Q-104 - 13th Dec 21 - Omi Omi    

Dr dear Dr: What is the reasoning behind the Government's new restrictions under the umbrella of Plan B - Is there a Christian Response to all of this tinkering around with social health issues?

Once upon a time the annual winterval Flu-jab was just such a big deal for many people with arguments flying back and forth about this tiny little honey bee of a jab, that it all seemed such a huge debate every winterval gone wrong. Now since Covid 19 fast becoming Covid 22, as the Russian pop band Tatu might put it, Covid has driven a huge truck of viruses right through the walls and barriers and bases of the Army of health workers who once looked after the empirical lives and bodies in beds of the people, and who once looked so kindly on their poor patients as mere victims rather than modern threats to their own health, reminiscent of scenes from the Song, “Not Gonna Get Us”, once a huge hit at the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest with the Red Army in the background singing in pleasurable English, and now on the lips of most Russian children. Strange times - how times have changed even within one calendar year or so. 

As Dr Karl might put it - Many people have short memories in general in traumatising times such as in international pandemics with people dropping like flies. At the beginning of the pandemic back in February 20-20, it was very hard for the then civil liberties government to get the whole pandemic response effort off the launch pads of the country in that timeframe, chiefly because already many people on the ground were invoking the Human Rights Act 98 against any response of a governmental nature, pointing to the laissez-faire attitude of Sweden as a better template. Few of the government lawyers bar one had read the small print of the Human Rights Act which could eventually come to the aid of an interventioniste government in time, but there we go, the rest is history.

As of today, the 13th December 2021, there is now one recorded death from the Omicron variant with 10 people hospitalised with the new variant. The health secretary stated that about 20% of people with the virus have the Omicron variant, but it was pointed out that the ratio of Omicron variants to Delta variants was growing, doubling every 2 days so that by tomorrow, the 14th December it was expected that 40% of people with Covid would have the Omicron variant. A virologist though on Russia Today managed to get out a more sobering message. He stated that this beast is much more complicated than the standard single mutation type of virus in the past up to that point. This beast has about 30 variations in the spike proteins so it is difficult to control and harder to counteract. It might even be something so different in terms of the normal run of things, that it might well be a new virus introduced into Botswana and RSA from elsewhere. Lots of African nations on the red list at that time. Both Javid and Boris are now stating that the best thing to counteract this new variant is the 3rd booster jab and this they have urged. Dr Jane Harvey from the vantage point of her vaccination center in town pointed out that they were managing a superhuman effort of 2,000 people jabbed each day, so some progress there. But what if this virus is so different in terms of mutation that it must be identified as a new virus, introduced from elsewhere? Wuhan?

We can only speculate. Some contacts at the old Royal and Commonwealth Society at St Giles in Oxfordshire point out to me from their assets on the ground in such African countries that although this variant is more transmissible and more fluid, it seems not to require hospitalisation and does not generally result in death, unlike the previous ones of Beta and Delta, but they also report that lots and lots of Sino-Soviet workers have been operative for some time in those countries while building infrastructure and mining diamonds and gold, so there seems to be some speculation about the origins of this new variant, so much so that some posit that it is not a mutation occurring naturally in the field as it were but a new virus of the genre that has been introduced to the area in the Deep South in Africa. Whence? Wuhan? We can only speculate.

Christians can only pray. A unified or maybe uniform Christian Response is yet to emerge, but generally Christians have sought to cooperate with the impossible bind that the local civil government has now found itself in - it has been a monumental task to get anything remotely governmental even off the ground in this timeframe - nothing would have happened if it wasn't for that lone wolf governmental lawyer I mentioned up above from Middle Temple - chiefly because in the election manifesto of 2019 this government had naturally and innocently promised everybody, before Wuhan 2019, from Tom to Dick to Harry that they were a civil liberties government, low taxes - low spending - low interventionism, but the virus does not bother to read political manifestos, helas. That day of Wuhan 2019 was sprung upon all of us like a huge oriental trap. Christians then have tried to go along with governmental programmes and governmental solutions to some pretty big scares. They can do no other for the time being. This is not the time for anti-government resistance, most feel. So it seems that most of the churches and faiths have simply agreed to batten down the hatches. Few have looked beyond the times to other challenges to come in this sector of the Human Rights Act itself. But it is not about law, this is increasingly about survival as nations and nation states. Dr Newman from Carolina says that this is about the very concept and survival of the nation-state itself. Government too - old categories like those blue Wallersteiner manifestos more and more out the window. Christianity can help, but it needs to be asked, and preferably nicely.