Response to SARS-CoV-1 2003
What a difference two decades makes
My wife and I celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary recently. Such a milestone lead us to reminiscence about our many adventures around the world over the years. One particular adventure was particular pertinent to the world we find ourselves in today - the outbreak of SARS-CoV-1 in Hong Kong in early 2003 - because we were there, at Ground Zero.
My wife and I celebrated our honeymoon in Hong Kong and Singapore in 1993. This was my first overseas holiday and opened my eyes to the wonderful world ‘out there.’ Ten years later, my wife secretly organized a trip back to Hong Kong and Singapore. At the time was so busy at work that I was completely oblivious to what was going on around me, but she contacted my boss, organized annual leave for me, booked the flights and accommodation, and packed my bags. She planned to spring the trip on me on the day of the flight by claiming we were picking up a friend at the airport. She was nothing if not creative.
But it did not happen like that.
The week before the flight my employer called us into a meeting and advised us that 50% of our department would be made redundant within the next week. That was the first shock. Then, as we watched the news later that night, we were informed that some terrible respiratory disease was spreading uncontrollably through Hong Kong, killing people left and right. The news showed footage of chaotic hospital scenes, doctors rushing around in masks, patients packed in hallways, and inevitable views of the squalid apartment block slums through which this disease was spreading. With crises left and right, my wife tearfully told me of her secret travel arrangements. We agreed we’d monitor the situation before deciding what we’d do.
In the end, we decided “Damn the Torpedoes!”, we would just go. In 1993 we flew first to Hong Kong and then to Singapore. This time we were flying to Singapore and then Hong Kong, so we reasoned we could make a decision about the Hong Kong later. At least we would have half a holiday. As for work - “f*ck em!”
Singapore was calm and we had a good time, but we did notice a difference in the reporting of the SARS crisis. There wasn’t the edge of panic of the reporting from Australia, the UK and USA. Singaporean news carried calm and reasoned statements from the Hong Kong medical authorities which made it clear that outbreak - whatever it was - was confined to a very small slum neighborhood, far from the major tourist centres. We decided to go.
We flew into Hong Kong - the epicenter of a worldwide public health pandemic if you were following western news media. Masked health officials used hand-held temperature scanners to randomly check incoming passengers for any sign of a fever, but otherwise things were calm. The streets were normal. People went about unmasked, but enterprising vendors were beginning to sell surgical masks from purloined packets on the street. We decided to buy a pair the day before we left, mainly so we could take photos of ourselves clowning around in masks.
I read the local English language papers daily to find out what was happening and it proved to be an eye opening experience. The Hong Kong medical establishment was perplexed. It wasn’t so much “what is this SARS virus?” as “where is this so called pandemic happening?” The BBC World Service was reporting hundreds of deaths and overwhelmed hospitals - naming certain hospitals and interviewing doctors and medical staff - but the Hong Kong authorities were asking “who are these doctors?” None of these people seemed to exist. The hospitals mentioned were calm. I remember reading a letter to the editor from the head of respiratory medicine at the named hospital explaining that the number of patients in their wards were normal for the season. The people who had died - and the number was only around 10-odd people - were very elderly, or very sick (immunocompromised) and had died of normal pneumonia. The bottom line was, there was no SARS pandemic.
On our return to Australia were met at the airport with additional health measures - as we passed through immigration, a business sized card was slipped into our passport stating:
And that was it. A business card. No quarantine. No lockdown. No medical experiments. No imposition of fascism.
The experience profoundly affected my understanding of the pseudo-medical/industrial/media complex. I recognized that medical hysteria was easily generated by exaggerated reporting of outbreaks occurring on the far side of the world. The same story would be repeated with MERS a few years later, then Ebola, Bird Flu, Zika virus…. the list goes on. A far away place. A mysterious disease. The inability to verify. Fake doctors. Fake claims. Panic. Miracle drugs. When we travelled to South America a few years ago my local GP asked if I wanted to be vaccinated against Zika virus. I guess he was concerned that if I was pregnant there was a risk my baby could develop micro-encephaly. I laughed at him and said, “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
When the SARS-CoV-2 story was breaking out in the media, I immediately called it our as just another fake, like all the other fake pandemics over the past twenty years. I joked that in a year or two we’d all be laughing at how we’d been led to panic by “the flu.” It was true, but no one is laughing.
I was browbeaten into getting the two doses in Moscow by the Moscow city administration, which had virtually put me under house arrest for a while as I am an elderly resident. They blocked my social card that allowed me to use public transport free of charge. I managed to flee Moscow and live at our place in the country: better under house arrest there than in the Moscow city centre. My wife, however, was told that if she didn't take the two doses, she would be fired. She's an English teacher at a state school. She had to line up in a local park, where mass inoculations were undertaken. So right at the very end of the of the whole Covid Show here, late last October, I had the 2 doses, and got my QR code that, wonder of wonders, afforded me entry to bars, theatres, restaurants etc. — places that I had long ago ceased to frequent. And shortly thereafter, suddenly, as if by magic, the whole shit show ended: no more restrictions, no dire warnings of the approaching Grim Reaper of the Plague. All history now.
I visited Hong Kong in 2008 aboard HMCS REGINA; I loved the city immediately and while it was out of this world as far as the cost of living for residents, staying as a guest was surprisingly affordable and street food was cheap.
The western world is still not ready to concede that it has been had and the millions upon millions of 'doses' western countries bought really didn't 'save millions of lives'. There are fewer better examples of donkeyhood than Canada, where Trudeau the Younger bought something like 75 million doses for a population of about 35 million. There was a spastic attempt to give some away at the last minute because they were within weeks of expiry, but the poor third-world victims weren't having any and guessed correctly that Canada only wanted to get someone else to throw them away. I think that was the Astra-Zeneca, which nobody trusted very much.
I'll tell you what the pandemic did for me - it completely changed the way I look at the country I live in, forever. I watched people I would have credited with better sense shout angrily that mandatory vaccination must be employed to make the vacillators and holdouts get the shot. If they only menaced themselves, they could do as they pleased, but 'this virus' was going to kill other people and those walking germ incubators could not be allowed free will so long as their sickness menaced others. A majority was said to support 'vaccine passes' which would allow you to enter a restaurant or movie theatre with other right-thinking people who were proud to 'do their duty for the community', and a survey taken weeks later reported the concept had 'taken well' and even more people supported it; wanted it to continue even after the 'pandemic' was over.
In the end I got the initial two doses, because Transport Canada ordered a vaccine mandate and those who wouldn't take it would be placed on indefinite unpaid leave and eventually let go. A very few where I work held out and would not accept 'vaccination', and they were eventually called back to work without any repercussions at all. But I would have had to hang tight for another two months without work, and I have a family to support.
So now I have arrived at a place where I basically care nothing for other people with the exception of people I know well; any sense of 'community' or 'national unity' is gone, and I couldn't care less if the place is run by Trudeau or the disinterred corpse of Lenin. I don't feel any obligation to anyone else or any 'higher calling', and pay little to no attention to national politics except to marvel at the idiocy of the present leaders and observe much of the same among the opposition.