THE British historian Guy de la Bédoyère claims that ‘Australia is falling apart’. Off Guardian suggests that we are ‘going full fascist’. Daily reports in France, Russia and everywhere in between and beyond, hover between pity, amusement and disbelief. How did this happen – in Australia? The overseas storytelling can barely keep up with the never-ending stream of new announcements designed to grind us into the ground. But on and on it goes.
There is, at last, a book-length account of Australia’s eighteen months of madness that will either warm the hearts of Covid realists, remind us of all the Covid policy absurdities or perhaps simply provide yet more chilling evidence of the sinister forces at work that are changing us irrevocably.
Unfolding Catastrophe: Australia (Sense of Place Publishing, 2021), by John Stapleton, restores – though perhaps only a little – the faith we ought to have in the journalist class, so utterly diminished by their sitting out the crushing of our lives (at best) and their active collaborating in the spread of Covid propaganda (at worst).
Recognising early on the biggest story of all of our lives, Stapleton set out to record in graphic detail and with authenticity the developing catastrophe, from the toilet paper crisis at the start to the emerging apartheid regime for those who refuse the State Injectible.
Stapleton records with palpable astonishment the now familiar litany of harms that have been done, not only to the body politic, but to our core values, indeed, to our very sense of our country. Our place. They include the impositions of lockdowns that do not work but cause harm beyond telling; the ‘wildly inaccurate’ modelling that predicted catastrophe and instead merely delivered fame and riches for those involved; the succession of non-medical interventions with no basis in science and without popular understanding that this is the case; the low information voter; the punitive policing; the absence of real leadership in the crisis; the incoherent messaging from the top; the disaster that is ‘National Cabinet’; magic money tree economics; the relentless announcables; the Covid cronyism; the entrenching of power by the political class.
This all amounts to ‘a radical social experiment going against decades of epidemiological wisdom’. It has been, Stapleton suggests, ‘demonic’. Not just stupid and deranged, but evil. It has caused, as we now see in all our empty churches, ‘spiritual damage’. Earthly lives gone, and souls lost. A sad tale of deceit and compliance, of induced fear, isolation, economic deprivation, destroyed friendships and civil fracture. A creepy but unmistakable feel of the Biblical End Times, the streets empty. Astonishing submissiveness. A story of manufactured narratives, of a ‘disinformation feedback loop’ as Stapleton reports, his previous faith in the scepticism of his countrymen utterly destroyed. Societal dysfunction. Many ‘conspiracy theories’ across the internet have proved to be spot on.
The book draws upon a broad range of expert observers, who include journalists of every colour and distinguished academics such as the Spectator’s Ramesh Thakur, a breath of fresh air amid the fetid atmosphere of secular decline. Ramesh’s call on the Covid response, as reported by Stapleton: ‘The greatest mistake in history’. World War One is right up there, but this call is no exaggeration.
Rational argument simply does not work with our rulers. Copious evidence relating to the policy disasters of the pandemic never breaches the walls of the bubble. As Stapleton said in an interview with Sydney Criminal Lawyers, ‘it all fell on deaf ears’.
Is the tide of opinion turning against the ever-increasing crush of medical technocracy? Stapleton has cautious optimism. Speaking up for those of us who, mercifully, live outside the cities, he says: ‘But there are no cases or virtually no cases in this area. Nobody knows anybody who has died.’ Pennies may, at last, be dropping. Crisis? What crisis? It is a case-demic of a very mild strain of the initial virus, without the remotest hospitalisation crisis
Chillingly, as Stapleton says, ‘All of this has been done in secret, and in our name.’ The parliaments rarely sit. Public Health Orders trump democratic processes. Reasons are never given for policy actions beyond formulaic tosh. We never signed up for this.
Steve Waterson, one of the few consistently sane voices in the corporate media, describes the book as a ‘devastating indictment of Australia’s response to the Covid pandemic’. I am glad Waterson didn’t confine himself to ‘Australian governments’, for we are, all of us, complicit in this truly diabolical attack on everything we have all lived for. Stapleton uses the term ‘manipulated’ and ‘held hostage’ to describe our corporate media’s role in the fiasco.
Stapleton, alone, it seems, among our publishers and authors, has taken a stand – for freedom, common sense, perspective and Aussie values. His is a stand for life itself. His work shames his colleagues who have chosen to sit quietly in the corner these past eighteen months, or worse, to join in the chanting for the Covid Fascist State. This book is the methodical work of a brave truth-teller who is willing to call a spade a bloody shovel, in the best tradition of fair-dinkum journalism.
As the first draft of history, this magnificent book should be marked ‘essential reading’. Normally one might add here: ‘Send a copy to your member of parliament’. Alas, I fear, in this case, such a course of action would be pointless. Our rulers are in and settled, on a good wicket, and they intend to bat on.
A ‘signal collapse and rearrangement of society’? Who on earth could disagree?
Dr Julie Ponesse, a professor of ethics at the University of Western Ontario and a member of the Canadian Covid Care Alliance on the current vaccine mandates and passports in the context of our existing informed consent laws and commitments to privacy and bioethics.
Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates Are Now Pointless: Covid-19 vaccines do not keep people from catching the prevailing Delta variant and passing it to others
1) Excellent scientific research papers published or posted in August 2021 clearly demonstrate that current vaccines do not prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
2) Vaccines aim to achieve two ends:
To protect the vaccinated person against the illness.
To keep people from carrying the infection and transmitting it to others.
If enough people are vaccinated or otherwise become immune, it is hoped that the disease will stop circulating. We call this herd immunity.
On the way to herd immunity, there is an assumption that people who are immunized can form safe clusters or groups within which no one is carrying or transmitting the virus.
3) Unfortunately, this last assumption (2.b.ii) is no longer true under the new variant of SARS-CoV- 2, Delta (B.1.617.2), which now accounts for essentially all cases worldwide.
4) Delta is more infectious than the Alpha strain (B.1.1.7) that prevailed in the UK from January to May 2021 (and in the US from March to June 2021), meaning that Delta is passed more readily person-to-person than the previous dominant strain. (see section 5, below).
b. From its origin in India, Delta has soared to nearly complete domination of COVID-19 viral strains everywhere in a matter of months, because it spreads so easily and infects both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
5) New research in multiple settings shows that Delta produces very high viral loads (meaning, the density of virus on a nasopharyngeal swab as interpreted from PCR cycle threshold numbers).
Viral loads are much higher in people infected with Delta than they were in people infected with Alpha.
Viral loads with Delta are equally high whether the person has been vaccinated or not.
Viral load is an indicator of infectiousness. [13,14] The more virus one has in the noseand mouth, the more likely it is to be in this individual’s respiratory droplets and secretions, and to spread to others.
6) Due to evolution of the virus itself, all the currently licensed vaccines (all based on the originalWuhan strain spike protein sequence) have lost their ability to accomplish vaccine purpose 2(b), above, “To keep people from carrying the infection and transmitting it to others.”
7) Vaccine mandates are thus stripped of their justification, since to vaccinate an individual nolonger stops or even slows his ability to acquire and transmit the virus to others.
8) Under Delta, natural immunity is much more protective than vaccination. All severities ofCOVID-19 illness produce healthy levels of natural immunity.
The Documentary Evidence:
Here are three studies whose findings and data support the above statements:
(A) The first is by the Massachusetts Department of Health and the CDC, published August 6, 2021 in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. An outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in Provincetown, Massachusetts in July 2021 during two weeks of heavily attended indoor and outdoor public gatherings. The study focuses on the 469 cases among Massachusetts residents who were in attendance. [1] All successfully gene-sequenced isolates (120) were the Delta variant.
346 of the cases in Massachusetts residents (74%) occurred in fully vaccinated people who had received a 2-dose course of the BioNTech/Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, or a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson. Vaccine coverage at this time among all Massachusetts residents was 69%. This suggests that vaccinated people became infected just as frequently as unvaccinated people in this outbreak.
We do not know the vaccination percentage among actual festival attendees who were Massachusetts residents, but we can assume given the demographics of the festival that it was the state average (69%) or higher. We also do not know the total number of Massachusetts residents who attended. Both of these numbers would be needed to determine actual values for vaccine efficacy in this outbreak.
However, we cannot brush the high percentage of vaccinated people in the infected sample under the carpet quite as easily as the authors do, when they say, “As population-level vaccination coverage increases, vaccinated persons are likely to represent a larger proportion of COVID-19 cases” (p. 1061). This is true, but we would still, if vaccine is protective, find vaccinated cases to be underrepresented in an illness sample compared to the number vaccinated in the whole population of attendees. As best we can tell at this festival, vaccination was not protective against infection, because the proportion of vaccinated in the sample (74%) is in the same numeric range as the proportion vaccinated, 69% or above.
Among the 346 cases who were already vaccinated, 79% were symptomatic, reporting cough, headache, sore throat, muscle aches, and fever. Four of these vaccinated, infected individuals (1.2%) were hospitalized. No one died. The remainder of the vaccinated cases did not report symptoms.
Among the 123 cases who were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, one was hospitalized (0.8%) and no one died. Percentage with symptoms was not reported.
Vaccinated and unvaccinated cases were found to have very similar viral loads (in a sample of 127 and 84 cases, respectively). This means the PCR tests showed that vaccinated and unvaccinated infected people were carrying similar amounts of virus in their upper respiratory tracts at diagnosis and were thus equally infectious.
(B) The next study, released August 10, 2021, examines the Delta viral load phenomenon in far more detail, and shows clearly that vaccinated people can become infected and pass the infection to other vaccinated people. The Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam has about 900 staff members, including an Oxford University Clinical Research Unit. The entire hospital staff was vaccinated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine two-dose series in March and April 2021, and then enrolled in a post-vaccination study. Thus, a great deal of detailed information was available when the outbreak struck. [2]
The entire hospital staff was PCR negative for SARS-CoV-2 in mid-May 2021. The index case (first known case in a cluster) became mildly ill on June 11 and had a positive PCR with a high viral load. The whole staff was then re-tested. 52 additional cases were identified immediately. Ten more had high viral loads, a number being staff who shared an office with the index case. All the additional cases at first had no symptoms.
The hospital was then locked down. Over the next two weeks, 16 additional cases were identified in subsequent PCR surveys. 62 of the 69 PCR-positive cases participated in this study of the outbreak.
Forty-seven (76% of the 62 subjects) developed respiratory symptoms, three with pneumonia on chest x-ray and one requiring three days of nasal cannula oxygen (this is the least intensive form of oxygen therapy). Everyone recovered fully.
Peak viral loads in this fully vaccinated, infected group were, on average, 250 times higher than peak viral loads with older variants early in the pandemic (March-April 2020), when no one was vaccinated. This is a means of comparing the biology of the variants themselves: the Delta virus has gained the ability to replicate itself enormously in the upper respiratory tract, regardless of vaccination, thereby making itself more infectious.
In the current outbreak, viral loads (and thus infectiousness) peaked in the 2-3 days both before and after symptoms began.
All sequenced isolates were the Delta variant. The genetic sequences from hospital staff were more similar to each other than they were to contemporaneous isolates from the city at large or from more distant parts of the country. This means it is likely that the virus spread among the (fully vaccinated) hospital staff from a single infected (and vaccinated) staff member who brought it from the outside. Given the dynamics of symptoms and positivity among the staff, it is clear that asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic staff members, as well as symptomatic, were infecting others.
PCR tests continued to be positive up to 33 days after diagnosis (averaging 21 days). Case- control comparisons showed that staff members with lower titers of neutralizing antibodies after vaccination and at diagnosis were more likely to become infected. However, there was no correlation between vaccine-induced antibody levels at diagnosis and viral loads or the development of respiratory symptoms.
(C) The third study is an analysis of ongoing population-wide SARS-CoV-2 monitoring in the UK, whose primary purpose is following changes in vaccine efficacy. In the UK study, the PCR tests are done on members of randomly selected households across the UK, following a predetermined schedule that ignores symptoms, vaccination, and prior infection. The current analysis was released on August 24, 2021 and summarized in commentary in the British Medical Journal on August 19, 2021. [3, 4]
The study includes measures of viral load or “burden” under Alpha and Delta predominance. While Alpha was the dominant UK strain (January to mid-May 2021), vaccination or prior COVID- 19 disease strongly reduced viral load compared to unvaccinated people who had never had COVID-19.
The sample size was large and random, obtained as described above. 12,287 new PCR-positives were found in the Alpha-dominant period, of which 88% were unvaccinated and had no evidence of prior infection. Only 0.5% of new positive tests were from fully vaccinated people and 0.6% from people with prior COVID-19 infection. Since it was a large, random sample and vaccination percentages increased dramatically in the UK across this time period, we can safely say that vaccination and prior infection were very protective against becoming infected with the Alpha variant. Virtually all the new infections occurred in unvaccinated people.
After mid-June 2021, when greater than 92% of PCR positives in the UK were Delta, the differences in viral load between vaccinated, unvaccinated, and people with past COVID-19 disease nearly vanished. Viral loads in all three groups were much higher than with Alpha, indicating increased infectiousness. More vaccinated people were now showing symptoms when they became positive, also correlated with viral load.
During the Delta-dominant period, the sample was 1939 new positive PCR tests. Of these, 17% (326) were from unvaccinated people without prior COVID-19 disease, 1% (20) were unvaccinated with evidence of prior disease, and 82% (1593) were fully vaccinated. This is approximately the percentage of the UK population who were vaccinated by August 18, 2021— when 75-83% of UK residents were fully vaccinated and 84-89% had received at least one dose. [5]
Like the Massachusetts study reviewed above, this suggests that the new Delta variant infects vaccinated and unvaccinated people with equal probability. To go from 0.5% of randomly sampled new infections in vaccinated people (under Alpha) to 82% (under Delta) in several months, as the population is becoming more and more vaccinated—these are extraordinary numbers.
If vaccination is still effective in preventing infection, we would expect the proportion of infections in a random population sample to be less than the proportion of the population vaccinated. If 82% of randomly obtained positive tests occur in vaccinated people, and about 82% of people are vaccinated, then vaccination is not reducing the likelihood of infection at all. Efficacy at preventing infection has become zero.
The UK study addresses vaccine efficacy in much more complex ways than the straightforward numbers I present here. The authors conclude that both of the earlier UK-approved vaccines (BioNTech/Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca) have lost some efficacy against Delta compared to Alpha. But both vaccines, they maintain, remain substantially effective at keeping people from becoming infected with the Delta strain, in the range of 67 to 80%. If this is the case, why was 82% of their random sample of new positive PCR tests from vaccinated people?
If a vaccine reduces the risk of becoming infected by two-thirds (67%), we would expect the proportion of vaccinated in the positive sample to be less than the proportion of vaccinated in the population. Say we start with 1000 people in the country, of whom we will randomly sample 100. The country is 80% vaccinated. This means that in our sample of 100 we have 80 vaccinated and 20 unvaccinated people. Let’s say that the virus has infected 10% of the people across the sampling period, or 10 total cases. If 8 of the infected are among the vaccinated, and 2 in the unvaccinated (80% and 20% of the positives, matching the ratio of vaccinated and unvaccinated in the population), the vaccine has made no difference in whether one can get infected (0% efficacy). If the vaccine is 67% effective, the cases in the vaccinated group would be reduced by 2/3 to 2.67 cases, and the total cases would be only 4.67 cases (2.67 vaccinated and 2 unvaccinated). This means that only 2.67/4.67 or 57% of the cases would be in the vaccinated group, and 43% in the unvaccinated. (We can go back to 10% overall being positive just using ratios, yielding 5.7 cases among the vaccinated and 4.3 among the unvaccinated.)
This is why the proportion vaccinated in the infected sample, very close to the proportions vaccinated in the total population, are incompatible with the efficacy numbers generated by the authors. It appears to me—as in the Massachusetts study—that the vaccine is not decreasing susceptibility to infection at all, and is in reality somewhere between slightly (insignificantly) decreasing susceptibility and slightly increasing susceptibility to the Delta variant.
The UK study is clear that viral load (and thus infectiousness to others) is much greater with Delta than with Alpha, and that, with Delta, viral load and infectiousness are equal in vaccinated and unvaccinated infected people.
Discussion #1:
These three different studies in three countries with three different population sampling methods produced the same result: with the current, dominant Delta strain, vaccinated people become infected and carry just as much infectious virus in their upper respiratory tracts when infected as unvaccinated people. The reproducibility of this finding makes it a very strong finding.
The study in Vietnam shows clearly that infected, vaccinated people transmit the infection to others.
Under the current dominance of the Delta variant, being vaccinated or not has no influence on a chief determinant of infectiousness: the size of the viral load carried in the nose and mouth of an infected person. In addition, both vaccinated and unvaccinated become infected in significant numbers, approximating the ratios of vaccinated and unvaccinated in the population.
The rationale for mandates—that each individual has a responsibility to be vaccinated to limit spread of the virus to others—is hereby seriously or even fatally undermined. The decision to be vaccinated, under Delta predominance, has become entirely personal, affecting only the future health and well-being of the individual receiving the vaccine.
Blaming the unvaccinated for the rapid spread of the Delta variant has no merit whatsoever, since both vaccinated and unvaccinated infected people are equally infectious to others, and vaccinated and unvaccinated people are represented in illness samples in proportion to their representation in the general population, showing they are equally likely to become infected.
These findings also equalize vaccinated and unvaccinated in terms of quarantine, vaccine- based exclusion, or the wearing of masks.
The Delta variant has entirely changed our expectations of the effects of vaccination on containing the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
What about natural immunity from previous COVID-19 infection?
What about natural immunity from previous COVID-19 infection, with regard to the change in virus strain? An Israeli study posted on August 25, 2021 powerfully shows that “natural immunity [from previous COVID-19 infection] confers longer-lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS- CoV-2 compared to the BNT162b2 [BioNTech/Pfizer] two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.” If a person is both naturally immune and received one vaccine dose, immunity to Delta infection is even stronger. [6]
To demonstrate this, the authors studied the records of a large Israeli Health Maintenance Organization covering 2.5 million people (26% of the population). They compared the numbers of positive PCR tests from June 1 to August 14, 2021, when the Delta variant was dominant, in people who were either immunized in January-February 2021 or had COVID-19 infection in January-February 2021.
Those who were vaccinated but never had COVID-19 disease were 13 times more likely to develop a new SARS-CoV-2 infection than those made naturally immune by COVID-19 disease. The increased risk was also significant for having symptoms or not.
When the prior COVID-19 disease was allowed to happen earlier in the course of the pandemic, from March 2020 through February 2021, vaccinees who had never had COVID-19 disease were still (a) 6 times more likely to have a positive PCR in June-August 2021 than a naturally immune person, (b) 7 times more likely to have symptomatic disease, and (c) at greater risk for COVID- 19-related hospitalization.
By comparison, under Alpha strain dominance during the first half of 2021, over 50,000 staff members of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio demonstrated that vaccine-induced immunity (from any of the three US-authorized vaccines) and natural immunity were equally protective against COVID-19 disease. [7]
The Israeli study shows at a later time period how the Delta variant has escaped the control of at least one of these vaccines, while natural immunity to earlier forms of SARS-CoV-2 still confers protection.
A Danish study of 203 recovered COVID patients shows that COVID-19 infection/disease provokes robust immune responses in the vast majority of people regardless of disease severity, including mild cases and even true asymptomatic cases (excluding those with false positive tests). [8]
Discussion #2:
It is difficult to tell anything about the virulence or pathogenicity of the Delta variant itself—how sick it makes people—since the available studies are all done in highly vaccinated populations. Vaccination has protected against severe disease and death with all the other variants, and may well do the same with the Delta variant. This remains the most compelling reason individuals may decide to be vaccinated.
What drives people—especially PhD’s, together with certain minorities [9]—to choose not to be vaccinated? There is substantial recorded and written evidence from first-hand observers and vaccine recipients themselves, and in the immunization “adverse effects” registries of both the US and Europe, that we are tolerating with COVID-19 vaccines a level of severe adverse effects, including death, that would have been unthinkable for any earlier vaccine.
So far, convincing evidence that these effects are “not related to vaccine” has not emerged. Convincing evidence would be research-lab-level autopsy studies of people deceased soon after vaccination (or ill soon after vaccination and eventually deceased), including immunofluorescence or other specific staining for the unique proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids of vaccine or SARS-CoV-2 itself in different tissues. (Some excellent examples of this approach are autopsy studies illuminating the pathophysiology of COVID-19 disease by C Magro and others at Weill Cornell Medical Center [e.g. 10].) Biopsy studies of key tissues in living affected people, such as those with persistent neurologic deficits after vaccination for COVID-19, would also provide powerful evidence. It is highly irregular and indeed unacceptable that such autopsy and biopsy studies have not been done.
Some prominent scientists and a significant number of physicians take these allegations of vaccine-caused injury very seriously. Doctors for Covid Ethics, a British/European/worldwide group of physicians, link the known pathophysiology of clots in COVID-19 disease [10] with a possible pathophysiologic mechanism explaining the numerous cases of thrombosis after vaccination, such as those in published literature due to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. [11,12] This mechanism would not be unique to one vaccine type or brand, nor are the reports of postvaccination thrombosis unique to one type or brand of vaccine.
In the four major papers reviewed above (Massachusetts, Vietnam, UK, and Israel), the biologic facts of the new Delta variant and its relationship to vaccination are clearly and reproducibly established. This is the value of good science.
Conclusion:
Given all the above evidence, mandating others to take a vaccine is a potentially harmful, damaging act.
Since the principal reason for COVID-19 vaccine mandates—protecting others from infection—has evaporated with the ascendance of the Delta variant, those who mandate COVID-19 vaccines may wish to seek legal counsel regarding their culpability and liability (including personal) for potential long-lasting harm to those whom they pressure into vaccination with threat of exclusion from employment or education or other public activity. Remind your attorney that if an unborn or nursing baby is damaged, liability persists until the child is age 23—plenty of time for discovery of the ways whereby vaccine producers and government regulators may have suppressed important information about harmful effects.
References:
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* Nina Pierpont is a graduate of Yale University (BA in biology), with a MA and PhD from Princeton University in population biology/evolutionary biology/ecology, and the MD degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She has been a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons. She is currently in private practice in upstate New York, specializing in behavioral medicine.
The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.
The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. national security state and its civilian allies to great effect to divide the American population, to attack independent reporting as well as independent thought, to gut the anti-war movement, and to normalize the U.S. government’s overt and persistent degradation of the country’s Constitution. This, of course, is in addition to the illegal U.S. occupations and drone wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that were also born out of this event.
The true beneficiaries of 9/11
As a nation, the U.S. populace has failed to grapple with these realities, and many others, in the two decades since the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 fell. Far from bringing any benefit to the alleged masterminds of the event, the results of 9/11 instead overwhelmingly favored the ambitions of a powerful faction within the U.S. national security state that had long sought to bring the dissident-elimination efforts it spent decades implementing abroad – from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Operation Condor in South America – home to roost.
As a result, the response of the U.S. government to the attack supposedly launched by those “who hate us for our freedom” was to work to reduce our freedoms and civil liberties. Now, 20 years on, the sophisticated “War on Terror” apparatus has been fully turned into a “War on Domestic Terror,” with many of those who once opposed the war on terrorism abroad now cheering on the ratcheting up of its domestic equivalent.
Yet, the domestic terror apparatus being swiftly created and implemented very clearly targets individuals and ideologies on both sides of the political divide. It is also extremely vague, essentially leaving it up to those holding the reins of political power – whether Democrat, Republican or something else – to decide who is “terrorist” and who is not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Joe Biden back in the mid-1990s who introduced legislation that would have given the president sole and unappealable authority to define what constitutes “terrorism,” a fact that was omitted from media coverage of last year’s presidential campaign and the past several months of his presidency.
A crisis of courage
It seems clear at this point that one of the key reasons the U.S. continues to hemorrhage its remaining civil liberties, either as a result of the new “War on Domestic Terrorism” or as a response to COVID-19, is that it is undergoing a crisis of conscience and courage in grappling with not just the true nature of the events of 9/11 itself, but with the orthodoxy over the “official story” of those events.
Even two decades after the fact, it is still deemed too controversial or unthinkable to question whether the official story is an accurate portrayal of the events that transpired on and led to that day. This is despite the fact that the official story itself, presumably the same story told by the 9/11 Commission report, has been labeled incomplete, and unable to answer major questions about that day, by its very authors. In addition, the official story relies heavily on testimony obtained through extreme torture, meaning it is of questionable accuracy.
Many of those who have been quick and vocal to point out the lies of the U.S. government when it comes to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and other consequences of the War on Terror have been unable to even consider that the official story of 9/11 may not be legitimate and may indeed have been dealt from the same pack. This may be for a variety of reasons, including a strong desire to not be de-legitimized by their peers as bearers of the “conspiracy theorist” smear and an unwillingness to face a political reality where U.S. government officials may have been complicit in a deadly attack on American soil. In those two examples, however, the failure of such individuals, particularly in media, to even consider that there may be more to the story boils down to a desire for self-preservation in the case of the former and preservation of a particular worldview in the case of the latter. Yet, in both cases, the casualty is the truth and the cause is cowardice.
By failing as a society to thoroughly examine the events of 9/11 and why those events occurred, the American public has shown the powers that be that their desire to preserve a “safe” worldview — and to preserve their own careers, in the case of certain professional classes — is enough to keep people from questioning world-altering events when they emerge. Those powers are well aware of this refusal and have been using it to their advantage ever since.
The poison remains in our system
Today, with the COVID-19 crisis still dragging on, we are similarly immersed in a situation where nuance and facts are being cast aside, militantly in some cases, in favor of the establishment narrative. Is everyone who chooses not to take this particular vaccine a “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaxxer”? Does it really make sense to so dramatically divide the public into groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated through a new ID system when the vaccine claims to reduce the severity of illness but not to stop disease transmission? Should those that question the motivation of politicians, powerful pharmaceutical corporations and mainstream media “experts” be censored from expressing those views online?
You do not need to agree with those who hold such views, but what is wrong with hearing what they have to say and debating their evidence with your own? We are losing the ability to have rational public discourse about these issues — and losing it swiftly, at a speed comparable to what took place in the aftermath of 9/11, when questioning the motives of the Bush administration, U.S. intelligence agencies and other groups, as well as their proposed responses and “solutions,” was deemed “unpatriotic” and even “treasonous” by some. Calls were made to strip an entire class of Americans of their freedom for merely sharing the same ethno-religious identities as those we were told attacked us, and many went along with it. Freedom became treated as a privilege only for certain groups, not as a right, and this insidious fallacy has reared its head yet again in recent months in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine debate and also the war on domestic terror.
Our pandemic of fear
Though the failure to consider explanations for 9/11 that deviate from the official story can be called cowardice, the most enduring lesson 20 years on from 9/11 is perhaps that fear was and remains the most powerful tool that has been consistently used to whittle down our freedom and civil liberties. While the divide-and-conquer strategies have raged on from 9/11 to the present, the largest wealth transfers in history have occurred, creating an unaccountable and ultra-wealthy super-elite that dominates an ever-growing underclass.
The march towards this de facto neo-feudalism certainly didn’t begin on or after 9/11, but our collective failure to grapple with the narrative orthodoxies of that day have prevented us from fully understanding the big picture of that event as well as many subsequent and similarly consequential events. For too long, the desire to preserve our self-image, our reputation, and the worldview we are taught in school has all too often made hard, difficult truths a casualty.
In order to truly understand the War on Terror, the domestic surveillance state and our current reality, we must accept that we were lied to about 9/11. We must ask the hard questions and accept hard truths. We must put an end to the 20-plus-year-long pandemic of fear over “invisible enemies,” fear that has pushed us to surrender the very freedoms that we are told we are protecting.
The United States, and much of the world, is quickly becoming an unrecognizable and authoritarian dystopia. We cannot wait another two decades to grapple with the difficult questions and realities that arose after 9/11 and persist into the present. We will either be remembered as a country that took freedom and liberty for all seriously or we will be remembered as a nation of cowards who, driven by fear, were willing to deprive this group, then that group, of their freedom — before losing that freedom entirely.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for MintPress News. She currently writes for her own outlet Unlimited Hangout and contributes to The Last American Vagabond and MintPress News
TWO decades after 9/11, which was eleven years to the day after President George H W Bush delivered his famous ‘new world order’ speech, the historical significance of both events is now much clearer.
Two decades of permanent ‘most favoured nation’ trading status for China has produced the largest transfer of wealth, technology, manufacturing capacity and markets in human history, and destroyed the American industrial economy.
Two decades of the ‘War on Terror’ and the cancerous growth of a global surveillance state has destroyed Western liberty and obliterated civil rights.
Two decades of the corporate internet, social media and smartphones has lobotomised Western culture, destroyed key Western institutions, engineered a rolling mass psychosis and transferred regional political and economic power to Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Two decades of the occupation of Afghanistan, then Iraq, drone war and collateral murder in Pakistan, attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen has destroyed the authority of the United States and its allies to the point where the senile winner of a crooked election mumbling prepared talking points inside a fortified Capitol is the nominal leader of what was once called the free world.
Before 9/11 it was still almost possible to believe America’s idealised story of itself. Today the USA can be compared to the most corrupt regimes in history, and may even be the most corrupt, given the scale of corruption now possible.
Gangster states, which are merely criminal rather than sadistic and depraved, now look at the United States with justified disgust.
But America is also no longer really America, just as Britain is no longer really Britain. Both are no more than holding companies of a global commercial conglomerate hostile to national power as a barrier to global domination, just as developing national power in an earlier era was determined to weaken regional power.
All this was accelerated after 9/11 through the imposition of a war whose structural outcome, if not objective, was the demolition of the democratic West, and it is now being accelerated yet further via the pandemic.
Once again shock propaganda has been used to declare a state of emergency and enable the seizure of power from the people to State and transnational organs. Here, too, a highly profitable permanent war has been declared against an invisible enemy with no definable conditions of victory, or even coherently stated aims.
Again, the winners are the same global political, economic and security elites who consolidated after 9/11 by destroying the independence and competence of the institutions over which they had acquired control in the process of converting them into instruments of domination.
Here too, beyond a lingering and misplaced respect for institutional authority, the plausibility-effect produced by endless, mantra-like repetition, and the production of irrelevant distractions, the official story remains unpersuasive.
In the days which followed 9/11 questions were already being asked about the relationship between the official story, the actual pattern of the evidence and a series of imponderables, and they have continued to be asked.
What is without question is that one hour after the attack in New York, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had identified the likely perpetrator as Osama Bin Laden (Bin Laden would later deny any involvement) and called for the declaration of a global ‘war against terror’ extending beyond the perpetrators of 9/11 itself to confront terror generally.
The paradigm was adopted wholesale by George Bush in a speech to Congress nine days later. ’Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda,’ Bush said, ‘but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.’
Islam itself was not the enemy, we were told. Al Qaeda had only ‘hijacked’ Islam for the purpose of ‘remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere’.
In subsequent years this vague and ambiguous distinction would be used to support the extension of police state surveillance not just of rapidly growing Muslim populations across the West (to monitor evidence of dangerous radicalization) but also anyone articulating suspicion towards Muslims. By 2019 more ‘Right-wingers’ than Islamic activists were being referred to the Prevent programme. Last month the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin implying that if Americans question and challenge the COVID shot mandates, they are now considered potential ‘Domestic Violent Extremists’.
In truth, Bush and his associates and masters had hijacked Al-Qaeda and Islam for the purpose of imposing their own radical agenda. Spun between a belligerent discourse of Islamofascism and a police discourse of Islamophobia, a schizoid and insulting fantasy of a liberal Islam became the object of a new imperialism in the stated cause of Western values, and in reality enacting their destruction.
Just as recent calls to ‘Save the NHS’ have served to camouflage the liquidation of the NHS, the rhetoric of ‘nation-building’ efforts to extend Western democracy across the world have, in reality, destroyed democracy everywhere.
Even as mass Muslim immigration into the West accelerated following their destruction of their countries, a steady drumbeat of slaughter and atrocity in London, Madrid, Paris and elsewhere, staged by actors invariably known to intelligence agencies, maintained a climate of hostility and madness to the benefit of the occupational elites. The language of permanent terror bled into a culture (what is a safe space but a refuge from a world of terror?) as a psychologically brutalized population regressed into a cloying “thoughts and prayers” martyrology, in fact promoted or exploded into murderous psychosis, combining in cases like Usman Khan, who shortly before his London Bridge rampage attended a conference on criminal rehabilitation as a rehabilitated criminal. https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-indoctrination-of-the-justice-system/ (The Millwall supporter who helped to disarm him, Roy Larner, was later added to terror watchlist.)
In February 2007, when former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski denounced before the Senate ‘a historical, strategic and moral calamity . . . driven by Manichaean impulses and imperial hubris’, the full extent of the damage was not yet clear. What now is clear is that the War on Terror was a weapon directed against the West itself which has succeeded beyond all expectations.
Whether through a conscious plan or what Hegel called the cunning of reason, the West has been destroyed. What now exists is a shadow West, which still speaks as if it was the West for camouflage, but in the service of completely different goals. It is not a coincidence that the characters promoted and rewarded for their participation in the War on Terror have either remained in place or returned to play a role in the pandemic: from their perspective there has been no error. What has materialised over the last thirty years, and especially the last eighteen months, is a new system of power, which although still defined within the context of the history of the nation-state, represents its ultimate destruction.
On social media, a Sydney doctor questioned whether vaccines and lockdowns would be effective in ending the pandemic while also scrutinizing how medical authorities were handling treatment. As a result of his postings, New South Wales medical authorities have taken action against Dr. Paul Oosterhuis by suspending him.
Oosterhuis’ social media activities have garnered at least two anonymous complaints to the medical council, the group confirmed on September 2nd.
“Over the last 18 months, I have been increasingly concerned about the misinformation and censorship creeping into science and medicine,” the doctor had stated.
Oosterhuis recommended that medical authorities advise COVID-19 patients to take vitamin D and zinc and to treat them with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
He called the lockdowns “totalitarian” and causing “massive damage to society-wide.”
In a post, he wrote. “The risk of antibody-dependent enhancement of disease… driven by immune escape from the selective evolutionary pressure of vaccinating with a non-sterilizing agent is a real and present danger and needs to be discussed. The danger to millions is distressing me, and discussing that danger is, I believe, unarguably in the public interest.”
According to the Medical Council of New South Wales, Oosterhuis’s social media activity was flagged. He was asked to attend an “immediate action panel” on September 3rd and the anesthetist was questioned by the MCNSW.
“The Council deals with individual doctors whose conduct, performance or health may represent a risk to the public and works with them, where possible, to reduce that risk by for example, placing conditions on their medical registration. Section 150 or immediate action panels are held by the Council when a complaint or notification prompts serious concerns about risk to public safety or the need to otherwise act in the public interest. Panel members include community representatives as well as medical practitioners,” the MCNSW statement read.
The MCNSW provided Reclaim The Net with this full statement here
Ultimately, the MCNSW chose to suspend Dr Oosterhuis’ later that day.
Medical practitioners can be suspended by the medical council under New South Wales’ Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (NSW). The New South Wales Medical Council collaborates with the state Ministry of Health to investigate and resolve complaints about specific doctors and other medical specialists.
According to the council, this law does not give it the power to de-register Oosterhuis or revoke his license and they have no authority to punish him. However, despite his almost 30 years of experience in medicine, his suspension has already barred him from practicing in the medical profession.
Oosterhuis has responded by stating that he will not adjust his behavior to be more compliant. He stated that he intends to challenge the suspension, saying:
“I am very disappointed by the Medical Council’s decision to suspend my registration.
“The material I submitted in support of my evidence-based concerns was not considered. I intend to appeal the decision.
“The council drew upon s150 powers to demand an urgent hearing into some posts I have shared on Facebook on the importance of early treatment, particularly the low hanging fruit of vit D, Zinc, Quercetin, vit C and the repurposed drugs Ivermectin.
“I’m pro choice, pro informed consent… it’s always been a key ethical principle… you need to be able to discuss all the risks, benefits, and alternatives of any medical intervention.”
He later added, “Censorship kills. My responsibility to the Hippocratic oath, and basic ethics compels me to share data that I believe is definitely in the public interest.”
Despite an initial public statement, the MCNSW failed to make any further statements on this issue.
Much attention is focused on President Joe Biden in a Thursday speech announcing that the coronavirus testing alternative United States government employees had been able to use to avoid the mandate to take experimental coronavirus vaccines is being eliminated and that regulations are in the works to require all employees at companies with 100 or more employees to take the “vaccines” or be tested weekly. Less noticed is news that experimental coronavirus vaccines may soon be rolled out for young children. Pfizer-BioNTech is seeking in the next few weeks approval for giving its experimental coronavirus vaccine shots to children ages five through 11, while Moderna is close behind, proceeding with testing of its shots on children 11 and younger. Then come shots for toddlers and babies.
Shots mandates for workers first, shots mandates for children next: That seems to be the situation in America, though it should be noted that some children —especially older children — are workers too.
Of course, as happened Thursday with the testing alternative to shots disappearing for government workers, expect that alternative to go away for people working at private businesses as well. By the time a shots mandate for children comes along, a testing alternative might not be available from the start.
Biden provided in his speech a preview of an argument in favor of mandatory shots for children. First, he asserted that the August 23 expedited Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of a Pfizer-BioNTech experimental coronavirus vaccine for people 16 and over means “the time for waiting is over” for people 16 and older who have not taken the shots. Second, Biden suggested that as soon as vaccines are approved for use in an age group of children his conclusion is that the children in that age group should then be given shots:
It comes down to two separate categories: children ages 12 and older who are eligible for a vaccine now, and children ages 11 and under who are not are yet eligible.
The safest thing for your child 12 and older is to get them vaccinated. They get vaccinated for a lot of things. That’s it. Get them vaccinated.
A move to require children to be given the experimental coronavirus vaccine shots should come as no surprise. Children across America have long been mandated to receive many vaccines on a prescribed timeline in accord with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine schedule or similar state vaccine schedules in order to attend school. And many of the mandates are difficult to avoid. In California, for example, the vaccine mandate applies even to children in private schools and only has a very limited exemption.
The obvious way to introduce the requirement that young children take the experimental coronavirus vaccine shots is to make the shots a prerequisite for attending school. There is plenty of precedent for that from all the other vaccine shots required in the CDC and state vaccine schedules.
Next up, the shots can be required for even homeschooled children, just like the shots requirement for people employed in businesses with a 100 or more employees can be extended to people employed in businesses with under 100 employees, the self-employed, the retired, and the unemployed. Indeed, on Thursday Biden announced he will mandate US government contractors and 17 million healthcare workers take the shots, no matter how many employees their employers have.
There is no constitutional basis for the experimental coronavirus vaccine mandates Biden announced on Thursday. If he can get away with those mandates, what’s to stop him from expanding on those mandates so he can eliminate all the “loopholes,” including the one protecting children from forced shots.
A Florida appeals court has overruled a district judge who sought to block Governor Ron DeSantis from banning mask mandates in public schools, even as President Joe Biden vowed federal support for administrators who do so.
On Friday, the First District Court of Appeals in Tallahassee overruled Leon County Judge John Cooper’s decision to block the enforcement of the mandate ban, meaning schools that try to force children to wear masks can be punished by the governor.
“Upon our review of the trial’s court’s final judgment and the operative pleadings, we have serious doubts about standing, jurisdiction, and other threshold matters,” said the appeals court order, casting doubt on the case the mandate advocates made through a group of parents.
DeSantis is a Republican governor opposed to lockdowns and mask mandates, who has opted for encouraging vaccinations and antibody treatments for Covid-19 instead. He has argued that masking up ought to be voluntary, and that school mask mandates violate the rights of parents and children. Under the rules enacted by DeSantis last month, school administrators who impose mask mandates can be docked pay. Judge Cooper tried to block their enforcement.
Of the 67 school districts in Florida, 13 have adopted strict mask mandates in violation of the state order. So far, DeSantis has withheld the monthly salary of school board members in two counties, Broward and Alachua, while investigating others for non-compliance.
On Thursday, Biden said the federal government would reimburse anyone who defies the mask mandate ban, as part of his push to force some 80 million Americans to get vaccinated or submit to weekly tests under the threat of losing their jobs or paying massive fines. Biden blamed the “unvaccinated” for the surge in Covid-19 cases and said the vaccinated must be protected from them.
“This is not about freedom, or personal choice,” Biden said in a televised speech, later adding, “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us.”
Biden also said state governors should require vaccinations of all school teachers and staff, imposed a vaccination requirement on 300,000 teachers in the federal Head Start program, and vowed to go after any governors “undermining” his measures.
“If these governors won’t help, I will use my powers as president and get them out of the way,” he said.
Last month, DeSantis vowed to “stand in the way” of Covid-19 mandates, lockdowns, and other restrictions, saying the US can “either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat, has written to Amazon and Facebook, requesting more information on their efforts to combat the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. The Democratic party has intensified its criticism of online platforms for their failure to address what they say is misinformation, which they blame for the stalling of the vaccination program.
“Despite some concrete and positive steps previously taken, these companies owe both the public and the Congress additional answers about the exponential and dangerous proliferation of misinformation,” said Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in a statement.
In recent weeks more Democrats, including White House officials, have spoken out against online platforms for their failure to address health misinformation, blamed for the increased vaccine hesitancy in the country. Biden singled out Facebook, saying the company was killing people for allowing the spread of vaccine-skeptic content.
In a statement to Reuters, Facebook said that, since the beginning of the pandemic, it had “removed over 20 million pieces of COVID misinformation, labeled more than 190 million pieces of COVID content rated by our fact-checking partners, and connected over 2 billion people with reliable information through tools like our COVID information center.”
It added it had “removed over 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups for repeatedly violating our COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation policies and will continue to enforce our policies and offer tools and reminders for people who use our platform to get vaccinated.”
A spokesperson for Amazon said that it has been “constantly evaluating the books we list to ensure they comply with our content guidelines, and as an additional service to customers, at the top of relevant search results pages we link to the CDC advice on COVID and protection measures.”
Republican Governor Greg Abbott has been slammed as a hypocrite after he signed an anti-Big Tech censorship bill on Thursday, with critics pointing out that he’s cracked down on Texans who’ve protested against Israel’s actions.
In a video on Thursday, Abbott claimed “freedom of speech is under attack in Texas,” before revealing he would be signing a law that “prevents social media companies from banning users based upon the user’s political viewpoints.” He said it would allow Texans to file lawsuits against “dangerous” Big Tech platforms that wrongfully suspend their right to post.
“In Texas, we will always fight for your freedom of speech,” Abbott concluded, as he signed the bill.
Though many US conservatives praised Abbott online for signing the bill, journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the same governor had previously used his power to crack down on pro-Palestine activists who protested against Israel.
“I’m happy seeing anyone take a stand against Big Tech censorship, but I also feel compelled to note that [Abbott] himself is one of the country’s most repressive censors,” Greenwald tweeted on Friday, noting that the governor had championed a law that “punishes American citizens who refuse to take an oath about Israel.”
“I can’t overstate how repressive is the censorship supported by Abbott and other mostly but not all red-state governors that punish citizens who advocate a boycott of Israel. Thankfully, the courts are declaring them unconstitutional, but Abbott is a fraud.”
In 2017, Abbott’s office announced that the governor had “proudly” signed a new law that “prohibits all state agencies from contracting with, and certain public funds from investing in, companies that boycott Israel.”
At the signing of the bill, Abbott declared that “any anti-Israel policy is an anti-Texas policy” and “any boycott of Israel is considered to be un-Texan,” ultimately disregarding citizens whose views on the matter didn’t align with his own.
“We will not tolerate such actions against an important ally,” he warned.
A Muslim speech pathologist at an elementary school in Austin, Texas was subsequently ousted from her job after she refused to take an oath swearing she would not engage in a boycott of Israeli products or other such anti-Israel actions.
In 2019, a federal court in Texas ruled Abbott’s bill to be an unconstitutional violation of citizens’ First Amendment rights.
In March, Abbott also took aim at the social network Gab, calling it an “anti-Semitic platform” and declaring, in a video in which he sat in front of an Israeli flag, that it had “no place in Texas.”
Abbott received heavy criticism from Republicans for his anti-Gab stance, including from several Jewish conservatives who served in President Donald Trump’s administration.
The governor’s statement was branded “despicable and false” by Gab CEO Andrew Torba, who pointed out that nearly 800,000 Texans had visited the network in the previous 24 hours and that even the Texas Republican Party had a verified account on the site.
Somewhere a brilliant but troubled biotech engineer is doing CRISPR in his garage. He has all he needs: a computer, a fridge, a centrifuge, some animal cages, and an assortment of microorganisms in tubes, which he has labeled and stored until he’s ready. Today he will use a gene-editing technique to make a deadly, fast-spreading bacterium. Oh, and he plans to unleash it upon the world tomorrow. He just needs to make a few finishing touches.
Why is he doing this?
Maybe he’s gone mad. Maybe he’s lonely and wants to get revenge on the world. Maybe he read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and thinks humans are a plague. In some sense, it doesn’t matter. Out of a thousand other brilliant gene researchers, he has broken bad. And nobody really knows what he’s working on in that garage. He is as invisible to his neighbors as he is to the girls he likes.
What on earth are we going to do about this young man?
How do we stop people like him from unleashing mass death?
And if we are going to stop him, who is the “we?”
Today, more and more people have access to technological means to wreak havoc on the world. As more people have access to exponential technologies, some subset of them could be out there in the dark working on the next existential threat.
So what are we going to do?
Reasonable Regulations
For most people, the answer is linear, even logical: regulation. It’s plausible enough. Certain kinds of activities are riskier than others, so ordinary people are going to have to trust and empower authorities to provide regulatory oversight. Sounds simple. Advocates of this kind of regulation are not arguing that risky research should be banned. As we stipulated in our own scenario, 999 out of 1,000 are not monsters at all but up to good things. Some of their work will be welcome medical breakthroughs.
So maybe some people should be allowed to engage in activities that create existential risks. Otherwise, such activities should be tightly controlled by regulators in licensed, transparent environments. And, of course, government ought to supply that regulatory oversight; or so goes that rationale.
Turnkey Totalitarianism
A handful of people have begun to study existential threats like the ones described above. One such individual is philosopher Nick Bostrom who in the policy summary of his “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”, writes:
“In order for civilization to have a general capacity to deal with “black ball” inventions of this type, it would need a system of ubiquitous real-time worldwide surveillance. In some scenarios, such a system would need to be in place before the technology is invented.”
After a unipolar surveillance regime is put in place, Bostrom thinks that dangerous materials that could go to the development of existential threats would have to be supplied by a “small number of closely monitored providers.”
So, we get ubiquitous surveillance plus tight regulation, which some such as privacy policy analyst Julian Sanchez have referred to as “turnkey totalitarianism.” The question before us then, is, would it work?
Regulating the Regulators
In a separate article titled “Fawning Over Fauci,” I suggested the media better investigate a situation that is not very different from the one I imagined in the opening vignette. However, the major difference is that there wasn’t some kid in a garage in this real-world scenario. There were government-sanctioned scientists in a research center — The Wuhan Institute of Virology — who used largesse dispensed by our own government.
Indeed, one of the best ways to provide oversight in various research endeavors is to control the funding sources for such research. I have suggested that it is plausible that the infectious diseases branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH/NIAID), run by none other than Anthony Fauci, was responsible for funding research into zoonotic viruses of the sort that includes Covid-19.
In other words, without Fauci and his agency’s regulatory failure, there might have been no pandemic.
Let’s assume that Anthony Fauci and the functionaries at the NIAID presided over the funding of dangerous research, which was to be tightly controlled and regulated (if not outright banned). Let’s stipulate that such research did lead to a pandemic that has already killed millions of people. And as the virus mutates, it evades not only vaccines, but all manner of bureaucratic mandates. It could soon be endemic.
In this scenario, though, all of the criteria for reasonable regulation ought to have been satisfied. Yet we still got mass death. In other words, there was neither a mad scientist nor a monstrous incel, at least not as far as we know. It could have been as simple as bureaucratic incompetence combined with negligence at one of the labs serving at the NIH’s behest.
For now, I’ll leave aside questions about whether or to what extent the Chinese government knew about the research and could have co-opted it for nefarious purposes. Despite the Communist Party’s sorry track record, the most likely explanation is that this was a terrible accident. We simply can’t say. Nor are we ever likely to find anything but lies coming out of Beijing (or Washington for that matter).
But one thing is clear: there is currently no way to regulate the regulators. Instead, we have no choice but to live with them. Otherwise, they are entirely unaccountable. They alone hold power to take such enormous risks, presumably in the name of science.
The Problem of Power
When it comes to the idea of government, most people suffer from both a great blind spot and a failure of imagination.
The blind spot is a refusal to believe the state is itself the greatest of all existential threats to humanity. Whether in Hollywood’s depiction of corporate baddies or general concerns about gigantism, most people can’t or won’t appreciate the fact that nation-states hold all the records for mass killing. Compare individuals and corporations to that record. It ain’t even close. Yet most people want desperately to believe the state’s job is to protect us. Unicorn governance. Again, the state is the greatest source of violence in human history.
The failure of imagination lies in a widespread inability to see how it might be possible for humanity to mitigate existential threats without the linear model of state control. Whether we’re talking about “reasonable regulation” or “turnkey totalitarianism,” the linear model originates in Hobbes’s Leviathan rationale, which holds most people in its thrall. Simply put, the Leviathan rationale prompts us to entrust a powerful monopoly to protect us and work in our interests.
But then, somehow, we have to oblige that powerful monopoly to stay in its place. The problem is, it rarely does. As Edmund Burke wrote:
In vain you tell me that [government] is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! The Thing itself is the abuse! Observe, my Lord, I pray you, that grand Error upon which all artificial legislative Power is founded. It was observed, that Men had ungovernable Passions, which made it necessary to guard against the Violence they might offer to each other. They appointed Governors over them for this Reason; but a worse and more perplexing Difficulty arises, how to be defended against the Governors?
Checks and balances last for a while. But as soon as they fail, the proxies of that powerful monopoly seize yet more power. Any remaining checks and balances are crushed under Leviathan’s weight, well, unless Leviathan can no longer swim in an ocean of red ink. By then, it might be too late.
The Nihilism of the Vulnerable World
Thinkers such as Nick Bostrom aren’t wrong about the world’s vulnerability to exponential technologies in the hands of bad actors. What they too often forget is that politics selects for arrogance and sociopathy. Politicians and technocrats are no angels, despite how badly we might wish them to be. Even if we find the occasional wise leader to hold the ring, the ring invariably gets passed along. There is always a sociopath waiting. And that’s why the upshot of Turnkey Totalitarianism is deeply problematic, even though there are evil geniuses among the citizenry. Acknowledging all this threatens to leave us in nihilism. After all, wasn’t it very likely a small group of government technocrats and regulators who unleashed the Covid-19 pandemic?
My friend and mentor, entrepreneur Chris Rufer reminds us that the best defense against violence isn’t a panopticon or a global superstate.
“The best defense against violence is to minimize the number of people in the world who are willing to use it,” Rufer said. And I think he’s right.
I suspect it can’t hurt to have more people of basic morality checking up on each other, too. I admit, though, that preemptive morality can only reduce the number of black balls in the existential threat bucket. But that’s something. So we must start to think of morality not as a set of abstract rules but rather as an active, continuous practice to be set alight in everyone.
And we must practice morality even as we admit to ourselves that the risks of our extinction will never be zero.
Max is also co-founder of the event experience Future Frontiers and founder of Social Evolution, an organization dedicated to liberating humanity and solving social problems through innovation.
Contrast Covid’s impact on four East Asian countries (Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and South Korea) with its impact on four US Northeastern states (New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut).
All eight jurisdictions host high-tech societies with market-orientated economies and democratic constitutions.
All boast ultra-modern hospitals, medical colleges and public health programs.
Two differences: a) compared to the US Northeast, the East Asian countries engage in more trade and travel with Covid’s epicentre, China; and, b) Covid toured East Asia before debuting in the US Northeast.
New York state’s population (19.5 million) is slightly smaller than Taiwan’s (23.8 million). Covid has killed 837 Taiwanese, and 54,895 New Yorkers.
Massachusetts’ population (6.9 million) is comparable to Singapore’s (5.9 million). Covid fatalities in Massachusetts – 18,272. Covid fatalities in Singapore – 55.
The combined population of our four Northeastern states (38.7 million) is well below South Korea’s (51.3 million). Covid’s death toll in our Northeastern states is 108,480. Only 2,303 South Koreans have died from Covid.
Our four East Asian countries (207 million) register a total of 19,308 Covid deaths. New Jersey (8.9 million) claims 26,919 Covid deaths.
Per capita, Covid has proven 341 times deadlier to New Jersians than Singaporeans!
Regarding Covid testing rates, Singapore is East Asia’s outlier. By conducting 17.8 million tests Singaporeans have achieved 3 tests per citizen. This still falls short of New York’s 3.3 tests per citizen and Massachusetts’ 3.8 tests per citizen. (You’ve read correctly. Certain people get tested again and again.)
Most East Asian countries, following Japan’s lead, test only patients exhibiting pneumonia-like symptoms. Japan tests 174,000 per 1 million inhabitants. Our four East Asian countries cumulatively have conducted 58 million tests. New York has conducted 66 million.
Massachusettsans test for Covid at 22 times Japan’s rate!
Medical tyranny boosters attribute East Asia’s “success” to harsh public health regimes; but Northeastern states imposed notorious lockdowns, often more Draconian than those deployed in East Asia.
Testing strategies are key. Testing only symptomatic patients is sounder than mass testing.
Asymptomatic Sars-CoV-2 carriers are extremely unlikely to be contagious.
Most people who contract Sars-CoV-2 become neither sick nor contagious.
PCR tests detect: a) miniscule infections that will not take hold; b) dead viruses from infections defeated by natural immune responses; and c) random genetic flotsam resembling Sars-CoV-2.
Mass testing yields positive results from persons who are neither sick nor contagious, and who are unlikely to become so.
By inflating case counts, mass testing makes Covid appear worse than it is.
Likewise, declaring all those who die after testing positive to be “Covid fatalities” – co-morbidities be damned – inflates death tallies; again, making Covid appear worse than it is.
Testing-based legerdemain doesn’t fully explain the whopping discrepancy between Covid’s impact in East Asia and the US Northeast.
This discrepancy also arises from the fact that the US Northeast was one of several areas following Milan’s lead i.e., during the pandemic’s early months health authorities allowed the contagion to rage unchecked through long-term care facilities.
Senior’s homes became Sars-CoV-2 incubators.
Milan, Montreal, the US Northeast et al became continental super-spreaders evidenced by supersized body counts.
Covid-19 is one matter; government response to Covid-19 is quite another.
Sources
Covid fatality and testing stats were extracted from Worldmeter’s Covid database on September 2, 2021.
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021
Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…
Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.
Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?
Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”
And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.
This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”
This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue
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