Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 6.12.20

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.  

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*  

Covid

In case you live in a cave . . . The chaos, confusion and cover-ups that characterised China’s initial response to the coronavirus were laid bare last week. Unprecedented leaks and interviews with whistleblowers from the Chinese health system exposed how officials downplayed the severity of the pandemic in the crucial early stages. China reported 2,478 confirmed new cases nationwide on February 10, even as provincial health authorities circulated a document that cited 5,918 newly detected cases, more than twice the official tally.

Oh, dear: Don't talk while eating in restaurants, a study has warned, as it claims people can be infected by Covid-19 more than 6m away. According to researchers in Korea: Diners should refrain from having "conversation during meals" as well as avoid "loud talking or shouting". Their study claims that people who are 6.5m apart can still infect each other, and the window of transmission can be as little as 5 minutes. Restaurants should consider installing dividing walls between tables to prevent this happening, they say..

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

More here on the possibility of a 4 day week.

Another relevant line from Piers Plowman of c.1380:- As for pilgrimages to St James' shrine - If people do go to Galicia, let them go there once and for all, and never come back! Translator's note: The poet deprecates repeated visits and implies a preference for 'spiritual' pilgrimages. That is, works of virtue like visiting the sick as prescribed in the epistle of St James.

María’s Riding the Wave: Days 21&22    

The EU

Solidarity and consensus above all else - even lives? See the article below. Which isn't about the pluses of Brexit . . .

Ambrose Evans Pritchard has, of course, already warned of the economic consequences of this approach.

 

The Way of the World

How on earth have we reached a point where scientists can develop a vaccine for a virus that was unknown a year ago, only to find that 15% or 20% of the population won’t take it because of something a pissed-up pop star said on Twitter? Seriously. You have educated people saying they won’t take an “untested Frankenstein drug, developed by Big Pharma”, before rushing off to a dimly lit car park and scoring a gram of coke from a man called Barry the Bugle. . . . Nutterness has seeped into every single corner of our lives. Two and two is four. “You say that, Grandad, but is it?” . . . We have “influencers” whose facts are never checked and who can, and will, reach more people today than any professionally put-together newspaper. Every day, Kim Kardashian can and does out-Beeb the BBC. We all saw, last week, that astonishing 3D map of the Milky Way. Well, that’s what news has become: a big, cloudy muddle. It’s sad — and it’s bloody dangerous.

Every divisive question these days turns into a culture war. Two tribes, reading two sets of media, developing two unrelated narratives, subject to two opposed purity spirals, are so far apart that they might as well inhabit different dimensions. . . . People might initially pick their side contingently and with reservations. But, once they've done so, centrifugal forces haul them away from the middle ground.

 

English

A site for those readers as interested as paideleo in etymology. Not to be confused with entomology. 

  

Finally . . .

Amusing aphorisms No.8. I had my patience tested. I'm negative.

THE ARTICLE

  

Coronavirus has exposed the deadly cost of the EU’s cult of ‘solidarity’: The EU's sluggishness in approving the vaccine suggests the member states put unity over saving lives:  Janet Daley 

In roughly three decades as a political journalist I have never known a day of such stunning, unalloyed, unimpeachable good news as last Wednesday. It was breathtaking. Watching the news channels was, for the first time in living memory, a succession of joyous moments with experts tripping over their own superlatives to express delight and pride in the achievements of their specialisms, not to mention that of science in general.

Now, not only had effective vaccines been discovered but the first of their kind had been officially approved and was about to be delivered to the population. When Jonathan Van-Tam said that he had become “emotional” on hearing the pronouncement of the regulators, it rang completely true. It is safe to say that not many government statements – perhaps not even the announcement of an end to a war – could have such a profound impact on the life of a nation.

At the Downing Street press conference, they did their best to contain the excitement, clearly terrified that the country’s resolve might evaporate: the present danger remains, restrictions must be maintained for the immediate future, blah-blah. But they must have wanted to break into song. Because this was clearly the turning point. From here on, in a succession of careful steps, things would get better and better – and we would have our lives back.

In crass political terms, there was something more. The previous day’s Commons vote in which Boris Johnson had suffered such a humiliating rebellion by his own party, was now wiped from the headlines – and possibly from the consciousness of the country – to be replaced with a world-beating triumph. We were the first country whose regulators had issued the permit for which the entire population of the planet had been waiting.

It became clear, listening to the lucid and persuasive accounts of why it had been possible, that this was entirely due to the continuous monitoring procedures adopted by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. This high degree of sophisticated methodology and assiduous competence for which the MHRA was renowned – so much so that the European Union, in the days when we were still friends, had based its medicines regulation in the UK – had beaten everybody to make the first call. So, it seemed that there was even a Brexit dimension to this. Matt Hancock jumped in with both feet: the fact that we were now out of the EU, and free at last – thank God almighty, free at last – to make our own independent decisions on these matters, had been the miraculous key.

But it wasn’t. It became clear quite quickly – Brexit triumphalism being a target for close media scrutiny – that any member state of the EU could have done precisely the same thing if it had so chosen. The emergency use provision under which the MHRA had licensed the Pfizer vaccine was available to any individual EU country – or all of them at once. That we chose to do it was indeed an individual decision but it was not the case that it would have been legally impossible to have acted in the same way if we had remained members.

So the question before us is, why did none of the member states do the same or indeed, why didn’t the European Medicines Agency which oversees these matters for the whole of the EU, move as quickly as the UK when that was perfectly possible? What followed was a lesson in a larger truth than Brexit, or EU medicines practice. The spluttering indignation from EU sources, not to mention some quite shameful attempts to discredit the validity of the MHRA’s decision, was a sight to behold. The UK had been too hasty, too self-interested in a nasty nationalist way, too careless in its investigations. There was a clear hint that undue haste had led to sloppiness and a lack of caution.

This was unforgivable, given the acknowledged worry that a dangerously high proportion of the population might be anxious about accepting the vaccine – because it was, by the EU’s own admission, baseless. The very same people who were muttering about our hasty judgment were, in the next breath, insisting that Europe would be ready with its own approval by the end of the month. There was absolutely no question that the vaccine would soon be accepted as safe and ready for use in the member states. The delay was not the result of material doubts about Pfizer’s product which had been discovered in Germany and was being manufactured in Belgium, but about the need for all the member states to act in concert – as one unified body – which meant following the procedural rules for communal consent, and that would take a few more weeks.

Have you got that? It is, apparently, more important for all the EU member states to be seen to act together than it is to make the speediest possible decision on a vaccine that could save lives. At the present mortality rate in Europe, a delay of a further month might mean an extra death toll of hundreds of thousands – and still more delay to the economic recovery that can only follow once restrictions have ended, with all the further damage to the quality of life that will involve. So European unity is worth more than anything – even life itself?

It is difficult to understand how such a view could be uttered without any embarrassment. To comprehend the set of beliefs from which it springs, you need to recall the origins of this whole idea: European unity was the post-war antidote to the mass murder of one another’s people that had been such a feature of the last century. But it was also the milder form of that other monumental twentieth century phenomenon: the communist principle (note the small “c”) that social benefits must always be collective and equally distributed. Everybody has to have precisely the same advantages as everybody else at the same time. This is what Brussels calls “solidarity”.

No individual person or state government must take precedence over any other – even if that means postponing a stupendous accomplishment of human intelligence which could make the difference between life and death. Perhaps they think it’s worth it.

 

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.