‘Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear.’ Alan Paton, ‘Cry, The Beloved Country’.
HUMANS have free will. We can choose between telling lies and seeking out the truth, between succumbing to insanity and clinging on to rationality. Sadly the global political classes have abused their free will. Suffering from mass Covid-19 hysteria, they are strangling their economies through lockdowns and plunging millions into hunger and eternal poverty.
Covid-19 should not be anthropomorphised and blamed for this. After all, it’s a virus. The blame lies with weak governments who fell for the lockdown masterclass of propaganda engineered by China and its WHO collaborators.
Lookdowns are medieval in nature, an unproven method of dealing with disease. That so many countries have embraced this misguided and superstitious attempt to control Covid-19, including the continent which ushered in the Enlightenment era, shows just how much we have universally regressed.
In April the International Labour Organisation warned that half the world’s workers will lose their jobs because of the global economic atrophy. The repercussions of this are vast.
Global economies are interconnected. As the developed world retracts into a depression capitulated by lockdowns, Africa, the continent of the young, is likely to suffer the most.
The economic, health and societal devastation engendered by lockdowns means that 6.7million more children under five are now at risk of malnutrition and starvation. Around 80 per cent of them will be from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Over 40million people in sub-Saharan Africa are now at risk of extreme poverty, with millions more at risk of getting tuberculosis (TB). Over the next five years a million people are expected to die of AIDS and 1.4million from TB. The projected deaths from TB alone exceed the current Covid-19 mortality rate.
Death tolls from Covid-19 in Europe have been high owing to the high proportion of elderly people. But Africa is the continent of the young, who are barely at risk of dying from Covid-19. In a frustrating display of obtuseness, and proving that they too are signed-up members of the Covid Cult, the South African government panicked and plunged their nation into unnecessary hardship. They have virtually destroyed their own country in a futile attempt to cheat death.
South Africa had one of the harshest lockdowns in the world. Citizens were stripped of freedom even to walk their dogs or buy alcohol and cigarettes. At the start President Cyril Ramaphosa ludicrously attempted to appear Churchillian and declared ‘war’ on a virus. So far South Africa has almost 730,000 cases of Covid-19. Yet the mortality rate is 2.68 per cent, a minuscule number compared with how many will perish from the devastating effects of lockdown.
South Africa’s already fragile economy has shrunk by over 50 per cent, the largest contraction in its history.
More than 250,000 domestic workers have lost their jobs, fired by employers scared of catching Covid-19 or facing unemployment themselves.
They would have supported their elderly parents and young children with meagre salaries. Now homeless and hungry, women are reduced, together with their children, to begging at traffic lights for food. Millions of South Africans are at risk of starvation. No wonder the UN is predicting a famine in the developing world.
Last year half a million South Africans developed TB, with 58,000 dying from it. But since lockdown thousands of TB patients have forfeited their treatment for fear of catching Covid-19 at clinics or have had their treatments or screenings stopped. Testing for TB declined by 50 per cent. Millions were locked down in crowded and poverty-stricken townships, where living in multi-generational households meant children risked catching TB, far more dangerous to them than Covid-19. TB is also far more lethal to grandparents.
South Africa allocated over £25billion to fight Covid-19. That’s a lot of money for a country facing mass unemployment and a decaying economy. Only £1.5billion has been earmarked for combating TB and AIDS, crippling vital resources needed to fight the upcoming, and real, pandemic of these two diseases. All the progress South Africa made in tackling these is being pummelled by the hysterical over-reaction to Covid-19. Project Fear has worked well.
South Africa and Rwanda are the only two African countries to impose strict lockdowns. Given that these don’t work in combating Covid-19, and just delay the inevitable, South Africa has seen the highest number of cases on the continent. As my TCW colleague Will Jones points out, some of the strictest lockdowns are also associated with a high death toll.
Since the South African government relaxed their lockdown restrictions, Covid-19 cases are on the rise, proving that all lockdown does in tackling this virus is kick the can down the road. Viruses come back after lockdown, it’s what they do. Herd immunity, the one realistic hope we do have in tackling Covid-19, cannot be achieved through lockdowns.
Yet despite all this evidence, and the mass hardship and adversity that lockdown has caused South Africans, the government are threatening to impose another one.
We know they are not alone in this. Given that Britain has just enforced another one on us, it won’t be long until South Africa does the same. As one country jumps into the fire another one, unthinkingly, follows. Lockdowns like ours give other governments a legitimate reason to imprison their entire population. This is morally reprehensible and anyone cheering on lockdowns needs to think of the wider repercussions.
Lockdown zealots should take a break from baking bread and open their eyes to the global damage that their cultish ideology has fashioned. Starving children and elderly grandparents dying from TB in South Africa are just one small part of the collateral damage caused by this mass social experiment of locking down whole populations in a misguided attempt to control a virus.
Death is one certainty we all have in life. Hard decisions had to be taken over Covid-19 but those taken were mostly wrong. The crisis in South Africa shows that lockdowns cost more lives than Covid-19 ever will. We are witnessing a horrific crime against humanity. It must be stopped.
