Rockefeller Foundation ‘Reset the Table’ Report Predicted COVID-Related Food Crisis — 2 Years Before It Happened
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 30, 2022
Just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic — and almost two years before global health officials warned of a food shortage crisis — the Rockefeller Foundation issued a report predicting the crisis and offering up solutions, including “shifts to online enrollment, online purchasing of food.”
In a report published July 28, 2020, “Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System,” the foundation described “a hunger and nutrition crisis … unlike any this country has seen in generations.”
The authors blamed the crisis on COVID-19.
The report concluded the crisis would have to be addressed not by strengthening food security for the most vulnerable, but by revamping the entire food system and associated supply chain — in other words, we would need to “reset the table.”
The Rockefeller Foundation called for this food system “reset” less than two months after the World Economic Forum (WEF), on June 3, 2020, revealed its vision for the “Great Reset.”
Some of the contributors to the Rockefeller Foundation report are WEF members; a few of which, along with other proponents of “resetting the table,” also have ties to entities pushing vaccine passports and digital ID schemes.
Rockefeller Foundation: ‘changes to policies, practices, and norms’ are needed
The WEF describes the Rockefeller Foundation as a “science-driven” philanthropic organization that “seeks to inspire and foster large-scale human impact that promotes the well-being of humanity around the world” and which “advances the new frontiers of science, data, policy and innovation to solve global challenges related to health, food, power and economic mobility.”
In the foreword to its 2020 “Reset the Table” report, foundation President Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, who is a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), states:
“America faces a hunger and nutrition crisis unlike any this country has seen in generations.
“In many ways, Covid-19 has boiled over long-simmering problems plaguing America’s food system. What began as a public health crisis fueled an economic crisis, leaving 33 percent of families unable to afford the amount or quality of food they want.
“School closures put 30 million students at risk of losing the meals they need to learn and thrive.”
The report did not explain how the Rockefeller Foundation was able to know about this food crisis mere months after the pandemic took hold — especially as the report states it was developed out of “video-conference discussions in May and June 2020.”
The report also didn’t provide any insight into the role pandemic countermeasures such as lockdowns — which the foundation championed along with the WEF — played in contributing to the food crisis.
In its report, the Rockefeller Foundation proposes a series of solutions, derived from “dialogues with over 100 experts and practitioners.”
One recommendation calls for moving away from a “focus on maximizing shareholder returns” to “a more equitable system focused on fair returns and benefits to all stakeholders — building more equitable prosperity throughout the supply chain.”
This may sound like a good idea, until one considers “stakeholders” in this case refers to “stakeholder capitalism” — a concept heavily promoted by the very same large corporations that have been beneficiaries of the shareholder capitalist system.
The WEF also heavily promotes “stakeholder capitalism,” defining it as “a form of capitalism in which companies seek long-term value creation by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large.”
For some context, economic fascism, as personified by the regimes of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, encompassed government-mandated “partnerships” between business, government and unions organized by a system of regional “economic chambers,” and a philosophy where “the common good comes before the private good.”
It is, of course, unclear how the “needs [of] society at large” are determined — or by who.
The Rockefeller Foundation report declares, “Success will require numerous changes to policies, practices, and norms.”
What does such “success” entail? The report names three main objectives:
- Data collection and digitization: The report calls for “shifts to online enrollment, online purchasing of food, direct farm-to-consumer purchasing, telemedicine, teleconsultations, as well as [broadband access that is essential to] education, finance, and employment.”
The report describes the lack of universal broadband access in this context as “a fundamental resiliency and equity gap.”
- “Stakeholders” working together with the goal of forming a “collaborative advocacy movement.”
- “Changes to policies, practices and norms,” which the report says would be “numerous.”
These objectives, dressed up in “inclusive” language, are further described in the report as being beneficial to human health, ensuring “healthy and protective diets” that “will allow Americans to thrive and bring down our nation’s suffocating health care costs.”
The report goes as far as to describe this as a “legacy” of COVID-19, even predicting that doctors will “prescribe” produce for patients.
According to the report:
“One of Covid-19’s legacies should be that it was the moment Americans realized the need to treat nutritious food as a part of health care, both for its role in prevention and in the treatment of diseases.
“By integrating healthy food into the health care system, doctors could prescribe produce as easily as pharmaceuticals and reduce utilization of expensive health services that are often required because of nutrition insecurity.”
But as Dr. Joseph Mercola pointed out, despite this purported emphasis on healthy, nutritious food, the words “organic,” “natural” and “grass fed” do not appear in the report.
What does appear is the phrase “alternative proteins,” in this case referring to proteins derived from the consumption of insects — another concept promoted by the WEF.
In 2021, for instance, the WEF published a report titled “Why we need to give insects the role they deserve in our food systems,” suggesting that “insect farming for food and animal feed could offer an environmentally friendly solution to the impending food crisis.”
Yet again, an “impending food crisis” is forecast, which may lead some to ask how entities such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the WEF even knew what was coming.
As stated by Mercola:
“COVID was declared a pandemic March 11, 2020, so by the time this Rockefeller report was published, the pandemic had only existed for four months, and while certain high-risk groups did experience food insecurity, such as children whose primary meal is a school lunch, widespread food shortages, in terms of empty shelves, were not widely prevalent or particularly severe in the U.S.
“It seems nothing escapes the prophetic minds of the self-proclaimed designers of the future. They accurately foresee ‘natural disasters’ and foretell coincidental ‘acts of God’. They know everything before it happens.
“Perhaps they truly are prophets. Or, perhaps they’re simply describing the inevitable outcomes of their own actions.”
Mercola suggests such crises are inevitable because they are part of “an intentional plan” by the very same actors.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s amazing ‘predictions’ of future crises, and its ties with Big Tech and Big Pharma
Lending credence to Mercola’s view, and as recently reported by The Defender, the Rockefeller Foundation, WEF and other entities accurately predicted a remarkable number of crises that then came to pass.
For instance, Event 201, held in October 2019 and co-organized by the Rockefeller Foundation, accurately “predicted” the global outbreak of a coronavirus.
Similarly, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), which co-organized a “tabletop simulation” predicting the global outbreak of monkeypox in March 2021, with an imaginary start date of May 2022, has received $1.25 million in grants from the Rockefeller Foundation since January 2021.
In turn, the other co-organizer of the monkeypox “tabletop simulation,” the Munich Security Conference, in May 2022 held a roundtable with the Rockefeller Foundation on “Transatlantic cooperation on food security.”
Among the suggestions arising from this roundtable include a “focus on transforming the global food system and making it more resilient to future shocks, with steps taken now and over the long term.”
The Rockefeller Foundation is also a partner and board member and donor to GAVI: The Vaccine Alliance — alongside the WEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which hosted Event 201.
As previously reported by The Defender, the GAVI Alliance proclaims a mission to “save lives and protect people’s health,” and states it “helps vaccinate almost half the world’s children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases.”
GAVI is also a core partner of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The GAVI Alliance — and the Rockefeller Foundation — also work closely with the ID2020 Alliance. Founded in 2016, ID2020 claims to advocate in favor of “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID,” adding that “doing digital ID right means protecting civil liberties.”
As reported previously by The Defender, ID2020’s founding partners include the Rockefeller Foundation, GAVI, UNICEF, Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank, while general partners of ID2020 include Facebook and Mastercard.
For the past two years, the Rockefeller Foundation and entities such as ID2020 and the WEF have been closely involved with the push for digital “vaccine passports.”
For instance, on July 9, 2020, the Commons Project, itself founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, launched “a global effort to build a secure and verifiable way for travelers to share their COVID-19 status” — that is, a vaccine passport.
The Commons Project also was behind the development of the CommonPass, another vaccine passport initiative, developed in tandem with the WEF.
In turn, the Good Health Pass was launched by ID2020, as part of a collaboration between Mastercard, the International Chamber of Commerce and the WEF. It was endorsed by embattled former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, now executive chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
Other members of the Good Health Pass Collaborative include Accenture, Deloitte and IBM — which developed New York’s “Excelsior Pass” vaccine passport system.
The Rockefeller Foundation, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also funded an August 27, 2021 document issued by the WHO titled, “Digital documentation of COVID-19 certificates: Vaccination status.”
The document is described as follows:
“This is a guidance document for countries and implementing partners on the technical requirements for developing digital information systems for issuing standards-based interoperable digital certificates for COVID-19 vaccination status, and considerations for implementation of such systems, for the purposes of continuity of care, and proof of vaccination.”
And in another remarkably prescient “prediction,” the Rockefeller Foundation, in 2010, published a report — “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” — which presented four future scenarios.
One of these hypothetical scenarios was “Lock Step” — described as “[a] world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.”
The description of this “Lock Step” scenario goes on to state:
“Technological innovation in ‘Lock Step’ is largely driven by government and is focused on issues of national security and health and safety.
“Most technological improvements are created by and for developed countries, shaped by governments’ dual desire to control and to monitor their citizens.”
This scenario also predicted “smarter” food packaging:
“In the aftermath of pandemic scares, smarter packaging for food and beverages is applied first by big companies and producers in a business-to-business environment, and then adopted for individual products and consumers.”
Moreover, the “Lock Step” scenario remarkably predicted China would fare better than most countries in a hypothetical pandemic, due to the heavy-handed measures it would implement:
“However, a few countries did fare better — China in particular.
“The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery.”
The Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement in public health is not new.
Going back more than a century, the foundation heavily promoted “scientific medicine” and formalized medical practice based on the European model on a global scale, at the expense of homeopathy and other traditional and natural remedies.
The foundation’s “philanthropic” activities have been described as “de facto colonialism in countries including China and the Philippines.”
Moreover, the foundation helped give rise to the first global public health entities, the International Health Commission (1913-16) and the International Health Board (1916-1927).
It also helped finance the earliest public health programs at universities such as Harvard and Johns Hopkins — today home to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
South Korea, Poster Child for Containment Strategy, Now Has Same Excess Mortality as Sweden
BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 30, 2022
Until recently, South Korea was the poster child for the ‘contain and vaccinate’ strategy, having kept infections to a minimum until completing its vaccine rollout.
In November of last year, former ‘Zero Covid’ proponent Devi Sridhar argued, “It is never too late to learn lessons from countries such as South Korea, which pursued maximum suppression, and succeeded.” And in a super-viral tweet, Vincent Rajkumar (a professor at the Mayo Clinic) proclaimed, “South Korea followed the textbook principles of epidemiology. Kept deaths 40 times lower all the way till 75% of population fully vaccinated. This is success.”
All that was true until February of this year, when the country saw its first major outbreak. This outbreak, as I noted previously, led to a large spike in excess mortality; by March’s end, the number of weekly deaths was almost 70% higher than normal.
Owing to this spike, South Korea now has the same excess mortality as Sweden – which took a famously relaxed approach to dealing with Covid. Note: the chart below is based on weekly deaths, rather than age-standardised mortality rates, so it overstates excess mortality in both countries.
Incidentally, you wouldn’t know this from looking at the official Covid death rates. As the chart below indicates, the number of ‘confirmed’ Covid deaths per million people is much higher in Sweden, presumably due to differences in testing or diagnosis. Which illustrates the importance of tracking excess mortality.
So, the country that did least to contain Covid has ended up with the same death toll as one of the countries that did most. What’s more, the majority of Sweden’s infections occurred before the vaccine rollout, whereas the vast majority of South Korea’s occurred after. Which suggests the benefits of containing the virus until after the vaccine rollout have been overstated.
Of course, South Korea didn’t do terribly. By containing the virus using border controls and contact tracing, they avoided really draconian lockdowns, and saw a comparatively mild downturn. Yet the measures they took still constitute a major infringement on civil liberties. As the Guardian notes, “Koreans’ movements were so finely and publicly tracked that secret love affairs and even hidden sexualities were brought to light.”
Anyone who cares about civil liberties will now have to ask whether South Korea’s strategy was worth it, given that Sweden ended up with the same death toll.
Guardian Pushes for Return of Masks, Mass Testing and Quarantine
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 28 2022
Here we go again. It’s the middle of summer and the leading opinion piece in the Guardian today calls for the return of restrictions in response to rising infections and hospitalisations. In a piece introduced with, “a few small changes would make a big difference to millions of vulnerable people”, journalist Frances Ryan writes:
If you’re reading this in the U.K., odds are that by now you’ve had coronavirus: seven in 10 of us have watched the dreaded red line appear. You may have been stuck in bed with it twice or even three times by now; by April 2022, England alone had recorded almost 900,000 reinfections. When the public asked to “return to normal”, I’m not sure a regular hacking cough was what they had in mind.
Almost 900,000 reinfections? How will 1.6% of the population have coped with getting another cold?
Ryan continues:
It is an odd situation. Last week, Covid infections were reported to have soared by 43%, while hospitalisation from the virus rose by 23%. An estimated 1.7 million people in the U.K. tested positive over those seven days. Two million of us now have long Covid, with about two in five of those – or 826,000 people – having symptoms for at least a year.
What Ryan fails to mention is that Long Covid studies frequently find small to negligible numbers of additional symptoms compared to a control group, meaning the quoted figure is unlikely to be an accurate picture of the real impact of COVID-19.
Ryan again:
Back in February, Johnson said the Government had created a plan to start “living with Covid”, but what it really did was form a plan to catch and spread Covid. After all coronavirus prevention measures were dropped on April 1st – from the legal obligation to isolate if you had Covid, to the end of most free testing – the public were left wide open to mass infection. Even hospitals were told by ministers to ditch mask mandates, though some worried trusts have defied the rules and kept them. That all precautions were pulled back just when most people’s vaccine immunity was beginning to fade, and the virus was evolving to be more transmissible, gives a hint at how little logic ministers applied.
Since Ryan accepts that vaccine protection wanes, she evidently intends restrictions, sorry, precautions to continue indefinitely. Indeed, the plummeting of the infection fatality rate makes no difference to her argument, as “excessive focus” has been placed on deaths, she says.
One of the biggest problems facing Britain’s attempts to quell the virus is that this Government doesn’t really want to. There is hope – the number of people dying from Covid has reduced since its peak – but excessive focus on this has long hidden the fact that loss of life has never been the only thing that matters: how many people are infected with the virus matters too. A strategy that lets the virus rip through the population increases the risk we all face, be it from surges, new dangerous variants, or in developing long Covid. Fundamentally, it means accepting a reality where it is deemed normal for many of us to be (possibly severely) sick, from a virus whose long-term effects – and the effects of repeated reinfection – we still know little about.
Once again, the plight of the vulnerable is deployed to justify indefinite restrictions on everyone – a logic which would destroy most freedoms given the opportunity, as we have seen in the last two and a half years.
There will be few greater casualties though than the 3.7 million clinically extremely vulnerable people, especially the 500,000 who are immunocompromised and can’t get much or any benefit from a booster jab. Trying to avoid the virus in a country that has forgone all safety measures means risking your life when you pop to the shops. Ministers who are content for repeated coronavirus infection to just become part of British life are content for isolation to be part of clinically vulnerable people’s.
What does Ryan propose? The reinstatement of free lateral flow tests – as though there isn’t an economic crisis on, and we haven’t spent enough over-testing ourselves for colds; the return of the legal requirement to isolate for those with a positive test – a measure extremely disruptive to education, employment, health care and everything else; and financial help such as sick pay for those isolating – more magical money. Plus more of the vaccines she has acknowledged don’t work for long.
And, inevitably, masks: “Wearing masks in busy and enclosed spaces again is the right thing to do; just under half of Britons (48%) reported wearing a face covering when outside their home last month, down from about 95% during the January Omicron wave.”
From a sceptical point of view, it’s depressing that nearly half of people still say they’re wearing a mask – though since far fewer than half the people I see out and about are actually wearing a mask, this poll probably reveals more about the biases of polls (and what people say to them) than the reality on the ground.
Then Ryan lays it on thick:
Unless we wish to sign up to getting repeatedly sick for the foreseeable future, and to the risk of long-term disability from long Covid, we are going to have to bring back low-effort protective measures to curb it. A recent public health campaign in Ireland, which encourages people to think of clinically vulnerable people in their daily interactions, shows how easy it is to do things differently.
Former Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam recently said the rise in infections was nothing to worry about and that even he had stopped wearing his face mask. But will he think again now, if respectable opinion starts to shift in the direction Frances Ryan and others would like?
Let’s hope this is just an anomalous op-ed and not the start of a trend. After all, if this is what they’re saying in June, what will they be saying in December?
The Long Arm of the Covid Saga
By Gabrielle Bauer | Brownstone Institute | June 28, 2022
With the emergency phase of the pandemic behind us, the Covid alarmists don’t have much material left to work with—but doomsaying abhors a vacuum.
Enter long Covid, the perfect object of fear because it can never be disproved. You can hold it responsible for any symptom you develop after the acute phase of the illness, whether weeks or years down the road. Tired? Long Covid. Forgot where you put your keys? Long Covid. Breathless after climbing a flight of stairs? Long Covid, no doubt. It’s an unfalsifiable diagnosis, a fearmonger’s wet dream.
If I sound flippant, it’s because the past two and a half years have left me just a tiny bit wary of the human propensity for panic. As we’ve all discovered, a panicked populace will accept—or rather, demand—any and all restrictions on basic rights and freedoms. If we allow long Covid to become the new panic button, these restrictions could stretch into an indefinite future.
For the record, I’m not suggesting that long Covid doesn’t exist. I don’t wish to dismiss the suffering of affected people. My beef isn’t with individuals, it’s with public health messaging that keeps pumping fear into an exhausted and confused populace that has lost the capacity for rational risk assessment. I’m suggesting that we put long Covid in perspective so it doesn’t become the next pretext for putting our lives on hold.
Media Magnification
We certainly can’t count on a balanced perspective from legacy media and the experts they enlist: fear generates clicks, retweets, and ad revenue. “There’s no one who is too young and healthy to not go on and get post-acute COVID syndrome,” says New York rehabilitation therapist David Putrino in Parade magazine, doing his part to ensure everyone stays scared.
In a New York Times article titled “This is really scary: kids’ struggle with long Covid,” National Institutes of Health researcher Avindra Nath warns of the impact of long Covid on children’s development. “They’re in their formative years,” he says. “Once you start falling behind, it’s very hard because the kids lose their own self-confidence too. It’s a downward spiral.”
One can’t help contrast this solicitude with the lack of media concern about the effect of school closures and long masking on child development. Just saying.
Long Covid alarmists also compete for airspace in the Twitterverse, with professional fearmonger Eric Feigl-Ding predictably leading the charge. From his May 20 tweet: “Let this sink in. A billion people could suffer long Covid in the next 3 years.” True to form, he can’t resist inserting some chest-beating into his scare story. “The burden of long Covid will likely be much higher than anyone imagined. And yet very few care enough to mitigate transmission. And that makes me sad.”
It’s not just health professionals who spit out such tweets. Software developer Megan Ruthven exhorts us to reactivate the stop-the-spread program of 2020, this time to “prevent hospital collapse due to long Covid.” For exactly how long? According to a dude called Xabier Oxale, as long as it takes. “Let’s look at Long Covid, and then, only then, you can assure that a strain is less severe. For that, you need months, even years. As they don’t know, cautionary principle must prevail. Covid Zero!” That’s right, folks. Covid Zero is back.
Then there’s Charlos, who decries the government’s inaction in the face of long Covid, which he dubs “the greatest mass disabling event in human history.” The ampersand-loving Mx. Charis Hill, meanwhile, points the guilt screws right at you and me. “You may be personally willing to risk an infection & Long Covid & the loss in financial stability that will cause. But what if you get Covid, give it to your spouse/child/parent/sibling, & they become permanently disabled? Because of you?”
If these Tweets don’t strike terror in your heart, you have only to read the June 7 blog post by the People’s Pharmacy. “Long Covid is common and scary!” reads the headline, followed by “long Covid is nasty!” in the subhead. Further along in the article, we learn that the “brain and body both react to Covid!” Not one to give up on exclamation marks, the author warns us again that “the body is also impacted!”
It’s time to slow the spin, I say. Let’s start with some numbers.
All over the map
Studies on the prevalence of long Covid have yielded wildly discrepant results, which alone should cast doubt on the scariest numbers. Some researchers estimate that fewer than 10% of Covid infections progress to long Covid, while others peg the rate at more than half. In children and adolescents, the reported prevalence swings even more widely—between 4% and 66%, according to a review of 14 studies. To make things still more confusing, long Covid symptoms can also occur after influenza, though with less frequency.
So what and whom are we to believe? When in doubt, it never hurts to look at large, well-controlled studies, which by design carry the greatest statistical weight. A UK analysis of over 50,000 subjects, both with and without a history of Covid infection, suggests that long Covid may not live up to its cataclysmic media portrayal. In its report on the study, the UK’s Office of National Statistics states that 5% of previously infected subjects reported at least one common long Covid symptom 12 to 16 weeks later. The twist: “[The] prevalence was 3.4% in a control group of participants without a positive test for COVID-19, demonstrating the relative commonness of these symptoms in the population at any given time.”
There it is, straight from the ONS: at any point in time, more than 3% of random people on the street experience the nonspecific symptoms that characterize long Covid, such as fatigue, headaches, and poor concentration. A similar picture emerged from a controlled Danish study of pediatric long Covid, involving over 44,000 subjects and published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.
A substantial minority of previously infected children reported long Covid symptoms—but so did their non-infected counterparts, at a lower rate deemed “statistically significant but not clinically relevant.” While this doesn’t disprove the existence of long Covid, it does invite skepticism about the sky-high prevalence figures reported in some studies.
Symptoms attributed to long Covid are also all over the map, from hallucinations and hair loss to menstrual changes and penile shrinkage. Allergic reactions, peeling skin, joint pain… the list goes on. But here’s the thing: we can’t conclusively pin any of these symptoms on long Covid. As a McGill University report on long Covid symptoms concedes, “Noticing something after getting sick with a virus does not automatically imply that it was caused by the virus.” In a nutshell, long Covid remains a slippery eel, adept at eluding our grasp.
What we don’t know
There’s something else we don’t know, and it’s the hottest of hot potatoes: whether situational or psychological factors could explain some long Covid symptoms. Relax, people. I’m not suggesting it’s all in the head. All I’m saying is that a symptom can spring from more than one source, and experts agree.
A Johns Hopkins expert report on the origin of long Covid symptoms allows that mental health problems can arise from “unresolved pain or fatigue, or from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after treatment in the intensive care unit.”
Along similar lines, a Globe and Mail article notes the challenge of untangling “which [post-Covid symptoms] can be attributed to long COVID and which are the result of hospitalization, since a lengthy stay can itself cause a host of physical and mental health problems.”
I repeat: I am not negating the existence of long Covid. I am not denying it can cause pain and suffering. I support research and public investment into the phenomenon. I’m simply saying that we need to drop the sky-is-falling pronouncements and replace them with more balanced and hopeful messaging.
Above all, we need to avoid turning long Covid into the new Scary Thing, the monster in the closet that leads a frightened public to demand longer and harsher restrictions on living. No level of protection is worth going through that exercise again.
Gabrielle divides her time between writing books, articles, and clinical materials for health professionals. She has received six national awards for her health journalism.
Lockdown Harms Impossible to Cover Up
BY MICHAEL SENGER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | JUNE 26, 2022
According to a recent study by the World Bank, published in the journal Nature, lockdowns and the response to Covid-19 have pushed an additional 75 million people into extreme poverty, living on less than US $1.90 a day.
In the typical Walter Duranty style that’s become a kind of twisted journalistic norm since March 2020, the World Bank and Nature of course blame this on “the pandemic” rather than lockdowns. I remain baffled as to how seemingly well-meaning people are able to sleep at night repeating such nonsense—are they somehow blind to the role of their own sycophancy in perpetuating these policies?
Nonetheless, there are signs that the political mainstream is starting to realize lockdowns were a disaster. Today, the Wall Street Journal published an excellent piece titled The Revenge of the Locked-Down Voters, noting the growing political backlash against lockdown politicians from voters at the lower end of the income scale.
This comes shortly after the New York Times quietly acknowledged a study showing that Covid lockdowns and mandates led to over 170,000 excess deaths among young Americans.
Likewise, today the Daily Telegraph, the UK’s centre-right newspaper of record, published an excellent piece titled Basket-case Britain is the definitive proof lockdown was an epic mistake.
And, as in America, this comes shortly after the London Times, the UK’s centre-left newspaper of record, published a cautiously-introspective piece on its support for lockdowns.
These are promising indications that the political mainstream, especially on the right, is coming around to the fact that lockdowns were a policy catastrophe more quickly than some might have worried.
Still, there’s much more to be done. Currently, the mainstream left and right are starting to realize lockdowns were a big mistake, while many career bureaucrats are still stuck pretending lockdowns were the greatest medical breakthrough since penicillin. There really needs to be a bipartisan consensus that lockdowns were an unprecedented policy catastrophe before we can start to see justice and have undue foreign and financial influence taken seriously.
Ivermectin Study’s Negative Conclusion is at Odds With Its Findings of Significant Clinical Benefit
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 21, 2022
A new study on cheap, repurposed Covid treatment ivermectin has concluded that its findings “do not support the use of ivermectin to treat mild to severe forms of COVID-19”. However, this conclusion is at odds with its findings.
The study, “Non-effectiveness of Ivermectin on Inpatients and Outpatients With COVID-19; Results of Two Randomised, Double-Blinded, Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trials”, is published in Frontiers in Medicine. It includes among its authors Dr. Andrew Hill, who last year appeared to suggest to Dr. Tess Lawrie that pressure had been applied to him not to find in support of ivermectin in an earlier paper. He told her, “I’m in a very sensitive position here”, and “I don’t really want to get into” revealing who from Gates-funded charity Unitaid, which funded the study, really wrote the conclusion of the paper downplaying the benefits of the treatment.
The new study gives a helpful introduction to the drug.
Ivermectin is a low-cost established drug with clinical benefits and minimal safety concerns, which has been shown to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 in vitro in studies. Ivermectin has rapid oral absorption, with high lipid solubility is widely circulated in the body, metabolised in the liver, and excreted in faeces. The adequate concentration of ivermectin inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 in the in vitro experiment is higher than the approved dose of ivermectin concentration in plasma and the lungs of humans. However, a meta-analysis demonstrated that the administration of a standard FDA-approved dose shows a positive clinical response in COVID-19 patients.
The study is a follow-up to an earlier, smaller study which showed promise. However, the promise has not, the authors say, been borne out.
Despite our previous more favourable results from a multicentre, randomised clinical trial in 69 COVID-19 patients at the beginning of the pandemic which noted the effectiveness of ivermectin in recovery and decreasing duration of hospital stay, the current results of this extensive study on 609 admitted patients with moderate to severe form of COVID-19 and 549 outpatients with a mild form of COVID-19, did not show adequate support for the effectiveness of this drug.
Despite this downbeat assessment, the new study did actually find a significant 32% improvement in ivermectin hospital patients achieving complete recovery, with 37% of ivermectin patients vs 28% of placebo patients achieving the outcome [95% CI, 1.04–1.66].
A number of the other key outcomes, including ICU admission and death, were also better in the ivermectin group, though the study was underpowered (not large enough) for these results to be statistically significant (i.e., we can’t be sure they weren’t coincidence). These were:
- ICU admission: 28 ivermectin vs 32 placebo patients; 9% vs 11%; 16% improvement [95% CI, 0.52–1.36].
- Invasive mechanical ventilation: 3% ivermectin vs 6% placebo; 50% improvement [95% CI, 0.24 –1.07].
- Supplemental oxygen by non-invasive ventilation: 244 ivermectin vs 252 placebo; 78% vs 85%; 7% improvement [95% CI, 0.86–1.00].
- Death: 13 ivermectin vs 18 placebo; 4% vs 6%; 33% improvement [95% CI, 0.35–1.39].
The fact that all these outcomes showed an improvement, and mechanical ventilation and death considerably so, is a signal that the benefit is unlikely to be solely due to chance. Thus the conclusion should really have been that a larger study is needed to see if the promising results can achieve statistical significance.
For outpatients, there were also some significant clinical benefits:
- Fever duration: 2.02 (± 0.11) days ivermectin vs 2.41 (± 0.13) days placebo; 16% improvement.
- On the day seventh of treatment, fever, cough and weakness were significantly higher in the placebo group compared to the ivermectin group.
A few results went the other way, though none of these were statistically significant. For inpatients:
- Length of hospital stay: 7.98 (± 4.4) days ivermectin vs 7.16 (± 3.2) days placebo; 20% worse [95% CI, 0.15–1.45]. The study claims this finding is “significant”, but the wide confidence interval going through 1.0 indicates not. The authors write that “delays in discharging patients to other facilities such as rehabilitation centres… might be the reason for more extended hospital stay other than treatment for COVID-19”.
- Mean oxygen saturation at day seven: 92.01 (Range: 72–99) ivermectin vs 93 (Range: 48–99) placebo; 1% worse [95% CI, –2.89 to 0.91].
- Relative recovery (where some symptoms persist on discharge): 53% ivermectin vs 60% placebo; 13% worse [95% CI, 0.76–1.00].
- Persistent dry cough (until seventh day): 5 ivermectin vs 10 placebo; 3% vs 9%; 36% worse [95% CI, 0.13–1.03].
For outpatients:
- Hospitalisation: 7% ivermectin vs 5% placebo; 36% worse [95% CI, 0.65–2.84].
- PCR negative on day five after treatment: 26% ivermectin vs 32% placebo; 19% worse [95% CI, 0.60–1.09].
The authors write that “no evidence was found to support the prescription of ivermectin on recovery, reduced hospitalisation and increased negative RT-PCR assay for SARS-CoV-2 five days after treatment in outpatients”. However, it’s important to note that this was for ivermectin given more than a week after symptoms began. Proponents of ivermectin often argue that treatment should be given within five days of exposure, i.e., as soon as possible.
The paper does mention this issue, though in a strange sentence with typographical errors perhaps indicative of a late addition: “Ivermectin may be going to be effective if it is given at the earliest possible time that clinical symptoms appear whiles [sic] the mean duration of symptoms before randomisation was 7.36 ± 3.43 days in the ivermectin group and 6.98 ± 3.63 days in the placebo group.” Typographical errors aside, the point is correct; an outpatient study really needs to start the treatment sooner.
There may also be a dosage issue. While the trial gave a dose of 0.4 mg per kg per day over a duration of three days, some have suggested a higher dose is required. The paper nods at this where it says: “Krolewiecki et al. assessed antiviral activity and safety of a five-day regimen of high dose ivermectin, comparing the control group in 45 patients with COVID-19. The findings support the hypothesis that ivermectin has a concentration-dependent antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2.”
A further potential problem with the study, which was conducted in Iran where ivermectin has been popular as a Covid treatment, is the question of how many of the placebo group were also secretly taking ivermectin anyway. In the limitations the authors note that “after the allocation of ivermectin or placebo, a significant number of patients declined to be participants”, which may be because they realised they wanted to be sure they were taking the drug. Taking an antiviral medication was an exclusion criterion for outpatients – 18 admitted to it, but how many continued with the trial (for which they were presumably paid) but took such drugs anyway? Furthermore, previously taking an antiviral does not appear to have been an exclusion criterion for inpatients, so it is unknown how many placebo-arm inpatients had taken ivermectin or another medication prior to hospitalisation. Once in hospital, I imagine they would not have been able to continue taking any medication secretly, and perhaps that explains why nearly a third of the inpatient participants were lost to follow up, most due to voluntary withdrawal or “incomplete intervention” (31.6%, 282 of 891; 136 ivermectin and 146 placebo).
Overall, I find the conclusion baffling given the findings. There were statistically significant benefits of ivermectin for complete recovery, shorter duration of fever and quicker clearing up of cough and weakness. There were also large but not-statistically-significant benefits for mechanical ventilation and death. The negative findings were mostly small and none were statistically significant. This is for a study which didn’t start the treatment until over a week into symptoms, and may have been confounded by people in the placebo arm also taking the drug.
Perhaps we will never get to the bottom of exactly how effective ivermectin is against COVID-19. But since it’s a safe drug (to quote U.K. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, “Ivermectin has proven to be safe. Doses up to 10 times the approved limit are well tolerated by healthy volunteers”) and this study shows once again that it gives some benefit – other studies show much greater benefit – why not be honest about that, allow medics to include it in their treatment protocol, and stop making such a fuss about stopping them?
The Lockdown Advocacy of Devi Sridhar
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | June 20, 2022
The Covid era gave rise not only to popular mania but also to astonishing intellectual pretension. The experts were everywhere. They had all the answers. They knew for certain that a path never tried in anyone’s lifetimes was the certain way to go in order to control a virus. And this fanatical attachment to one goal caused all other considerations to be pushed aside.
The end of the story was baked in from the start. The experts were proven to have massively exaggerated their prowess and understanding of events. On point after point, their models blew up. The epidemic would end the way they always have, through acquired immunity and endemicity. Nowhere did the methods of the vaunted experts achieve the goal; at best they delayed the end point and created tremendous destruction along the way.
Now there is a problem: how to dial it all back without admitting profound error. This is a particular problem for those who wrote books before the story was complete. And by complete I am referring especially to the tremendous waves of infections that came 20 months after lockdowns were first imposed.
A paradigmatic case is Devi Sridhar, professor and chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. During the pandemic, she became a ubiquitous presence on television for two years both in the UK and the US. Her main message was to advocate and defend lockdowns, masking, mandates, and the entire apparatus of compulsion that characterized the pandemic response in nearly every country in the world. Her message was always geared toward what is called eliminationism or zero Covid.
As a Rhodes scholar in a high prestige position, she was well positioned to be this messenger. She has a compelling way and presents well in the medium. Plus, the message she delivered was the one that earned an official stamp of approval from all mainstream media. She was also a pro at delivering an attitude of disdain toward anyone who dared question the zero Covid story.
Now she has a book out that further elaborates on her point of view. It has the right title: Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World and How to Prevent the Next One. It’s a pretentious title, presuming that she knows for certain that the pandemic was preventable and therefore she should be trusted to tell us what to do next time.
What’s striking is the contrast between the certitude of the body of the book in which she is an unapologetic defender of China-style lockdowns and the afterword, which must have been written only days before the book went to print. Here we have a very different tone, discussed toward the end of this review.
Sadly for her, the book came out just before a wave of new lockdowns came to China that wrecked the lives and liberties of hundreds of millions of people and made an enormous mess of the entire economic mission of the country. She must not have had time to revise the manuscript.
Of China, her book says:
The way China set about eliminating SARS-CoV-2 could be described as draconian. It undertook house-to-house testing and removed individuals to quarantine facilities if they tested positive (sometimes against their will); it used tracking technology to trace 99–100 per cent of those who had had contact with the infected; it locked down entire buildings so individuals could not leave their flats or have free movement; and it constructed completely new hospitals within days…
The Chinese government understood well that the virus moves when people move. So it stopped people moving internally…
The efforts to contain the spread within Wuhan were effective and focused on reducing the R number…
These measures to contain spread worked…
[China showed that] containment strategies (however draconian) could be effective at stopping this respiratory pathogen…
The evidence in February 2020 showed that containment was successful…
Within the span of three months, China had eliminated the virus fully within its borders…
This is the same message she delivered to millions day after day for two years.
We could just stop this review here, observing that none of the above turns out to be true. Currently, China faces an enormous problem. If we are to believe the data, vast swaths of China’s population still lack acquired immunity to Covid. Millions or billions need the exposure, and, as with all places in the world, the result for nearly everyone moderately healthy and not elderly will be recovery. This will happen with or without lockdowns.
President Xi Jinping, however, became convinced either by virtue of his ego or his circle of sycophants that his lockdowns two and a half years ago were his greatest achievement. He was celebrated by the World Health Organization and nearly every country in the world copied his brutal methods of virus suppression. He regarded it then as evidence that the CCP was destined to rule the future, by virtue of its masterful social, economic, and now medical management of society.
So of course the CCP cannot turn back now. He has stated repeatedly that there will be no compromise of the zero Covid stance that both he and Dr. Sridhar have long advocated. He must now either continue to threaten and enact lockdowns or figure out some clever way to back away from the position without admitting past error. He may in fact figure it out at some point.
After all, nearly every other government in the world has finally figured it out. Even under the best of assumptions that lockdowns offer some contribution to mitigate the ill-effects of a pathogen, the costs far outweigh those benefits. And those costs not only include economic, educational, and nutritional ones but also costs in terms of deaths from overdoses, despair, and self-harm from the inevitable demoralization from being treated like a prisoner or lab rat.
So I did read Dr. Sridhar’s book in search of some insight as to why she could have made such a profound error. All I found was a relentless and single-minded attachment to a zero Covid agenda, or some version of it, a genuine belief that the right deployment of human force could somehow make a virus go away. It truly boggles the mind.
The rest of the narrative is utterly predictable.
Countries that locked down are good, especially New Zealand and Australia. Countries that did not are bad, especially Sweden but also the UK and the US after reopening. Countries that kept lockdowns longer are good. Countries that opened up too soon are corrupt and rejecting “the science.” The Great Barrington Declaration is bad. Ramdesivir is good while Ivermectin is bad. And so on.
Her hard-core bias extends even to a rousing defense of Rebekah Jones, the low-level data employee in Florida who wrongly accused the Governor’s office of manipulating data in a case that was later tossed out.
The book is so partisan that she sometimes lets her politics even race ahead of her epidemiological position. For example, and this probably won’t surprise you, she comes to the defense of the George Floyd protests even in the midst of lockdowns:
In late May 2020, I was asked whether protesters were wrong to take to the streets. I replied that racism is also a pandemic, and one that Black Americans feel can’t be swept under the carpet any longer. While clearly mass gatherings during a pandemic are risky, I could understand that people were willing to take this risk in order to effect change for their children and the children of their children. This is how the civil rights movement has attempted to progress racial equality over decades.
In any case, you get the point here. She has a tribe and she wants to be its messenger. Still, I struggled through the entire text to see if I could find insight. This one jumped out at me:
While WHO was at the forefront of press briefings and leading technical and normative guidance to the pandemic, the World Bank had the financial power to help governments respond with key policies, whether through building up health systems and testing, putting in place economic packages to support lockdown measures, or in acquiring and distributing vaccines.
There we go: the World Bank subsidized lockdowns. Fascinating. That I did not know. This is a serious problem that needs to be fixed. How many millions face malnutrition as a result?
So much for the body of the book.
Probably the most telling part of the book is the afterword, written January 2022. Here our author jumps in with the latest information, namely that China had not in fact eradicated the virus and now keeps locking down, which she says is due to inferior vaccines. Within a few paragraphs, she – for the first time in the book – recognizes that even the best vaccines do not stop infection and do not stop the spread..
Whoops. Is she willing to rewrite the entire book in light of this last-minute realization that lockdown eliminationism and even mass vaccination cannot achieve the goal? No. Is she willing to rethink? Perhaps a bit but not enough.
While some say we should adapt normal social relations and mixing for the foreseeable future, I struggle with this line of thought. Humans are social: we need to hug, talk, dance, sing, kiss and be around others. We’re not bears or rhinos or other solitary creatures. We like seeing each other’s faces. And we know that a sense of community and connection are vital to wellbeing too. A holistic approach to public health is vital, and this includes not just people’s mental health but also their ability to pay rent, feed their family, stay warm through the winter and have a meaningful role in society, be that going to church or being part of a glee club. For a certain period of time, altering these made sense, so that we could avoid preventable illness and deaths; allow vaccines to be created, trialled and distributed in 2020 and into 2021; allow clinicians to better understand how to treat COVID-19; and allow a better understanding of transmission and risk.
Again, very interesting, especially because the change in tone from the rest of the book is so sharp. She doesn’t come close to repudiating her entire book – and she still believes that totalitarian measures somehow make sense for a “period of time” – but she does say that she is tired and exhausted and perhaps ready for some rethinking.
“I’ve taken a step back from media work… I’ve been testing several times a week, and, while I cautiously avoid crowded spaces, and wear masks on public transport and in shops, I continue to go to the gym and to hot yoga and to see friends outside or in small groups. I’ve found a sustainable way to live alongside COVID-19 for now… You’ve heard enough from me.
These are hopeful signs. It’s possible that even Devi Sridhar might eventually come to see the error of her ways. Or perhaps like most of the exalted experts who assisted in driving the world into the greatest calamity of the modern era, she will quietly disappear from the op-ed pages and television screens and go back to her prior life as a public health professor with degrees in anthropology. At some point, too, she will get Covid and discover with millions of others that it is part of the human experience to get sick and get well and become stronger as a result.
We will wait in vain for any sort of extended literary mea culpas. Not even the pensive afterword comes close. After all, when the next great health crisis presents itself, the WHO pushes for lockdowns again, and the major media empires need some great excuse to order people back home to be glued to the screen, the expertise of these compelling pundits – now with real media experience – will need to be called upon again.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Biden predicts ‘second pandemic’
Samizdat – June 22, 2022
The US needs more money to plan for “the second pandemic,” President Joe Biden said during a press briefing on Tuesday, as he praised his government’s efforts to ensure children under five can get Covid-19 vaccines.
Biden also hailed as “a very historic milestone” that the US has become the first country in the world to offer “safe and effective” Covid-19 vaccines for children as young as six months old.
When asked about how long the administration could keep up the new vaccine campaign, Biden suggested that the current budget would be enough to “get through at least this year” but stressed that “we do need more money.”
He went on to insist that he needed even more money for an unspecified “second pandemic.” “We need more money to plan for the second pandemic. There’s going to be another pandemic,” the president warned, without going into detail about what this new wave might entail.
Biden also took the opportunity to take a swipe at his predecessor, implying that Donald Trump’s lack of preparation increased the impact of the Covid pandemic. “We have to think ahead. That’s not something the last outfit did very well and that’s something we’ve been doing fairly well. That’s why we need the money,” surmised Biden.
Some health experts and agencies such as the World Health Organization have also warned of the likelihood of future pandemics. The WHO had previously announced that it plans to confirm a global pandemic treaty at the 2024 World Health Assembly, which it hopes will help “set out the objectives and fundamental principles in order to structure the necessary collective action to fight pandemics.”
The agreement, which heavily focuses on increased surveillance, vaccinations and “restoring trust in the international health system,” would legally bind its members under international law, superseding regulations of individual countries in an effort to get all nations to act as one in the face of a future outbreak.
Wake up, everyone!
By Paul Weston | TCW Defending Freedom | June 21, 2022
AFTER two years of Covid-19 insanity, the West has several new crises to deal with. Rampant inflation, coming food shortages and fuel shortages, monkeypox, a mystifying confusion about XX and XY chromosomes and a strange war in Ukraine which appears to be a proxy war between nuclear armed America and nuclear armed Russia.
I say a strange war because no one seems remotely interested in stopping it, no matter that it could lead to Armageddon. I think this is because Putin can be blamed for some of the deliberately engineered crises we are currently experiencing, so don’t expect it to end soon. Our armchair warrior political class seems more than happy to supply weapons to prolong the inevitable and are valiantly prepared to fight to the last surviving Ukrainian.
I feel as though we no longer exist as human beings in the eyes of our overlords. We are now just cattle being herded toward a dystopian future by a small number of immensely powerful individuals and global organisations who make no secret of the future they wish to build for us. This global coup d’état is driven by lies and corruption at every level of our national and international institutions. Nothing we have been told over the last couple of years is true.
For example, over the last thirty years in England and Wales an average 1.2 per cent of the population died every year, the vast majority of them old and ill. In 2020, the year of the alleged Covid-19 killer pandemic, just 1 per cent of the population died, and again the vast majority were old and ill. Yet despite experiencing a lower-than-average death rate, a Covid-19 emergency was declared which saw the biggest power grab by the state over the lives of its citizens since the dictatorships of Lenin, Hitler and Mao.
The most chilling aspect of this totalitarian takeover is that Western countries acted in unified lockstep as they tore up every tried and trusted historical public health protocol related to airborne viruses and replaced them with a tyranny that had no basis in medical or scientific reality.
People who recognised what was happening publicly protested and were met with state enforced paramilitary brutality never previously seen in the West. In Australia rubber bullets were used against peaceful protesters. In Canada, Justin Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to beat, jail and pauperise peaceful protesters who preferred to live their lives according to the Nuremberg Code rather than Trudeau’s Mengele Code. In New Zealand huge posters of a beaming Jacinda Ardern were ruthlessly displayed on advertising hoardings across the country.
The biggest issues I can see in all this criminal insanity are two-fold. Firstly, our ruling class now know they can do whatever they want to us if they terrorise us sufficiently, as in carry out acts of genuine terrorism against their own citizens to achieve a political ambition. Secondly, we now know exactly what they want to do to us because they meet up in Davos every year and shamelessly talk about it in very loud voices.
Their power is immense, and for the first time in history they have the ability to build a revolutionary new society without having to carry out violent street revolutions. All they need is electronic data and digital IDs linked to a government-controlled central bank digital currency, which all Western governments are currently implementing. Covid-19, mass vaccinations and digital Covid passes – please don’t think they have been consigned to history – were a necessary pre-condition of course if a Digi-Tyranny could ever become a reality.
Western governments are also working on legislation to both silence dissent on social media and stifle physical public protest. New Ministries of Truth are being formed which will disappear and memory-hole any written and spoken words our ruling class considers to be misinformation or disinformation. This is Orwell’s 1984 and it is happening before our very eyes.
Who are the people/organisations enacting this totalitarian Western coup d’état? Well, it is primarily the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the EU, Big Tech social media, the pharmaceutical industry, the entire Western political class and three gargantuan financial institutions called BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, along with a handful of monumentally wealthy billionaires including Soros and Gates.
The concerted power and wealth held by the above has completely corrupted politics, science, journalism, the judiciary, academia and medicine. There are still some brave souls from those professions who risk their careers by speaking out, but you will never see them via the mainstream media or the biggest social media platforms. Those we are allowed to see are bought and paid for propagandists who tell us nothing other than the revolutionary line.
I am fifty-eight years old now. I was born a long time after World War Two and my entire life – up until 2020 at least – was one of unimaginable ease and freedom compared to most humans who have ever lived. But the freedom I enjoyed is over now. Our future could be very grim indeed. Another pandemic will soon be coming our way and I suspect this one will be necessarily much more lethal than the last.
Also coming our way are ever rising interest rates to counter the deliberately engineered inflation. If these interest rates hit double figures, every average earning mortgage holder will lose their house. The manufacture of petrol and diesel cars will soon be phased out and extortionate taxes will be introduced to keep older ones on the road. Air travel for the masses is not part of the New World Order’s Green Agenda, nor is heating our homes with oil or gas.
They have told us what they want. A smaller population. A lower carbon footprint. A digital ID surveillance/social credit state capable of bending us to their dictatorial will. No more meat, just bugs; lots and lots of delicious bugs. The apparatchiks of the Green New World Order will still have their private jets, their beachside mansions, their haunches of venison and their champagne whilst we will own nothing, which I rather suspect will fail to induce delirious happiness whatever Herr Schwab might purportedly believe.
Can they achieve their publicly oft-stated agenda? Yes, they simply have to continue doing what they are already doing, although it will need to be substantially ramped up, hence my belief another pandemic is on the cards. In America they have the problem of gun ownership in the hands of ordinary citizens, so I think we will see huge efforts – by means more foul than fair – to urgently rectify this problematic issue for the New World Order.
Is it all doom and gloom? Not really. They have shown their hand and despite their seemingly limitless power and wealth there are only a few thousand of them whilst there are billions of us. I see our future as one of only two credible possibilities: freedom for us and jail for them, or slavery for us and even bigger yachts, private jets and sizzling steaks for them. It is up to us in other words. The very first thing the average person needs do is wake up. Before it is too late.
Fauci Finally Gets Covid: The Significance
BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | JUNE 17, 2022
What precisely happened in the month of February 2020, when Anthony Fauci and cohorts were plotting their pandemic response, is still a mystery. Jeremy Farrar, of the Wellcome Trust, in his book on the topic says that during these weeks, they went to burner phones, clandestine video calls, and warned family members that something terrible could happen to them.
Their top concern was the possibility of the lab leak from Wuhan. They needed to get to the bottom of it and prepare the spin. We know that the initial draft of the academic article denying the lab leak came out February 4, 2020, later published in the Lancet on March 16. But what happened in these three weeks – apart from the mid-February NIH junket to China to learn how to control a virus – remains foggy.
But this much we do know: by March 2, 2020, Fauci had his game plan lined up. Michael Gerson of the Washington Post wrote him on that day and asked about the purpose of social distancing. This was weeks before most Americans had even heard this euphemism for forced human separation. Was the idea to wait for a vaccine, Gerson asked?
Fauci answered in a private email as follows:
“Social distancing is not really geared to wait for a vaccine. The major point is to prevent easy spread of infections in schools (closing them), crowded events such as theaters, stadiums (cancel events), work places (do teleworking where possible… The goal of social distancing is to prevent a single person who is infected to readily spread to several others, which is facilitated by close contact in crowds. Close proximity of people will keep the R0 higher than 1 and even as high as 2 to 3. If we can get the R0 to less than 1, the epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
There we have it: the Fauci theory of how we get rid of the virus. We don’t need a vaccine. Just close things. Stay away from people. Don’t gather. Shut schools. Lock businesses and churches. All people stay away from all people. The R-naught will drop.
Then the virus will… and this is where the theory gets murky. Does it just vanish? Get bored? Get frustrated, give up, and vanish into the ether? And how long does this new social system of “social distancing” have to last? Years? Forever? And what happens once people start acting normally again?
This is very clearly crank science, one that confuses ex post data collection with causation itself and also seems to deny the workability of the human immune system. That such things would be written by a person in Fauci’s position is truly mind boggling. But the press went along, and still does after all this time.
What Fauci was imagining – and very few people picked up on it at the time – was the construction of a new social system. It was not just about this virus. It was about all pathogens and the whole functioning of society. He believed – or he decided to come to believe – that a re-engineering of the social order could successfully beat back common pathogens and bring about universal health.
He finally revealed this in his August 15, 2020, article for Cell that received very little attention at all. He was on his own attempting to implement an entire new social system based on a new ideology.
Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues. In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming.
This article reveals the most important point. The pandemic response was not just about this one pathogen. It was about what amounts to a political, economic, social, and cultural revolution.
It’s not socialism or capitalism. It’s something else entirely, something very strange, like a Rousseauian technocracy, simultaneously primitive and high tech, as managed by a scientific elite, an untested dystopia worthy of the most terrifying literature in the English language.
No one has voted for such a thing. It is something Fauci and his friends dreamed up on their own and deployed all their enormous power to enact just as a test, until it fell apart. The US and many parts of the world were in their grip for the better part of a year and two years in some places.
This is a scandal for the ages, one that far outstrips issues of tax-funded gain-of-function research, as important as that is. It’s even more important than reports that Fauci has been earning personal royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies that receive grants that he has personally approved. The real problem comes down to his power and the ability of elected representatives and courts to control him for many decades.
Regardless of Fauci’s millenarian vision, the course of the virus took the usual path but for one major exception: the waves of infection occurred based on class rank in society. There was a political hierarchy of infection that started with the working classes, moved to the bourgeoisie, hit the professional classes, then high-end journalists, and finally, at the very end came for the elite ruling class itself – Trudeau, Psaki, Ardern, Gates, and finally Fauci – regardless of their multiple vaccines.
And here is why Fauci’s covid infection is significant, 28 months after the first lockdowns. It’s a sign and symbol that his entire theory of virus control was wrong. He got his way with policy and it did not work. The virus finally landed on him, as if to reenact Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional story of Prince Prospero in his castle that he believed would protect him.
And as a result of his exposure, Fauci will surely (unless his repeated injection of the same vaccine harmed the operation of his immune system) gain the natural immunity that is already possessed by 78 percent of kids and likely two thirds of the general population.
It should also alert us to three points of moral urgency:
- We need to replace Fauci-style feudalism with a new theory of how to reconcile the freely functioning society with the presence of infectious disease, so that neither he nor people in his pay or sway can attempt this again.
- We need to act to disable the unmitigated power of administrative-state bureaucrats to seize control of the machinery of government.
- We need a new system to decentralize science away from privileged elites so that they can never again have monopoly control over what is considered to be the science much less posses the power to censor dissent.
These are the lessons, at least the start of them. This virus is either endemic or at least almost so, but we are left with astonishing social, cultural, and economic destruction from Fauci’s attempt to implement an experimental plan on the whole population not only in the US but all over the world.
We will suffer for many years or generations from it. And yet, in the end, infection is individual and probably unavoidable for most people. The immune system adapts. That’s how we evolved to coexist. To pretend otherwise is the very essence of denying the science.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
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Breast Cancer: Before You Consent
A new Unbekoming paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | September 18, 2026
Peter Gøtzsche reviewed every randomised mammography screening trial ever conducted for the Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane’s headline is that, assuming a 15% mortality reduction, one woman in 2000 avoids dying of breast cancer over ten years. Ten are overdiagnosed and treated. Two hundred experience false alarms.
But that headline assumes the reduction. When Gøtzsche looked only at the trials with adequate randomisation — the higher-quality ones — the reduction disappeared. No effect on breast cancer mortality. No effect on all-cause mortality.
This is the Cochrane finding, published in the establishment’s own database of systematic reviews.
No woman being asked to consent to a mammogram this week knows it.
That is why the new Unbekoming paperback exists. … continue
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- Why do we let Zionists decide what we can and can’t say?
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
- Fear Of Debate: Alarmist German Climate Scientist Calls On Mainstream Media To Discredit Skeptic Voices
- End-Of-August Arctic Sea Ice Extent Hasn’t Fallen In 20 Years, Official Data Show!
Aletho News 
