Excerpt:

According to an ABC/Ipsos poll conducted on 9–10 June, President Joe Biden has a net unfavourable rating of 21 (31-52) and former President Donald Trump of 25 (31-56). It is entirely conceivable, therefore, that they could both lose their quest for their respective party nomination, as indeed was suggested by Karl Rove in his Wall Street Journal column on 7 June.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Ron DeSantis are among the wide field of candidates contesting the Democratic and Republican Parties’ primaries. Either of them being the nominee will turn next year’s presidential contest into a Covid reckoning election. The primary season is already shaping up as one.

Meanwhile, permit me a moment of schadenfreude at this week’s news that a lockdown fanatic former leader, Nicola Sturgeon of Scotland, was arrested by police in an unrelated financial scandal, questioned, and then released.

And a second moment of satisfaction that on Sunday 12 June, Novak Djokovic won the French Open title for the third time. This increases his majors tally to 23, putting him in front of any other man in tennis history, making him the only man ever to have won all four majors at least three times, and returning the world number one ranking to him as well. Justice has been served against the Australian and US governments that deported him and banned him from entering the country to play in their respective Open competition because of his unvaccinated status.

At a Covid Crossroads

We seem to have come to some sort of a crossroads with respect to Covid. Along one road lies a wealth of studies demonstrating the negligible benefits of most of the key pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions. In May the US finally ended its ban on unvaccinated foreigners’ entry into the country.

A study by Kevin Bardosch used a “harm framework” to look at 600 publications. He concluded that “the collateral damage of the pandemic response was substantial, wide-ranging and will leave behind a legacy of harm for hundreds of millions of people in the years ahead,” exactly as many of us warned from the beginning.

Swedish researchers looked at nearly 3 million women to conclude that vaccinated women over 45 have a 23-33 percent higher risk of severe vaginal bleeding. A finding published recently in Nature showed that the risk of blindness (retinal vascular occlusion) in the two years after mRNA vaccination increased by 2.2 times.

In June a major peer-reviewed meta-analysis from the Institute of Economic Affairs by US, Swedish, and Danish researchers concluded regarding stringent lockdowns that, in the words of co-author Steve Hanke, Professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University, “the lives saved were a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering collateral costs imposed.” In his judgment, “When it comes to Covid, epidemiological models have many things in common: dubious assumptions, hair-raising predictions of disaster that miss the mark, and few lessons learned.” The comprehensive 220-page book found that draconian measures had a “negligible impact” on Covid mortality and were “a colossal global policy failure that should never be imposed again.”

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The Primaries Could be Circuit Breakers

The lens of how various leaders managed the pandemic therefore helps us to frame the contest in terms of their respective culpability in enabling and facilitating the grave attacks on freedoms, on the one hand, and their capacity and willingness to resist and reverse the blanket of authoritarianism that has suffocated liberal democracies since 2020, on the other. Because of the dominant influence of America on the rest of the democratic world, the US presidential contest has unique global resonance, even though the rest of us lack a vote in the contest whose outcome has the potential to shape our lives quite profoundly.

From this perspective, for someone who strongly resisted the insanity of the public policy response to a serious but not existential global health crisis, the ideal Republican and Democratic champions would be DeSantis and Kennedy. No one else comes close in the two parties to their record in forceful opposition to lockdowns, masks and vaccines.

If DeSantis and Kennedy were to triumph in the primaries against the odds, it would mean the campaign became a referendum on Covid for the voters of both major parties. It would further signify that the two heroes of the Covid resistance won the public debate, and whoever is elected president come November 2024 will have a clear mandate to revert to pre-Covid normalcy.

Many political leaders bowed to the demands of public health experts based on a combination of incompetence (for example in failures to prevent large-scale fraud and rorts [Australian vernacular: fraudulent or dishonest acts or practices “to take unfair advantage of a public service”]), malfeasance (for example in awarding no-bid contracts to personal and party cronies), scientific illiteracy, cowardice (for example Boris Johnson’s capitulation to masks in schools because he feared Scotland’s leader exploiting the issue politically), and laziness (Johnson is Exhibit A). A recent analysis by Associated Press found that, in “the greatest grift in US history,” $280 billion in US Covid relief funding was stolen by fraudsters and another $123 billion was wasted or misspent.

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