by Michael Tomlinson, Activist Post:
In the ongoing struggle to write the history of the pandemic years, nothing is more important than mortality – did the world’s governments save us from mass mortality or not?
The grand strategy (which as I have said before was neither grand nor strategic) was to lock down the population of whole countries as an interim measure ‘until a vaccine becomes available.’
This was a novel (and completely unproven) strategy to defeat a supposedly completely novel virus, on the grounds that no human had ever encountered anything like SARS-CoV-2 before so no one would have any pre-existing immunity to it. But the clue is in the name – SARS-CoV-2 was named after SARS to which it was closely related, sharing approximately 79% of its genome sequence according to this paper in Nature. It is situated within a cluster of coronaviruses, and another Nature paper discussed the extent of cross-reactivity with these including the common cold viruses, and even with other families of viruses altogether. It was somewhat novel, but not unique.
