Jack the Insider: Be afraid: the stupid are out there, on the loose

I spent just 24 hours in ICU at Westmead, a shiny new sub-ward created by the hospital to manage an anticipated influx of COVID-19 patients that has yet to be realised.

It is one of the rare places where the hospital beds are comfortable. I know this because I was quickly shovelled off and put onto a ward bed later which was not.

I am home and in good nick, by the way. I have a lot of people to thank from the chief surgeon down to Tracy, the ICU nurse who appeared like an angel while I was in the midst of a hydromorphone (if they sold that in six packs, there’d be a long line outside the bottle-o right now) post-surgical fog, and the nurses in the renal ward who went above and beyond, day in day out, to get me out of the place and back home where my recovery continues.

These people are irreplaceable or at least could not be replaced for many years should they fall sick or worse.

The question that has been gnawing at me is, why are many people in our communities behaving so badly during a pandemic which directly or indirectly puts these people at risk?

There have been government failures. Victoria has high levels of community transmission where three months ago there was none. The failures are well understood. Back in April, the only way community transmission could have occurred was from breaches of quarantine from travellers returning from overseas.

People line up to get COVID-19 tested at the Parklands Christian College in Logan, south of Brisbane, after an employee tested positive. Picture: AAP.

Those breaches did not occur in New South Wales, but they did in Victoria where unbelievably, the Andrews Government chose to use private security firms as the stop gap between those infected and the general community.

The federal government, too, has failed to properly oversee an aged care industry, leaving conditions in some centres ripe for widespread COVID-19 infection.

Governments are often well intentioned but invariably imperfect bodies. COVID-19 has a way of exposing systemic flaws, failures of policy and management. Worst of all though this virus has given voice to the crazy as a rat in a coffee can hucksters, grifters and attention-seeking narcissists that infect our communities.

Let’s start with yesterday’s “Everyone, look at me” egomaniac, Dr Stella Immanuel, a Cameroonian born doctor who has set herself up in Houston, Texas. Immanuel claimed she has cured COVID-19 with you guessed it, liberal doses of hydroxychloroquine.

In her six months as an accredited physician in the US, Immanuel has claimed genital cysts and endometriosis are caused by people having sex with demons. She believes many current medical treatments are formulated from alien DNA. Oh, and she believes the world is run not by humans but by alien reptiles from beyond the moon.

You turn up in her clinic, she’s going to put your symptoms of aches, pains and general malaise down to a case of bad juju.

I wouldn’t let this doctor tend to a crook chicken mainly because she is likely to bite its head off and suck its brains out through its eyeballs as a form decongestant.

Every reputable health agency from the US CDC down has said hydroxychloroquine has little or no efficacy and poses health risks namely increasing the threat of heart arrhythmias.

In any event, the fixation on one form of treatment with little or no clinical basis for its use conceals the fact that some other treatments are proving effective.

Dexamethasone, a steroid that stifles the immune response, has become the first drug treatment to have a proven efficacy in reducing mortality among COVID-19 patients on ventilators or receiving oxygen but not ventilation. A recovery trial of more than 2000 people found that it reduced deaths in people on mechanical ventilators by one third – and by a fifth in those who received oxygen but not ventilation.

It has now been adopted for use in the UK medical system and its use will go global.

Yesterday, the Calamity Jane of police roadblocks, Eve Black was pulled over by Victoria Police in Carlton and arrested. Reports indicate she declined to lower her driver side window and had it smashed by the wallopers for her trouble.

In a Facebook entry made after she posted her gloating video showing her badgering police in the performance of their duty (how stupid can one be?), she replied to a question asking if she should have ignored police questions at the roadblock if she was in the commission of an offence. “Normally this would come with legislation which is a form of consent,” she replied blithely.

This is the typical babble of the Sovereign Citizen movement. Call me crazy but when I want legal advice, I am probably not going to get it from a person whose major career highlight includes working at a gym.

Where to from here for Black? Well, to the magistrate’s court obviously to face a raft of traffic and public health charges but after that, who knows? Black and so many like her appear to be auditioning for roles in tedious reality TV shows. Farmer wants a SovCit?

There is no sense of community, no looking after others. But it’s not just that. Take a look at these people and there is nothing there. No grounding in history, no sense of intellectual curiosity, a fluid set of beliefs and credos based on a quick search for easy answers that begin and end with scanning Facebook and YouTube entries from other fools or jumping in the deep end of 8Chan for the crazy brave.

If an individual has no idea of how we got to where we are today, and how the world actually works then almost anything becomes possible. So when we consider one of the numerous tentacles of QAnon conspiracies, namely that Hollywood and political elites are abducting children, ripping out their adrenal glands and chewing on them as an ageing prophylaxis – a laughably bizarre conspiracy without any evidence if ever there was one, these people happily stand in line to drink the Kool Aid because they have no intellectual foundation to challenge it.

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Posted by Lizzy Rose on Wednesday, 29 July 2020

A quick look at one of the Bunnings bush lawyer’s Instagram accounts shows psychic Lizzie Rose masked up and wishing our health care workers every good fortune in April. Two months later, she’s taken a plunge in the deep end of 5G and Gates Foundation conspiracy theories. I’d argue she can shift from the sane end to the Krazee with a K end of the spectrum seamlessly because she is a person without substance and whose only sense of identity comes from the attention she is able to garner.

Obviously, we don’t live in a meritocracy because if we did these people would be silently fetching drinks and food or meekly recommending the nine iron for the tricky up and down onto the fifth green to health care professionals on the Covid frontline.

Worse, these people attract headlines while those who put their bodies on the line every damned day are not just ignored but put at risk from the sorts of behaviours promoted by the narcissists with their dismal conspiracy theories.

Be afraid. The stupid are out there in number and they are on the loose.