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Saturday, December 31, 2022

Consequences of the COVID Crisis

Yes, Esmerelda, this crisis will soon be behind us. Like the matriculation exams we faced at the end of what our teachers hoped would be our final year of high school. The pressure and anxiety was tremendous, but how many of us went back to school after the last exam to say “Thank You”, personally, to our teachers? I thought as much. (I had an excuse: I was booked on the train home that afternoon, a nine-hour trip).

So a year from now we will raise our glasses, slap each other on the back thus spilling ginger beer down each others shirts and blouses, and say “We did it! We got through it!!”. Some sourpuss (me, probably) will say somberly “Absent Friends”, and we will mumble “Absent Friends”, take a sip, and feel cheated because none of our friends died from COVID-19.

But wait! The press and the politicians have another crisis in store for us:-

Genome Registration!

Yes. Scientists using computers will discover that those people who were vulnerable to COVID-19 had the faulty BQPF gene at location 1872 on Chromosome 25.

The government, still reeling from shooting itself in the economic foot (remember, the virus did not cause the crippling economic debt, politicians did that) will announce the Splendid News that we can all get our genome described – for free, and those of us with the aberrant gene can get a free vaccine.

Thus, by foolishly destroying the economy with its knee-jerk reaction, the jerks can reap a second benefit.

And once the genome database of a nation’s citizens is established (babies will be genomed routinely at birth from now on), all sorts of screening will be available to doctors (who can prescribe drugs targeted to our particular genomic profile (Good!) and to insurance firms (who can now deny insurance to those who are seen to be at risk from an expanding list of “known genomic causes of disease” (Bad!!)

I recommend Matt Ridley’s “Genome” and Richard Dawkins’s “The Age of the Genome”

Now, the effects of the politicians decisions on the COVID virus (“The Impact of COVID on the economy”), and in Australia, the impact of the bushfires), will require massive funding which will have to be found by – changes in the taxation laws, a long-awaited move for those with drooling lips; you know who they are.

You may well be the first in your street to start paying taxes at 50%; just think of that!

Accompanying the money-grab will be privacy grab. Your tax return will have to be accompanied by your digital genome if you have not already checked the box that reads “I hereby authorize licensed members of the government to …” which means, of course, Carole, the clerk with red hair, in receiving.

Laws will need to be enacted, so the lawyers will be on the scene because their taxes will go up, too, because their revenue will go up once they get access to the genome database to bring heartache and misery through paternity testing, which will snowball into more lawyer-revenue through paternity and divorce suits.

Oh! The misery brought on my the mis-handling of the virus.

Makes you want to weep, perhaps blow your nose. Maybe cough a little …

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