The sum of all fears for the average Russian has just been averted. The large packet of totalitarian answers to a problem of questionable magnitude has been booted from the State Duma. There has been an air of dread amongst the populace who were waiting to see if nationwide QR-code legislation would make it into law destroying their lives and businesses to separate those vaccinated from plague ridden riff raff. There was an expectation that some sort of Hegelian Dialectic gamesmanship would get a watered down, but still crushing version of this system passed. Thankfully for the sake of the Russian economy and sanity itself this is now not to be. This decision to completely bail on a QR Code apartheid not only comes at an interesting moment in history but has great relevance for Russia itself and issues related to Covid-19 on a global scale.

Screenshot: From the official Instagram account of the State Duma: “The Council of the State Duma unanimously removed the bill on QR codes from consideration”. Interestingly the text says the next big law under consideration is about “punishing pedophiles” even more harshly.

Why was the public so concerned over this, shouldn’t we fight Covid-19?

There was a sort of test run of this QR code system in Moscow. It didn’t last very long and from the onset it was clear that the Russian masses were not going to let laws get in the way of their daily activities as is tradition. Any filtration processes at subway entrances were a joke that caused a complete transport collapse and lasted around 48 hours in total. The boiled down version of this idea mostly applied to restaurants which were forced to check guests for having a vaccination code. There was much resistance to this, and certain crafty restaurateurs saw the value of convincing the government that they were enforcing QR code restrictions while just letting anyone through the door anyways. After Putin came back from one of his trips abroad, this system, which was ever so critical for our safety, vanished into thin air, but it certainly left a bad taste in the public’s mouth and many bankrupt restaurants.

Later a similar project was put into place in Tatarstan with even more violently resisted results. Perhaps if this were to have happened on a national level in one clean sweep it could have broken the Russian economy. The QR madness in Moscow/Tatarstan from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok would have been vastly more devastating than all of Washington’s sanctions packages combined. Perhaps it was a wise choice for a certain President to keep this a “States’ Rights” issue and repeatedly reaffirm that vaccination is a personal choice.

 So why did this happen now?

 People have been asking me for quite some time about the reality of anti-Covid measures here in Russia and what the government is doing. The problem is that to understand today’s Russia you simply cannot think of the state as a monolithic block. There is no Putin dictatorship under a crushing cult of personality with all roads to power leading to an often shirtless God-Emperor. Russia is not the Borg Cube.

There has been a massive unseen war going on behind the walls of government institutions over the pandemic, which explains why Covid policies here have come and gone seemingly at random in various regions. Even at the macro level, there has been a soft push (with the threat of a hard push) for vaccination and yet Putin himself a few weeks ago said something very important about the Omicron Strain…

“Although they say it (Omicron) is not so harmful, some experts even call it live vaccination. <…> Let’s not get ahead of ourselves”.

In political terms this seemed like a big call to just let the whole Covid situation go while having the ability to retract this statement in a few weeks if necessary. It is also a very Russian answer to a problem for things to just magically work themselves out on their own. For those conspiratorially minded it is interesting that this self-vaccinating Omicron Variant of Covid-19 that Putin brought to public attention is accused of being artificially created by the Mainstream Media. This is some dark food for thought for sure.

Going further into the realm of conspiracy, there could be a connection between the absolute failure of negotiations between Russia and the U.S. and finally dropping this QR code legislation. Russia got nothing that it wanted from the Globalists so maybe the Globalists are going to get nothing from Russia? Moscow’s participation in the big school play may be over for good.

What does this mean for Russia?

Both sides of the Covid fight in Russia have done a good job of building up enemy lists and a deep seeded hatred for the other. When one side wins in this type of scenario we can all guess what is going to happen next. There could be some major restructuring and firings coming up within the next year as revenge time is surely nigh.

For the Russian masses this will show that being obstinate pays off. Very often people of questionable intelligence vastly overestimate the ability of the individual to make change in society, but one thing the individual can do is resist, and when the majority of the population decides to grind the wheels the engine comes to a halt. The more collective mindset of Russians has saved the day and the Russian cultural traits of complete disregard for rules and brutal obstinacy have been revalidated for another generation.

What does this mean in the context of Covid-19 globally?

There is now a major nation that has essentially given up on anti-Covid measures. It is also a global player with some significant media and internet presence that can advertise this fact. While Australians are being beaten and gassed for not wearing a mask at some bar, Russia will probably say to the world how great it is that they defeated Covid using measures that had a minimal impact on the rights of citizens and now everything is back to the Old Normal. They may even broadcast the whole notion that Omicron is a passive solution to the problem and that there is no threat.

This will make Russia become even more attractive to Western Conservatives and we should expect a wave of anti-vaxxer immigration to the land of bears and snow. You may scoff at this notion, but when one gets emails about this issue daily, things look a lot different.

But of course, if Russia completely drops its war on Covid, that will mean that Russians will suddenly present a “danger” to the populations of foreign nations and may be banned from traveling to most if not all of the West regardless of vaccination. And going to Russia as a Westerner could mean the death of your travel future as you’ve been tainted by their lack of anti-Covid measures. That may sound insane but it is bureaucratically logical and a natural next step in the ever devolving Monopolar vs. Multipolar conflict that we are all in against our will.

Earlier this month, Dr. Peter Hotez announced that his team of researchers at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor University had developed an effective vaccine against the coronavirus. In limited clinical trials, it showed effectiveness comparable to the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna and better than the Johnson and Johnson and widely used AstraZeneca vaccines.

What makes this development so important is that Hotez is making his vaccine freely available to the world. Anyone who has the necessary expertise to produce it is free to do so without worrying about patent monopolies or other intellectual property claims. They are also freely sharing the technology, not claiming industrial secrets like Pfizer and Moderna.

The production process is also fairly simple. An Indian manufacturer is already producing 100 million doses a month. Many other facilities can likely be quickly configured to produce the vaccine. With no patent rights, the vaccine is cheap. Hotez estimated that it can be produced for $1.00 to $1.50 a shot. That compares to prices around $20 a shot for the mRNA vaccines. At these prices, purchasing 2-4 billion vaccine doses to immunize the unvaccinated in the developing world should be a very small lift compared to the trillions of dollars and millions of lives the pandemic has cost the world.

At the moment, it is not clear that the Hotez vaccine figures prominently in the plans of the international aid organizations providing vaccines to the developing world or to the governments of the United States and other wealthy countries funding these efforts. Part of the hesitance can be justified by the fact that the vaccine has not undergone a large-scale clinical trial to more precisely determine its safety and efficacy.

However, this objection should be soon overcome. India has given the vaccine an emergency use authorization. With the vaccine’s widespread use in India, it should be possible to compile enough data to assess its safety and effectiveness in the not distant future.

The other issue is a more serious one. The fact that the vaccine is cheap and the technology is being open-sourced is likely a strike against its widespread adoption by major international organizations. The United States and other rich countries are worried about the threat of a good example.

Open-Source Versus Patent Monopolies

The United States, along with other wealthy countries, has long relied on government-granted patent monopolies to finance most of the costs of developing new drugs, vaccines, tests, and other medical devices. The logic is that corporations will be willing to spend large amounts of money, in often risky research, if they have the prospect of large profits when they have a successful product.

While everyone acknowledges the value of government-funded research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies, most of this funding goes to more basic research. The idea is that somehow, if the government was involved in the later phases of the development and clinical testing process the money would be mostly wasted. (Operation Warp Speed is a useful counter-example to this view. The government essentially picked up all of Moderna’s development costs, as well as the cost of its clinical trials.)

There are many problems with relying on patent monopolies to finance medical innovation. The most obvious is the price of drugs and other products enjoying patent monopoly protection. Drugs are almost invariably cheap to produce and distribute. However, the patent monopoly allows drug companies to charge markups, that are many thousand percent above the free market price, for drugs that may be essential for people’s health or even their life. In a patent-free world, drug affordability would be a non-issue, except for the very poor. In a world where patent monopolies can allow drug companies to charge tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars for their drugs, affordability is a huge issue.

But the problem goes beyond just dealing with high prices. As every economist knows, when the government interferes in a market to keep the price up (by granting a patent monopoly), it creates perverse incentives. The most obvious is the incentive to promote drugs as widely as possible, even if it means misrepresenting their safety and effectiveness.

To be clear, companies always want to sell more of their products; that is how they make money. But they have far more incentive to bend the rules or break the law when selling drugs with markups of several thousand percent than when they are selling plastic forks or paper plates at markups of 20 or 30 percent.

This is a substantial part of the story of the opioid crisis, where several major drug companies paid billions of dollars in settlements based on allegations that they misrepresented the addictiveness of the new generation of opioid drugs. More recently, we have the case of Aduhelm, an Alzheimer’s drug of questionable safety and effectiveness. Biogen, the drug’s manufacturer, was hoping to sell it for $54,000 for a year’s dosage. The drug was approved by the FDA, reversing the decision of its advisory panel. The biggest problem in assessing the drug’s usefulness is that so many of the experts in the area have received money from Biogen, so it’s not clear whose opinions can be trusted.

To protect their patent monopolies, drug companies will spend tens of millions of dollars on legal fees to harass potential competitors. This can mean, for example, pushing dubious patent claims that a less-established or generic company lacks the resources to contest.[1]

Patent holders can also effectively pay off potential generic competitors to stay out of the market. While an explicit payoff is illegal, a drug company can certainly make a deal with a potential generic competitor to manufacture one of its drugs. If the generic company decides to drop plans to introduce a generic competitor to the brand company’s patented drug, it would be difficult to prove in court that this was not just a coincidence.

The corruption from patent monopolies gets into all areas of health care policy. The pharmaceutical industry always ranks near the top in lobbying expenses and campaign contributions. Huge amounts of money are at stake with the government’s decisions on patent and pricing policy, as well as decisions on approving and buying drugs in programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Perhaps the worst part of the story is that patent monopolies are likely to impede the research progress. Its impact takes different forms. First, the existence of large patent rents for a particular drug is likely to lead competitors to try to find ways to innovate around the patent to get a share of the rents. While it is generally desirable to have multiple drugs for a condition (some patients may react poorly to a particular drug), resources will generally be better spent attempting to find drugs for conditions where effective treatments do not already exist rather than developing the fourth, fifth, or sixth drug in an area, with the hope that a company’s marketing division can get them a large cut of the profits.

The desire to protect intellectual property claims can also prevent potentially productive collaborations. It doesn’t do a pharmaceutical company any good if it has a great breakthrough with a partner, but the partner is able to claim patent rights. The New York Times just ran a lengthy piece on the decades of research that allowed for the rapid development of the mRNA vaccines. At one point, it noted how the leading researchers in the field were unable to arrange a collaboration because of disputes over ownership of patents.

This problem is likely common. The point of the research being done by pharmaceutical companies is after all is to get a patentable product. Developing drugs or vaccines that may save lives and improve public health is secondary.

The Open-Source Alternative

There are many different ways to fund open-source research. My preferred route would be long-term government contracts, with large grants going to prime contractors, who would then be expected to subcontract with smaller firms where appropriate. (I outline this system in chapter 5 of Rigged [it’s free].)

Military contracting provides a loose model for this approach. While there is much waste and fraud in the system of military contracting, this system for biomedical research has the huge advantage that while much military research is secret (often for good reason), everything would be fully open in this system.

If a major contractor with a large grant didn’t seem to be producing anything, it would quickly be apparent to researchers around the world. If Pfizer or Merck got $5 billion over a decade to research diabetes drugs, and had nothing to post after a year or two, it would be apparent to researchers around the world that something was wrong. If the story proved to be outright fraud (e.g., the top executives of the company had all bought themselves huge vacation homes), then the contract would be canceled, and the people responsible would be prosecuted. If it turned out that they were just incompetent, then the company would surely never get another research contract.[2]

The big advantage of going this route is that all research findings would quickly be available to researchers everywhere. They could build on successes and learn from failures. We would not be seeing the problem noted in the NYT piece on developing mRNA vaccines, where cutting-edge research was not shared because of disputes over ownership of patents.

And, since all research findings were fully public, no one would have the incentive or the ability to mislead other researchers or clinicians about the safety and effectiveness of drugs, as happened with opioids. With everything on the table for all to see, it would be difficult to perpetuate a lie of any consequence.

The other huge advantage of going this route is that drugs, vaccines, tests, and everything else developed through this system would be cheap. This would make providing access to the best technology in developing countries a far more doable task. It would even make a huge difference in rich countries like the United States. Instead of spending $500 billion a year on prescription drugs, we would be spending closer to $100 billion.

The Danger of the Hotez Vaccine

I have argued for years for the benefits of an open-source funding system along the lines discussed here and in Rigged. But, even if this is really a great idea, as I believe, no one would envision throwing out a functioning system, however wasteful and corrupt, for an unproven idea. The obvious route for going from the current system to an open-source system would be to take small steps with little downside risk.

This is exactly what Peter Hotez and his team of researchers did with developing their coronavirus vaccine. They were able to arrange enough funding from various sources to cover the research costs. They are now prepared to make it available to the world without conditions. If further research supports their initial findings, the world will have a cheap, effective vaccine that can quickly be produced in sufficient quantities to vaccinate the world.

That would be a huge deal and a great success for the open-source model. It would likely lead to demands for more public funding of open-source research. It may also help to pressure philanthropies—that claim to be concerned about public health—to fund research on an open-source model. Needless to say, it would also be very bad news for the profits of Pfizer and Moderna, and other drug companies that hoped to make billions off of COVID-19 vaccines.

Given the widely recognized value of government-funded basic research through NIH and other agencies, it would require a very strange view of scientific progress to think that government funding of downstream research would be just throwing money in the toilet. But the best way to disprove this view is to produce results for an open-source model. Dr. Hotez has done that, and the whole world needs to know.

Notes.

[1] There is an important asymmetry in legal battles between a patent holder and a generic competitor. The patent holder is fighting for the right to be able to sell a drug at patent monopoly prices, meaning markups of many thousand percent. The generic company is fighting for the right to sell the drug in a free market, with markups that may be less than one-tenth as large.
[2] To answer an obvious question, we would need some international agreement to share research costs worldwide. There would be problems negotiating such a deal. However, anyone who has followed recent trade negotiations knows that we have had enormous problems negotiating and enforcing international rules on protecting patents and other forms of intellectual property.

cepr.net via counterpunch.org

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

How can we explain how Australia, Britain, Austria, Italy, and more have gone the path of arbitrary and capricious detention and exclusion from society? The Austrian government mobilized perhaps 500 people into the streets in support of lockdown and apartheid measures, colluding with media to inflate that number by a massive factor of sixty.

The reactions to this certainly represent an extreme polarization of society. Yet in politics, there are no coincidences. So while the ruling class would prefer little resistance by some metrics, the popularization of resistance and the potentials this arena holds are also promising in elite contingency planning. Such will be our primary focus in this review.

Whichever holds the most potential and handles resistance in the best way, while carrying out some form of the underlying plan, will be the version of the plan the managers attempt to deliver for the elites.

And this presents a great danger; those still capable of thinking being demoralized by the state of humanity, and drawing eugenicist conclusions parallel to those of the elites. After all, how can the great herd of humanity acquiesce in such a way? If there is a lesson to be learned from history, perhaps it is not ‘never again!’ so much as ‘it will always happen again’.

While the state and corporate sanctioned hatred espoused by media to the unvaxed has reached an alarming temperature, the counter-narrative of blaming the ‘sheeple’ for the new age of mass house-arrest and social apartheid is also growing.

While one is situated as an overt policy of the state apparatus, the other builds popular support and has all the trappings and bearings of authenticity, people power, life, and motion.

Roman Plagues, Inflation, and Great Awakening

In 168 AD the Greek physician Galen was summoned by the synarchy of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus then ruling the Roman Empire, to provide guidance on the management of the small-pox pandemic then affecting millions, now called the Antonine Plague.

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), French. The Plague of Ashdod, 1630. Oil on canvas, 148 × 198 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

Then as now, according to Sabbatani and Fiorino (Infez Med. 2009 Dec;17(4):261-75), the primary factors that led to the pandemic were underlying conditions: primarily poor sanitation and hygiene, and poor diet and access to food. A disproportionate number of Roman subjects lived in overcrowded cities, and lived at the hands of landlords, speculators, and the average life expectancy had dropped to around 25.

Then as now, all of these factors were socially constructed and were not merely ‘facts of life’ as if handed down by the gods, but rather were conditions imposed upon the great mass of humanity by an unhinged oligarchy.

Whether this plague was seen as beneficial by the oligarchy, for whom – then as now – maintenance of a declining population rate was subsidized by coordinated migration from the reaches of the empire – is a subject of debate. Did they see the unwashed rabble in the back alleys of the metropolis as useless eaters, then as they do now?

At any rate, history views the Antonine Plague as a turning point, after which came an age of inflation and division from which the Roman Empire is said to have never fully recovered. The response to the plague from Christians, with their care for the ill, is also a factor in the rapid growth of this monotheism in the empire.

Ultimately Lucius Verus would himself succumb to the mystery illness the following year in 169, and perhaps it is lessons as these which provide for us some insight into new methods of biological warfare when class war is the proscribed remedy for surplus population. If manufacturing such a contagion, it would make sense that it be no more lethal than the common cold, and that nevertheless the concentration of power and an economic regimen which also decreased lives and livelihoods could be obtained at a far smaller cost.

The Antonine and then Cyprian Plague in the 3rd century AD would together lead towards an increased mysticism, religiosity, and tended towards the rapid ascension of Christianity.

Then, as now, the scenario fuels the ‘Great Awakening’, and public embrace of conspiracy theories is at an all-time high, just as mysticism and superstitions also grew through the Roman Empire during these centuries.

Problem-Reaction-Solution, and other things unrelated to Hegel

It is said that history repeats or at the very least parallels, but rather than ascribe these to abstract and still mysterious iron laws of history or any providence directing these, perhaps instead these events return and return again because they are methods of control that work. As Marx said, when history does repeat, the first is tragedy, the second is farce.

The farce at hand today no doubt is that the plague is real and yet also nary more deadly than the flu.

As we previously discussed, it was Foucault who shows convincingly that it was the first the authorized response to the plagues, with its systems of quarantine and mass surveillance, etcetera, that gave initial impulse and inspiration towards the construction of the first modern prisons a century or so later, with its panopticon.

But in regards to the growth of mysticism, paranoia, and religiosity, we see this growing in all areas, both for and against the mandates. Common now is the paranoia around infection, when the common cold never produced this except among germophobes, or in the ritualized wearing of masks which in fact ‘do’ nothing, or rather do something other than what is being publicly explained.

And on the other side, the rapacious and gratuitous abuses by the elites whose evil knows no bounds, has led to a kind of spiritual or religious awakening against the mandate.

Naturally those managing for those in power at the very top, above and beyond mere elected politicians and public health ‘experts’, understand this ‘problem-reaction-solution’ pattern which has so far worked for them.

So in light of that fact, we are drawn to a particularly problematic notice of potential danger scribbled in Schwab’s Covid-19 book. Here we are instructed to infer from the pattern and logic of the text so far, that if the Black Mirror dystopian scenario obviously preferred by the ruling class, with its social credit system – if this does not work – then we have a fall-back plan for a sort of Handmaid’s Tale scenario.

As ridiculous at face value as such things may have sounded just a few short years ago, here we are today with open eyes and open minds, understanding precisely such scenarios and their potentials. Schwab, for his part, does anyhow.

It is there on page 167 that we find it laid out in the standard cryptic fashion, that a fundamentalist theocracy is also something that elites have thought through potential outcomes.

That’s an awfully specific outcome, to be mentioned. The social credit scenario in the Black Mirror seems much more obvious, in part because we are already now living it.

What sorts of problems would be presented so that the reaction could produce that, specifically that, as a solution?

Interestingly, we have numerous factors lining up. While we have noted previously that the population ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory popular in France and catching on in the U.S., is depicted in films like ‘Children of Men’, a common theme with that dystopia and the Handmaid’s Tale is a population and reproduction crisis.

The Geopolitics of Fiction

Perhaps it was Victoria ‘F*ck the EU’ Nuland who first truthfully articulated a shift in U.S. policy away from Trans-Atlanticism. Though, her faction still rests on this doctrine and Biden has struggled to make good on such a return to good EU relations after a stark departure during the Trump years.

But an isolated U.S. is a geopolitical factor in The Handmaid’s Tale. In the TV series version, a more thorough geopolitical situation is relayed to the audience. The premise of the story is that as the result of the overuse of GMOs with their terminator seeds, men’s sperm count rapidly declined. But because the broader crisis, it ushered in a neo-Puritan theocracy, and women were blamed for it. At the same time, the ‘war against boys and men’ theme was depicted as a problem in the U.S., the reaction to it being the formation of the ultra-conservative militant group with MRA beliefs infused with Christian fundamentalism that ultimately seizes power.

Undoubtedly, the elites prefer the Black Mirror scenario of a Trans-Atlanticist surveillance state, and indeed that it is not just a social credit state but a surveillance state is also mentioned on the same page 167 in the typical Schwabian manner. This is the method whereby the entire book can be understood, where certain kinds of ‘warnings’ are precisely the kinds of outcomes the ruling class wants. And we know this because they have actively, with tremendous gusto, pursued those outcomes for decades.

The surveillance state reference relates here to a disingenuous social-democratic nod to Shoshana Zuboff’s tome ‘Surveillance Capitalism’, mentioned also by Schwab on page 167 in connection to the dystopia warnings on the same page. Zuboff is a member of the establishment ‘temple’ in good standing, and also a member of the ‘state’.

Like Schwab, she explains the dangers of rapacious predatory capitalism while being a vociferous defender of its ethos. It may be hard for some to imagine how it’s possible to hold such positions while also selling one’s financial services to the very target of the same criticisms. But neuroticism and self-serving hypocrisy are par for the course in that world.

Schwab pretends to warn and lament that such an outcome like The Handmaid’s Tale is a possibility of certain societies like the U.S. , if they‘ mismanage’ the situation, by which we understand means ‘manage precisely as we want once the pushback forces us to’.

What do we mean here? While the Atlanticist model requires increased ideological harmony between the U.S. as Europe is instructed to ‘love’ a sort of strange cultural hybrid of intersectional ‘black struggle’ with something closer to home, cross-dressing, which a few decades ago we could simply call ‘RuPaul’.

And the U.S. is instructed to look at European ‘social democracy’ as an inspirational model, though in practice also it comes with less social and less democracy. But it is the ‘vibe’ of a state that provides welfare that matters, even as in the U.S. it doesn’t. It feels like it does when Democrats are in office.

So together there is some hegemonic ideological construct that conjoins Western Europe to the U.S., despite that spatially and economically Europe is more dependent on Eastern Europe, China and MENA.

A Swift Conclusion

There are also big pushes by some dissenting voices within the elites, who got behind Trump and may well still be behind him, that want to collapse Atlanticism all together, meaning the end of NATO but also the IMF, and so naturally those elite forces nevertheless bent on population reduction and their own preservation are looking at ways to manage the blowback as well.

For reasons beyond our scope here, Biden’s foreign policy and his attitude to the EU seems to be a clone of Trump’s. Which oddly and incredibly, lends more to the Handmaid scenario than it does Black Mirror.

Conclusively, while legal and constitutional pushes for election reform and a robust curtailment of the covid restrictions is in order, on our radar screen should be the manipulation of this resistance towards Christian theocratic aims – not because they challenge the status quo, but because they would be controlled by it.

The author can be reached at FindMeFlores@gmail.com

Amid studies showing a link between some vaccines and heart problems, professional athletes appear to be collapsing on the field of dreams like never before. Are these incidences normal occurrences, coincidences or symptomatic of mandatory vaccine programs?

As more countries make vaccinations mandatory requirements for participating in many aspects of life, including that of sporting events, stadiums around the world have become something of testing grounds for determining the efficacy of the rollout. Thus far the results do not look particularly promising.

Last month, the world of female rugby was rocked by the news that Scottish sensation Siobhan Cattigan, 26, died suddenly “in non-suspicious circumstances,” as the Daily Mail reported. Yet anytime a young person – not least of all a healthy star athlete – dies unexpectedly there is some inherent element of ‘suspicion’ involved. Perhaps not in the criminal sense, but certainly from a medical point of view.

Moreover, had Cattigan’s premature death, the cause of which has not been disclosed, been an isolated event then it could be chalked up as something of a tragic ‘fluke.’ It appears, however, that Cattigan’s sudden death was not an isolated event, but rather part of a disturbing trend in the world of sports.

Scottish Rugby is deeply saddened to hear of the tragic passing of Scotland international and @StirlingCounty player Siobhan Cattigan.

https://t.co/txAVOHsqMs pic.twitter.com/l13wtlOYl4

— Scottish Rugby (@Scotlandteam) November 30, 2021

Last month, three professional athletes were stricken by health emergencies in the same week. Football player for Wigan Athletic, Charlie Wyke, 28, suffered cardiac arrest during scrimmage and was taken to hospital where he was reported in stable condition. Wyke credited emergency CPR performed by manager Leam Richardson with helping to save his life.

Days later, John Fleck, 30, a player with Sheffield United, was carried off the field on a stretcher during a Championship game against Reading. The Daily Mail, citing an anonymous source, reported rather defensively that “John Fleck’s issue was not vaccination related.” The list doesn’t end there.

In late October, Barcelona player Sergio Aguero, 33, considered one of the best strikers today, had his dazzling career cut short after being diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia following a match; on November 1st, Icelandic midfielder Emil Palsson, 28, required resuscitation after a cardiac arrest 12 minutes into play; on June 12, Denmark midfielder Christian Eriksen, 29, named Danish Football Player of the Year a record five times, suffered a heart attack at Euro 2020 and given cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He announced his retirement from the sport after being fitted with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator to regulate his heartbeat.

Footballers suddenly collapsing on the field used to be a mercifully rare experience.

It’s now almost a daily one.

Are any mainstream media journalists investigating the sudden rise in these events? https://t.co/RK6xj7YaGd

— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) November 25, 2021

Do any of these health emergencies prove that the mandated Covid vaccines were to blame? Absolutely not. In fact, many medical professionals who have been quoted in the media on these incidences are inclined to blame “coincidence.” The Daily Mail went so far as to say that many scientists have rejected the suggestion that vaccines were suspect “especially as the country braces itself for a possible wave of more cases and deaths from Covid after the discovery of the Omicron variant.”

The conclusion by Reuters, after consulting with a number of medical experts, was nearly identical: “No evidence COVID-19 vaccines are linked to athletes collapsing or dying from myocarditis.”

Nevertheless, the sudden spate of on-field emergencies has raised questions among several seasoned veterans of the game.

“In my 19 years as a pro footballer & and then my 20+ years watching and commenting, I’ve never seen ANY players collapse, pass out, etc either live or during any of the thousands of training sessions and matches I’ve taken part in,” remarked ex pro-footballer Kevin Gage over Twitter.

Former England star Trevor Sinclair speaking about the incident involving Fleck on radio station TalkSport, commented: “I think everyone wants to know if he (Fleck) has had the Covid vaccine.”

Everyone I speak to about these heart problems suffered by footballers (which worryingly seem to be happening more regularly) are they linked to covid vaccines or not??

— Trevor Sinclair (@trevor8sinclair) November 24, 2021

Anecdotal evidence aside, is there anything in the medical literature to suggest a cause and effect may be in play? The answer points to the affirmative, with various studies indicating possible health issues associated with the vaccines, yet these risks, albeit rare, are being downplayed by social and mainstream media.

In early November, the American Heart Association, not your average right-wing group of conspiracy theorists, released a report with the lengthy title: ‘Abstract 10712: Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning.’

The conclusion from the AHA seems worthy of some attention: “We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.”

Despite the long-standing reputation of the AHA, Twitter actually fixed a warning stamp on the link to the study, claiming it may be “unsafe.”

What the hell is going on? pic.twitter.com/WlpUKP8QFU

— Heidegger (@Kukicat7) November 8, 2021

Meanwhile, the first glimpse of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine trial data – which is being released at the excruciatingly slow rate of 500 pages per month, meaning that full disclosure will not occur until the year 2076 – does little to instill confidence.

Zerohedge, quoting journalist Kyle Becker, reported “there were a total of 42,086 case reports for adverse reactions (25,379 medically confirmed, 16,707 non-medically confirmed), spanning 158,893 total events.

More than 25,000 of the events were classified as “nervous system disorders.”

Again, none of this proves that the vaccines are to blame for the apparent rise in collapses now happening in various sporting events. Indeed, it has been suggested that Covid-19 itself may be to blame for increasing the frequency of cardiac arrest through “some inflammatory response,” Dr. Satjit Bhusri, a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, told WebMD.

The point is we just don’t know. As the world navigates its way painstakingly through this period of impenetrable darkness, along a coastline riddled with dangerous rock formations, it would seem wise not to discount any possibilities, no matter how unsettling. That is the only way of allowing the science to indiscriminately determine the facts. Ignoring the other side of the debate as ‘conspiracy theorists,’ however, will prevent the necessary discussion from happening in the first place, which may very well be the goal behind such a risky game.

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

Western media has been shockingly nonchalant about Austria announcing it would become “the first European country” to make vaccines against Covid 19 mandatory, with possible prison sentences for non-compliance. Can we get a second opinion?

Amid a surge in new Covid cases, Austria has ordered a 10-day lockdown of its entire population – including those who have received inoculations – starting on November 22. On top of that, the government said it was preparing legislation for a mandatory vaccine regime to be rolled out on February 1st, the chancellor, Alexander Schallenberg, has announced.

“We haven’t been able to convince enough people to vaccinate,” Schallenberg said in an effort to rationalize the draconian decision. “For too long, I and others have assumed that you can convince people to get vaccinated.”

Incidentally, Schallenberg, who descends from a long line of blue-blooded Austro-Hungarian nobles, was hand chosen to replace Sebastian Kurz as chancellor last month as the latter became embroiled in a testy corruption probe. Immediately following Schallenberg’s appointment, wily Covid-19, perhaps seeing a golden opportunity for a power play amid the chaos, surged in the country.

What the new Austrian chancellor seems to have forgotten, however, in his desire to play medical dictator is that people have a right to self-autonomy over their bodies. Strongly encouraging civilians to receive a vaccination is one thing; forcing it upon them by coercion – on pain of financial penalties and even imprisonment in the event they cannot pay – is crossing the humanitarian red line. That much, at least, has been determined by the United Nations.

Austria will now be imposing a COVID lockdown on vaccinated AND unvaccinated people.

They have also announced that a VACCINE MANDATE for the ENTIRE COUNTRY will be put into force by February — the first in the world.

— Dr. David Samadi (@drdavidsamadi) November 19, 2021

In October 2005, some 190 UNESCO Member States adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, which committed the signatories and the international community to “respect and apply fundamental ethical principles related to medicine, the life sciences and associated technologies.”

Article 6, Section 3 reads:

“In appropriate cases of research carried out on a group of persons or a community, additional agreement of the legal representatives of the group or community concerned may be sought. In no case should a collective community agreement or the consent of a community leader or other authority substitute for an individual’s informed consent.”

Speaking on the need for the Declaration, Pierre Sané, former UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences (2001-2010), discussed a meningitis pandemic that swept through the Nigerian city of Kano in 1996. Pfizer, in what it described as a “humanitarian gesture,” offered to help by making available a new antibiotic drug called Trovan, which could be administered orally to children. Pfizer failed to acknowledge, however, that Trovan had never been tested in a disease outbreak, nor was it ever given to children orally. Nevertheless, six weeks after the outbreak had occurred, 200 children participated in Pfizer’s clinical trial.

Sané explained what eventually happened: “A governmental committee of medical experts investigated the Trovan trial and concluded that it was illegal and unethical. The desperation of the parents and the emergency situation made it easy to enroll patients in the trial, suggesting free treatment for a serious disease. Parents with infected children were often not aware that they were included in a clinical trial; they were afraid for their children and did not ask many questions…

“In many cases no permission was requested to test the drug. Pfizer argued that informed consent could not be obtained from parents because they were illiterate. In this impoverished part of the country, few parents indeed could speak or write English,” Sané added.

Shocking as it was, the 2001 report by the Nigerian medical authorities was never released to the public. Not until May 2006 did the Washington Post (thanks to the intervention of a whistleblower) report that Pfizer had conducted an illegal trial of an unregistered drug. The revelations showed a clear case of exploitation, in violation of international law, where impoverished, illiterate and uninformed people unwittingly stood in for guinea pigs. It also appeared that the medical trial had never been approved by an ethics committee, although Pfizer produced a letter of approval, dated March 1996. There was no ethics committee in existence in Kano at that time.

In addition to Pfizer’s apparent criminal record, the recipients of their vaccines have no legal recourse in the event they are injured or worse. And although it is rarely discussed in the mainstream media, people are suffering severe injury, even death, as a result of these unproven inoculations. The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has recorded 4,694 deaths, 5,413 “life-threatening” reactions to Pfizer’s vaccine, and 23,867 hospitalizations as a result of the inoculation in the U.S. to date (critics contend, however, that the numbers of injuries have been drastically underreported). Yet, the pharmaceutical companies enjoy full indemnity from any legal action, which should be of concern considering these vaccines, issued in accordance with an ‘Emergency Use Authorization,’ were developed in – to quote former U.S. President Donald Trump – “warp speed.” Just a non-professional hunch, but ‘warp’, ‘speed’ and ‘vaccine’ are three words that should never appear in the same sentence.

Florian Dagoury, currently the world’s top static breath-hold free diver, has been diagnosed with myocarditis and pericarditis 40 days following his second dose with the Pfizer vaccine. He is known for the fact he officially held his breath for 10 min30sec https://t.co/rxXVMD5ipO

— George Fareed (@GeorgeFareed2) November 8, 2021

Incidentally, should anyone be interested in educating themselves on the details of the Pfizer vaccine before they submit to the jab, they will have to wait until the year 2076 when the 329,000 pages of data can be released in its entirety (or, as a judge recently ruled, 500 pages per day).

“It took the FDA precisely 108 days from when Pfizer started producing the records for licensure (on May 7, 2021) to when the FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine (on August 23, 2021),” argued Aaron Siri, a lawyer working on behalf of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, which submitted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FDA. “While [the FDA] can conduct that intense review of Pfizer’s documents in 108 days, it now asks for over 20,000 days to make these documents available to the public.”

Despite what must be considered a shadowy record at best, Austria just committed itself to the astonishingly draconian demand that its people either take one of these jabs (from either Pfizer, or another brand) or be ostracized from polite society, and possibly even sent to prison.

Chancellor Schallenberg may wish to inform himself that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights took a heavy cue from the Nuremberg Code (1947), which issued from the Nuremberg trials of medical researchers (known as the ‘Doctors’ Trial’) who were convicted of committing horrific crimes against humanity in the name of medical research.

Month 21 of a pandemic and I still haven’t heard any public officials talk about the benefits of eating real food, exercise, and increasing vitamin D exposure towards positive public health outcomes. Weird. @joerogan

— James DiNicolantonio (@drjamesdinic) November 21, 2021

The first recommendation of that Code concerns the issue of informed consent, which acknowledges respect for personal autonomy in medicine, as well as recognizing that physicians should avoid actions that injure human patients.

It reads as follows: ”The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.”

The Austrian government is glaringly ignoring the very first line of the Code that reads: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” This is a gross denial of history, a notoriously grim history, which condemned millions of innocent people to a humanitarian nightmare. While vaccines can play a major role in fighting against the current pandemic, to enforce this medical intervention on anyone violates every aspect of human liberty and freedom, which many generations of men and women have fought to ensure. It’s time to stop the segregation of society, a creeping global apartheid, which will ultimately lead to far more death and injury than any virus.

(Click on the image to enlarge)