By Enza Ferreri

It seems to me that this lockdown could be never-ending.

I don’t think that anything like this, such an incredible measure to imprison an innocent, predominantly healthy population for such a long time, has ever occurred before. It would appear like a first in human history.

The rationale behind the lockdown restrictions is also very shaky: if, in the effort to beat the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the final goal is to create herd immunity, namely a situation in which the part of the population who has developed immunity to the virus is large enough to make the virus “endemic”, something similar to what in our parts of the world happened, for example, to the cold virus and the influenza virus, which means that we can consider it part of our everyday life and live with it, if this is the goal – and it is or at least it should be -, the lockdown is not the best way to go about it.

The reason is that immunity to a pathogen (disease-inducing organism) can only develop through contact with that pathogen.

Immunity can occur in two ways. It’s either by natural ways, namely when the organism in question accidentally comes into contact with our body and thus our immune system gets the chance to know it, develop specific antibodies against that particular virus or bacterium, and recognizes it when it meets it again with already-prepared weapons to fight it.

Alternatively, immunity develops through artificial ways, when a vaccine can replicate this naturally-occurring process in a more controlled form, by rendering the pathogen less virulent when it is injected in the body. To make that happen, several mutations in the organism have to take place which can take many years, which is why “vaccines” like the ones we have at the moment against the SARS-CoV-2 virus are not strictly speaking vaccines, because the process to produce them has not followed the normal, regular procedure.

Instead of waiting for nature to take its course through progressive weakening mutations, since it would take such a long time, and not wishing to inject the virus as it is which would defeat the object since natural contact with the pathogen may occur anyway, what is injected with the “vaccine” is not the virus in a weaker form, which we don’t have, but messenger RNA (mRNA), a piece of genetic material that teaches our cells to make copies of the virus’ spike protein, with which the coronavirus enters our cells. If later we are exposed to the real virus, our immune system will presumably recognize it and be able to fight it.

However, a legitimate argument against developing herd immunity “the natural way”, through normal social contact among human beings in the absence of a vaccine, exists: it may be dangerous, risky and “inhumane”.

Whether it’s possible to call a lockdown which has already lasted over one year and of which there is no end in sight, which has caused terrible social costs in terms of unemployment, an economic crisis in comparison to which the crisis of 2008-2009 is tiny, an epidemic of psychological and mental illnesses, suicides, deaths from diseases which have not been treated due to the quasi-total concentration of health services on Covid-19, a “humane” measure is at least debatable.

But a herd immunity can only develop in the presence of human contact, there simply is no other way.

To try to have all this situation under control is a vain attempt.

Nature has its own ways, over which we don’t have as much dominion as we, in the modern era, erroneously think.

An article of March 16 on FEE website says:

In July, Adam Weinstein of The New Republic wrote that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was leading Americans “on a Death March” by not embracing the same COVID-19 restrictions as many other US states…

Weinstein wrote that DeSantis, instead of listening to the experts, was simply encouraging residents to behave responsibly, which Weinstein called a “libertarian-dreamer gambit.” Such an approach, he wrote, made DeSantis an accomplice to murder and perhaps even genocide…

Weinstein’s comments seem hyperbolic today (to put it mildly), but he was hardly the only member of the media and the political class making such claims, even though Florida’s COVID-19 mortality rate was far lower than many other US states (and remains so today)…

More than six months later, US media and politicians are reconsidering Florida’s response to the pandemic, Axios reports: “After a solid year of living with a pandemic, the national press is beginning to ask the question that even Democrats have been quietly pondering in the Sunshine State: Was Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pandemic response right for Florida?”

The article highlights a pair of recent articles—one in The New York Times and one in The Los Angeles Times—that compared Florida’s pandemic response and outcome to that of California, a state where the virus exploded over the winter despite the fact that the Golden State had the harshest lockdown in the US.

Just look at the graph above my article, from December 2020, after Florida had removed most lockdown restrictions.

And we must not forget that in Florida many elderly people live, so in theory this state has a disadvantage vis-a-vis Covid-19 and its situation, other things being equal, should be worse than in other US states.

If you’d like another graph, relative to Europe this time, here’s Sweden compared to other countries.