Originally posted on March 17, 2021. Reposted here without edits. On March 9, 2021, CBC published an article on its website under a rather worrying headline – “New outbreak of COVID-19 in B.C. care home where 82% of residents were already vaccinated”1. At face value, in fact, the headline is downright alarming, since the last […]
Originally posted on June 15, 2021. Reposted without any edits. Thus past Sunday, June 13, 2021, The Guardian published a fairly lengthy piece on the present flare-up of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia, in particular among native and migrant factory workers1. The piece in general is laudatory, describing at times truly atrocious conditions and circumstances faced […]
Originally posted on December 30, 2020. Reposted here without edits. There is a lot more to be said on the subject, and especially on the juxtaposition of “individualism” and “collectivism” in contemporary propaganda, both in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and as a more general phenomenon. Let us establish a few core principles before […]
Originally published on June 24, 2021, reposted with only the tiniest of edits. Notably, in recent months it seems that even many healthcare facilities in the US have by and large dispensed with masking or with any other form of COVID-19 protections. Given the insistence of the Biden White House that we must now learn […]
Originally published on May 1, 2021. Republished with minor grammatical edits. There are press conferences, and then there are press conferences. In April of 2020, when the COVID-19 epidemic was raging across the state of New York, especially in New York City, the state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, began to hold daily press conferences updating the […]
To start with, when any given government is forced to confront an outbreak of any kind of disease, there are three and only three broad policy approaches to choose from: Ignore the epidemic. That is to say, adopt no special policies or additional public health measures to address this specific outbreak. Respond in force. This […]
Given that the COVID-19 pandemic is still upon us, now more than three years after it first appeared, with well over a million already dead and hundreds more dying every day in the US alone, it seems appropriate to devote at least the first few posts of my revitalised blog to the topic. Before turning […]