Of all categories of disease, there’s a malicious peculiarity to one in particular. Autoimmune diseases arise when our immune system – designed to fight off infection from foreign pathogens – goes to war with our own body instead. Whereas an infection is something that happens to us, an autoimmune disease is something that we inexplicably do to ourselves.

Scientists are now starting to question if ‘long covid’ – itself vastly overstated by quantum and effect – might actually be an autoimmune disease. Absent any formal medical training, I can tell you they are absolutely correct.

One does not need patients, a clinic, nor a laboratory, to reach this conclusion: the symptoms are obvious at a macroscopic level to anyone paying even scant attention. Our entire society, like every once liberal democracy around the globe, is sick – not with Covid-19, mind you, but with our response to it. We in the West are firmly in the grasp of an autoimmune disease, whereby every defence system we have in place to protect us has seemingly turned against us. We find ourselves under constant attack by that which we have previously entrusted to keep us safe.

Our federal government  – whose primary duty is the security and defence of its citizens from foreign threats – appears to view said citizens’ free choices as the bigger threat. It has been happy to collude with despotic state governments ruling by edict rather than consent, enabling draconian Public Health Orders made at the whim of state Health Ministers and not subject to the rigorous debate of legislation. Our parliaments could still provide a forum for this debate, of course – if they weren’t so frequently shut down. Perhaps most tellingly, when the so-called National Cabinet was found to not legally be a cabinet, ScoMo moved quickly to introduce a bill to make it so; this was nothing other than an attempt to avoid scrutiny under Freedom of Information requests. Are these people our elected representatives, or our rulers? Our parliamentarians, or our parents? They’re telling us to put a mask over our mouths, but one gets the distinct impression they are also trying to pull the wool over our eyes. This type of decision-making in secret and the proroguing of houses of parliament constitute major inflammatory markers in the diagnosis of our democracy’s autoimmune disease.

Let us move on to our academic class then, which is supposed to offer informed and critical commentary on matters of public policy – another line of defence for the body politic. Far from fighting off mistruths and misjudgments on public policy, our ‘experts’ are almost universally facilitating its armament. They have provided the justification for all manner of absurd impositions and restrictions, writing blank cheques for politicians, businesses, and activist types to cash in at the Bank of Because Covid. The little expert advice which is actually supplied for scrutiny is often contradictory or found badly wanting. Consider Matt Barrie’s excellent takedown of the Doherty Institute modelling: no Australian in their right mind should have accepted this. Yet, we continue to ‘trust the experts’ – because they’re the ones doing the Big Think for us, and we wouldn’t want to strain an intellectual muscle and risk our health doing it ourselves. If we asked our most vocal experts for an epidemiological map of their foreign-sourced grant funding, however, we might expect it to raise a red flag or two.

To our police then, the killer T-cells of our defence system – those with a job to serve and protect us (excluding, presumably, from politicians) under threat of force. Now, they are being used to violently enforce comically dystopian mandates that many don’t agree with themselves. A few brave officers – like Senior Constable Alexander Cooney of NSW Police and Acting Senior Sergeant Krystle Mitchell of Victoria Police – are speaking out. However, too many seem willing to be part of the autoimmune response, attacking their own communities with a virtual panopticon of surveillance and a hitherto unthinkable suppression of basic human rights. The irony of beating or shooting at people in the interest of public health appears to have been lost on them.

But what about business groups? They’re advocating for businesses to miss out on 20-30% of their customer base, and creating all manner of staffing problems by championing a vaccine apartheid that many businesses simply do not want. Who needs foreign pathogens when your own lobby groups fight you?

Unions? They earn a dishonorable mention too. A far cry from protecting workers from abusive governments or employers, they have turned on their members in displays of such shark-jumping as the CFMEU calling its left-wing member base ’neo-Nazis’. 

And ah yes, the media. The utter betrayal of the fourth estate is one of the great tragedies of this whole sordid affair. Instead of acting in our defence and holding our government, institutions, and corporations to account, they’ve opted to do their bidding instead. They’ve been downright abusive towards whole swathes of the population that have done what would previously have been called ‘investigative journalism’.

Worse yet, by an order of magnitude, is the unconscionable conduct of our medical regulators. Rather than protecting our national body from commercial predation, exploitive treatments and untried drug therapies, they’ve put themselves between patient and doctor, banned long-established treatments, promoted experimental ones, and silenced some of our brightest medical minds. They’ve advocated in favour of routine testing of the healthy, ignored long-held guidelines about informed consent and freedom from coercion, and undermined trust in science in a manner that may not recover for generations. They’ve cowed GPs, who can no longer offer honest advice to their patients lest they be deregistered.

One might consider our GPs the last line of immune defence in our currently sick society. However, we still have our family, friends, and neighbours for support… don’t we? In Covid world, even those closest to us have been turned against us. Mao would be proud at the self-destructive impetus under the urging of police and premiers alike.

If the diagnosis is clear, so too is the treatment: immunosuppression. We must, as soon as possible, lower the power of the defences attacking us until they cease to be the greater threat to our society’s health. Then, and only then, can we slowly rebuild them to serve us in the manner they were intended.