The Post-Partisan Emporium

Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal · December 3, 2021 In October 2021, it seemed as though the lockdowns that still paralyzed societies from Australia to New Zealand and Singapore were coming to an end, as these countries threw in the “Zero-COVID” towel following a year and a half of rolling restrictions and closures. But with COVID-19 cases rising in Europe, several countries are implementing lockdowns all over again, often with clearly punitive motivations.  This November, Austria’s government announced that police would enforce a lockdown exclusively against unvaccinated citizens . Following days of massive protests, the policy was extended to everyone, with steep fines and even prison sentences to be imposed on those who refuse to comply, and a compulsory vaccination requirement tacked on for good measure. Next door in Germany, where a new lockdown was announced this December for unvaccinated people , barring them from almost all public places except for pharmacies an...

COVID Insanity: A Further Surge Omar Khan An Opening Salvo A viral strain cannot be a peg by which we assess what we can and cannot achieve, who we can or cannot be, or the contours of social, economic and national destiny. Moreover, all the largely evidence free, almost madcap nostrums rolled out, have failed. Sweden, where they were ignored (no lockdowns, no mask mandates, no school closures) and where sanity prevailed, boasts a lower all-cause mortality in 2021 than in 1991 (and many intervening years since). In the East Coast of the US, both infections and deaths are higher this “vaxxed” autumn than the preceding autumn. The same is true in the UK. Baffled we may be, but data is data. Lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates have all flopped and backfired. Governments devastated their own societies with illogical, unsound, unscientific policies that we will be decades recovering from, and whose precedent will cast a shadow over civil liberties for quite some time to come. The ...