“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. ”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Designate a public enemy. Paint them as responsible for society’s ills. Pass ever-increasing punitive measures against them, all the while expanding the power of the state, in the name of protecting the people. Every step of the way, the public will cheer you on.
Adolf Hitler. Josef Stalin. Mao Ze Dong. Dictators and tyrants across history have employed this stratagem to great effect. And now it has come to Singapore.
Singapore announced new Covid measures yesterday following a spike in transmissions. These include:
- Home recovery protocol as the norm for Covid patients, except for partially or unvaccinated individuals aged 50 and older, vaccinated people aged 80 and older, children below one year old, and children between one to four years old assessed to be clinically unsuitable for home recovery.
- Unvaccinated people are barred from shopping malls, attractions, hawker centres and coffee shops. They can still buy takeaway food and visit large standalone supermarkets.
- Fully vaccinated people are only allowed in these places as individuals or in pairs.
The government claims that this will ‘protect the unvaccinated and reduce the strain on the healthcare system’. A deeper investigation reveals that this claim is absurd.
Singapore’s Covid mortality rate is 0.125% (153 deaths out of 124157 cases). The overwhelming majority of Covid deaths in Singapore occur among patients above the age of 60 with 2 or more comorbidities. Outside that demographic, deaths and critical illnesses are extremely rare. By allowing patients that don’t require specialist medical treatment to self-isolate and recover at home, this reduces the strain on the healthcare system.
In Singapore, living in family units is the norm, as is living in multi-generational family units. In families of mixed vaccination status, self-isolation and home recovery will expose the unvaccinated and partially vaccinated to the disease. Similarly, in families that have not been vaccinated, everyone at home will be exposed to the virus. It is more difficult to isolate a patient with a contagious disease at home than in a hospital with a specially-designed contagious disease ward and well-trained and -equipped staff. I will not be surprised if home-based clusters will form next.
If Covid were so mild that even the unvaccinated can be allowed to recover at home as the default, why should they be subject to more stringent rules in the first place? Why do they even need ‘protection’? Why do they need to be protected from the protected who took the protection so they can be protected against the virus?
The US CDC claims that the unvaccinated are 11 times more likely to die than the vaccinated. However, given that the mortality rate of Covid in Singapore is just 0.123%, such a figure is statistically meaningless. Should an unvaccinated person who is not in the at-risk demographic catch the virus, he is extremely likely to recover. Upon recovery, he gains natural immunity, which is 13 times more effective than the Pfizer vaccine against the Delta variant.
With the Delta variant of Covid, there is no difference in viral load between a vaccinated and unvaccinated carrier. The only difference is severity of symptoms, and even then, only for 6 months at best. This means that a vaccinated carrier is just as contagious as an unvaccinated carrier.
Why bar unvaccinated people from indoor spaces?
This is an extremely onerous restriction due to Singapore’s geography. Urban Singapore is designed along its roads and public transportation network. Buses and trains connect every major neighbourhood and urban centre to every corner of the country. In 2020, the MRT and LRT train networks saw a daily ridership of 2.162 million, while bus ridership was measured at 2.878 million a day. Every major bus interchange and train station terminates at or near a shopping mall.
In some places, the train station or bus station is integrated directly into the mall: exiting requires passing through the mall premises, or else taking a very long roundabout route. In the downtown area, some stations have underground shopping arcades, which may or may not be counted as a mall under these new rules.
The shopping mall is the heart of Singapore’s urban life. Eateries, childcare centres, medical clinics, supermarkets, hairdressers, gyms and other vital services are embedded in malls. These rules bar unvaccinated people from essential services in urban areas.
The unvaccinated can still visit small standalone shops. Most of these, however, are sited in and around older public housing estates. Accessibility is far limited compared to malls with bus and train services, especially for Singaporeans who cannot afford their own vehicles. Reducing the accessibility of medical services during a pandemic is counterproductive to ending it. Reducing the accessibility of other services further compounds the misery of the people for little gain.
With so many retail jobs concentrated in malls, banning unvaccinated people from malls means that every unvaccinated worker must also be let go or placed on indefinite leave. As far as I can tell, there is no exception for such workers. At the same time, the government has also made it illegal for companies to fire workers solely because of their vaccination status.
This presents a legal difficulty, one that has clearly not been thought through.
It is probable that these frontline workers will continue to operate under the current vaccinate or test regime, or an even more stringent version of it. Nonetheless, there is still nothing in the news about this. Expect unvaccinated workers to be fired anyway, because this law gives unscrupulous bosses an excuse to do it. Even if mall workers were allowed to get tested instead, the cost of each test must be borne by the employer or employee. No matter which way the government leans, the livelihoods of frontline workers and their families will be affected.
Hawker centres are another critical component of Singaporean life. These are food courts that offer cheap and quickly-cooked food, the staple for the busy working professional. Hawkers run on tight profit margins, relying on volume of sales to make a living. Earlier pandemic measures that forced hawker centres to switch entirely to takeaway cratered the income of hawker stores. Many of these hawkers are senior citizens with little grasp of technology or the English language, and thus are shut out from food delivery platforms. Food delivery apps also charge a fee for delivery, forcing hawkers to either raise their prices or eat massive losses. To save the hawkers, the government relaxed the rules for hawker centres earlier this year. Reducing the number of patrons so dramatically will send shock waves through the hawker centres once again, further reducing their income.
The overall effect of these measures is to shut out unvaccinated people from most public spaces. In so doing, it causes significant knock-on effects to small businesses and lower-income families—precisely the same groups that have been and continue to be hit hardest by government responses to the pandemic.
The true tragedy of all is that this will not influence Covid transmission the way the government thinks it will.
99% of Covid transmissions take place indoors, or even as high as 99.9%. By banning unvaccinated people from public spaces, the virus will spread among vaccinated people instead—and in homes with recovering patients.
The vaccine reduces severity of symptoms, and asymptomatic Delta carriers can spread the virus. An unvaccinated person who catches the virus and develops symptoms knows he is sick. He will then be likely to seek medical attention and isolate himself. A vaccinated person who catches the virus but does not develop symptoms will not know he is sick, unless he goes the extra mile and spends the extra money to test himself regularly. This means an asymptomatic person is likely to continue spreading the virus, oblivious to that fact that he is a carrier.
The vaccine is non-sterilizing. It does not kill the virus completely. It does not even prevent transmission. It could even worsen transmission. As Malo Gato notes, it’s possible that the vaccinated are driving the spread of the disease. With these new rules, Singapore is likely to see this over the coming weeks and months. Unlike superspreaders of other diseases, a vaccinated Covid Patient Zero will not develop symptoms, and statistically a number of patients around him won’t either, so it becomes even more difficult to contain the infection.
How will the government ‘protect the unvaccinated and reduce the strain on the healthcare system’ by introducing policies that increase the likelihood of silent superspreader events?
The answer is simple: It’s not meant to do that.
The purpose of these policies is to place even more pressure on the unvaccinated. By systematically shutting them out of urban life, the government aims to coerce them into taking experimental ‘vaccines’ that do not stop the spread of the targeted disease and are vastly more dangerous than all vaccines combined.
Neither the government nor the press will show you the image below.
This is a vaccine mandate without formally legislating a mandate. It is rule by bureaucratic fiat, decided not by the duly elected representatives of the people, but faceless bureaucrats and ministers in high office.
These measures are nothing less than medical discrimination, and poorly-planned discrimination at that. With a pliant media and a silent opposition, there is nothing to stop measures from getting stricter over time. There is nothing to stop the government from steadily ramping up the pressure, until at last the vaccine becomes mandatory and all holdouts are re-educated.
Not that this will quell the pandemic.
Countries that pushed for mass vaccination programs saw an uptick in deaths shortly after an increase in new vaccinations. Palestine, the UK, Cambodia, Thailand.
Singapore reported 29 deaths from Covid in 2020—and 124 in 2021. The difference was the rise of the Delta variant, which was allegedly less deadly than the Alpha strain, and mass vaccinations beginning in December 2020.
The implications are statistically interesting, and you are not supposed to notice this.
It’s easy to comply. Just two jabs, both of them free, and you can get (most of) your life back. If you don’t, you will be shut out from public life or be forced to take Antigen Rapid Testing, which costs $15 per test—and which is good only for one day. But once the state can force you to comply with this, they can force you to comply with everything.
Covid measures will not stop at 2 jabs. It will become 3 jabs, as it already is in Israel, and then it will become regular biannual shots. Proof of vaccination will become a requirement to hold a job or buy groceries, as it already is in Lithuania, and failure to keep up with the jabs means losing everything you have. Wearing the mask and taking the vaccine becomes a highly-visible test of loyalty and obedience to the state, in the guise of a public health measure. Everyone who refuses to take the loyalty test will be branded as enemies of the people and spreaders of disease, so everything that happens to them next will be justified. After that, whoever fails to keep up with ever-changing regulations will become the new enemies of the people, and the new targets for the state. The government can claim to restore the freedoms once a target is hit, freedoms that they took away in the first place, then renege on their promises by claiming that the situation has changed.
The government will always find new reasons to justify new measures to grant themselves more power and force compliance.
What can we do?
Do not participate in the system. Do not repeat the propaganda. Do not remain silent.
The truth will emerge in the coming weeks and months. We will see the true impact of these measures, and the costs. Already there is growing resistance to vaccinations in Singapore. As much as the government insists that the vaccines are safe, word is spreading of the deaths and injuries that occurred after taking the vaccine. Likewise, word is spreading of the states that lifted restrictions and implemented treatments smeared by the media, and saw Covid numbers drop dramatically.
Continue to speak the truth, without fear and favor, and it will be revealed in the fullness time. Until then, we must continue to hold the line.
“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
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