While it is better to be safe than sorry, an otherwise sound principle can be taken too far. Such appears to be the case of the Covid crisis where 70 per cent of deaths from the disease in the UK and Israel are among the fully vaccinated..

In the popular imagination, amplified by an uncritical partisan media, fault is usually found lurking in the dark hearts of the big business patriarchy and personified as the cartoonish "Daddy Warbucks".

The good guys are depicted as the white-coated scientists, or all-knowing technocrats who are "only here to help". But cui bono? Who benefits? Are not civil servants susceptible of taking opportunities their offices confer in terms of power, influence and money?

To be fair, no one knew the danger of Covid at first, so it was sensible to brace for the worse. So extreme measures were taken and appeared to be justified. But as time went on, less and less so.

Looking at the Hong Kong's Government's death statistics over the last decade, the rate went up 10.8 per cent. One might assume that the increase can be blamed on Covid. But looking deeper, one finds the increase in deaths over the previous decade was about the same - 10.1 per cent. This gain had nothing to do with Covid - except for a portion of the difference - .07 per cent. Hardly worth shutting down the town, much less the world.

As time passed, information released seemed to be meant to justify draconian measures mandated by experts to keep the panic and dread of the disease at the highest possible revs. And increasingly female dominated and sensation-seeking media was most helpful in these circumstances.

Concurrently, there is a titanic battle between right and left, both in America and Europe with left championing restrictive measures and right demanding a return to normality. The left, whose denizens have the government jobs, and whose school teachers and public sector workers did not lose their salaries were not hurt while the least favoured private sector workers suffered great loss.

Reviewing the impact of Covid, the public health threat seems more imagined than real. First, the information the state authorities provided was more to encourage compliance with mandated behaviour than assisting laymen to make independent risk assessments.

In the end, Covid seemed to be a disease that killed the very old and the very sick. At first the average age of death was 82. Then it dropped to 70 - but the 70 figure suddenly included deaths from pneumonia and flu which has a respectable all-age death toll of its own.

There has also been evidence of the officials doctoring the books to make it worse than it was in a game of bureaucratic grantsmanship. Doctors who differed from the official scarifying policies are persecuted by medical authorities and blocked from access to social media by partisan "fact-checkers" deployed by "big tech" corporate giants who were resolutely on the side of the what was rapidly becoming catergorised as the Deep State.

This scaredy-cat approach has put the western world at a decided disadvantage, having its businesses shutdown with elites admonishing the hoi polloi to wear masks and social distance and submit to vaccinations that don't vaccinate while the elites whoop it up at all-night parties ignoring rules they insist others follow.

This panic has been largely confined to the West. It has been clear for more than a year that East Asian economies have not taken the same hit from Covid as their counterparts in the West. As lockdowns choked industry and everyday life in Europe and the US last year, the people of Wuhan staged a large pool party in the summer, free from Covid restrictions. Even in Hong Kong, where all wear masks, the streets throng with people and masks are removed off in restaurants or when people are out of sight.

The sense of optimism is reflected in China’s trade flows. Trade during 2021 increased 35.1 per cent to US$3.3 trillion, according to China Customs. More broadly across Asia, merchandise export volumes were up 15.4 per cent year on year. Meanwhile exports from all other regions were down compared with two years ago, according to the World Trade Organisation.

There are those who say, led by the World Trade Organisation, that a successful recovery in global trade requires widespread access to vaccines. “Leading indicators confirm positive signs of recovery in goods trade during the second quarter of 2021, but purchasing managers’ indices suggest weaker growth in services," said WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

“As of May 2021, the number of international flights was just over half their pre-pandemic level. A full recovery for international travel, and for global trade in general, depends on rapid, equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines around the world,” she said.

The United Nations and Ms Okonjo-Iweala have warned that sluggish vaccination programmes in poorer countries are threatening the global recovery – and that it is in the world’s best interest to vaccinate all populations as quickly as possible.

In terms of trade, least-developed countries’ (LDCs) merchandise exports decreased 12 per cent last year compared with 2019, while services exports collapsed by 35 per cent. Goods trade suffered particularly from a sharp drop in fuel prices, with fuels and mining products representing around half of LDCs’ goods trade.

But is it not truer to say that vaccinating poorer countries would only cloud statistical differences showing that the Covid threat is far more imagined than real - which the unvaccinated countries would not show a greater Covid death rate than those that were fully vaccinated.

The fact that the death rate in Hong Kong seems to grow 10 per cent every 10 years speaks less about the threat of Covid and more to an increasing age of the Hong Kong population.

While global bandwidth of bureaucratic agreement is perhaps the greatest ever witnessed since the dawn of time, the widespread uniform bureaucratic measures still fall short of being labelled a conspiracy theory, which would involve active collusion among the parties involved. This is not suspected.

What is, is rather like what the Combines Investigation Branch of the Canadian government discovered a few decades ago when they found that a half dozen petrol stations strung out between two cities were raising petrol prices in unison. Telephones were bugged and the retailers were closely surveilled, and eventually brought in for questioning. At which point it was discovered that one them chanced to raise his price, and the others followed suit one by one. This was repeated several times, which prompted the investigation. But there was no evidence of collusion.

In like matter, bureaucrats, first from better-safe-than-sorry motives took drastic measures out of genuine concern, and later maintained these measures despite doubting their efficacy in order to protect themselves from criticism of doing too little. Or as time passed, needlessly doing too much.

Each unconnected bureaucracy saw what each other was doing and did the same. Over time, it became clear that politicians, who were nominally in charge, were happy to give up their authority while at the same time relinquishing responsibility for negative outcomes, saying they were only following expert advice, better to escape blame if things went wrong.

Scientists and bureaucrats discovered that this turn of events conferred upon them greater power if they ramped up the danger. This was no problem with the help of a compliant, partisan media increasingly dominated by women, who can be frightened by anything that an expert says is dangerous.

Couple this to a leftist ascendency in the Washington, hostile to the lower orders of the private sector that seeks to reduce the public sector, and we have interlocking motives that both benefit themselves and their Deep State siblings while damaging those in the lower registers of the private sector who seek to reduce state power and influence.