Qui Bono ?

Who Benefits : or Who Benefited ?

Note to readers : in February this year I almost packed up and abandoned the whole blog and website. I had even written and scheduled the post that explained why I was doing that. As it is I left my goodbye note scheduled and edited but kept moving the schedule date back and back again. All the time I was editing what i’d written and even after a few months of edits and several complete rewrites I still wasn’t happy with what i’d written so in the end I stored it in the bin named recycle and started thinking about my posts again.

The dip in posts viewed is entirely logical when I think about it now : it was always intended as a sailing blog so when I had to stop sailing it’s purpose was largely gone. Today, several months later iv’e had several episodes of the view count and visitor count surging and then declining : right now (as I write) i’m having another one and this time it’s not so much a flash in the pan but a long rolling wave. My only comment is that this week iv’e usually had above 250 views per day and nearly as many visitors yet only one has liked or commented – I find that deeply frustrating. The other thing I notice is that most readers are still coming and reading sailing posts rather than anything else – for example my newer posts which are often much better in terms of my thinking and writing. Today, I will only say that I find writing is much better for me than not writing so my blog is really for me to help me with my thoughts even if and when they’re a bit odd.

This post sits alongside my post about the Covid 19 debacle as it’s the result of one of the questions I asked myself even while the whole thing was happening and i’d begun seeing the holes appearing in most of the pro vaccine story. The question was : “who benefits or who is benefiting ?” and my first answers were obviously the big drug companies first as they were making huge profits, and as I write still are. Pfizer alone recorded a profit of £100 billion in just one year from it’s vaccine sales but commented negatively that it’s profits would be as low as £60 to £70 billion in subsequent years : that’s a lot more than the GDP of many countries.

The second main beneficiary was people such as Baroness Mone who managed to secure lucrative contracts for things such as personal protective equipment – in short, masks – and may have made some £60 million in personal profits from £220 million in contracts despite claiming that she wouldn’t benefit financially in any way. Just as a side note Mone and her partner bought a big shiny yacht at around that time and many of her company’s products were found to be defective. To the best of my knowledge that’s never been dealt with except in a secondhand kind of way when the entire Tory party got taken down in the general election that followed. Like everything else about Covid 19 and the useless masks and lockdowns it’s been conveniently forgotten.

Did anyone, except some dodgy ministers and their pigs in the trough mates, benefit from the vaccine or the lockdowns ? Pro vaccine types would claim, and still do claim, that the vaccine saved some lives directly and others indirectly by protecting them against the virus : the evidence now seems to be that not only does the vaccine not give any protection at all but it did cause some deaths directly and seems to be linked to reduced immunity in those who were given it early on in the first wave. Today it’s becoming clearer that multiple doses, as we are seeing now, reduce general immunity over time resulting in increased rates of cancer just for a start.

I’m going to argue that, in a way, some people benefited from the rules as imposed during the Covid 19 lockdowns and some even said that the same rules should still have applied when lockdowns were lifted : some of these being the mandatory wearing of masks, social isolation and distancing and mandates for future doses of vaccines. Of these it was the mandated acceptance of rules that weren’t even actually in place as laws or rules but which had become a kind of accepted practice. One example and the thing i’m going to talk about today was the rule/but not actually a rule at all was what many claimed was a rule about outdoors exercise – that it was strictly limited to one session and specifically one hour per day. For those that actually remember, that was never an actual rule (or law) but was often touted as such by the police and frequently quoted in social media.

I was originally going to use, as an example, the council harbor master of a seaside town on England’s south coast who positively delighted in his new powers of being able to turn sailors away from his harbor even when, clearly, there were few boats actually out on the water and using the place. However, that’s just one total rule loving council dweeb, a bit like one of Tolkien’s hobbits just before the scouring of the shire by the returning hero’s. For those not familiar with t5he works of J R Tolkien or LOTR it’s the episode when the disgraced and kicked out of the council wizard Saruman manages to take over the Shire with a bunch of thugs and a few compliant Hobbits : The Rules, as they were known were a lot like what we could and couldn’t do during Covid.

The organization and staff that really benefited was, very strangely, the NHS and nursing showing it’s weakly compliant and rule following dark side. If you ask ‘how do you know?’ it’s because I heard from my late mother the poor state of my late father when he was sent home from the hospital, not only very late (around midnight), with none of his take home medicines, in an obviously poor state of care and in only night wear on a cold night. Far worse was the state of my partner’s late father at almost the end of life when he had to be in hospital, was denied access to even his immediate family and discharged to a peripheral hospital in an uncared for state.