HAVE you noticed how Sage scientists find a new Covid mutant to terrify us with each time lockdown freedom beckons?
We saw it with the Kent variant, the South African version and the Brazilian, none of which proved much more resistant to vaccines than the one and only Chinese original.
Read our coronavirus live blog for the latest updates
Today we are being cowed by an Indian invasion — and it’s all part of a deliberate ploy to scare us into submission.
You may remember BBC reporter Clive Myrie’s Grim Reaper tour of the Royal London Hospital, chanting: “We’re all scared. We’re all scared.”
“Dying and dying and dying,” he intoned like a horror movie narrator, as he followed patients to their graves.
Hoardings across the nation pictured models in oxygen masks, pleading with their eyes for us not to kill anyone else.
Well, it turns out this was an “unethical” and “totalitarian” hoax, a Whitehall version of TV’s Would I Lie To You?
A new book reveals alarm about these tactics even among Sage’s own behavioural scientists, one of whom — Susan Michie — is a fully paid-up member of the British Communist Party.
In Laura Dodsworth’s A State Of Fear, Sage psychologist Dr Gavin Morgan says: “Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government.”
Another team member says: “The psychologists . . . have too much power and it intoxicates them.”
This attempt at mind control has backfired, turning people into timid neurotics, scared to return to normal life.
The book’s testimony revives doubts about official statistics on sky-high mortality rates — and the true cause of all those deaths.
It also renews questions about the many thousands of patients left untreated for life-threatening cancer, heart, stroke and kidney disease, not to mention mental health.
CALCULATED BID
Debunked Prof Neil Ferguson’s bloated predictions of 500,000 Covid coffins were derided by independent non-Sage experts.
Yet even he admitted being astonished that we could be controlled by tactics stolen from authoritarian communist China.
“We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought . . . and then Italy did it and we realised we could,” he said.
This was our first glimpse into a calculated bid to terrify and incarcerate the entire population for most of the past 18 months.
Now they are trying to do it again.
On the very day we are let loose into a pub or restaurant, Sage scientists warn our final June 21 Great Escape might have to be postponed.
They have no idea if the latest variant is more lethal than the others, but you can’t be too careful, can you?
Variants pop up almost daily — and they will continue to do so forever.
So far our miraculous vaccines have coped just fine and even Sage admits they will probably do the same with this Indian blighter. It might spread a little faster but it seems no more deadly.
Most important, there is no threat of the NHS being overwhelmed. Nor has there been so far. It won’t stop the doomsters, though. Yesterday we were blessed with wannabe Shadow Chancellor Yvette Cooper warning against lifting restrictions on foreign travel.
The demand for instant lockdown in the face of any viral threat is now baked into British politics and psychology.
Come next winter, the slightest hint of a rise in deaths from flu will spark clamours for masks, social distancing and High Street closures.
HOUSE ARREST
Yet the evidence from other experts suggests infection and death rates were falling before all previous orders to stay indoors.
Britain is now on a rising tide of prosperity, with hundreds of billions of cash in savings and investment ready to splurge, saving countless jobs and firms from bankruptcy.
America has already ditched the wearing of face masks and social distancing.
The last thing we need is another lurch back into house arrest.
It is surprising so many people are refusing a life-saving jab when their relatives are dying in India because they have no option.
The sensible move is the rapid acceleration of vaccinations in Bolton and everywhere else the Indian bug is taking hold.
After they have become effectively immune, we should do what we have always done: Trust the people.