Michelle D. Castillo 
It’s amazing how many people thought that shutting down the global economy would have had no economic impact. Many of those same people are now furious about product shortages and rising inflation.
Avoiding logic from the start only means that it will one day come back to haunt us. The consequences we live with today are things we were already well aware of. But blind faith in politicians and trust in “experts” led many to believe that these consequences could have been avoided.
We know that if demand increases and supply cannot keep up, we will inevitably run into shortages. Keeping people stuck at home, doing nothing all day, has driven up demand for many products.
We know that any increase in costs businesses face will be passed on to the consumer. The prices we pay today only reflect the increased shipping rates.
We know that printing money leads to inflation and that international borrowing puts us in debt. Calling it a fancy name like “wage relief grant” doesn’t change that.
Rhetoric cannot replace reality. Did the restrictions save a single life? Absoutely. But at what cost ?
Anything to the extreme is a solution, but how sustainable or practical is the extreme? Car accidents can be avoided if the speed limit is reduced to 5 km/h. But who’s really going to put up with that?
If there are 100 wounded soldiers in battle, the doctor can use all his resources to save the person who had the least chance of survival. But since the resources are scarce, we must consider their alternative uses. The medic can use those same resources to save 90, but he will have to sacrifice ten.
Politics and economics do not mix because they serve two distinct purposes. Economics is about trade-offs; the policy is only about the next election cycle. This means that the concept of compromise must be completely lost on voters. Politicians need to be able to convince voters that they can have their cake and eat it too.
The lofty rhetoric about saving lives and livelihoods was just a way to promote the false idea that we were going to get into this pandemic and come out unscathed. We weren’t saving lives or livelihoods; we only traded against each other.
The proof is there for those who choose to watch it. Despite health protocols and measures – lockdowns, safe zones and vaccination mandates – the number of cases and deaths were exponentially higher than when these measures did not exist. Whether this number would have been even higher or not, had there been no measurements, is an open question – not an anticipated conclusion.
If there is a lesson to be learned from this pandemic, it is that politicians should be judged on their actual results and not on their desires. We didn’t want to kill grandma, but a lot of grandmas died. We wanted to preserve lives and livelihoods – we lost both.
The Prime Minister has finally realized that he cannot be responsible for our lives. What made him think he had the right in the first place?
Human beings are not pieces on a chessboard that governments can move around at will. They have their own responses to government policies. This is why many people still had social gatherings, businesses did not participate in the safe zone initiative, and employees did not comply with vaccination mandates.
The government’s reluctance to accept individual responses has triggered absurd measures like wearing masks with our family members in the car, banning food and drink in cinemas, and banning loud music. on the beaches.
When the adult population failed to respond to vaccination efforts as the government intended, children became their next target, despite all the evidence clearly showing that pediatric mortality is only a fraction of a percent.
The vaccination campaign was doomed from the start. It takes a very good salesperson to sell people a vaccine that does not guarantee protection against infection when for many years it was assumed that vaccines protected against infection.
Yet cases seemingly plummeted overnight without us ever having to reach the supposed “herd immunity” vaccination threshold.
After two years of going through the rigmarole to defeat the virus, only to have restrictions lifted when that goal has not been achieved, the question that concerns us should be: was it science or was it just political science?
