The Aftershocks of Pandemic Restrictions: Report from Ghana: Part 6: Conclusions
Ola, Cape Coast
Sunday 21 January 2024
The word obrunyi literally means “from beyond the horizon.” In this part of the world, this is their word — usually contracted to brunyi — for a white person. This part of west Africa has more experience dealing with foreigners than most. The obrunyis have been coming here for over five hundred years.
Of course, the slave trade ended long ago. But the traffic in human bodies continues, albeit in a subtler fashion.
It’s late in the afternoon on my last day in Cape Coast. I’m walking along the beach at Ola in the company of my young nephew, past the rough-hewn wooden longboats which to this day constitute this nation’s fishing fleet. The sun is setting in the western sky, casting a rosy glow over the blue-green waters. The roar of the surf is pounding in my ears, as memories of my late youth wash over me like ocean waves.
I ask my nephew, What was it like for you when the schools closed? This was his reply:
It was boring. I didn’t have my books. I didn’t have my friends.
What did you do all day long?
Nothing.
Were you afraid of the covid?
Yes. They told us it was like Ebola.
Once again I pose the question — this time silently, to no one in particular: Was it worth it?
That one’s easy. Of course not. COVID-19 was never the threat it had been made out to be — certainly not compared to the draconian measures most nations employed to combat that threat. Sweden stands out as a shining exception. They didn’t lock down, they didn’t close schools, they didn’t muzzle their children, and their reward was one of the lowest age-adjusted excess mortality in all of Europe, along with zero covid deaths in school-age children.
As of 31 December 2023, Ghana had recorded a total of 1,462 covid deaths — an insignificant number for a nation with a population in excess of thirty-two million, and on a per capita basis more than two orders of magnitude below that of the United States — despite their vaccination rates being less than half of ours.
If the drugmakers had not had their modified RNA platform ready to go, and no one had ever heard of SARS-CoV-2, then 2020 would have been — a nasty flu season. Worse than usual, but nowhere near as destructive as this global trash fire that was the pandemic response.
Remember covid is a disease that kills primarily people past the age of sixty-five. This country, with its youthful population, is facing challenges that dwarf anything ever posed by covid. Malaria kills several times more people here every year than covid ever did. A third of these deaths take place in children under the age of five.
This is a country in which untreated sewage runs through the gutters alongside every street in every city and town and village. Child labor is still a huge problem, as is child marriage. The notion that they were protecting children against a disease that posed no threat to them by robbing them of part of the education that is their only ticket out of poverty is beyond absurd.
Of course, that never was what this was all about, was it? As a noted philosopher and humanitarian said:
You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated.
The same sage also favored us with these words of wisdom:
It's been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bullshit, and they get vaccinated.
Indeed.
During my previous visits here, whenever I would walk down the streets, little children would call out to me, gleefully reciting the English they learned in school:
Brunyi-How-Are-You-I-Am-Fine-Thank-You-And-You?
I don’t get that this time around. Now the children linger in the shadows, staring at me dolefully. Something has been taken out of the spirit of the children in this country, and I don’t know when or if they’re going to get it back. Will they ever wrap their minds around what was done to them, at the behest of rich white people in climate-controlled conference rooms thousands of miles away?
My book The Day the Science Died: Covid Vaccines and the Power of Fear is now available on amazon.