Here is how this pandemic ends, Mr Cheadle

OMICRON has a normal Cold virus insertion 214EPE as part of its mutation and is developing into a less pathogenic virus, at the same time it appears that hospitalisations and death rates are decoupling from case loads, which continue to skyrocket. As John Campbell MD puts it, “the virus caught a cold” (see below).

Reuters are reporting that the Omicron variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 ‘likely acquired at least one of its mutations by picking up a snippet of genetic material from another virus – possibly one that causes the common cold – present in the same infected cells.’

Netcare has found that there appears to be a decoupling of the rate of community transmission and the rate of hospital admissions, meaning that ‘fewer people end up in hospital than the official infection figures might suggest’.

“This is what we saw with the Spanish flu. We call it an antigenic drift. The Spanish flu never went away. It stopped killing people but it morphed into what we know is a very highly transmissible influenza or flu-like virus that is still with us today,” says Richard Friedland, Netcare CEO.

This is an entirely normal sequence of events, as the coronovirus becomes endemic and the pandemic winds down. As I wrote in September most respiratory pandemics last no more than two years, with the black death a five year affair.

Professor Frode Forland, director of infectious diseases at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, says: ‘It might be that it has now replicated and mutated so many times that this is the optimal position from the virus’ point of view, to spread widely and not kill the hosts.

‘That’s what we’ve seen with other diseases beforehand. And of course, then it gets into more like an endemic phase.’

Scientists have long predicted the coronavirus is unlikely to ever be eradicated but will instead transition into a milder cold-like virus as the world develops stronger immunity. 

Of course there is one huge caveat, this could all change if Covid itself, decouples from the history of respiratory disease and instead of natural evolution, is being manipulated in the lab. But let us assume that what is occurring is zoonotic transmission and the pandemic is entirely natural and not man-made.

Barring some unforeseen event, like a mad scientist in a dark lab, manipulating the genome, one can predict, based upon past experience, the end of this saga sometime in early 2022 (fingers crossed).

Since public health policy in South Africa is being set by non-scientists like Halton Cheadle and his crony Glenda Grey, and other law school frat boys (see here) we are likely to see the introduction of strict vaccine mandates at the same time that the pandemic ends.

My earlier postings on the subject raise the issue of Cheadle’s involvement in Kagiso a company invested in Aspen, the local producers of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and thus question the law professor’s fitness to be involved in public health policy.

Cheadle’s involvement with the ruling party and UCT appears to be the reason why he is allowed to operate in such a cavalier fashion — his relationship to Kagiso is a conflict of interest if ever there was one.

For the record, Cheadle’s company Cheadle Thompsen Haysom continue to appear as advisers on Kagiso annual reports. The sizeable investments by Kagiso in Aspen have not drawn any criticism from the medical establishment, despite their associates and advisers seeking to set public health policy. Cheadle appears to have presided over a 2018 matter at the Competition Commission involving Rustenberg Platininum Mines and Mototolo Ventures, an entity partly owned by Kagiso Tiso. He has appeared before the Cape Law Society disciplinary committee regarding a similar lack of transparency and conflict of interest at Labour Court during 2010 without any sanction from this body.

UPDATE: CCMA declares vaccine mandates unconstitutional

Mandates: Statist power grab undermines personal autonomy as well as collective rights

A STATIST POWER-GRAB is on the boil. Government control of your entire life from cradle to grave is what many political pundits have in mind. Whether it is the far-left who are pursuing the end of private property ownership in order to make the state the ‘custodian of all property’, or misguided intellectuals on the right promoting vaccine mandates and grumbling meekly about the price of petrol at the pump and ignoring state-controlled fuel levies, the result is all the same.

Erosion of the fundamental, egalitarian and openly democratic principles, granted everyone in South Africa. Obliteration of personal freedom and evisceration of the core values enshrined by our constitution as a foundation stone, in what is an emancipatory charter of our Republic, has been a trend for nearly a decade.

In the rewrite of the constitutional narrative to favour personal agendas and party fortunes, (think of Gwede Mantashe and his resort to pro-fossil fuel rhetoric), an agenda is clear — the blatant capture and reshaping of our political system to allow for the wholesale reshaping and reorganisation of the national character in the image of other totalitarian dictatorships around the world, think of China, Cuba, and North Korea.

Thus Omphemetse S Sibanda writes: “It is highly problematic when individuals care for themselves and their immediate families only and do not care about the wellbeing of the entire community in which they live during the pandemic”, and by that he means the state: “If people don’t care, the state must help them to care or to grow a caring bone.” [my italics]

A community no doubt comprised of party loyalists, sycophants and acolytes?

It was my namesake CS Lewis who wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their conscience.”

The same may be said of those who lack any conscience in the ANC, and by illustration Deputy health minister Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo who believes “the rights of individuals not to get vaccinated for Covid-19 will be trumped by the rights of a collective who choose vaccination.”

“A collective right becomes superior to an individual right,” he claims. “We will not deny you to stay at home if you so wish but you can’t force yourself into a taxi of 10 other people who are vaccinated if you refuse to vaccinate but you want to travel with them to work.”

By which one can only presume, that the collective rights and authority to vaccinate, referred to here are whatever the party determines to be the prevailing authority and not some high-minded ideal, based upon any democratic conception of our national character. Ditto patient rights.

Freedom is not a bone you throw to a dog

It is thus that Ben Winks, a highly acclaimed legal advocate on the far-right (of winklehood), and many years my junior, and certainly too young to experience forced medical interventions under apartheid, who incorrectly and without any evidence suggests: “Does the Constitution allow compulsory vaccination? Yes: it commands it”.

Well, how incredibly patronising of these three men, (and yes one should also question why so many male voices on the subject?)

Do Sibanda, Dhlomo and Winks, et. al. seriously presume to suggest they know what is best for my family, and further, foolishly assume, they have some right in law to inject my family against their will, in violation of Article 12 (which has its corollary in article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), as if I do not possess free will nor any volition and am simply a ward of the state? And whatever happened to Article 13, freedom from slavery?

For the record I am not disabled, have been jabbed twice by Pfizer, but hereby lodge my objections to any coercion and removal of choice — brazen attempts to unlawfully usurp my freedom and that of my family under the ruse of collectivism and simple majoritarianism. Just about nobody is suggesting that infected persons should be free to infect others, but rather to use an analogy, there is no rationale behind forcing everyone to take ARVs merely to avoid HIV.

A civic duty is no longer a duty when it is a compulsion. A person is no longer a free individual if they are slaves to the collective will, or require another’s permission to do what is considered natural. To reiterate, mandates are ordinarily granted during elections, and constitutional mandates arise from a defence of the constitution, not a shoddy, legalistic attempt, nor a quasi political project, to rewrite and interpolate its contents.

We are not your willing slaves

All pro-mandate opinion pieces published in the public arena to date represent a dangerous resort to authoritarianism and statism, in which it is argued inter alia, the state should treat individuals as children, or worse, mere tools, in effect a sad resort to the ancient doctrine of patria potestas, or the state ‘acting as parent’, apparently in order to defend the ‘collective will of the people’.

While the rights of the person certainly need to be weighed against the rights of the collective, the issue begs the question, who are we as a nation, what is the collective will, and who claims to represent it? Our freedom is not reducible to some fratboy law school formula, (one part individual to three parts party agenda divided by collective power). Freedom includes freedom from, as in freedom from war, coercion and fear, without which there could be no democracy.

This is exactly why these proposed mandates deserve a referendum (if not a constitutional amendment) since the result represents a major shift in the democratic, antislavery narrative of the country. Switzerland recently held a referendum on the issue of limited vaccine mandates. The UK’s Sajid Javid has declared “Mandatory Covid vaccines ‘unethical’ and ‘impractical’. Our democracy could do better than to attempt to crowd out those voicing objections.

And what if we all voted for totalitarianism, servitude and the end of democracy, what then?

If one perceives that the collective will is enshrined in the constitution and not any one particular organisation nor individual, then it should follow that article 12 (Freedom and security of the person) be read with the same circumspection and deference as article 11 (Right to life) and article 13, (Freedom from Slavery, Servitude and Forced Labour).

There is a good reason why these non-derogable rights, appear right next door to each other, while our health rights are littered throughout the constitution, appearing several times under Health Care, Environment and so on.

A non-derogable right is not subject to retroactive legislation during a state of emergency and cannot simply be curtailed holus bolus via an act of parliament.

Reintroducing the death penalty would probably protect the collective from harm, but be a violation of the values referred to in the preamble. Adopting Nazism as an ideology would most likely get the trains running on time, at least for the majority of us, whilst ending multi-party democracy might result in greater efficiency, and less taxation for everyone, as would a communist dictatorship.

I am not going to repeat my previous piece on patria potestas, but you can read it here. And I also suggest you read my initial response to that other looney toon of the left, posing as a legal pundit in the media, Pierre de Vos.

There is also this piece: ‘When the pandemic ends, those unlawful mandates are going to haunt us”, one of several similar pieces published here, which might elucidate the issue.

SEE: It looks like Omicron variant causes milder illness – is this how Covid-19 becomes endemic?

When the pandemic ends, those unlawful mandates are going to haunt us

THERE has been a plethora of verbiage on the subject of ‘vaccine mandates’ over the past weeks. Several pieces written by legal academics and health scholars all present these measures as a fait accompli, and worse, present public health policy as if the extraordinary measures contemplated do not require anything resembling rational debate inside our nation’s democratic institutions.

Mandates are usually associated with elections and the resulting laws and policies are ordinarily drafted by parliament. Instead public health activism has adopted the fever pitch of the imperative, the unquestioning injunction and ever-present directive. What passes for debate these days, usually 5-minute opinion provided by so-called expert ‘talking heads’ on television followed by equally vapid ‘vox pops’ from the public with absolutely no balance provided by presenters, is leading the country assuredly down the road of internal passports and vaccine score cards.

As I have already written, this country has an egregious history when it comes to internal passports, in particular the aparthied era dompas, not to mention a troubled past — one haunted by the evil doctoring and medical experimentation of the likes of Dr Verwoerd et al. All the more reason to tread carefully lest we forget the lessons of the past and ignore the imperatives enshrined in our constitution?

Instead a paid-for-promotion by Investec, boldly claims without providing any citations: “Unvaccinated people are driving up the chances of mutation, creating more opportunities for the Covid-19 virus to bypass the immune system. The more people who are vaccinated, the closer we will get to a point of containment like we have with the flu.”

The same piece is remarkable for its failure to disclose the banking group’s considerable investment in Aspen Pharmacare, and instead presents an Aspen Senior Executive, Dr Stavros Nicolaou as an expert in the field of epidemiology. Then Professor WD François Venter of the Wits Centre for Reproductive Health is presented as an expert on virology. The webinar is a far cry from a national science symposium on the subject and a long way away from resembling anything like a colloquium or conference.

At the same time as these paid promotions, other health propaganda pieces are published in the media.

One by Safura Abdool Karim of the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism falsely claims “South Africa’s laws allow for the government to implement mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations but these mandates won’t necessarily infringe on individual rights.” Then proceeds to jump the gun in claiming “under the Notifiable Medical Conditions Regulations, a healthcare provider would be allowed to administer a vaccine even if a person refuses to accept it.”

While the National Health Act of 61 of 2003 certainly allows for the quarantining of individuals suspected of being infected with a notifiable disease, (and Covid-19 is a notifiable disease according to regulations), the act does not provide for mandatory vaccination as such, nor does it define vaccination nor even provide a relevant immunisation section. The astonishingly brazen claims made by Karim, instead appear to refer to draft regulations which have yet to be promulgated, and thus an as yet unfinalised government vaccine mandate policy — a policy which remains moot, and which is already the subject of a legal challenge by a religious group.

It is worth considering first principles and discussing what exactly we are dealing with here.

A piece ‘comparing SARS-CoV-2 with SARS-CoV and influenza pandemic’ published in the Lancet in September 2020, may be considered required reading:

Microchip ‘vaccine passports’, second thoughts on Cheadle-stan

AS ONE of the vaccinated, I am generally in favour of universal immunisation strategies. The majority of deaths during the Covid epidemic have come from the ranks of the unvaccinated. Vaccines save lives, I wrote, but ‘removing patient consent destroys the foundation of our democracy’. I have thus tended to promote informed consent, patient choice and persuasion rather than outright coercion — and favour to some extant, what is referred to in legal circles as ‘positive discrimination’ especially when it comes to certain categories of employment.

An opinion piece by Kevin Ritchie in the Star entitled “Vaccine hesitancy: Why it’s time to create no-vaxx, no-go areas however paints a grim future of a state in which all citizens are effectively microchipped, forced to carry electronic ‘vaccine passports’ — internal passports that act to either grant or restrict access to freedom of movement, or as Ritchie explains, “no jab, no pub, no shopping mall”.

All this is to be achieved on the basis of immediate and instantaneous third-party access to patient information. A feat which would necessitate the removal of rights already granted under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI), not to mention placing restrictions and limitations on fundamental freedoms — the right to privacy, freedom of movement and other rights enshrined in our Constitution.

I have already written how an antiquated dominionship and/or guardianship model of state power (the state acting as parent-of-the-people), and thus a model contrary to our human rights based system, is being rolled out as we speak by Cheadle, Karim and Grey et al, in the process negating the hard-won victories of our democracy.

Unlike members of PANDA, who are campaigning for individual privacy and rights when it comes to employment, I have no quibbles in disclosing my Covid vaccine status to all and sundry, but can’t help wondering how this plays out as we move forward and especially when it comes to other diseases, for example HIV?

Didn’t we all win a patient rights battle, fought during the late 90s and over the turn-of-the-millennium, for HIV patients to not be coerced into disclosure of status? And why is Covid being treated like a chronic illness, when all the evidence points to its eminent and impending seasonal nature?

As Helen Braswell writes in Statnews: “The truth of the matter is that pandemics always end. And to date vaccines have never played a significant role in ending them. “

Brasell who a former Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard, where she focused on polio eradication, argues that “there were no flu vaccines in 1918, when the world didn’t yet know that the great influenza was caused by a virus, H1N1. In 1957, when the H2N2 pandemic swept the world, flu vaccine was mainly a tool of the military. In the pandemic of 1968, which brought us H3N2, the United States produced nearly 22 million doses of vaccine, but by the time it was ready the worst of the pandemic had passed, and demand subsided.”

She writes: “That ‘too little and too late‘ phenomenon played out again in 2009, when the world finally had the capacity to make hundreds of millions of doses of H1N1 vaccine; some countries cancelled large portions of their orders because they ended up not needing them.”

The same may be said for a previous coronovirus pandemic thought to have occurred in 1889, and known in medical histories as “the Russian flu,” which “might actually have been caused by one of the human coronaviruses, OC43.”