Over the last few days, three very significant events have happened to me, which ultimately resulted in this text, which is perhaps a kind of last-ditch idea and plan to at least partially get out of all this.
Since I started writing about Covid and started... Healthy Forum, I receive emails and messages from ordinary people, friends, but also from doctors from Covid AROs, nurses, teachers, scientists... And strangely enough, almost all of them have one thing in common.
"Thank you very much for what you are doing, it comforts me that there are still people who are able to think rationally... I fully agree with you and I am glad that you are trying to find data and I admire that you have the courage to speak out..."
A huge number of people see the madness that is happening around us, and yet they remain silent and afraid. They see government measures and decisions that are not only stupid and illogical, but unfortunately, they are without any overlap. The longest government vision ends in two days, because on the third day the regulations are changing rapidly... But what is worse, they all have a terrible impact on health, the economy and general life in our country - they are pure social experiments on all of us.
A few days ago, I happened to sit all evening over wine with Michal Faflík – an artist who was with Václav Havel at the Velvet Revolution from the very beginning. He also, among others, stands, along with Bořek Šípek, behind the first VH bench, which stood in front of his wine bar.
Back then, in the very beginning of November, when they were sitting around apartments, theaters and cafes – there were literally only a few dozen people around the Civic Forum and everyone simply believed that they were doing something right. In that revolutionary time, it was literally a matter of criminality, or even life, if communism did not fall in the end. And the probability that this would actually happen was actually almost zero in the beginning. And yet they did not give up and in the end things turned around and those few people literally rewrote history.
That was real heroism back then. But today it's nothing!
My only heroism lies perhaps in the fact that after this well-spent evening talking about Václav Havel, despite the completely stupid curfew, I returned home up the hill after two bottles of wine... 😉
The second tangible turning point for me was the fact that even I, as a small Czech "amateur epidemiologist", could expose the nonsense written by the renowned Reuters agency, picked up by the Czech ČTK and dozens of servers and periodicals around the world.
End of media lies!
And no one cared (and still does), no one discovered the mistake, no one spoke up, and yet the fake news sowed more and more fear in millions of people around the world.
And the last and perhaps most crucial point was an email I received last Friday from the president of a university. The email began similarly to the one I have already quoted others and continued:
"...use it however you want, but please ANONYMOUSLY, I do not want my name published anywhere. Although the majority of the top management at our university supports this line, such opinions are in the minority among ordinary employees and we must of course comply with all government measures. Of course, I have signed the petitions of doctors and the Healthy Forum on my own behalf, but I do not speak out publicly about it, that is not my role."
"And is that my role???!!!" I wrote to him,
He answered then in a completely manly way
"..I realize this and I know that this is my weakness and the weakness of the entire system. The silent majority. Or maybe the silent half."
And so we continued to write to each other in a friendly manner...
I also don't enjoy spending whole days studying graphs about the spread of disease and mortality in the Czech Republic or checking the work of journalists. I want to continue writing my books in peace. And what's worst is, I can study the spread of the epidemic a hundred times, compare the symptoms of the flu and point out its real danger to children - I can be right a hundred times, but I will always be just an "amateur epidemiologist artist" who advises government experts, who, as it turns out, are wrong.
The only way out of all this is simply up to you - doctors, professors, school principals, epidemiologists, statisticians, hygienists, nurses, virologists, economists, psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, sociologists, the opposition... In short, everyone who has something to say about it professionally and knows that an atrocity is happening here.
You all need to slam the table and shout ENOUGH!
Speak up and start showing people the other side of the coin through the eyes of your field: the real reality of the disease, not distorted by the media.
It is up to you to calm people down and dispel their fear. And that is exactly the path that I believe will ultimately lead to pressure on the government and gradually to a change in the populist government's policies and a return to normalcy in the country.
I understand that for most of you from the academic world, it is not usual to speak out, to appear in the media and show your position. Many who write to me are afraid for their positions in hospitals, schools, scientific institutes, or are just afraid of the long fingers of Prymula and others who are still pulling the strings of the government. Or the mockery of state propaganda, which is really going full speed and many have already tasted its bitter taste.
But I think it's really time to step out, step beyond your shadows and speak out. Because right now, your voice is needed the most! Unfortunately, no one else can do it but you!
I thank all the more those who are no longer silent and are unfortunately "rewarded" and ridiculed in the media for it... ;-(
Please persevere!
Try to fight for truth and objectivity!
If you have access to the media, please go there and talk openly about Covid and all this madness from the perspective of your field. Please show people the other view, which is not shrouded in fear and freezers with corpses. The view of pure reality of numbers, comparisons without emotions with other diseases, with realistic death rates and real danger. About the sociological and economic impact of senseless measures on society. Translate and show opposing studies from abroad.
In short, show the people and the government the opposing opinion and opinion, so common in science, which has incomprehensibly disappeared today. And has been replaced only by the hysteria of government experts who are being played with.
Speak up and speak up when you hear your colleagues' misguided calculations about thousands of deaths per day that can no longer be averted! Because when such words do not have a loud enough opposing opinion, they unfortunately become a general truth that shapes the entire society and its fear.
Samizdat
If you don't have a way to publish your professional texts, I'd be happy to help you with that myself and with other people from Healthy Forum we will help. I am already trying to combine interesting texts there. The readership of our articles is in the tens of thousands and interest is growing, and I believe that people will continue to share them themselves.
Let's make a modern samizdat for people - popular scientific articles that people will understand and free them from unnecessary irrational fear.
And if you are still worried, we can also publish the texts anonymously - with only your profession and expertise disclosed.
If you know an expert who should speak out, try to convince them. Write to your colleagues to speak out as well, and I believe that more and more will gradually join in.
And don't believe anyone who tells you it doesn't make sense.
A former prisoner-playwright managed to turn the helm of history, and I, as an "amateur epidemiologist", managed to catch one of the world's largest news agencies spreading lies.
Every gesture, no matter how small, has meaning and as a priest once told me, "Everything counts..."
It doesn't matter at all that you are in the minority - the only important thing is that you believe in your truth and don't let yourself be lulled into thinking that what is happening is normal or that there is a reason for it to be like this forever.
Please join us, write and let's finally publish the truth!
In the words of Václav Havel:
"Hope is not the belief that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something has meaning - regardless of how it turns out."
You will best support my work buys books,
if you don't read, you can and otherwise....
