Could a Broader Perspective Benefit Us All Right Now?

Image by Dirk Vetter from Pixabay  

As someone who has had the misfortune to be intimately involved, both personally and professionally, with a few characters who use manipulation and control tactics such as gaslighting, triangulating, lying, invalidation, minimisation, moving the goal posts (and so the list goes on), I have learned not only to develop and hold healthy boundaries – but to take notice when my gut tells me the ground on which I’m standing suddenly feels less solid beneath my feet.

I feel like that right now in relation to the environment here in New Zealand around COVID19 restrictions and what I’m seeing happen elsewhere.

Attending a parent’s evening at the kids’ school this week, one of the important topics up for discussion was how we promote inclusion around the issue of vaccination status as some fractures are beginning to rear their ugly heads in reflection of what is going on in society at large. To put this into further context, I am talking about a class of nine-year-olds, where playground and classroom talk really should not be focused on these adult issues and themes.

I imagine this is particularly difficult for any teacher whose only basis for getting a vaccination themselves was in order to keep their job (all teachers in New Zealand were given a matter of only weeks’ notice to become fully vaccinated or leave).

In another post I saw from a professional contact of mine, who runs a customer experience consultancy business, she was recounting a story of an elderly gentleman who had entered a store that required a My Vaccine Pass. Upon advising he did not have one, the clerk frantically and loudly pointed him to the door and ushered him out.

She was making a plea to service providers to give their teams guidance on how to say “No we can’t serve you” without humiliating their fellow citizens.

I responded “I suspect these are fear driven responses and, until we are able to address the fears, it will be hard to avoid this”.

At the parent’s evening I heard parents respond with fears from two polarised perspectives. One was fearful of masks not being worn in the classroom because her father had been in intensive care being treated with COVID19, whereas another parent’s father and mother had both suffered strokes within a week of having the vaccine administered.

In New Zealand the government announced the My Vaccine Pass a matter of weeks ago and, from the third of December, many venues and facilities became inaccessible to those who cannot show this. To qualify for one you have to be fully vaccinated and have a booster (at this stage) every 6 months, though I suspect New Zealand will follow suit with other countries who now recommend a booster every 3 months as it’s becoming less effective.

The recent mandates have left many workers without jobs and many citizens unable to access services, facilities (like swimming pools and libraries), and education unless they get behind the governments drive to fully vaccinate.

Now, until recently, we in New Zealand have been relatively sheltered from COVID19 which, I suspect, has perhaps made many of our citizens even more fearful of the virus. The whole of Auckland (population 1.7 million) has been on lockdown since August when the Delta variant took hold. The Prime Minister has been promising to open it up again at 90% vaccination rates.

Vaccination is touted (and now mandated) as the key to social and personal freedoms.

Despite this, COVID19 has spread but - to put it in perspective, we are talking (as of 12 December 2021) about 6738 active cases in the whole country (population 5 million). My gut tells me the measures are way out of kilter with the actual threat. So I took a good look at some of the statistics around the world to see what’s actually been happening and gain some perspective. Was I being too glib?

I will quote the UK figures as it’s been one of the most impacted countries, and is also my country of birth where I have lots of family and friends who have shared their stories over the last year and more. Here is what I found...

Looking at the stats taken from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ total active cases in the UK right now are 1,171,000 (of 69 million population). So 1.7% of the UK population have currently tested positive for COVID19.

Now while this is a particularly tricky coronavirus, it is a coronavirus nonetheless; one of the most common causes of cold and flu symptoms worldwide for centuries. 1.7% of the population having it doesn't sound that extraordinary to me.

The total accumulated cases in the UK since the start of the pandemic is 10,771,444. This means 15.6% of the population have tested positive for COVID19 at some point.

Total deaths in the UK (attributed to COVID19) since the start of the pandemic are 146,387, which is 0.21% of the UK population.

So only 15.6% of the UK population has actually caught this virus since the start of the pandemic and 0.21% have died.

Someone I know who lives there said to me the other day "I dread to think where we would be without the vaccine, this virus is doubling every two to three days!”

I responded “Let's look at that, where would you - a healthy individual (who has barely ever had flu, never mind the common cold nor any other respiratory issues) - be?  If you were in proximity to the virus, as you probably have been on many occasions, would you even catch it? Probably not. And if you did catch it, what are the chances of dying from it? Very little, odds are you would recover”.

Then I saw a post from Esther Jacobs on LinkedIn, citing the example of a flight from South Africa to the Netherlands (where you have to show proof of a vaccine or a negative test) which demonstrates why vaccinations themselves do not stop the spread. All passengers were detained for testing on arrival in the Netherlands, 61 of them testing positive for COVID19, which means a lot of vaccinated people are carrying the virus without knowing it.

Now that I am looking more widely, I’ll share the global figures.

Total cases (of COVID19) since the start of the pandemic are 269,917,935 (3.86% of the human population) of which 5,316,825 i.e. 1.97% have died (i.e. 0.076% of the total global population).
By far and away the vast majority of people do not catch the virus and, of those who does, the vast majority recover. So why all this fear and panic? Why all the stringent measures?

Have vaccines slowed down the virus any? It is one year ago since the first Pfizer vaccine was administered to a 90-year-old grandmother in the UK. Prior to that, according to the same data source, using 4 Dec 2020 as a reference point (pre vaccine), globally 1,626,314 had died at that point, out of a total of 67,120,936 cases i.e. 2.42% (which is 0.02% of the global population).

Of course I know it’s a particularly nasty virus and not one I’d want to catch anymore than I want to catch any virus particularly. Of course it's incredibly sad that people die from this virus or suffer symptoms of long COVID19, but I wanted to gain some perspective.

It's hard to tell what impact vaccines have had. The first variant of the virus appeared in September 2020, months before vaccines started to roll out (from Dec of 2020) and it is unknown what the virus's natural path could have looked like. Certainly enough modeling was done to scare people into complying with public health measures and positioning vaccines as the silver bullet to social freedoms.

Vaccines that are entirely new technology, different from any vaccines used before, and on the market and in people's arms in record speed. The vaccines are losing effectiveness by the day as the virus mutates and people are being asked to have more shots more frequently.

I particularly like an article written by Guy Hatchard PhD who has applied in depth critical thinking on the topic and has been in correspondence with the government’s closest advisors here around the management of the virus over the last year or more, and until the last few months.

One of his key concerns is the lack of any mandatory reporting about vaccine side effects. He says “The failure to alert the public that there was a measureable and significant risk to vaccination was compounded by false government assurances that there was no risk… Public perception of safety (of the vaccines) has become so entrenched that individuals posting about their adverse reactions on social media are often mercilessly trolled”.  

As I said to my friend in the UK “The bottom line is that, while this is a particularly nasty virus, and while there is certainly some truth in what you're being fed and regurgitating, it is not the whole truth and it's most certainly not in context or unbiased”.

When I look at this reasoning about wanting to avoid an overload the health system, for example, sure there was an initial influx last year, doctors were baffled dealing with something new and it took everyone by surprise.

But where is the load being accounted for in administering millions of vaccine doses and tests? Vaccines that are becoming less effective. And where is the tracking of the load being created by vaccine side effects?

And if there's such a load on the health systems, why aren't governments investing in and promoting good healthy eating and lifestyle practices that support and boost healthy immune systems? Where is the investment in effective treatments?

Why are perfectly healthy people being penalised when unhealthy people - so long as they're vaccinated - get to walk around spreading the virus? And all of this in the context of barely a dent on the overall global population.

I don’t mean to trivialize this by any means, but if someone would have told me a couple of years ago that we would all be walking around wearing masks and segregating our society into vaccinated and unvaccinated in response to a global pandemic, with people losing their jobs and access to facilities and services for non compliance, I would have imagined a scenario where a good proportion of my friends and family had died.

But it just doesn’t bear out in the facts.

Meanwhile, what is very obvious, is pharmaceutical companies are making some good money, and creating some great repeat business. Governments have people divided and distracted, so I have to wonder if it’s worth checking what other legislation is going through at the speed of light while people are all looking elsewhere.

I have had a look on the parliamentary website for proposed legislation and submission dates. There has been an interesting array of legislation slipping through here, from our water systems to artificial intelligence, all with extremely short submission deadlines.

But now I am venturing into another territory, the possible motives behind the government and media manipulation and control tactics. This has the potential to create more fear and, since I know no further facts around it nor have any real perspective on it at the moment – and certainly no control over it – it’s not where my focus lies.
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For now it is only clear to me that the fear mongering around this is disproportionate to the facts, as perhaps are the public measure in place and the extraordinary drive to vaccinate. It has certainly quelled any unbalanced fears in relation to “what if” I catch the virus, or what if anyone around me has it.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of vaccination, is it worth the time to take a broader perspective right now to help alleviate any fears you many have in relation to this topical issue? And, if not this issue, what else is taking centre stage in your life that might benefit from a broader perspective?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be Purposeful in Your Focus - Your Glass Is Actually Still Half Full, How to Reclaim Your Freedom Instead of Feeling Trapped, When Life Is Uncertain It Feels Good to Take a Positive Step, How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think?  and Empower Yourself - When a Difficult Reaction Sends You Into a Tailspin. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.