As I said, it was/is a novel virus, now mutating into just one of the myriad of common cold viruses. And yes, it had an impact. But those poor people who died of it were, on the whole, already ill.

I am certainly not trying to downplay the individual tragedy but in a much colder way of looking at things, viruses are part of the background noise of humanity having an evolutionary purpose in terms of impacting on those who are older/weaker. Just the way of the world.

The Spanish Flu was different, as is influenza generally, in that it mutates far quicker and has the potential to kill outside of the usual groups. Covid 19 was/is horrible, and measures had to be taken (although the debate is still to be had on that when everything is known) but the reality is that in any society in which resources have to be directed, does it really rank with the wider damage of conditions such as cancer and so on which impacts on a far wider range of the population?

This is where I believe the real debate/discussion lays and why I am led to understand that this hype around 'Monkey Pox' is part of that wider issue.

Edited by Matov (26 May 2022 9.28am)

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." - 1984 - George Orwell.

It's a silent "K"

We have no way of knowing that but we should do. With all the money spent (and we are talking hundreds of billions) why could we not have a detailed assessment of every death to reveal the true danger. We are supposed to have had some 178,000 deaths in the UK over two years from a population of some 68,000,000 but we know these were deaths "within 28 days of a positive test" so the actual number will be significantly lower. Even if you take this figure as realistic COVID deaths we are still looking at mortality of something in the region of 0.1 percent per year which is a normal bad flu year. The argument is that it would have been worse without lockdowns and other measures but we know now that it's not the case due to places like Florida and Sweden where there were very limited measures put in place. It made no significant difference.

Also note that excess mortality was higher in 2021 than 2020 when we didn't have the vaccine. You don't have to be any kind of expert to work this out.