For those who frequent Western media, the attitudes held towards so-called “zero-covid policies” from American and UK commentators might seem shocking. The American-Anglo elites’ utter dismissal of the impossibility of maintaining such policies because of the economic costs, even as their own countries suffocate from spiralling inflation due to worker and goods shortages and stagnant growth, all because of their shameful ability to exercise the smallest modicum of self-control, is frankly preposterous.
These attitudes, however, stem from the incestuous collusion between the media and its controlling economic elites who share the notion that convenient freedom of movement must be maintained at all costs, even if it spells the potential end of the human species.
Since the 13th century, the quarantine, named for the forty days a ship must remain in harbor during pandemics to ensure that the crew were not carrying plague, has been the most effective tool in human history for preventing pestilence from crossing borders.
It does not require that borders be sealed, but be restricted with enforceable measures to prevent the free inflow of vectors. This effectively guarantees public safety in disease-free areas, or if already penetrated, allows authorities to track, trace, and eliminate local cases, preventing additional inflows hampering control.
This has been the standard procedure of states and cities for nearly a millennia. This begs the question, why have leaders in most states flagrantly refused to enact mandatory quarantine policies to prevent the spread of COVID?
China used quarantines to its advantage, closing domestic borders in initial days, while keeping international outflows open and flowing to allow the rest of the world to share the burden of the pandemic.
American and European responses were characterized by gross inaction, in which the state often literally did absolutely nothing, leading to the current chaos and mass deaths. Quarantines in most states were mere recommendations, ad hoc responses to backtracking on hastily planned border closures, and left totally unenforcable. This stands in shocking contrast to the vaccine mandates leading to the mass firings that would later exacerbate acute labor shortages in these states which have been devastated by the sheer incompetence of their governments.
The handful of countries that enacted thoughtful quarantine procedures, like Taiwan, were either overlooked, or mocked when they made missteps, both by the left and right leaning press. Likely due to pressure from both international and local elites, leaders in charge like Taiwanese CECC leader Chen Shih-chung 陳時中, frequently backtracked on quarantine policies to make exceptions for patron elites, ultimately leading to the rare outbreaks that Taiwan experienced when Chen reduced quarantine times for pilots not once, but multiple times. This was despite the intermittent outbreaks caused by these deadly blunders, for which he still has taken no responsibility whatsoever, despite the blood on his hands.
So, if mandatory quarantines at borders are so effective, then why does the neoliberal media deny its efficacy and lambast such policies, and why are governments unwilling to implement them? It is because both the media and political class are organs of the same elite power structure which refuse to act in the interests of public health, except with token gestures and quick-fixes like vaccine subsidies, especially if they go against the interests of those who fund their campaigns, filthy slush funds, and help bail them out when prosecuted for their graft.
Those who control the levers of power, both in the media and the halls of legislatures, cannot abide by their hard fought for rights to unlimited jet-setting cross-border capital transfers and an endless, borderless realm where with just the right amount of cash, words like citizenship have lost their meaning.
Thus, our civilization has pretended as if 750 years of human history and practice have never happened: quarantines are the egregious tools of overzealous authoritarians, while mandates to forcibly take experimental already deprecated vaccines is apparently left as the only rational choice for the “free world,” once elites soured on masks, too.
The notion that vaccines are the only solution left is a lie, and the assertion that vaccine mandates “work” at stopping the pandemic is an outright fraud with no evidence in existence in support. It is an established fact that fully vaccinated people can still be infected and transmit the virus, making the repetition of this assertion journalistic malpractice.
The weekly editorials asking then, why, despite vaccines, new strains continue developing that are increasing able to evade those crude magic bullets, and why, despite two years after the initial outbreak, the world seems less equipped to deal with the disease than even at its inception, are all for naught.
Vaccines can help, and so can masks, but when the virus has a literally endless selection of fresh hosts, when borders are swung wide open, and life arbitrarily returns to normal for those who’ve submitted to marginally effective vaccines, without the basic centuries old tool of quarantining every being used to stop its flow, the virus will inevitable continue to spread. New mutations will emerge, and as they do, and render existing vaccines and immunity ineffectual, the cycle of infection, spread, and mutation, will unerringly repeat itself, until our species have rendered ourselves extinct through our choices of inaction.
Next time the disfunctional, corrupt, and useless joke that is the UN dares to speak about preventing global calamities, they would do well to begin by reflecting on the one they themselves hath wrought through their WHO and the choices of its 192 member states, the collective leaders of this self-perpetuating power orgy. Since the very beginning of the pandemic, just after the WHO lied about the virus being airborne, these leaders began to decry border restrictions. Continuing to listen to such leaders after their failure to do their most basic job, protecting the public, will allow the coronavirus to infect nearly every man, woman and child on the entire globe. Let the memory of the more than five million people who have prematurely perished because of the ineptitude of our ruling class remind us that we can do better if we would simply demand more from our governments.
Staff writer: Ari B
List of shame:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/08/how-long-can-you-maintain-it-cost-of-taiwans-pursuit-of-covid-zero-starts-to-show
https://www.ft.com/content/4b34e1a4-8e67-40f4-b042-4fc304b46f50
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/zero-covid-strategies-abandoned-in-the-face-of-the-delta-variant.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/07/us-china-covid-strategy-523843
nytimes.com/2021/10/27/world/asia/china-zero-covid-virus.html
youtube.com/watch?v=-Rbk3_IElp8