Programming note: This coming week The Mark Steyn Show airs every weeknight on GB News, starting on Monday at 8pm GMT - that's 3pm North American Eastern. More details below.
~The short version of our ChiCom-19 update is simple:
The disease and the cure have now parted company, entirely.
For most of the last two years, the official policy goal of many governments was "Zero Covid". To that end, for example, Australia took extraordinary action: it cut itself off from the world, and significantly shriveled internal movement too, depriving Victorians of the company of New South Welshmen, if that's the term.
Well, Zero Covid has been an obvious delusion for at least eighteen months, and is now impossible to sustain. So even Fauci and Boris have given up on the "Look, I think one last push will do it..."
So the policy goal of eliminating Covid has been replaced by one of vaccinating as many people as possible, and then vaccinating them some more: Once a year - no, once every six months (US CDC)... five months (CDC revised)... four months (France)...
Justin Trudeau was caught on tape musing on whether "we" should "tolerate" the unvaccinated. We now have the answer: No. Jean-Yves Duclos, Canada's health minister, is talking about mandatory vaccinations: Not mandatory vaccine passports. Mandatory vaccine injections.
This would seem to be in explicit violation of the first clause of the Nuremberg Code:
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
And no one even pretends to be offering the original trade-off: the return of normal life for just a couple of jabs. Now it's a couple of jabs in order to retain your job (or your country) for a couple of months.
Yet tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions around the "free world" are apparently cool with it, disdaining obsolescent concepts such as "ethics" in favor of "following the science". Whether any kind of vaccine mandate is constitutional in America is currently in the hands of genius jurists such as Sonia Sotomayor, who revealed the other day the hitherto unknown news that Omicron has put over 100,000 American children in "serious condition", many on ventilators. Given Madam Justice Sotomayor's subsequent unmasked knees-up in DC, it may be up to a hundred million by now.
So the cure has parted company from the disease, and indeed from the science. The pretext for mandatory vaccine passports and mandatory vaccine injections is the spread of Omicron. Omicron is everywhere, not just remote Antarctica but even more remote and isolated Australia.
So vaccines are being mandated at the moment they do ever less of what vaccines are meant to do. According to Discovery Health, South Africa's largest health insurance administrator, Omicron has reduced the effectiveness of the Pfizer jab from 80 per cent to 33 per cent. I would bet that percentage will be lower in a month's time.
Well, you could always try the Moderna - although France, Germany and Scandinavia have effectively banned that one for anyone under thirty because of heart inflammation concerns. How about if you're thirty-two, thirty-three?
So it will be a condition of residency in the Dominion of Canada that you are injected with a) something forbidden in Europe or b) is only twenty-something per cent effective against what it's purporting to protect you from.
As it happens, Omicron's mutations are in the spike protein that the vaccine developers used to create immunity. How did that happen? Well, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (so you can take it to the bank) says it may have come from mice.
So here we go again: I take it as read that 2022 is the Year of the Mouse in the same way that 2020 was the Year of the Bat and 2021 the Year of the Pangolin.
And, if you suggest otherwise, there go your Twitter and Facebook accounts.
All the above is so breathtakingly stupid it can't really be accidental, can it? To state only the obvious, none of the above impedes the virus: Chairman Dan in Melbourne shuts everything down and tightens the screws, and he's still got Omicron dripping off every light fixture in the state. If you were really interested in "Zero Covid", getting on top of its ability to survive and travel would seem a priority. But universalizing the problem - masking and jabbing everyone from two to a hundred and two - only gets in the way of that.
Which is so obvious it has to be intentional, no?
~Has there ever been a medication that works for everyone on the planet? Well, yes. John Derbyshire reminded me the other day of "medicinal compound", but unaccountably played the Irish Rovers instead of The Scaffold (whose name seems more appropriate for where we're headed):
That's Paul McCartney's kid brother Mike leading the group above, with Graham Nash of The Hollies, Elton John and Tim Rice on (unseen) backing vocals.
Note how many of the lyrics foreshadow our own time - morbid obesity, transitioning, self-identification; the only difference is that guy from Pfizer is now playing Lily the Pink, which is no fun at all.
~Oh, breaking news from Cyprus: The Omicron variant has merged with the Delta variant to create Deltacron - the transmissability of Omicron plus the severity of Delta. Boy, I didn't see that coming.
~A year ago today, Kathy Shaidle, my friend and fearless comrade in so many battles, took her leave of us at Mississauga Hospital in Ontario. She had been busy emailing just thirty-six hours before, but her sickness then accelerated too fast for Kathy to go into the High Anglican hospice her Catholic self had been weirdly looking forward to.
I miss her more as the months roll by. I miss her fabulous rudeness: Over a decade ago, she started using "More K-Y for That Slippery Slope" as her all-purpose headline for identity insanity, and these days there isn't a week that goes by without at least a dozen "more K-Y" stories. In less mordant mode, her question to lefties was: "What happened to you?" - ie, a lot of these people are obviously damaged, and the left's solution of ever more solipsistic self-definition has only piled higher the mound of human wreckage.
You can see Kathy discussing that in more detail here - and you can read my account of the sly autobiography revealed in her film essays here. And, of course, all Kathy's tremendous movie writing for SteynOnline is archived here in handy Netflix-style tile format.
~Here's a "more K-Y for the slippery slope" story: Do you like all that Ivy League boola-boola varsity stuff? Well, during yesterday's Yale-Dartmouth-Penn swim meet, the hundred-meter freestyle was taken by Yale.
Very freestyle. In this case, Yale's female-to-male transgender swimmer beat Penn's male-to-female transgender swimmer.
As to Dartmouth's lousy cis-swimmer, I think they let her make the tea.
~As mentioned above, I'll be live on your TV screens every night with The Mark Steyn Show on the new must-see UK channel GB News. The fun starts at 8pm GMT/3pm North American Eastern - but the show replays at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific, which is possibly more convenient for our US and Canadian viewers.
Either way, I hope you'll dial us up if you are in the general vicinity of the receiving apparatus. Once Big Ben strikes eight, you can shoot me your comments on the show at [email protected], and I'll respond live on air.
You can watch from anywhere on the planet via the GB News home page - or you can click the livestream here (you may have to refresh the page):
If you're one of the many who prefer me in non-visual formats, the Steyn Show also airs live on GB News Radio. You can listen from anywhere on earth here.
~I'll be back later with our Song of the Week. Thank you for all your recent comments on the Steyn Club and its various activities as Covid lurches on. I am very grateful to all the members of The Mark Steyn Club from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati who have stuck with us these last four-and-a-half years. We hope to welcome many more of you in the decades ahead.
