Covid-19 is a moderate disease threat but has nonetheless resulted in society facing several crises at the same time, says former president Václav Klaus. As a result of a media-driven panic campaign, the former president says society suffers from “covidism”, he told CNN Prima News in an interview on Sunday.
Klaus, who served as the Czech president from 2003 to 2013 and who is known for his euroskeptic and sometimes contrarian views, said he believes that Czech society is currently in a series of two crises. On the one hand, according to him, we are facing a crisis of “moderate influenza-type illness”, which is Covid-19. On the other hand, we are also finding ourselves in a social crisis, which Klaus known as “covidism”, as most people, in his view, react to the current situation irrationally.
The ex-president, however, emphasized that he did not want to downplay the seriousness of the disease, but emphasized that the media, which act as “panic boosters”, has created an atmosphere of fear that has driven poor policy decisions.
“They managed to scare people,” he said, adding that he has grown used to seeing repeated shots of paramedics in “spacesuits”, patients in the ICU, and field hospitals being constructed on television screens.
In addition, the entire pharmaceutical industry is benefiting from the current epidemic.
“The pharmaceutical business lives on the joy of this epidemic. It makes incredible profits that it could never make before,“ said Klaus. According to him, only a small part of the medical community is willing to oppose the prevailing doctrine, the aim of which is to “totally intimidate”.
The whole idea of the so-called anti-epidemic system called “PES”, created by the Czech Health Ministry, is flawed, he continued.
“I think it’s an unreliable thing mixing pears with apples,“ said Klaus. According to him, the system was created by quasi-scientists and mathematicians.
“It’s about how much significance you give to individual factors, and that’s the arbitrariness of the creators,“ he criticized the calculation of the index, according to which the government now regulates the measures.
“Covid-19 lives its own life. The chances of a person to affect it are relatively small, as evidenced by the very different course of the disease in different countries of the world, in different places, and in our country, where the same rules apply,“ said the ex-president.
Klaus does not blame the government for misjudging the situation, but believes the government should have retained control over the decision-making process instead of relying on medical experts who may be unlikely to take into account other elements of society, such as the economic and social well-being of the country.
“I blame the government for passing on a decision that is highly political in nature, for handing it over to so-called experts.”
According to him, this step systematically strips the government of responsibility and it should not be forgiven for that.
Title image: Václav Klaus (CNN Prima News)
