Thought of the Day - January 18 - A Year Ago

It has been a year now since I first heard about the Novel Coronavirus. I first saw the story via YouTube on channels such as Agenda Free TV (Steve Lookner), then Peak Prosperity (Dr. Martinson), at this point the discussion was the handful of people ill in Wuhan, China. Mid-January there was really no information in the popular press, but a little digging and it became evident that this was going to be an issue - particularly when I saw the main reporting was all about how this was being covered up, and whistle-blowers were "disappearing" - quite different from the bubonic outbreak in China a couple of months earlier. From then I started driving friends, family, and later-on neighbours, crazy talking about how our lives were going to change. But took me until the beginning of February, as we headed to Mexico, before I really started to comprehend by how much.

As the saying goes "where there's smoke, there's fire". I was staggered to see the lengths that people in the know were taking - many covering their asses before the public woke up - so I knew this was big. Two quick examples:

• reputable medical journals, such as The Lancet, were hijacked with articles about SARS-CoV-2. These articles were getting published without proper peer review. One that comes to mind from last February stated that: "[We were] becoming threatened by rumours and misinformation around its [SARS-CoV-2] origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" - this, it turned out, was not to be based on any evidence but rather an opinion piece by the folk (such as Peter Deszak) who funded the CoronaVirus research in Wuhan - yikes;

• and when US senators, after their first "briefing" on the Novel Coronavirus, quickly began dumping stocks before an inevitable market "correction".

Okay so here we are a year later, several million people have succumbed to COVID-19. And the world has changed, but, then again, in a lot of ways it really hasn't.

Cheers

Cliff