An elderly and unhealthy population
Sir David Behan former CQC chief and former director of social care
In the 21st century we are living longer in the UK, but we are not necessarily enjoying healthier longer lives, and our added years are not always comfortable ones.
Life expectancy has, until recently, continued to rise, and alongside this, people are taking an increasing number of underlying health conditions into their later lives – these conditions include coronary heart disease, diabetes, cancer and obesity.
The issue is not just the nature of these conditions, but also the numbers of people who are reaching old age with these conditions. We know there are more older people in the UK than younger people.
A difference between my generation (Baby Boomer) and those before me is that they had more children. Now, decades later, those children have reach their later life and make up a large demographic bloc, many with comorbidities, and needing care.
Looking ahead, given the UK’s current age dependency ratio, this is an issue which is only going to increase. This will have significant implications for the health and social care systems which will face growing pressures as they try to keep up with the growing demand.
This is all particularly pertinent at present, during the Covid-19 pandemic. We know this virus disproportionately affects older people, and those with underlying long-term conditions.
In care homes, by the very nature of the support they provide, there are residents who are elderly, and with comorbid conditions.
This brings into the focus the impact of Covid-19 on care homes, and the numbers of residents who have contracted the virus, and of those you have sadly lost their lives.
It also brings into focus the scale of the challenge that care homes across the country are currently facing, and the heroic efforts of those working in care homes, on the ‘second front line’ of Covid-19.
If the case for longer term reform for the care sector was not already strong enough, Covid-19 has highlighted the fragility of the sector, and made the case for reform even stronger so that the sector can continue to support the UK’s growing health needs in the 21st century.
Pssst. You.
Yeah, you.
Are you interested in talking about…things? You know, the kind of things that we’re not allowed to talk about anymore? You know, since the…uhhh…“The Event“?
You are? Great. I mean, you might have noticed things are getting a bit hairy out there. As in, you’re likely to get your head bitten off for daring to suggest that things may not be totally ok with the “new normal.”
It seems all these new social norms and cultural taboos that have arisen in the past few weeks have also created a raft of new thoughtcrimes: Things that must not be spoken for fear of being expelled from polite society . . . or worse.
That’s why it’s so vitally important for us to speak out about our concerns before these socially-policed thoughtcrimes become literal crimes. As I’m sure you know, if these new social norms are not confronted, voicing dissent will soon become impossible.
So, allow me to voice some thoughtcrimes of my own. But be forewarned: I assure you that you will find at least some of my ideas to be offensive. You will disagree with them strongly. You will become irate.
The real question is: What are you going to do to those voicing opinions you disagree with? Engage in dialogue with them? Or demand that agents of the state scrub their speech from the internet and lock them in a cage for their thoughtcrime?
Well, either way, I’ve already committed thoughtcrime numerous times in recent weeks, I might as well share them with you. Are you ready? Let’s go.1. We have met the enemy . . . and it is our neighbors
People imagine that when the boots-on-the-ground tyranny arrives, it will be enforced by the police or the military. Newsflash: the boots-on-the-ground tyranny is here, and it is being enforced by your neighbors, Joe Sixpack and Jane Soccermom.
Need proof? How about all the new “snitch lines” that are opening up in city after city and state after state all around the globe to help good citizens tattle on neighbors who aren’t practicing proper social distancing?
That’s right. It’s not just guys yelling out their windows in Brooklyn anymore. Now whenever you see someone within two meters of someone else it is your duty as a loyal citizen of the Brave New World Order to actively report them to the authorities so that they can be dealt with by Big Brother. Rest assured, a score card is being compiled for each jurisdiction, and the powers-that-shouldn’t-be are keeping a list of who’s being naughty or nice (Good job, Minnesota!).
Still, while we can all unequivocally and universally agree 100% with the idea that anyone who physically approaches another human being in this Year of our Virus 2020 deserves to be charged with manslaughter for their heinous act, maybe, just mayyyyyybe—and I’m just spitballing, so forgive me if this seems brash—we’re heading into dangerous territory here. You know, what with the social distancing Stasi becoming the enforcers of our new police state nightmare and all. Call me crazy.
When 9/11 happened, there was a marked and notable intensification in the propaganda glorifying the American military. Not that such propaganda didn’t exist before, but it was nothing like what we’ve seen since “the day that changed everything.” Yes, the hero worship of veterans is one of the hallmarks of the Age of Terror that 9/11 ushered in .
So if this plandemic is the new 9/11, what’s the new hero worship? Well, it should be obvious by now: Doctors are the new soldiers. Now we must dutifully show our appreciation for the brave medical workers on the front lines of this new war…or face yet more social castigation.
You may have noticed the interesting phenomenon making its way around the world. I call it “The Totally Spontaneous Balcony Applause Phenomenon.” Yes, completely out of the blue, all the people under lockdown have decided to show their appreciation for the valiant doctors and nurses in this heroic struggle by going to their balcony at a pre-appointed time and applauding. And no, this totally spontaneous phenomenon is not just occurring in one or two countries. Or three or four countries. But in seemingly every country around the globe.
Just like that. Just out of the blue. Must be something in the zeitgeist, I guess.
Now you’ll forgive me for being out of the loop, but as you know the corona madness has not quite made its way to Japan yet. (But, precisely as I predicted, the very same day that the Tokyo 2020 Games were postponed the Tokyo Governor suddenly became gravely concerned about her city, and they are now going to “have to” lockdown Tokyo unless the poor plebs behave.) So I don’t know exactly how people decide on the right time to go to their balcony to applaud. Is it done by vote? What if I’m a few minutes late? Will people think I’m clapping for something else? What exactly is the etiquette here?
Here’s my thoughtcrime: I find these displays creepy and off-putting. I find the glorification of doctors and nurses unsettling. Not because I think they are all quacks. Not because I think they are all evil. Not because I am not grateful for the work that (some) doctors do (some of the time). Not because I don’t recognize the enormous stress that these doctors and nurses are under right now. But because this socially engineered adoration is going to be used to push an agenda exactly like the glorification of veterans was used to push the militarism agenda of the post-9/11 years.
This time, we are being asked to glorify doctors and nurses because these are the same trusted experts whose authority cannot be questioned who are going to be giving you the vaccine. You know, The Vaccine. The one that will bring an end to the then 18-month long psychological siege that we are being placed under.
What?? You still question the vaccines? You still dare to defy the authority of these brave doctors and nurses who risked their lives for us? You can’t say that, you disgusting conspiracy mongering throughtcriminal, you!
Be honest, you know that this push is coming. And they are getting the public to sign on with all these “spontaneous” balcony applause sessions. So perhaps you’ll forgive me for not joining in.
I am still baffled by the attention that otherwise sane human beings are given to the latest reported numbers from this or that health agency about the scourge of Covid-19. People are throwing around CFRs and R0s like they’ve been studying epidemiology their whole lives. In truth, they’re just regurgitating whatever they saw on CNN or were told in the latest Governor Cuomo press conference.
So what do we make of the baffling discrepancy in death rates from Covid-19 between different countries? Why is Italy’s death rate from the disease a staggering 10% while China’s is more like 4%? And what does that mean for the 70% of humanity that “experts” warn will be infected by this virus?
And while we’re at it, why don’t we ask some equally meaningful questions, like: What color is the Easter Bunny? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? And just how tasty is the cheese that the moon is made of, anyway?
As I demonstrated weeks ago, methods for diagnosing this disease vary so widely from country to country that making comparisons between countries isn’t even like comparing apples and oranges. It’s like comparing apples and aardvarks. And diagnosing a particular type of viral infection via CT scan? How can we possibly trust the infection numbers that are being generated by such methods?
All of that would make the calculation of mortality rates for this disease problematic enough. But, to make matters worse, we don’t even have an accurate tally of the number of people who have died from Covid-19. Take the infamous Italian example, for instance. We’re told that the staggering death rates in Italy (roughly 10% if we go by the official numbers at press time) are a sign of just how deadly this new virus can be.
…But there’s some problems with those numbers. As Prof Walter Ricciardi—scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health—recently revealed, “The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.”
So how many of the people who are reported as “Covid-19 deaths” in Italy actually had coronavirus listed as their cause of death? Just 12 per cent. What’s more, according to the Italian government’s own report, half of those who died had three or more other diseases at the time of the death. Nearly 80 per cent had at least two other diseases that they were fighting when they died. Only 1.7 per cent of those who died had no other disease.
But why listen to James Corbett, conspiracy theorist, or those silly Italian government health advisors on this matter? Well, I’m not alone in this suspicion of the official numbers. It turns out the “Our World in Data” research group that has been attempting to keep track of the coronavirus numbers has stopped using the World Health Organization’s data because “we found many errors in the data published by the WHO when we went through all the daily Situation Reports.”
And John Ioannidis — who Corbett Report listeners will remember launched the replication crisis in science with his landmark 2005 paper on “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” — has recently come out questioning whether the current Covid-19 response is “A fiasco in the making.” As Ioannidis observes:
The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.
After this current madness passes, people will view the public’s blind acceptance of these practices in the same way that we look at the public’s blind acceptance of bloodletting and other methods of medical chicanery from times past.
OK, so you still insist on taking these phony baloney numbers seriously? Then let’s take another looks at that Italian report on those dying with (not of) Covid-19.
The report tells us that the median age of those who have been pronounced dead with (not of) Covid-19 is 78. To put that number in perspective, the average life expectancy in Italy is 82.8.
That means those who are dying with (not of) the disease are within years of reaching the average life expectancy (and, let’s not forget, they are also suffering in the vast majority of cases from at least two other diseases). I venture to say that a similar panic could be raised about just about any viral disease in circulation if it was being reported in the same way as this coronavirus is being reported.
Since we’re committing thoughtcrimes here, let’s be blunt: “Elderly Patient With Multiple Complications Dies After Contracting Respiratory Illness” is NOT a news story. It’s a daily fact of life.
But in fact, it is a news story. I have been keeping tabs on how the Canadian MSM have been covering the pandemic panic and saw a segment on one of the national news broadcasts about a woman whose 91-year old mother died in a nursing home. It was implied that this 91-year old woman’s life was tragically cut short by the coronavirus and, to make matters worse, her daughter was unable to hold a funeral or service for her mother because Canada is currently under lockdown. I don’t know if I have lost touch with reality or everyone else has, but let me reiterate: This is NOT a news story.
Don’t get me wrong: Any such death is doubtless a tragedy for the family involved. My heart genuinely goes out to all those who lose their relatives in such circumstances. But this is not something that we upend our entire civilization over. We do not stop all productive human activity on the planet, collapse the economy, send millions upon millions of people to the unemployment line, institute lockdowns, and begin talking about mandatory vaccinations, internal passports and other abrogations of essential human freedoms on such a basis.
In fact, if I were to be dying at the age of 78 due to some viral respiratory illness along with my other 78-year old cohorts, I can guarantee that I would be outraged that the powers-that-shouldn’t-be were using my death to upend the liberties that I had spent my life attempting to defend. It is disgusting.
“But what about the young people who die of the disease?” you ask. Fair enough. Again, according to the official reports (which, let me remind you, should not be trusted), there are people under the age of 78 who are dying from the disease as well, albeit in much smaller numbers. And, according to the “models” from the “experts” (who, let’s remember, are right about everything), there could be hundreds of thousands more deaths before this pandemic runs its course.
Well, that brings me to my ultimate thoughtcrime:
People die.
Sometimes they die of car accidents. Sometimes they die of work-related mishaps. Sometimes they die of old age. Sometimes they die under extremely questionable circumstances while trying to shed light on information that is uncomfortable for the deep state. And, yes, sometimes they die of respiratory illnesses during viral pandemics.
I’ll go one step further: Our mortality makes us who we are. Humans are blessed and cursed with a knowledge of our own fate. No one makes it out of this life alive. And so the question of what we do with our lives becomes paramount.
But more and more, death is being removed from life. Our elderly are shipped off to nursing homes to whither away so that we don’t have to face aging. The funerary industry is neat and anti-septic. Death has become an abstraction. Something that happens somewhere out there, to other people. Not to us, though, surely.
But this entire pandemic madness seems to be predicated on the notion that disease and death are somehow avoidable. That we have conquered such things. Or, at least, that no new disease could ever possibly arise (bioengineered or not) to upset our perfect balance with nature. I mean, yes, many people die of the flu every year, but that doesn’t count. That’s not new.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t work to cure diseases and improve our health. Quite the contrary. It’s just that this current bout of hysteria seems almost anti-human; as if we should be able to transcend our mortal humanity.
CJ Hopkins, in his characteristically humorous way, points out the absurdity of this “War on Death” in his latest article:
We can’t let these Russian dissension sowers, neo-Nazi accelerationists, and coronavirus-sympathizers confuse us. They want to convince us that Death is, yes, scary, and sad, but inevitable, and natural. How utterly heartless and insane is that?!
No, we need to close our minds to that nonsense. People are dying! This is not normal! Death is our enemy! We have to defeat it! We need to hunt down and neutralize Death! Root it out if its hidey hole and hang it like we did with Saddam!”
I don’t know why the idea that death is a part of life should be controversial. But, given that even a respected blogger like Craig Murray can be largely lambasted by his own audience for daring to post similar musings, I suppose that it is. I don’t know anymore. Perhaps I’m off my rocker.
All I know is that the room to express dissent on these topics is fast disappearing. It’s time for those of us who can tolerate thoughtcrime to circle the wagons. The Thought Police are closing in.So maybe you disagree with me. Maybe you’re offended by what I say. Maybe you have your own thoughtcrimes that you’re afraid to express. But if we don’t engage in dialogue about these ideas now, what are the chances that this information will be easier to share in the future?
So what’s your thoughtcrime? Share it with the community in the comments below.
Since death is one idea that has no history except as an idea and not a reality any of us have experienced, it is the most frightening idea there is and also quite simple. It is the ultimate unknown. It has always haunted human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously.
It lies at the root of war, violence, religion, art, love, and civilization. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, why we like to win and not lose, pass and not fail, “pass on” and not die. It is so funny and so sad. We would be lost without it, even when we feel lost when thinking about it. And it is fundamental for understanding the action and reaction to Covid-19.
Societies have always been people banded together in the face of death. And since people are not just physical beings but symbolic creatures who can think and imagine the past and the future, societies are necessarily mythic symbol systems whose job is not only to protect people physically, but symbolically as well.
Sometimes, however, the protection is a protection racket with racketeers holding people hostage to fabricated fears that keep them locked in a living-death.
Thus death, this most potent imaginative idea and reality that doesn’t exist except as a mystery about which anything we say is speculation, can be used for good and evil, depending on who controls society.
Death is the great fear, the human haunting that hangs by a thread over life like the sword of Damocles.
In 1944 in a newspaper column, George Orwell made an astute remark:
There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated…. I would say that the decay in the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.
Beliefs, of course, like “personal immortality” and all others, such as the recent rise in the belief in atheism, which is as much a belief as belief in God, are, partially at least, relative to time and place, and develop out of social storytelling. The “hard facts” on which many feel their lives and security rest are themselves dependent upon the symbols which give them legitimacy.
Reality is indeed precarious with society suspended by a web of myths and symbols. It is through cultural and social symbol systems that society’s meaning is transmitted to individuals, and it is within the symbol systems that the control and release of action resides.
In today’s electronic mass media world, those who control the mass media that control the narrative flow – the storytelling – control the majority’s beliefs and actions.
Since society is held together by this myth system – the beliefs and values people live for and live by – that sustains it, societies have always had to offer symbolic “answers” to death. For without a meaningful symbolic for coming to terms with death, human action would be stymied and people would be reduced to what the psychiatrist Allan Wheelis termed “intense, preoccupying yearning.”
Today we can hear such yearning everywhere.
Shortly after Orwell made his prescient comment in The Tribune, nuclear weapons were developed and used by the United States to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians. With those weapons and their use, the ages-old symbolic narrative of life and death was transformed in a flash.
“The significance of the possibility of nuclear death is that it radically affects the meaning of death, of immortality, of life itself,” wrote Hans Morgenthau.
The traditional symbolic sources that once served to allow humans to transcend death were fundamentally undercut, and the search for new modes of death transcendence was carried on beneath the portentous covering of the nuclear umbrella.
A qualitative transformation in the meaning of human existence was thus brought about as humans, who had the weapons, replaced the belief in God as the holder of the power over life and death, since nuclear war could result in the extinction of human life, leaving no one left to die.
This is our world today, and it is where the Covid-19 story takes place. A world not just of nuclear fear, but a host of other fears constantly inflamed by the mass media that hypnotize people through the conjuring of death-fear.
In his great work on group psychology, Freud showed us how it was not just mental contagion and the herd instinct that got people to join in group behavior. People could be induced to become little children and obey their leaders because they have “an extreme passion for authority.”
When leaders speak, the children hear the inner voices of their parents telling them to be careful, be very careful, the bogeyman is everywhere, so listen and obey. Freud, the Jewish atheist, and Dostoevsky, the Russian Orthodox Christian, were in agreement about people’s desire to give up their freedom to authority figures who would allegedly shelter them within their warm embrace.
The easiest way to do this is to convince people that death is stalking them, for the bogeyman is always death in one form or another.
It works to get people to support the terrifying sadism of wars against fabricated “others,” who are always portrayed as aliens who are out to kill the good people.
It works to get people to give up their freedoms out of fear of “terrorists,” who are said to slide and hide in the interstices of everyday life, ready to pounce and kill at any moment.
And it works to get people to obey orders to protect themselves from terrifying viruses that are lying in wait everywhere to strike them dead.
In his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky said that people want miracles, mystery, and authority, not freedom. His Grand Inquisitor, while a fictional creation, lives on in reality.
For the Grand Inquisitor represents those power elites across the world who wish to cower people into accepting their dicta on Covid-19 as truth without questioning its logic or rationale.
To question has become an act of insubordination deserving death by censorship or the defiling of one’s name via the term “conspiracy theorist,” a name used by the CIA to dismiss anyone questioning its murder of President Kennedy. Death comes in many forms, and the fear of it has always been used by the powerful to render the common people speechless and obedient.
How can any thinking person, anyone not totally crippled by fear, not question what is going on with the coronavirus disaster when reading what Peter Koenig, a thirty-year veteran economist of the World Bank and World Health Organization, writes in his article The Farce and Diabolical Agenda of a ‘Universal Lockdown’:
The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.
There is no coincidence. There were a number of preparatory events, all pointing into the direction of a worldwide monumental historic disaster. It started at least 10 years ago – probably considerably earlier – with the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report, which painted the first phase of a monstrous Plan, called the “Lock Step” scenario. Among the last preparatory moves for the “pandemic” was Event 201, held in NYC on 18 October 2019.
The event was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the club of the rich and powerful that meets every January in Davos, Switzerland. Participating were a number of pharmaceuticals (vaccine interest groups), as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s of the US and – of China.
One of the objectives of Event 201 was a computer simulation of a corona virus pandemic. The simulated virus was called SARS-2-nCoV, or later 2019-nCoV. The simulation results were disastrous, killing 65 million people in 18 months and plunging the stock market by more than 30% — causing untold unemployment and bankruptcies. Precisely the scenario of which we are now living the beginning.
The Lock Step scenario foresees a number of ghastly and disturbing events or components of The Plan to be implemented by the so called Agenda ID2020, a Bill Gates creation, fully integrated into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) – target date for completion – 2030 (also called Agenda 2030, the hidden agenda unknown to most of the UN members), the same target date for completion of the Agenda ID02020.
I ask the question but I am afraid I know the answer: miracle, mystery, and authority usually defeat evidence and simple logic. Fear of death and free thought scare children. The Grand Inquisitor lives on:
But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it.
Death: A simple idea with such a powerful punch.
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