Apologies to Harrumpfers for my extended silence – my duties as a chorister in two intensive programs with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra – Mahler’s Second Symphony and Brahms’ German Requiem have claimed much of my attention.

I had hoped that the war in Ukraine would make good the hazard deficit that underlies the psychology of Covid catastrophism, and certainly there seem now to be many fewer people seized of the belief that Covid is a genuine threat to their lives. Many pointless, irrational anti-Covid measures linger, however, and, notwithstanding the valiant efforts of our leaders to pretend otherwise and sheet the blame home to the bogeyman Putin, printing money by the trillion and then forcing people to stay at home and stop producing stuff that could be bought with it really has brought back inflation on a scale we had thought, until 2020, had been forever banished.

I’m reminded of Jonathan Swift’s perceptive remark “You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into.” Nonetheless, as Prof Matthias Desmet has counselled, the only way to prevent the ‘mass formation psychosis’ to which he attributes the perverse response to Covid from developing into full-blown tyranny is for those of us who mercifully escaped it to keep plugging away, and confronting our fellow citizens with the lamentable truth about the madness to which they have been party, and for which they must bear their share of responsibility.

I’ve been slow to pick up on the talks given by the excellent Dr John Campbell, but here’s one from July 7^th that ought to give even the most committed covidista pause for thought. Excess deaths in the UK are running at about 16% – that is, 16% more people are dying than would statistically be expected. The figures for Australia are remarkably similar.

Dr Campbell draws attention to the fact that, in the UK, deaths FROM Covid comprise a minority of the total. Of course, to a true covidista, the only deaths that really matter are those from Covid – so unbalanced has their world view become. Now, it would be counter-scientific to declare, simply because a period of unprecedented non-pharmaceutical intervention was followed by a spike in deaths from causes other than that which the intervention was designed to combat, that that intervention was the cause of the spike. But it surely merits a thorough government investigation.

That, however, would require a willingness among the turkeys who gave us this catastrophe to vote for Christmas – so I’m not holding my breath.

Tom Forrester-Paton