A sense of de ja vu descends as news reports and WHO bulletins produce a mixture of fear and calm mongering. Hantavirus is nothing to worry about; evidence of human-to-human transmission is rare/understudied; it doesn’t meet epidemic proportions. A repeat of January 2020’s farce all while globalised transport infrastructure spread coronavirus in late 2019. Fortunately, the Andean variant of hantavirus is not novel and previous outbreaks have been contained, as happened in Epuyen. Yet a combination of simplistic media coverage and public health complacency show little has been learnt since covid.

The cultural narrative that the pandemic has birthed has provided new cleavages for the dissemination of social and political actions. While the underlying class structure and the power of an overarching managerial-capitalist elite remain intact, covid has created new vectors for culture war conflicts and an overlying caste structure delineated by educational attainment, one’s position in administrative hierarchies, and one’s views on current cultural battles.

The libertarian movement “consists of a loose network of libertarian and free-market think-tanks, national ones that include lobbying groups, who gravitate inside the Beltway, and state or regional think-tanks, who necessarily remain in the heartland in body if not alas in spirit. There are now legal organizations that allegedly pursue cases in behalf of liberty and against government tyranny”[1]. As Rothbard notes regarding issues like NAFTA, welfare and taxation, this type of libertarianism became little more than a lobbying arm for big businesses and elements of the government apparatus. Rather than a serious critique of the status quo (the size and scope of government, the capacity to exit, the lobbying power of businesses), it devolves into low tax liberalism that defends established interests. Replacing the income tax with a sales tax or flat tax does nothing to challenge the power of the state, but rather redistributes the tax burden onto a wider range of the working and middle classes. Privatisation usually empowers a cadre of individuals deeply intertwined with the state in the first place rather than introducing market forces into sclerotic bureaucracies.

With the Omicron variant causing farcical panic levels within government and public health responses, and the introduction of lockdowns in Europe and Plan B in the UK[1], the length to which bureaucratic and medical institutions will hold onto the pandemic powers they’ve accrued is extensive. This isn’t so much a slippery slope as a blatant power grab as the “necessity” of emergency powers is extended to all corners of life, irrelevant of the actual health concerns that coronavirus raises. Through a combination of short-term planning and long-term incompetence, as well as a desire to avoid any form of scrutiny, governments and their biomedical authorities across the world are bolstering police powers and emergency legislation to limit rights to civil action and protest, as well as prevent legitimate speech through curtailing “disinformation”.

The UK HSA data for weeks 46[1] and 47[2] continue to show both the strength of vaccines in limiting hospitalisations and deaths (even though breakthrough cases are increasingly prevalent) and their weakness in failing to prevent case growth. Confirming what I[3] and others have written about before, this data shows both the problems of the prevailing narratives around vaccination and why greater targeting of vaccines should be focused on, rather than the current strategy of vaccinating anyone and everyone.

I wrote a few months ago about how we are seeing the development of a perma-lockdown situation[1], where the decreasing efficacy of vaccines and the failure of measures like masks or social distancing to meaningfully dent COVID case numbers has led to the call for greater restrictions and lockdown-like policies from our increasingly-powerful medical networks. Now, with cases rising substantially in Europe, we are seeing this come to fruition. Austria has instituted a lockdown against the unvaccinated, with Germany potentially following suit. The Netherlands and Belgium have introduced partial lockdowns[2]. And in Gibraltar, where the population is near enough 100% vaccinated (with 40% having received booster doses), there are potential curbs on social activity on the horizon as cases spike.

The increasing evidence of the COVID vaccines’ leakiness and reduced efficacy, both in terms of waning immune efficiency and in terms of vaccine escape through variants, show the folly of vaccines being the only substantial tool being used to tackle coronavirus. The vaccines we currently have are primarily designed to prevent severe infection and fatality, with the efficacy against transmission reducing substantially with variants compared to the trial data. Against the Delta variant in particular, vaccinated populations have similar levels of viral load compared to unvaccinated as well as similar protection levels as natural infection[1].

Lockdowns and coercive mandates have moved from a position of extraordinary intervention in the face of a novel virus to an increasingly used catchall to deal with complex problems, including potential new viral outbreaks, climate change and existing respiratory illnesses. Before, these were recognised as problems of systemic action, with incentives designed to produce negative externalities while concentrating wealth at the top. The disequilibrium of medicinal practice or the effects of climate change were never simply the product of individual decisions but the lock in of multiple imperatives, from consumption to product sourcing based upon principles of profit, cost-cutting and limited spatio-temporality.

Crises present the mechanism through which new dispositions, new discourses can be established and expand. Inverting societal dynamics and opening up established power to challenge allows for the multitude of potentialities to overwhelm the governance of ordered multiplicities, upending the “small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious, mechanism that obeyed economies too shameful to be acknowledged, or pursued petty forms of coercion”[1]. However, by their very nature, the subtlety and microscopic scope of these various elements means they are adaptable, making the crisis double-edged in that it both cracks the ground of established power while allowing dynamics attenuated to that power to fill them in. The power of dispositions is in their fluidity. Crisis is the ground for this fluidity, bending and reshaping dynamics for further dispositionality.

A common refrain for developing post-coronavirus discourses is the idea of the “new normal”. This has become a mantra of both anti-authoritarian sceptics and conspiracy theorists who see the expansion and grounding of state power during the pandemic as indicative of an authoritarian turn as the surveillance state becomes ubiquitous. However, it has also become an epithet amongst the forces many in the former group see as constructing this post-COVID dystopia, particularly the WEF and their Great Reset project.