After a year and a half of covid, what have we learned? By Stephen Spartacus.

What if there is no level of vaccination that will provide the “safety” promised by the political, bureaucratic and modelling class? What if Covid, like many other diseases, just won’t go away and no current treatment will take us back to pre-Covid life? What if there are certain problems that are beyond the wit of government and man to resolve?

Israel has reached 80% of population vaccination yet is still experiencing Covid infections and deaths. Will Australia again be locked down if, having reached 80% vaccination, it similarly experiences Covid infections and deaths? …

It has long been clear that our political and bureaucratic class will spend obscene amounts of other people’s money to solve the unsolvable. Are Covid lockdowns just another example of this?

Are covid and other, future pandemics more or less inevitable now that all eight billion humans are effectively so close in terms of disease spread? Was the era of cheap and easy international travel just a brief interlude, never to be repeated? What if the threat of disease — or biological warfare — makes interconnected groups too vulnerable, so we have to mostly remain in isolated groups?

It seems unlikely, but it is possible.

The primary reason most animals reproduce sexually is to incessantly jumble up our immune systems — reshuffling the deck — which allows us to defeat bacteria and virus most of the time. Asexual reproduction and natural selection of pathogens would pretty much ensure disaster otherwise, as pathogens could evolve to target a stationary target — a common immune system that didn’t change. (Matt Ridley wrote an interesting book on this in the ’90s.) So we already pay a large price in our never-ending fight against bacteria and viruses. Avoiding living in large groups might be another price we have to pay.