Pandemic of law

This article appeared in an adapted form in the issue of La Verità of 15 November 2020. At that time, due to an editorial mistake, some provisional numerical elaborations were published. The following text and the explanatory notes amend and supplement what has been published in the printed version.

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Working months ago on these pages of "lockdown", I observed that no real or presumed problem, simple or difficult, sanitary or non-sanitary, individual or collective, can be solved by depriving itself of the resources necessary for its solution. Then I stressed, among other things, that in order to protect a community at risk it is necessary to put those who are not at risk in a position to make that protection effective. Today's case does not deny the rule and indeed the corollary confirmation of a broader natural law: if the most fragile are exposed to a certain danger, the remaining population is called to take action so that they enjoy care, protection, income, physical support. and moral. Not to deactivate as the logic of the "lockdown" preaches, which in undermining the productive capacity and serenity of those who should take charge of the vulnerable, extends vulnerability to everyone, multiplies the quantity and quality of danger and makes reaction impossible.

After having written these things, all things considered obvious, I found that the awareness of the contradiction was much more extensive than I imagined. Apart from the few "experts" who managed to bring it to television screens, more and more people measured the disproportion between the even officially limited damage of the problem and the universal ones of its "medicine". With the return of the autumn closures, large crowds occupied the Italian squares to claim the right to live from their work and thus contribute to the well-being, and therefore also to the health, of their community. These were not heretical positions or – whatever that means – "deniers", if it is true that on 9 October one of the special envoys of the WHO for the Covid-19 emergency, David Nabarro , declared in a videocast of the magazine Spectator that

we at WHO do not invoke lockdowns as the primary means of controlling this virus . The only situation in which we think a lockdown is justified is one where you have to buy time to regroup […] but, in general, we don't recommend it. […] Look at what is happening at the poverty levels. World poverty could double within the next year. […] It is a terrible and frightening global catastrophe, so we strongly appeal to world leaders: stop using lockdowns as the main method of control. Develop better ways to do this. Work together, learn from each other, but remember: lockdowns have only one consequence, which you absolutely must not overlook, which is to make poor people terribly poorer.

There Dr. Nabarro did not even mention the Covid-19 disease, " a normal disease " (so Dr. Roberto Bernabei , a member of the CTS of the Government) which, affecting almost only people of no longer working age, could not even come close to the monster goal to double poverty in the world. The "terrible and frightening global catastrophe" was instead that of its alleged remedy, already announced in April by the UN World Food Program, according to which the hundreds of millions of people afflicted by hunger would double due to the "lockdowns", and suffered in an exemplary way even by a developed nation like Argentina, reduced to poverty after eight months of uninterrupted closure and nevertheless … of uninterrupted growth of infections.

Of the many ways in which "lockdowns" erode everyone's health for free, the economic one is only the most obvious. With unemployment, bankruptcies, impoverishment and precariousness, not only the physical and mental well-being of individuals deteriorates, but also the wealth of the tax authorities of all and therefore the possibility of enjoying public services, including health services, whose present "trouble" It will therefore only worsen due to the lack of fiscal resources to be allocated to personnel, machinery, drugs and structures. To this emerged part of the problem must be added the deeper one of the inconvenience caused by the uncertainty of the future, the fear of sanctions, of confinement in the home (which, Bernabei himself warns, " kills like the virus "), of the isolation of the most fragile and of the fear of undergoing health services even for much more lethal diseases such as oncological ones, whose screening would have already dropped by almost one and a half million units in the first half of the year. The most worrying part is missing because it has a long effect, the one affecting children and young people, who without having to fear the new disease gulp down the alleged drug more than anyone else: with segregation, separation from peers, lack of physical activity at 'open, the decline of education and school dropout, the alienation of distance learning and computer addiction. The psychological, emotional and cultural wounds inflicted on younger people, documented in almost 3 out of 4 cases by a survey conducted last spring by the Gaslini pediatric hospital , become chronic and are transmitted to future generations.

Adopting any definition of health, there is no doubt that "lockdown" is today in itself a pandemic pathogen capable of producing a vast spectrum of syndromes and complications, even fatal ones . It would therefore be urgent to carry out epidemiological studies on its impact on the populations involved, as has already been done in the past when dealing with the effects of fiscal austerity. Pending such investigations, the available experiences and data can be used to sketch a comparison between the "lockdown" pathogen ( L ) and the viral one ( C ) of which L would like to be the antidote. ^[1] In terms of morbidity, C produces symptoms in less than 0.5% of the Italian population ^[2] and since the beginning of the epidemic it has severely or critically affected 0.1%, ^[3] while L it's hitting everyone (100%). In terms of pathogenicity and lethality, C can trigger a mild (36.5% of cases) to severe (5.8%) ^[4] respiratory disease and does not cause death in 97.8% of infected with less than 80 years (99.1% in those under 70), ^[5] while to date only 174 of the deceased (0.02% of the infected) did not already have ongoing chronic or serious diseases. ^[6] L can trigger one or more disabling pathological states linked to material, social and emotional deprivation, sedentary lifestyle, stress, conflicts and limited access to social and health services, whose potential lethality is documented, but not yet quantified in case. Furthermore, C kills individuals with an average age equal to the national life expectancy ("shoot the old ones", quoted by Bernabei), while L threatens life in every age group, having to date tripled the mortality among heart attacks and infants and promising tomorrow to make cancer deaths " the next pandemic ." Finally, in terms of social impact, C imposes greater caution towards sensitive groups (third and fourth age, immunosuppressed, chronically ill, etc.) especially in the areas most at risk and an enhancement of dedicated health services, while L demands the closure of schools , universities, theaters, parks, sports facilities and commercial establishments, the repression of some constitutionally ordered rights, loneliness, hardships throughout the population and an economic recession of many percentage points.

The epidemiological indicators available and approximable by order of magnitude suggest that the health risk represented by L clearly exceeds that of C , both for the number and severity of the associated pathologies, and for the universality of the subjects who express them, individually or in comorbidities. For these reasons, while the greater lethality of its individual effects remains to be verified, it is plausible if not certain – according to the reported alarms of health and international experts – that it is destined to express a much higher overall mortality. The hypothesis that lockdown syndromes represent the most important new pathological event, albeit neglected, which today threatens the well-being and life of the world's populations, must therefore be accepted. That, in short, the first epidemic to be worried about is that spread by the practice of "lockdowns" , all the more incomprehensible not only as it seems rather far from maintaining the containing effects it promises, ^[7] but even more because it is produced – this once for real, without imagining conspiracies – in the laboratory, artfully designed by men, meticulously codified in the laws and inflicted on citizens by the public force, so that the antibodies of work, sociability and criticism are not activated. Instead of stopping it, the artificial epidemic thus set up has outclassed its natural antagonist in every possible dimension and shielded it to add to the contained and contained damage of the virus the irrepressible damage of its own fury, and put humanity in a circle of destruction that nature alone could never have achieved.

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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/pandemia-di-legge on Mon, 16 Nov 2020 09:37:37 PST.