In early 2020, a new virus hit the world. A virus so, so awful that nanny said we had to stay indoors. We couldn’t go near another person, go to work, school, visit a shop or travel anywhere. Life turned upside down. For millions, their livelihoods just stopped instantly. Unemployment rates flew up, and western governments especially introduced emergency payments to those now finding themselves out of work. Emergency payments that continue to the present day. In countries without the European levels of welfare, such as India, trains just stopped in their tracks. Leaving many workers who travel across the country to simply try and walk hundreds of miles home, with no financial means of support. For the luckier ones, offices worldwide closed, but they were allowed to continue working, albeit from home. It was a virus that also hammered stock markets across the world down by 40% or more.
If you feel you’ve heard the story before, then it may be because you watched the 2011 film ‘Contagion,’ in which a disease hit the world, killing thousands, stopping everything, and striking fear and distrust into everyone worldwide. This film had all the ingredients you might expect to find. The heroes, desperately trying to save lives and find a vaccine, like Kate Winslet. The villains, like the odd-toothed conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede, played by Jude Law, who gets his just desserts when he dies trying to prove the virus isn’t real. The film is quite clear on who is good and who is bad, in typical Hollywood style, and ends by showing how the virus began in a pig farm in China, started by bats. If that bit sounds really familiar, it’s because you may have heard it used in 2020 as a possible explanation of how Corona (Spanish, English Translation: Crown) began.
The gist of the film is certainly that only a vaccine is the solution, and in one week of August 2020, during travels across countries, the following line, from acquaintances and TV was heard, Ad Infinitum:-
“Life won’t get back to normal until we get a vaccine.”
So there we go, there’s a big illness, and the people are being primed to take what they are told is the remedy.