28 days.
How have we changed? China’s communist government would love it.
Of course, it’s those groups already left battered, bruised and bloodied by 20 months of restrictions that will be worst impacted again.
As the nearly-dead British tourist and travel industry that finally sees some light at end of very dark tunnel, but is now being sacrificed for the craven media’s demands.
How will isolationists learn to see that closed borders do not work?
All viruses must be addressed internationally. Even paranoid specialists admit that closing off the UK completely would have only temporarily delayed any arrivals of major new versions.
Australia and New Zealand have been locked out for two years, but they had to face some of the most severe and long-lasting lockdowns when Delta inadvertently slipped in. You can’t keep out a virus – the ‘rona doesn’t respect national borders.
The World Health Organisation is right to criticise the UK, US and Europe for imposing travel restrictions on southern African states and to call for borders to remain open so countries that discover new variants don’t try to hide them like China did right at the start of this almighty mess.
England has included ten countries in southern Africa on their red-list. They will now require that all arriving passengers do a day-2 PCR test. Once they are negative, the self-isolation process must be completed. Pictured: Heathrow Airport passengers queue to check in
However, they were totally wrong when they refused to name the new variant Xi in fear of offending the Chinese authoritarian leader.
Xi Jinping is the person I believe every variant of Chernobyl should be named after. His brazen and unforgiveable covering-up of Covid’s pandemic is both historic and petty.
Then there are our poor children and teenagers – the group least personally impacted by Covid who keep getting it in the neck.
The government made an announcement that Secondary School students in secondary schools will wear masks starting today in communal areas. Students are sitting in classrooms filled with ice and cold, their windows left wide open.
As expected, out-of control teachers unions lobby for facemasks to be reinstated in classrooms. This is in addition to the savage bubbles that have cost thousands of dollars each week in education.
Some schools are already banning parents from Christmas Nativity Parties.
Meanwhile, Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary attended last night’s National Teachers Awards. There were hundreds of people crammed into one room that was not ventilated and there wasn’t a single mask.
It is a cruel and hypocritical act.
If nothing else, after everything we’ve already put them through, please God let our kids and teenagers get on with living a normal, unmuzzled life.
On Sunday, Underground passengers in London wore face-coverings as they travelled on it. Boris Johnson stated that it was important to use ‘targeted precautionary steps’ following the positive testing of two persons for the new variant.
I will need to know how teens can get a second Covid jab, and how the booster program is open to everyone under 40.
Isn’t all the confected hysteria a result of fears this new form of the virus might evade the jabs?
I’m all for the Covid vaccines by the way, personally. But I’m viciously opposed to the concept of mandating jabs and the type of health apartheid that is creeping across Europe.
It’s time we accept that viruses mutate and the arrival of a nasty variants every few months is an inevitability, without turning our lives upside down, causing global stock markets to crash and the mental health of millions to spiral.
The government must give us the facts the moment they have them, without any hysteria, and then allow us to make sensible decisions about what level of risk we’re prepared to take based on our own health profile.
If 20 months later, we can’t open up the country and restore our civil liberties, I worry that it will be impossible.
If we keep compliantly allowing our freedoms to be stripped on the whim of a poll-driven government, then don’t be surprised if they never fully return.
A dystopian nightmare looms and it’s time to speak up and stand up.