NORMALISATION refers to a psychological process that makes something which is in reality highly unusual, seem normal. The unacceptable becomes acceptable, the insane comes to be regarded as sane.
There is nothing more insane or indeed more final than early and unnecessary death. And yet all of us are right now effectively in an extraordinary social experiment where people dying on a mass and daily scale has been normalised and presented as somehow acceptable.
Think back to two years ago to the times BP – the Before Pandemic age of innocence. If more than 100 people, week after week, had been dying in Scotland from a new disease, it would have dominated every news bulletin and every headline – and rightly so.
This is what has been happening over the last few weeks yet an ever-compliant London media have been talking about the pandemic in the past tense! As a result they have assisted in normalising the deaths of thousands of our fellow citizens. Only in the last few days, when third-wave Covid has hit England with a vengeance, have the broadcasters finally woken up to impending disaster. This is the reality which has disappeared from the headlines.
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Covid infection rates are out of control. Community transmission is rife. Almost 80% of the population has been double-jagged but that does not provide general protection.
Coronavirus has been allowed to breed by preying on the unvaccinated and the foolhardy. All of that had been combined with a series of disastrous policy blunders.
On what planet are schools allowed to return from summer holidays before a decision to vaccinate our teenagers? In what solar system are nightclubs opened up months before vaccination passports are competently introduced? In what universe are mass public events allowed before the contagion has been stamped out?
Of course, the death toll is much less than it was at the height of phase one of the pandemic or indeed phase two last winter. That is the impact of the vaccination programme weakening the link between infection and hospitalisation and death. But the link has been weakened, not severed.
The death rate is still high, far too high. In addition, the debilitating effects of long Covid are still unquantifiable but are clearly extensive and serious. And it’s likely going to get worse. We are on the threshold of a northern winter with a runaway infectivity rate and a health service buckling under the pandemic strain.
What’s more the clock is ticking on waning protection from the vaccines. The scientific evidence is clear enough, but the vaccination programme has slowed to a trickle. In the early spring, 60,000 vaccinations were being administered each day in Scotland. Now it is a mere 5000. Why this inexplicable slowdown when people are still unprotected? People are being kept waiting for second jags and now booster shots?
ANXIOUS 50-somethings are consulting the NHS “Inform” platform on a daily basis only to be met with the message that information will be posted “soon” on how to book a booster appointment. Apparently the “booking portal will be available from mid-November” and vaccinations will then be available through to January.
Just like the schoolchildren non-programme it is months too late and as a result many vulnerable people will catch Covid and some will die.
When the first Commons Select Committee report on the pandemic came out last week, the administrations across these islands came in for severe criticism. Understandably, grieving relatives are still looking for explanations over the incompetent policy decisions of spring 2020 which placed the elderly, in particular, at such risk.
There is at least something of a case for the defence on ministers. Covid-19 was a new condition in March last year and the scientific advisers mistook it for a bad flu pandemic. Under these circumstances it would have taken politicians of real vision and moral courage to avoid fatal mistakes.
However, there is no such defence available now. Covid is the most researched disease in history. It is no longer a known unknown. The measures required to stop it in its tracks are also well known and the abject failure of governments across the UK to do so is manifest.
The UK, the country which invented public health, already had one of the highest death rates in the world and now has, by a light year, the highest rate of continuing infectivity.
On Monday of this week there were more than 49,000 new infections in the UK – more than the USA, four times that of India where the Delta variant ravaged, seven times the number of Brazil where the Covid-denying president left the country defenceless.
The current Scottish rates are a bit below the UK average just because the third wave hit here a few weeks earlier following on the school timetable. But they are still far too high.
And into this cauldron of infection the UK Government is inviting 30,000 delegates to COP26 in Glasgow accompanied by an indeterminate number of protesters. If the summit was being held anywhere else, Scotland and the UK would be on the red list and not allowed to attend in person!
There is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, normal about this madness.
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