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December 22nd, 2024

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Covidstan, Now and Forever: The Mounting Toll

Mark Steyn

By Mark Steyn

Published September 23, 2024

Covidstan, Now and Forever: The Mounting Toll

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I have just returned from a rare post-cardiac public appearance - for Hillsdale College in Washington, DC. I was struck, as I always am on my increasingly infrequent ventures into internal travel in the United States, by the number of persons - fellow passengers, check-in agents, hotel staff - still wearing Covid masks. Are they now Monkeypox masks? Virus X masks?

Or maybe mosquito masks? Right now, the states of Vermont and Massachusetts have cancelled public events and are "strongly recommending" their citizens remain indoors between 6pm and 6am because of a killer mosquito on the loose. (But don't worry, the highly credentialed "fact-checkers" assure us it isn't Farmer Bill Gates playing with the old gain-of-function at the world's biggest mosquito farm.)

Be that as it may, it is all too clear that, were governments to announce Lockdown 2.0 tomorrow, half your neighbours would be eager to comply all over again - notwithstanding the ongoing economic and social devastation from last time round. The damage was not from Covid, but from Covid policy; the damage next time round will likewise be from rule by "experts".

~Speaking of which, two years ago we received the following letter from John Cross, a pharmacist in the Worcestershire town of Bromsgrove:

I was lucky in that I got an early Astra Zeneca Sars Cov 2 (Covid 19 vaccine) in January 2021. My wife was working as a vaccinator at a local surgery. There was 'overage', the little bit extra that pharmaceutical manufacturers have to put in liquid containers to ensure that there is no short dosage, so I was able to agree not to waste vaccine and get on with it! Remember how important it was at the time to get vaccinated against this novel virus (or so the government told us - I am not saying they were wrong!

Exactly two weeks after I had the vaccine I went for a walk around the locality. We were only allowed to see one friend. We were in lock-down. It was a very, very cold Wednesday in February. On getting back from the walk I sat in front of the log fire in the evening after eating, as was usual in the winter. I noticed that the soles of my feet were feeling quite numb, like chilblains...

You can guess where this is heading:

Dave the chicken man came to deliver a fresh chicken, as he did every fortnight. My money was upstairs. I had to apologise, saying that I didn't have the strength in my legs to climb the stairs. He could see that something was wrong. He went away without being paid...

It got worse:

Christine left me at the hospital entrance and I had to see her drive away, not knowing that I wouldn't see her again for nearly six weeks. We had not been apart before that for more than a week...

And worse:

I couldn't close my eyes to sleep. The left one stayed constantly open... I didn't realise until much later that this was all down to paralysis of the muscles in my face. Eventually one of the nurses realised that my eye wasn't closing so taped it shut and administered eye drops to stop my cornea drying up and getting damaged...

And on and on. We forwarded the letter to the GB News team in London to set up an interview, but shortly thereafter I had my first two heart attacks and the duplicitous f**ker Angelos Frangopoulos took advantage of me being in the ICU in France to pull me off the air permanently because of the heat he was getting from Ofcom. So the interview never happened.

A year on, John Cross killed himself.

His Majesty's Government had found that Mr Cross had indeed been disabled by the Covid vaccine, but he was "insufficiently" disabled to be eligible for compensation. Our friend Claire Hibbs had the same problem - of minor government jobsworths overruling her own doctors - as have many others:

After a three-year battle with the VDPS, the tenacious Hibbsy was eventually (just a few days ago) able to get that decision reversed.

The compensation is derisory and contemptible - 120,000 quid - but we are proud to say that the very first to be awarded that sum two years ago was the very first vaccine victim to appear on The Mark Steyn Show, Vikki Spit. Indeed, six of the first ten to receive compensation were Steyn Show guests: the squeaky wheel gets the grease, as Vikki told me. And, as footling as the compensation is, it was enough to enable Charlotte Wright to keep her house and thus the same local school - so that, in addition to losing their dad to this killer vaccine, her kids did not also lose their home and their friends.

At the time Claire spoke to us, the threshold for compensation was that you had to be at least fifty per cent disabled. Apparently the bureaucracy has since raised it to sixty per cent. Mr Cross's children are now trying to get the vaccine compensation scheme "reformed". Good luck with that. An evil government has sloughed them off with: not to worry, the official Covid inquiry will be looking into the matter sometime next year. Too late for John Cross - and for how many others?

Meanwhile, the peer-reviewed repudiations of the Covid years pile up. From the journal Vaccine:

Association of SARS-CoV-2 immunoserology and vaccination status with myocardial infarction severity and outcome

This is a study of a thousand patients at a hospital in Madrid. If you find the peer-review lingo a bit hard to follow, Alex Berenson cuts to the chase:

The researchers examined outcomes from almost 1,000 heart attack patients from March 2020 through March 2023 in a Madrid hospital. They found vaccinated and previously infected patients had an over 50% higher risk of death or heart failure than unvaccinated people who had also been previously infected — and a 90% higher risk than those who were unvaccinated and previously uninfected.

The gap remained even after researchers adjusted for risk factors such as smoking, blood pressure and age. "The combination of vaccination and natural immunisation against SARS-CoV-2 may predispose to the development of severe heart failure," they wrote. Most patients had received the mRNA jabs from Pfizer and Moderna.

The paper may help explain why post-Covid death rates remain persistently high in heavily vaccinated countries, belying the predictions of epidemiologists who expected death rates to fall below normal after the epidemic ended.

You don't say - although the Steyn Show did, and, in consequence, I'll never be on UK telly or radio ever again. Whereas the men and women who made the killer AstraZeneca - the King's various English, Irish and Australian subjects - were rewarded with knighthoods and damehoods.

And yet I picture those masked nitwits on my trip to DC happy to live in Covidstan forever, and I think of the current public-health orders in Vermont and Massachusetts: Shelter in place; just leaving your home could kill you!

And I remembered one of our most freakishly prescient Tales for Our Time, by (of all people) E M Forster, set in a world where humanity is confined inside to divert itself with shallow electronic distractions all day long:

"I have been threatened with Homelessness," said Kuno...

Homelessness means death. The victim is exposed to the air, which kills him...

"But why shouldn"t you go outside?" she exclaimed, "It is perfectly legal, perfectly mechanical... One simply summons a respirator and gets an Egression-permit..."

"I did not get an Egression-permit."

"Then how did you get out?"

"I found out a way of my own."

The phrase conveyed no meaning to her, and he had to repeat it.

"A way of your own?" she whispered. "But that would be wrong."

Increasingly, "ways of our own" are becoming "wrong", don't you find? Still, it's all nice and cosy in the cell when you're fed entertaining distractions 24/7.

But what should happen if The Machine Stops? If you've yet to hear my reading of Forster's novella, you can find it here.

It is increasingly unsafe outside but not because of the mosquitoes. Our Diversity Stabbing of the Day:

The Dutch government has asked Brussels for a formal opt-out from EU "refugee" policy. I doubt the Eurocrats will agree. There's no point "protecting our democracy", as US Democrats like to say, if democracy has evolved to the point where, notwithstanding election results, no change can be permitted in anything that matters.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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