Tag: the new normal

COVID-19: Life won’t return to normal for at least two years, expert warns, saying pandemic ‘isn’t over until it’s over globally’

Life globally will not return to normal for two or three years based on the rate of the current vaccination rollout, it has been warned – but there are early signs jabs are reducing cases in the UK.

Speaking to Sky News, Dr Clare Wenham, assistant professor of global health policy at London School of Economics, said the COVID-19 pandemic will not be over until the world’s population is protected.

“At the moment, the data is showing it’s going to be 2023/24 before the global vaccines are distributed to everybody,” she said.

“That’s a long time. And distributing some now might be able to get us back to normal life sooner.”

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The Post-Pandemic ‘New Normal’ Looks Awfully Authoritarian

We’re told that life is never getting back to normal, so we need to suck it up and accept a world of mask-wearing, economic disruption, and social distancing. It’s a denatured echo of the warnings we’ve heard before that government responses to COVID-19 are pushing the world toward authoritarianism—but dressed up as if that’s a good thing.

That’s unfortunate, given that less-intrusive responses to the pandemic are proving at least as effective as heavy-handed ones. And that’s before we even discuss the inherent value of the freedom that looks destined to be pushed aside by public health concerns  and by disingenuous government officials.

“As 2020 slides into and probably infects 2021, try to take heart in one discomfiting fact: Things are most likely never going ‘back to normal,'” wrote CNN International Security Editor Nick Paton Walsh last week. In his piece he discusses the likely permanency of mask mandates, telecommuting, reduced physical contact, and similar changes to life.

Some of the alterations Walsh mentions may be matters of personal choice, but a good many of them are imposed by “politicians who pretend that ‘normal’ is just around the corner,” as Babson College’s Thomas Davenport says in the article.

We’re supposed to accept our newly constrained lives as “the new normal”—in a phrasing that’s already very tired, indeed.

Actually, repeated references to a “new normal” aren’t just tired; they’re ominous.

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Nearly two decades after 9/11, the parallels between the post-terrorist attack ‘New Normal’ & that of Covid-19 can’t be ignored

Both the 9/11 attacks and the Covid-19 pandemic have dramatically shaped Western society. But the changes they wrought were devastating and unnecessary, pushed through by control-hungry governments who saw opportunity in crisis.

While both the worst terror attack in US history and the deadliest pandemic in a generation were immediately hyped as the defining elements of the era, the uncomfortable reality is that neither terrorism nor the novel coronavirus pose any risk more severe than taking a bath.

However, the media hype – fueled by think tanks and governments drooling over the possibility of adopting controls that would normally spark popular revolt – has created the same climate of fear that allowed the imposition of the post-9/11 police state, paving the way for a post-Covid regime that will make the Patriot Act look cuddly.

The shocking changes to the American “way of life” that have followed both events were in no way required, or even logical, responses to the crises in question. It took an unlikely series of what the government described as “intelligence failures” for the events of 9/11 to fall into place, and the Trump administration scrapped completely adequate pandemic response plans to adopt a regime of lockdowns and economic shutdowns that will likely end up doing more harm than the virus itself. Had governments followed their own procedures, neither catastrophe likely would have happened.

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Invasion of the New Normals

They’re here! No, not the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We’re not being colonized by giant alien fruit. I’m afraid it is a little more serious than that. People’s minds are being taken over by a much more destructive and less otherworldly force … a force that transforms them overnight into aggressively paranoid, order-following, propaganda-parroting totalitarians.

You know the people I’m talking about. Some of them are probably your friends and family, people you have known for years, and who had always seemed completely rational, but who are now convinced that we need to radically alter the fabric of human society to protect ourselves from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or absolutely no symptoms at all) in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99.6% survive, which, it goes without saying, is totally insane.

I’ve been calling them “corona-totalitarians,” but I’m going to call them the “New Normals” from now on, as that more accurately evokes the pathologized-totalitarian ideology they are systematically spreading. At this point, I think it is important to do that, because, clearly, their ideological program has nothing to do with any actual virus, or any other actual public health threat. As is glaringly obvious to anyone whose mind has not been taken over yet, the “apocalyptic coronavirus pandemic” was always just a Trojan horse, a means of introducing the “New Normal,” which they’ve been doing since the very beginning.

The official propaganda started in March, and it reached full intensity in early April. Suddenly, references to the “New Normal” were everywhere, not only in the leading corporate media (e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, et al.), the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC (and the list goes on), but also on the blogs of athletic organizations, global management consulting firms, charter school websites, and random YouTube videos.

The slogan has been relentlessly repeated (in a textbook totalitarian “big lie” fashion) for going on the past six months. We have heard it repeated so many times that many of us have forgotten how insane it is, the idea that the fundamental structure of society needs to be drastically and irrevocably altered on account of a virus that poses no threat to the vast majority of the human species.

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5 Ways “The New Normal” is Getting Worse and Worse

From mandatory masks to mandatory tests to mandatory track-and-trace, the roll-out is on. It’s been a big few days for the New Normal narrative and, through the deliberately cultivated haze of confusion, it’s not hard to see the world they want to build is taking shape.

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