End the Lockdown
- Thread starter Walter
- Start date
Some Tory MPs are trying to persuade Boris to abandon the 6ft social distancing rule as Britain is now the only country in Europe that uses it.
Although if he did, he'd probably only be able to do it for England as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own powers over such matters, just like each US state or each Canadian province.
Although if he did, he'd probably only be able to do it for England as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own powers over such matters, just like each US state or each Canadian province.
Editor of Spiked Online Brendan O’Neill says the left are the most pro-lockdown wing of the political class.
Speaking to Julia Hartley-Brewer on talkRADIO this morning, Brendan says he feels that “the left has lost the plot”, adding that he doesn’t think they have considered the potential economic consequences of lockdown.
Arguing that economic lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic hits the least well off the hardest, Brendan says “these are the people who have to leave their houses in order to make a living.” Stating that the left has turned against working people “in a way that I find really perverse”.
Speaking to Julia Hartley-Brewer on talkRADIO this morning, Brendan says he feels that “the left has lost the plot”, adding that he doesn’t think they have considered the potential economic consequences of lockdown.
Arguing that economic lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic hits the least well off the hardest, Brendan says “these are the people who have to leave their houses in order to make a living.” Stating that the left has turned against working people “in a way that I find really perverse”.
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The lockdown has done untold damage to this country
Democracy, liberty and wealth have been decimated by this hysterical policy.
BRENDAN O'NEILL
EDITOR
20th May 2020
Spiked
Covid Britain feels like a one-party state. Normal political life has been suspended. Political protest and industrial action have been banned. Even small gatherings that question the ruling ideology of this strange new nation – the ideology of lockdown – are violently broken up. Witness the police brutality that was visited upon lockdown sceptics in Hyde Park a few days ago. You dissent at your peril.
The role of the citizen in the Covid dystopia is to applaud the state, not question it. Every Thursday night, on your doorsteps or your balconies, you must clap for the benevolent state and its gracious health service. Big Brother loves you and you must love it back. Vast propaganda billboards remind us of this duty. From Wembley Stadium to motorway hoardings to the front windows of the most respectable citizens’ houses, the same three words loom, like an omnipresent reminder to the masses of the only opinion you’re allowed to hold in Covid Britain: ‘Thank you NHS.’
The despotic instinct runs riot. We have seen police officers telling people to get out of their own front gardens, to stop walking in the Peak District, to get off park benches and return to their house arrest. Snitching is the only thriving business. By the end of April, British police forces had received 214,000 calls from Covid Britain’s willing army of spies. ‘Always the eyes watching you’, as Winston Smith put it.
New rituals ensure order and obedience. A face mask, like a burqa in Afghanistan, signifies your fealty to the new religion: social distancing. ‘Stay two metres apart’, the relentless propaganda instructs, even though the medical benefits of such distance are far from clear. People do the awkward pavement dance to avoid getting too close to passing strangers, and take their place in long, silent, fractured queues outside supermarkets, keen not to displease any lockdown fanatic who might be watching.
Not only is work strictly regulated in this one-ideology nation – so is play. There will be no hugging of people from outside your household until autumn at the earliest, says Matt Hancock, the secretary of state for human touch. A survey found that some people (possibly as high as one in five) are breaking lockdown to have sexual intercourse. Sex is an illicit activity in Covid Britain, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hancock is our one-man Junior Anti-Sex League keeping a watchful eye over citizens and their wandering hands. In Orwell’s dystopia, ‘the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion’. Same here. Just ask Neil Ferguson. He lost his job for having sex (when it should have been for his dodgy models).
Public debate has disintegrated. Do not for one minute be fooled by the noisy media discussions of the government’s failures or the pantomime yelling matches between TV presenters like Piers Morgan and some hapless minister. All of this takes place within the lockdown ideology. The only ‘dissenting’ view you may hold in Covid Britain is that the lockdown didn’t come early enough / wasn’t severe enough / is being eased too early. The media-government spats over the Covid crisis are the narcissism of small differences. The very shrillness of these discussions is an indicator that what we have here are groups devoted to the same cause – locking down the country – but who differ over how successfully the cause has been implemented. Hell hath no fury like fanatics bickering over details.
It’s the same in politics. Every clash and row takes place within the parameters of acceptable thought. Genuinely demurring voices are notable by their absence. Lockdown scepticism is staggeringly absent. Jacob Rees-Mogg is right to say that MPs must get off their Zoom calls and physically return to the Commons. But it isn’t their physical absence that’s the problem – it’s their intellectual absence. Where are the voices for reason and liberty and a return to work and production? The speed and thoroughness with which our allegedly conflictual political system was bent to a singular, myopic cause raises profound questions about the health of our democracy.
In lockdown Britain, there’s one way to think and one way to behave. You must accept the lockdown or risk being demonised as a hateful individual and possibly being beaten by the police. You must mask your face, keep your distance, foreswear sex, go shopping, go home again. Question nothing. Eat your meals, get your exercise, watch the news, go to bed. And await deliverance by officialdom. Although deliverance will be into a ‘new normal’, we are now chillingly told, in which the low-carbon, socially distanced, populace-managing dreams of the technocratic elite will finally become a real-world nightmare.
‘But it is all necessary’, the lockdowners cry. This was questionable from the very start of the lockdown. Now it is utterly untenable. The lockdown was justified as a temporary measure to ensure that the NHS was not pushed to breaking point by the hundreds of thousands of Covid cases that the ideologues of doom predicted. The cases never came. Many hospitals are half-empty. The lockdown’s justification has evaporated.
And yet it continues. And it’s easy to see why. It’s because lockdown has become a political, ideological cause, not a medical one, on to which so many of the elite’s prejudices – about the harmfulness of economic growth, the undesirability of mass society, the unimportance of liberty, the need for mass compliance to expert advice – have been projected. The lockdown is now separate from the pandemic. It has its own logic. It is the ruling ideology of our age. That is why Covid-related reason – whether one is pointing out that the models were wrong or that cases in London have plummeted – is proving such a feeble tool. Because the lockdown is no longer really about Covid.
How has the subjugation of democracy, liberty, daily life and reason to Covid hysteria been so successful? Through terror. It is not an exaggeration to say that the government launched a campaign of terror against the populace. Government adviser Professor Robert Dingwall is right to say that officials have ‘effectively terrorised’ people into believing that coronavirus will kill them. We have been incited to fear not only a disease, but each other. Misanthropy is the fuel of the lockdown ideology. Steer clear of people. Do not touch them. Do not sit next to them. They might be diseased. And you might be diseased. That baleful instruction, now rescinded, to ‘Stay Home’ and ‘Save Lives’ made it clear: you are dangerous, and if you go outside you could kill people. The purest form of the culture of fear.
Polls show that many people are now reluctant to go back to normal life. Many want schools to remain closed. There is fear about returning to work. Things are so bad that the government is having to redirect its resources, away from terrorising us to stay indoors towards trying to coax us to come out again. It is reported that Boris Johnson recently joked with his colleagues, saying: ‘I’ve learnt that it is much easier to take people’s freedoms away than give them back.’ That isn’t funny. The use of terror to cow much of the public, decimate economic life and suspend everyday liberty is not a joking matter. Terror has consequences, especially in a situation where any form of meaningful dissent from the terror was demonised and even criminalised.
How do we get out of this? With truth and reason. With facts about the virus, not hysteria. With clear information about the very small risk that Covid poses to the vast majority of us. And with a renewed commitment to freedom and democracy and to the thing that makes those things possible: the treatment of citizens as adults to be engaged with, not miscreant children to be terrorised into changing their behaviour. For the sake of liberty and the economy, the lockdown must end. But that isn’t enough. After that we need a reckoning with the ideology of the lockdown, and with the pre-Covid prejudices, elitism and hysteria that are its fuel.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/20/the-lockdown-has-done-untold-damage-to-this-country/
Democracy, liberty and wealth have been decimated by this hysterical policy.
BRENDAN O'NEILL
EDITOR
20th May 2020
Spiked
Covid Britain feels like a one-party state. Normal political life has been suspended. Political protest and industrial action have been banned. Even small gatherings that question the ruling ideology of this strange new nation – the ideology of lockdown – are violently broken up. Witness the police brutality that was visited upon lockdown sceptics in Hyde Park a few days ago. You dissent at your peril.
The role of the citizen in the Covid dystopia is to applaud the state, not question it. Every Thursday night, on your doorsteps or your balconies, you must clap for the benevolent state and its gracious health service. Big Brother loves you and you must love it back. Vast propaganda billboards remind us of this duty. From Wembley Stadium to motorway hoardings to the front windows of the most respectable citizens’ houses, the same three words loom, like an omnipresent reminder to the masses of the only opinion you’re allowed to hold in Covid Britain: ‘Thank you NHS.’
The despotic instinct runs riot. We have seen police officers telling people to get out of their own front gardens, to stop walking in the Peak District, to get off park benches and return to their house arrest. Snitching is the only thriving business. By the end of April, British police forces had received 214,000 calls from Covid Britain’s willing army of spies. ‘Always the eyes watching you’, as Winston Smith put it.
New rituals ensure order and obedience. A face mask, like a burqa in Afghanistan, signifies your fealty to the new religion: social distancing. ‘Stay two metres apart’, the relentless propaganda instructs, even though the medical benefits of such distance are far from clear. People do the awkward pavement dance to avoid getting too close to passing strangers, and take their place in long, silent, fractured queues outside supermarkets, keen not to displease any lockdown fanatic who might be watching.
Not only is work strictly regulated in this one-ideology nation – so is play. There will be no hugging of people from outside your household until autumn at the earliest, says Matt Hancock, the secretary of state for human touch. A survey found that some people (possibly as high as one in five) are breaking lockdown to have sexual intercourse. Sex is an illicit activity in Covid Britain, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hancock is our one-man Junior Anti-Sex League keeping a watchful eye over citizens and their wandering hands. In Orwell’s dystopia, ‘the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion’. Same here. Just ask Neil Ferguson. He lost his job for having sex (when it should have been for his dodgy models).
Public debate has disintegrated. Do not for one minute be fooled by the noisy media discussions of the government’s failures or the pantomime yelling matches between TV presenters like Piers Morgan and some hapless minister. All of this takes place within the lockdown ideology. The only ‘dissenting’ view you may hold in Covid Britain is that the lockdown didn’t come early enough / wasn’t severe enough / is being eased too early. The media-government spats over the Covid crisis are the narcissism of small differences. The very shrillness of these discussions is an indicator that what we have here are groups devoted to the same cause – locking down the country – but who differ over how successfully the cause has been implemented. Hell hath no fury like fanatics bickering over details.
It’s the same in politics. Every clash and row takes place within the parameters of acceptable thought. Genuinely demurring voices are notable by their absence. Lockdown scepticism is staggeringly absent. Jacob Rees-Mogg is right to say that MPs must get off their Zoom calls and physically return to the Commons. But it isn’t their physical absence that’s the problem – it’s their intellectual absence. Where are the voices for reason and liberty and a return to work and production? The speed and thoroughness with which our allegedly conflictual political system was bent to a singular, myopic cause raises profound questions about the health of our democracy.
In lockdown Britain, there’s one way to think and one way to behave. You must accept the lockdown or risk being demonised as a hateful individual and possibly being beaten by the police. You must mask your face, keep your distance, foreswear sex, go shopping, go home again. Question nothing. Eat your meals, get your exercise, watch the news, go to bed. And await deliverance by officialdom. Although deliverance will be into a ‘new normal’, we are now chillingly told, in which the low-carbon, socially distanced, populace-managing dreams of the technocratic elite will finally become a real-world nightmare.
‘But it is all necessary’, the lockdowners cry. This was questionable from the very start of the lockdown. Now it is utterly untenable. The lockdown was justified as a temporary measure to ensure that the NHS was not pushed to breaking point by the hundreds of thousands of Covid cases that the ideologues of doom predicted. The cases never came. Many hospitals are half-empty. The lockdown’s justification has evaporated.
And yet it continues. And it’s easy to see why. It’s because lockdown has become a political, ideological cause, not a medical one, on to which so many of the elite’s prejudices – about the harmfulness of economic growth, the undesirability of mass society, the unimportance of liberty, the need for mass compliance to expert advice – have been projected. The lockdown is now separate from the pandemic. It has its own logic. It is the ruling ideology of our age. That is why Covid-related reason – whether one is pointing out that the models were wrong or that cases in London have plummeted – is proving such a feeble tool. Because the lockdown is no longer really about Covid.
How has the subjugation of democracy, liberty, daily life and reason to Covid hysteria been so successful? Through terror. It is not an exaggeration to say that the government launched a campaign of terror against the populace. Government adviser Professor Robert Dingwall is right to say that officials have ‘effectively terrorised’ people into believing that coronavirus will kill them. We have been incited to fear not only a disease, but each other. Misanthropy is the fuel of the lockdown ideology. Steer clear of people. Do not touch them. Do not sit next to them. They might be diseased. And you might be diseased. That baleful instruction, now rescinded, to ‘Stay Home’ and ‘Save Lives’ made it clear: you are dangerous, and if you go outside you could kill people. The purest form of the culture of fear.
Polls show that many people are now reluctant to go back to normal life. Many want schools to remain closed. There is fear about returning to work. Things are so bad that the government is having to redirect its resources, away from terrorising us to stay indoors towards trying to coax us to come out again. It is reported that Boris Johnson recently joked with his colleagues, saying: ‘I’ve learnt that it is much easier to take people’s freedoms away than give them back.’ That isn’t funny. The use of terror to cow much of the public, decimate economic life and suspend everyday liberty is not a joking matter. Terror has consequences, especially in a situation where any form of meaningful dissent from the terror was demonised and even criminalised.
How do we get out of this? With truth and reason. With facts about the virus, not hysteria. With clear information about the very small risk that Covid poses to the vast majority of us. And with a renewed commitment to freedom and democracy and to the thing that makes those things possible: the treatment of citizens as adults to be engaged with, not miscreant children to be terrorised into changing their behaviour. For the sake of liberty and the economy, the lockdown must end. But that isn’t enough. After that we need a reckoning with the ideology of the lockdown, and with the pre-Covid prejudices, elitism and hysteria that are its fuel.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/20/the-lockdown-has-done-untold-damage-to-this-country/
The lockdown doesn't apply to Welsh politicians. Just us little people...
Welsh ministers don’t even know their own rules
By refusing to follow England out of lockdown, the Welsh government has created needless confusion.
MARCUS STEAD
20th May 2020
Spiked
The ongoing pandemic has exposed the fundamental flaws of Welsh devolution, in ways more obvious than at any time in the 20 years since its inception. At best, it has led to comical absurdities. At worst, it has led to dangerous levels of incompetence among the Welsh government and confusion among the population.
During his Sunday evening TV address, Boris Johnson outlined his plan to ease the lockdown restrictions in the weeks and months ahead. There was a great deal of confusion at first. But the following day, the UK government published a 60-page document outlining its plans in depth. That afternoon, Johnson addressed the House of Commons, and in the early evening he gave a news conference to offer further clarity.
Things were even more confusing in Wales, where, on bank holiday Friday, Wales's First Minister Mark Drakeford held a little-watched news conference to announce a three-week extension to the lockdown, with some very minor loosening. Only a small minority of Welsh people would have interrupted their bank holiday to watch the briefing. Some may have seen snippets on TV news bulletins, but a very large number would have been completely unaware it ever took place.
Last Monday, on the day the UK government published its proposals, Paul Davies, leader of the Welsh Conservatives, challenged Drakeford to outline his plan for easing the lockdown. The plan was eventually published on Friday, but it was thin on detail and offered no dates. In Westminster, Labour leader Keir Starmer had been demanding a detailed plan from Johnson for weeks. Yet the same standards don’t appear to apply to Labour in Cardiff Bay.
Worse still, Drakeford didn’t even seem to be aware of what lockdown rules were already in place. He wrongly said at a news conference that, ‘The rules in Wales are that two people can meet providing they observe social distancing’. He then dug himself into a deeper hole by adding that two people have been able to interact in that way throughout the lockdown. He said he had always seen people meeting whenever he bicycled through one of the major fields in Cardiff on his way to his allotment.
Embarrassed civil servants were forced to clarify that people can only leave home for five specific reasons: to take exercise, to go to work if it’s not possible to work from home, to shop for ‘necessities’, to address a medical need, or to provide care for a vulnerable person. But they added that pre-arranging to meet friends and family, even one at a time, is not a ‘reasonable excuse’. Anyone following Drakeford’s incorrect advice might have potentially received a fine from the police.
Wales's Senedd, Cardiff
Mark Drakeford, First Minister of Wales
Furthermore, what on earth was Drakeford doing making journeys to his allotment? Tending to an allotment is a hobby and so it doesn’t meet his own criteria for leaving home. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’, seems to be the mantra from Wales’s nanny-in-chief.
And Drakeford wasn’t the only one caught out. Last Tuesday, pictures appeared in the Sun showing Wales’s health minister, Vaughan Gething, eating chips with his wife and child in a picnic area of Cardiff Bay. Conveniently, the guidance was altered a day later and having something to eat in a park while out exercising is now permitted.
If Boris Johnson or Matt Hancock had made similar gaffes or had broken the rules in this way, the London media would have demanded their resignations. But there was barely a squeak from the supine Welsh media, who have a dangerously cosy relationship with the Cardiff establishment.
Thanks to the easing of the lockdown in England, in recent days we have witnessed heart-warming scenes on news bulletins of people in England meeting up with their parents for a walk or a chat on a park bench, while keeping two metres apart. Drakeford and his government have cruelly decided that the Welsh cannot do this. They have yet to explain why we can be trusted to keep two metres apart from the person in front of us in the supermarket queue, but cannot be trusted to keep two metres apart from our own mothers in a public park.
The divergence in approaches of the UK and Welsh governments has led to some crazy situations, particularly as large numbers live within 20 miles of the border with England. A person living just over the English side of the border in Lydney, Gloucestershire, can now legally drive for four hours to a beach in East Anglia, but cannot drive to a beach less than an hour away in Barry, South Wales.
None of this confusion would have been an issue 25 years ago, in the pre-devolution years, when there would have been one clear plan, and one set of instructions applying to the whole of the UK.
Marcus Stead is a journalist based in Cardiff.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/20/welsh-ministers-dont-even-know-their-own-rules/
Welsh ministers don’t even know their own rules
By refusing to follow England out of lockdown, the Welsh government has created needless confusion.
MARCUS STEAD
20th May 2020
Spiked
The ongoing pandemic has exposed the fundamental flaws of Welsh devolution, in ways more obvious than at any time in the 20 years since its inception. At best, it has led to comical absurdities. At worst, it has led to dangerous levels of incompetence among the Welsh government and confusion among the population.
During his Sunday evening TV address, Boris Johnson outlined his plan to ease the lockdown restrictions in the weeks and months ahead. There was a great deal of confusion at first. But the following day, the UK government published a 60-page document outlining its plans in depth. That afternoon, Johnson addressed the House of Commons, and in the early evening he gave a news conference to offer further clarity.
Things were even more confusing in Wales, where, on bank holiday Friday, Wales's First Minister Mark Drakeford held a little-watched news conference to announce a three-week extension to the lockdown, with some very minor loosening. Only a small minority of Welsh people would have interrupted their bank holiday to watch the briefing. Some may have seen snippets on TV news bulletins, but a very large number would have been completely unaware it ever took place.
Last Monday, on the day the UK government published its proposals, Paul Davies, leader of the Welsh Conservatives, challenged Drakeford to outline his plan for easing the lockdown. The plan was eventually published on Friday, but it was thin on detail and offered no dates. In Westminster, Labour leader Keir Starmer had been demanding a detailed plan from Johnson for weeks. Yet the same standards don’t appear to apply to Labour in Cardiff Bay.
Worse still, Drakeford didn’t even seem to be aware of what lockdown rules were already in place. He wrongly said at a news conference that, ‘The rules in Wales are that two people can meet providing they observe social distancing’. He then dug himself into a deeper hole by adding that two people have been able to interact in that way throughout the lockdown. He said he had always seen people meeting whenever he bicycled through one of the major fields in Cardiff on his way to his allotment.
Embarrassed civil servants were forced to clarify that people can only leave home for five specific reasons: to take exercise, to go to work if it’s not possible to work from home, to shop for ‘necessities’, to address a medical need, or to provide care for a vulnerable person. But they added that pre-arranging to meet friends and family, even one at a time, is not a ‘reasonable excuse’. Anyone following Drakeford’s incorrect advice might have potentially received a fine from the police.
Wales's Senedd, Cardiff
Mark Drakeford, First Minister of Wales
Furthermore, what on earth was Drakeford doing making journeys to his allotment? Tending to an allotment is a hobby and so it doesn’t meet his own criteria for leaving home. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’, seems to be the mantra from Wales’s nanny-in-chief.
And Drakeford wasn’t the only one caught out. Last Tuesday, pictures appeared in the Sun showing Wales’s health minister, Vaughan Gething, eating chips with his wife and child in a picnic area of Cardiff Bay. Conveniently, the guidance was altered a day later and having something to eat in a park while out exercising is now permitted.
If Boris Johnson or Matt Hancock had made similar gaffes or had broken the rules in this way, the London media would have demanded their resignations. But there was barely a squeak from the supine Welsh media, who have a dangerously cosy relationship with the Cardiff establishment.
Thanks to the easing of the lockdown in England, in recent days we have witnessed heart-warming scenes on news bulletins of people in England meeting up with their parents for a walk or a chat on a park bench, while keeping two metres apart. Drakeford and his government have cruelly decided that the Welsh cannot do this. They have yet to explain why we can be trusted to keep two metres apart from the person in front of us in the supermarket queue, but cannot be trusted to keep two metres apart from our own mothers in a public park.
The divergence in approaches of the UK and Welsh governments has led to some crazy situations, particularly as large numbers live within 20 miles of the border with England. A person living just over the English side of the border in Lydney, Gloucestershire, can now legally drive for four hours to a beach in East Anglia, but cannot drive to a beach less than an hour away in Barry, South Wales.
None of this confusion would have been an issue 25 years ago, in the pre-devolution years, when there would have been one clear plan, and one set of instructions applying to the whole of the UK.
Marcus Stead is a journalist based in Cardiff.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/20/welsh-ministers-dont-even-know-their-own-rules/
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You would have been swell during WWII with rationing and curfews Karl.
Heck, you’d likely side with the Germans.
If this generation had faced the nazis we would all be speaking german right now.
In fact, it's you lockdowners who could never cope with WWII.
You're terrified of a poxy virus not much different from the flu, afraid to step foot outside and move within six feet of another person. Goodness knows how you would have fared had you lived in a British city during the Blitz.
In fact, there wasn't even a lockdown during the Blitz. We were told to carry on as normally as we can. "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON."
Now it's "DON'T KEEP CALM. PANIC. STAY AT HOME OR ELSE YOU WILL DIE."
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This generation is too busy censoring medical professionals who aren't towing the lock down narrative while Bill Gates is all over the MSM and social media pushing his bullshit vaccine.
Even the morons on Gilligan's Island had the sense to listen to the professor and NOT the millionaire.
You need to start asking yourself questions and thinking for yourself. Like, if masks are so effective then why shut down the economy. And if they aren't effective, why try to make everyone wear one. The fact is, they are NOT very effective unless you have the incredible discipline of surgeon. Look at the pics I posted elsewhere in here of Dr. Fauci wearing a mask, touching and readjusting it, touching his face. Pretty much makes the whole exercise f*cking pointless.
Too bad the morons here don't have that much sense.
Yes, Dr. Fauci touched his face, which PROVES it's ALL A HOAX!
I see your comprehension levels are slipping. I said it makes the exercise pointless. But hey, you go right ahead and pretend I said it's all a hoax if that's what gets you through your day.
Whole lotta dumb in that post.
What’s next? Are you going to tell us 5G is spreading the virus?
I’m terrified?
Have you read any of your posts Karl?
I’ve never heard so much whimpering.