Roger Watson
Your correspondent in travelling for work in Italy and Slovenia these two weeks. The first leg is complete, and I have just left an Italy deeply scarred by the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. Similarly to the UK, the social distancing stickers are everywhere and hand ‘sanitizers’ are much in evidence. Italy added an extra twist with automatic temperature scanners, and one remained at the entrance of the university building where I was working.
However, unlike the UK, where—with the exception of the occasional half-wit or Chinese student—very few people wear face masks. In Italy I reckon that about a quarter of people persist with the mask habit and another quarter have their masks displayed in a way that I have come to associate uniquely with Italy, the mask strapped to the wrist like a fashion accessory.
The Italians simply cannot let go and if you listen in to conversations (I do not speak Italian) you will hear the words ‘pandemico’ and ‘mascherina’ used frequently, for which I am sure readers need no translation. Trying to open a discussion with colleagues, bearing in mind that these are health professionals with research experience and training in evidence assessment, and you are treated to such hushed tones of reverence for a virus that did little more in the vast majority of people than give them a runny nose.
It is a fact that the Italians probably were cowed into obedience to a much greater extent than most countries, with the possible exception of China. Of course, towards the end of the restrictions to freedom there were some mass protests and people rebelled by congregating for communal meals in the streets in some towns. It was all over the mainstream media in the UK…remember? But the Italians, a nation in love with illness, hospitals and medical interventions, crammed people into ICUs and on to ventilators at a rate exceeding the UK by an order of magnitude and persisted long after, for example, in the UK we had realised that this was killing people. Italy maintained travel restrictions and mask mandates much longer than other places in Europe and everyone I know there is having their Covid-19 ‘vaccines’ boosted at every opportunity.
Meantime, the news from the UK—before Gary Lineker shoulder charged him off the front pages—was all about Matt Hancock and his apparent mishandling of the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. As I said here recently it is blindingly obvious that Hancock, as odious and power-crazed as he is, is the fall guy here and we are barely getting a glimpse of who is behind this. I rarely stoop to conspiracy theories as they are too convenient and those proposing them usually think that they require no explanation other than that they are also blindingly obvious. But if we turn a blind eye to the extent to which the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ measures were implemented in lockstep across the world we are ignoring reality. Our leaders in the UK took the knee to the Covid narrative and ‘panicked’ and we are expected to believe that this was all down to the work of mad Matt Hancock. My question is, how did Italy manage to do the same without him?
Roger Watson is a retired academic nurse who lives in the UK.
He is currently engaged in a range of professional consultancies in the UK, Europe and China. He writes regularly for several outlets including The Daily Sceptic, The European Conservative, Country Squire Magazine and The New Conservative.
