Was delighted to hear that something is being done about the appalling behaviour of the Mpumalanga ANC bigwig who illegally appropriated a house on the Desmond Tutu School for Leadership campus in White River. Its dean Chuck Stephens, a Canadian who has been in SA since 1994, sent me a follow-up to the harrowing story we ran last week: “Just a quick thank you for taking my RECKLESS COVID ENDANGERMENT seriously. I have finally managed to get the attention of the Canadian government. They are prodding the Canadian High Commission in Pretoria to get involved. I am not asking for help with the legal challenge – we have that under control. Not guilty. But the crude and reckless way that they handled my arrest, the same weekend that SA returned to Alert Level 4, needs to be investigated BY THE COVID POLICE. I am lobbying hard to rally support for that. Your quick response helped me get some support, so I really appreciate it.” The silence from Pretoria, sadly, is deafening.
And then this arrived from the free thinking scientist who signs off his note as Timothy Noakes, Cape Town: “Two comments on the recent discussions regarding Berendien Lubbe’s highly entertaining letter. The current government guidelines are based on two presumptions. The first is that persons who are asymptomatic can spread this particular infection. And second that the hard lockdown logically prevents dissemination of the virus and therefore must save lives.
I’d be interested in the biological explanation of how the first happens. That is, how does a virus spread between individuals without intracellular replication in the infected individual since, in my understanding, such intracellular replication must produce symptoms due to the inflammatory response that this intracellular replication must inevitably activate.
Also, what is the evidence that countries like Sweden that did not lockdown have experienced materially worse outcomes over the past 18 months than countries like the UK and the majority of states in the US that went for the hard lockdown option as has South Africa?”
To receive BizNews founder Alec Hogg’s Daily Insider every weekday at 6am in your inbox click here. You can also sign up to the weekend’s BizNews Digest for a wrap of the best content BizNews has to offer, for a leisurely Saturday read.
