Here’s something that’s been bugging me. How did U.S. intelligence analysts pick up on what they deemed a dangerous novel virus in China at a time when there’s no good evidence China had picked up on it or was concerned? How did they spot the signal in all the noise of a normal Chinese flu season?
U.S. intelligence officials have admitted in various media reports to tracking the coronavirus outbreak in China since mid-November 2019, and even briefing NATO and Israel at the time. Yet at no point has any detail been provided on what caused them to take this unusual action.
Here’s what we’ve been told, as gathered by DRASTIC’s Gilles Demaneuf. ABC News on April 9th 2020 reported information from “four sources” that “as far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population”.
These concerns “were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI)”, citing two officials familiar with the report. The report was “the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images”. One of the sources said: “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event” and that “it was then briefed multiple times to” the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House.
The ABC report adds that “China’s leadership knew the epidemic was out of control” and the U.S. President was briefed in January.
From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policymakers and decision-makers across the federal Government as well as the National Security Council at the White House. All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said…
“The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing,” the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. “But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something the military needed to take a posture on.”
The NCMI report was made available widely to people authorised to access intelligence community alerts. Following the report’s release, other intelligence community bulletins began circulating through confidential channels across the Government around Thanksgiving, the sources said. Those analyses said China’s leadership knew the epidemic was out of control even as it kept such crucial information from foreign governments and public health agencies.
However, the media reports are inconsistent. The same day (April 9th), NBC News published the following report, stating that “there was no assessment that a lethal global outbreak was brewing at that time”.
The intelligence came in the form of communications intercepts and overhead images showing increased activity at health facilities, the officials said. The intelligence was distributed to some federal public health officials in the form of a “situation report” in late November, a former official briefed on the matter said. But there was no assessment that a lethal global outbreak was brewing at that time, a defence official said.
Air Force Gen. John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he did not see intelligence reports on the coronavirus until January.
We went back and looked at everything in November and December. The first indication we have were the reports out of China in late December that were in the public forum. And the first intel reports I saw were in January.
The NCMI itself denied to ABC the existence of the “product/assessment” i.e., the report being referred to (though some have suggested a report that wasn’t technically an intelligence ‘product’ likely existed).
According to a Times of Israel report of April 16th 2020, the U.S. intelligence community “became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of [November] and drew up a classified document”. This report also claims that China was aware at the time: “Information on the disease outbreak was not in the public domain at that stage – and was known only apparently to the Chinese Government.” An Israeli Channel 12report of the same date claimed U.S. intelligence was ‘following the spread’ in mid-November and even briefed NATO and Israel at the time – though, somewhat contradictorily, said the information “did not come out of the Chinese regime”.
A secret U.S. intelligence report, which warned of an “unknown disease” in Wuhan, China, was sent to only two of its allies: NATO and Israel. In the second week of November, U.S. intelligence recognised that a disease with new characteristics was developing in Wuhan, China. They followed its spread, when at that stage this classified information was not known to the media and did not come out of the Chinese regime either.
These media reports from unnamed intelligence officials referring to undisclosed briefing documents are clearly not all consistent. The Times of Israel claim that the Chinese Government knew in November is particularly odd as that report says it draws its information directly from the Channel 12 report, which states the opposite. The ABC News claim that the Chinese Government was aware in November of an “out of control” epidemic that was “changing patterns of life” but this information was kept secret is also odd. How could could an “out of control” epidemic that was “changing patterns of life” be kept secret? When the virus came to light at the end of December it was accompanied by a flurry of social media activity in China. Where is the social media activity from November, of people talking about an “out of control” epidemic that was “changing patterns of life and business”? Where are the satellite images showing these impacts on hospitals and social life? None have been produced, but this would be straightforward to do.
This leads to a crucial question. Did China know in November? I had previously assumed so, but looking more objectively, I’ve not seen any hard evidence it did. The 2021 US intelligence report on Covid origins says China “probably did not have foreknowledge that SARS-CoV-2 existed before WIV researchers isolated it after public recognition of the virus in the general population”. But was it aware of an unusual outbreak of unknown etiology earlier? I can’t see we’ve been shown evidence it was.
Apart from the claims in the above media reports (which, as noted, are largely denied by defence officials), the only evidence we have comes from the 2022 Senate minority staff report, which has links to U.S. intelligence, especially biodefence bigwig Robert Kadlec. This report suggests that China became aware of a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in November 2019 and, at that time, began working on a vaccine. But it gives no real evidence for this claim, just vague statements about when safety training occurred and insinuations about the timing of vaccine development. It also, notably, puts the attention wholly on Chinese research and the WIV and not at all on U.S. research, leading to suspicions it is a ‘limited hangout‘ from the intelligence community and an exercise in attention diversion.
It’s worth noting that Colonel Dr. Robert Kadlec, who appears to be behind the Senate report, was the first Homeland Security Director of Biosecurity Policy under President G.W. Bush and a mastermind of the early pandemic simulations, including 2001’s Dark Winter. When COVID-19 struck, Kadlec became the top emergency preparedness official co-ordinating the response from both the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the federal Government. He is thus a central figure in the U.S. biodefence establishment that brought us lockdowns and cannot be considered an independent or reliable source of information.
The best independent evidence we currently have that China knew earlier than the end of December are the reports Gilles Demaneuf relays from two U.S. scientists, Lawrence Gostin and Ian Lipkin, that in mid-December Chinese scientist contacts mentioned an unusual virus outbreak to them. This is hardly early, though, and is weeks after mid-November.
There are many reasons to think, as per the Channel 12 media briefing, that China did not know before December. For example, the evident lack of concern the Chinese Government had about the virus right up until around January 23rd. As late as January 14th China’s experts were telling the World Health Organisation they weren’t even sure the virus transmitted between humans! It’s hard to credit that, but it still shows how unalarmed they were.
There is also the absence of previous public health alerts like the one that appeared on December 31st 2019 from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, plus, as noted, the lack of any social media activity about an outbreak in November. In addition, there is the apparent failure to sequence the virus earlier than the end of December, and then in a private lab, which also puts the idea that China was developing a vaccine from November on shaky ground. And there is the fact that Chinese authorities appeared to believe the Huanan wet market was a plausible origin for the virus during January until they investigated the theory and debunked it.
Sure, there may be alternative explanations for some of these things. For instance, the wet market story may have been a way of supporting the bizarre initial claim that there didn’t appear to be human-to-human transmission, which it’s hard to believe Chinese scientists ever really believed, given how implausible it is and the fact that there did seem to be some awareness of a wider outbreak among Chinese scientists during December. On the other hand, the leaked Chinese Government report from February 2020 appears to show officials hurriedly looking back to see what was going in hospitals in October and November, with no indication they knew at the time – and also no indication of an “out of control” epidemic. Perhaps this too is a clever fake. But is all of it fake? And in any case, where is the actual positive evidence that China knew?
The apparent cluelessness of the Chinese contrasts strongly with what U.S. intelligence officials have said they knew in November, as per the above media briefings which state that U.S. intelligence analysts were ‘following the spread’ since mid-November and that the United States’ military, Government and allies were being kept informed. Perhaps some of this is exaggerated by intelligence officials trying to defend themselves from charges of missing the early signs of the pandemic. But all of it?
Furthermore, there is a very telling report from Dr. Michael Callahan, whom Dr. Robert Malone has described as “the top U.S. Government/CIA expert in both biowarfare and gain of function research”, and who was already in Wuhan at the beginning of January “under cover of his Harvard Professor appointment”. He told Rolling Stone that he had gone to Singapore to track the virus during November and December. He claims to have been tipped off about the virus by “Chinese colleagues”, but this is very vague and may not be true.
In early January, when the first hazy reports of the new coronavirus outbreak were emerging from Wuhan, China, one American doctor had already been taking notes. Michael Callahan, an infectious disease expert, was working with Chinese colleagues on a longstanding avian flu collaboration in November when they mentioned the appearance of a strange new virus. Soon, he was jetting off to Singapore to see patients there who presented with symptoms of the same mysterious germ.
There are two other striking contrasts between the initial approaches of the United States and China that are worth noting. Firstly, U.S. intelligence and biodefence people were highly alarmist about the new virus straight off in January while the Chinese Government remained apparently calm until around January 23rd. It’s still not entirely clear why China reversed policy at that point; ostensibly it was connected with acknowledging human-to-human transmission, but that is unlikely to be the real reason.
Secondly, U.S. scientists and intelligence officials latched onto a wet market theory that they knew to be false given that U.S. intelligence had been following the outbreak since November and that Chinese authorities themselves debunked the theory very early on. Despite this, some U.S. scientists, including those involved in the Fauci lab leak cover-up, have stuck to it doggedly since.
It is also of significance that U.S. intelligence officials and scientists have since the very start actively blocked any attempt to investigate the possibility of an engineered virus, a lab leak or early spread of the virus (though a few in U.S. intelligence seem to have been willing to investigate, albeit apparently with an agenda to exclusively blame China). Senior Government officials have been reported as repeatedly warning colleagues “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued”.
Despite squashing the investigations into origins, U.S. intelligence officials have insisted time and again that the virus definitely or likely wasn’t engineered and even backed the wet market theory months after it was discredited by the Chinese themselves. On April 30th 2020 the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (which at that time was in vacancy) issued a statement that: “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” On May 5th 2020, CNN reported a briefing from a Five Eyes intelligence source stating unequivocally that the coronavirus outbreak “originated in a Chinese market”.
Intelligence shared among Five Eyes nations indicates it is “highly unlikely” that the coronavirus outbreak was spread as a result of an accident in a laboratory but rather originated in a Chinese market, according to two Western officials who cited an intelligence assessment that appears to contradict claims by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
There is of course no way that genetic modification could have been ruled out, either then or since, given the lack of similar natural viruses and animal reservoirs and the fact that the knowhow to make the modifications certainly exists. For all its faults, the 2022 Senate report was the first intelligence-associated document to treat an engineered agent as a serious possibility – though notably to try to put the blame entirely on China. American scientists are simply not talking, however – an evasiveness that led Jeffrey Sachs to disband the Covid origins taskforce which formed part of the Lancet Covid commission he was chairing, perceiving severe conflicts of interest and a basic lack of cooperation from U.S. scientists, who appeared to be hiding something.
My fear is that there aren’t many good ways to explain all this. Why was U.S. intelligence following a potentially dangerous virus outbreak in China in November, weeks before there is evidence China was aware of the situation or concerned about it? How did it spot such a signal in the noise of an early flu season? As Gilles Demaneuf points out:
Satellite imaging would not allow us to distinguish between a bad seasonal pneumonia outbreak and the beginning of a coronavirus outbreak occurring at the same time. It is therefore likely that only part of the data that NCMI observed, such as communications at specific hospitals, was indeed linked clearly to something worse than a bad but still standard pneumonia.
But of course – and this is a crucial point – COVID-19 is not clearly and clinically distinguishable from a bad but still standard pneumonia. Demaneuf implies that analysts intercepted hospital communications revealing something distinctive that caused them considerable concern. But what is that? They don’t say – but they should. To state the obvious, these reports should be declassified and put into the public domain. The difficulty, though, is that it’s hard even to conceive what it might be. What were the doctors saying to one another that grabbed the intelligence analysts’ attention and caused them to start briefing NATO and jetting off to Singapore? Whatever it was, it does not appear to have alarmed the hospital doctors themselves, as no evidence has been produced that doctors or Government officials in China noticed or were concerned prior to mid-December. We have also seen no evidence of the “out of control” epidemic that was “changing patterns of life and business” as claimed in ABC News. The trouble is, in the absence of details, we’re left wondering what it could conceivably be, particularly when COVID-19 is not clinically distinguishable from other causes of severe pneumonia.
There is, it should be noted, one straightforward way to explain all of this, but it’s implications are disturbing to say the least. It is that the virus was deliberately released in China by some group or groups within the U.S. intelligence and security services. The purpose of such a release would be partly to disrupt China and partly as a live exercise for pandemic preparedness – which is, as we know, how the pandemic was in practice treated by those in the U.S. biodefence network. While shocking, this is not outside the bounds of possibility. Consider what Robert Kadlec wrote in a Pentagon strategy paper in 1998:
Using biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic loss and subsequent political instability, coupled with plausible denial, exceeds the possibilities of any other human weapon.
If this were the case, it may be that the addition of the furin cleavage site to the virus would be to enhance its infectiousness in order to increase the chance of a pandemic occurring (perhaps they’d tried before with a less infectious virus and it hadn’t worked so well). The virus would be deliberately relatively mild so it didn’t do too much harm, but severe enough to have the desired impact – at least when assisted with psyops and propaganda. Very few individuals would likely know the origin – most would be part of the live exercise.
Such a scenario would neatly explain how U.S. intelligence personnel were closely ‘following the spread’ in November despite China being oblivious. It would also explain why U.S. biodefence people were far more alarmist than the Chinese authorities from the get-go; why they have denied the virus could be engineered and squashed all efforts to investigate origins (and clung to discredited theories); and why they have followed through on the whole lockdown-and-wait-for-a-vaccine biodefence plan despite the virus plainly not warranting it (and the measures not working), and generally treated the whole thing like a live exercise. It’s uncontentious to point out that the pandemic was a golden opportunity to put their long-prepared plans into practice. But what if it was an opportunity they didn’t leave to chance?
None of us wants to draw this conclusion, of course. To disprove it, at least as far as this argument is concerned, we would need to see considerably more detail about what U.S. intelligence analysts were seeing and saying in November 2019, which would explain how they knew what China did not and why they were so concerned when China was not.
Short of this, it’s hard not to wonder: what if releasing the virus in China to disrupt the country and see how the world responds could have been some hare-brained scheme cooked up in the deeper recesses of the U.S. biosecurity state?
Twitter’s former safety chief has said he was baffled when the FBI grilled the company over assessed foreign influence threats on the platform, the latest trove of documents released by journalist Matt Taibbi and Twitter owner Elon Musk shows.
According to excerpts from internal communications that were published on Sunday, FBI agent Elvis Chan told Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, in July 2020 to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force, adding that the intelligence community sought “clarifications” from the company.
The FBI then sent a list of detailed questions, asking Twitter to explain why, during an earlier briefing for US security and intelligence agencies, “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.” At the end of their letter, the FBI attached references to several news articles about Russian and Chinese “propaganda” campaigns on social media.
Roth shared the questionnaire with other Twitter executives, saying that he was “frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we’d get from a congressional committee than the Bureau,” according to screenshots published by Taibbi.
The former safety head added that he felt “not particularly comfortable” with the FBI demanding written answers on the matter. According to the released files, Roth wrote that the premise of the questions “seems flawed,” arguing that the intelligence community had “fundamentally misunderstood” Twitter’s position on disinformation.
“We’ve been clear that official state propaganda is definitely a thing on Twitter,” Roth wrote, suggesting he contact Chan over the phone as soon as possible.
The exchange took place when US officials, think tanks and media outlets were warning about alleged foreign meddling in the ongoing US presidential election campaign and disinformation related to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Musk, who finalized his acquisition of Twitter in October, promised more transparency at the company, and fired some of its top executives.
The files previously released by Taibbi with Musk’s blessing revealed how Twitter staffers struggled to rationalize the permanent ban of former US President Donald Trump, and the blocking of a story about the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son.
The “lab-leak” theory is enjoying a strong revival at the moment, thanks in part to Elon Musk having obliquely endorsed it in a Tweet while clearly point the finger at Anthony Fauci: “As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people.”
This despite the fact that an article in Science appeared to have already put the theory to rest over a year ago by showing that the initial cluster of Covid-19 cases in Wuhan was located on the opposite (left) bank of the Yangtze River from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is commonly supposed to be the pandemic’s epicenter according to the “lab-leak” theory.
But unbeknownst to most observers, there was in fact another infectious diseases lab in Wuhan, the German-Chinese Joint Laboratory of Infection and Immunity, and it is located on the same side of the river in the cluster.
The below map from the Science article makes the distance of the cluster from the two campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology clear – although the article itself coyly refrains from referring to the Institute.
Instead, the article shows that even if many of the earliest known cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan did not have any “epidemiologic link” to the famous Huanan wet market, the great majority of them were clustered in the vicinity of the market. This suggests – as per the quasi-official account – that the epidemic started in the market by way of animal-to-human (zoonotic) transmission and then spread to the surrounding area via “community transmission.”
Ergo, the “lab-leak” theory is dead.
Except that there is also an infectious diseases lab in the area of the cluster: the aforementioned German-Chinese Joint Laboratory of Infection and Immunity at Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College. The laboratory is a joint project of Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College and the University Hospital of Essen in Germany. Prof. Ulf Dittmar, chair of the virology department in Essen, has also referred to the joint laboratory as the “Essen-Wuhan Laboratory for Virus Research.”
(See interview here [in German]. It should be noted that in the cited interview, conducted in January 2020, Dittmar downplays the dangerousness of the novel Coronavirus and warns against “hysterical” reactions.)
Helpfully, the map from the Science article also indicates the locations of the Chinese host institutions of the joint laboratory: the Union and Tongji hospitals. Per the legend, they are indicated by crosses 5 and 6: right next to the home location of what the article identifies as “cluster 1,” an elderly husband and wife who represent “the earliest known case cluster and the only cluster admitted by 26 December. They had no known connection to Huanan Market.” (Red dots on the map indicate cases with a known connection to the market; blue dots those that have no known connection.) The Tongji Hospital is the closest to “cluster 1.”
Astonishingly, in early September 2019, only three months before the allegedly initial outbreak of Covid-19 just a stone’s throw from Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, then German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to none other than…Tongji Hospital in Wuhan. The hospital is also known as the German-Chinese Friendship Hospital.
A photo of Chancellor Merkel being welcomed by nurses at the hospital reception can be seen here. The accompanying article in the German newspaper Die Süddeutsche Zeitung notes another highly intriguing fact: the Essen University Hospital is not the only German teaching hospital with which Tongji has a “close partnership.”
It also has a partnership with the Charité Hospital in Berlin of Germany’s “state virologist” Christian Drosten! Drosten is the chair of the virology department at the Charité.
Now, it was none other than Christian Drosten who in mid-January 2020 – just a couple of weeks after the initial outbreak of Covid-19 just a stone’s throw from Tongji Hospital – devised the notoriously oversensitive PCR test that would become the “gold standard” for detecting the virus. Since Drosten’s PCR would also and especially be used to test people with no symptoms of the illness, it thus paved the way for the outbreak to obtain pandemic status.
Before the PCR test was adopted by the WHO, Drosten’s paper on it would be rushed through the peer-review process of the EU-funded journal Eurosurveillance in record time: going from submission to acceptance in anywhere from three-and-a-half hours to 27-and-a-half hours per the calculations of Simon Goddek.
According to accompanying tweets and Gettr posts in German, a photo that circulated on the two platforms earlier this year is supposed to show Drosten at a Tongji Medical College (or perhaps joint Tongji-Charité?) event. “What a coincidence,” some of the posts note ironically. (Here, for instance.) Many of the posts link a Charité webpage. But the link does not contain or no longer contains any such photo. It merely leads to generic information on a Charité-Tongji exchange program, thus leaving the source of the photo unclear.
Christian Drosten at Tongji Medical College event?
A Google search result from the Tongji website (see below) tantalizingly notes that a “Sino-German Disaster Medicine Institute, Charité University in Germay [sic.] and Tongji Hospital was officially opened in Tongji Hospital, Wuhan, China.” But the indexed Tongji news article is not available nor is it cached, and the URL is not archived by the Wayback Machine either. Could this be the event at which Drosten is pictured? Perhaps Drosten could clarify.
In any case, thanks to a FOIA request, we know that Drosten participated in February 2020 email exchanges with Anthony Fauci and other international scientists about the possibility of a lab leak and that he was in fact, in contrast to other participants, particularly irritated about the hypothesis. Several of the others – including, n.b., Anthony Fauci – are clearly willing to entertain the possibility of a lab leak, and Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust even says that he is split 50:50 between lab leak and natural origin and that Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney is even 60:40 lab leak.
The doubts and open-mindedness of the other participants elicits an obviously pissy response from Drosten. “Can someone help me with one question,” he asks, “didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it? …Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”
As the journalist Milosz Matuschek has pointed out in an article for the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, the FOIA release could prove to be a problem for Christian Drosten. For in a sworn statement to a German court, Drosten has insisted that he
had no interest in steering the suspicion about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a certain direction. In particular, I had and I have no personal interest in ruling out the so-called laboratory thesis as origin of the virus. If there were indications for the correctness of the laboratory thesis, I would vigorously defend it in the scientific and public discussion.
Prosecute/Drosten?
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, a translator, and researcher working in Europe. Follow him at Twitter here. He writes at edv1694.substack.com.
“From Zero Covid to No Plan: Behind China’s Pandemic U-Turn” is the headline of the latest highly revealing Times reporting on the end of Zero Covid in China. “After micromanaging the coronavirus strategy for nearly three years,” we read, “… Xi Jinping has suddenly left the populace to improvise.”
The essence of the piece is that the Chinese have rightly regained their freedoms, but they’re now left to face a terrifying virus alone and undefended by their government, which is also very bad, and possibly worse than the lockdowns, as bad as they were.
China’s party-run media has cast the shift [from Zero Covid] as a stressful but well-considered exit, opening the way back to good economic times. Warnings about the dangers of the coronavirus have swiftly disappeared, replaced by official claims that the Omicron variant is generally mild. By holding off from easing until now, the government has saved many lives, the People’s Daily said on Thursday in a long article defending Mr. Xi’s pandemic strategy as “totally correct.”
In reality, an examination of how the shift unfolded in Chongqing and elsewhere reveals a government overtaken by a cascade of Covid outbreaks, confusion over directives, economic woes and then rare political protests. …
It’s almost like mass containment doesn’t do anything aside from wrecking the economy and ruining everyone’s lives. I’m glad the Times can finally come close to admitting this now, in the last weeks of 2022.
By changing only a handful of words, you could make key sections of the article apply to Germany, or any western nation aside from Sweden or Belarus:
Even the Chinese Communist Party, a virtuoso at controlling the narrative, is finding it difficult to sell the policy lurch to anxious residents.
[Xi] turned China’s intense top-to-bottom mobilization against the pandemic into a showcase of the party’s organizational strength. For two years, his Covid war enjoyed widespread public acceptance, but eventually the effort exhausted staff, strained local finances, and appeared to drown out attempts to discuss, let alone devise, a measured transition.
Whereas in the West, we had totally open and honest discussions about the insane, enduring closures, that weren’t marked by massive censorship and government intimidation at all. Otherwise, Western nations were themselves locked in exactly this same international competition, eager to display the fruits of their superior pandemic planning to the world, and terrified that failure would cost them legitimacy. One of the reasons Germany locked down so hard during Fall 2020, was that the Merkel government had collected many international plaudits for their handling of the first wave — effectively taking credit for the seasonality of infections. They were unwilling to surrender the regard they had earned so easily.
Mr. Xi has no likely successor and could stay in power for at least another decade. But the scars from the abrupt change may feed distrust in his domineering style.
It’s not subjecting his whole country to absurd containment theatre over what is no more than an influenza-level risk that poses a political problem for Xi, but rather “the scars from the abrupt change” in policy.
Finally the reporters get around to discussing the protests.
In Zhengzhou in central China, thousands of workers clashed with police at an iPhone plant, angry about a delay in bonuses and the handling of an outbreak.
In Haizhu, a textile manufacturing district in southern China, laborers poured onto the streets over food shortages and hardships under lockdown. Migrant workers, who depend on daily work for their livelihoods, went weeks without jobs.
“I couldn’t make a living this year,” said Zhou Kaice, a street porter in Chongqing. “Some bosses I worked for started up for a few days but were then shut by lockdowns.”
Despite the strains, officials still insisted China must win its pandemic war. Provincial leaders throughout November declared their commitment to “zero Covid,” often citing Mr. Xi as their lodestone.
“If pandemic controls were loosened, that would inevitably create mass infections,” said a Xinhua editorial on Nov. 19. “Economic and social development and the public’s physical health and safety would be seriously hurt.”
How many times did we have to read that lockdowns were the ultimate way to grow the economy, because without them, the virus would somehow destroy all business activity?
It’s also interesting how anti-lockdown protestors in the West are thugs and stupid conspiracy-crazed Nazis, while in China they are “students, workers and homeowners.”
By [November], China’s most widespread protests since 1989 had begun. Students, workers and homeowners in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere vented against Covid controls, angered by a fire in western China that many believed, despite official denials, had killed residents trapped in their apartments by lockdowns.
“I tell you that in this world there’s only one sickness, and that’s poverty and having no freedom, and we’ve got plenty of that,” said a Chongqing man whose tirade went viral in China.
“Give me liberty or give me death,” he shouted, using the Chinese version of the American revolutionary battle cry.
Sounds like the Canadian trucker protests — you know, those guys who posed such a threat to freedom and democracy that it proved necessary to freeze their bank accounts.
At the end, the Times assures its heavily masked and vaccinated readership that “most people are staying home,” but that “if deaths rise sharply, public anger could revive” because “infections could hinder a quick economic rebound.”
Until we Decovidify the newsrooms, there will never be sane reporting on SARS-2 in any major press outlet, ever.
If there is one thing that people should have learned from the pandemic, it is that the more control government takes over our day-to-day lives, the less we have of everything that makes life worth living.
The list of questions about our dystopian Covid-19 response will be analyzed and investigated for years to come. It’s essential we continue the work of uncovering the lies and manipulation we’ve all experienced, and bring those responsible to account. Some things may never be adequately uncovered or explained, but we can’t get caught up in the many aspects of the pandemic response at the expense of the bigger picture.
The following examines two key realizations about the pandemic on which we need to focus, regardless of what else we discover and what actions are taken:
The Covid-19 pandemic response was not based on sound medicine or science, and was not commensurate with the actual threat of the illness. Even if Covid-19 had proved to be as lethal as it’s falsely claimed to be, violating human rights and depriving individuals of personal autonomy are never the appropriate response to a pandemic. We must never let this happen again.
The Covid-19 pandemic revealed movements, led by globalists and wealthy technocrats, but also supported by many of our government and public leaders, to grasp power in ways that have the potential to destroy the foundations of Western civilization. There is a push toward global governance, in which all citizens are tracked and controlled in every aspect of their lives through digital identification, under the guise of preserving and distributing Earth’s resources in a more “equitable” manner.
Some kind, or naïve, souls will still try to say that our Covid response was a result of the government and public health authorities trying to do the best they could, to handle a brand new virus that no one could predict. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Here are 10 facts we knew about Covid-19 in March 2020, which should have informed our pandemic response, but did not:
Data from China and Spain informed us that Covid-19 was a disease that mostly impacted the elderly and those with chronic health problems. An early study from China confirmed that children could contract Covid, but with less severe symptoms than adults. From the petri dish Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, we knew that the virus spread rapidly in close quarters, but that most people who tested positive were either asymptomatic, or not seriously ill.
We knew that SARS-CoV-2 was similar in structure and pathogenicity to the SARS virus of 2002, was likely spread through airborne transmission, and was made up of 29 proteins, of which spike protein was one. We knew that similarities in human and viral proteins could lead to vaccine-induced autoimmunity (when the body attacks itself), and that this had occurred when using spike protein in-vivo to elicit immune response in rodents during the first SARS outbreak. We knew that the spike protein has similarities to human DNA, and that instructing the body to make spike protein could possibly cause autoimmune illnesses or pathogenic priming, which is when the body overreacts to the virus, leading to systemic inflammation. Only one immunogenic (producing an immune response) epitope in SARS-CoV-2 had no homology to human proteins. For this reason it was recommended that the spike protein not be the basis of any vaccine developed to treat SARS-CoV-2.
We still remembered what every medical student was taught: the purpose of a surgical face mask is to prevent dropping saliva or other contaminants into your patient while conducting surgery. (And in fact, studies that had been conducted on the benefit of masking in surgery found no difference in infection outcome, whether the surgery group was masked or not.)
We knew that face masks were not effective at preventing the spread of respiratory diseases. In analyzing the Spanish flu of 1918, doctors and scientists had concluded that, “Masks have not been proved efficient enough to warrant compulsory application for the checking of epidemics.” This was also the conclusion of a meta-analysis of studies from different countries and settings that was published by the CDC in May of 2020. A study of 6,000 people, early in the Covid-19 pandemic in Denmark, found a less than one tenth of one percent difference in contracting Covid between those who wore masks while going about daily activities, and those who were unmasked.
We were aware of six coronaviruses that infect humans, including four that regularly circulate and cause the common cold, and knew the basic pattern and treatment of the symptoms of coronavirus infections. We knew that coronaviruses mutate rapidly, and that all attempts to develop a vaccine for them in the past had failed, partly for that reason. In March 2020 we already knew that.
We knew the mantra “early treatment saves lives.” No one considered it good medical practice to send an ill person home to tough it out, without any treatment other than to go to the ER if breathing was so labored your lips were turning blue.
We knew that chloroquine, an antimalarial medication, was shown in vitro to be effective against SARS in the outbreak of 2002. We knew that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a slightly altered version of chloroquine, had been in routine use for decades, with so few side effects it was considered safe for pregnant women and children. Other antivirals, including ivermectin, were also being tested by doctors and found to be effective in treating Covid-19. (see Peter McCullough; Pierre Kory – Dept of Homeland Security; Pierre Kory U.S. Senate; Zev Zelenko)
Pandemic planning scenarios prior to March 2020 had unequivocally determined that lockdowns of the general population were not a proper pandemic response because of the extreme damage they would cause the poor, the vulnerable, and the overall structure of society.
We knew that influenza and other respiratory viruses are seasonal, hence the term “flu season,” and that some years are worse than others. For example in the severe 2017-2018 flu season, hospital resources were strained enough that they put patients in hallways, and even erected outdoor tents to make space for more patients, without creating fear and panic in the general population.
It was accepted that hypothesis and experimentation, and the discussion and challenge of different ideas and methods are what lead to advances in science and medicine. If anyone had said in March 2020, “I represent science… Attacks on me are quite frankly attacks on science,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci did in November 2021 (see here and here), they would have been fodder for Saturday Night Live, not the object of sycophantic consideration on every mainstream media platform.
In looking back, March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, will be remembered as the day we threw our knowledge of science, medicine, good governance, and healthy society right out the window of a speeding train that was carrying democracies toward medical tyranny.
We slapped face masks on toddlers and children. We closed businesses, public schools, universities, and churches. We put little circles on the floor six feet apart, and directional arrows in the grocery store aisles, maintaining that 6-feet of distance that former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said was an arbitrary number without scientific or medical basis. We shut down movie theatres, concert halls, and Broadway. We canceled trips, family gatherings, funerals, weddings, holiday celebrations, commencement exercises, and sporting and community events.
All this panic for a disease with an infection fatality rate similar to the flu (even lower than the flu, for children) as was established early on by John Ioannidis of Stanford University.
But no one seemed to want to draw on prior knowledge and maintain calm and perspective. Instead, the “dangerous nature” of this new Covid-19 disease was constantly outlined for us by our public health and government leaders. Mainstream media outlets reported case counts and death counts in serious tones of dismay every day, without any context or comparison to standard death rates and the impact of respiratory diseases in years past. Emotional abuse of the public was rampant, with the authorities blaming the natural rise and fall of Covid cases on people not properly complying with the pandemic mandates. Even as the public was driven to a panic, government leaders hypocritically violated the masking and lockdown rules that they imposed on everyone else.
Illogical fear, driven by a hyperactive media, and by cowardly and controlling government leaders and public health authorities ruled the day. One of the most insidious results of our descent into ignorance about medicine, and our discarding of social contracts and human rights, was the rise of self-righteous intolerance for, and censorship of, anyone who questioned what was happening.
The Covid-19 response revealed that there is a movement, being pushed by wealthy ideologues, to control people through medical mandates and digital identification. In January 2019, Bill Gates boasted a 20-to-1 return on vaccine investments in an interview at a World Economic Forum Davos meeting, having turned $10 billion into $200 billion over a 10-year period. Gates, who labeled the 2010’s the “decade of vaccines,” can’t get enough of pandemic simulation games in which every aspect of a future calamity is addressed.
In March 2020, while the rest of us were coming to terms with the idea that there was a pandemic, Gates was already talking about the need for a Covid mRNA vaccine (a product in which Gates had conveniently invested $20 million in 2016). Gates also happily opined that everyone would need digital proof of immunity in order to open the world back up and allow travel between nations. In March 2020, Gates, who had predicted a pandemic in a 2015 TED talk where he said “we’re not ready,” was talking enthusiastically about being better prepared for the next epidemic (having already invested heavily in vaccines, testing, and surveillance).
The requirement to show proof of Covid vaccination in order to participate in public life was brutally adopted in places such as New York City, Austria, and New Zealand, and in varying degrees in many other states and countries. The so-called “vaccine passport” was a trial run for a digital ID for every human being on the planet. Digital ID was already in process in Canada when the peaceful Freedom Convoy protestors, and their supporters, had their bank accounts digitally frozen and their truck licenses and ability to do business in certain provinces revoked. The complete control of citizens through digital ID is already in place in China where protestors recently saw their green Covid pass turn to red overnight, causing them to lose access to public transport and essential services, and removing the right to travel.
Digital identification for the whole world was a topic at the World Economic Forum Davos conference this year. “Our future is digital. If you’re not part of it, you’re out of it,” said a UN representative to the WEF Conference, as the group discussed “digital inclusion.” The UN’s International Telecommunication Union focused on the “world’s digital transformation” at their summit in Bucharest, Romania in September 2022.
The digital ID is touted as a convenient and uniform way for assuring medical “safety” for ourselves and others, but Brett Solomon, an expert on human rights in the digital age, states,”[D]igital ID, writ large, poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered.” Journalist and author Naomi Wolf, who has for years studied the factors that destroy democracies, is adamant that vaccine passports are a foot in the door that leads to fascism. Wolf states, “Vaccine passports sound like a fine thing if you don’t know what those platforms can do. I’m CEO of a tech company; I understand what this platform does… It’s not about the vaccine, it’s not about the virus, it’s about data. And once this rolls out you don’t have a choice about being part of the system. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that [digital] platform with no problem at all.”
Control of people through digital ID is the goal of the UN, of Bill Gates, the WEF, the WHO, and many government leaders worldwide. Covid-19 was just a vehicle for trying out what they could get away with. Now it’s climate change. In a Project Veritas undercover interview, CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester acknowledged that people were experiencing Covid fatigue, so “once the public would be open to it,” CNN would be focusing on climate change, “constantly showing videos of decline, and ice, and weather warming up, and, like the effects it’s having on the economy.” Chester stated, “There’s a definitive ending to the pandemic, you know it will taper off to a point that it’s not a problem anymore. The climate thing is gonna take years, so they’ll probably be able to milk that for quite a bit,” because, “Fear sells.”
Now in the name of “preserving the planet,” the same technocrats and billionaires who have orchestrated much of the pandemic response are pushing the green agenda at the expense of food and warmth, freedom, and life itself. While the globalist elites fly around in their private jets telling everyone else how to live and what they need to go without, government lackeys sucked into the globalists’ agenda are closing down farms and limiting the use of fertilizers and fuels, creating food insecurity and misery.
The globalists, oh so concerned about our planet, are coming up with lovely plans for innovations such as The Line, a glass-enclosed 105-mile long building that will house 9 million residents, rectifying the problem of “dysfunctional and polluted cities that ignore nature.” (Walk it in 20 minutes! No need for a car! Everything you need in one spot!) They’ve also designed the 15-minute-city, another “innovation” designed to corral and control the peoples of the world. (Check out the movie In Time if you want a feel for the concept of the 15-minute-city.)
Whether foisting Covid restrictions on humanity, or overturning our lives for the green agenda, the end goal is the same. Klaus Schwab’s right-hand man, Yuval Noah Harari, said at the ironically named Athens Democracy Forum in September 2020 that, “Covid is critical because this is what convinces people, to accept, to legitimize total biometric surveillance.” Harari said, “We want to stop this epidemic? We need not just to monitor people; we need to monitor what is happening under their skin… And Covid is important because Covid legitimizes some of the crucial steps [toward biometric surveillance] even in democratic countries.”
The marriage of Big Pharma and government in the pursuit of the Covid-19 vaccines was one of the most dangerous of all developments during the pandemic. A vaccine development process that normally takes 5-10 years was shortened to 9 months. As explained by Dr. Tess Lawrie of The World Council for Health, the randomized control trials shortened Phase I, merged Phase II and III together, and then the control group was given the vaccine, meaning there is no control group to follow long-term. A Pfizer spokesperson acknowledged that they did not test the vaccines for preventing transmission, yet multiple health and government officials continuously claimed they were 95% effective. No pregnant women were included in the trials, but our health officials recommended that pregnant women take the Covid shot.
The vaccines were proclaimed “safe and effective” ad nauseam, and the vaccination of millions began. The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) accumulated thousands of reports of injuries and deaths associated with the Covid shots – more for the Covid shots than for all other vaccines combined in the previous 30 years – but the mantra of “safe and effective” was just proclaimed louder. On December 13, 2022 a documentary about people who have been injured by the Covid shots was released. Within 24 hours, YouTube took it down, labeling it “medical misinformation” because, “YouTube doesn’t allow claims about Covid-19 vaccinations that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization.” I guess if you’re injured by the Covid shots you have to call the WHO to confirm it happened? You can view the documentary here: “Anecdotals.”
The Covid-19 bivalent booster was tested on eight mice, and zero humans, but the FDA and CDC deemed these shots safe for everyone age 6 months and up as well. When the FDA gave full approval for Pfizer’s Comirnaty on August 23, 2021, two main points were made: Comirnaty and the Pfizer/BioNTech emergency authorized vaccine are the same formula, and can be used interchangeably, but are “legally distinct.” As in, you can’t sue a drug company for vaccine harms resulting from an EUA-only vaccine, but you can sue if you’re injured by a vaccine that has full FDA approval. Interestingly, Pfizer has not distributed Comirnaty to be used by the public, and has stated that it won’t. To date, all the available Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and boosters for Covid are only authorized for emergency use.
Every person who has received a Covid shot is participating in the largest long-term clinical trial in the history of the world. We will not know the full impact for years, but what we’ve seen so far is alarming and heartbreaking. How long will people ignore the evidence all around them of vaccine injury?
From dozens of performers dropping on the stage, or cancelling shows “due to illness” or the sudden death of a band mate, to people developing sudden chronic illnesses and cancers, to menstrual problems and an increase in miscarriages and stillborn babies, to athletes dropping dead on the field and young people dying in their sleep, to children having heart attacks, journalists keeling over mid broadcast, to the emergence of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, the evidence is all around us. What we’re seeing is not normal, and the attempt of authorities to explain it all away as being caused by “stress,” or “dehydration,” or “just one of those unfortunate medical events,” is not going to be able to cover the vaccine damage forever.
The world was played during the pandemic. The pharmaceutical industry saw the rise of multiple new billionaires; government leaders flexed their emergency-powers muscles; the mainstream media promulgated lies; and people took their government-funded hush money and did what they were told.
Meanwhile fundamental human rights were taken from us, and dangerous precedents were set. Every freedom-loving person needs to step up, become informed, and be ready to speak out and push back, because the people who gained power and money during the pandemic want to keep the gravy train rolling.
A repeat of the medical tyranny we were subjected to during the pandemic, and the fulfillment of a vision of a “digital transformation of the world,” will only happen if we comply.
1. The most recent WHO-declared Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEICs) for SARS-CoV-2 and Monkeypox were both caused by lab-created viruses, based on many careful analyses of their genomes.
2. There is no evidence that pandemic preparedness ever benefited anyone but the preparedness industry, and substantial evidence that it led to the creation of the COVID pandemic.
4. The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board has also geared up to push the identical program as the WHO: surveillance, One Health, and investment — “all topics that the GPMB has long recognised are crucial for the advancement of resilient pandemic preparedness mechanisms.”
5. The G20 nations agreed last April to a $50 Billion dollars a year price tag for gloval pandemic preparedness.
6. The Globalist agenda is out in the open for all to see.
The pandemic preparedness concept is based on fantasy; it is a dangerous money grab for a new biodefense industry. It brought:
· Many more high-containment BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs,
· 15,000 new scientists trained to research biowarfare pathogens,
· Poorly tested drugs and vaccines for which the manufacturers had no liability
· More corruption and pork for politicians to distribute.
· Nathan Wolfe’s company: biolabs in Ukraine, squire to Ghislaine Maxwell, funding by Hunter Biden’s investment group
· Peter Daszak’s ‘nonprofit’ that collected dangerous viruses from over 30 countries to bring to the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DOD’s DTRA) for further investigation
· Extremely dangerous anthrax, smallpox and COVID vaccines
· The COVID drug paxlovid, which led to relapses of COVID in President Biden, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and NIAID Director and Presidential COVID adviser Anthony Fauci and millions of Americans, presumably prolonging their infectiousness and causing more cases of COVID
· Expensive new federal agencies (ASPR, BARDA in DHHS, and subagencies within DHS and within DOD) and new funding streams to the NIH
· An excuse to censor alternate medical/scientific views
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently hosted a roundtable forum of experts challenging the science coming from federal public health agencies surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine. Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo announced the creation of the state’s new Public Health Integrity Committee, and Gov. Desantis announced he is requesting a grand jury investigation of vaccine-makers. Will other states follow?
The attempt to remask the public has started. And it’s rapidly moved past COVID as a reason to know of any basic respiratory illnesses. But does science justify it? Jefferey and Del break down the latest PR push surrounding masking.
Early during lockdowns in 2020, when the whole of the media marched in lockstep with the most appalling reach of public policy in our lifetimes, two doctors from Bakersfield, California went out on a limb and objected.
Their names: Dan Erikson and Artin Massihi from Accelerated Urgent Care. They held a press conference in which they claimed that lockdowns would only delay but not finally control the virus. Moreover, they predicted, at the end of this, we would also be sicker than ever because of our lack of exposure to endemic pathogens.
You could say they were brave but why should it require bravery simply to share conventional wisdom that is part of every medical background? Indeed, the idea that reducing exposure to pathogens creates more vulnerability to disease is a point every generation in the last hundred years has learned in school.
How well I can recall the outrage! They were treated like seditious cranks and news media blasted their comments as somehow radically heterodox, even though they said nothing I had not learned in 9th-grade biology class. It was utterly bizarre how quickly lockdowns became an orthodoxy, enforced, as we are now learning, by media and tech platforms working closely with government agencies to warp public perceptions of science.
Among those warpings was an incredible blackout concerning the basics of natural immunity. My goodness, why did this happen? It’s not conspiracy to draw an obvious reason: they wanted to sell a vaccine. And they wanted to push the idea that Covid was universally deadly for everyone so that they could justify their “whole-of-society” approach to lockdowns.
Here we are three years later and the headlines are all over the place.
Meanwhile, it’s time we get clear on some basics. There is no one better to lay it out other than the greatest living theoretical epidemiologist, Sunetra Gupta. I think one way to understand her contribution is to see her as the Voltaire or the Adam Smith of infectious disease. The very essence of liberal political economy and liberal theory generally from the Age of Enlightenment to the present is the observation that society manages itself. It does not need a top-down plan and the attempt to centrally plan the economy or culture always produces unintended consequences.
So too for the issue of infectious disease. Dr. Gupta’s observation is that we evolved with pathogens in a delicate dance in which we share the same ecosphere, both suffering and benefiting from our entanglement with them. Disturbing that balance can wreck the immune system and leave us more vulnerable and sicker than ever before.
Writing in the Telegraph, she says “I am used to viewing infectious disease from an ecological perspective. Therefore, it did not come as much of a surprise to me that some non-Covid seasonal respiratory diseases almost immediately started to take a knock on the head during lockdown. Many took this to be an indication that lockdowns were working to stop the spread of disease, forgetting that the impact of lockdowns on already established or ‘endemic’ diseases is completely different to the impact on a new disease in its ‘epidemic’ phase.”
She explains that society-wide pathogenic avoidance creates an “immunity debt,” a gap in the level of protection that you have developed from previous exposure. There is a “threshold of immunity in the population at which rates of new infections start to decline — known as the herd immunity threshold. If we are below this threshold, we are in immunity debt; if we are above it, we are in credit — at least for a while.”
With normal diseases, we experience immunity debt in winter and so the herd immunity threshold rises. That’s when we experience more infection. As Fr. Naugle points out, this reality is reflected in our liturgical calendar during the winter months when the message is to look out for danger, stay healthy, be with friends and family, and intensify your concern for issues of life and death.
However, this period of conventional sicknesses gives rise to an immunity surplus as we move into spring and we can go about our lives with more confidence and a carefree attitude, and hence the symbolism of Easter as the beginning of new life. And yet the months of sun and exercise and party time gradually contribute to building up another immunity debt in the population which will be paid again in the winter months.
Notice that this pattern repeats itself in every year and every generation, all without the help of government public health agencies. However, writes Gupta, “disturbing this order can have a profound impact on an individual’s ability to resist disease. More than anything, it is clear that we are experiencing an entirely predictable perturbation in our finely balanced ecological relationship with the organisms which are capable of causing serious disease.”
Lockdowns changed nothing about these seasonal and natural processes except to make our immunity debt deeper and scarier than ever. To be sure, lockdowns in the end did not stop the pathogen that causes Covid. Instead, they only forced one group to be exposed earlier and more often than other groups, and this allocation of exposure took place entirely based on a politically scripted model.
As we saw, the working classes experienced exposure first and the ruling classes experienced exposure later. The policies entrenched a grim and medieval-style political hierarchy of infection. Rather than encouraging the vulnerable populations to shelter and everyone else to gain immunities through living normal life, lockdown policies pushed the working classes in front of the pathogen as a protection scheme for ruling classes.
And yet now, the results are in. Those who delayed infection for as long as possible, or otherwise tried to game the careful ecological balance with newly invented shots, not only eventually got Covid but made themselves even more vulnerable to diseases that are already endemic in the population.
What Gupta has explained with such erudition was actually the common understanding of previous generations. And nothing about the dangerous innovation of lockdown ideology has changed these natural processes. They only ended up making us sicker than ever. So there is some irony in reading stories of alarm in the high-end media. The right response to such alarm is simply to say: what else did you expect?
The Bakersfield doctors were right all along. So was my mother, her mother, and her mother before her. Together they had far more wisdom about infectious disease than Anthony Fauci and all his cohorts.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought us a panoply of lies and evidence-light declarations that were less intended to inform Americans than to consolidate power and buy time. Among these were Anthony Fauci’s famous shift from arguing against wearing masks, to recommending wearing one, and, finally, to wearing two.
Fauci also tried to convince us that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not manipulated in a lab even though his inner circle had emailed him about “unusual features” of the virus that looked “potentially engineered.”And, of course, we had “fifteen days to stop the spread,” an evergreen concept that dragged on for two years. Lest readers fault us for forgetting, there was also the “gain of function” controversy, the focused protection battle, school closures, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and vaccine misrepresentations.
These topics have received much public attention. The one pandemic topic that hasn’t, and is nonetheless important, is the maligned ivermectin. It’s time to set the record straight.
If you’ve followed the news closely over the last two years, you’ve probably heard a few things about ivermectin. First, that it’s a veterinary medicine intended for horses and cows. Second, that the FDA and other government regulatory agencies recommended against its use for COVID-19. Third, that even the inventor and manufacturer of ivermectin, Merck & Co., came out against it. Fourth, that one of the largest studies showing that ivermectin worked for COVID-19 was retracted for data fraud. And, finally, that the largest and best study of ivermectin, the TOGETHER trial, showed that ivermectin didn’t work.
Let’s consider the evidence.
Ivermectin has a distinguished history, and it may have benefits comparable to those of penicillin.The anti-parasitic’s discovery led to a Nobel Prize and subsequent billions of safe administrations around the world, even among children and pregnant women. “Ivermectin is widely available worldwide, inexpensive, and one of the safest drugs in modern medicine.”
The FDA put out a special warning against using ivermectin for COVID-19. The FDA’s warning, which included language such as, “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death,” and “highly toxic,” might suggest that the FDA was warning against pills laced with poison, not a drug the FDA had already approved as safe.Why did it become dangerous when used for COVID-19? The FDA didn’t say.
Because of the FDA’s rules, if it were to make any statement on ivermectin, it was obliged to attack it. The FDA prohibits the promotion of drugs for unapproved uses. Since fighting SARS-CoV-2 was an unapproved use of ivermectin, the FDA couldn’t have advocated use without obvious hypocrisy. Ivermectin’s discoverer, Merck & Co., had multiple reasons to disparage its own drug.
Merck, too, couldn’t have legally “promoted” ivermectin for COVID-19 without a full FDA approval, something that would have taken years and many millions of dollars. Plus, Merck doesn’t make much money from cheap, generic ivermectin but was hoping to find success with its new, expensive drug, Lagevrio (molnupiravir).
A large study of ivermectin for COVID-19 by Elgazzar et al. was withdrawn over charges of plagiarism and faked data. Many media reports seem fixated on this one dubious study, but it was one of many clinical studies. After the withdrawn studies have been removed from consideration, there are 15 trials that suggest that ivermectin doesn’t work for COVID-19 and 78 that do.
The TOGETHER trial received significant positive press. The New York Times quoted two experts who had seen the results. One stated, “There’s really no sign of any benefit [from ivermectin],” while the other said, “At some point it will become a waste of resources to continue studying an unpromising approach.”
While the Elgazzar paper was quickly dismissed, the TOGETHER trial was acclaimed. It shouldn’t have been. Researchers who have analyzed it have found 31 critical problems (impossible data; extreme conflicts of interest; blinding failure), 22 serious problems (results were delayed six months; conflicting data), and 21 major problems (multiple, conflicting randomization protocols) with it.
While the popular narrative is that the TOGETHER trial showed that ivermectin didn’t work for COVID-19, the actual results belie that conclusion: ivermectin was associated with a 12 percent lower risk of death, a 23 percent lower risk of mechanical ventilation, a 17 percent lower risk of hospitalization, and a 10 percent lower risk of extended ER observation or hospitalization. We have calculated that the probability that ivermectin helped the patients in the TOGETHER trial ranged from 26 percent for the median number of days to clinical recovery to 91 percent for preventing hospitalization. The TOGETHER trial’s results should be reported accurately.
Based on the clinical evidence from the 93 trials that ivermectin reduced mortality by an average of 51 percent,and on the estimated infection fatality rate of COVID-19, about 400 infected Americans aged 60-69 would need to be treated with ivermectin to statistically prevent one death in that group.The total cost of the ivermectin to prevent that one death: $40,000. (Based on the GoodRx website, a generic prescription for ivermectin is priced at approximately $40. Roughly 2.5 prescriptions would be needed per person to receive the average dose of 150 mg per patient.)
How much is your life worth? We’re betting it’s worth far more than $40,000.
When the next pandemic strikes, by necessity we’ll rely on older drugs because newer ones require years of development. Ivermectin is a repurposed drug that helps, and could have helped so much more. It deserves recognition, not disparagement. What we really need, however, is a way to inoculate ourselves against the lies and misrepresentations of powerful public figures, organizations, and drug companies. Sadly, there are no such vaccines for that contagion.
David R. Henderson is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California.
Charles L. Hooper is President and co-founder of Objective Insights, Inc. Prior to forming Objective Insights in 1994, Charley worked at Merck & Co., Syntex Labs, and NASA. Charley’s experience is in decision analysis, economics, product pricing, forecasting, and modeling. He is passionate about helping pharmaceutical companies think clearly about their business opportunities.
Newsflash from China: the world’s last bastion of Zero Covid has finally given up the pretence. “Covid China cracks”… this is a message that seems to have penetrated even the mainstream media’s coverage.
What is not, however, entirely clear is how brave BBC reporters can travel around the world to capture footage in the Far East, but were blind to peaceful protests closer to home. Those voices of reason who have been ignored for almost three years have found the cognitive dissonance more than a little unnerving. How can it simultaneously be true that lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in UK are bad, selfish and unscientific, while lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in China are brave and pushing back against regime oppression?
Even in their dissonant apostasy, the media cheerleaders still struggle with fundamental misconceptions due to their alignment with the crumbling narrative and blindness to the obvious: “the main challenge is ensuring the inevitable uptick in infections does not lead to mass deaths” claims the BBC. Really? With almost three years of data now to hand, is it now not blindingly obvious that the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance was absolutely correct when he stated on 16 March 2020 that “this is a mild disease in most people”? If these brave reporters want to investigate ‘mass deaths’, how about some hard-hitting investigative reporting on iatrogenesis instead?
This unpalatable (and hard to ignore) charade aside, can we at least hope that this is the end of an era? Can the Zero Covid chapter be closed for good?
Let us hope so. Humanity may – finally – have rid itself of Zero Covid policies, but what of its erstwhile supporters – what new hair-brained schemes are they now supporting? Whether the chaos they were involved in creating was by accident or design is arguably immaterial: how can society protect itself against future periods of collective self-harm?
The precautionary principle “emphasises caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations that may prove disastrous”.
Winding back the clock almost three years, it was for this reason that many of us had a principled objection to draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, i.e. lockdowns) from before they were enacted. While this view is now fashionable, many supported these policies at the time and then did not want to back down from this shibboleth. But why was it ever acceptable to deploy this combination of hand grenades to crack a nut? Why did society go along with a perverse inversion of the anti-precautionary principle: “panic; shout ‘fire’, abandon detailed disaster planning and then implement the precise opposite, botch the implementation, shut down constructive debate and then vilify those that challenge the new orthodoxy”?
It is instructive to observe the flailing attempts by vocal proponents of Zero Covid and its associated policies (school closures, rules of six, masks, vaccine mandates) to post-rationalise and excuse their mistakes. This is where lessons will be learned (and not, incidentally, from the preposterous attempts by those who piloted the ship onto the rocks to shift blame onto others or to claim that the right decisions were made “based on all the informationavailable at the time”).
We have previously outlined clear evidence of what was common knowledge by mid-March 2020. Chief Scientific Advisor Vallance, quoted above, went on to state: “Epidemics are like a pole vaulter taking flight: the outbreak starts slowly, takes off rapidly, reaches a peak and then comes back down to earth”. No different to what had happened in previous months on the Diamond Princess, in Wuhan and in Bergamo. This was a known quantity well before the UK launched itself, lemming-like, off the cliffs on 23 March 2020.
From hereon in it was one-way traffic for much of the next two years. Dissent was essentially criminalised, and the full force of far-from-benign authoritarian state machinery was turned against its citizens. Rational discourse was squashed (why would authorities collude with the media to stifle calm voices of reason such as Professor Jay Bhattacharya and instead promote shrill panic-mongers?); the media controlled via carrot (advertising) and stick (OFCOM diktat); dissenters were made an example of. None of this was necessary, and a normally-functioning society and fourth estate could have led us quickly back to balanced rationality, avoiding much of the human cost and unnecessarily-wrought collateral damage of the Coronapanic debacle.
They might prefer us to forget, but we must not. Thankfully, public records exist that will serve as a salutary reminder to future generations of what our own home-grown Zero Covid zealots wanted to perpetrate. For example, in the dark days of February 2021, 47 MPs from Opposition parties tabled an Early Day Motion promoting Net Zero. This Motion – as well as its stated (and implicit) underlying assumptions – has not aged well, the most egregious claim being that harsher draconian measures might avoid “putting huge additional strain on the NHS” – tell that to those on the now-gargantuan waiting lists for essential treatment. Most of the 47 signatories on this Motion are Labour MPs… Labour is currently riding high in the polls. They might well now criticise the UK Government’s handling of the last few years, but it was Labour – and their union paymasters – who were consistently pushing for more and more restrictions. Voters should be careful what they wish for.
So good riddance to Zero Covid, but have we learned any lessons? Unfortunately, there is as yet little evidence to show that society has the strength to resist the siren calls of the next Zero Policy fiasco… for example, could it be that Net Zero is an unholy hysteria rather than a holy grail? We would do well to look a bit more closely before we leap into deindustrialised pauperisation.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and in the interests of protecting all that we hold dear, we can only encourage everyone to keep constructively challenging and critiquing the official narrative.
I’ve given partial replies here and there, but I’ve never laid out all of my ideas in one place. I think these strange exercises seem much less bizarre when considered against the broader backdrop of the pandemicists and the beliefs they share. You might call their most central article of faith pandemicism, which is the doctrine that pandemics represent a serious threat to human health, and that they can be prevented or substantially ameliorated with the right scientific interventions.
Aspects of pandemicism are as old as 1918, but the proximate origins of this mind virus are much more recent. Tellingly, they don’t lie with any kind of pandemic at all, but rather with the WHO campaign to eradicate smallpox. This started in 1967, and it took ten years to complete. Any institutionalised enterprise that persists for a full decade will acquire institutional momentum, such that it can’t simply be turned off when the mission is over. Just as the push for trans rights and trans acceptance owes a lot to the institutional forces accumulated by the gay rights movement since the 1970s, pandemicism became the next stage of advocacy for the smallpox eradicators after they had put themselves out of business. All the careers, institutions and grand funding schemes that had been thrown at smallpox needed a second act.
The smallpox eradicators began their transition to a post-smallpox world by fantasising that the virus they had killed off would someday return. Donald Henderson, director of the eradicators, founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies in 1998, a key pandemicist think tank that was later rechristened as the Center for Health Security, and that went on to hold a series of notorious and well-publicised pandemic war games. The earliest of these – Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm – were funded by the US Department of Defence and involved elaborate fictional scenarios of smallpox biowarfare. Later on, with the rise of billionaire philanthropy and the ever waning cultural significance of Variola, the Johns Hopkins pandemicists began peddling horror scenarios of other pandemic pathogens. Event 201 was their first major tabletop exercise featuring a pathogen other than smallpox that entered humans via a natural spillover event.
There are, then, two pandemicist eras – an early period, fuelled by Defence funding and devoted primarily to biowarfare scnearios, with curious parallels to the 1995 film Outbreak; and a later period driven by banal third-worldist philanthropy, that is more heavily focused on natural pathogens and reflected in the film Contagion. The Hollywood resonances are no accident; the pandemicists are above all interested in publicity and fundraising, and they try hard to make their mark on popular culture. The earliest wargames were at base morality tales intended to convince the US government to increase its smallpox vaccine stockpiles. The second era of pandemicist thought owes a great deal in turn to the SARS outbreak of 2003. Vaccine development at this stage becomes the central concern, and the pandemicist mission expands with novel projects to predict and preempt the emergence of novel human-infecting viruses. The old roots were still there, and the Defence Department funds were a major part of this new research.
The primary problem of pandemicism, is that there just aren’t very many pandemics, which means that most of the time the pandemicists don’t have anything to do. Wargaming attracts publicity and the interest of fundraisers, and it gets scary viruses into headlines in the absence of any reason for them to be there. Pandemicist wargames feature what we should think of as “fundraising viruses.” These are either fictional pathogens with very high infection fatality rates (often modelled on SARS), or real viruses like Nipah that are extremely deadly but not very contagious. The pandemicists almost never bother to wargame the most common pandemic virus, namely influenza, because nobody finds it particularly scary. As founding pandemicist Larry Brilliant said in 2007:
Last year, six hundred thousand people died and we didn’t notice. That’s a little bit of the reason you find so much hyperbole in the whole question of pandemic flu. Because a lot of public health people are saying, oh goody, we have something that’s going to frighten rich people, let’s use it as a chance to build up the public health system.
Fundraising viruses are a fictional threat. Any viral pathogen adapted to spread widely via direct person-to-person contact in human hosts will cause nothing more than influenza-like illness, with mortality well within the familiar range for seasonal respiratory viruses. This important difference, between what grabs attention and what is actually biologically likely to occur, is one reason I think that most scientists, and the pandemicists in particular, ignore the broader behavioural patterns of viruses and the evolutionary pressures to which they’re subject. Looking too deeply into these questions threatens to turn up evidence that we don’t really need the pandemicists at all.
Formally, it seems that this bland pandemic theatre is supposed to familiarise “stakeholders” and “decision-makers” with the expected mitigationist response. As late as Event 201 in Fall 2019, this response consisted of not doing very much. Before Corona, the pandemicists didn’t like the idea of travel restrictions or lockdowns. These might be used to contain very local outbreaks, but once a virus had achieved pandemic status, closures were considered counterproductive and likely to increase poverty and disease in the developing world. The pandemicists preferred things like travel advisories and fast-tracking vaccine development. The idea of mass containment emerged in the wake of SARS; it was never a part of Western pandemicist doctrine, though brief lockdowns were trialled in Mexico in 2009 against the nothingburger Swine Flu, and again in 2014 against Ebola.(1)
As I never tire of typing, what happened in the West was a hybrid response. Via China and pressure from the WHO, mass containment came to be added at the very last minute to the standard mitigationist playbook that the pandemicists had been peddling for a generation. This is why the messaging shifted so suddenly after February 2020. Until that date, we were in the standard world of Event 201, and authorities talked down the risk of the virus in an effort to prepare us all for the inevitable infections and deaths. Mass containment, adopted with the Italian lockdown in March, required a vastly more hysterical and overblown messaging strategy, in an effort to convince all of us to hide at home.
All that wargaming about how we’d stay open didn’t matter very much in the end, because well-publicised pandemic wargames aren’t actually planning exercises and have very little strategic importance. They’re for fundraising and publicity.
Probably the most obtrusive feature of pandemicist material – and the least discussed – is its extremely low quality. This is above all why I have a hard time buying theories that these events reflect any nefarious plan. They are just so, so stupid, it is actually hard to put into words. While earlier wargames were fairly textured and elaborate, there’s been a steady decline, worsened by the arrival of Big Philanthropy. I strongly advise that you not waste your life watching the extremely insipid Event 201 videos. Far more digestible is the SPARS pandemic exercise, which is often cited as another ominously prophetic document, particularly for its lengthy discussions of anti-vaxxers and pro-vaccine public health messaging. There are some parallels to recent events, but if you read carefully, you’ll see that the whole thing is firmly rooted in vintage 2016 anxieties about social media disinformation. And, again, it’s just really, really dumb. Every chapter concludes with tiresome questions for discussion by “public health risk communicators,” whoever they are. It feels like a weird textbook written for virusphobic primary school children in an alternate reality, where the hot new social media platform is called ZapQ and the big antivaxx disinformationist is a “science blogger” named EpiGirl and public health officials recruit a “hip hop icon” named BZee whose fictional tweets get fewer retweets and likes than mine do (see the figures on p. 25).
Nevertheless, the SPARS scenario and others like them have their moments of foreknowledge. I would never exclude malfeasance outright, but the general explanation for this phenomenon is that we get the virus freakouts we plan for. Virus fantasies like Event 201 and SPARS reflect a prior epidemiological interest in specific pathogens, and they serve to focus the attention of the public health brigade further on specific viral species. Monkeypox and the 2009 Swine Flu show that pandemicist attention alone – in the absence of any serious mortality – is enough to generate widespread hysteria. These are prophecies, but they are mostly self-fulfilling ones. That is also why the laboratory origins of SARS-2 are such a big piece of this puzzle.
What’s missing from all these planning scenarios – what every last one of them fails to predict – is the steely biomedical dictatorship that emerged to ruin all of our lives in 2020. Nobody in any of these wargames is ever locked up in their homes. Public health officials respond to the off-message EpiGirl with press releases, not threats and deplatforming. There are no green passes. The unvaccinated are never deplored or fired. Part of the reason is that, before 2020, lockdowns had never been part of the plan, and they gave public health bureaucrats a chance at overt and direct repression, which they’d never counted on before. But it’s also true that the basic project of pandemicism has authoritarian and repressive elements baked into it, which I think the pandemicists themselves never really noticed. They’re just not the most intelligent or introspective people.
(1) In the years after SARS, some public health bureaucrats and pandemicists played with ever more restrictionist mitigation regimes, contemplating school closures and work-from-home orders, but their focus remained firmly mitigationist. The purpose was only to slow infections to spare the healthcare system. Mass containment, by contrast, is eradicationist in outlook, aiming not to slow infections but to stop the virus altogether.
Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
On July 6th, the New York Times published an astonishing investigation: In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit. The article documents in grim detail how Chosen Company, an international volunteer battalion for Kiev, routinely executes Russian prisoners of war. It is the very first mainstream admission that this practice – a brazen breach of the Geneva Conventions, and a grave war crime – is widespread among Ukraine’s fighters, both foreign and homegrown. … continue
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