Dave Witherow: Here Is The News

Doctor Bloomfield, our Voice of Science, has announced he is retiring.

The job as been onerous, he says, and he is looking forward to a more relaxing life and fresh opportunities as an “influencer”.

 Some of us – a small, warped, scientifically-illiterate minority, no doubt – tend to think that Dr Bloomfield has done more than enough influencing already. And not just influencing, which, after all, leaves a bit of wiggle-room for the poor sod being influenced. Coercing, actually, would be a more accurate word for what Dr Bloomfield has been up to. Get injected, show your papers – Herr Doktor Bloomfeld knows all about that.

His departing spiel was basically the same old stuff. There were no apologies, no second thoughts or admissions of inadequacy. He left off as he started, a grey man, a hollow mannikin, devoid of charisma.

How, then, should we assess the achievements of Dr Bloomfield? What remains - after two years of his pseudo-medical dictatorship – that we might want to thank him for? Each of us will have their own view, but here, as of last Thursday, are Dr Bloomfield’s.

The Covid emergency, he thinks, is now more or less behind us. The Team of Five Million, facing imminent catastrophe, stayed staunch. There was no sign of dismay, no hysteria or excessive ripping of knickers. Steady as she goes. And it was this fine communal response – this phlegmatic refusal to panic under pressure– that, more than anything else, has allowed us to win through to the enviable situation in which we find ourselves now.

There have, the Doctor concedes, been one or two glitches, tiny flies in the ointment. The main one, obviously, was the unexpected business of everybody coming down with Covid – such a strange relapse after our stupendous triumph in eliminating the virus. But this setback, as Dr Bloomfield now understands, was actually an essential step on our path to ultimate victory.

 And then there is the coincidental matter of the Health Service collapsing. Well, not quite collapsing - the buildings remain structurally sound, but they are stuffed full of sick people. Which means, unfortunately, that patients in the Intensive Care Units can’t be moved out because, well, there’s no room left in the recovery wards. Which are also, alas, short of staff, due in no small measure to the mystifying number of doctors and nurses not yet “vaccinated”.

But these are mere hiccups. Everything, otherwise, is hunky-dory and proceeding according to plan. There are waiting-lists, of course, but there have always been waiting-lists, and the only difference now is that the seriously sick may stay on a list until, ideally, mortality solves the problem. With the money thus saved being then available for buying further stocks of Boosters.

People grumble. People always grumble, yet the undeniable fact is that our Health Service is now so lean and fit that we have been able to give half of it to our Maori friends – whose anatomies and diseases differ so much from ours, and whose need, as always, is so much greater than our own. And as for that poor lady who who was sent home from the Emergency Department and then sadly died – well, none of us lives forever.

Dr Bloomfield’s critics – and, amazingly, there are a few – claim that the policies he has advocated have been a monumental disaster. And that our coronavirus strategy - aka our global leadership - was a delusion based on the infantile belief that we could keep a free-floating microbe at bay forever. This notion always seemed dubious, and there were qualified people - doctors, scientists, experienced nurses – and even a sprinkling of the university termites – who realised that it was nonsense. They tried to warn us and were silenced by the media. And when they persisted they lost their jobs. Which, as all right-thinking sheep agree, is the proper treatment for anyone who questions Dr Bloomfield.

But the virus, the sneaky, unsporting little bastard, paid no heed to Dr Bloomfield. It evaded the border militias and refused to stop for the traffic-lights. It barrelled straight through them – even the red ones. It slipped through quarantines and breezed through face-masks, and now it’s circulating everywhere, infecting and re-infecting and dodging all our defences.

“Cases”, as they are called, are booming. There were seven thousand new ones today, and eleven thousand yesterday. Yet, oddly enough, there is no more mention of lockdowns. No return to that winning formula, to those inspiring days when the team of five million was leading the world, and when a single “case” would immobilise cities, townlands, entire provinces. When walking was forbidden, and cycling and swimming and shopping and even boozing? And when we all wore muzzles, some of us even in bed?

Yet now, with “cases” busting out right and left, there are no such rigorous restrictions. What can have happened? Has a new plan been devised? Is there any explanation for such an astonishing U-turn?

Well, yes, there is. Just leave it Doctor Bloomfield.

The elimination campaign, you see, was not what it seemed – or what we naively imagined at the time. It was a holding operation – a delaying tactic till the hospitals were prepared and sufficient “vaccines” were ready for widespread distribution. And now, with that phase of the operation successfully completed, we must all understand that the idea of actually eliminating the virus was never meant to be taken seriously. And that the word “elimination”, was a kind of metaphor - a rallying-cry, if you like, in a time of terminal danger.

Not that Dr Bloomfield would ever be guilty of lying. Not at all. Every word was gospel, but we have to remember that words, as Orwell taught us long ago, are weapons to wield as we wish. And the word “eliminate”, in the flexy lexicon of Dr Bloomfield, means whatever he feels it ought to mean whenever it happens to suit him.

And now Doctor Bloomfield is jumping ship. His war is over, his battles won, and his minuscule enemy confined within the infected bodies of several million New Zealanders. The virus has been cornered. It has been  quarantined, bottled up, and we’ve got it just where we want it. We know exactly where to find it now, and it’s only a matter of time till we land the killer blow.

Few people ever really fathomed the full ingenuity of Dr Bloomfield’s stunning strategy in saving us from the virus – and in fact none of it would have been possible without his brilliant perception that these new “vaccines” are not at all like the old ones. Medicinally, of course, they are useless – possibly even worse than useless. They don’t prevent infection, or reduce transmission, and indeed it now seems that the fully-Boosted are carking faster than anybody else. But, even if true, this is irrelevant, because the new drugs treat people in the mass, rather than as individuals. Their effect is psychological, rather than purely medicinal, and they act on whole populations, binding them together through herd-solidarity and communal ritual. Thus the ceremonial baring of the arm, the taking of the shots, and the acquisition - through an invisible but extraordinarily potent bond - of the will to obey, no matter what, and the astonishing capacity to make sacrifices they would normally find ridiculous.

Doctor Bloomfield, in his modest way, understood this very clearly. He grasped the real significance of these revolutionary new genetic treatments. Without them, he realised, we would never have tolerated the massive costs of confronting the pandemic – the suicides and lost futures, the wreckage of our economy and the loss of our democracy and the burden of debt we have hung round the necks of our children.

Unvaccinated, we would never have accepted this. We would have rebelled. We would have said to hell with it. And individually, and alone if necessary, we would have stood fast to defend the way of life that we know, and our idea of what it means to be free. And that could never be permitted.

So it’s farewell Dr Bloomfield – off to fresh fields and impostures new. With tidings of pandemics yet to come. More viruses, ever more virulent. Pox after pox. A cascading future of all the poxes now being readied by the scientists of Wuhan.

Dave Witherow, a former columnist with the Otago Daily Times, emigrated to New Zealand from Northern Ireland in 1971. He's an author, script writer, and worked as a scientist for Fish and Game.