Principles Covid mania savaged
Three big ones we've casually turfed
We’re doing things we’d never imagine before Covid. Things that depart from foundational principles.
Medical advice
“Take X medicine” used to be a thing that carried weight. It was almost sacred. A doctor said it to a patient. Privately. In the context of a duty of care. Sometimes a parent would say it to a minor child, under the considered direction of a doctor.
Now we’re dispensing medical advice willy-nilly. Colleagues, friends, politicians. Bosses, bureaucrats, shopkeepers.
It’s on billboards and in pamphlets. Government sends text messages not just urging some medical treatment, but shaming strangers for not taking it.
Principles are designed for times we may be tempted to break them. Like now.
If you’re giving medical advice, why?
Forcing medical treatment
Before Covid, we took great exception to forcing anyone to take any medicine. Now we’re doing it with a breathtaking hubris. Sometimes even with an overt display of righteousness.
When has this ever worked out well?
Governments are not things conjured up to be able to determine good from bad medical treatment for individuals. It is a matter too complex, too nuanced and to particularised to the individual.
If you endorse government mandates on industrial-scale medication of everyone, why?
Government by man
The Magna Carta set us off in earnest on the path to government by law, not by man. That was in 1215.
In South Africa, we affirmed this loudly in 1996 with our shiny new Constitution. Then, over the space of a few months in 2020, we stomped all over it.
Suddenly we have a Command Council. It is dominated by just a few real decision-makers. They seem to be Cyril Ramaphosa, Lindiwe Zulu and presumably one or two others.
By fiat, they make decisions that limit human rights, announce this one evening and by morning it has been made a law.
And people accept it. Many do so with a sycophantic glee.
But it’s an emergency, one might argue. I argue in many, many other places that this is nowhere near an emergency worthy of what has been done to us for nearly two years and counting.
If you support some politicians deciding on rules that limit your human rights, imposing them by fiat, justifying it all with reference to a virus that certainly by now is the flu (Omicron), why?