‘Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings.’
Etienne de la Boetie, The Politics of Obedience
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Four years since the Covid saga began, it is tempting to write the whole thing off as a surreal nightmare, an unexpected vacation into the Twilight Zone, a temporary glitch in the Matrix…. but for me, and I suspect for millions of others, it was the moment when a curtain fell across my life, separating my existence into Before and After.
My Covid story began much earlier, in October 2016. One afternoon I had just returned home from the shops when I received a phone call from my 78 year old father bringing the awful news that he had been diagnosed with suspected liver cancer, something that was confirmed a few weeks later. Thus began three years of surgery, remission, relapse, chemo, radiotherapy and finally in August 2019 the news that nothing more could be done. The only positive of a pretty ghastly time was that my dad’s illness inspired me to move closer to him and our relationship also became closer as a result.
On the morning of the 1st of November 2019 I was at the station about to board my usual work-bound train when I received a distressing phone call from my stepmother. My dad had had a fall and an ambulance was on the way. On arrival at their house I found the paramedics there. In the previous weeks my dad had been struggling with pain in his back and legs and he had already had one minor fall. This time he had got out of bed to go to the toilet and had fallen beside his bed, lying there for some hours before my stepmother discovered him.
A fairly nightmarish day ensued with my dad now barely able to move his legs and having to undergo the indignities this necessitated. Eventually he was diagnosed with sepsis and also that his tumour was now pressing on his spine. The consultant he finally saw seemed confident though that this could be rectified.
Sadly, this turned out not to be a false hope and it soon became apparent that my dad had lost the use of his legs, a hard blow for a proud and independent man. Initially he came home, confined to an uncomfortable medical bed in the living room with carers coming in to attend to his hygiene needs. He celebrated his 82nd and final birthday at home but days later another infection saw him return to hospital.
During this time the UK general election took place, and I cast what I strongly suspect will be my last ever vote on such an occasion. Politics was a strong interest of mine, at least as a spectator sport if not from an ideological perspective. I voted Conservative as I usually did, as despite some misgivings about the competence of Boris Johnson he wasn’t the radical socialist Jeremy Corbyn who I thought could only lead the country to disaster – rather ironic, with hindsight.
Hindsight also brings the great regret that my dad ended up in a care home. He had always said that he never wanted to be in such a place, but with the loss of his legs and his regular infections the doctors recommended he be in a nursing environment. I should have resisted this and found another way to take care of him, but convinced myself it was the only option - an immense regret given subsequent events. The nursing home was not exactly the Hilton either. The staff were generally very nice if thinly spread, but conditions such as the food and access to wi-fi were nothing to write home about.
I had myself signed off work, and every day my stepmother and I would visit my dad, keeping him company and doing the little jobs that were often overlooked by the care home staff and bringing him snacks and clothes as needed. He remained pretty stoic despite the awful situation, but occasionally he did reveal the pain and suffering he was going through.
When did I first hear of Covid? Probably early January, when it was just some vague rumours of a virus in Wuhan, China. Something to do with bats in a wet market. I remember joking about it with my dad and assumed like the bird flu of 2009 nothing would come of it. I returned to work part-time at my teaching job, and some of my students being from China and Hong Kong seemed slightly concerned about it. But there was certainly no suggestion this was going to be something significant.
My dad had come close to passing away in February, when he fell into a very deep sleep and could not be roused, and I was preparing myself for the worst when to our delight and surprise he suddenly came round, baffled as to why we were so concerned. His siblings came to visit him, and most of the time he seemed to be in reasonable spirits although it must have been very hard. He did break down once in our presence and after that we pushed to get him into a wheelchair which gave him a boost as he was able to leave his room for the first time in two months.
Even in early March Covid remained a background story, and I recall joking with an acquaintance about not shaking hands. I also remember a student from Austria saying that there was a curfew there and laughing at the very idea that such a thing could happen in the UK. Suddenly, the mood changed and it was being heavily hinted that a lockdown was coming and that schools and shops would be closing. Having suffered from germ-related OCD for many years, the idea that there was an invisible killer virus that could live on surfaces and travel in the air was my worst nightmare. So even though on a rational basis I was not actually that worried about Covid, my anxious brain was triggering me into non-stop hand-washing and surface-wiping. I wasn’t worried about catching it, purely about infecting someone else. Hindsight again. I can’t believe now I was so naïve as to even remotely believe the nonsense being spewed.
On the 17th of March my dad called me and said he had been quarantined in the home and no visitors were allowed. To my shame, I felt a brief moment of relief, as my OCD about infecting him was briefly diminished. Quickly the reality of not being able to visit him dawned, having to leave a shopping bag of supplies for him at the nursing home door instead of going in, and constant struggles to even get hold of him on the phone. It was a truly awful time, and no doubt for many others in a similar position.
The full lockdown which began a few days later, I was against from the start, even if the virus was a threat, it seemed like a huge over-reaction to close everything down. I remember watching Johnson’s televised speech and thinking ‘this will kill more people than Covid’; which of course turned out to be true.
I also remember thinking that surely, no one would obey these absurd rules? However, on the Monday morning after Boris’ announcement I walked the 20 minutes or so to the care home from my flat and I was absolutely astonished that aside from a couple of cars I was literally the only person on the streets. I passed a large B&Q and there were a couple of staff hanging around outside, they seemed pretty surprised to see me. I really had no idea just how compliant people could be; or was it just that people were enjoying the prospect of an extended paid holiday from work?
Of course, not being able to see my dad gave me a strong personal reason to be against the lockdown, although my eternal regret is that I didn’t just demand to see him and if necessary force my way into the care home, or just get him out somehow. He passed away just over four weeks in, and there’s no doubt in my mind that his life was shortened further by not seeing his loved ones. What did he have to live for? I recently looked back over some texts from that time and they are truly painful to read. What he and so many others must have endured due to those lying bastards… My only consolation is that he got out at just the right time. He was too young to have to fight in the War, was just the right age to enjoy the 60s, made enough to be reasonably comfortable from the 80s onwards and left the stage just as Western Civilisation committed mass suicide.
The ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’ nonsense was extended indefinitely. I taught online to my bemused A-Level students who were struggling to maintain any kind of motivation with their exams cancelled.. As April dawned it was like my dad was dead already. I remember standing on the street opposite his window hoping he might be able to see me, but of course he could not even rouse himself from his bed.
We were there on his final night, the care home calling at 2am on Friday 17th April to say we could come in. We found him eyes open, breathing rapidly, and unresponsive, and he passed away a few hours later without saying anything, but at least he didn’t die alone. There were many who were not so fortunate including a colleague of mine’s husband who died in hospital the following year having had only Ipad communication with his family in days leading up to his death.
My dad, being a humble guy, specified ‘a very modest funeral service’ in his will. It turned out to be a little more modest than he might have expected with only eleven mourners (one more than officially allowed!), and no wake afterwards. While we were arranging the ceremony I asked the undertaker if they were busier than usual, and he said if anything they were less busy, with most of the deaths non-Covid ones. This just added to my sense that there was a huge over-reaction going on.
Meanwhile, I was continuing to teach my students. Being a private school we had resources and continued to conduct all lessons albeit over Zoom or Google Meet. It was all essentially meaningless given exams had been cancelled, and the students did well to keep any motivation going. The A-Level ‘results’ were pretty absurd with teachers deciding on the grades awarded. I tried to do mine with some integrity but to be honest I don’t know why I bothered as the grade inflation across the board was ludicrous. A number of my students suffered mental health issues during the course of the lockdowns, including at least two total breakdowns. Whether this was causation or correlation I can’t prove, but isolating kids, gaslighting them into thinking they might kill their grandparents and making their futures ever more uncertain is hardly a recipe for good mental health.
At what point did I move from lockdown/covid scepticism to the realisation that something genuinely sinister was going on? For me it was the masks. Things appeared to be calming down and gradual reopening was taking place. Then the face coverings were imposed and it became blatant that this was not just incompetence but a deliberate effort to keep the scare story going. To my shame, I wrapped a scarf around my face to get an Uber, but when the masks were imposed in shops that was the final straw. I went past my local Tesco the day before masks became mandatory and noted about 70% of customers were unmasked. The following day I entered and to my huge disappointment about 98% were now wearing them. Yet again I was stunned by peoples’ compliance with absurdity. Fortunately, my best friend, her daughter and son-in-law were also not going along with it which preserved some of my sanity. Other than that, pretty much everyone I knew seemed to completely buy the narrative, although I was noticing more and more people on Twitter commenting about the increasingly deranged situation. Meanwhile the media, politicians and governments around the world appeared to be in virtually unanimous lockstep on the threat of Covid and the draconian measures allegedly required to combat it. Whatever was going on, we were certainly not in Kansas anymore.
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I think I spent much of that summer in a state of bewilderment, watching 98% of the population supping deep of the Kool-Aid. I still had no clear idea of what was happening although I was seeing videos online showing sheer madness from the likes of Australia and New Zealand with the police brutalising non-mask wearers, and suggestions of health passports and vaccine mandates. The names of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum came into my view for the first time. At the end of August an anti-lockdown protest was organised to take place in Trafalgar Square. The feeling of entering the familiar square and seeing thousands of other people was quite emotional, knowing for the first time that we weren’t alone in opposition to the madness. It was all very amateurish with the speaker system not working well and some of the remote speakers unable to connect. The star speaker was David Icke and if you had told me a few months earlier that I would have been attending a protest addressed by him and Piers Corbyn I would have laughed. But these guys were the only ones seemingly speaking up. Afterwards we marched to the gates of Downing Street carrying our banners and wearing our ‘No New Normal’ T-Shirts. It was a positive experience, although its main function was to giving us boost just knowing that others thought as we did.
The following month another protest took place in Trafalgar Square. This time, the police came looking for trouble. As a German doctor took to the platform to speak, the Met’s bully boys stormed in with batons flying. Many people sat on the ground in response but were struck anyway. It was a truly disgusting spectacle which of course was barely covered by the mainstream media other than the likes of ‘Conspiracy Theorists clash with police at anti-lockdown demonstration’ (The Independent).
We continued to attend protests in London on a monthly basis, the numbers growing. In October we marched down Oxford Street and it was quite an experience to be amongst so many people with bus drivers tooting their horns and shaking hands with protestors.
Did these protests really achieve anything however? They made the participants feel better perhaps, but with almost no media coverage and the government pressing ahead with their ‘vaccination’ programme it was hard to feel optimistic going into 2021.
I had returned to work in September, and initially the school was something of an oasis of relative normality. But masks for students and teachers gradually crept in, and I was virtually alone in eschewing a face covering and declining to take part in Covid testing. Fortunately I did not receive any harassment from the management over this, but I know other teachers in other settings were not so lucky. At one point I sent a long email to the Deputy Head expressing my opposition to masks and citing studies that suggested they were inimical to the health and education of the pupils. He told me privately that he agreed with me but that he had received multiple messages from staff demanding that they be retained - potentially indefinitely! I remember invigilating a mock exam around this time and the lines of masked-up students in the hall proved to be a truly dystopian sight.
In December, after some brief nonsense about dividing the nation into ‘tiers’, the whole country was put into a new lockdown, even more soul-crushing than the first as by this time the lies were totally apparent. Christmas gatherings were supposedly cancelled although it was clear many would ignore the ‘rules’.
Schools were closed yet again, and I was back to teaching online. My enthusiasm was understandably low. Trying to talk to the kids about what was going on felt impossible as they totally bought into the propaganda, as did almost everyone I knew. I remember trying to talk to my stepmother about the vaccine but she didn’t want to know. My cousin got quite angry and compared me to David Icke when I suggested he not let his kids have it.
As for the vaccine, I was absolutely convinced it was dodgy. I had read the government’s consultation documents which were released in the Autumn of 2020 and was horrified by the statements that the usual processes (which take years) would be skipped and that the manufacturers would have no liabilities. This, combined with the fanatical determination of the government to inject seemingly everyone and the insane levels of guilt-pushing/virtue-signalling ‘get jabbed’ propaganda being spewed by the media and corporations, made me quite certain I would not be getting it. I genuinely thought I would be out of a job within a year given the discussions about mandatory vaccines and that teachers in countries such as Australia had been mandated to have it.
So the early months of 2021 found me at a very low ebb. I even starting looking at how much it would cost to live in Belarus or Tanzania – two of the very few countries to not have imposed lockdowns (John Magufuli, the President of Tanzania, who had called out dodgy tests and vaccines, died rather mysteriously and conveniently around this time, along with several other African politicians who had opposed Covid measures). How things had taken such a dark turn in just under a year was quite surreal. I felt like my whole world view had been turned upside down. Even the local church had a statement in its newsletter to the effect that ‘covid deniers are not welcome here’ and that it was a ‘duty’ to take the vaccine. Suffice to say, I did not attend there again.
Every time I went to the supermarket it was a minor ordeal. Although I was very rarely challenged or hassled, it was grim and isolating seeing all the masked up shoppers. I took to counting the number of fellow non-maskers. It was rarely more than single figures, although it was sometimes useful to be able to recognise a fellow non-believer such as the lady behind the fish counter who said ‘nice to see your smile’ – we immediately acknowledged each other as kindred spirits.
It was at this point I started seeing stickers up about the ‘covid hoax’ in the area I lived. It got us thinking that there must be others who felt the same way in the local area. So we started up a telegram group to try to connect to them.
At first it was such a relief to meet like-minded people. The reassurance that we weren’t alone or completely mad was palpable. At some of our meetings around 30 people would turn up in a park and everyone was delighted to connect. At one of these events, two police officers walked very slowly from across the other side of a field towards us. Everyone immediately divided into groups of six (then the maximum ‘allowed’ for meetings under the government’s insane rules).
We carried on attending protests in London, and again it was a good feeling to walk the length of Oxford Street chanting ‘freedom’ with new friends and strangers alike. At one of these we took a cab to the meeting point and the taxi driver perceptively described the event as ‘permitted protest’. By June, when I attended a protest in Westminster and saw shirtless drunks squaring up to the police whilst MPs simply entered Parliament through the side entrance I was questioning the purpose of the events.
Most of the restrictions were lifted around this time, although it felt like a temporary lull in proceedings. Indeed, in the Autumn fresh nonsense about the ‘Omicron variant’ began to surface – the sinister name clearly given to it in order to keep the masses quaking in their boots. The vaccine propaganda continued unabated with Austria mandating it and many countries adopting vaccine passports to access daily life. One of the people we had met through the group was sacked from her job as a care worker and the deadline for dismissing the thousands of NHS workers who had refused the jab came ever closer. This was a genuinely scary time, world governments seemingly desperate to inject as many people as possible with the experimental MRNA vaccine, with the theories as to why getting ever darker.
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Then, quite suddenly, it ended. The government backed down at almost the last moment from its threat to sack unjabbed NHS workers. A little over three weeks later, on the very same day all restrictions were lifted in England, Russian forces entered Ukraine. A new narrative was dominating the media agenda and Covid began to be squeezed out. The propaganda around Ukraine was remarkably similar to that of Covid – absurdly one-sided, full of blatant untruths, and promoted by virtually every institution and arm of government.
Our group had broken up by this point, and gradually a semblance of normality returned to everyday life. I even boarded a plane for the first time in four years, something which I had resigned myself to never doing again. Some of the trappings of the scam remained, with masks lingering amongst some of the more fearful and/or virtue signalling elements and ‘boosters’ being pushed in the winter.
Of course, so many other narratives have been pushed since then - or maybe they just seem more obvious to me now. It’s clear the ‘pandemic’ theme has not gone away as every now and then a fresh scare will be raised - be it monkeypox, camel flu, parrot fever… and of course the ever-caring World Health Organisation continue to push for their ‘pandemic treaty’.
Sometimes, I shake my head at the madness of that period, finding it hard to believe it ever actually happened. I hear it spoken of less and less, as if there is now a collective desire to forget about that crazed time, although in the UK and elsewhere so-called public inquiries are taking place ostensibly to investigate governments’ handling of the pandemic. Calling these absurdities whitewashes would be doing them a courtesy. Meanwhile, excess deaths across the western world continue to leave the medical profession ‘baffled’.
Others much more knowledgeable than I have discussed and documented the various reasons and agendas behind what really happened. For me personally, the scamdemic will always be linked in my mind to my dad’s passing, leaving me with regrets that I hope I will one day be able to let go of. Even more than that, and although I have not lost hope nor humour, it left me with a very different view of the world - a world where as the meme goes, the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is about six months.
Very sad and touching story. Extremely well written.
I lost my father during the fauxdemic. Not physically, he’s still alive although he refuses to speak to me because I don’t and won’t agree with any of his views on allopathic medicine or the world in general.
ConJob19 woke me up. To more than the fakery that exists in this world but also to how indoctrinated and mind controlled my whole family is/was. Consequently I try to see the positive aspects of awakening rather than focus on the regrets, or the things I can’t change.
Forgiving yourself and letting go of regret is what your father would want.
If you had demanded to see him or attempted to storm the barricades, you can’t know if that would have worked, or made a difference to the length of his life.
I’m not sure exactly how to reach self forgiveness, or how one resolves the “what if’s” after losing a family member, but you did the best you could under the circumstances, with the knowledge you had at the time.
Maybe self forgiveness starts with something as simple as positive affirmations. Telling yourself daily that you forgive and love yourself. That your father would want you to live in the now and enjoy this and every moment, while you are still alive.
I went through the same thing with the masks in supermarkets. I can’t tell you how many times I got dirty looks for being unmasked. Security guard confrontations. Arguments.
It still annoys me to this day the way some people in my neighborhood (I walk everywhere) cross the street to avoid getting near an actual person, as if we are all potential biohazards.
The faux authority figures who enforced masks and vaccines are the same order following types who normalize tyranny and democide by refusing to speak up or step up.
Thanks for sharing your story.