If you’re American, congratulations. You no longer belong to the dumbest country on earth. That dubious honour now goes to Britain. Sorry, America — you’re now only the second dumbest country on earth.

Britain’s story these days is somewhere between tragicomedy and farce. Let me give you three examples — of what it means for a society to self-destruct, by way of idiocy, greed, recklessness, and ineptitude.

Let me begin by telling you a little story. I have a friend who bought his wife a birthday present, before Christmas. A little necklace. It still hasn’t arrived, and there’s no sign it’s ever going to. It’s been held up at three — or is it four? — borders, and there it is, still stuck. Why is that? Because of Brexit. And this poor guy is getting wifed on, hard. “Do you hate me? Where’s my birthday present!!” “Darling, it’s because of Br — “ “Don’t make excuses! You don’t love me anymore!!” Hello, divorce lawyers. OK, I’m kidding. They’ll be OK. But Britain won’t.

Britain, in an act of suicidal lunacy, chose to “leave” the EU, cheering in a wave of delusional nationalism. The EU wasn’t just Britain’s friend: Britain is a tenth the size of the EU, economically and demographically. You don’t just “leave” a union and market ten times bigger than you, without catastrophic consequences, like trade stopping, investment ceasing, unemployment spiking, prices soaring, and shortages happening. So we economists warned all this was, well, suicidal lunacy. But something had broken in the minds of British people. They didn’t believe it. They believed adorable but dangerously misinformed old conservative idiots with names like Lord Ducky Crumpets-Walpole, who themselves didn’t have the faintest clue as to what “breaking up with your closest ally in the world, who’s ten times bigger than you” really meant. And so here they are.

The reality of Brexit is much, much worse than we economists warned about. It goes like this. The British economy is starting to shut down like a heart attack. Europe is simply stopping sending goods to Britain, and Britain to Europe. The costs involved have soared from “nothing” to “impossible.” Remember my friend’s wife’s present? Nobody’s had to fill out customs forms and declarations in these places for thirty years. And since then, economies have changed. It’s not so easy to declare where a thing was “made” or if it ever touched this kind of raw material or that or what its intended use is, and the only option is to pay a fortune to someone who can. Faced with mountains of paperwork for each shipment, businesses are just giving up, throwing their hands up in despair. And that means a) mass unemployment, as they go bankrupt b) shortages and c) higher prices. Sound dire? It is.

British people are shocked, suddenly — after voting for Brexit — to discover that ordering stuff from Europe, which used to be as simple as a click, now comes with massive taxes, customs, and suspicious “handling charges,” which they have to pay, or else. Charges that easily add 25% to 50% to the cost of basic things. And while we economists warned Brexit would make Brits poorer, even we underestimated the effect. We thought tariffs would rise, but we didn’t think that trade would come to a sudden stop, which means mass unemployment and shortages and higher prices are all exploding. That’s the worst case scenario, and it’s fast becoming real. What is it called when trade suddenly stops? Sanctions.

Britain is the only country in the world — the only one I can think of in modern history — amazingly, comically, painfully dumb enough to impose sanctions on itself. Almost overnight — it’s been less than a month — you can’t get basic things like European medicine, wine, cheese, beer, clothes, shoes. They’re just…gone. Poof. That might not sound like a big deal, until you consider that Europe supplies many of Britain’s goods, while Britain only supplies Europe with services. Services are easy to relocate — just pick up and hire people in Europe, which is exactly what many British businesses are doing. Goods are not easy to relocate — you have to move a whole factory. So Brits are now poorer forever, in a hard way — not just less money, but less stuff to spend it on, too — they suddenly have vastly less “consumer choice.” Imagine if entire sections of the supermarket — reflecting whole sectors of the economy — simply vanished overnight. You probably can’t, because it’s something that doesn’t tend to happen in the absence of, say, a bully like America sanctioning you, which is something that usually only happens to poor brown people. But nobody sanctions themselves, right? That’s just…idiotic! Well, not until now, anyways.

What kind of country is foolish enough to impose sanctions on itself?

What Brits don’t seem to understand is that they are paying tariffs to their own government now, and tariffs are just a tax. But if all Brits wanted to do was pay higher taxes…they didn’t need to leave the EU to do it. They just had to write a cheque. Are you beginning to see how painfully stupid all this is? The response often comes, from dummies with names like Lord Botherington Fothergill-Smythe: “We’ll have more in the public purse!” No, you won’t. Paying higher taxes to make the economy smaller means less tax revenue and investment overall. Like other nations hit with sanctions — Venezuela, Iran — it’s becoming hard to get the stuff Brits are used to enjoying, as shelves simply sit empty, unemployment explodes, prices soar, and shortages become the stuff of everyday life.

All that would be painfully stupid enough — imposing sanctions on yourself — if Britain wasn’t also currently the world’s leading example of how to get a deadly pandemic so catastrophically wrong you turn it into an even deadlier one.

Britain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world. That’s bad, right? It is, dear reader. But not as bad as this. Britain’s bred its own new strain of Covid that’s a) more infectious and b) deadlier than the old one.

If that sounds really bad, that’s because it is. The daily death toll in Britain is still going up, even as infections are finally going down, which is pretty stark confirmation that this new strain kills more people. Younger people. Leaves people sicker, even when it doesn’t kill them. I called it Super Covid a while back, and I wasn’t kidding.

How did Britain breed an even worse strain of Covid? It didn’t take the virus seriously. It put in place half-hearted lockdowns that were no such thing — gyms and schools and nail salons stayed open. Borders were never closed. As a result, the virus ripped through the nation like wildfire, different mutations from around the world converging — and Britain became something like the perfect petri dish for a new strain of the virus, which was mutating faster the more it multiplied. It was only a matter of time.

The reason that we want to stop viruses like Covid dead in their tracks isn’t just what they do now: it’s what they can do in the future. Mutate, evolve, become vaccine resistant, deadlier. That’s basic high-school level science. Literally nobody in the British government understood or cared. The government’s “scientific advisors” were busy denying there was a problem. To this day, aging grandees with names like Lord Mimblefart Petherton-Jones will stroke their chins and utter pronouncements like: “we shall not let the virus take away our freedom!” as if having the highest death toll in the world is some kind of shining ideal of liberty.

You might think that’s bad, but in fact, it’s only the beginning. What did the British government do next? In order to respond to this crisis, it decided to gamble with the entire nation’s lives. It “delayed” the second dose of the vaccine. Pfizer and the WHO both recommend that the second dose is had within three weeks. The British government’s delayed it to twelve. That’s four times as long. You might not think that’s a big deal, but let me assure you, it is. Why?

Because science says so. Animal models already tell us that if the second dose isn’t had within about a month, the immune cascade vaccines trigger fails to happen. Immunity doesn’t result. Antibodies aren’t developed. Why is that? Because this is an mRNA vaccine, and while they’re cutting edge, they have one big Achilles heel: they’re fragile. RNA is a notoriously fragile molecule to handle in the lab — something every bioscience grad student finds out the hard way. That’s why these vaccines come with new and strange precautions, like keep them frozen, or, even, don’t move them more than three times. All that is to try and protect the fragile RNA, which falls apart at the slightest disturbance. And that’s probably what’s going on in the animal models — the RNA’s simply being broken down by the body, and so the second dose needs to be given relatively quickly, or else the vaccine has no effect.

What’s the upshot likely to be for Britain? The entire country’s vaccination program is likely to fail. There are going to be a whole lot of people who get one dose, but not the second in time, and most of those people will not develop immunity. Do you know what happens when you cross a halfway vaccinated population with a fast evolving virus? That’s right, vaccine resistance. Britain already made itself a perfect petri dish for new strains of Covid — but what Britain’s doing right now is making it the perfect petri dish for deadlier, more infectious, and much, much more vaccine resistant strains of the virus. If that makes you shudder, it should, because that is how Covid never goes away, and become a seasonal illness like the flu, only with an astronomically higher mortality rate.

Again, all this is basic science. A dummy like me can figure it out and explain it to you. And yet the government and all their scientific advisors deny any of the above is remotely dangerous at all, while the rest of the world’s scientists are somewhere between baffled, alarmed, and horrified. It’s a level of stupidity that’s off the charts. Who wants to infect themselves with a deadlier strain of Covid? Who puts in place a program that’s going to breed a vaccine-resistant Covid?

Oh, hi Britain.

Umair
January 2021