Vanja Figenwald: From Autumn, Covid Should Become Your Personal Problem

As expected, the arrival of the vaccine has brought with it a new kind of pandemic discussions, among them the most important one – how exactly we will conclude the story with Covid. The answer to this question is still being skillfully avoided by governments, focusing instead on achieving the highest possible vaccination rates, but it is already clear that we will soon have to finally decide whether the epidemic is over or not and whether any measures will remain after its end.

The matter is seemingly, but only seemingly, not simple as it implies a clear definition of criteria, a key element that has not existed from the beginning. Is the criterion the maintenance of a functional healthcare system? The ability of the population and the economy to cope with restrictions? The number of infected? The number of hospitalized? The number of deaths? The reproduction rate of the virus? The relative number of infected/hospitalized/dead (per hundred thousand or million inhabitants)? The percentage of vaccinated? Simply a political decision as in Slovenia?

As things stand now, vaccination rates have emerged as the decisive criterion for declaring the end of the epidemic, although this varies from country to country and no one has clearly defined it. Otherwise convincingly the largest and most prolific exporter of Covid hysteria, the United Kingdom, has decided, despite an extremely high vaccination rate, to postpone the opening of the country until next month because the infection has started to spread again in some places, although it seems that the number of deaths is not keeping pace with the number of infected this time, which is an extremely important factor in making a decision about the eventual end of the epidemic.

Personally, I believe that instead of exhausting ourselves searching for a usable criterion, the time has come to turn Covid into a personal health decision like smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, or obesity. In other words, the imposed violent collectivism that arose as a result of the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment should be replaced by the usual, albeit unpopular, personal responsibility. If there are enough vaccines and everyone can get vaccinated, just as everyone can quit smoking, overeating, and drinking, then Covid is no longer a social but a personal problem. Consequently, from autumn, or more precisely when vaccines, probably also the first approved treatments for the sick, become definitively available to everyone, measures should be completely abolished and (truly) declare the end of the epidemic. When I say completely, I mean completely. There should be no measures, Covid certificates, or restrictions at all. Just as there are no certificates and restrictions for the flu, for example. No one wants to get it, and so many get it and a significant number die (sometimes over 600,000 globally in a season), yet no one even blinks.

Some will note that there are people who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons or that some fall ill despite vaccination. To that, I can only respond that I am very sorry, but I am not the right address for complaints – turn to those who can be vaccinated but do not want to. High vaccination rates also reduce the possibility of virus circulation and mortality, it becomes clear, and even the esteemed American Johns Hopkins now suggests switching to counting hospitalizations instead of infections as the main criterion for making decisions about the epidemic. Likewise, some American states have already abolished daily counts of infections in favor of weekly or biweekly counts. What about the new, more virulent variants that arise due to virus circulation? Vaccines can be adapted very quickly, within a few weeks, it is not an unsolvable problem. Moreover, so far, no relevant reduced efficacy has been proven for any of the existing variants despite the hysterical ramblings of various scientists scared of their own shadow. Do vaccines have side effects? Which drug doesn’t? Are some serious? Have you read the paper that comes with Aspirin? Was it developed too quickly? I think that about 20 years is not really fast. Was it tested too little? About 2.7 billion people worldwide have received various shots so far, that seems like a pretty large sample. Do we not know the long-term consequences? Okay, let’s stop our lives for ten years to be completely sure. In general, without prolonging about Bill Gates, Donald Trump, 5G, and the global pedophile conspiracy combined with the global pharmaceutical conspiracy, the point is to switch to personal responsibility for one’s own health as in the case of so many other diseases. As a society, we have given as much as we could. This disease is becoming less and less a collective problem day by day, and more and more an individual one, and somewhere from autumn it is time for everyone to take care of themselves. Or not care. And that is, in fact, freedom, although many have forgotten it in the last year and a bit.