Making our flesh creep

'Then what can you want to do now?' said the old lady, gaining courage. 'I wants to make your flesh creep', replied the boy. ('The Pickwick Papers')

Here is the story in the Daily Mail on Friday.

A doomsday new Covid variant that could kill up to one in three people is a 'realistic possibility', according to the Government's top scientists.

Documents published by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) today warned a future strain could be as deadly as MERS — which has a case fatality rate of 35 per cent — could be on the way.

I don't feel like commenting. I just want to record it.

Oh wait, I shall comment. The word 'could' is doing a very great deal of work here, as it does all the time in news stories. 

Best to read about what has happened, not what will happen. You save a lot of time that way.

I don't believe a word of this scare. Doctors feel it is their duty to scare us. 

As a genuinely Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury said, 'If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome'.

But if it were true, it would mean vaccines have failed - yet politicians are bribing teenagers, who have no need to fear Covid, to be vaccinated. 

Will any self-respecting teenager be bought like this? I suppose so.

No wonder paranoid people weave conspiracy theories.

Knut Witkowski, an epidemiologist whose opinions are not allowed in the mainstream media, warned that lockdowns would lead to variants of Covid-19 and cause far more deaths than would happen without lockdown. 

But I don't believe the British need worry. 

And Romania?

Romania had only one lockdown that ended in May last year and vaccinated a lot of people much faster than most countries on the Continent (a.k.a. Europe), though much less fast than in the UK. 

Romania now seems to have reached a glass ceiling, after 5 million out of 15.5 million adults have been vaccinated. 

Most of the rest don't want a vaccine, especially people in the countryside, where Covid is much rarer than in towns (something that's true worldwide). 

Romanians do not believe things the authorities tell them, unless perhaps the priest. 

It's telling that the Patriarch, who celebrated his 70th birthday recently, has not been vaccinated. Had he been vaccinated that would have influenced people.

Lots of Romanians I know (lawyers, 'intellectuals', people with jobs in international companies) say they will not be vaccinated.

Meanwhile the number of cases is now very few, far below the EU average and below even Sweden, which had no lockdown at all, let alone the UK.

Let's see what happens. 

How tedious all this is. 

I wonder if people in 'the West' will still believe the experts on climate change or anything else after this. 

The answer seems to be yes, very much so. 

They believe in all sorts of things, like the Black Lives Matter movement. Their credulity seems to have no limit.

Romanian scepticism is something Western civilisation needs.