As of tomorrow, Denmark admits the failure of all Covid control measures (including vaccines)
All restrictions will be dropped - not because they worked but because they didn't.
In less than 12 hours, Denmark turns into Florida.
No masks (except possibly in hospitals and nursing homes).
No vaccine passports.
Any person jabbed with ANY Covid shot can enter the country without a test; unvaccinated people can enter with a negative PCR test.
“We say goodbye to the restrictions and welcome the life we knew before,” the prime minister said last week.
Right on schedule, the bluecheck muppets popped up to explain that the Danes had won because they weren’t a bunch of unmasked Trump-loving mouth-breathers.
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The muppets are half right. Denmark is 90 percent-plus adult vaccinated, almost 70 percent boosted. Plus the Danes have that legendary “high trust in government,” so they do exactly what the public health authorities say, double-quick! Denmark is Dr. Anthony Fauci’s dream.
But here’s the thing.
Sars-Cov-2 could not care less about all that trust and all those jabs. Denmark is now right up there with Israel in seeing the highest rates of infections of any country - ever.
In the last two weeks, more than 10 percent of ALL Danes - the equivalent of 35 million Americans - have been infected with Covid (the number is probably considerably higher, because at some point testing becomes impossible).
As someone once said, virus gonna virus.
And though Omicron is milder than Delta, Covid deaths in Denmark are now higher than at any point except a couple weeks last January, and the rise shows no sign of slowing.
In fact, even if the Omicron wave suddenly turns around with the end of all restrictions (and wouldn’t that be ironic), deaths will almost certainly keep rising through most if not all of February. Deaths lag.
In reality Covid is far from done with Denmark.
But the Danes are done with Covid. I thought they had figured this out back in September, when they went through their first round of loosening restrictions. (I wrote about them then.)
But the fall wave spooked them - and convinced them to give boosters a try.
Now they have learned. Fool me twice, mRNA vaccines, shame on you. Even those legendarily trusting Danes were hardly going to line up for a fourth shot in a hurry.
Let’s just hope that they haven’t mucked up their chance at long-term immunity too much already. Time will tell. (It would be nice if the virologists and immunologists weren’t too scared to attack this question head-on, but Saint Fauci and the Bright Boys (free band name!) are going to do everything possible to keep anyone with a laboratory from asking.)
In any case, the vaccine fanatics - so wrong about so much so often - are right on one point. Small, rich, mostly homogenous countries like Denmark, with relatively stable political cultures, have a big edge right now. Their public health advocates and governments will have a far easier time admitting they were wrong than those in the United States.
The reason should be obvious.
Nobody risks getting fired - much less indicted - in Denmark for telling the truth.
The unvaccinated still needing to show a negative test to enter the country while the vaccinated do not is still discrimination and does not follow the science. Until all people are treated equally there is still something rotten in the state of Denmark.
But they still believe in vaccines: you can enter if vaxed and if not must be tested. This is good news, but not completely there. It seems to me these places are attempting what is called in IT a graceful shutdown. Crashing it all at once is to admit you were wrong all along. Instead, a bit at a time so people cheer at winning the battle but having really lost the war.