Dr Malcolm Kendrick is a GP, author and blogger who’s well worth following in these bizarre times.

His latest post about the on- and on- and ongoing coronavirus pandemic concludes:

”It is said that the first casualty of war is the truth. Never has this been more certain than with COVID. In this case, first we killed the truth, then we killed science, then we beat inconvenient facts to death with a club. It is all extraordinarily depressing.”

Doctor’s shorthand for such a diagnosis would be BHM. “A bloody horrible mess.”

”Those wanting to make money have distorted and damaged research for their own ends. Those who want to vaccinate the world, forever, have seen a door open to the promised land. Those who wanted lockdown are inflating the numbers of those killed.

All that and much, much more.

I must confess that although the title of this post was irresistible, it’s not particularly accurate.

The virus is not crouching so much as slouching to a crawl in terms of hospitalisations and deaths.

And the overarching agenda of most developed countries’ governments is scarcely hidden. They intend to keep the ‘emergency’ going for as long as the corporatocracies that own them require it to run.

Since the two trends are running in opposite directions at the moment, the citizenry will continue to be subjected to a deluge of fear mongering, outright lies and censorship by the corporate and state media until the (real or media-generated) ‘second wave’ arrives to reignite the ‘crisis’.

Naturally there are many agendas in play beneath the overall umbrella. There are obvious pharmaceutical industry ones. And short- and long-term political ones. Meanwhile, we must obediently keep our distance, mask up, shut up and let them get on with it.

Ends and means

What intrigues me about the COVID agendas in the UK is which are means and which are ends? So far they have resulted in:

• An epochal fall in GDP
• Millions of workers have lost or about about to lose their jobs
• Possible drastic cuts to public transport networks due to drop in passengers
• Freedom of assembly effectively suspended (try holding a kids party in Manchester)
• Government by U-turn and confused messaging

All of the above are direct outcomes of the UK government’s responses to SARS-CoV-2. They are neither caused by the virus nor necessitated by it.

Moreover, it was clear right from the beginning that COVID-19 poses a statistically significant risk to only a relatively small, well-defined subset of the population. Those in their 80s, typically with underlying conditions.

Yet the most damaging responses have been directed towards the non-retired majority of the population, who are mostly at tiny or no risk from the virus, i.e. children, students, employees and the self-employed.

Essentially, the government has behaved like someone stung by a wasp on their forehead, whose tactic to minimise the pain is to smash their head repeatedly against a brick wall until it is, in Dr Kendrick’s words, a bloody horrible mess.

With a claimed UK-wide death rate from/with COVID-19 of barely 0.06%, the appropriate response to SARS-CoV-2 should have been the equivalent of applying touch of sting-relief cream and a taking couple of ibuprofen tablets.

Instead, we could characterise the government’s unprecedented orgy of spending on furlough payments, business grants, corporate bailouts, etc., as repeat doses of an anaesthetic powerful enough to allow the country to carry on smashing its head against the wall.

Again, this is damage being inflicted on society by its managers, not by the virus.

If the purpose of a system is what it does, then the purpose of the government’s response to SARS-CoV-2 is obviously to shrink the prosperity, prospects and freedoms of the bottom 90% of British society.

Why would they want to do that? Well, here is a detailed and coherent article describing how the elements of the jigsaw puzzle fit together.

I urge you to read it even if, like me, you instinctively wince at phrases such as ‘new world order’ or at images of Cyclopean pyramids. Because it is impossible to believe that the colossal damage that our leaders are systematically inflicting on our society is solely directed at countering the virus.

And as Sherlock Holmes got to say, “…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.