The Vaccine Roadclot

Vaccines: The single-handed reason that saying “bless you” when you hear someone sneeze no longer signals a genuine fear that that person might drop dead any moment. A scientific marvel that slowly but surely, disease by bloody disease, mutation by soddin’ mutation, is turning the human race immune to the vehement embrace of Grandfather Nurgle.

Vaccines are neat! Especially so one year into the Covid plague, with vaccines on the horizon that promise a return to social interactions, movie theatres, and late nights at the pub.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, as of time of writing, Thailand begrudgingly agrees to continue to use the AstraZeneca vaccine, after shortly joining a slew of nations that have halted the Astra inoculations. Just as there’s an acute vaccine shortage all ’round the globe. Just as China is setting its diplomatic hooks into populations and nations with offers of its own Sinovac vaccine.

There’s got to be a good reason to cease vaccinations though, right? Rumours abound that the British AstraZeneca vaccine is causing blood clots, rumours that Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Iceland, (and just ahead of publications also Sweden), and briefly Thailand, have all taken to heart. But according to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO), there’s no reason to believe that the 30-some cases of blood clots among some 5 million Astra-vaccinated people in the EU is anything but a coincidence, and just represents the normal amount of blood clots among the general population. But why then has at least (at the time of writing) nine countries world wide halted the use of the vaccine if the clotting is perfectly natural?

Let us take a look at a few what-ifs to sus out what to make of this controversy. And to do that, let us make some working assumptions. From conversations with doctors, I am lead to understand that stage three trials of vaccines are usually composed of some 30’000 people. Once these 30k have been vaccinated, you document the found side-effects and what level of immunity the vaccine affords, and presto it’s off to the races.

Potential circumstances #1: It’s as the EMA and WHO says. The reported events of blood clots have nothing to do with the Astra vaccine. It’s just stupidity-hysteria. If you don’t have a pharmacological degree or an administrative responsibility for human civilization to survive a deadly and stupefying plague; trust the authorities and shut up.

Potential circumstances #2: AstraZeneca found among their 30k testers the possibility that the vaccine could cause blood clots. Which means, that eventuality should have been on the package. Which means that Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Belgium, and all the rest knew the risks. Bitching about it now seems immature. There’re always risks with pharmaceuticals. All medical drugs are basically poison. They’re just hopefully the right kind of poison at the right time. In such a scenario; chin up and shut up and get on with the program you reactionary twits.

Potential circumstances #3: The blood clots are caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine, but the odds are real fucking low, seeing as they didn’t even show up during testing. If a side effect is to reliably show up during stage 3 trials, the odds of them occurring must be higher than 1 in 30’000 cases. According to the data that this hysteria is based on, the odds are 30 in 5’000’000 of clots occuring. In shortened form, that’s 1 in 166’667 cases. Obviously, it’s possible for Astra to have missed that eventuality in QA, considering it’s more than five times rarer than the least probably side effect that you can expect their trial runs to find.

Potential circumstance #3.5: Okay, we need to keep in mind that people are absolute garbage at internalizing statistics. We’re shit at it. Just plain suck. Confirmation bias, a lack of perspective, and an inability to understand numbers over like 20, makes us woefully ill-equipped to accept long odds and probability. I mean, if we were any good at it, there’d be no money in gambling. But there is! There’s a metric shit-ton of money in gambling. Which would indicate what I’ve been saying: That people are incapable of understanding basic statistics.

So what when you have a vaccine, a vaccine that’s supposed to save human civilization from a slow smother, and the idea is that you’re going to vaccinate some 70% of the world’s population, you’re going to come across some weird effects. Inevitably. Even the really, really, really, really, really, REALLY, unlikely ones. It makes a statistical impossibility a practical inevitability. And that’s fine. It’s okay if thirty people have complications if it immunizes 3.9 million people (seeing as the Astra vaccine is reportedly like 78%-proof) from a deadly disease. How deadly? Well, assuming that all 3.9 million of those people would otherwise catch the bug, it would save 86’848 people. And that’s not counting all the people that those 3.9 million might pass the bug on to. So what we’re weighing here is 30 lives against over 86’000 lives. That’s not even a contest for any responsible government.

In which case, stop being such fucking reactionary babies, you immature shits, and cease your virtue signalling during a global crisis, please okay thanks and bye.

Potential circumstance #4 (the least likely one): AstraZeneca has lied about their stage 3 trial results, and there’re a bunch of problematic side effects that their vaccine can cause. And if so, fuck ’em. Burn AstraZeneca at the stake of public opinion. Chase them off across the English Channel and let them peddle their poison to the politically proven pinhead population there.

Look, things aren’t ideal. The world is not an ideal place, even before the Wuhan Virus gummed up the works. We’re tired of staying at home, we’re sick of social distancing, and we’re fed up with restrictions. Even we who aren’t stupid enough to still believe it’s all a hoax. Everyone wants this nightmare to end. And the solutions aren’t always going to be gentle or nice. The AstraZeneca vaccine is proving itself to be a problematic one, seeing as it can cause a pretty rough flu reaction (especially among those that have already had Covid-19). But it’s still better than the alternative. And even though there’re plenty of different vaccines out there (Moderna, Pfizer, Sinovac, Sputnik V, etc.) everyone’s raging for doses.

We’re not spoiled for choice right now. We need to take what we can get to make it through this global crisis. And we can either whine like little bitches about our world not being perfect, or we can nut up and shut up and get on with the program. You can either be a trooper and do your part by getting vaccinated if/and/or when one is made available to you, or you can be a Belgian baby about it and whine that someone once told you that maybe there’s a statistical impossibly small chance that doing your diligence could maybe be dangerous to you personally. It’s your call.

/Sebastian Lindberg 16/3-2021

A Year of Covid-19

By this week, it’s been about a year since the Wuhan Virus struck my shores up in the Norse part of the world. A year of isolation, turbulence, and further deterioration of the quality of the public discourse. We joked back in 2016 that we’d cross out that year from our calendars. How innocent we were. Sweet summer children…

So, while we’re (supposed to be) cooped up in our homes and general vicinities, holding on hope that this angel of death is going to pass us by soon, why don’t we take a moment to set up a sort of disclaimer. A short-hand for dealing with the global pandemic, if you will…

First off; the vaccines work. Just not like you think they do. Vaccines have never been guarantee. They’re a hurdle for infectious disease. Sometimes, even oft-times, a big enough hurdle to kill its onslaught. A vaccine is a wave-breaker. And if you’re given the chance, if you’re next up on the rooster, you should probably take it (barring medical complications or conditions that could severely affect you in a bad way). And remember that taking the vaccines is not just your potential subjective benefit. It’s for the benefit of your community. Your family. Don’t be an obstinate ass-hat.

Secondly; Stop bitching about it morphing your DNA. If you’re whining about your precious gene-sequence being corrupted, odds are it’s not a very precious gene pool to begin with. Plenty of vaccines re-work the DNA in subtle ways by introducing modified mRNA to the mix. You can’t get antibodies or T-cells without setting up some factories for them. And you can’t set up factories without supplying some plans. That’s what the mRNA vaccines do. They don’t fuck up our gene pool any worse than your mother-aunt already has. So shut up.

Thirdly; side-effects are sadly an inevitability with vaccines. The faster the production, the shorter the testing, the more there’ll be. But most bad side-effects are statistically non-existent. Trouble is, when you are to vaccinate billions of people, even statistical irrelevancies become practical certainty. That’s just how statistics work. And seeing as most human beings are practically incapable of measuring or judging odds and chances, just don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it, because you’re not equipped to.

Fourthly; a lot of hate is being levied against medical professionals, infectious disease doctors, and even vaccine coordinators. If you’re one of the haters; fuck you. Fuck you sideways. These people, to the best of our knowledge, work to the the best of their abilities to save people’s lives. The vast majority of them aren’t trying to screw you over for some twisted political agenda. They are trying their best to navigate medical assistance through a web of laws, bureaucracy, disingenuous and signal politics, and hate-guzzling trolls to save our fucking lives. By any conceivable meritocratic metric, they know what they’re doing a hell of a lot better than you do. Here’s an idea for a benchmark: If you can’t fathom the proper use of a period to clip a sentence, or if you think that multiple exclamation marks is valid for anything but comic relief, don’t think you’re intelligent enough to validly criticize public health workers that are slavering away through the worst conditions of their careers to save your life. You don’t have the cognitive capacity or validity to criticize them. Just a bunch of misaligned hate and self-loathing. Go dig a pit and stay there until the coast is clear, you fucking hate-monger.

Fifthly; masks have become a contentious topic. Mostly in the binary US. Over there, you’re either a sheep or a malicious culprit, depending on where you lean on the political spectrum. But from what I’ve seen during my work commute or on the news, people aren’t capable of wearing the masks properly. From interviews I’ve had with doctors, masks were discussed to be scrapped as unreliable even in the controlled settings of most surgeries before the pandemic hit. Odds are, in the microbial chaos of everyday life, outside of a controlled environment, masks are ineffective at best. At worst, a false safety blanket, that let people rationalize going out unnecessarily. However, we’ve also seen that people aren’t getting infected on the, for example, public transport system where masks have been mandated. Either way, the masks aren’t going to single-handedly save you, and they’re not so fucking important as to justify a civil war. Get a fucking grip.

Which brings us to the next point…

Sixth; though the masks won’t save you, social distancing still might. During the Christmas holidays, the ski slopes of northern Sweden were full of privileged fucking morons. A sad fact that prompted extra measures to be taken to withstand a second… third… I lose track; another wave. So keep distancing yourself! Don’t go to fucking Mexico, for example, just because you want to look for Coco, or because you can’t stand your daughters enough to keep them in the house for a week. Stay in your cave, you fucking troglodytes!

Seventh; even during the Spanish flu pandemic, beginning at the ass end of the first world war, the disease was politicized. The very reason that it is now called ‘the Spanish flu’ isn’t because it began in Spain, but because Spain couldn’t silence reports on it. For all we know, the first deadly outbreak of that strain happened in Kansas, in troop camps awaiting orders to ship to Europe. And with the liberating troops finally on the shores, the disease spread. And no one wanted to acknowledge it in fear of demoralizing the population. So even though it’s natural for nations to politicise a pandemic, don’t play along, you muppets.

Eight; because that being said, China seems particularly wild in shifting blame for the pandemic eruption. According to them it’s either India, or the US, it’s the Australians that exported the virus to China (according to frenzied attempts to obfuscate by Chinese state media). Bears to note that all three countries have been in recent conflicts, both violent and diplomatic, with the Chinese People’s Empire. Make of that what you will…

Ninth; it’s not over. The Spanish flu stuck around for three years. Hopefully, we’ve gotten better at dealing with vaccinations and preventative measures in the hundred years since. But odds are, 2021 won’t see us quite back to normal, and we’re quite simply going to have to accept that. I know; it sucks. But it is what it is.

/Sebastian Lindberg 23/2-2021

A Self-Prescribed Collapse

“We didn’t get any support to help test our employees, we didn’t get any protective equipment. They didn’t help us to do what they wanted us to!”, the chairperson of the lobby organisation for private health care services in Sweden whines. According to her, their businesses were left out in the cold as soon as the pandemic spread. They had to fend for themselves like the poor little helpless babes they now claim to be. They were abandoned in the midst of a oncoming pandemic, according to their version of events.

Recently, a study from the Swedish health care inspection (IVO) painted a stark picture on the state of the Swedish geriatric care. The institutions that are supposed to care and tend to the elderly, where the vast majority of Sweden’s disproportionate high number of Wuhan Virus casualties can be found. According to the report, old people diagnosed with the disease were oft-times given sedatives, painkillers, and locked in their rooms to die. To hand-wave away potential criticism, the geriatric care units locked the doors so that families couldn’t visit their old ones. Meanwhile, the unprotected employees and carers cycled through the wards, spreading the infection like wildfire.

The elderly were left to die. Hooked up to drugs and shut away in their rooms. Not by the Swedish state or the public health ministry, but by the health care administrations, private and public, across the country.

And according to the public and private elderly home administrators, they didn’t know any better. They had no means to do any better. Their hands were tied and they didn’t get any help. So they left their clients to die. Because, apparently, that was the best they could do without the stern government hand to guide them. They say that they didn’t know any better.

If that was their best idea, I hate to imagine what their bad ideas looked like…

The private and county municipal health care industry in Sweden has faltered. The pandemic was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And they’re not alone. Reports of business sectors falling apart are abundant. The taxi-cab industry clamours that it’s bleeding and demand government aid packages to stay afloat. Same goes for hundreds of gas stations across Sweden. And yet, it seems that the country is doing much better economically than most others in the western world, where big and small private businesses are snuffed out en masse.

The Wuhan Virus, Covid-19, the novel corona virus, the new plague, is proving to be the death knell to many of our social and financial institutions.

These stories might come as a shock to most. Maybe not strictly as a surprises any more, after a year of lockdowns and a new modus operandi for the world, but certainly something worthy of lamentation. What you took for granted, this consumerist society, the service industry, the very fabric of our post-modern world, is cracking under the pressure of a pandemic disaster.

To me, however, it gives a rise to nothing but anger and derision. Because we knew that another pandemic was coming. We had near misses for several years counting up to this Wuhan Virus. We had the avian flu, the pig flu, SARS, all potential killers. We dodged them, for the most part, but you can’t stay lucky forever. And what did we do? Did we prepare? Did we stockpile protective equipment? Did we build safeguards against economic lockdowns? Did we train the public pre-emptively on how to deal with a potential plague? Did we adjust our health care services to match a looming eventuality?

No. We did not. We knew it was coming. Scientists and doctors knew it was coming. And our leaders, us the public, didn’t want to listen. We wanted to carry on like always even though every single one of us that knew better told us that it wouldn’t always be so.

We were told. The public was told. Politicians were told. The media was told. And we didn’t listen. We made no adjustments. The health care services around the world didn’t stockpile materials. They didn’t shore up the turnover of employees. They didn’t put safeguards in place. Because that would have cost money. Our politicians didn’t push the issue. They didn’t pressure the health care industry to prepare. They didn’t push the markets to invest for a pandemic winter. Because being a storm crow won’t win you any votes. And so, our gutted public health care advisory boards were left, toothless, to set up contingencies on their own. Without respect or attention paid by the rest of society. Because the looming threat of pestilence was their problem, we dismissed.

And now we, the industry, the public, the politicians, the markets, wail and whine at the public health defenders that they haven’t done enough to protect us. Even though we all knew damned well that our margins weren’t enough to handle the strains of a crisis. We knew. The health care industry which constantly cuts corners and personnel to mitigate fiscal concerns knew. The politicians who threw away stockpiles of medical protective equipment because the storage of it turned costly knew. The markets that continually rely on the wild and unsustainable consumption of goods and services knew. The banks that provide loans to businesses under circumstances that weren’t sustainable or resilient enough to withstand a plague knew. The public lulled into laziness and complacency knew. We all knew that the centre wouldn’t hold come a real disease.

And now we complain when our margins aren’t enough to withstand a plague. Now we shift blame while we full well know that the paradigms and systems we have laboured to maintain couldn’t sustain this kind of inevitable event. We knew we should have changed, we should have evolved, but we couldn’t be arsed to. It is almost as if we’ve actively exerted ourselves to create and propagate a society that can’t handle the stresses of inexorable disaster. This isn’t the first time a confluence of calamities have steam-rolled civilization. It will not be the last time either.

I think it is beyond the pale when the likes of Eva Nilsson Bågenholm, the chairperson of the lobby organisation of the private health care sector to whine and complain and shift blame. I think it is beyond the pale of the likes of her, in charge of safeguarding our elderly, to claim that they didn’t know what to do when disaster eventually hit as everyone knew it would. We all knew this was coming. And we collectively chose to shove our heads in the sand, to keep cutting corners, to keep slimming the margins.

The doctors and epidemiologists don’t deserve our scorn. We should instead look into the mirror. We deserve to feel absolute and utter shame because we chose to disregard history, the storm crow advice of the WHO and national health care advisors. And now we’re proving too cowardly to face up to our own lack of foresight.

The pandemic’s humbling effects aren’t the fault of doctors and medical professionals. They simply work for us, the democratic public. It is not their fault that we hamstrung their efforts. The fault is our own.

/Sebastian Lindberg 1/12-2020

Offended By Science

“I didn’t recognize myself in their depiction of 70-year olds”, the poor victim on the radio show explains. “I felt offended. So it was my right to sue them.”

Them, in this case, being the Swedish Public Health Ministry (Folkhälsomyndigheten). Because according to the Ministry, 70-year olds should sequester themselves away from social interactions to prevent Covid-19 infection, seeing as the elderly are particularly sensitive to the effects and complications that the Wuhan Virus can cause.

According to this 70-year-plus old psychologist, the Public Health Ministry have discriminated against him and his peers. Stigmatized them. The internationally controversial Swedish Public Health Ministry, which has earned global ire for the country’s lax Covid restrictions and high number of deaths at elderly homes, have treated them unfairly.

Imagine the brass balls of privilege of this Boomer, to initiate legal action against the public agency whose job it is to keep him alive and healthy, for doing that very job. We have seen this sort of behaviour in the US, with violent protests against stay-at-home orders and mandatory masks. There, we have seen people take up arms and threaten violent insurrection just because the state doesn’t want them to die and spread a deadly and degenerative malady. We have even seen the US federal authority on infectious disease, Doctor Anthony Fauci, receive death threats, because he has prioritised fighting a deadly virus over pandering to malcontents with the cognitive capacity of angry muppets.

Naturally, the US is worse. Big surprise. But I did not expect to hear from this sort of querulant in placid, passive lil’ old Sweden.

I get disagreeing with restrictions. Or the lack thereof, as Sweden has been accosted for by neighbouring countries. I have also said my piece on the mandate of masks among the public. Fact is we won’t know the “right” way of dealing with Covid until we’re done with it. Probably not even then. By contrast, I also understand the introduction of restrictions on the market economy to avoid catastrophic spread. Depends on whether you value economic growth or human lives, really. It’s a matter of priority, and I know very well that some prefer their stock portfolio’s over the health of random schmucks. The 1%, and those that desperately want to belong to it, didn’t go away just because a plague erupted.

What I do not understand is how you can claim that statistically relevant biological information can be construed as discriminatory. What kind of ass-ward pageantry is that?! How can you argue with any sliver of intellectual honesty that doctors discriminate against you when you’re part of a demographic that suffers particularly from the new influenza strain? It is factual, statistical truth that the elderly suffer the worst. We saw that back in March and April. The intensive care units around the world were filled to the brim with people around the age of 70.

Imagine being so privileged, so belligerently entitled, that you think that the scientific field of epidemiology is assaulting you. Personally. With science and statistical analysis. It’s like a fat person seeking judicial arbitration against Newton for formalizing the theory of gravity. I’m not saying a Boomer is the only creature that in its natural habitat can accumulate this amount of egocentrism, but… ‘lo and behold. Now, most of the elderly that I’ve spoken to or observed following the restrictions either can’t mentally adjust to them, or blatantly don’t care whether they live or die. But as of yet, I hadn’t encountered anyone that would even conceive of screaming “unfair!” at the face of a pandemic response figures.

And yet, here we are. With the government agency tasked with safeguarding the citizenry and society in the face of a pervasive new bug. They labour without a national stockpile of protective equipment, against market forces that have hollowed out the healthcare industry to its bare skeletal structure, against a public that is desperate for things to go back to a normal that was intrinsically unstable. And whether they’ve been right or wrong in their labours, whether they’re failing or succeeding, I do not believe for a minute that the Swedish Public Health Ministry is “out to get” the elderly or infirm. Yet, they have to receive, react to, and handle egocentric complaints like this.

Speaking of “unfair”…

/Sebastian Lindberg 24/11-2020

Paradise Lost

One point two trillion dollars. That’s how much money that the tourism sector is set to lose just because of a little flu bug. 1.2 trillion, that’s… wait a minute, twelve zeroes, so… 1’200’000’000’000.00 dollars US. That’s just about twice the annual US defence budget. That’s how much money that the tourism sector stands to have lost in just four months.

Now that’s just fucking sick. It’s the kind of money that becomes so stupidly astronomical that we can’t even grasp it. We could go to Mars with that kind of money. No, not just travel there, of course we could, and have. No, if we laid it all out in single dollar bills, we could actually build a fucking bridge to Mars. That’s how much money that is. A space-bridge to Mars kinda much. It’d be a flimsy bridge, and I guess you’d have to use some pretty strong wire to rig it all up, but… nevermind. That’s beside the point. That’s a lot of money to miss out on in a four month period. You could forget to turn your light bulb off for a 50 billion years long vacation for that kind of money. It’s fucking sick.

You know what’s also fucking sick? That we, consumers, spend that much on just flitting about the planet all willy-nilly-like. Some 8’000 hotels in the US alone seem to be shutting their doors. Airlines are shutting down, closing down routes, and stranding aircraft left and right. And the number of people left without a job, without an income, are beyond count (unlike the apparently very countable 1.2 trillion dollars).

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing…

I love travelling. I love just sitting at the airport, waiting, knowing that I’m on my way somewhere. I think travelling broadens a person’s horizons, and thus strengthens their immune system to The Dumb^[tm]. Travelling is good for the soul, if there’s such a thing.

That said, I think that the way we do it, and the reason why most people do it, isn’t very healthy… To some, travelling is about new experiences. Broadening horizons, expanding cognition, observing alternatives to our own little world. But many more, I believe, miss the point. They travel not to become better, but to seem better. They wallow in the extravagance of travelling, believing that seeming is being. They totter hither and tither with their selfie-sticks, more concerned about letting people back home witness their freedom, and wear their worn passports and novelty t-shirts like medals. To these, it seems, travelling is a luxury item to flaunt to the world to try and convince themselves and everyone around them that they’re special.

Another large group, those that may very well be the bread and butter of the travelling industry, travel just to escape. Escape the monotony of their lives. They partake of the blessing to, once a year, be able to go somewhere else, just to imagine themselves seem a little more alive. And usually, they go to the same old places. From Sweden, during the 80’s and 90’s, we travelled to Mallorca or Crete or some other mediterranean island. Since the 00’s, we travelled to Thailand. Every year, every summer, like clockwork.

Some ink-slinging blowhard once said that it is the journey that’s important; not the destination. And that’s been lost, especially with the availability of air travel. We conk down in an aluminum hell-tube for a few hours, and then step out into a new and exotic location. That’s not really journeying as much as it is really shitty teleportation.

But following this new world order for travelling, out of the wood work crawls pundits and classist academics, bemoaning the idea that flying and travelling may become so much more expensive in the near future. That such a development, with fewer destinations and higher prices, will cause a new class divide in society. A divide between the cans and cannots; those that make enough money to be able to flit about, and those that toil beneath the sun, bound to the earth, like serfs. Theses voices echo from the thin confines of a socialist dogma, fearing the return of some class society that never really disappeared to begin with. As if the equality of vacation options available to a population was the most important metric to retain following a collapse of the tourism industry.

And while the post-colonialists whine that their privileged middle class may lose some benefits, I’d like to point out to these spoilt voices that there are far worse effects from the lack of affordable tourism than some shattered veneer of equality. For example, the resurgence of poaching and illegal hunting now that local denizens no longer profit off of endangered spieces’ by letting white folks come take pictures or buy an easy trophy kill.

Still… I would argue that a swift economic kick in the nuts to the global tourism trade isn’t such a bad thing. Those that stand to really gain from their travelling experiences don’t really need an airplane ticket to do so. And it’s really not the responsibility of the tourism trade to stop poaching by outbidding outdated Asian mysticism; that’s a job for local governments and the sole responsibility of the heartless desires of eastern markets. Because the truth is that all that travelling, all those travel blogs and all those Facebook bragging rights, they come at a cost. A cost to the environment. A cost to public health. And sometimes also a very tangible cost to the locals that we deign to crash in on.

And truth be told, those concerns are much more important than your Instagram account, your escape from your sordid reality, or your precious class idenity. It’s all a matter of priorities. And I don’t think that anyone’s precious ego is more important than a chance to curb our addiction to unsustainability.

/Sebastian Lindberg 28/7-2020

A Plague of the Stupid

A man died in intensive care at a hospital in San Antonio, Texas. In his 30’s, which is remarkable. But otherwise, someone dying from Covid-19 in the US isn’t news. It’s barely even a story anymore, other than a deeply personal and subjective one. What is remarkable though, are the circumstances under which this patient caught the virus…

Apparently, the patient had attended a Covid-19-party. The gist of which is that someone diagnosed throws a party, to see if anyone else gets infected. To see if the disease is a hoax or not. And supposedly, this 30-year old went to one. Caught the bug. And died in hospital care. And just moments before drawing his last breath, he’d told a nurse “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not…” Or so retells the Chief Medical Officer of the hospital.

Seems poetic to me.

Yeah, maybe that’s harsh. Yes, I realise that this cretin’s passing is a tragedy to a mother, a father, a grandparent, a lover, a friend, a dog, a goldfish, what-so-ever the patient left behind. Their mourning is real, their sorrow tangible, their tragedy palpable. But do you know what’s just as palpable by everyone else? That dumb motherfuckers like this party-goer here is allowed to actively participate in our society. That dumb motherfuckers like this are gleefully putting other people in jeopardy. That dumb motherfuckers like this are allowed to vote.

Sure, disinformation is rampant in the US. In the whole world in fact, but the US is fucking top-ranked as far as legitimized bullshit goes. But it doesn’t take a lot of sense to seek a second opinion. It’s not a high bar to crawl across to listen to any other gods damned charlatan than Laura Ingram or Sean Hannity or Jeanine Pirro (and yes, there’s plenty of blame to be spread in their direction, but that’s not this column). It is not on-par to rocket-science to listen to medical professionals over pundits and demagogues on matters of an international health emergency. I am not asking for much, by international standards. But from large swathes of the US population, it seems I might as well ask for a three hundred word synopsis of Finnegan’s Wake.

No… no, I’m not making light of all the tragedy that the virus is causing. I’m not laughing at mass graves in Chile. I’m not deriding the onslaught in Swedish nursing homes. And I’m most certainly not being glib about the Expendable Essentials, the thousands of people that are being pushed by governments around the world to save the general population from distress or death meanwhile being thrown under the proverbial bus by their leaders with naught but a pat on the shoulder.

But if you’re so stupid that you can’t, for lack of imagination or intelligence or compassion, I understand not which, look and behold the state of the world and the consequences that this virus is causing and take even the slightest precautions; then you, sir, are a fucking moron. And you deserve everything that your stupidity brings upon you. The tragedy isn’t that you, sir, die in surprise, but that you’ve probably put plenty of other people at risk. People that weren’t as stupid and deserving of their fate as you were. You, in your belligerent idiocy, actively made the world a worse place to live in for a vast majority of your fellow human beings.

Now, at the back of the room, I can hear the murmur of “elitism”. That it is in poor taste to degrade people that lack, for some unutterable reason, capacity for coherent cognition. But no… shaming these woefully malinformed malcontents for their malignancy can’t possibly be considered “elitist”. It is not elitist to not actively search out a vector of a potentially deadly plague. It is not elitist to recognize demagogues like Ingraham and Pirro for who they are. It is not elitist to ask and expect of people not to make themselves a lethal nuisance to others. And even though there seem to be plenty of people that can’t clear that standard, either because they’re ill-informed or ill-educated or ill-advised or just ill-headed, it is often not an elite one to ask for.

To many across the world, this is a plague of the elderly and infirm. To some, it’s a plague even of the young and fit. And others it is a plague of those forced to deal with it on the front lines. But in some places, Covid-19 is a plague of the malignantly stupid.

/Sebastian Lindberg 14/7-2020

A Smoke Screen Face Mask

Face masks. The fresh new fashion trend coming out of a new world order of germ spread prevention. A little piece of gauze over your mouth (and sometimes even nose). Putting people back on the streets and keeping tailors in business since the spring of 2020. An aegis for the public to hide behind as the angel of respiratory distress passes along them. A sign of caution, respect, and consideration for your fellow man. At least, that’s the sales pitch.

It’s a curious fad, one born out of fear and paranoia. And sadly, maybe it’s a fad that’s about as useful for public health as nipples on body armour.

You see, the medical community is split on the practical relevance of public face masks. Despite the fact that many countries (such as France, Germany, Turkey, Austria, etc.) have made the masks mandatory in public areas, the World Health Organization has been… luke warm on the use of masks (which, granted, they may be pushed to change in the near future (note that The Guardian is not a trusted source of news)). Sometimes arguing that effective face masks should be reserved for health care professionals who are more exposed than the random pedestrian, and at other times arguing that the public just don’t know how to use a mask properly. But still, countries are coming out in favour of the public covering their noses and mouths, regardless of whether the individual is sick or not. To make matters even muddier, studies and criticism have come out on both sides. Some mean that masks are better than nothing, others that they only supply an ignorant population with a false sense of safety, which may turn out worse for them than them cowering in fright in their homes.

So… why exactly is this such a big thing? What’s the huff in the midst of the global economy tanking and death tolls rising? Why would governments push for the public to engage with a dwindling supply of safety equipment best left to professionals? Or why would our leaders try to convince the public that this particular brand of tin foil hat will save them? Well, I believe I just gave a credible answer in a sentence above. The economy is failing… and governments around the world are desperate to salvage it. Or at least prolong its suffering for a few more months.

But who are they kidding. The economy has been failing for quite a while. Years. Decades. Perpetually kept on life support so that it can truck on for a little longer. Make the powers that be a little more money. Before it finally passes violently into that good night. Exponential growth, speculative investments, housing bubbles, trade wars, resource shortages… even if you don’t want to admit that the economy has been terminally ill for a very long time, you should at least be able to agree that it has been a very sickly beast, beaten to within an inch of its life by a fever pitch of greed.

Its death throes have been a long time coming…

Wait, hold on a second, what the fuck does the inherent unsustainability of the global market have to do with Wuhan Virus face mask usage?! Well… nation states tend to want to keep turning. They want to squeeze the last toothpaste out of the tube. That would be a sure-fire way to explain why countries, from Germany to the US and China, are eager to get people back out onto the streets. Out to spend. Out to generate taxes and profits. Why else would they jump onto face mask obligations without solid scientific support for it? Why would your government want you to become infatuated with a protective measure that might not actually protect you very well? Why would they push out scavenged mouth-curtains when they damned well know that the general population neither has the discipline or the education to use these masks with any amount of efficiency?

Look, face masks have their uses. They have the potential to save plenty of front line lives. But efficient ones aren’t made from your last-year-collection of sun-flower tops. Your old shirts were never woven to be able to keep micro-particles out. And even if they were, such masks, able to withstand the onslaught of germs, only stay good for a little while. And both you and I know damned well that you’re not going to keep cannibalising your wardrobe every damned time you intend to go out. The WHO, the absolute human authority on pathological prevention, make it clear that face masks are only a truly effective foil in the hands of trained professionals. And lets face it; most of you out there are neither trained or professionals.

True, we don’t rightly know exactly how Covid19 works. It seems like a weird bug, supposedly leaving millions unaffected, demolishing our ability to smell for some stupid reason, and it’s even under debate whether or not surviving the infection actually makes us immune to it, like what any damned other viral malady does. Even the actual lethality of the contagion is still up for debate. But that’s no damned reason to start praying to Asclepius or any other such superstitious nonsense. And yes, putting your faith, you health, in the hands of a flimsy piece of bargain-bin fabric is tantamount to making a sacrifice Dhanvantari. Because these face masks that are supposed to save us all? They’re at best a fickle rampart, useless on their own, and at worst not much better than a fire-extinguisher as protection when cliff-diving into a volcano.

Look, I get it. I want to get back to the way things were too. I want to go out, have a pint with the mates at the pub, sit in a park, go to the cinema… Shit, I had a line on Yusuf Islam playing live this summer! I haven’t seen my special someone in four weeks due to quarantine! But no matter how much I want to get back to the way things were, I don’t want to put my neighbours’ lives at risk to do so (a priority that our governments just don’t share).

So; face masks. Sure… use them all you like. If you use them right, they might even do you some good. But they’re a compliment. Not a compensation that would let you go on as if nothing’s changed. Remember that obliging you to wear one is just a government gambit to get you back to generating taxes; a gambit that makes you and your loves ones’ health play second fiddle to the bottom line. If you’re not sick, the face mask alone probably won’t save you. And if you’ve got symptoms, you should stay the fuck home anyway, which means you’re not gonna need your massacred summer dress covering your face. Because if the flu was as easy to stop as just to stick your nose into your shirt, I’m thinking we wouldn’t be in this position to begin with…

/Sebastian Lindberg 18/5-2020

A Fuck-Off to Gramps

I was blessed today. Truly. By a little old lady cowering in the corner of the tram. Because, you see, yesterday I had this whole column planned about journalists’ inability to do math to save their lives and professional credibility. But as it turns out, and as I suddenly figured out, the Centre for Disease Control are just as bad at it.

So, I’m out of a column. And as I’m going home from work, stressed about my deadline, stepping onto the busy tram, this little lady with her coat lifted up over her mouth and nose, skitter away from me and begins with a muffled whimper to tell me to keep my distance.

Which afforded me a blessed opportunity to tell her to fuck off.

Look, I agree with Social Distancing protocols. I think people should stay the fuck home to the greatest possible extent that they can. If you so desperately need a hair-cut that you have to make yourself part of the problem, then maybe you should just shave it all off, you vain cretin. And I think protesters that defy lock-down regulations bloody well deserve the plague. Smooth that fucking curve all year! Wooo!

But you can’t expect every one else to quarantine when you won’t. Me? I’m one of the Expendable Essentials. I work as a teacher at an elementary school. I am mandated to keep working. Without protection. As if nothing’s wrong. If I’m not showing symptoms, my employer and my government tells me to keep at it. To babysit teenagers so that their moms and dads can keep working in transportation or healthcare or whatever is needed to keep the country spinning. And no, there aren’t any masks for public use distributed in my country. That sort of protection is spared for those of us that are critically exposed, like nurses and doctors, for whom the masks actually help. A lot.

Mine is not the choice to get on the tram every day, to and from work. Mine is not the choice to expose myself. The government has deemed me expendable.

So what’s your fucking excuse, you Canasta Club reject?! If you’re old, if you’re part of one of the risk groups, if you’re scared to catch your death from a tired school teacher minding his own business at the end of a long day, keeping his distance the best he can in public transportation during rush hour, why the fuck are you out and about on the town in the middle of a pandemic?!

Okay… we’re all stressed. The world was fucked up before, but 2020 sure as shit turned up the stakes. We’re all trying to make the best of it. Regardless if you’re isolated from loved ones, out of a job, or mandated to keep exposing yourself by going to work like nothing was wrong. And we should all try to respect each other, mind our distances, not make ourselves part of the problem, take care of each other, yada yada yada…

But you shouldn’t put in effort to place yourself more at risk. And don’t expect the general population to bow to your safety just so you can go along like you always have. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t be reckless. Don’t inflate your disputable significance by trying to make yourself a stain on my conscience.

And don’t get up in my fucking face after I’ve spent the last eight hours minding 450 nurgling teenagers. I’m already taking a fucking bullet for you and your precious society. So. Piss. Off.

/Sebastian Lindberg 28/4-2020

Just let them have more Kool-Aid

Quarantine’s rough on everyone. Jobs are lost, people are getting the jitters staying at home, and mental health is even harder to maintain when you’re locked up inside than it was before. But Social Distancing seems to be working to slow the spread, even if it’s not nearly enough for some health care services around the world.

It’s sometimes difficult to imagine how things could get worse. Unless you’re living in the Fragmented States of America. Then, over the weekend, it got real easy to imagine how things could get worse, as the most belligerent parts of the nation brought guns to a epidemiological fight.

All across the US, people took to their cars and their MAGA shirts and hats to close down their cities and towns in an effort to protest and threaten their leaders to cease the shut-down in effect. Some even brought their obscene automatic rifles on display on the steps of civic buildings, chanting that not even a global pandemic and international health crisis would stand in the way of their corn-syrup-soaked privileges. In Denver, Colorado, it even went so far that the already beleaguered health worker professionals had to leave their posts to perform a silent counter-protest; blocking the Trump-fanatics in their rage-filled, slow-moving cavalcades.

Nurses and doctors who labour day and night to stem the tide had to go on strike to take a stand against the most putrid people of the Republic. That is absolutely staggering.

“Give me Liberty or give me Covid-19”, one plaque in Olympia, Washington, said. “Freedom or Death”, another one cried.

Okay then. Sure. These bible-humping, Trump-totting, ignoble ignoramuses can have it. It is just a shame that the Wuhan Virus isn’t lethal enough to plausibly make a dent in their numbers. Or discriminating enough to target these gaps in the gene pool. If people want to make themselves a part of the problem, then let them. I’m liberal enough to see the philosophical virtue in letting people put themselves at whatever risk they want. You can’t force people to not become part of the problem. All you can do in such circumstance is to also treat them as part of the problem…

Deny people health care if they won’t follow quarantine protocol. The US has already proven that it has no inherent problem with letting people die on the doorsteps of hospitals, and that its health care administrations are woefully unprepared to meet this challenge. I am sure that the insurance industry would just absolutely love to void a whole lot of flimsy insurance claims because the claimants have disobeyed the stay-home ordinances of many states. Cordon these cretin off from all the horrified masses that prefer not to subject their health services to back-breaking pressure. With any luck, the stress of having broken their contract with their government will send these profanely armed death-cultists and Rapture-chanters into a mindless frenzy and kill each other off.

You think I’m being too harsh? What we have here is a sizeable minority of the population that have turned ignorance and indignant rage into a revered virtue. Galvanized by a criminal and unconscionable president. These creatures are a threat to every single other being that comes close to them. As if their evangelical fanaticism wasn’t bad enough. As if their armaments and love for The Gun wasn’t bad enough. As if their rage and stupidity weren’t bad enough. Now they are on the verge of taking up arms against their elected leaders just because they want to make themselves carriers of a potentially lethal, nation-breaking virus…

Is it really I who am too harsh when I think that a vast majority of the US population would be better off without them? Am I the one being too harsh when I think the world would be better off without them? I am humanist and liberal enough to see the ethical problem of just smothering them like the political wild-fires that they are, but here we have a circumstance where they want to expose themselves and their loved ones to a decimation. To me, it seems like a problem that comes with its own solution.

Sure, the virus isn’t all that lethal. But its lethality increases with obesity, nicotine use, underlying health concerns, and when official health guidelines get ignored. Maybe Lady Luck and her a-romantic companion Statistical Probability would be on our side this time.

Of course, we would never be that lucky. No excommunication is going to happen. If they have to, I bet Jared Kushner and the Orange House would even use their “own federal medical reserves” to save a good portion of their precious base. No, with so many military grade guns in so many belligerent and angry hands, with white supremacist support from an orange despot and his converted political establishment, with a soft-core plague running rampant and supply shortages abound, with overworked government staff and idle hands among an insanely armed population, odds are instead high of insurrection. Civil war. Just like what the Orange Hydra has insinuated calls for from his ivory throne. Just like all the great Empires of Earth’s days passed, so do the Discordant States of America seem to be fated. In fire and blood, and not a clean sweep.

Either way, all us international onlookers can do is to by proxy experience all the shame that the ruling minority of the US seem completely alien to feel on their own, and to keep face-palming our way through the new millennium.

/Sebastian Lindberg 20/4-2020

The Expendable Essentials

Under lock and key. Seems a fitting way to sum up the collective policy of the western world in handling the spread of the Wuhan Virus. Shut down, stay indoors, close down anything but the life support functions of society. Embed within people the urgency of Social Distancing. Effectively kick the ladder out from under the spreading disease. Cut off the ways of transmission. Which seems like a plausible strategy, if we’re to judge from the South Korean and Singapore examples.

While the Wuhan Virus in most cases just presents like a mild cold, or even asymptomatic, it most definitely has lethal potential. Mostly to the old. Or those that have already compromised their health, like smokers. But also, strangely enough, to some of our youngest, whose immune system seems to be sent into complete overdrive as a response to the disease.

So, to protect our eldest from this new threat, the world closes down. Borders are shut. Travel is restricted. Events and venues, ranging from festivals to restaurants to retail and hotels, are shut down. All to prevent the spread. Public gatherings are outlawed, with Germany and the UK leading the charge by limiting congregations of more than two people by threat of fines. The quarantine is nearly universal. Global. People should stay at home, work from home or lose their jobs, not see each other, and just hold on until the flu passes.

But there’re exceptions, aren’t there? There are always exceptions. Just as the general population is asked and required to follow social distancing guidelines, another set of people are demanded to break protocol. Our doctors, nurses, transportation workers, infrastructure technicians, in some countries also our teachers. All of whom are exempted from the sometimes draconian measures of Social Distancing. Because they have been deemed “Essential”.

At first, it felt validating. To know that one is indispensable to the workings of society. Despite sometimes being low-paid, already exhausted from mismanaged work-loads, or marginalized and looked down upon, it’s nice for the world to realise just how important, nay; fundamental, you are.

Until you realise that the validation you just got is attached to a callous disregard whether you live or die as a result of your tireless work.

Essential Service Workers, doctors or teachers, or nurses or transportation workers or grocery employees, are all forced or required or strongly encouraged to keep society afloat, while the rest of the population hunkers down. Yet, these same Essential Service Workers are denied or refused proper gear to protect themselves. In some states, it has even gone so far that retired health care workers are being pushed to return to work. Retired health care workers, whom I might add, are in exactly the group most at risk of having fatal consequences if infected.

Statistical analysis out of hard-hit Italy seems to suggest that continued exposure to the virus might even raise the risk of dire complications. But do any of these ”essential” people receive proper protection to do their job? No, largely they don’t. The free market has run out of essential protection, so there’s none to be had without paying ”too much” for it. Doctors and nurses recycle one-time-use masks, or go without, wearing the same depleted protective gear for days, weeks, months. Work until exhaustion clocks them out, cowering in corners or stacked together on any flat surface theyr can find. And that’s just for the health care workers. All the other essentials? They’re left to wrapping their faces with scarves, or stuck with depleting bottles of hand sanitizers.

It’s nice to be needed. When a government or a company for years have been undermining your sense of self worth with inhumane schedules or meagre pay, it’s nice to for once be told that life wouldn’t work without you. But do you know what’s not as nice? Be told that you’re not only essential, but also expendable. Because that’s what governments say that you are, when they push you to continue to work without providing you with other ways than isolation to protect yourself. They tell you that you’re expendable. More expendable than the non-essential business executives, lawyers, insurance salesmen, bankers, politicians, et. al., that are all oh so important to protect, shut away as they are in ivory towers to await the passing of the storm.

Because even in an equal society, some are more equal than others. And as it turns out, some people in society are more important to protect than others. Even when those ”others” are considered ”essential”.

/Sebastian Lindberg 7/4-2020