Depending on which news sources one reads, the Rally for Freedom in Lisbon yesterday – promoted by World Wide Demonstration – united anything between 500-700 or 3,000 to 4,000 people.
The discrepancies come from the guesstimates of different sources.
Police attested to the lower numbers, members of the promoting organisations to the higher.
The upshot of the day was that the comments of a grandmother who considers the ‘origins of Covid-19’ to be “a lie” were splashed over various papers..
“There is no SARS-CoV, it’s all a lie”, American resident Vicky Ketion told Lusa.
Lusa’s text uploaded onto social media saw commentators despairing with Ms Ketion’s narrative, saying they had been very ill with something that most definitely existed.
The thrust of the event was to demonstrate against the imposition of mask wearing and the removal of so many human rights in the name of the pandemic.
Portuguese prime minister António Costa and President Marcelo were both labelled dictators as people conforming to the same beliefs as Ms Ketion made similar speeches in around 40 countries at roughly the same time.
By coincidence (or perhaps not), the Telegraph reported shortly before yesterday’s rally that scientists in the UK are now expressing regret over the totalitarian methods used to control people’s behaviour during the pandemic.
Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour have admitted that they used ‘fear’ to “increase the perceived level of threat of Covid-19” (click here).
They have been speaking to Laura Dodsworth who has spent a year investigating the (British) government’s tactics for her book “A State of Fear”, coming out tomorrow.
Says the Telegraph, all these positions will come up for scrutiny when Britain holds a public inquiry into the pandemic response next year.
At the same time, doctors a bit throughout the world are raising legal cases against governments to challenge the form they have been dragooning citizens into successive lockdowns and restrictions that plunged so many into terrible financial, social and mental straits.
For now there has been no talk in Portugal about a public inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic. But it could well be coming. The new ‘fines’ governing mask wearing on beaches this summer, for example (click here), have created a storm of unrest – not least because the ‘official bathing season’ opened this weekend without the regulations governing these fines having been published in Diário da República.
As a result if people do ‘access beaches’ without masks in place, they cannot for the time being be fined – no matter what authorities may say.
According to tabloid Correio da Manhã, Maritime Police are not even particularly keen to go around fining people on beaches for not wearing masks in the various situations stipulated.
“The national Maritime Authority wants to make it clear that like last year it will continue to favour a strategy of awareness instead of repression”, says the paper today
