Why dealing with Corona makes me despair
by Guy Mettan, freelance journalist, Geneva
(3 October 2021) In her editorial last Sunday [12 September], Ariane Dayer talks about a “Swiss secret” and asks why so many Swiss people hesitate to get vaccinated. An excellent question... to which she was careful not to answer. She contented herself with saying that we “should try to understand”.
That is precisely the problem. Since the beginning of the crisis, no one has tried to understand why a large part of the population was sceptical about the proposed solutions. The medical technocracy, the politicians and the media have never bothered to do so. They refuse to question anything, even the slightest thing, and despise those who dare to ask questions and demand answers that go beyond the usual authoritarian arguments, along the lines of “shut up, we know better than you”.
But I am grateful to my colleague Ariane for opening the door for me the moment I decided under pressure to get vaccinated because I care for an elderly person. So I will try to explain why I was – and still am – not against vaccination but against compulsory vaccination and the way this crisis was handled.
First, I would like to point out that my concerns are not based on an aversion to technological risks, nor are they directed against medicine or science as such. Without it, I would have died two or three times already, and I voluntarily underwent eye surgery in Cuba, paying the hospital a hundred dollars to start up the generator, in case of a power cut during the operations scheduled for that day.
In summary, there are two main reasons for my despair: the feeling of being taken for a fool and the refusal to admit that the measures taken are a grave violation of freedom and democracy, the former violating my personal dignity and the latter my dignity as a citizen.
From the beginning I was shocked by the inertia, then by the incompetence and finally by the disproportionate nature of the planned measures. I still remember how the French Minister of Health, Agnès Buzyn, and Daniel Koch1 declared on television in January 2020 that the virus would not reach our countries and that we had nothing to fear. Two months went by without anything being done, and then it turned out that we had neither the necessary material nor the infrastructure, that we were told lies (about wearing masks and about tests that were not recommended before they became compulsory) and that we tried to blame China and the WHO to better hide our failure.
These initial mistakes could have been forgiven if the effort had been made to apologise, but this never happened. Worse, the excesses continued by imposing general and indiscriminate measures (not envisaged in the pandemic plans), by forbidding general practitioners to treat their patients (an impertinence!), by turning old people’s homes and nursing homes into gulags with no access for relatives (regulations worse than prison), and by banning any empirical treatment attempts, even if they are as harmless and proven as with hydroxychloroquine (recommended by the director of Novartis at the beginning of the crisis) and ivermectin (awarded a Nobel Prize).
To this day, I do not understand why these treatments are still being fought against, despite the scandal surrounding the Lancet journal being forced to retract an article, despite remdesivir (recommended despite its harmfulness and ineffectiveness), despite the failure of the European Discovery study (which was supposed to analyse their effects), and why they still require long and very costly randomised trials, while the vaccines were approved before the last phase of the study was completed. In this context, I am very surprised that in the case of the AIDS vaccine project, the discovery of which has just been presented, two years of in-depth studies are foreseen before possible use, while it took only a few months for the Covid vaccines to be approved.
This has done much to sow doubt about the integrity of medical research and hospital technocracy. It seems to want to protect the pharmaceutical cartel by demanding randomised trials that only big pharmaceutical companies can afford. This impression is reinforced by the fact that universities and hospitals refuse to disclose to the public the researchers’ vested interests and the amounts they receive from private foundations and Big Pharma for their research. At no point during the crisis have they bothered to explain to the public how they can improve their natural immunity through lifestyle, diet, vitamin intake, etc.
Nor does the non-transparency of the contracts for the purchase of vaccines, the approval procedures, the chemical composition and the immense profits made by the manufacturers on the backs of the taxpayers, speak in their favour. Finally, the doubts are all the more justified because the recognition of Chinese, Russian or Cuban vaccines is stubbornly refused, under pretexts that probably have more to do with politics and protectionism than with medicine.
Politically, the handling of the crisis was even worse. One had the impression that politicians were engaged in a constant competition for coercive measures – to see who would be the first to propose the most extreme measure in order to get on TV and make people forget the initial negligence. Then, with the support of the media, the fear-inducing blackmail began: bed occupancy rate, number of daily deaths and reproduction rate of the virus made headlines for months before being largely forgotten! Today, during the introduction of the Covid certificate, no figures circulate any more, except for a hypothetical over-occupancy of beds (which is primarily due to a reduction of available beds!) It is no longer even known according to which criteria the vaccination obligation is imposed and could be lifted again. At the same time, the effect of vaccination is diminishing, as is the case in Israel, one of the countries with the highest vaccination rate in the world, but whose infection and mortality rates are not decreasing (see Le Figaro of 5 September).
One could also cite the stubborn refusal of elected representatives to be accountable, to take stock of crisis management, the pestering of hapless café and restaurant owners and theatres that have turned their halls into disinfection chambers, to acknowledge the violations of fundamental rights, to enforce a concealed blackmail of the unvaccinated, even though the law forbids compulsory vaccination, dividing families and society into mutually hating clans (many vaccinated people, far from being appeased and pacified, their anger at the non-vaccinated is intensified), sacrificing generations of pupils and students by denying them the right to unhindered access to education.
Finally, mention must be made of the media, which has played a disappointing role throughout the crisis. They lacked a critical spirit towards health technocrats, ridiculed sceptics, multiplied moral lectures and futureless announcements, and refused to let critical voices be heard even when they came from the most established academia, denied the devastating effects of the measures on public liberties and mental health, and ridiculed alternative models such as the Swedish one, which successfully managed the crisis without patronising its citizens nor endangering their liberties.
In short, there are always good reasons to doubt. In a month’s time, if all goes well, I will have been vaccinated, be in supervised freedom and show my Covid certificate every time I go out. However, it will take me a long time to forgive the ignominy I have experienced. I will always be able to console myself with the fact that, despite all the announced disasters, the deadly Covid pandemic has allowed Switzerland to increase by 61,000 new inhabitants and the world population to grow by another 70 million souls per year...
| * Guy Mettan is a political scientist and journalist. He started his journalistic career with Tribune de Genève in 1980 and was its director and editor-inchief in 1992–1998. From 1997 to 2020, he was director of “Club Suisse de la Presse” in Geneva. Nowadays he is a freelance journalist and author. |
1 Head of the Communicable Diseases Division of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) at the time.
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)