Obliged to commit suicide

By Modesto P. Sa-onoy

John Horvat II’s article in Return to Order last week is worth sharing. I received the article entitled,  “No One Can Oblige Us to Commit Suicide” last Friday. It is a long discourse so let me cite passages to illustrate his point that governments have no right to compel people to commit suicide.

Citing recent studies in England and the US, Horvat wrote that “something went seriously wrong with the models used to project the threat to public health. These models were not even close to reality. The most cited was released by a team from the Imperial College London led by Prof. Neil Ferguson. It was used by large number of governments to impose extreme confinement measures on their citizens. These political leaders showed more faith and reverence for this model’s skewed projections than they accord to the Four Gospels.”

The Four Gospels of course refer to the Bible, universally accepted as inerrant, a characteristic that the project studies cannot claim. After all these studies are mere projections or conjectures.

Horvat said that “these London experts estimated 2.2 million Americans would die (but until today) only a fraction of that number succumbed. The study’s principal author later admitted that the wild estimates were based on thousands of lines of undocumented code written 13 years ago to model flu pandemics. These initial models were not just miscalculations, but guesstimates based on a poor application of science. A politicized media then ran with them.”

He charged that “no one has yet been called to account over this massive mistake. These scientists still have their jobs. The government leaders who rashly and unquestionably accepted and acted on their inflated numbers are still in office. Irresponsible media continues to whip up hysteria.”

Worse, he complained, “not satisfied with their disastrous handling of the crisis in the medical field, government leaders doubled down and went for an encore in the economy and society-at-large. The wheels of industry and commerce came to a screeching halt in anticipation of the pandemic that would kill millions. A good portion of the world is still in some phase of lockdown. These decisions too were based on the same faulty models. They are triggering a meltdown.

“Government actions should be based on real data and sound science. The continued implementation of extreme confinement measures based on these flawed guesstimate models is nothing but socio-political and economic suicide.”

Horvat pointed out that “vast stretches of America with few or no cases of the virus were treated with the same drastic rigor as New York City, the national hot spot. Vibrant businesses and operations were simplistically divided into just two groups: “essential” or “non-essential.” Who knows what questionable criteria informed this un-Solomonic decision seeing that in many states, abortion mills, marijuana dispensaries and liquor stores were deemed “essential,” but not so churches and religious gatherings?”

Replace the US and New York with the Philippines or more pinpointedly Negros and Bacolod, and you have the same scenario because in knee-jerk fashion the Philippines followed imitated the criteria and methods that China, the European Union and the US believed with Gospel truth.

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko downplayed the pandemic, appearing at Orthodox Easter services and other public events and calling concerns over the virus a “psychosis”. Belarus is the only European country that continued holding football matches during the crisis.

Horvat concluded that “One day, history will judge with great severity the guilt of all involved in creating the panic and hysteria informing this crisis. It will condemn harshly those who have openly and unashamedly used the crisis to pursue their subversive ideological goals. To varying degrees, each must bear some responsibility for this medical and economic calamity. They will share in the blame for those who will perish by illness, suicide, anxiety, and other indirect causes of death wrought by the worldwide panic and everything it triggered.

“The only way out of the crisis is to pull out of this suicidal course. Now. Immediately. No one can be obliged to commit suicide.”

Because of our national “psychosis” the MMDA was at a loss on what to do after May 15. They threw the problem to the national government with two proposals – barangay with “too many cases” would be locked down. If there are barangays where there are no new cases, we can reopen them.”