The “New ABNORMAL”, the “organized solitude”

… From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic

… covid represents the first time ever in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations

… the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria

… they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics

… from isolating the symptomatic to enlisting those with natural immunity, who had recovered from the illness, to care for the sick

… Lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures

… In 1968, an estimated one to four million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic

… businesses and schools stayed open and large events were never cancelled

… We did not do this before because it does not work; and it inflicts enormous collateral damage

… In March of 2020, lockdowns were an entirely de novo experiment, untested on human populations

… a novel mode of social organization and control—what I call the biomedical security state, the “New Abnormal”

… The term “lockdown” originated not in medicine or public health but the penal system

… Prisons go into lockdown to restore order and security when prisoners riot

… “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”

… a kind of overbearing medical terror was deemed necessary

… a sort of super civic spirit, with imposed obligations presented as demonstrations of altruism

… citizens no longer have a right to health safety; instead, health is imposed on them as a legal obligation (biosecurity)

… The new imposition of health as a legal obligation—biomedical security—was accepted with little resistance

… we lived through the design and implementation of not just a novel pandemic strategy but a new political paradigm

… more effective at controlling populations than anything previously attempted by Western nations

… to reflect on the chosen term, social distancing, which is not a medical term but a political one

… We had already been psychologically primed for over a decade … by using digital devices to limit human interactions

… The specter of people with no symptoms being potentially dangerous—which never had any scientific basis

… In the past, a person was assumed to be healthy until proven sick

… needed a note from a doctor establishing an illness

… we began to assume that people were sick until proven healthy. One needed a negative covid test

… It would be hard to devise a better method than the widespread myth of asymptomatic spread … to destroy the fabric of society and to divide us

… People who are afraid of everyone, who are locked down, who are isolated for months behind screens, are easier to control

… A society grounded on “social distancing” is a manifest contradiction—it’s a kind of anti-society

… human and spiritual goods we sacrificed to preserve bare life at all costs

… friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting and providing the sacraments to the sick and dying, worshipping God, burying the dead

… Ordinary human contact—our most basic human need, was redefined as contagion—a threat to our existence

… We already knew that social isolation could kill

… increasing a whole host of health risks and decreasing life expectancy

… It is no accident that one of the most severe punishments we inflict on prisoners is solitary confinement—a condition that eventually leads to sensory disintegration and psychosis

… con l’acquiescenza della Chiesa, durante i lockdown abbiamo abbracciato e promosso attivamente quella che la filosofa Hannah Arendt ha chiamato “solitudine organizzata”

… a social state she identified as a precondition for totalitarianism in her seminal book, The Origins of Totalitarianism

… continued with forced vaccinations & discriminatory vaccine passports, mandated for novel products with minimal safety and efficacy testing

… The resultant carnage … was not … collateral damage inflicted by coronavirus

… No, this was collateral damage inflicted by our policy response to the coronavirus. Unless we learn from these policy failures we will be doomed to repeat them