THE FEAR STRATEGY – published in Serbian daily "Politika" June 18th, 2020.

Could Covid-19 be the biggest peacetime catastrophe to befall us in living memory, or is  global manipulation of unprecedented proportions at play? Are the pandemic protective measures more dangerous than the disease itself? Are ordinary citizens so dim witted and irresponsible that the government must protect them from themselves, thus halting basic human rights and imposing unprecedented surveillance measures?

The draconian measures introduced by governments have been justified by advice from the scientific community. The problem is that this community has a highly heterogeneous structure of experts whose views on the pandemic differ significantly. The authorities have, for the most part, chosen to rely upon those experts who, on account of their catastrophic projections, initiated the implementation of absurdly restrictive, often illogical and inconsistent measures.

There are those in the scientific community who disagree with the official, somewhat dystopian, narrative. They consider the isolation measures to be disproportionate to the risk of infection and that they cause not only enormous damage to economies, but to health of the population too. Marginalising and censoring that segment of the scientific community raises considerable suspicion and uneasiness – what motives could lie behind the ignoring and silencing of reputable experts who think differently?

All the while, governments, duty-bound to calm hysteria and provide accurate information to its citizens, are doing everything to elevate fear and panic, and nothing to reign in the fear-mongering media. It is extremely hard to believe that panic and hysteria serve as a good means of saving lives.

Furthermore, the statistics do not support those who claim that this is a world crisis without precedent. A “disappointingly insufficient” number of people are actually dying, stubbornly refusing to comply with the catastrophic projections by staying alive. Not even the routine assigning Covid-19 as the cause of death has helped. In England, for example, 20% of those who have died have been over the age of 90, 74% were over the age of 75, while 90% were over the age of 65. In most of these cases, irrespective of age at death, there were notable pre-existing health issues. According to official data however, they all died from Covid-19. It seems that no one dies of old age anymore. Covid has furthermore magically managed to exterminate all other flu viruses, normally abundant amongst the population over the winter period.

At time of writing, on a planet whose population is estimated at about 7.8 billion people, about 440,000 souls have passed away. According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates from December 2017, up to 650,000 people die of seasonal flu-related respiratory diseases every year, quietly and without panic. (Covid-19 is that kind of disease.) Only when the number of Covid victims reaches 650,000 will the same mortality level, as mentioned by the WHO, be attained. The death toll will then have to rise a further 350,000 to equal the number of fatalities of the „Hong Kong flu“ from 1968. The estimated number of deaths of that flu ranged between one and four million people, at a time when world total population was half of that of today. Nevertheless, that severe pandemic did not halt life on Earth.

Fear strategists state that nothing will ever be the same again, at least not until we have the much-anticipated life-saving vaccine. They claim that millions would have died had draconian measures not been implemented, because that is what their “very, very” scientific and complex models show. These strategists ignore the fact that mortality varies significantly from country to country despite the implementation of similar measures, that there is no clear correlation between the number of deaths and the strength of lockdown measures, that there are proportionally vastly more deaths in Western countries than in Eastern Europe or the Far East. The lack of knowledge of the disease is thus compensated with an excess of panic.

And while the world trembles from this induced fear, economies are collapsing, unemployment is rising, the debts of states, companies and citizens are rising. Children are missing out on school, students are not attending college, critical operations are being postponed, essential therapies are not carried out. People are dying of preventable deaths because they do not dare go to hospital for fear of dying from Covid. Domestic violence is growing, anxiety, neuroses and psychoses are taking their toll. How many people have already died because of Covid prevention measures? How many will die when the current adrenaline “Covid shock” subsides? And how many will come out of this induced madness with a newly impoverished and ruined life? Who will take responsibility for that – the esteemed scientific community, perhaps?

Was this hysteria created by people with malicious intentions or those too close to the pharmaceutical industry and Bill Gates’ funds, or is it a consequence of a lack of knowledge, fear and hurried panic? Whatever the reason, one thing is certain – it is very convenient for authorities (democratic and the other ones, regardless) when citizens are “herded” indoors, when they lose perspective and common sense, and when they stop asking perfectly logical questions. If this is what fear strategists wanted, they appear to have succeeded.