Kerryn Phelps Dances the Malhotra Shuffle

A Parents Guide to Prodigal Children

Kerryn Phelps Dances the Malhotra Shuffle

As I write this latest rant, we have just passed Christmas and the New Year, the former with all its religious connotations and the latter a sobering reminder that we enter (or have entered) into the fourth year of psychological traumata at the hands of public health and other establishment elites.

And so, it is as opportune a time as any for us to explore a parable form the tradition by which we might say the star on the tree leads us to Bethlehem and a 2023 “Anno Domini”, with lessons also for those secular folk traumatized in the common era.

The parable concerns the prodigal or second son of book of Luke, who asked his father for an early inheritance. The father in his generosity granted the wish only to have the son squander the inheritance recklessly and hedonistically, returning destitute to the father who welcomed him with open arms and total forgiveness, much to the irritation of the elder son who was loyal all along.

A vulgar interpretation would have it, and often is by those wanting a simple write off for their own or others sins, that all is to be forgiven without regard for an Earthly sense of justice. But not so fast.

 To be sure the parable remarks on the furious indignation of the elder brother as something to be remedied in his own heart. But lacking is any negative commentary that the brother is off on a purity spiral or overplaying the friend enemy distinction. Neither is he cruel, unfair or even jealous. On the contrary, the father as model of our conduct makes clear the elder is just and wise and deserves to inherit the estates half that was promised him, a half which is indeed the only part remaining. As the elder continues on a journey of identification with the father, the elder remains on course to hold every ounce of power currently held by the father and the father is beseeching him to wield it justly and mercifully and with a sense of community that is the family. We can only speculate on the elder brother’s response. What we are not permitted to speculate upon is the father’s assessment of his eldest son, and the response expected of him.

Now what of the younger brother? It is worth pointing out that the father is representative of an omniscient God (or for the secular world a proper moral orientation that the reader’s intuitions can grasp and be guided by). And so what the father hears with his ears is somewhat immaterial as the father sits within the story as the moral of the story itself narrated by Christ who ought to know. That is to say, the text is not just the text. The youngest does not merely makes mistakes on investment. On his way to destitution, he debauches and depraves, winding up ironically adding insult to self injury getting work as a swine herder, something forbidden for a Judean. So closes the first act of his character arc. He descends into the filth with pigs and deserves every step on the way down.  The second act of his character arc involves a transformation of self that, more than his youthful legs, gives him warrant to carry him home and the forgiveness he ultimately receives. The younger brother has agonizing moments of confrontation with the self and does not like what he sees. With the getting of insight he returns with the view he deserves to be no better than a servant for indeed he is no better. He believes this sincerely and wants his father to hear this confession. He needs return to the drawing board of character development and realizes his father (and by extension) elder brother are the appropriate ones to help him complete his journey.

Now what has all this to do with a British cardiologist and an Australian professor of family medicine.

Some of us anti covid cult dissident folk are the older brothers of this tale. We have held to systems of ethics, basic logic and non-politicized and non self interested science and medicine from the beginning. Like the older brother we tilled the field and suffered for our principles, all the while participants with the general public in dialogue and a horizontal model of community. We woke up fast in early 2020 and we woke up hard, making public declarations at times we knew would be damaging to career if not more. But we did it anyway. We were arrested and suspended, made pariahs and had all the mud in the world flung at us. We commune with long dead thinkers, many of whom are alien to even the progressive science of the last century. We do this from motivational well springs that those who whore about with pharma and celebrity and various melding of medicine and politics can only babble in simulation without any understanding.

So when we straighten our backs and leave the field to encounter talk of holding a party for a prodigal son or daughter (or brother or sister), we bloody well would like to know if they have returned reeking of pigs with blistered feet and most important of all, a sincerely contrite heart and want to learn something from us. Some of us at least are interested in truth, whatever we take for moral purity and a terribly old fashioned and currently unfashionable thing you might have heard of called justice. Above all we want to convert this truth into action.  And we only ever compromise very cautiously and even more conditionally.

Malhotra the Prodigal Son?

Enter British cardiologist Asseem Malhotra onto the stage of our parable. Malhotra was already a minor celebrity pre covid, even to the point of being a familiar guest on significant TV programs of the UK. He had, so to speak, a “platform” and at least 200K twitter followers when I first encountered him (now approaching double that). Malhotra was famous for dishing out some well deserved critiques of the sick care system and pharma. He was the architect of what appears to be a fusion of the low carb and Mediterranean diet. It seems that with diets like psychotherapies, there is nothing new under the sun. Just throw some old ingredients together in not entirely novel ways and rebrand and we are off to the races, along with the bestsellers list. The paternalist spirit was alive and well in Malhotra tweeting April 2020 at how “disgraceful” it was “feeding junk food to already overweight and obsess NHS staff”, this excoriation a response to Krispy Kremes publicity stunt to send 1,500 free doughnuts to the priests and priestesses of UK’s main religion, i.e. the NHS. Much as I hate a good doughnut like anyone else concerned with health, the point is that KrispyKreme did not “feed” anyone anything. They sent the product to the hospital and sentient beings with free will and sovereign ownership over their overweight bodies chose to eat them. Beware authoritarians with messages you believe in.

25th November 2020 Malhotra uses his platform to tweet out on the covid synthetic nucleotides “Vaccines are the safest of ALL drugs. Far safer than any other drugs people are taking on a regular including most people most people over 50 taking at least one prescription. The vaccine safety concerns are totally disproportionate to reality” (sic). Needless to say in his practice he would have promoted the “vaccines” as rigorously.  

2nd December 2020 the Johnson regime approves the Pfizer BioNtech vaccine, perhaps making the UK the fastest nation (or nation collective) in the world to take the moon shot and manage to land on its spikey surface with spike of their own. Only then could the rollout commence and Malhotra himself (and his father) receive their first doses a month after into the new year of 2021. The pharma skeptic Malhotra’s pro covid vax tweet precedes the approval and beginning of the rollout by precisely one week, before he could rightly claim to know anything about the vaccine but by an article of pure dumb blind faith. He promotes a product with scant “data” provided exclusively from the “public private partnership” of pharma and the government of the UK (including all the “yes Ministers” who really run the show).  Let that sink in.

5th February 2021 we have the infomercial masquerading as current affairs “Good Morning Britain” tweeting about a late January interview with local celebrity Malhotra convincing some skeptical British Indian film director (with an OBE of course) on the safety of the vaccine. Malhotra’s basis thesis was that big pharma is bad pharma, but not this time for the covid vaccine qua vaccine is holy. Naturally he succeeds in persuading her. Was there any doubt?

Here we have a doctor playing TV celebrity counseling a film director directing herself as the easily convinced skeptical patient. Pure sincerity and pure theatre running at the same time in clown world, these are two elites once again telling the proles what to think.  

By 26th July 2021, the plot takes a tragic turn. Malhotra’s previously fit and apparently health father passed away of a cardiac event at the age of 73, this approx. 6 months after his (and his sons) first of two doses.  It is worth noting parenthetically that the father was himself a physician, former high executive of the British Medical Association and like the son presumably sharing in the blind faith towards pharma as regards covid. Malhotra takes the journey down the rabbit hole as it were, emerging with the conclusion the jab put his father on a course towards an early death. And now on “our side” he is hailed as an anti (covid) vaxxer hero, even calling for the vaccine to be banned. (from doughnuts to jabs, there goes the paternalism again. When the problem is being regulated into what to think/eat/inject, when will “they” stop telling us what to do and wanting to take control)

Criticizing one who has passed through tragedy puts us in delicate territory. A man loses a father before his time, perhaps iatrogenic via the vaccine, perhaps not. Of that I cannot and will not judge. What is objectively the case is less important than what he believes to be the case and how we might assess him in light of what follows.

Like a broken man two thousand years ago fed less than the swine under his ward, this makes little difference to the question of whether and how to exercise compassion at the total expense of justice. And it certainly makes little difference over the question of merit towards being considered an intellectual, a critical thinker or even an “expert”.

I take it that the majority who read this will be on the side of the aisle opposed to the mainstream narrative around covid, and will be tempted to accept Malhotra into the fold as a thought leader and expert. I shan’t counsel against this except to offer a few thoughts before you rush headlong into inviting this prodigal son to the party

Firstly, in Malhotra’s article of July 2022 in the Journal of Insulin Resistance (a journal upon which he sits as part of the editorial board) he writes that he received the vaccine as early as he could to prevent transmission to his patients. At the time he was volunteering at a vaccine centre, not a cardiology clinic. He was pumping as many covid vaccines into as many patients as he could, biologically and propaganda both). Prior research in primates provided no evidence that the vaccine was likely to prevent transmission. Nor was there any evidence of enduring reduction of transmission in humans to date. Still, faith won the day, not science. Assuming for example and for sake of argument that vaccines for polio and tetanus have proven their worth, Malhotra seems to have fallen for a logical fallacy so basic that no critical thinker can retain the title after having made it. He believed that everything that carries the label of, and certain shared qualities with, that class of objects known as “vaccines” are a priori the same. Because polio ergo covid is the assumption. This staggering error never ceases to amaze me. We might as well say that all surgeries in virtue of being surgeries are the same. Well if you believe that, have I got a frontal lobotomy for you! No, vaccines are not all the same even as biological objects, much less objects of psychological and political (even economic) utility. And the covid vaccines are very heavily non biological in this sense. Once again we return to the example of surgery. Removing an appendix that threatens to rupture is all about the biological. The only non biological concern is if one values life over death if things go south. Breast augmentation on the other hand is only minimally a surgical intervention. Everything that is behind the choice to augment ones breast is outside the body, outside the surgical theatre and in psychological and sociological space. Malhotra simply didn’t see any bigger picture. He played right into it. And we are left speculating if for lack of personal tragedy he would ever see it, let alone care. Sure it was his father. But thats the point for even the tax collectors love their own. What if it wasn’t and it was your father instead. Think about that. His was an experiment in N=1, a lowly “anecdote”. I have a fondness for anecdote myself as a foundation for science. But I’ll wager if someone came to Malhotra (or Phelps) in early 2021 with a story about their father he (she) would have said “one patients story does not a scientific proof make. Look at the data (Pfizers data), listen to us experts and thou will see the truth”.

Placing covid vaccines within some homogenous category is not just a silliness unbecoming of an intellectual, it also renders others vulnerable to unintended (but entirely foreseeable) consequences. Let’s follow my logic. A) these “experts” perpetuate the idea everything marketed as a vaccine belongs to a common class. B) they believe the covid vaccines are far from safe. C) via their silence over time they contribute to a false picture of covid vaccine safety, in so doing and in their own small way building up behind the dam a great number of cases brimming with adverse reactions. Now if and when this dam eventually bursts, even if by their own hand, other putatively safe vaccines might suffer similar reputational loss. If and when that happens, will these experts take one shred of personal responsibility for the resultant case of measles meningitis or fatal tetanus? Of course they won’t. I’d wager they would take to the platform once again, this time to pontificate out how vital it is that we adhere to the traditional schedule. It well might be similar to the fascial show in psychiatry where every 10-15 years they discover for the first time that there is no “chemical imbalance” behind most major psychiatric disorders. Then they forget it again only as experts to rediscover.      

Since his father’s passing, Malhotra has demonstrated some regrets, in particular to the late father himself (and fair enough and to his credit). But to my moral sensibilities he seems uncomfortably comfortable continuing on in the role of expert, seamlessly moving from one platform to another without questioning whether he has an undeserved sense of platform entitlement. Its “listen to me and get your jab” to “listen to me and avoid the jab” with the common preposition being “listen to me”. But why? Unfortunately we don’t have any rehab clinics for those addicted to a sense of platform entitlement and suffering from an expert complex. But would he attend one if there were? And why am I the only one who would seem to see it fitting to drive him there?

So dear reader, shall you invite this prodigal brother into the fold? Is he really an expert? Is he your expert? With all the compassion in the world I can muster, I can’t see why this entitles him to anything more than the compassion that’s due anyone who’s had a loss. And not even to stand at the front of the queue as if there isn’t people far less resourced who have suffered far greater losses. Surely a modicum of compassion is enough. Yes?

Phelps the Prodigal daughter?

Where Asseem Malhotra is the son of British medical aristocracy, Kerryn Phelps AM won her place in the closest thing Australia has to an aristocracy when admitted into membership of the order of Australia (AM). This appointment relates to being the first female president of the Australian Medical Association in particular, along with other positions of leadership empty of meaningful content. That is to say, if the AMA provides no substantially meaningful service, what does it matter if she held its highest station?

Phelps is no stranger to the screen and print media either, being an author, household name and Australian media darling this past few decades, perhaps second only to calm tones of covid policy cultist Dr Norman Swan. The notoriety would not have hurt her chances amongst the voters when going for positions in local and federal politics, Phelps winning on both attempts.  

Phelps is also well known for marrying her wife in a New York same sex marriage ceremony way back in 1998, the event placing her ahead of curve of Australia’s own change in the legal status of marriage. All up she enters into competition for awards and leadership with a triple layer of identity politics armor, four layers if we include her being the first to make the AMA a climate change activist lobby (was there any doubt).   

On 18th March 2020 Australia’s governer general declared a biosecurity state of emergency, the day before the Ruby Princess docked in Sydney with what the establishment knew in advance were hundreds of cases. One week after the declaration and the consent manufactured by her docking and the consequent media hysteria, Australia’s travel ban was declared. Though restrictions of various kinds began earlier, this was the date we became what I have termed the Gulag Archipelago formerly known as Australia. Currently we remain on conditional parole until the WHO global pandemic treaty is up and running in 2024 and they doctor up the next threat somewhere in the coming decade.

Ours was one of the most oppressive and draconian restrictive policies in the world, a time and place where civil and political liberties would come to die. Phelps publicly supported and promoted this each and every step along the way, even to the point of lamenting an easing on isolation requirements as recently as August 2022. She provided precisely zero support for anyone of the freedom movement, including besieged and suspended doctors. She said nothing when her own AMA invited the dark lord Fauci to be keynote speaker at its conference in Sydney (via zoom I assume). She is a fully made member of the high table of Ozsage, the body that promotes covid vaccines to the hilt and whose name is given it by its UK equivalent. Yes once again Australia can just be derivative of our masters in the North.  Ozsage and its members, Phelps included, are all about pure elitist managerialism and hyper regulation. Read their works. Let that sink in.  

Australia’s vaccine rollout would not be officially launched February 22nd 2021, 7 weeks behind that of the UK though similarly without evaluative rigor. That was when the clock would start ticking on any observance of immediate, imminent and delayed adverse reactions. Phelps and her partner had their jabs (plural) in June-July 2021 (Phelps own second dose was in July, suggesting the couple might have started in June), coming back for more even after what she described in her partner as an immediate adverse reaction.

Of her partner’s covid vaccine adverse reaction (see news.com.au) Phelps states “This is an issue that I have witnessed first-hand with my wife who suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes, including burning face and gums, paraesethesiae, and numb hands and feet, while under observation by myself, another doctor and a registered nurse at the time of immunisation,”

Of herself the article continues

“I continue to observe the devastating effects a year-and-a-half later with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.”

Phelps states that she informed the TGA of her and her partners own mid 2021 adverse reactions shortly after they occurred, silence being the stern response.   

And yet Phelps disclosed nothing of this to the public until 20th December 2022, almost 3 years after the lockdowns and other screws of coercion began tightening towards the vaccine to come, 22 months after the vaccine launch and one and a half full years (17 months plus!) after her and her partner’s alleged injury. Let that sink in.

Let sink in also that on the very same day of her stunning and brave coming out as a covid vaccine skeptic, Ozsage released a position paper with the smart arse title “OzSAGE says “avoid decking the halls with COVID-19 folly”. The lead recommendation reads as follows “Vaccinate children aged 6 months to 5 years”. I’ll spare you the horrors of the rest of what Ozsage is and wants for you.

“Now Robert”, you might say, “she’s afraid of the machine. You have left out her own reference to AHPRA’s gagging of doctors and the fear campaign.”   

Indeed the news.com.au article reads

“Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunisation, with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration,” she said.

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), which oversees Australia’s 800,000 registered practitioners and 193,800 students, last year warned that anyone who sought to “undermine” the national Covid vaccine rollout could face deregistration or even prosecution.

AHPRA’s position statement said that “any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice which contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards and may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action”.”

And so what? Phelps is an extremely savvy Machiavellian player who chooses her entrance and exit timing with fine precision and shrewd speculative intuition. She did it with the AMA. She did it with politics. She did it when she left her board role of the infamous “satellite group” and other business ventures and you can bet she’s doing it here with the stunning and brave coming out as a covid vaccine skeptic (never discount the nagging power of a spouse also, behind every great woman is a…er..…great woman). If I had Phelps clout (and I don’t), the first thing I would do is call out AHPRA as nasty mean over regulators to force them into playing to a different frame, my frame. And when AHPRA don’t really go after her as hard as they have with the real dissidents such as yours truly, AHPRA restores itself as quite moderate really, at worst the innocent victims of having been manipulated by the mean national cabinet of the Morrison regime. Then we can get back to business as usual with the sham of prudent regulation plus/minus a little faux reformation. The idea that a wealthy powerful 65 year old celebrity doctor with her career in the rear view mirror actually has anything to fear from the regulator is laughable, and claims on my side she is oh so brave are a sign people have looked too long at “the science” and not enough at the brutal cynical politics of human nature.

A number of points follow from these and other revelations

Firstly, and parenthetically, Phelps states she and other medical specialist colleagues believed significant adverse reactions were occurring.

Once again, the news.co.au article states

“She revealed she had spoken with other doctors “who have themselves experienced a serious and persistent adverse event” but that “vaccine injury is a subject that few in the medical profession have wanted to talk about”.

These doctors likewise were also, needless to say, silent. This combined with her comments regarding the TGA provide more telling evidence of the ridiculousness of Matthias Desmet’s theory of “mass formation” where compliance to restrictions even in the expert class results commonly from faithful devotion to the narrative and a state akin to hypnosis. Not at all! Whether I interview whistle blowers in high church hierarchy, military hierarchy, high finance and the banking industry, the gambling industry, politics, pharma or here in Phelps own “tells”, a common theme emerges. People have more than a dim awareness of the truth and often an openness to hear it. But they work within systems more powerful than they. They have a sociometer that gauges the likely impact to reputation, career, their affordance of first world luxuries etc if they fight the machine. Having made the measure they decide the truth just isn’t worth the price. They go along to get along to get ahead and stay ahead. Cowardice rules the land. Not hypnosis. Don’t let little liberal compassionate copes fool you. For those who don’t spit on utilitarianism, action (and even some degree of belief) flows downstream from utility.   

Secondly, I’ve never read the Art of War. But if I had and were to be pretentious enough to quote it, I’m pretty sure I’d not find it written that we ought to let our enemies choose our role models and spokespeople, this most especially when they remain part of the enemy army (i.e. Ozsage) and largely remain devoted to enemy ideology. I guess much depends on how the friend enemy distinction is framed in this struggle. Many in our movement desire the same thing Phelps does. They are afraid of spike proteins sure. Yet they will happily submit to a less spiky prison. As long as their biological arses are protected from the spike, the injury to civil and political liberties is easily endured. I’ll wager that Phelps, Ozsage and others intuit this too. So a self interested limited hang out here and there doesn’t stop prison construction. 

Thirdly, as is the case in mating behavior, reaching out to and sucking up to Phelps also signals we need her bad and place a value upon her higher than ourselves. Those who so badly want her to be one of ours will often also be those who speak of the inevitability of truth emerging and the good guys winning hooray and hooray. If such is the case and you are so much the optimist, why do we need Phelps? Let any join us on our terms and to our ends if they wish to try. Of the rest, let the unrighteous be unrighteous still. It’s really pathetic to see someone wish to date another who has played on the bullying side for almost 3 years, all because the love interest suffered from a dose of their own medicine and now likes some of the same music. To our side I’d implore, have some dignity please. If we have anything good and beautiful and true to offer, in time they will come to us. If they don’t, what really have we lost? And if you think you’ll “convert” her and she’ll “join” you, take a cold shower and wake up to the real world.     

Fourthly, Phelps and Ozsage are nested within deeper and much more powerful structural problems which are so taken for granted as to be unrecognized. Australians love to see tall poppies rise and fall this is true. But we cannot stop looking at tall poppies and regarding only tall poppies as meaningful to behold. Our movement will introduce speakers on its side who have been fighting from the start as being experts with MD’s, PhDs, this or that establishment accolade and blah blah blah. Is the irony lost on us that the other side has many more PhD’s than us, many more professorial titles, more Nobel prizes and so forth. So what? Might it not occur to us that a good part of the problem is not the cult of their expert but the cult of expertise as such? Might it not occur to our side that credentials and publications and all the professorial titles in the world (God forbid being past AMA hierarchy) have proven themselves to be awful predictors of who has the moral fiber to be part of the vanguard against the madness of this past few years? And not just the moral fiber, credentials and establishment success are an awful predictor of possessing the intellectual capacity also? The remedy lay not in extremist leftist ideology of destroying the establishment for destructions sake. Rather it’s in swimming upstream closer to the truth of realizing that existing system players created this mess and all the remedies flowing from it involve destructions in order to preserve something deeper and superior. Phelps simply has nothing of value to add that a dangerous narcissistic system did not invest in her and her in it. Our criteria of who ought to lead our vanguard of counter elites ought to be a) when did you come out, b) how much did you publicly add to the discourse and c) why did you do what you did and why did you think what you thought from a critical thinking and ethical perspective. Our movement has all sorts of people with moral compasses and minds set aright, many credentialed and many not. We have non doctors who understand the data of medicine better than the medicos and medicos who understand the ethical landscape better than those from the humanities. We have wise laity and wise professors. It’s high time we look at criteria of merit outside that used by the world who made the mess in the first place. We have all these in our ranks already and room for those who are genuinely wanting to join. Well Kerryn sorry to say auditions closed many months ago. You lost your way, arrived late, played out of tune, looked in the mirror too much and missed the cut. C’est la vie. On your bike.

I don’t expect though this radical realization to be welcome and its implications followed through towards a more classless assessment of merit to raze all the old castles to the ground (AMA, AHPRA, the Royal Colleges et al). Doctors on my side of the fight, especially senior ones, are more likely give Phelps a free pass and disguise this as sophistication or mature high Kohlbergian compassion. Why? Because she and they are members of the same class, and to throw her a free pass is to throw one at themselves and keep to the misplaced validation of doctors qua doctors as experts. Her medical degree is their medical degree. Her professorial title is their professorial title. Her royal college is their royal college. The number one motto of medicine is never bring the profession into disrepute, only hang a colleague out to dry if necessary, cover up seniors sins if possible and throw juniors under the bus. Make the laity think you are special.  

Finally, there is no denying and no easy forgiving that via great moral and intellectual failures of commission and omission she contributed to all the horrors of this past few years. I see not a shred of self reflective embarrassment necessary of a prodigal child. To be frank at this late hour I’d doubt its sincerity if I did see a tear or two. Some anankastic readers will identify with themselves as having lost sleep when making more modest errors in life or work, with much more modest negative consequences to others. That is to say they did far less and punish themselves far worse, yet wish not to have Phelps face any consequences at all. Phelps (like Malhotra though much worse) seems to suffer from no dint of confidence in herself as expert critical thinker and ethical protagonist which we all ought to listen to. Now I don’t expect them to respond to their failures like the aristocrats of old and dispatch themselves in a roman bath or to a samurai blade. We are post moderns after all. I don’t even expect them retire to a monastery. But the least they could do is retire to a life of contemplation or de platform themselves and submit to people on our side to learn something for a few years. This brings me to my most important and final point. Earlier I mentioned sociometers and social signals. To the extent we embrace faux prodigal children now is the extent to which we fire an arrow into the future. And that arrow carries a message. And that message reads “you of power and influence, you can do and say and not do and not say whatever the hell you want. All you have to do is make an 11th hour concession here and there and you can flip and flop and all will be well. the dissidents will embrace you and the people will love you”. People far nastier and more ruthless than Phelps will pick up the signal too. We saw this with the WMD war machine. No one divested them of their power and Blair (for example) is more powerful now than ever. The war machine keeps spinning and many have lost their lives. So accuse me if you like of going off on a purity spiral or being cruel or lacking the sophistication to dance a little with the devil to make some gains. But when nothing substantially structurally changes and history rolls around again, when the same kind of creatures inhabiting Ozsage come to lurk within the upcoming Australian CDC, don’t say I didn’t warn you to be a bit purer when you had the chance.

So dear reader, is Phelps your prodigal sister? Is she an expert? Is she your expert? Is she so stunning and brave? Does she deserve a place amongst the leadership of a new vanguard against the establishment? Do you need her? With all the compassion in the world I can muster, I can’t see why this entitles her to anything more than the compassion that’s due anyone who’s had a loss, and this after having taken a place in line behind those poor than herself who have suffered more. Surely that is enough.

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This piece is rededicated to Dr Thomas Binder, the Swiss cardiologist/immunologist who has been with us from the beginning of the lockdown wars. His intelligence is matched only by his bravery. We are part of the class of 2020.