I HAVE STOPPED my polite Saturday protest outings, where I handed out homemade cakes to passers-by in my hometown and engaged them in a discussion about Covid measures. I guess I never really believed that as a nation we would accept that teens and children not being exposed to the real virus receive the (experimental, no liability, no safety data) Covid vaccinations. Once this was approved by our government, seeing my adult comrades – even my parent comrades – scrambling to get these young disease carriers vaccinated broke part of my heart.

Which species is at risk of unnecessarily harming its young at the risk of prolonging the life of its elders by a few years? At 56, I am closer to old age than to youth, and this monstrous perversion of the natural order shocks every moral fiber of my being. It has been a dark time, and I fought against retreat to my tower, surrounded by easy-to-build walls of disgust and despair for my fellow human beings.

But my heart knows that is not the way. I must always remember that there was a time when I, too, got involved in the measures introduced to combat the virus.

I remained at home; I have moved away from my family and my friends; I believed without asking questions, without criticism, what was claimed by politicians and reported by trusted media; I applauded the NHS; I wore a mask – and judged those who did not; I kept my only child at home and isolated from his friends for months; I held my breath as I passed people outside; I haven’t seen my single, elderly mother for months; I put on a mask to walk from my table to the restaurant to the bathroom; I believed that developing the vaccine for those most at risk was a complete success and our way out. 15 million hits to freedom, I really believed it.

The most bitter of all, when I had already gone at the time to total opposition to blockades and school closures, and although surprised by the inclusion of my age group (group 9, the most 50 years) in the vaccine rollout schedule, and despite feeling that I personally needed it, I did the first AZ vaccination in March of this year, thinking I didn’t want low use in one of the 9 categories then listed to give our governments the excuse of delaying the lifting of restrictions. The irony of this lost none of its spur over the next seven months, as the vaccination rollout grotesquely and inexorably unfolded to the current 12-year-old age groups, but what is done is done.

A year ago, after absorbing months of sophisticated messages designed specifically to scare me (and for a detailed account of the actions of our government, the behavior specialists who advise them, and the media, read the excellent book by Laura Dodsworth A state of fear) I was indeed afraid, a little for myself but especially for the others, a dark conviction lodged in my heart that it was dangerous, that it was not sure.

I have encountered this fear in many forms and regularly while talking to people on my Cake and Liberty Saturdays. Over the summer, with cases of Covid and flat hospitalizations as cancer patients have died without treatment, I would suggest that the restrictions can be lifted and so many gentle and well-meaning people would agree that yes, yes , they absolutely should, yes the collateral damage was horrible, it was tragic, but… not yet. It wasn’t sure yet. And when I asked them okay, so when would that be safe, what case numbers did we need to see, what criteria had to be met to make them feel safe, they literally pulled over and me watched in genuine bewilderment, unable to calculate that even as a possibility. In the 21 Saturdays, no one I have asked this question has ever found an answer. Looking into their eyes, I realized that many of them had been so deeply scared that they couldn’t even imagine a time when they would feel safe again.

What have we done? And how did we get so sensitive?

I argue that the unstoppable drift of the health and safety mission has a lot to answer for, and by allowing the authorities to speak unopposed in the smallest details of our lives, we have unwittingly been psychologically prepared to consider as normal and legitimate, a degree of interference that would have scandalized our grandparents, and would have been only short-term.

The Occupational Health and Safety Act has been part of the UK legal system since 1974 and was developed in response to the particularly dangerous employment conditions that existed in factories and mines at the time. It is in the nature of all public organizations to expand their payroll, budget and remit, and the Health and Safety Executive was no exception (in 2019 it had a budget of £ 231million and employed 2,400 people), spawning miniature health and safety services, teams, departments and agents in every council across the country. Conducted in tandem with the arrival in the UK of American-style accident response litigation, the laudable initial goal of reducing unsafe work practices in coal mines, oil rigs, construction sites and factories have sort of turned over the years into bans on flying kites. on beaches, against the installation of Christmas decorations in workstations and only authorizing electrical engineers to change the time on clocks in workplaces.

The HSE in my opinion is a valuable organization doing important work, and it is itself frustrated with how some worthy officials outside the organization overinterpret and zealously invent the rules, but the fact is. that this is what humans do, and we have indulged in these swifts at a cost that we are only now beginning to realize. By obediently acquiescing to these endless forays into our private lives, we have not provided the solid challenge that all good practices and laws demand.

Of course, it is up to us to reduce unnecessary risks to workers. Of course, we must enforce safe and sensible working practices. Of course, we should have rules in place to minimize serious accidents – whether for customers, travelers, workers, students, patients or customers. But a line has to be drawn somewhere, and the right place for the line can only be found through debate, and debate needs opposition. By undoubtedly yielding to any new injunction that emerges, accepting dictates that we deem excessive or foolish, and not requiring a vigorous defense of the cost-benefit ratio of every proposal, we have set a deadly precedent that has directly contributed to our situation.

We have allowed ourselves to be infantilized and disempowered, we have allowed a voluntary suspension of our own common sense in favor of risk assessments, we have let down our own critical thinking in the face of political postures, but worst of all, we have slipped imperceptibly in the conviction that absolute security is possible, that we can eliminate all risk if we only do what we are told, if we only follow the rules given to us by those in power.

It is plainly obvious that many people will not – will not be able to – take off their masks until someone in authority tells them it is safe to do so. You can explain until you’re blue in the face that an aerosolized virus the size of SARS-CoV2 goes through masks as dust blows through a chain-link fence, rendering their mask comically useless at best, but until an authority figure gives them permission to take it off, it stays. You can explain that the transmission of fomites has been completely debunked (by the CDC, nothing less), but until the powers that be say hand sanitizer is no longer needed, the bottles and pumps and the exhortations to apply them frequently will continue to proliferate.

And if that was the extent of it – the scene of self-imposed masks and excessive hand cleaning – it might not matter so much. But I fear that, as part of this process, we have granted permission to outside authorities to override not only our intellectual but also moral compasses. And to quote Voltaire, “anyone who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.

This week, like every week for months and months now, there have been 40% more deaths at home than the five-year average, according to the ONS. Of the 935 total excess deaths at home this week alone, only 47 were deaths from Covid. The measures we have put in place to fight Covid might be woefully ineffective in their primary purpose, but they prove to be obscene in killing people in other ways.

Too good, it’s not sure.

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photo by Anatolia from Adobe Stock