By Seth THÉVOZ

By Jonathan COOK

When I criticize meddling in Syria by Britain and America, or their backing of groups there that elsewhere are considered terrorists, it does not follow that I am, therefore, a cheerleader for the dictatorship of Bashar Assad or that I think that Syrians should be denied a better political system. Similarly, when I criticize Joe Biden or the Democratic party, it does not necessarily follow that I think Donald Trump would have made a better president.

A major goal of critical thinking is to stand outside tribal debates, where people are heavily invested in particular outcomes, and examine the ways debates have been framed. This is important because one of the main ways power expresses itself in our societies is through the construction of official narratives – usually through the billionaire-owned media – and the control and shaping of public debate.

You are being manipulated – propagandized – even before you engage with a topic if you look only at the substance of a debate and not at other issues: such as its timing, why the debate is taking place or why it has been allowed, what is not being mentioned or has been obscured, what is being emphasized, and what is being treated as dangerous or abhorrent.

If you want to be treated like a grown-up, an active and informed participant in your society rather than a blank sheet on which powerful interests are writing their own self-serving narratives, you need to be doing as much critical thinking as possible – and especially on the most important topics of the day.

Learning curve

The opportunity to become more informed and insightful about how debates are being framed, rather than what they are ostensibly about, has never been greater. Over the past decade, social media, even if the window it offered is rapidly shrinking, has allowed large numbers of us to discover for the first time those writers who, through their deeper familiarity with a specific topic and their consequent greater resistance to propaganda, can help us think more critically about all kinds of issues – Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Israel-Palestine, the list is endless.

This has been a steep learning curve for most of us. It has been especially useful in helping us to challenge narratives that vilify “official enemies” of the west or that veil corporate power – which has effectively usurped what was once the more visible and, therefore, accountable political power of western states. In the new, more critical climate, the role of the war industries – bequeathed to us by western colonialism – has become especially visible.

But what has been most disheartening about the past two years of Covid is the rapid reversal of the gains made in critical thinking. Perhaps this should not entirely surprise us. When people are anxious for themselves or their loved ones, when they feel isolated and hopeless, when “normal” has broken down, they are likely to be less ready to think critically.

The battering we have all felt during Covid mirrors the emotional, and psychological assault critical thinking can engender. Thinking critically increases anxiety by uncomfortably exposing us to the often artificial character of official reality. It can leave us feeling isolated and less hopeful, especially when friends and family expect us to be as deeply invested in the substance – the shadow play – of official, tribal debates as they are. And it undermines our sense of what “normal” is by revealing that it is often what is useful to power elites rather than what is beneficial to the public good.

Emotional resilience

There are reasons why people are drawn to critical thinking. Often because they have been exposed in detail to one particular issue that has opened their eyes to wider narrative manipulations on other issues. Because they have the tools and incentives – the education and access to information – to explore some issues more fully. And, perhaps most importantly, because they have the emotional and psychological resilience to cope with stripping away the veneer of official narratives to see the bleaker reality beneath and to grasp the fearsome obstacles to liberating ourselves from the corrupt elites that rule over us and are pushing us towards ecocidal oblivion.

The anxieties produced by critical thinking, the sense of isolation, and the collapse of “normal” is in one sense chosen. They are self-inflicted. We choose to do critical thinking because we feel capable of coping with what it brings to light. But Covid is different. Our exposure to Covid, unlike critical thinking, has been entirely outside our control. And worse, it has deepened our emotional and psychological insecurities. To do critical thinking in a time of Covid – and most especially about Covid – is to add a big extra layer of anxiety, isolation, and hopelessness.

Covid has highlighted the difficulties of being insecure and vulnerable, thereby underscoring why critical thinking, even in good times, is so difficult. When we are anxious and isolated, we want quick, reassuring solutions, and we want someone to blame. We want authority figures to trust and act in our name.

Complex thinking

It is not hard to understand why the magic bullet of vaccines – to the exclusion of all else – has been so fervently grasped during the pandemic. Exclusive reliance on vaccines has been a great way for our corrupt, incompetent governments to show they know what they are doing. The vaccines have been an ideal way for corrupt medical-industrial corporations – including the biggest offender, Pfizer – to launder their images and make us all feel indebted to them after so many earlier scandals like Oxycontin. And, of course, the vaccines have been a comfort blanket to us, the public, promising to bring ZeroCovid (false), to provide long-term immunity (false), and to end transmission (false).

And as an added bonus, vaccines have allowed both our corrupt leaders to shift the blame away from themselves for their other failed public health policies and our corrupt “health” corporations to shift attention away from their profiteering by encouraging the vaccinated majority to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority. Divide and rule par excellence.

To state all this is not to be against the vaccines or believe the virus should rip through the population, killing the vulnerable, any more than criticizing the US war crime of bombing Syria signifies enthusiastic support for Assad. It is only to recognize that political realities are complex, and our thinking needs to be complex too.

To be clear, I haven’t ‘changed my view’. I’ve kept an open mind throughout. I scorn the media’s silencing of dissenting scientists, the general celebration of vaccine profiteering, the unscientific discounting of natural immunity, and the divisive use of mandates to scapegoat https://t.co/83L1UXR4ga

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 3, 2022

‘Herd immunity

These ruminations were prompted by a post on social media I made the other day referring to the decision of the Guardian – nearly two years into the pandemic – to publish criticisms by an “eminent” epidemiologist, Prof Mark Woolhouse, of the British government’s early lockdown policies. Until now, any questioning of the lockdowns has been one of the great unmentionables of the pandemic outside of right-wing circles.

Let us note another prominent example: the use of the term “herd immunity,” which was until very recently exactly what public health officials aimed for as a means to end contagion. It signified the moment when enough people had acquired immunity, either through being infected or vaccinated, for community transmission to stop occurring. But because the goal during Covid is not communal immunity but universal vaccination, the term “herd immunity” has now been attributed to a sinister political agenda. It is presented as some kind of right-wing plot to let vulnerable people die.

I’ve had run-ins with Off-Guardian of late, but they’re right to highlight the WHO mucking about with the established definition of ‘herd immunity’. This kind of thing does nothing but undermine trust in science and scientists https://t.co/SgEMqnptZu

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 2, 2021

This is not accidental. It is an entirely manufactured, if widely accepted, narrative. Recovery from infection – something now true for many people – is no longer treated by political or medical authorities as conferring immunity. For example, in the UK, those who have recovered from Covid, even recently, are not exempted, as the vaccinated are, from self-isolation if they have been in close contact with someone infected with Covid. Also, of course, those recovered from Covid do not qualify for a vaccine passport. After all, it is not named an immunity passport. It is a vaccine passport.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has at least been open about the “reasoning” behind this kind of discrimination. “In a democracy,” he says, apparently unironically, “the worst enemies are lies and stupidity. We are putting pressure on the unvaccinated by limiting, as much as possible, their access to activities in social life. … For the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy.”

Notice that the lies and stupidity here emanate from Macron: he is not only irresponsibly stoking dangerous divisions within French society, he has also failed to understand that the key distinctions from a public health perspective are between those with immunity to Covid and those without it and those who are vulnerable to hospitalization and those who are not. These are the most meaningful markers of how to treat the pandemic. The obsession with vaccination only serves a divide and rule agenda and bolsters pandemic profiteering.

Crushing hesitancy

The paradox is that these narratives dominate even as the evidence mounts that the vaccines offer very short-term immunity and that, ultimately, as Omicron appears to be underscoring, many people are likely to gain longer-term immunity through Covid infection, even those who have been vaccinated. But the goal of public “debate” on this topic has not been transparency, logic, or informed consent. Instead, it has been the crushing of any possible “vaccine hesitancy.”

Dr John Campbell is always worth listening to. The bottom lines of the latest omicron research are positive:
a) It’s likely to be more like a cold
b) It’ll spread so quickly there’s a good chance we’ll have herd immunity within months, at minimal suffering https://t.co/GIpGYbXZOX

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 8, 2021

I have repeatedly tried to highlight the lack of critical thinking around the exclusive focus on vaccines rather than immune health, the decision to vaccinate children in the face of strong, if largely downplayed, opposition from experts, and the divisive issue of vaccine mandates. But I have had little to say directly about lockdowns, which have tended to look to me chiefly like desperate stop-gap measures to cover up the failings of our underfunded, cannibalized, and increasingly privatized health services (a more pressing concern). I am also inclined to believe that the balance of benefits from lockdowns, or whether they work, is difficult to weigh without some level of expertise. That is one reason why I have been arguing throughout the pandemic that experts need to be allowed more open, robust, and honest public debate.

It is also why I offered a short comment on Prof Woolhouse’s criticisms, published in the Guardian this week, of national lockdown policies. This evoked a predictably harsh backlash from many followers. They saw it as further proof that the “Covid denialists have captured me,” and I am now little better than a pandemic conspiracy theorist.

Framing the debate

That is strange in itself. Prof Woolhouse is a mainstream, reportedly “eminent” epidemiologist. His eminence is such that it also apparently qualifies him to be quoted extensively and uncritically in the Guardian. The followers I antagonize every time I write about the pandemic appear to treat the Guardian as their Covid Bible, as do most liberals. And they regularly castigate me for referring to the kind of experts the Guardian refuses to cite. So how does my retweeting of a Guardian story that uncritically reports on anti-lockdown comments from a respectable, mainstream epidemiologist incur so much wrath – and seemingly directed only against me?

The answer presumably lies in the short appended comment in my retweet, which requires that one disengage from the seemingly substantive debate – lockdowns, good or bad? That conversation is certainly interesting to me, especially if it is an honest one. But the contextual issues around that debate, the ones that require critical thinking, are even more important because they are the best way to evaluate whether an honest debate is actually being fostered.

Either Prof Mark Woolhouse has arrived at this view very late in the day, or corporate media like the Guardian have until now effectively gagged eminently qualified scientists critical of lockdown policy. Either way, it looks like we’ve been screwed over pic.twitter.com/Gmj1RjXrBe

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 3, 2022

My comment, intentionally ambiguous, implicitly requires readers to examine wider issues about the Guardian article: the timing of its publication, why a debate about lockdowns has not previously been encouraged in the Guardian but apparently is now possible, how the debate is being framed by Woolhouse and the Guardian, and how we, the readers, may be being manipulated by that framing.

Real, live conspiracy

Interestingly, I was not alone in being struck by how strange the preferred framing was. A second epidemiologist, Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician at Harvard who serves on a scientific committee to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saw problems with the article too. Unfortunately, however, Prof Kulldorff appears not to qualify as “eminent” enough for the Guardian to quote him uncritically. That is because he was one of three highly respected academics who brought ignominy down on their heads in October 2020 by authoring the Great Barrington Declaration.

Like Woolhouse, the Declaration offered an alternative to blanket national lockdowns – the official response to rising hospitalizations – but did so when those lockdowns were being aggressively pursued, and no other options were being considered. The Guardian was among those that pilloried the Declaration and its authors, presenting it as an irresponsible right-wing policy and a recipe for Covid to tear through the population, laying waste to significant sections of the population.

My purpose here is not to defend the Great Barrington Declaration. I don’t feel qualified enough to express a concrete, public view one way or another on its merits. And part of the reason for that hesitancy is that any meaningful conversation at the time among experts was ruthlessly suppressed. The costs of lockdowns were largely unmentionable in official circles and the “liberal” media. It was instantly stigmatized as the policy preference of the “deplorable” right.

This was not accidental. We now know it was a real, live conspiracy. Leaked emails show that Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president, and his minions used their reliable contacts in prominent liberal media to smear the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?” a senior official wrote to Fauci. The plan was character assassination, pure and simple—nothing to do with science. And “liberal” media happily and quickly took up that task.

The Guardian, of course, went right along with those smears. This is why Prof Kulldorff has every right to treat with disdain both the Guardian’s decision to now publish Prof Woolhouse’s criticisms – so very belatedly – of lockdown policy and Prof Woolhouse’s public distancing of himself from the now-radioactive Great Barrington Declaration even though his published comments closely echo the policies proposed in the Declaration. As Prof Kulldorff observes:

Hilarious logical somersault. In the Guardian, Mark Woolhouse argues that [the] UK should have used focused protection as defined in the Great Barrington Declaration, while criticizing the Great Barrington Declaration due to its mischaraterization by the Guardian.”

Hilarious logical somersault. In @guardian, Mark Woolhouse argues that UK should have used focused protection as defined in the Great Barrington Declaration, while criticizing the Great Barrington Declaration due to its mischaraterization by @guardian. https://t.co/lJfKVbzgaC

— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) January 3, 2022

Reputational damage 

If we put on our critical thinking hats for a moment, we can deduce a plausible reason for that mischaracterization.

Like the rest of the “liberal” media, the Guardian has been fervently pro-lockdown and an avowed opponent of any meaningful discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration since its publication more than a year ago. Moreover, it has characterized any criticism of lockdowns as an extreme right-wing position. But the paper now wishes to open up a space for a more critical discussion of the merits of lockdown at a time when rampant but milder Omicron threatens to shut down not only the economy but distribution chains and health services.

Demands for lockdowns are returning – premised on the earlier arguments for them – but the formerly obscured costs are much more difficult to ignore now. Even lockdown cheerleaders like the Guardian finally understand some of what was clear 15 months ago to experts like Prof Kulldorff and his fellow authors.

What the Guardian appears to be doing is smuggling the Great Barrington Declaration’s arguments back into the mainstream but trying to do it in a way that won’t damage its credibility and look like an about-face. It is being entirely deceitful. And the vehicle for achieving this end is a fellow critic of lockdowns, Prof Woolhouse, who is not tainted goods like Prof Kulldorff, even though their views appear to overlap considerably. Criticism of lockdowns is being rehabilitated via Prof Woolhouse, even as Prof Kulldorff remains an outcast, a deplorable.

In other words, this is not about any evolution in scientific thinking. It is about the Guardian avoiding reputational damage – and doing so at the cost of continuing to damage Prof Kulldorff’s reputation. Prof Kulldorff and his fellow authors were scapegoated when their expert advice was considered politically inconvenient, while Prof Woolhouse is being celebrated because similar expert advice is now convenient.

This is how much of our public discourse operates. The good guys control the narrative so that they can ensure they continue to look good, while the bad guys are tarred and feathered, even if they are proven right. The only way to really make sense of what is going on is to disengage from this kind of political tribalism, examine contexts, avoid being so invested in outcomes, and work hard to gain more perspective on the anxiety and fear each of us feels.

The corporate media is not our friend. Its coverage of the pandemic is not there to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more, and monetize that distress. The only cure for this sickness? A lot more critical thinking.

mintpressnews.com

The EU and especially the euro are in a corner.

The single currency was created with the aim of devaluating the northern EU currencies by bringing in the euro-weak-countries (PIIGS) into its fold. Having done this, these structurally weak countries have been able to weigh down the exchange rate of the euro. A euro with only “strong currencies” like the Deutsche mark and the French franc would have been much stronger and therefore less competitive (…). The result has been an impoverishment of the periphery and an enrichment of the centre of the EU empire.

In other words, the euro was designed to be structurally much weaker than the hypothetical German and French currencies, but stronger than the good, old Italian lira, Spanish peseta, or Greek drachma.

The reality is more subtle: in technical terms, the euro was born to be deflationary.

The aim was to devalue the euro to favour, particularly, German exports. For this reason, it must be assumed that the euro must be deeply deflationary, with relatively low consumer inflation.

Looking back, all this has happened since 2010, not only in the EU but in the entire western world. To save the financial system after the subprime crisis, a lot of money was artfully created but it wasn’t put in the hands of the people. In other words, it saved the banks and enriched a handful of financiers, yet it condemned most families to impoverishment, especially those living in the Euro-weak countries, which suffered parallel asset inflation.

In this context, it must be remembered that Italy was the only western country in the post-subprime era that did not have to save its national banks, which were more financially backward and therefore not involved in the so-called “creative” finance of mortgages.

On the contrary, Italy had to save just one single Italian bank with public money, but using Libyan money: Unicredit, which ended up almost bankrupt due to speculation by its Austrian and German branches. Gaddafi saved, as always, Italian companies that were in great temporary crisis, as was the case with Fiat in the 1970s.

Gaddafi was only to be slaughtered by a revolt that was carried out with incredible timing, and mainly at the advantage of Paris, Berlin, and partly London, within two years.

All in all, we can conclude that the euro currency is deflationary by definition, i.e. it only ‘works’ as designed when there is low inflation in the eurozone.

* * *

Now, let’s jump forward to current times.

Post-COVID, demand and consumption in the EU, previously stagnant, has picked up again after lockdowns, but only temporarily. The breakdown of the supply chain after the lockdowns, combined with an explosion in global commodity prices did the rest, creating a price explosion that was largely unexpected in its size. Adding to that a decrease in storage facilities, (and even on some extent) planned gas “shortages” took place in the EU especially in northern Europe, since their gas storages were not filled properly as they should have been. (Perhaps it was to “help” the approval of North Stream II, as a necessary requirement for the EU?)

These circumstances have caused the breakdown of important crisis containment mechanisms in the euro area. In other words, inflation, although tamed, will spiral out of control in the coming months, without corrective measures to the detriment, above all in countries that were most affected by the COVID crisis and that were most state-indebted, as well as institutionally weak.

Italy fits this description perfectly, because today it survives thanks to the ECB’s credit lines in the purchase of BTPs (Italian bonds) together with the PNRR money/Green EU deal with Draghi’s government, which pretends to make the GDP grow, but, in reality, it is only nominal growth.

Without writing it off, Italy’s debt is close to 180% without considering its shadow economy; basically leaving the country’s planned debt to be repaid at a later date. In the end, the Italian piloted default is just a matter of time, perhaps to be bartered lately in exchange for precious Italian assets as compensation.  In other words, a disguised colonisation, yet to come.

This has been the context for the lockdowns implemented in Europe for too long, which have removed the demand for goods. Lockdowns which are now possible again post Omicron.

In reality, lockdowns would be scientifically senseless today, given the absence of a medical crisis. Now they are being replaced by a targeted reduction of consumption, i.e. by excluding a large number of non-vaccinated people from social life, at least in Austria, Germany and Italy (once again united in their social-health destinies, as was the case 85 years ago).

* * *

So here we are, finally having to interpret the recent words of Mr. Giorgetti, the Italian Minister of Economy who said, on behalf of the EU, “that next year there could be blackouts in the eurozone” (therefore in Italy…).

This is a reminder: the last blackout of an entire nation – in darkness, see below – took place in Italy, in 2003.

In fact, the energy blackout recently announced by Giorgetti would have the same function as a lockdown: to remove demand, i.e. to lower consumption prices (inflation).

Knowing well that, as of Jan 1, 2022, with the new electricity and partly gas tariffs, companies, depending on the supply contracts, will find themselves facing double and even triple digit increases.

With further increases expected, even in double digits, Italian companies, in the second quarter of 2022, will be in a Catch-22 situation. Either, they must stop producing and pay penalties to their customers, or they must pay handsomely for energy and raw materials which would be at such huge prices that they would never be able to pass on to their customers during a systemic crisis.

Hence the need, rather than the option: to invoke force majeure to stop producing.

Now, let us ask ourselves: how does one stop producing industrial goods without being taken to court by customers/clients?

What better choice than a ‘state’ blackout?

Looking at the 2003 blackout, one realises that anything is possible, given how little was normal even then…

The case for a blackout next year would be very strong, especially in Italy. A country where there are still about as many state pensions paid as there are people working. In other words, a country technically close to the failure, firstly of its unsustainable social security system.

Italy’s industry is still relatively healthy, albeit small and medium-sized, which is the only bulwark in the country’s resilience. Knowing full well that next year we will be at the mercy of disproportionate production cost increases, and consequently on the consumer side/CPI.

So, if we think about it, a blackout might be an almost welcoming way of not honouring our contracts.

And, above all, to deny inflation: if a product is not on the shelf, what price must be shown? Maybe zero? Exactly… annihilating statistical inflation!

* * *

Never mind that, because if this happens, it will kill a country. But there is a further critical point – how will an eventual blackout be implemented?

History can help us. According to the Swiss report of the Federal Office of Energy, the 2003 blackout occurred in very strange situations, especially on the Italian side (but not only there).

In short, there were two fallen trees in a series in Switzerland, with some delay. Two short circuits without contact, i.e. physical interruption of the line but only of the electrical flow, for intrinsic safety.

In the middle of the night there was a phone call (not recorded, possibly even half denied in its full contents by the Italian authorities, some details seem to be still missing) from the Swiss operator to Rome for countermeasures at power grid level.

Between the first and the second fallen tree (in of itself a very strange and almost surreal event, due to the very mild weather conditions, see below), there was an ill-advised Italian decision to finally increase the power demand on the Peninsula side instead of lowering it.

Then the fall of the second tree, although in the absence of wind (in the Sils/CH area), resulting – like the first one – in a short circuit without contact.

It should be noted that the second tree is said to have fallen in the Hinterrein area close to the “Lei Valley”, where one of Switzerland’s main power stations is located, exactly the same area where the Swiss-Italian border had to be moved to build such strategic infrastructure for this constraint (Italian law 9.3.1957 n. 317, Italian-Swiss border protocol).

Ironically, the main shareholder of this power station was and still is Edison, based in Milan, originally part of the Montedison Group; and, indirectly, at the time, a Swiss company heavily participated by the French energy giant EDF (today, Edison is also owned by EDF).

In short, an international detective story, that we believe is unlikely to be repeated today.

* * *

Hence, this time, after the frightening Quirinale Treaty between the Rome political establishment and France, we should possibly look to Paris.

Please notice that one of the largest energy flows in Italy comes from the north-west arc, i.e. from France. And practically all this flow converges in the Rondissone knot, where most of the electricity imported from abroad converges.

In this context, a skilled observer would look for problems on the foreign supply line in Rondissone (close to Turin) and beyond, in order to anticipate rather than prevent, a possible blackout.

If the EU does not want to see its favourite creature, the euro, blow up, it must now block incoming inflation.

To finalize this scenario it is likely that between Brussels, Paris and above all Berlin – with Draghi at the helm now and possibly during the entire 2022, in Rome – these people are willing to do anything to save their own interests, which revolve around the current euro. Or a future one (…).

This is why we are putting so much attention on the implications of Giorgetti’s words, which are still to come…

By Stavroula PABST, Max BLUMENTHAL

In October 2021, it seemed as though the lockdowns that still paralyzed societies from Australia to New Zealand and Singapore were coming to an end, as these countries threw in the “Zero-COVID” towel following a year and a half of rolling restrictions and closures.

But with COVID-19 cases rising in Europe, several countries are implementing lockdowns all over again, often with clearly punitive motivations.

This November, Austria’s government announced that police would enforce a lockdown exclusively against unvaccinated citizens. Following days of massive protests, the policy was extended to everyone, with steep fines and even prison sentences to be imposed on those who refuse to comply, and a compulsory vaccination requirement tacked on for good measure.

Next door in Germany, where a new lockdown was announced this December for unvaccinated people, barring them from almost all public places except for pharmacies and supermarkets, Berlin is also weighing a vaccination mandate for all. One German constitutional lawyer has even proposed that refusers of the jab “be brought before the vaccinator by the police.”

Though statewide lockdowns have eased in Australia, the country is constructing internment camps for those who test positive for Covid, along with their Covid-negative “close contacts.” Harley Hodgson, an Australian held for 14 days in one such camp despite repeatedly testing negative for Covid, said of her experience: “You feel like you’re in prison. You feel like you’ve done something wrong. It’s inhumane what they’re doing.”

Initially marketed to the public as a means to “flatten the curve” and “slow the spread,” lockdowns now represent one of the most draconian aspects of the perverse New Normal that has metastasized amid an atmosphere of seemingly endless emergency.

While much of the public accepted such restrictions during the early days of the pandemic, they are now met with increasing resistance by citizens around the world who have suffered from economic devastation, homelessness, suicidal ideation, social isolation, domestic violence, addiction and the cancellation of routine medical procedures as a result of lockdowns.

The German police chase down anti-mandate and lockdown protestors for the “public health”. pic.twitter.com/mP15RJJc4P

— Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) November 30, 2021

The public health justification for these non-pharmaceutical interventions has not only been discredited in the eyes of millions across the globe, but by an array of scientific studies and data demonstrating that they likely caused more deaths than they prevented.

The lethal impact of lockdowns was particularly pernicious in the Global South, where hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people were driven into a cascading humanitarian crisis. As the World Food Program warned in 2020, “135 million people on earth are marching towards the brink of starvation” as a result of their economies shutting down to supposedly inhibit the spread of COVID-19.

In his book, The Covid Consensus, professor of African history at King’s College Toby Green chronicled the misery, migration outflow and mass death spawned by lockdowns imposed on populations from Africa to Latin America.

“Lockdowns were not a policy that made any sense in societies where many people live largely outside, and SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that circulates inside,” Green told The Grayzone. “Moreover, they made no sense in regions such as Africa where the population is much younger than in rich countries – they merely saw a massive shift of health burden from the global rich to the global young and poor.”

For most people on the planet, the economic and psychological harm experienced during the past 19 months was not the result of the pandemic per se, but of emergency-order restrictions governments imposed on them and justified as public health measures. In the Global North, such costly efforts did little more than delay the inevitable spread of COVID-19 while transferring wealth into the hands of Big Tech oligarchs who constitute the pandemic’s real “winners.”

Though public health scholars and some officials warned that lockdowns would do possibly irreparable damage to the global economy while only deepening the public health crisis, the politics of the Trump era enabled supporters of harsh restrictions to caricature critics as dangerous right-wing extremists.

“Discussion of the inevitable harm of lockdowns has been almost totally forbidden by most of the mainstream media and academia, while the left followed the lead of the Democratic Party, doing all it could to marginalize any discussion of the collateral damage of these measures,” Christian Parenti, professor of economics at the City University of New York and author of several books about policing and mass surveillance, commented to The Grayzone. “Any questioning of lockdown measures was cast as right wing, even fascist. But mostly the left just ignored the emerging facts, particularly regarding the carnage caused in the Global South.”

One of the most outspoken among the public health scholars sounding the alarm about the social cost of sweeping restrictions was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at  Stanford University. As a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated a strategy of focused protection instead of hard lockdown, Bhattacharya and his colleagues were subjected to social media censorship and mainstream media attacks.

“Lockdowns provided the illusion of control over a virus that was present in parts of the world and spreading far earlier than most officials believed,” Bhattacharya told The Grayzone. He added, “Much of the evidence that people have developed to argue that lockdowns work come from modelling studies that have proved incredibly inaccurate.”

Indeed, the initial inspiration for locking down the UK and parts of the US derived from a bunk model of projected fatalities that has since been discredited.

Lockdowns were inspired by bogus modelling by unqualified academics

On March 16, 2020, as the global consensus formed around implementing restrictions in some form, a professor from London’s Imperial College delivered a presentation to the British government that would prove pivotal. That academic, Neil Ferguson, introduced a model asserting that if the UK did not impose a harsh lockdown, 500,000 citizens would die of Covid-19 that year; and if it took only moderate steps to restrict public life, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson planned, 260,000 would die.

In either case, Ferguson insisted, the national healthcare system would be overwhelmed and the economy irreparably damaged. Within a week, Johnson’s government accepted Ferguson’s fatalistic model and locked down hard.

Around the same time, the Trump White House received a paper from Ferguson that envisioned a catastrophic death toll. His model predicted fatalities at a 25% higher rate than the CDC’s already stark projection: 2.2 million dead in the first year unless the US instituted lockdowns.

“What had the biggest impact in the model is social distancing, small groups, not going in public in large groups,” Dr. Deborah Birx, a leader of Trump’s coronavirus task force, referring to the Imperial College projection. The New York Times reported on March 16, the day the Trump administration received Ferguson’s paper: “White House Takes New Line After Dire Report On Death Toll.”

While Ferguson’s modelling succeeded in inspiring harsh lockdowns, it ultimately brought him public embarrassment. First, the professor was caught breaking the quarantine he personally inspired to enjoy a tryst with his lover – a married woman who complained that the lockdown “strained” her relationship with the professor. Then, as time went on, it became clear that Ferguson’s models had exaggerated the Covid-19 fatality rate by a factor of at least four.

“Yes, my prediction was off,” he admitted to the Times of London in August 2021. But by then, the damage was done.

This was not the first time Ferguson’s numbers had proven to be wildly off the mark. Back in 2001, Ferguson projected that as many as 50,000 could die from Mad Cow Disease. After a panicked government slaughter of some 6.5 million cattle, the mass death failed to come to fruition. (Only about 2,800 have died from Mad Cow in three decades).

In 2005, Ferguson was at it again, predicting up to 200 million global deaths from the bird flu. In the end, only a few hundred people died. Then in 2009, Ferguson warned that 65,000 could die from the swine flu in the UK alone. But when the dust cleared, he and his team were off by a factor of over 1000.

So why did governments across the Atlantic trust a serial exaggerator who appeared to have no formal training in epidemiology or computer modelling, and whose codes were buggier than a locust infestation?

Before briefings from Ferguson, leaders from Whitehall to Washington were already in a panic over the onset of the novel coronavirus. A haze of reporting in early 2020 made the coronavirus appear more deadly than it turned out to be, with some reports suggesting the fatality rate could rise to as high as seven percent.

Although it is now known that COVID-19 does not kill the vast majority of people it infects, with Infection Fatality Rates (IFR) of .15 percent overall and .05 percent for persons under 70, the confusion and uncertainty led many public health officials to act quickly. In reality, the coronavirus is a less lethal disease that spreads easily, making it harder to contain with human interventions.

Further, according to Toby Green of King’s College in London, British public health officials were easily seduced by the tech-centric presentation of academics like Ferguson.

“Let’s remember that in the UK, where Ferguson’s model first had its influence, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s advisor on Covid-19, had already written about the importance of a data-driven approach to policy,” Green explained. “Matt Hancock, the health minister, was also highly integrated into the tech sector through his family, which runs a tech business. So a computer-driven model [like Ferguson’s] was appealing.”

Somehow, the technocrats placed in charge of Covid-19 policy across the Atlantic demonstrated little concern for how the lockdowns they suddenly imposed would impact the economic and social wellbeing of the citizens they were supposed to protect.

A bonanza for tech oligarchs, “the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day” for the less fortunate

In the United States, lockdowns and various rolling restrictions triggered an economic catastrophe for working and poor people across the country, pushing those already on the financial precipice over the brink.

In the US in 2020, 40 percent of people making under $40,000 annually lost work, and almost three million women were driven out of the workforce due to an inability to balance work and caregiving and virtual learning obligations for children who could no longer attend in-person school or daycare. Dozens of airlines failed, and at least 200,000 small-businesses were shuttered.

Increased unemployment benefits and stimulus checks had a salutary effect on the economic well-being of average Americans, seeing personal savings rise 8 percent between 2019 and summer of 2021. But even if American poverty did not immediately surge, it may yet do so, now that stimulus checks, generous unemployment benefits, and the eviction moratorium have all been terminated by the administration of President Joe Biden.

As lockdowns drove inequality in the US, millions skipped routine medical care such as childhood vaccinations and cancer screenings, because the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommended that hospitals suspend non-essential and elective procedures. In May 2021, almost ten million routine screenings were missed in the United States, while other preventative health visits declined on a mass scale due to elective procedure suspensions, which may also lead to worsening public health problems in the long-term.

Due to the CDC’s recommendations, 1.4 million medical workers lost their jobs in April 2020. One medical record company estimated that screening for breast, colorectal, and cervical cancers dropped by 80% to 90% during March and April of 2020 compared to the same months in 2019. Now, the US is struggling with a surge of cancers and other ailments that went undetected because of overzealous and overly broad lockdowns.

While average Americans paid a heavy price for the restrictions, Big Tech oligarchs quickly emerged as the pandemic’s winners. In 2020, billionaires increased their wealth by 54 percent. In fact, the top 1% of U.S. households now officially control more money than the entire middle class, or the middle 60 percent of households by income, in the US.

While the pandemic response has adversely affected working people and small businesses worldwide, lifting restrictions is in fact against major corporate interests: Amazon’s stock even fell seven percent in July as re-openings stalled pandemic-related online buying.

As lockdowns took their psychological toll on the US population, opioid-related deaths surged to record levels – up 30% from the previous year across the country and up 40% in 10 states. The sharpest rise in deaths occurred in Black Americans, along with those aged 35 to 44.

Lockdowns and excessive closures have also contributed to an international rise in domestic violence.

Despair rose in a significant way with the crisis: according to the CDC, 25.5 percent of survey respondents aged 18-24 reported seriously considering suicide within the previous 30 days by the end of June 2020. The same study indicated adults were more than twice as likely to report considering suicide when compared to those surveyed before the onset of coronavirus.

Professor Stephen Reicher, a behavioral scientist who advised the UK government on Covid policy, commented: “The problem with lockdown is isolation; being cut off from people is bad for you psychologically and physically. It is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”

The impact of restrictions on young people, adolescents and babies who are at very little risk of illness with serious COVID-19, with a one in 50,000 chance of hospitalization and a two in one million chance of death for children, cannot be overstated. Babies and young infants, after all, require regular socialization and interaction for healthy development. Many of them, however, were only able to visit their closest family members over the past year and a half. Ultimately, extended periods of social isolation or loneliness can negatively impact a young individual’s health even decades later.

The overall outlook for young people, as suggested by the 2020 CDC study referenced above, is and remains grim. In Las Vegas, Nevada, schools opened in December of 2020 after an unprecedented 18 adolescent suicides were recorded in the district since March of the same year. And in the state of Victoria, Australia, about 340 teenagers each week were hospitalized due to mental health emergencies as of August 2021.

For many among the urban laptop class, including a large swath of the hyper-online Western left which still clamors for national school closures and demands lockdowns in the face of a handful of new cases (while crudely painting critics of official Covid policy as Nazis), quarantine orders merely enforced an already sedentary lifestyle that revolves around Zoom meetings, ordered food and Amazon deliveries. The restrictions further eliminated tedious commutes to work while providing those able to work remotely with the satisfying sense that staying home was a bold act of social solidarity.

Under this spectacular arrangement, which assumed individual behavior could slow down or contribute to the spread of a virus, isolation was framed as a moral choice that led many of those willingly confined to their homes to fear or vilify a working class that frequently provided them with vital services. And while non-pharmaceutical interventions have generally proven futile against COVID-19, the stentorian demands to socially distance and attendant shaming of those who fail to obey has done little more than generate hostility between friends, families, and communities.

“Lockdowns are a luxury of the rich,” Bhattacharya said, “and affect a certain class of people at the expense of others. A lockdown doesn’t mean all of society stops and we all sit in cages alone while we wait for the fires to go away. The poor and working class, many of them vulnerable and older, are asked to risk themselves, while another class of people stays at home protected.”

This was particularly true in the Global South, where class divisions are clearly drawn and most people live dangerously close to the poverty line.

Lockdowns drive debt, dependency and death across the Global South

The legacy of colonialism and imperialism has split the world economy into a “core” of wealthy economies and a periphery of poor economies that are largely dependent on exporting cheap raw materials and low-value added manufactured goods. When the wealthy core economies locked down in 2020, international trade contracted, triggering a violent economic whiplash in developing countries as their earnings from exports and tourism suddenly collapsed.

As a result, developing country debt has risen from an average of about 40 percent of overall GDP to over 60 percent. Throughout 2020, developing economies were forced to pay out 194 billion to their creditors, even as their economies contracted dramatically. This forced poor countries to cut deeply into social spending to maintain debt servicing from institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, the IMF has doled out “Covid funds” to 85 countries around the world. An analysis by Oxfam found that 85% of the 107 loans provided to these countries require them to impose austerity until well into the future to pay them back. Now, devastating impacts on future health and social spending in poor countries is practically inevitable.

With surging unemployment, reduced incomes, and fewer social services, the populations of poor countries in the Global South have experienced massive increases in hunger.

As early as July 2020, the Associated Press reported that an additional 10,000 children were dying of hunger every month “due to the virus.” In fact, the deaths were the result of governments’ choice to lock down. Indeed, the coronavirus has had very little effect on the health of children, except indirectly through bad policy. Thus, millions of children across the Global South who were not hungry in 2019 are hungry today because of the lockdowns.

In all, about 2.37 billion people – or about 30 percent of the world population and 320 million more people than in the previous year – did not have access to adequate food at some point during 2020.

As Nash Landesman reported for The Grayzone, extensive lockdowns with little social support by the US-backed government of Colombia led to mass unemployment, evictions, and widespread hunger throughout 2020, especially in working class neighborhoods of Bogotá, where residents placed red flags outside their homes to signal their sense of despair.

Mexicans similarly protested lockdown measures, with one vendor affixing a sign to her stall reading: “Mexico is NOT Europe. If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”

Mexico is not Europe, in Mexico if you don’t work you don’t eat, reads sign in entrance to the Coyoacán market. The government has ordered everyone to stay home to prevent #COVID19, but 60 million people work in informal economy and have no income if they don’t work. by me. pic.twitter.com/Ux62ifVFBY

— 𝓐𝓷𝓭𝓪𝓵𝓪𝓵𝓾𝓬𝓱𝓪 (@Andalalucha) April 8, 2020

And in Honduras, which has been ruled for over a decade by a corrupt US-backed government installed through a military coup, citizens facing food and water shortages due to lockdown took to the streets in protest in March 2020, encountering heavy police repression. The protests continued into September, with drivers blocking roads to demand compensation for wages lost during the forced quarantine.

Road blocks & protests continue in different parts of #Honduras. In #Tegucigalpa & Taulabé (just north of central city of Siguatepeque), ppl are blocking roads demanding food & water during #COVID19 lockdown In Taulabé, security forces just tear gassed & evicted protesters pic.twitter.com/o3bahQD63A

— Honduras Solidarity (@hondurassol) March 27, 2020

In India, meanwhile, where GDP shrank a record 7.3 percent from March 2020 to March 2021, a study of Uttar Pradesh state households found incomes contracting about 75 percent. Anthropologist Dr. Chandana Mathur of Maynooth University reported that the strict, yet poorly planned lockdowns in India kept millions of migrant workers away from income sources, forcing them into homes that were thousands of kilometers away from work or simply non-existent.

Just two days before the March 2020 lockdown, many transportation services in India ground to a halt, stranding and starving thousands of people at a time when strict stay-at-home rules were declared. To enforce the orders, police brutally beat those considered insufficiently compliant. One estimate found that about 1,000 people died from March to July 2020 due to the displacement.

In fact, mass suffering was anticipated by some governments and experts when the restrictions began. In March 2020, a cost-benefit analysis by the Dutch government’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy concluded health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. Similarly, a 2020 Actuarial Society of South Africa model posited that a lockdown in the country may lead to 29 times more deaths than the restrictions can prevent.

And indeed, when lockdowns and other stringent interventions were applied in South Africa, many suffered enormously. Researchers estimate that 47 percent of South Africans ran out of money for food in April 2020. While rates of deprivation have decreased, estimates of hunger in the country remained steady at 17 percent of households throughout April and May 2021.

South Africans also faced a decrease in overall life expectancy due to other restriction-perpetuated factors, such as an increase in HIV and tuberculosis related health issues thanks to treatment stoppages, outbreaks of other infectious diseases especially associated with malnutrition, poverty and suspension of relevant vaccination programs, and interruptions in maternal and infant care.

Despite such excessive restrictions in the country, which previously included a curfew, a ban on gatherings and even on alcohol sales, some estimates found that 80 percent of South Africans were still infected with COVID-19.

A recently published study by researchers at the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Free State, COVID-19 in South Africa, found that “no changes in the shape of the [epidemiological] curve can be attributed to the introduction or easing of any regulation at [the current time].”

Instead of flattening the proverbial curve, restrictions induced economic and social deterioration which killed millions in the name of public health, while depriving an entire generation of the global poor of the right to education.

Lockdowns brutalized the world’s poor while depriving generations of education

For governments across the world, Covid provided an opportunity to pummel their most vulnerable residents, as well as those who dissented from the official order. As Amnesty International’s European bureau stated in a detailed but under-acknowledged June 2020 report, “The police enforcement of lockdowns disproportionately impacted poorer areas, which often have a higher proportion of residents from minority ethnic groups.”

Among Amnesty’s most disturbing findings was that police searches of Black Britons rose by a full third in the first month of the pandemic; Roma populations across Eastern Europe were placed under militarized quarantines and cut off from food supplies, causing deprivation on a mass scale; homelessness surged across the continent, and refugees and minority residents were subjected to police brutality on a regular basis.

Throughout 2020 in New York City, Black and Latino residents received a whopping 80% of police summonses for supposedly violating social distancing measures, leading civil rights groups including a local chapter of Black Lives Matter to complain that Covid restrictions were being exploited to bring back dreaded “stop and frisk” policies.

In Greece, such measures have been exploited to target refugees, migrants, and others living on the margins of society. Greek authorities have even fined refugees arriving by boat to Chios island 5000 euros each for not providing proof of negative coronavirus tests in late August 2021.

Many refugees that I, Stavroula, am personally acquainted with in Greece avoided spending time outside during the country’s six month lockdown from November 2020 to May 2021 out of fear of arrest and deportation. The lockdowns, which often confined people to a few miles from their home, and which imposed curfews as early as 6pm, required everyone to possess a government-issued identification and a text message or written note explaining their reason for being in public.

Penalties for violating the restrictions could mean fines of 300 euros, about half a monthly salary in the country, which could financially ruin many Greeks. For those in the country without papers, not having the required documentation during an encounter with police could even lead to deportation.

Across the globe, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor and working class, have been arrested for violating quarantine and been locked up in crowded unsanitary jails where Covid infections run rampant.

In Washington DC’s municipal jail, 1500 inmates were held in de facto solitary confinement for over 400 days without basic services throughout 2020 and early 2021. Though most inmates had already contracted COVID-19, developing durable natural immunity to the virus, the lockdown was justified on the grounds of “slowing the spread.”

“An overwhelming majority of the jail’s inmates are Black, and many have not yet been found guilty of the crimes for which they were arrested,” the Washington Post noted.

In DC jail Covid lockdown, 1500 have been held in de facto solitary for over 400 days without basic services.

“An overwhelming majority of the jail’s inmates are Black, and many have not yet been found guilty of the crimes for which they were arrested.”https://t.co/ghaZRXFQE6

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 23, 2021

Similarly, St Louis city jail was the site of four prisoner uprisings since December 2020, with inmates forced into de facto solitary confinement for over a year with no trials. “People currently incarcerated…are tired of living in fear of COVID-19 and not being brought to trial,” one prisoner stated.

School-aged children and students around the world also suffered enormously under the weight of closures, particularly those in impoverished communities. In Uganda, citizens have spent large parts of the past two year under various forms of lockdown, with schools and recreation centers closed under orders of the US-backed leader Gen. Yoweri Museveni.

“An entire generation of our children is being plunged into the bottomless abyss of illiteracy and ignorance. I saw a docile wasted generation of young defenseless victims of Gen. Museveni’s warped COVID-19 directives loitering about and dwindling in hopelessness,” wrote dissident Kakwenza Bashaija after a visit to eastern Uganda.

The New York Times reported this November that Uganda’s ongoing school closures have consigned the county’s youth to possibly lifelong poverty. With educational institutions still off limits, the Times wrote, “young women, abandoning hopes of going to school, are getting married and starting families instead. School buildings are being converted into businesses or health clinics. Teachers are quitting, and disillusioned students are taking menial jobs like selling fruit or mining for gold.”

Poor and working class youth across the United States experienced similar educational setbacks as closures forced them out of the classroom. In the state of Virginia, for example, math achievement scores in 2021 were down by over 40% for eighth graders in comparison to 2018-19. Less than half of Black students from third to sixth grade were able to pass reading tests, while the math scores of disabled youth declined precipitously.

Glen Youngkin, a Republican who ran for governor in Virginia this year, highlighted these dismaying figures and slammed school closures in his closing campaign message. By capitalizing on the pent-up anger of parents in the state’s swing districts, Youngkin scored a surprise victory against a seasoned and well-funded opponent in a heavily Democratic state.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic bastion of New Jersey, incumbent Governor Phil Murphy nearly lost to a lesser known Republican challenger who hammered him over his support for some of the most stringent lockdown measures in the country. Murphy was walloped in Atlantic County, home of the Atlantic City resort and casino city where lockdowns pushed one third of small businesses into permanent collapse.

What’s not to like about the “Murphy lockdown”? https://t.co/29kSDvSym8 pic.twitter.com/8QniT8Yg5y

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 3, 2021

As the Biden administration considers new restrictions for US travelers, including placing the unvaccinated on a domestic no-fly list, the impact of lockdown policies has helped disrupt the international supply chain, driving inflation and shortages in supplies, gasoline, and even certain food items.

With the US government collaborating desperately with major corporations and retailers to repair the existing supply bottlenecks, some in the media class have urged convenience-accustomed Americans to simply lower their expectations.

While these lockdowns were implemented to supposedly blunt the impact of a public health danger, mainstream media have generally avoided a discussion of how well they mitigated the perceived crisis or of the severe social and economic harm they did to working people.

Despite the mass job loss, economic destruction, and increased hunger that non-pharmaceutical interventions have inflicted on the global population, the effectiveness of efforts such as lockdowns, curfews, school closures, and the constant PCR testing of healthy people are dubious at best.

Unpacking the misconception lockdowns work against COVID-19

Many credited lockdowns in China, Greece, Vietnam, and Australia with early COVID successes, contributing to a widespread perception that lockdowns are vital to saving lives, and, therefore, a compassionate choice. Such reasoning has led governments internationally to proceed with lengthy closures of daily life.

According to Dr. Bhattacharya, these policies might be appropriate to halt the spread of a given virus depending on its profile and status. “There are diseases that are incredibly deadly, but not particularly infectious, where quarantining and sharp lockdowns locally can be quite effective,” Bhattacharya explained. “For instance, we limited the Ebola [virus] outbreaks in this way.”

Could COVID-19 have been addressed through sharp interventions as Ebola was? The answer depends in part on the properties of the virus, such as how deadly it is and how and how easily it spreads. Oftentimes, more lethal diseases spread less easily than their weaker counterparts, and that’s because the host will either die or know what they have and isolate themselves accordingly, thus halting transmission. Despite significantly higher fatality rates (25-90%, depending on the outbreak) in relation to COVID-19, Ebola is less infectious than other diseases and does not spread through the air: in fact, it typically dies within thirty seconds outside bodily fluids.

In contrast, COVID-19 is a respiratory virus that likely spreads through aerosol transmission. Echoing the now-discredited modelling from the Imperial College of London, media coverage from early 2020 made the coronavirus appear more deadly than it turned out to be, with some reports suggesting the fatality rate could rise to as high as seven percent. In reality, the coronavirus is a less lethal disease that spreads easily, making it harder to contain with human interventions.

Because COVID-19 is a seasonal virus that tends to flourish in winter, much like the flu, early COVID “victors” like New Zealand and Australia were fortunate to get hit with it during their respective summers. They also are geographically isolated. The rest of the world was not so lucky.

Drawing on studies of virus prevalence in California urban areas in March 2020, for example, Bhattacharya concluded it was “too late” for the coronavirus measures that state officials issued to help eliminate the virus, with about 3-4% of survey respondents reporting they already had COVID-19 antibodies.

Such numbers suggest that the virus was present much earlier in many parts of the world than originally believed, rendering subsequent preventive pandemic measures futile in eliminating or slowing the virus despite their stringency. In other words, based on the nature of its spread and its widespread establishment in many communities, the virus had already taken root in an irreversible way.

“You don’t get up to 2 to 4 percent disease spread [of COVID-19] unless you’ve had it spreading for a while,” Bhattacharya said in reference to the California seroprevalence study. “That means 96 percent of the population [at the time was] still susceptible to the virus, and far from endemic. But way too far gone to actually have hope that any lockdowns will stop the disease.”

Despite the tendency to resort to them when cases rise, the evidence of lockdowns’ effectiveness in inhibiting the spread of coronavirus is threadbare.

Peru, which boasts the world’s highest COVID-19 death rate despite imposing hard lockdowns, was a case in point. Meanwhile, Greece locked down in November 2020 at around 2,500-3,000 cases daily, only to open again for tourism six months later with similar case numbers. Then there was Belarus, a country of over 9 million which did not lock down or introduce a mask mandate, and boasted one of Europe’s lowest COVID death rates all the way up to the Delta surge in Eastern Europe.

The International Monetary Fund, or IMF, reportedly offered Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko $940 million in COVID assistance on the condition that he imposed harsh pandemic restrictions. Lukashenko said he refused, proclaiming, “the IMF continues to demand from us quarantine measures, isolation, and a curfew. This is nonsense. We will not dance to anyone’s tune.”

By June 2021, only a minority of Belarusian citizens told pollsters they favored more COVID-19 restrictions.

Despite their widespread utilization as a non-pharmaceutical intervention against COVID-19, the shaky evidence for lockdowns does not end with anecdotes and country-specific strategies: dozens of academic and scientific studies call into question their efficacy or otherwise argue that the social, economic, and health related harms they pose significantly outweigh the risks. Their conclusions include the following (thread compiled by twitter user @the_brumby):

• In Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison, Aarhus University Economics Professor Christian Bjørnskov writes that after “[u]sing two indices from the Blavatnik Centre’s Covid 19 policy measures and comparing weekly mortality rates from 24 European countries in the first halves of 2017-2020, and addressing policy endogeneity in two different ways, I find no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development.”

• In Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19, Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, and John P. A. Ioannidis, a team of Stanford University academics and research data scientists, conclude that “there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (“lockdowns”) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020.”

• Medical researchers and doctors Rabail Chaudhry, MD, Justyna Bartoszko, MD and Sheila Riazi, MD (University of Toronto Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine), George Dranitsaris, MD (University of Ioannina Department of Hematology) and Talha Mubashir, MD (previously University of Toronto Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, now at the University of Texas McGovern Medical School Department of Anesthesiology) write in A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes that “government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.”

• In Stay-at-home policy is a case of exception fallacy: an internet-based ecological study, academics and researchers at Brazil-based institutions, including the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, R. F. Savaris, G. Pumi, J. Dalzochio & R. Kunst address early data favoring lockdowns and stay-at-home policies through an analysis of mathematical models and data from 87 regions worldwide. In “yielding 3,741 pairwise comparisons for linear regression analysis…[they] were not able to explain if COVID-19 mortality is reduced by staying at home in ~ 98% of the comparisons.”
• In Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation, French medical researchers Quentin De Larochelambert, Andy Marc, Juliana Antero, Eric Le Bourg and University of Paris Professor of Physiology Jean-François Toussaint write that the “[s]tringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.” Instead, they conclude that nations with stagnating life expectancies and high rates of income and non-communicable disease —in other words, existing characteristics of a nation’s demographics— faced higher mortality rates regardless of government interventions.

• And in Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response, University of Waikato Economics Professor John Gibson concludes that “Lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths…[t]he apparent ineffectiveness of lockdowns suggests that New Zealand suffered large economic costs for little benefit in terms of lives saved.”

These dozens of studies are consistent with pre-COVID-19 pandemic literature emphasizing the ineffectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns.

“Almost all [pre-pandemic planning guides before the coronavirus] emphasized respect for civil rights, disrupting societies as little as possible, protecting the vulnerable, and not spreading panic,” said Dr. Bhattacharya. “The lockdowns and the media narrative and the public health narrative of March 2020 violated all those principles.”

In a 2006 paper, Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, academics at the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (now known as the John Hopkins Center for Health Security) in Baltimore, Maryland, wrote: “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”

Documents as recent as the 2019 World Health Organization (WHO) guide, Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza, furthermore, state that the “evidence base on the effectiveness of [Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions] in community settings is limited, and the overall quality of evidence was very low for most interventions.”

While already-existing pandemic literature naturally could not make COVID-19 specific recommendations, a well-established understanding of the general ineffectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions for respiratory viruses largely went unheeded as media and government-driven fear gripped the population in early 2020. Everyday people paid and continue to pay the price.

“Making poor people a lot poorer” and shortening life spans

While they may not be effective at limiting the spread of coronavirus, lockdowns are effective at destroying the economy, people’s livelihoods, and perhaps the social fabric itself as individuals grow used to remaining distant from friends, coworkers, family and community.

And while income and education losses, extensive isolation, and other COVID-related disruptions are devastating in the short-term, they also can inflict long-term adverse impacts on the length and quality of life, even decades later.

Childhood years are vital to shaping an adult’s overall well being, and adverse events that elicit extended stress responses throughout one’s youth can have significant impacts on lifespan, and risk of mental health issues and chronic physical health issues in the long term.

Long-term unemployment, a common phenomenon during COVID-19, can also shorten life expectancy, with Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter concluding in 2009 that mortality rates are 50 to 100 percent higher for individuals the year after involuntary income loss, and 10 to 15 percent higher overall for the next 20 years of life.

Consistent stress itself, certainly exacerbated by ongoing coronavirus restrictions, can also trigger or exacerbate long-term health problems. Highlighting such issues in detail in COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink, University of Alberta Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics Dr. Ari Joffe concluded that aggressive interventions such as lockdowns will cost society far more WELLBY, or Well-Being-Years, than foregoing them over time.

Generally, extreme restrictions hit marginalized populations and working class people the hardest, especially in places where many were employed informally, and must therefore leave their homes illegally to work during stay-at-home orders. Fines for breaking restrictions and curfews are often prohibitive, moreover, and fail to address that many people are inadequately housed and cannot consistently follow such rules.

Even the WHO has appealed against lockdowns, acknowledging the strain lockdowns place on the disadvantaged. “We really do appeal to all world leaders, stop using lockdown as your primary method of control,” WHO COVID-19 envoy Dr. David Nabarro told British broadcaster Andrew Neil. “Lockdowns have just one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”

As the logic behind “stopping the spread” through indefinite lockdowns is questioned even by top public health authorities, the policy has reappeared with a vengeance in Europe, where it has been weaponized against non-compliant populations and to intimidate citizens into line with government policy. A winter of lockdowns, coercion and threats begins

The government of Austria triggered waves of national protest this November when it became the first in the world to announce a lockdown exclusively imposed on unvaccinated people. Just days before resigning, then-Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said he aimed to establish a “threatening backdrop” for those who refused to take the jab, promising that “Christmas will be uncomfortable” for them.

Days later, Schallenberg extended the lockdown to all citizens, imposing fines of up to $1660 for anyone who violates the restriction, per violation, and announced a policy of compulsory vaccination for all. For those unable to pay fines for remaining unvaccinated, their refusal “can be converted into a prison sentence,” as The Guardian reported. Those who did not take the jab by December 12 would remain under lockdown, underscoring the punitive agenda behind the policy.

Slovakia followed Austria’s lead, imposing a lockdown on unvaccinated citizens on November 18 before it expanded the policy to the entire population. The next country to impose an unvaccinated-only lockdown is Germany, where public health officials blame a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” for the fourth wave of COVID-19 cases. “Probably by the end of this winter, as is sometimes cynically said, pretty much everyone in Germany will be vaccinated, cured or dead,” remarked German Minister of Health Jens Spahn.

However, in Portugal, which has run out of people to vaccinate due to the country’s near-total uptake, infections are also surging, prompting the government to declare a state of emergency and impose a new bevy of restrictions. And in Gibraltar, officially the most jabbed place on the planet, with a 99% vaccination rate, authorities cancelled official Christmas festivities following a surge of COVID-19 cases. The news confirmed a November 2021 study from the US CDC that found that vaccinated people are “no less infectious” than those who are unvaccinated.

Just as the failure of vaccines to prevent the spread of COVID-19 became apparent, international media began filling up with panicked headlines about a terrifying new variant. Labeled “Omicron” by the World Health Organization on November 26, 2021, the variant reportedly originated in southern Africa. The doctor who discovered the variant has said all cases tend to be mild so far. According to the government of Botswana, it arrived thanks to four fully vaccinated travelers.

Among the first prominent public health pundits to hype the supposed danger of Omicron was Tom Peacock, a virologist from the Imperial College of London’s department of infectious diseases – a wing of the same Bill Gates-sponsored institution responsible for the discredited models that influenced the UK and US government’s first lockdowns by grossly overestimating the death toll from COVID-19.

Just spotted: very small cluster of variant associated with Southern Africa with very long branch length and really awful Spike mutation profile including RBD – K417N, N440K, G446S, S477N, T478K, E484A, Q493K, G496S, Q498R, N501Y, Y505Hhttps://t.co/kgA9c1hKDa

— Tom Peacock (@PeacockFlu) November 23, 2021

Even before the threat from the so-called Omicron variant is known, the US and EU have enacted new restrictions which are certain to ravage the already weathered economies of southern Africa. On November 26, the Biden administration issued a ban on flights from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, and Malawi. (At the time of publication, several of these countries have yet to register a single Omicron case).

“We are now entering a world where borders close for every variant,” Toby Green, author of The Covid Consensus, commented to The Grayzone. “It’s quite clear that Western governments and media don’t care at all about lives and livelihoods in poor countries. Tour guides, hotel porters, restaurateurs, those who depend on international conferences and study abroad visits – a large proportion of service industries in the Global South – will be devastated. And who benefits? Service industries in rich countries, where the profiteering of the last 20 months will get spent.”

For millions at the mercy of the new wave of restrictions, a dark winter has just begun.

thegrayzone.com

Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse. And (no coincidence), this ‘marker’ has come just as U.S. Covid deaths in 2021 have surpassed those of 2020. This has happened, despite the fact that last year, no Americans were vaccinated (and this year 59% are vaccinated). Clearly no panacea, this mRNA ‘surge’.

Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.

Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too (by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids at risk and elevating heating costs unduly), and the Pharma establishment will be aware that a new B.1.1.529 variant has made a big jump in evolution with 32 mutations to its spike protein. This makes it “clearly very different” from previous variants, which may drive further waves of infection evading ‘vaccine defences’.

Translation: a new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect. And what of inflation then, we might ask.

It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at Christmas markets (that’s if they open at all). A big reversal was foreshadowed by this week’s news: vaccine mandates and lockdowns, even in highly vaccinated areas, are returning. And people don’t like it.

The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Élite activity, has asked ‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?

Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.

Are you paying attention yet? The great ‘transition’ is conceived as a hugely expensive shift towards renewables, and to a new digitalised, roboticised corporatism. It requires Big (inflationary) funding to be voted through, and a huge parallel (inflationary) expenditure on social support to be approved by Congress as well. The social provision is required to mollify all those who subsequently will find themselves without jobs, because of the climate ‘transition’ and the shift to a digitalised corporate sphere. But – unexpectedly for some ‘experts’ – inflation has struck – the highest statistics in 30 years.

There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its ‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no dissidence.

A 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” by then dissident and future Czech President Vaclav Havel begins mockingly that, “A SPECTRE is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called ‘dissent’”. “This spectre has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting.” Well, today, as Michael Every of Rabobank notes, “the West has polarisation, mass protests, riots, talk of obligatory vaccinations in Europe, and Yanis Varoufakis arguing capitalism is already dead; and that a techno-feudalism looms”. Now, prompting even greater urgency, are the looming U.S. midterms. Trump’s return (even if confined just to Congress), would cut the legs from under BBB, and ice-up Brussels too.

It was however, precisely this tech revolution, to which Varoufakis calls attention, that both re-defined the Democrat constituency, and turned tech oligarchs into billionaires. Through algorithmically creating a magnetism of like-minded content, cascaded out to its customers, it has both smothered intellectual curiosity, and created the ‘un-informed party’, which is the today’s Managerial Class – the party of the credentialed meritocracy; the party, above all, smugly seeing themselves as the coming era’s ‘winners’ – unwilling to risk a look behind the curtain; to put their ‘safe space’ to the test.

Perversely, this cadre of professionally-corralled academics, analysts, and central bankers, all insist that they completely believe in their memes: That their techno-approach is both effective, and of benefit to humanity – oblivious to the dissenting views, swirling around them, down in the interstices of the internet.

The main function then of such memes today, whether issued by the Pharma Vaccine ‘Command’; the MMT ‘transition’ Command; the energy ‘transition’ Command; or the global managerial technocracy ‘transition’, is to draw a ‘Maginot line’ – a defensive ideological boundary, a “Great Narrative” as it were – between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling classes, and with that of any other ‘truth’ that contradicts their narrative. That is to say, it is about compliance.

It was well understood that all these transitions would overturn long-standing human ways of life, that are ancient and deeply rooted and trigger dissidence – which is why new forms of social ‘discipline’ would be required. (Incidentally, the EU leadership already refer to their their official mandates as ‘Commands’). Such disciplines are now being trialled in Europe – with the vaccine mandates (even though scientists are telling them that vaccines cannot be the silver bullet for which they yearn). As one high ‘lodge’ member, favouring a form of global governance notes, to make people accept such reforms, you must frighten them.

Yes, the collective of ‘transitions’ must have their ‘Big, overarching Narrative’ – however hollow, it rings (i.e. the struggle to defend democracy against authoritarianism). But it is the nature of today’s cultural-meme war that ultimately its content becomes little more than a rhetorical shell, lacking all sincerity at its core.

It serves principally, as decoration to a ‘higher order’ project: The preservation of global ‘rules of the road’, framed to reflect U.S. and allied interests, as the base from which the clutch of ‘transitions’ can be raised up into a globally managed order which preserves the Élite’s influence and command of major assets.

This politics of crafted, credentialised meme-politics is here to stay, and now is ‘everywhere’. It has long crossed the partisan divide. The wider point here – is that the mechanics of meme-mobilisation is being projected, not just in the western ‘home’ (at a micro-level), but abroad, into American ‘foreign policy’ too (i.e. at the macro-level).

And, just as in the domestic arena, where the notion of politics by suasion is lost (with vaccine mandates enforced by water-cannon, and riot police), so too, the notion of foreign policy managed through argument, or diplomacy, has been lost too.

Western foreign policy becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather is primordially focussed on the three ‘big iconic issues’ – China, Russia and Iran – that can be given an emotional ‘charge’ in order to profitably mobilise certain identified ‘constituencies’ in the U.S. domestic cultural war. All the various U.S. political strands play this game.

The aim is to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) into mobilisation on some issue (such as more protectionism for business against Chinese competition), or alternatively, imagined darkly, in order to de-legitimise an opposition, or to justify failures. These mobilisations are geared to gaining relative domestic partisan advantage, rather than having strategic purpose.

When this credentialled meme-war took hold in the U.S., millions of people were already living a reality in which facts no longer mattered at all; where things that never happened officially, happened. And other things that obviously happened never happened: not officially, that is. Or, were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

Russia and China therefore face a reality in which European and U.S. élites are heading in the opposite direction to epistemological purity and well-founded argument. That is to suggest, the new ‘normal’ is about generating a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive ‘realities’, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … and which are intended to bemuse adversaries – and nudge them off-balance.

This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not. It underlines that politics is no more about considered strategy: It is about being willing for the U.S. to lose strategically (even militarily), in order to win politically. Which is to say gaining an ephemeral win of having prompted an favourable unconscious psychic response amongst American voters.

Russia, China, Iran are but ‘images’ prized mainly for their potential for being loaded with ‘nudge’ emotional-charge in this western cultural war, (of which these states are no part). The result is that these states become antagonists to the American presumption to define a global ‘rules of the road’ to which all must adhere.

These countries understand exactly the point of these value and rights-loaded ‘rules’. It is to force compliance on these states to acquiesce to the ‘transitions, or, to suffer isolation, boycott and sanction – in a similar way to the choices being forced on those in the West not wishing to vaccinate (i.e. no jab; no job).

This approach reflects an attempt by Team Biden to have it ‘both ways’ with these three ‘Iconic States’: To welcome compliance on ‘transition issues’, but to be adversarial over any dissidence to mounting a rules framework that can raise the ‘transitions’ from the national, to the supra-national plane.

But do the U.S. practitioners of meme-politics, absorb and comprehend that the stance by Russia-China – in riposte – is not some same-ilk counter-mobilisation done to ‘make a point’? That their vision does stand at variance with ‘the rules’? Do they see that their ‘red lines’ may indeed be ‘red lines’ literally? Is the West now so meme-addicted, it cannot any longer recognise real national interests?

This is key: When the West speaks, it is forever looking over its shoulder, at the domestic, and wider psychic impact when it is ‘making a point’ (such as practicing attacks by nuclear-capable bombers as close to Russia’s borders as they dare). And that when Russia and China say, ‘This is our Red Line’, it is no meme – they really mean it.

Fifteen years ago, a man who was head of the GW Bush White House bio-terrorism study group, and a special adviser to the President, unexpectedly found himself propelled into becoming the ‘father’ of pandemic planning, after Bush had come to his bioterrorism people to demand some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. “We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”. From his perch of influence – serving an apocalyptic president — Dr Venkayya became the driving force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics.

The then White House guidelines (born out of a bio-terrorism context), allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and with churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment. It seemed so simple; “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?”: A model of disease control, based on stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.

Well, from there, the “founding father of lockdowns” (not unnaturally) became successively head of pandemic policy at the Gates Foundation, and then President of Global Vaccine Business Unit. However, as U.S. commentator Jeffrey Tucker observes, the policy models developed by this White House study group “kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period — some of them still not public — and what you observe is not science, but ideological fanaticism in play”.

Whatever its parentage, the lockdown movement that this adviser authored is global, ferocious, and, as a fully credentialised meme (bio-war parentage, White House and Gates), is almost irrepressible. It is the same in today’s euphoric stock markets: everyone gets caught up in the dance … chasing credentialised stock narratives to the point of irrationality. Who cares about the fundamentals, contra-indications, or even warnings from financial or medical experts. This pandemic policy approach has evolved into a form of contagion, in itself.

As in markets, so in politics: Memes, however well-credentialised, shift. The global political meme since early 2020 of lockdown and vaccine pandemic control – that became a quasi-hegemony – now is being overtaken by a fresh meme, and a new rising phase of politics: the politics of inflation.

Hot inflation figures are already defining the debate on the Biden agenda, the broader economy, and spooking the White House. Prices rose in the U.S. 0.9% from last month, for an annual inflation rate of 6.2% (the biggest inflation spike in 30 years).

This spike in inflation may sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB), potentially killing a quick deal on the $1.75 trillion package. Many Americans are unsettled, finding themselves inhabiting this ‘weird pandemic economy’. Shelves are empty. Wages are up, but so are prices (by more than official figures suggest), on almost anything you want to buy. The stock market soars, on the conviction that the Fed can never allow ‘the market’ to fall more than 10%. The economy is adding jobs, albeit mainly low quality ones. But ports are backlogged. ‘For hire’ signs are plentiful. Yet businesses report difficulty recruiting workers. And no one knows when things are going to straighten out, or even if they will straighten out.

Republicans have been ramming home the message that the inflation spike effectively, is a covert government ‘tax’, and they blame Biden’s ‘Big Spend’ for the inflation demon’s frightening apparition. Some ‘up’ the anxiety further, reminding Americans that the global ‘Davos’ élite have been openly telling us that one day we will own nothing; have no privacy, and will be happy. And the way they will make it happen, it is said, is through destroying the value of money.

It seems that the ‘politics of fear’ may be ‘crossing the aisle’. But, in this shift, Big Tech cannot ride so easily to the Establishment’s rescue. With the vaccine meme, it has been relatively routine for the Tech social media to censor and delete all contrarian opinion, whether credentialed or not; but when it comes to inflation, ‘fact-checking’ becomes not just redundant, but counter-productive, for the ‘facts’ are visible with every purchase made. And every consumer can attest that prices are rising well above 6.2%.

Inflation will become the hottest political issue as we head toward 2022. Two ex-Federal Reserve members say the Fed should raise rates to “at least 3%,” and maybe 4%. And two current Fed Presidents warn that the Treasury market is “not as resilient” as it should be, and that even modest stress could break it.

The former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, says that if the Fed doesn’t deal with inflation, then it “could result in the re-election of Donald Trump”. The Fed however, is locked tight in a corner of its own making: it has to finance Biden’s big BBB spend – and this implies keeping interest rates low (to keep Federal interest expenditure from ballooning). To ‘Go Big’ with fiscal spending will just accelerate inflation, yet this what the White House wants to do, when it says that spending will win the voters hearts, and that Biden too, very much shares Americans’ worries about inflation, and the prospect of rising mortgage payments. It is a plain non-sequitur.

Another ‘fully credentialised’ meme, chased to the point of exuberance, has been the ‘re-opening’ and return of ‘normal’ meme – if only (and when) vaccination rates were to reach 70% (a rate recently upped to 90%). But there is no normal. We’re living in a new post-pandemic world. The ever more complex, network, economic system is experiencing breakages at key points.

The notion that the economy could be locked down for two years, and then simply would ‘rebound’ just as ‘it was’, entirely intact, was always magical thinking, (and yet was widely embraced on Wall Street). The more complex the system, the greater the risk of systemic instability, as cascades start to slide away.

And human psychology and social culture is yet another complex networked system. The pandemic has made us question the ‘way we were’, and to rethink our life-balance. The behavioural changes induced by the Great Depression, for instance, did not fade until 30 years after the Depression was over. Such is the staying power of social trauma – whether it be war, depression or pandemic. Accordingly, we will not likely recover from this pandemic according to the logic embraced by the ‘bounce back’ meme.

On the whole, the ‘meme-politics of lockdown and vaccine mandates’ may be fading, but the inflation meme and the economic aftermath meme has only just begun.

Digging down deeper, we find that all this furious meme-chasing does have a common thread. Tucker observed that that the original pandemic planning was deeply ‘ideological’. How so? It may have become political-ideological since 2020, but the planning was years earlier. The link perhaps is expressed in the career progression of the ‘father of lockdown’ (as Tucker calls him): aide to the U.S. President, head of pandemic policy with the Gates Foundation and President of the Global Vaccine Business Unit.

The link would seem to be the commingling of Big Tech (Silicon Valley), Defence Tech, Big Business (Davos) and Big Pharma – giving birth to the technocratic managerialist mindset. (The managerial technocratic approach which so spectacularly blew-up, with the U.S. rout in Afghanistan, leaving in its wake only systemic human instability seeping across the nation).

Tucker gives us this thought about the ‘ideology’ underlying so many of these seemingly credentialised memes:

“In a surprising interview, Bill Gates said the following: “We didn’t have vaccines that block transmission. We got vaccines that help you with your health, but they only slightly reduce the transmission. We need new ways of doing vaccines.”

“What can we make of Gates’s passing statement: “We need a new way of doing vaccines”?”, Tucker asks. “Let’s travel back in time to examine his career at Microsoft and his shepherding into existence the Windows operating system. By the early 1990s, it was being billed as the essential brain of the personal computer. Security considerations against viruses were not part of its design, however, simply because not that many people were using the internet …

“The neglect of this consideration turned into a disaster. By the early 2000s, there were thousands of versions of malware (also called bugs) floating around the internet, and infecting computers running Windows worldwide … The problem of malware was dubbed ‘viruses’. It was a metaphor. Not real”.

It’s not clear that Gates ever really understood that. Computer viruses aren’t anything like biological viruses. To maintain a clean and functioning hard drive, you want to avoid and block a computer virus at all costs, explains Tucker. Any exposure is bad exposure. The fix is always avoidance until eradication.

“With biological viruses, we have evolved to confront them through exposure, and let our immune system develop to take them on. A body that blocks all pathogens without immunity, is a weak one that will die at the first exposure, which will certainly come at some point in a modern society. An immune system that confronts most viruses and recovers, grows stronger. That’s a gigantic difference that Gates never understood.

“In short, keeping viruses out of computers constitutes the single biggest professional struggle in Gates’ life. The lesson he learned was that pathogen blocking and eradication was always the path forward. What he never really understood is that the word virus was merely a metaphor for unwanted and unwelcome computer code. The analogy breaks down in real life.

“After finally stepping back from Microsoft’s operations, Gates started dabbling in other areas, as newly rich people tend to do. They often imagine themselves especially competent at taking on challenges that others have failed at simply because of their professional successes … And what subject did he pounce on? He would do to the world of pathogens what he did at Microsoft: he would stamp them out! He began with malaria and other issues and eventually decided to take on them all. And what was his solution? Of course: antivirus software. What is that? It is vaccines. Your body is the hard drive that he would save with his software-style solution.”

In parenthesis, we should note that dualism in ratiocination has be-devilled western thinking since the outset: First, the divine sphere of perfection redeeming the corrupted sinful sphere of humanity. And in its secularised form: Science redeeming wayward humanity towards universal utopias. And in our Tech age, AI ‘software’ correcting and ‘improving’ human hardware.

Here is the point; and here the thread: All our seemingly credentialised memes are hollow, in the same way Gates’ understanding of biology is. “Early on in the pandemic, to get a sense of Gates’s views”, Tucker says, “I watched his TED talks. I began to realize something astonishing. He knew much less than anyone could discover by reading a book on cell biology from Amazon. He couldn’t even give a basic 9th-grade-level explanation of viruses and their interaction with the human body. And yet here he was, lecturing the world about the coming pathogen and what should be done about it. His answer is always the same: more surveillance, more control, more technology”.

Let’s not pin this all onto Gates however – this dualistic way of ratiocination runs through all of western modernity. Tech vaccines are the solution to the Covid virus. And, forced (human) separation is good for placing the malware into quarantine. The real-economy is the hardware that Central Bank ‘software’ will protect against recessionary pathogens. The Davos’ Re-Set will upload new global software for a ‘fairer, greener future’. A fourth Industrial Revolution is the digital technological management that will clean out Climate malware. Etc, etc.

In reality, all these are highly complex network systems, not susceptible to dualistic intervention. They work – if they work – as organic wholes. At best, we face systemic instability, as a result of these naïve ‘software’ interventions. At worst, systemic collapse.

As millions of U.S. workers are about to be made redundant in the wake of the Biden administration’s harsh vaccine mandate, a recent study by Harvard University, which appears to show no discernable link between people fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases, deserves a second look.

By all indications, there is a Cateogy-5 socio-economic hurricane barreling down on the United States, yet few people – least of all in the legacy media – are willing to talk about. Possibly as early as next week, U.S. companies with a workforce of 100 or more will be forced to ensure that its employees are vaccinated or regularly tested. Aside from forcing many companies to close their doors forever, the mandate is expected to affect the lives of some 80 million Americans, many of whom will opt to drop out of the workforce rather than be forced to submit to a medical intervention.

This week, the issue came to a head as Southwest Airlines was forced to back down on its demand that employees be vaccinated by December 8^th as thousands of airline workers – including pilots, mechanics and crew members- went on sick leave simultaneously in a ‘silent strike’ against the mandate. The concerted labor action, which the mainstream media went to great pains to conceal, resulted in the cancellation of thousands of flights.

NOW – Seattle Fire and Police, discharged for noncompliance with the vaccine mandate, turn in their boots at the city hall.pic.twitter.com/O8ogfdaYTd

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) October 19, 2021

Meanwhile, in the background of this intensifying labor crisis, compounded by severe breaks in the supply chain, are disturbing reports that Pfizer, the Manhattan-based pharmaceutical giant, is enjoying unprecedented legal privileges when it comes to negotiating the use of its product with foreign governments.

According to Transparency International, a London-based watchdog, out of Pfizer’s 73 international deals involving the Covid-19 vaccine, only five contracts have been formally published by governments – and these with “significant redactions.”

Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group, revealed contracts that required governments “‘to indemnify, defend and hold harmless Pfizer’ from and against any and all suits, claims, actions, demands, damages, costs and expenses related to vaccine intellectual property.”

Why the massive veil of secrecy to protect Big Pharma, which stands to earn tens of billions of dollars off of vaccine sales in 2021 alone, if the cure was truly safe and effective?

This is where a healthy injection of scientific inquiry and second opinion would be most welcomed, not only to check the overreaching power of government in our daily lives, but to demonstrate the very real limitations of a draconian vaccine mandate in the fight against the coronavirus.

Former Washington State patrol troopers placed 74 hats and boots on the steps of the capital today for the 74 troopers that were fired over @JayInslee vaccine mandate! Un believable! pic.twitter.com/ItcLovEfm9

— Dawn-A.K.A. Tyson (@FireandIce1227) October 20, 2021

Presently, the media has been cultivating the narrative that any surge of new coronavirus cases in the United States is being driven by areas with low vaccination rates. If the ‘anti-vaxxers’ would just roll up their sleeves for the jab, the argument goes, we could finally get back to some semblance of normalcy. But does that prescribed cure bear any relationship with scientific truth? Are vaccines alone making a significant dent against the pandemic? A recent study put out by Harvard University appears to turn that wishful thinking on its head.

Despite the non-stop hype about the need for every single person on the planet to receive a vaccine before it’s safe to venture outdoors again, Harvard researchers dispelled that notion in one fell swoop when they wrote: “At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days.” The very next line is no less shocking: “In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.”

By way of example, consider the current conundrum involving Iceland and Portugal. Despite the fact that both of these countries have over 75 percent of their population fully vaccinated, they have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than other much-less vaccinated countries, like Vietnam and South Africa, where just 10 percent of the populations are fully vaccinated.

Meanwhile, tiny Israel, with over 60 percent of their population fully vaccinated, registered in September the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. These statistics fly smack in the face of media-inculcated convention.

Firing people because of an unconstitutional vaccine mandate is wrong.

— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) October 19, 2021

The very same unexpected trend was detected inside of the United States, which is on the verge of falling to authoritarian thinking. Of the top five counties that have the highest percentage of population fully vaccinated (99.9–84.3 percent), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies four of them as “high” transmission zones. Conversely, the researchers showed that of the 57 counties classified as “low” transmission counties by the CDC, 26.3 percent (15) have percentage of population fully vaccinated below 20 percent.

In light of these findings, the researchers were forced to conclude that they detected “no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated.”

In its interpretation of these findings, the researchers said that the current reliance on vaccines as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences “needs to be re-examined, especially considering the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant and the likelihood of future variants.” It’s important to emphasize this was not a call to shelve the vaccines, but rather to use them in combination with other “pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions.”

“Such course correction,” the researchers write, “becomes paramount with emerging scientific evidence on real world effectiveness of the vaccines.”

In closing, it would be wise to heed the words from the Harvard team at a time when society is being increasingly and unnecessarily divided between two warring camps – the vaccinated and the vaccinated.

“In summary, even as efforts should be made to encourage populations to get vaccinated it should be done so with humility and respect. Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good. Importantly, other non-pharmacological prevention efforts (e.g., the importance of basic public health hygiene with regards to maintaining safe distance or hand washing, promoting better frequent and cheaper forms of testing) needs to be renewed in order to strike the balance of learning to live with COVID-19 in the same manner we continue to live a 100 years later with various seasonal alterations of the 1918 Influenza virus.”

That seems to be sound scientific advice we can all live with, without destroying our societies and economies in the process.

New Zealand, the last of the dedicated “COVID Zero” nations on earth, has completed its transformation into a full-blown tyrannical regime, and shockingly, it has come with the consent of the vast majority of Kiwis.

Ja, smittskydd är jobbigt… Det skyddar ju bara liv, hälsa & ekonomin. pic.twitter.com/YGfEqBy5B4

— jan höglund (@janhoglund) September 2, 2021

Once hailed as the media and “public health experts’” favorite COVID-19 managerial “success story,” the puff pieces have been increasingly hard to find, as Wellington has spawned a dystopian concoction of insane, despotic government edicts, claimed as an absolutely necessary part of their everlasting fight against a disease with a 99.8% recovery rate.

Exclusive: Dr Anthony Fauci on why NZ ‘rose to the top’ in Covid battle https://t.co/c6FHHWGbja pic.twitter.com/RBAHaltFWA

— nzherald (@nzherald) December 6, 2020

Just observe what has happened in the Five Eyes partner nation during this week alone:

1) Virtually the entire country is once again under an indefinite lockdown, after a few COVID-19 cases were reported throughout the nation.  A single case necessitates a “snap lockdown,” in which all rights of millions of citizens are immediately restricted and indefinitely subject to the containment of a seasonal respiratory disease. The current lockdown has been extended over Auckland until at least mid September, with many predicting a much lengthier sentence. According to past precedent, Kiwis will not receive their freedom back until — this is the truly insane part of Zero COVID — there is zero community spread of COVID-19.

And the second another case pops up on the radar, the entire country goes back to square one of the Zero COVID protocol.

Covid 19 coronavirus Delta outbreak: Auckland lockdown could last ‘three to four weeks’, expert says, via @nzherald https://t.co/y5dK7T0Bm5

— Nino Brodin (@Orgetorix) September 2, 2021

2) A man is being shamed by his countrymen for having the audacity to “escape” from a government-sanctioned COVID internment camp. The camps have been described in a more positive, but false light by the press and government officials as “quarantine hotels,” but it is most certainly an internment facility, as leaving is not allowed, and it carries a fine and lengthy prison sentence.

The Hill reported: “The person was charged with failing to comply with New Zealand’s coronavirus health order. Under a new law passed last year, he could face a fine or up to six months in jail if convicted.”

Man facing charges after escaping quarantine hotel in New Zealand https://t.co/6pzI6x3aTF pic.twitter.com/85iHWJICrc

— The Hill (@thehill) September 2, 2021

3) The country’s police and military services are installing security checkpoints throughout New Zealand in an effort to make sure citizens are not traveling during the lockdown. Freely traveling during the lockdown now carries a massive fine and/or prison sentence as punishment.

Police set up checkpoints across Auckland to prevent non-essential travel as New Zealand recorded 75 new cases of COVID-19. Auckland will remain in a strict level 4 lockdown for another two weeks, but restrictions for the rest of the country were loosened https://t.co/9BC92LkTRq pic.twitter.com/qipRa7dxds

— Reuters (@Reuters) September 1, 2021

Police checkpoints in Auckland as New Zealand records 75 new Covid cases https://t.co/Rt9ZZhtPba pic.twitter.com/m2Lg343WbU

— City A.M. (@CityAM) September 1, 2021

New Zealand is now the only country in the world left that is dedicated to COVID Zero, the pursuit of the total elimination of a virus from their nation, which has been under a government-sanctioned self-siege since the beginning of 2020. All of the other nations that attempted to pursue the pseudoscience behind COVID Zero have failed in catastrophic fashion. New Zealand has transformed from a highly-touted COVID “success story” to a full-fledged house of horrors, and sadly, there is no end in sight to the ongoing madness.

dossier.substack.com

The land Down Under appears to be reverting back to its original status as a penal colony as government officials, looking more like prison wardens than any servants of the people, clamp down on demonstrators weary of more Covid lockdowns.

A heavy police presence in the major Australian cities on the weekend didn’t stopped thousands of protesters from taking to the streets in what many saw as a last-ditch effort to protect their severely threatened liberties and freedoms.

The protests came after New South Wales announced its second extended lockdown, which puts Sydney’s 5 million residents under strict curfew conditions until mid-September. The wait will seem all the more excruciating, however, as rumors are flying that the shelter in place orders may be extended all the way until January.

I’m really depressed. I see no end to this nightmarish tyranny.

I just want to leave Australia and never come back.

— Geronimo (@NototyrannyNOW) August 20, 2021

Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city behind Sydney, citizens face similar restrictions, which mean that – aside from going shopping within a designated radius from their homes, exercising for an hour a day outdoors, and going to work so long as they are engaged in “essential employment” – have essentially become prisoners inside of their own homes.

At this point in Australia’s history, the only thing that remains certain is the uncertainty, which makes the lockdowns all the more unbearable.

Images from Australia’s two major cities on Saturday showed powder keg conditions as demonstrators squared off against police, who responded with batons, pepper spray and mass arrests (It will interesting to see if Big Media describes the police actions against the lockdown protesters in the same compassionate way it described the actions taken against Australia’s very own Black Lives Matter protests around the same time last year. As the Guardian sympathetically reported: “At least 20,000 attended the Sydney [BLM] march which passed off peacefully, except for ugly scenes when police officers used pepper spray on protesters who had flowed into Central station after the rally finished.” It will be advisable not to hold your breath). In live footage obtained by Facebook user ‘Real Rukshan,’ large groups of police are seen confronting individual citizens, seemingly guilty of nothing else aside from just being there.

In one scene (at the 2:10 marker), an elderly man who appears to be leaving a Starbuck’s coffee shop is surrounded by no less than five police officers, who proceed to handcuff the man and, presumably, take him to prison. In another scene (at the 0:30 mark), two men are seen standing in front of the Bank of Melbourne confronted by six officers. In front of them on the street are four mounted officers astride anxious horses. The feeling conjured up in these incidences is the same: authoritarian police-state overkill.

Given the massive police presence amid the steady deterioration of basic human rights a person might get the impression that Australia is really dealing with an existential crisis. While that may be true with regards to obesity, drug abuse and homelessness, it seems to be a real exaggeration when it comes to Covid-19. After all, while evidence of the above mentioned scourges is visible everywhere in the country, the only place the coronavirus seems to exist in Australia is on the nightly news channels (which, by the way, have done a very poor job of keeping their audiences up to date on latest developments. Sources in New Zealand, for example, have informed that the media there has largely ignored the story of anti-lockdown protests happening just across the Tasman Sea).

For example, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, in an effort to portray the pandemic as enemy number one, expressed from the boob tube her “deepest, deepest sympathies” to the families of three people who died overnight from/with the coronavirus. Who were these fatalities? The public was not informed of their identities, but Berejiklian described them as “a man in his 80s, and a man in his 90s, and a female in her 90s.”

It’s just a hunch, but could the comorbidity in each of those “tragic” cases have been that silent killer popularly known as ripe old age? Yes, every life is precious and worth saving, but is Australian officialdom secretly shooting for absolute immortality among the population and not just prevention? That would certainly be the height of irony if true considering that the effort is killing just about everyone. In fact, it seems that the real pandemic attacking the Australian people is government-sponsored fear.

Meanwhile, Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews added insult to injury when he commanded from his bully pulpit that citizens, now deprived of their favorite drinking holes to while away the jobless hours, were forbidden from removing their masks to drink alcohol in the great outdoors. As to whether the consumption of a non-alcoholic beverage outdoors would also fall within the tight confines of the mask regime, dear leader did not say. However, the answer seems pretty clear since the state is actually using police helicopters to shoo away sunbathers from the nation’s many famous beaches.

People are letting off flares now on Lonsdale Street in the CBD for the anti-lockdown protest, choppers are overhead. @theage pic.twitter.com/xbkNbeuPIS

— Cassie Morgan (@cassieemorgan) August 21, 2021

All of this insanity has befallen the people Down Under after the continent has witnessed the barest uptick of Covid cases. In the state of New South Wales, for example, where Sydney is located, there were just 825 acquired infections reported on Saturday, an increase from the 644 the day prior. In the state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, the situation appears even less worrying, with just 61 cases reported as of Saturday. These low infection rates, taken together with a high level of public skepticism with regards to the safety of the Covid vaccines, translates into just 29 percent of the population opting to be jabbed to date.

.@ScottMorrisonMP has presided over the biggest Big State government that Australia has ever seen.

And don’t try to tell me #covid19 is an extraordinary circumstance.

We’ve had two World Wars, Spanish Flu and the Great Depression and NEVER has the government behaved this badly.

— Alexandra Marshall (@ellymelly) August 22, 2021

So as the petty tyrants Down Under seem more concerned with getting every single Australian citizen the Big Pharma jab – together with the lifetime of booster shots and lockdowns that will certainly follow – the populace is more concerned about how to save their collective health, sanity and jobs. That’s no easy task when the police give a hard time even to people who are found to be walking their dogs without a face mask on. These days even man’s best friend seems to have it better than the people struggling to survive Down Under.