From an early date, commentators have noted that the response to COVID had all the look and feel of a coup attempt. The masks, the slogans, the symbols, the lies, the sudden inversion of long-cherished norms and values, the mindless acceptance of information from nefarious sources like the World Health Organization and China. Something was seriously off, and it all seemed so obvious.

Thus, one overarching question always lingered over the response to COVID. How were officials able to implement such destructive, totalitarian policies across the western world without intelligence authorities stepping in to stop them?

A detached review of the evidence leads to a chilling answer—though in hindsight, perhaps the only one that was ever really possible. Quite simply, the reason the western intelligence community never stepped in to stop this illiberalism is that virtually all the most illiberal aspects of the response to COVID lead directly back to the western intelligence community itself.

Reviewing the Evidence

The western intelligence community was behind the birth of “social distancing” as public health policy via Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher—operatives with deep ties to the highest levels of the intelligence and biosecurity communities—through their work on biodefense policy during the Bush administration. In what may be the mother of all COVID coverups, Hatchett and Mecher’s story that “social distancing” was based on a 14-year-old’s science project, as told through the New York Times and celebrity author Michael Lewis, appears to be nothing but an elaborate cover story for the fact that the concept was lifted directly from China’s longstanding policy of “lockdown” during SARS in 2003.

The intelligence community either planned or was in attendance at nearly all the pandemic simulations that began being held on a semi-annual basis beginning with Dark Winter in 2001. Current Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was personally present and sat directly beside China’s CDC Director at the Event 201 simulation of a coronavirus pandemic which took place just weeks before COVID was revealed.

Michael Callahan, the federal government’s chief virus intelligence expert, told National Geographic that he began tracking the novel coronavirus in November 2019, and he was the US government’s only confirmed contact in Wuhan during the initial lockdown in January 2020. Upon returning from Wuhan, Callahan’s testimony was key to throwing the federal government into a state of emergency and the widespread adoption of mechanical ventilators which proved to be deadly. The federal government’s first impressions of COVID thus came from the western intelligence community via Callahan.

Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, one of America’s highest-ranking intelligence officials in 2020, arguably played the most important role of any individual in the initial months of the response to COVID, unilaterally ratcheting up alarm about COVID in the White House beginning in January 2020 and advocating mask mandates, quarantines, and shutdowns all based on his own sources in China, while breaching protocol on several occasions. Pottinger was also behind the appointment of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, and he selected Birx for this role as a “public health security advisor” as early as November 2019, the same time that Callahan began tracking the new coronavirus. Having been installed in the White House, Birx then went on to be the chief force orchestrating lockdowns across the United States.

The origin of the online videos of Wuhan residents falling to their deaths which went viral all over the world in early 2020 is disputed. The videos were carefully edited, suggesting a sophisticated state-sponsored disinformation campaign, and they directly contradicted the reality of what we now know was taking place in China at the time, suggesting the Chinese Communist Party either created or at least approved of them. However, the videos were generally released through Chinese dissident groups that claimed to be hawkish toward the CCP and thus also had the approval of the western intelligence community. While some of these were most likely CCP controlled opposition groups, regardless, the western intelligence community green-lit the dissemination of these videos.

The propaganda story about Li Wenliang, the eye doctor who was supposedly punished for warning his friends about an incidence of pneumonia in Wuhan in December 2019, appears to have in fact been invented by the venerated CCP propaganda outlet Beijing Youth Daily weeks after the events supposedly occurred. However, just days after being invented by the CCP’s propaganda machine, this absurd tale about Li Wenliang was featured in many of the western world’s most elite media outlets, including the New York Times, BBC, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and countless others, and it continues to be touted as true in elite policy circles to this day. This story, too, thus had the approval of the western intelligence community.

Prior to the lockdown of Lombardy, Italy, in February 2020, virtually no one in the world was publicly advocating or hoping that China’s lockdowns would come to be adopted as global policy. Yet in his book, Italy’s health minister Roberto Speranza recalls that he was well aware the concept of lockdown came from China and that the decision to adopt this policy in Lombardy was made based on information from Stefano Merler. A look at Merler’s work reveals that he spent 2020 stamping information from China as “science,” effectively running a propaganda laundering operation on behalf of the CCP. Yet Merler had also been praised by Bill Gates and was part of the western biodefense network. In 2013, Merler had authored Containing the accidental laboratory escape of potential pandemic influenza viruses; it appears the western biosecurity community deputized Merler for just this purpose in 2020. This decision for Italy to copy China’s lockdown policy thus appears to have been condoned by the western intelligence community as well.

Days after the lockdown of Lombardy, the WHO released a report gushing about China’s lockdown measures, telling the world, “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of nonpharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response.” As Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward reported, “What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this.” Apparently the western intelligence community either failed to notice or tacitly approved of this bizarre act of sycophancy to the CCP as well, rubber stamping China’s lockdowns into global policy.

In March 2020, hundreds of thousands of social media bots began touting China’s lockdown policy on Twitter using nearly identical language. Given these bots heaped praise on China while denigrating every other country in the world, including the United States, it’s long been quite clear that this was a CCP disinformation campaign. That said, these bots were permitted to perform their function and, incredibly, their pro-lockdown posts were not deleted from Twitter until well into 2021. Even as far back as 2014, millions of bot posts touted “lockdown”—specifically using the Chinese term instead of the western term of “social distancing”—in response to Ebola in Sierra Leone, and those bot posts remain intact to this day. These massive disinformation campaigns were allowed to take place and the posts were able to stay up for years despite social media being tightly monitored by the western intelligence community throughout this period.

As soon as lockdowns began, dissenting opinions were censored, with one prominent example being the censorship of Aaron Ginn for his original anti-lockdown article in March 2020. Worse yet, Twitter under its prior management gave prestigious “blue checks” to ridiculous users like nutritionist Eric Feigl-Ding, who sowed COVID hysteria on an almost daily basis from the earliest possible date. Even top scientists on the political left who generally supported lockdowns were so troubled by Ding as to jointly call him out as a charlatan. Yet astonishingly, Twitter ignored these bipartisan calls to rein Ding in and instead featured him prominently in its exclusive “COVID-19 experts” section. In light of revelations in the Twitter Files and Missouri v. Biden, we now know that the western intelligence community was steering these decisions on COVID by major social media platforms.

When the response to COVID began, the public health establishment, in accordance with its longstanding guidance, did not initially recommend masks. Weeks later, this guidance abruptly changed, and masks were mandated across the western world. Both Pottinger and Birx pushed for masks inside the White House based on their own information and experience from China. Simultaneously, Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard launched a bewilderingly-successful campaign to reverse the CDC’s longstanding mask guidance and push for mask mandates all across America—also based on information from China. The western intelligence community, through Pottinger and Birx, and perhaps through Tufekci and Howard, thus instigated this shift in masking guidance.

The intelligence community was also heavily involved in the development and push for COVID vaccines, with Michael Callahan and others playing leading roles in “Operation Warp Speed.”

The western intelligence community may also be behind some of the most prominent controlled opposition to the official response to COVID. Nearly every leading intelligence official in 2020 has endorsed the theory that COVID came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Matt Pottinger was instrumental in the initial push for that theory. One of the most prominent public advocates of the “lab leak theory,” Jamie Metzl, is a former member of the White House National Security Council. Some of the other most prominent public advocates of the lab leak theory have either now or in the past been directly employed by Sandia National Laboratories; Sandia National Laboratories was instrumental in the birth of “social distancing” as public health policy during the Bush administration.

Most importantly, the western intelligence community holds the keys to any serious investigation into any of these events. All over the world, across professions, citizens have been depending on the idea that if there was anything corrupt or rotten about the response to COVID, the western intelligence community would step in. Of course, that won’t happen, because as the above record makes clear, they’re the ones who planned it.

The Missing Link

The view of the response to COVID as having been driven primarily by the western intelligence community goes a long way to explaining several key mysteries.

It brings newfound significance to the catastrophe of 2010 to 2012 in which America’s entire spy network in China was systematically executed based on intelligence leaks from the CIA—this is considered one of the CIA’s worst failures in history. To put the horror of this catastrophe into perspective, dozens of CCP officials had been been selfless enough to place their trust in the United States, hoping that doing so might help bring positive change to their country. For this, some group in the CIA routed this information back to the CCP and had every one of these brave individuals murdered; the fate of their families is unknown. Apparently from such an early date, some elements in the CIA were already doing the bidding of the CCP to such a revolting degree, and were able to get away with it.

It explains why obvious communist assets like Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton, 40-year British Communist Party Member Susan Michie, the WHO’s Bruce Aylward, and others have been able to operate so openly and even advance their careers despite all the harm their policies have caused.

It may help explain why the intelligence community has been gradually cultivating more and more previously-independent media outlets, and how an entire apparatus for censoring the legal speech of western citizens was able to be set up and operated without the public’s knowledge.

It explains why the propaganda and illiberalism of the official response to COVID has always seemed so transparent, with media outlets across the world suddenly bombarding their own people with coordinated terror messaging featuring lines such as “flatten the curve,” “we’re all in this together,” “just stay home,” “follow the science,” and “two weeks to slow the spread” without anyone stepping in to stop it, and why the narrative of elite institutions has generally drifted so far from public opinion.

It explains why some leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson who weren’t initially keen on lockdowns have always seemed so confused; it seems the information they were being fed by the intelligence community on COVID may have been deliberately misleading.

It explains why the facts coming from the western intelligence community keep changing, with several officials initially telling reporters that they first learned about the virus in November 2019—in line with Callahan’s testimony—but then changing their story to insist that no one knew about the virus until December 30, 2019.

It explains why the “resistance” to the official response to COVID always seemed like such a hodgepodge, with a loose-knit network of rather ordinary individuals able to have such an unusually large impact on the public conversation, uncovering damning facts that were going unreported by major media outlets, and why even some very high-level officials like Supreme Court Justices have had to turn to grassroots sources like the Brownstone Institute for information on what actually happened.

An Unwitting Coup

Upon reviewing the evidence, it’s hauntingly clear that the illiberalism of the response to COVID largely emanated from the western intelligence community. But in part owing to the secrecy of the agencies involved, it’s difficult to determine who exactly within the intelligence community might have orchestrated all this and why.

One important lead is Richard Hatchett, the father of “social distancing,” who spun a book-length cover story about how the concept came from a 14-year-old girl’s science project. Another is Michael Callahan, whose testimony from Wuhan threw the federal government into a state of emergency. Callahan reported to Robert Kadlec, another official with longstanding ties to the biosecurity community. Another clear lead is former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger. Given Pottinger is central to virtually every official narrative of the initial months of the response to COVID, it’s inexcusable that he’s still never been called to testify about his role.

But so far, the trail ends there. Pottinger reported to National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and there’s nothing suspicious about either of those men. Another possible lead is Avril Haines, currently Director of National Intelligence, who sat alongside China’s CDC Director George Gao at Event 201—but Haines wasn’t in any position of power when COVID first appeared during the Trump administration in 2020. Perhaps a more likely scenario is that the leaders of our intelligence agencies were overly-trusting of their subordinates, and could thus have been rolled by some corrupt mid-level agents.

Further, there’s a degree of truth to the critical notion that, by virtue of their secrecy and their longstanding ethos of realpolitik, the western intelligence community may have a somewhat totalitarian culture all on their own, notwithstanding the influence of the CCP. This longstanding culture of justifying the use of force and propaganda abroad may have blinded western intelligence leaders to the illiberalism of the policies their agencies were deploying in response to COVID; thus, what we witnessed during COVID may have been the result of the CIA and its counterparts turning their awesome powers of manipulation against their own people, however unwittingly.

Still, the amount of planning and the reliance on information from China during the response to COVID is too uncanny for there not to have been a significant degree of CCP influence involved. While there’s plenty of corruption to go around in public health, the media, and other branches of government at both the state and federal level, no genuine inquiry into what took place can be possible without the intelligence community looking straight in the mirror.

The response to COVID was one of the greatest peacetime policy catastrophes in history, shredding America’s international credibility, robbing children of years of their youth and education, killing millions, throwing hundreds of millions into poverty, costing billions of life years, and transferring trillions in wealth from workers to billionaires, all for nothing. That this illiberalism emanated directly from the western intelligence community explains how a catastrophe of such magnitude was able to take place.

Most of all, that the western intelligence community drove the illiberalism of the response to COVID explains why the corruption and inhumanity of that response have always seemed so obvious, with the most valuable information on the events in question often coming from leading officials’ own books and interviews, despite how much harm they caused. They’re able to operate with such impunity because they know that the only agencies that can hold them accountable are the ones behind the whole spectacle. The propaganda is obvious, and it’s meant to be.

Given the scale of the tragedy and the gravity of the potential crimes, there’s a widespread sentiment that any investigation into the response to COVID should be handled by the proper authorities. On this point, Xi Jinping, a firm believer in the importance of law and order, couldn’t agree more.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

‘All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.’ – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Earlier today, former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who advocated and led the use of terror messaging to drive support for and compliance with lockdown measures throughout 2020, choked back tears as he told the Government’s official COVID Inquiry that he is ‘profoundly sorry’ for each and every COVID death and hopes lockdowns will be ‘much earlier’ and ‘more stringent’ during the next pandemic.

One need not have a background in law enforcement to recognize that these are the words of an entirely unrepentant sociopath. Hancock’s testimony seemed to confirm sceptic’s worst fears that the COVID Inquiry is being used as a pretext to institutionalise lockdowns, and it marked an astonishing new low for the COVID Inquiry, which so far has revealed little of value and assiduously avoided asking officials why they found the horrific decision to copy China’s lockdown policy remotely appropriate—though the officials have openly admitted lockdown wasn’t part of any western country’s pandemic plan and have pondered whether any country would have done it had it not been for China.

Worst of all may be the fact that 17 members of the pro-lockdown pressure group ‘Independent SAGE’ have been asked to give evidence at the COVID Inquiry. For those who’ve been paying attention, this is a far cry from how optimists hoped the aftermath of the COVID response would eventually play out.

‘Independent SAGE’ is not a legitimate political body. ‘Independent SAGE’ is nothing but a questionably-funded group of extremists with no relevant credentials proselytizing the dubious goal of ‘Zero Covid,’ while hijacking the name of an official Government body to fool the public into believing they have some legitimacy.

In short, ‘Independent SAGE’ is nothing but a disinformation organisation that caused unfathomable harm by convincing citizens and officials to pursue an illusory goal using illiberal methods with very real and catastrophic costs. To have Independent SAGE give evidence at the COVID Inquiry means the potential criminals have, quite literally, been given a role in prosecuting the case. The members of Independent SAGE are the ones who should be facing an inquiry; given the scale of the harm, the UK could do worse than to have them all banged up in the Tower of London—at least until we know more.

For the UK Government to stack the official COVID Inquiry with the members of an obvious disinformation group is deeply insulting to the public’s intelligence, and an unsettling glimpse into the lengths the Government has gone to manipulate the perception of public opinion since the response to COVID began. The public did not ask them to put all these members of ‘Independent SAGE’ on the Inquiry, nor can this decision be written off as a mistake. Rather, it reveals that many Members of Parliament are deliberately working to manipulate public perceptions to prevent the question of whether the UK should have imposed a lockdown from ever being asked—and it begs the troubling question of just how many of these MPs are not mere incompetents, but rather knowing accomplices to the crime. To be frank, it evidences just how vast the communist conspiracy which may have given birth to western lockdowns may in fact be.

That so many MPs may be knowing accomplices to the crime of lockdown helps explain why such transparently-questionable characters as 40-year British Communist Party Member Susan Michie; China admirer Neil Ferguson; Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton, who wrote that ‘public health’ is the ‘midwife of Marxism’; lead lockdown advisor Chris Whitty; and lead lockdown scientist Jeremy Farrar were all able to play leading roles in the response to COVID and significantly advance their careers in its catastrophic aftermath without scrutiny.

To see the leading instigators of lockdown getting away with all this, at least so far, is admittedly a bit deflating. But ultimately, there is an objective reality, and the reality is that these policies destroyed countless millions of lives and transferred trillions in wealth from workers to the very richest for virtually no human benefit. As Hannah Arendt so beautifully described, this, in the real world, is how evil works: the mass abdication of reality in favor of a fantasy that befits one’s own personal comfort and prurient self-interest. The wide embrace of this fantasy by those in power only deepens the moral imperative to insist on the admission of the objective reality of the devastation that lockdown in fact caused.

Further, that so many MPs are knowingly acting as accomplices to the crime of lockdown doesn’t necessarily mean they’re knowingly advancing China’s interests. To be sure, lockdown propaganda was extremely effective, and all one has to do is talk to ordinary people in liberal cities to realize that many of them honestly seem to think these policies were hunky dory. Some MPs may thus be rationalising their actions as simply telling the public what they want to hear.

When I argue that creating this rift between the ruling class’s self-interest and objective reality may have been the goal of China’s lockdown propaganda from the very start, some fellow commentators such as Will Jones, a good bloke at the Daily Sceptic, like to reply that it all sounds ‘too clever by half.’ But it’s really not terribly original. This is how organized crime organisations have always recruited—albeit on a much larger scale. In general, criminal organisations don’t recruit through applications and interviews; rather, they recruit through a process of manipulation and entrapment, gradually estranging individuals from what they believed to be their values, until all that’s left is nihilism, self-interest, and complete loyalty to the organisation. And, with its century of history, no one has more experience in this process than the Chinese Communist Party. In that sense, the response to COVID may be seen as the CCP’s largest-ever recruiting event. And without a doubt, Xi Jinping couldn’t be more proud of the performance of the Freshman class.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

It’s long been something of a mystery why there have been no major studies on how many COVID patients were killed by mechanical ventilators in spring 2020. Early data from China had suggested that ventilators would need to be used widely in the treatment of COVID patients, and this led to a major rush to procure ventilators on the part of politicians and hospital systems all over the world.

A small sample of the hundreds of headlines from that period features ones such as: “Cuomo refutes Trump, insists NY needs up to 40,000 ventilators,” “NY may need 24,000 more ventilators to fight COVID-19. Here’s how it could get them,” “Which coronavirus patients will get life-saving ventilators? Guidelines show how hospitals in NYC, US will decide,” “Amid Ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, Governor Cuomo Announces 1,000 Ventilators Donated to New York State,” “A New York hospital is treating two patients on a device intended for one.”

However, it soon became clear that ventilators were being vastly overused, and the medical community gradually ceased this practice of mass intubation. Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell acted as an early whistleblower, sounding the alarm in a widely-shared video:

We are operating under a medical paradigm that is untrue… I fear that this misguided treatment will lead to a tremendous amount of harm to a great number of people in a very short time… This method being widely adopted at this very moment at every hospital in the country…is actually doing more harm than good.

In interviews with major media outlets, several practitioners later disclosed that patients had often been put on ventilators not for their own benefit, but in order to stop the virus from spreading. As one doctor later told the Wall Street Journal:

We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patients’ benefit, but in order to control the epidemic and to save other patients. That felt awful.

As another doctor told Time Magazine:

He says some doctors are intubating early because they fear that less-intensive forms of ventilation, like high-flow nasal oxygen, can aerosolize a virus, putting health care workers at risk of getting sick. ‘This is more theoretical fear than a real fear,’ Hill says, since there’s not strong evidence that COVID-19 spreads this way.

As Dr. Rich McCormick told the House COVID Select Subcommittee:

The healthcare professionals…got it wrong. We were going off of old technologies, old assumptions. And I remember we were intubating people that probably shouldn’t have been intubated.

As Meredith Case, an internal medicine resident at NewYork-Presbyterian Medical Center, put it in a series of since-deleted threads, hospitals were “early intubating” patients for “many days if not weeks” in part “to avoid aerosolizing procedures to protect staff,” and several “practice changes lead to more time on the vent.”

One problem is the sheer number of patients. Another is that we are early intubating these patients given data suggesting improved outcomes and also to avoid aerosolizing procedures to protect staff.

1) We are mostly being transferred patients with single organ (i.e. respiratory) failure from other ICUs to offload those units. These patients have been intubated for many days if not weeks. Weaning is slow going
2) The shortages of critical analgesics and sedatives means we are using drugs less well suited to the purpose. Using second (third? fourth?) line meds hampers our ability to quickly wean sedation when oxygenation has improved, further prolonging time on the vent
3) Relatedly, in order to limit the # of times nurses and providers enter the room, we have moved away from our usual plan of IV pushes for analgosedation and toward IV drips because pushes require nurses to enter the room more frequently
4) These practice changes lead to more time on the vent, which in turn means more time to develop complications. Obvious point but important. More HAIs, more deconditioning, more delirium. I have two rising hyperbilirubinemias on my service concerning for acalculous cholecystitis

This practice of extended intubation was apparently consistent with early guidance coming from China. As fanatical mask advocate and free-speech opponent Zeynep Tufekci put it, “Chinese scientists” had advised “many COVID-19 patients need to stay on mechanical ventilators as long as four weeks”:

Some hospitals in New York began engaging in “split-ventilation”—putting patients on ventilators two-at-a-time:

At least one New York hospital has begun putting two patients on a single ventilator machine, an experimental crisis-mode protocol some doctors worry is too risky but others deemed necessary as the coronavirus outbreak strains medical resources.

“Split-ventilation” made intubation even more dangerous than it already was:

Facing a ventilator shortage, doctors are considering using one machine for multiple patients in respiratory failure. But it’s at best a stopgap and can injure the lungs.

As White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Ashish Jah wrote in NEJM:

[P]atients who are traditionally treated with noninvasive positive-pressure ventilation (NIPPV) for conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations may need to instead be presumptively intubated while awaiting Covid-19 testing results (using NIPPV is contraindicated for patients with Covid-19 because of aerosolization of the virus under positive pressure).

As Dr. John Ioannidis put it in a podcast with Vinay Prasad: “a lot of lives” were lost in spring 2020 in part because of doctors “not knowing how to use mechanical ventilation, just going crazy and intubating people who did not have to be intubated.”

Even Anthony Fauci eventually admitted that having “very very readily put people on mechanical ventilation” may have “caused more harm than good.”

I think the intensive care has improved. We very, very readily would put people on mechanical ventilation, when we found out through clinical experience it might have been better just to make sure we positioned them properly in the prone or supine position and not necessarily to intubate someone so readily, which might have actually caused more harm than good. We learned that as we got more experience.

The New Yorker featured a harrowing account of one early victim’s experience titled The Life and Death of Juan Sanabria, One of New York City’s First Coronavirus Victims describes Juan Sanabria’s final moments of consciousness before he was intubated:

At eight o’clock the next morning, the doctor called Walkiris and asked her to help persuade Sanabria to be intubated. He’d deteriorated overnight, and now needed to be on a respirator. “Am I going to die?” Sanabria asked Walkiris. “No, pápi,” she told him. “They’re going to put you to sleep for a little while, so you can relax your lungs. You’re breathing too fast.” He seemed dazed. “I don’t feel sick,” he said calmly. “Will you be here when I wake up?”

“I’ll see you on the other side,” she replied. “Let them do this.” As the nurses prepared to intubate him, he bragged about how his daughter was a nurse. Just before he went under, he sent Walkiris one last selfie…

The next day, Juan’s blood pressure dropped precipitately. Walkiris’s sister and mother tried to visit him in the hospital, too, but were turned away. They told Walkiris to pray. “I kept telling them, ‘Look at this chart. He doesn’t even have a few days,’ ” Walkiris said. “My family didn’t want to hear it.” He never regained consciousness after being intubated; by the time he died, on March 17th, no one had been able to say goodbye.

Indeed, this practice of mass intubation proved extremely deadly. A study in JAMA later revealed a 97.2% mortality rate among those over age 65 who’d been put on mechanical ventilators. To put this in perspective, patients over age 65 were more than 26 times as likely to survive if they were not placed on mechanical ventilators.

Overall, mortality among COVID patients in New York area hospitals fell by over two-thirds between spring 2020 and summer 2020.

The available evidence has always overwhelmingly indicated that ventilators killed many patients in spring 2020. However, until now, it’s been difficult to argue there was necessarily any kind of cover-up going on. Yes, some patients had been killed by ventilators, but there were, quite simply, not very many people talking about this issue. Rather, the simple explanation for why there had been no serious assessments of the number of patients killed by ventilators was that so few people were asking for them.

But this all changed dramatically in just the last couple weeks as the ventilator issue came roaring back into mainstream discourse. Most notably, a viral thread by Dr. Craig Spencer brought the ventilator question back into the spotlight.

There’s a lot wrong here. First, Spencer’s initial assertion that all the patients who were put on ventilators were going to die anyway directly contradicts his subsequent, defensive assertion that it’s unfair to “relitigate 2020” because we can’t relate to those kinds of high-stress frontline decisions. If all those patients had actually been bound to die anyway, then there wouldn’t be any mistakes to “relitigate.” And, if this policy of mass intubation was working so well that all the patients who died on ventilators would have died anyway, then there would have been no reason for the medical community to have ever stopped doing it.

That this self-contradictory thread has so many “likes” is somewhat troubling—a sign of just how widespread complicity is in propping up the logically-incoherent official COVID narrative. But the fact that so many people have gotten behind this ludicrous narrative actually presents a promising opportunity. For the first time, we now have something close to an official explanation of why there haven’t been any studies on how many patients were killed by ventilators.

In short, the establishment is trying to argue that while ventilators were overused in spring 2020, doing more harm than good—and the vast majority of patients placed on ventilators died—the ventilators themselves did not kill anyone. An astonishing argument, even by the abysmal standards of the COVID era.

But, since everyone supporting this narrative is arguing that there were no ventilator deaths in spring 2020, all we have to do is prove there were a significant number of ventilator deaths and what’s left of the establishment’s credibility on the initial months of COVID falls apart.

In addition to the anecdotal evidence discussed above, several unsettling data points have long strongly suggested that there weren’t just some ventilator deaths in spring 2020, but rather a pretty frightening number of them.

As a preliminary matter, the data bears out that ventilators were used very readily in spring 2020, especially in the greater New York area, and that ventilator use was sharply curtailed after that period. The CDC reports that 18,679 patients died with COVID in New York City hospitals throughout spring 2020. And, according to the sample in JAMA, just over half of those who died with COVID in NYC hospitals were put on ventilators. Accordingly, around 10,000 patients died with COVID in NYC hospitals after being put on ventilators in spring 2020.

As I’ve previously written, the percentage increase in excess deaths in the greater New York area in spring 2020 vastly outstrips the percentage increase even in other cities with similar climate and social and economic demographics, indicating an unbelievable number of deaths owing to iatrogenesis, ventilators and strict lockdowns in the greater New York area in spring 2020.

Additionally, as Jessica Hockett has documented in meticulous detail through multiple methods, New York City experienced a sharp, breathtaking mortality event just after its lockdown and response to COVID began, which was unlike that experienced anywhere else or at any other time. Given its singularity, this horrifying mortality event, quite simply, cannot be attributed to natural causes.

Jumping off Hockett’s work, below is a chart of weekly all-cause hospital inpatient mortality from January 2018 through April 2023, split between patients ages 65+ (blue line) and patients under 65 (red line). This spike in inpatient hospital mortality in New York City in spring 2020, especially among young people, is unparalleled in any other time period, even as COVID deaths supposedly began to climb again in 2021.

For comparison, below, I’ve produced this same chart for each of America’s largest metropolitan areas: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. (All data is from “CDC Wonder Provisional Mortality Statistics, 2018 through Last Month.” Data is collected at the county level; only data from counties typically considered part of each of these cities has been included.)

And here is the same chart for each at the state level:

Here are each of these charts juxtaposed in high-resolution images for purposes of side-by-side comparison. (You’ll need to right click and select “Open image in new tab” to zoom in.)

City level data:

State level data:

A couple of points on these charts. First, while the spike in mortality in the NYC area in spring 2020, especially among young people, is without parallel, it’s not the only one we see. These spikes in mortality among young people are conspicuous because it’s long been known that COVID’s infection fatality rate (IFR) is extremely skewed toward the elderly. This, for example, is the most widely-cited data on COVID’s IFR by age:

Thus, these spikes in mortality among young people cannot be attributed to COVID. Most notably, a significant spike in mortality appears among all age groups in California at the end of 2020—albeit not of the same magnitude as that in New York in spring 2020. One possibility is that, while the use of ventilators was generally scaled back, hospitals in California may have still been engaging in broad intubation or other iatrogenic practices by the end of 2020. Another possibility is that this spike in deaths in California was a byproduct of lockdowns and the fear that accompanied them; while one might expect lockdown deaths to be more normalized over time, increases in respiratory virus deaths tended to be accompanied by more restrictions, more fear, and thus more lockdown deaths. Even more strangely, Texas experienced a surge in deaths among young people in summer 2021 that was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in mortality among the elderly; this, frankly, may have had nothing to do with COVID.

That said, the fact remains that the New York area experienced a uniquely sharp, awful mortality event in spring 2020 which is not adequately explained by any of these other factors. And doctors were under significant pressure to put patients on ventilators in spring 2020, even if it was merely unconscious; politicians had purchased tens of thousands of ventilators at exorbitant prices, and hospitals did receive more funding if patients were placed on ventilators. Coupled with the above anecdotes about patients being placed on ventilators for extended periods to protect staff—and the fact that over 10,000 patients in New York City died after being intubated—it’s clear that a horrifying number of patients were likely killed by mechanical ventilators.

Yet astonishingly, despite all these facts, the establishment is arguing that no patients were killed by ventilators in spring 2020.

This, to me, is the kind of implausible, overly-defensive argument one makes when they’re panicked. Across America, tens of thousands of patients were placed on ventilators in spring 2020; given the vast majority of those patients died, it simply begs credulity that none of them were killed by ventilators. When a deadly procedure is applied to tens of thousands of patients, even a baseline level of human error would imply that the procedure was applied to at least some fraction of those patients by mistake.

The establishment has responded with subsequent studies claiming to show that “early intubation” actually reduced the time patients spent on ventilators, and thus didn’t kill any of them. But this is a straw-man argument. As the above anecdotes make clear, the issue isn’t whether patients were intubated “early” or “late” relative to any symptoms they might have shown—the issue is whether patients were placed on ventilators who should have never been on them to begin with, or otherwise kept on them too long.

Even more strangely, most of the attorneys with whom I’ve discussed the ventilator issue agree that—outrageous as it may be—there’s actually little litigation risk for the medical establishment because of the perceived global emergency in spring 2020. Regardless of how much harm was done, it’s simply too difficult to prove that the procedure violated the emergency standard of care given the information coming from China at the time.

This also explains why no one has yet taken the hospitals to court on the ventilator issue. If anyone wants to fight the establishment for real answers as to how many patients were killed by ventilators, the time and money for this cause will have to come on a charitable basis. Doubtless, the medical establishment’s high-priced lawyers are well aware of this fact—and this, too, leads me to believe that the real number of patients killed by ventilators must be frighteningly high; even absent any real litigation risk, the embarrassment alone is leading to this broad cover-up.

Nonetheless, the situation is morally inexcusable. It’s imperative that we get the truth of how these patients died, not only so we can put together what really happened in spring 2020, but also because it’s the least we can do to honor the deceased.

Speculating as to how it got to this point, I suspect the medical establishment didn’t want to disclose the number of ventilator deaths in spring 2020 in part out of embarrassment and in part because they thought it might undermine the official narrative and be used by opponents of COVID mandates (remember, we were the “bad guys” at the time). Now that the official COVID narrative has turned into something of a catastrophe and they’ve been sitting on this massive, morally-indefensible cover-up for so long, they just keep digging themselves deeper.

Given all the clumsy, self-contradictory arguments coming from the medical establishment, you’ve probably gathered that, unlike some of the characters I’ve sketched in my work, these are not sophisticated crooks. Rather, these are ordinary people who got into this profession because they wanted to help and now can’t seem to face what really happened. As I detailed in Snake Oil, it’s the hallmark of a great dictator to be able to bring out the evil even in ordinary people—and some men are uncannily good at what they do.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

Recently, I’ve been putting together a Twitter thread to serve as an open-access library of all the most important and viral video clips from throughout the response to COVID, beginning with the initial scenes of the lockdown in Wuhan all the way through today. The thread is organized semi-chronologically, but it also has no endpoint, so videos after the first hundred or so may be added on ad-hoc basis. Feel free to suggest or post any additions or to use any of these clips for your own purposes. Many thanks!

https://twitter.com/michaelpsenger/status/1658569732763820032

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

Throughout the response to COVID, I’ve considered the question of which institutional failure has been most responsible for the devastation we’ve experienced: public health, the press, the judiciary, or the intelligence community.

The broad failure of each of these institutions contributed in a major way to the catastrophe. In polls, respondents usually attribute the disaster primarily to public health and the press. But in my opinion, going back to the beginning of the COVID story, the worst, overarching institutional failure of all has been that of the western intelligence community.

Since they were first formed in the 20th century, America’s covert intelligence agencies have been the subject of controversy. Though a number of measures are in place to keep these agencies in check and ensure they’re staffed by reputable and patriotic individuals, the fact is that these sprawling agencies operate with a degree of secrecy unlike that of any other government institution, and there’s always been a question as to whether this is really compatible with democratic governance. One need not be a political radical to see how this secrecy can make it extremely difficult to hold these agencies accountable, giving them an unhealthy kind of “competitive advantage” over the rest of our institutions, even if not deliberate.

In practice, historically, while we don’t tend to see intelligence agencies acting with overtly malicious intent, we do periodically see the intelligence community abusing their veil of secrecy to cover up their mistakes, as they did during the quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq. And unfortunately, evidence continues to mount that that’s exactly what they’ve been doing during COVID. Most notably, an explicit discrepancy in a recent House Intelligence Select Committee Report on the early events of the response to COVID proves beyond a reasonable doubt that some key intelligence officials are covering up how soon they knew about the novel coronavirus.

The Report in question was prepared by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee; thus, it’s written for the purpose of arguing that the Trump administration didn’t act fast enough, and it makes for characteristically mind-numbing reading. Former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, who did just about everything in his power to railroad the White House into a panicked response—including by appointing Deborah Birx, who coordinated lockdowns across the US—is effectively held up as the Soviet hero who could have saved us all if only Trump had listened.

But the most important part of the Report comes in the form of a brief note on pages 31 and 32 regarding news reports from 2020 in which a number of officials told media outlets that intelligence about a public health crisis in Wuhan had begun to appear as early as November 2019.

Specifically, the first article, from ABC News, appears in April 2020 titled Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources, stating, “As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.”

The second article appeared the next day in NBC News, titled U.S. spy agencies collected raw intelligence hinting at public health crisis in Wuhan, China, in November, stating, “U.S. spy agencies collected raw intelligence hinting at a public health crisis in Wuhan, China, in November, two current and one former U.S. official told NBC News.”

A third article—which is not mentioned in the House Intelligence Committee Report—appears in National Geographic in August 2020 and specifically discusses DARPA’s virus intelligence chief Michael Callahan, stating, “Michael Callahan, an infectious disease expert, was working with Chinese colleagues on a longstanding avian flu collaboration in November when they mentioned the appearance of a strange new virus.”

In Deborah Birx’s book, she also notes that Matt Pottinger offered her a role in the White House as Public Health Security Advisor “in November 2019” as well.

Yet with regard to these reports, each independently confirming that intelligence about the coronavirus began to appear in November 2019, the House Intelligence Committee Report has this to say:

Press Reporting on November and December Intelligence

According to NBC News, sometime in late November, communications intercepts and overhead images indicating a public health crisis in Wuhan were distributed to some U.S. federal public health officials in the form of a “situation report” from an unspecified agency. ABC News reported that the report came from NCMI. According to ABC News, the alleged report “concluded it could be a cataclysmic event.” DIA, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, and the White House were briefed multiple times. According to NBC News, formal assessments of the novel virus were written in December and “that material and other information, including some from news and social media reports, ultimately found its way into President Trump’s intelligence briefing book in January.”

NCMI’s Director and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff denied the report on the record. Col. R. Shane Day, NCMI's director, released a statement that the media reporting “about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) Coronavirus related product/assessment in November of 2019 is incorrect.” Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten told NBC news that “We went back and looked at everything in November and December” and “the first indication we have were the reports out of China in late December that were in the public forum. And the first intel reports I saw were in January.”

Despite extensive efforts and direct questioning, the Committee has not been able to corroborate the NBC News and ABC News reporting.

The Committee has conducted an extensive investigation to identify the moment when the Intelligence Community first learned of COVID-19. Staff met with numerous working level officials at NCMI, CIA, NSA, ODNI, among other IC agencies; Staff also interviewed former NSC officials. The Committee has also reviewed all finished intelligence that is available to it as a routine matter and requested indexes of finished production from the IC to ensure that the Committee has reviewed all finished intelligence.

Every official interviewed by the Committee—from working level analysts at NCMI to an official with relevant knowledge at the NSC—said that their first indication of a novel virus came with the publication of the ProMED notice published at 11:59 p.m. on December 30, 2019 that reported the announcement of a novel virus by the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee.

In sum, the first warnings of COVID-19 came from the non-IC based public health track—in this case disease surveillance conducted by local public health authorities in Wuhan.

In other words, according to the House Intelligence Committee Report, the reports from ABC and NBC in 2020—each based on independent conversations with several officials saying intelligence on the new coronavirus began to appear in November 2019—are simply false. I personally reached out to the authors of these articles regarding this information, but they did not respond to request for comment.

The House Intelligence Committee Report does not mention the National Geographic article stating that Michael Callahan first heard about the new virus in November 2019, but the implication is that that article is false as well.

Instead, according to the House Intelligence Committee, “Every official interviewed by the Committee—from working level analysts at NCMI to an official with relevant knowledge at the NSC—said that their first indication of a novel virus came with the publication of the ProMED notice published at 11:59 p.m. on December 30, 2019.”

This conclusion by the House Intelligence Committee is, frankly, patently absurd. The Committee would have us believe that not one, not two, but three of America’s most objective and middle-of-the-road news outlets each made the exact same mistake as to the date in which intelligence on the new coronavirus began to appear, each based on their own independent sources.

This is, quite plainly, unmistakable evidence of a cover-up. Some officials in the US intelligence community have changed their story. Whereas in 2020 they were comfortable telling the public that intelligence about the new coronavirus began to appear in November 2019, they are now all insisting that they had no knowledge of the new coronavirus until December 30, 2019.

Exactly why these intelligence officials have changed their story remains something of a mystery. The most obvious explanation is that in the years after 2020, the response to COVID—especially the initial lockdowns of 2020—proved to be an unmitigated disaster. The fact that some members of the intelligence community became aware of the new virus in November 2019 begs the obvious question of how they could have possibly believed these lockdowns and mandates had actually been effective in stopping the virus in Wuhan—when Xi Jinping didn’t even order the Wuhan lockdown until the end of January 2020—making the intelligence community appear even more incompetent than they already do.

For three years, it’s been a mystery why the intelligence community has remained largely silent as western nations imported these illiberal measures such as lockdowns, mass intubation, mask mandates, and vaccine passes—each of which originated in China—that proved so catastrophic for the economies, societies, and principles of the free world. As I’ve written at length in Snake Oil, perhaps the most important explanation is the abundant evidence that leading intelligence officials became convinced from an early date—likely falsely—that COVID was the result of a dangerous leak from the Wuhan lab, and they’ve been extremely reluctant to reverse course. A more banal but equally important explanation is that, like the rest of the “laptop class,” intelligence officials simply didn’t mind the response to COVID very much and enjoyed being able to work from home, where little real intelligence work was done.

Within independent media circles, a common explanation you’re likely to hear is that intelligence agencies were “in on it,” but this, when you stop and think about it, is absurd. It’s ludicrous to think leading officials sat down with or sent out a memo to all their subordinates saying something like, “We’re actually using the response to COVID to usher in new forms of control over the public, but we can’t tell anyone ;)”. That said, a far more plausible scenario, for which there is some evidence, is that there’s serious corruption at the very top of these intelligence agencies, and these leading officials can be very effective at nipping any kind of serious investigation into the subject. There are some monstrous historical precedents for this kind of high-level corruption; Kim Philby, for example, as head of MI6, leaked intelligence to the Soviet Union that resulted in thousands of Allied deaths, seemingly for no reason other than a deep devotion to Marxism-Leninism.

By virtue of their secrecy and the difficulty in holding them accountable, intelligence agencies have to be held to higher-than-normal ethical standards. While accusations may be a dime-a-dozen, hard evidence that members of the intelligence community are lying to the public is rare. Here, we can see in plain black-and-white that intelligence officials have lied: In 2020, multiple highly-credible news outlets reported independently that intelligence officials told them information about the new virus appeared by November 2019, and now they’re saying they didn’t know about it until December 30, 2019.

Whatever the reason may be, the evidence is unmistakable that some intelligence officials are lying as part of a cover-up of earlier reports that information on the novel coronavirus appeared by November 2019. The fears of those critical of US intelligence agencies have evidently been justified: They’re abusing their secrecy to shield themselves from accountability. It’s absolutely unacceptable for members of the intelligence community to be caught in a lie about an event so cataclysmic as the response to COVID; arguably this is worse than Vietnam or Iraq because it pertains to events that had an enormous impact on the lives of Americans on American soil. Given the broad complicity we’ve seen among members of the mainstream media and political class, we may need a change in political leadership for this cover-up to get the kind of high-level attention it deserves; but for the sake of our democracy, it’s vital that it does.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

In any political debate, it can be tempting to focus on the most ridiculous arguments coming from the other side. It may be fun to laugh at the propaganda coming from the likes of Eric Feigl-Ding; and likewise, apologists for the response to COVID tend to address only the most outlandish claims about vaccines and such while a deafening silence surrounds the work of more serious anti-lockdown activists and researchers. But ultimately, to win a political debate, one side must eventually overcome their opponents’ strongest argument.

The strongest argument in defense of the response to COVID goes like this: While states and countries across the western world adopted broad social distancing measures in response to COVID, and sometimes referred to them as “lockdown,” in practice—aside from the forced closures that devastated certain small businesses and industries—these measures were largely a hodgepodge of loosely-enforced restrictions that citizens could easily flout, and opponents of these restrictions have, over time, often exaggerated their stringency for political reasons. Rather, it was widespread fear that was the primary driver of the devastation that we witnessed during COVID. We can call this the “pure fear” argument. This argument is implied by the mainstream use of the term “pandemic disruptions” as a catch-all for that vast social, psychological, and economic devastation.

Typically, this reasonable “pure fear” argument is then accompanied by a bunch of self-contradictory nonsense about how COVID restrictions saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if they were even stricter, and that anyway the only people who opposed them were a bunch of anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazis, and Trumpers categorically unworthy of gratitude. But for the sake of argument, we can address only lockdown apologists’ strongest argument, which is the “pure fear” argument.

First, the reason the “pure fear” argument is strong is that there’s a degree of truth to it. An objective view of events is that COVID restrictions generally were loosely enforced, and fear itself accounted for the vast majority of the devastation, social deterioration, and illiberalism that we witnessed during COVID. However, for the following reasons, the “pure fear” argument, like all other arguments in defense of the response to COVID, fails to withstand scrutiny.

1. Governments deliberately used propaganda on their own citizens to ratchet up fear of COVID and increase compliance with restrictions.

Across the western world, governments used propaganda on their own citizens for the specific purpose of ratcheting up fear of the coronavirus and increasing compliance with lockdown measures. State scientists in the United Kingdom later admitted they’d used fear to change minds in a series of interviews with author Laura Dodsworth: “Using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism.” “The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment.” “Psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic.” As one Member of Parliament put it:

If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become. If we’re being really honest, do I fear that Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.

Likewise, a report later released by the Canadian Armed Forces revealed that military leaders saw COVID as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public, “shaping” and “exploiting” information to bolster government messages about the virus.

As a result of these domestic propaganda campaigns, across the western world, we were all treated to such delightful slogans as “just stay home,” “two weeks to slow the spread,” “follow the science,” and “we’re all in this together”—each of course, in truly Orwellian fashion, being a boldfaced lie.

Needless to say, pro-lockdown officials cannot launch a massive propaganda campaign to deliberately terrify citizens into complying with lockdown measures, then turn around and use that fear to excuse the effects of the lockdowns into which they deliberately terrified citizens into complying.

2. Studies have borne out that it was governments’ own lockdown measures that were most responsible for the widespread fear of COVID.

As a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judged the threat of COVID was their own government’s decision to employ lockdown measures. “We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown—in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if government’s taking such drastic measures.’ We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.”

These study results are damning, because overall, throughout 2020 and 2021, citizens across the western world consistently estimated their risk of dying of they contracted the virus to be dozens or hundreds of times greater than it really was. According to the most widely cited study on COVID’s infection fatality rate by age, the average IFR of COVID for those under 40 years old never exceeded about 0.01%. But in surveys conducted regularly by the University of Southern California, on average, throughout 2020 and 2021, Americans under 40 consistently estimated their chance of dying if they contracted the virus to be around 10%, a 1,000-fold overestimation.

Lockdown apologists might argue that it was the frightening images from places like Lombardy and New York that caused widespread fear of COVID. However, overwhelming peer-reviewed evidence has established that COVID was circulating globally by fall 2019, and these horror stories in large, liberal cities only began after they implemented strict lockdowns and began mass ventilating patients on the advice of the World Health Organization—strongly suggesting that the frightening scenes owed to lockdowns and iatrogenesis rather than some sudden surge in the virus. Further, the Cardiff study is clear that it was the government’s decision to lock down—not these stories from large liberal cities—that was the primary driver of COVID hysteria.

Given it was their own lockdown orders that were primarily responsible for the widespread fear of COVID, pro-lockdown officials cannot use that fear to excuse the effects of the lockdowns they ordered.

3. There’s no evidence that fear of COVID had reached anywhere near the level of mass hysteria responsible for this level of devastation prior to lockdowns.

Prior to the cascade of lockdowns across western nations in spring 2020, life was actually surprisingly normal, and even those who would later spend years demanding harsh mandates were still generally discussing COVID in reassuring and sensible terms. The Atlantic, for example, published an excellent piece titled You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus. On February 27, 2020, the New York Times considered the cost to society too great to justify even temporary school closures, noting the tendency for officials to just “do something” to give voters the impression the government is in charge, “even if it’s not relevant.”

Even on social media, discussion of the virus was surprisingly tame. Prior to the lockdown of Lombardy, Italy, it’s difficult to identify even a single individual in the world who was publicly advocating or hoping that the world would come to adopt China’s lockdown policy. Weeks later, hundreds of thousands of tweets appeared using many languages and dialects to admire China’s lockdowns in nearly identical terms while denigrating other governments’ light-handed responses—but these tweets turned out to be from bots.

For example, this is how normal the city of Bordeaux, in France, looked the day before France imposed one of the stricter lockdowns in the western world.

Many of us likely have similar recollections. While there were some strange shortages of goods like toilet paper, these could generally be attributed to a small number of panicked individuals. The fact is, until lockdowns began, COVID hysteria simply hadn’t entered the mainstream. For the vast majority, life continued largely as normal, and given the studies discussed above, it’s very hard to believe that any panic would have continued much longer absent these cataclysmic decisions by governments.

4. Sweden’s data speaks for itself.

Sweden, which was unique among western nations in that it had no lockdown and few COVID mandates to speak of, ultimately experienced the lowest excess death rate of any OECD nation from 2020 to 2022.

Thus, even if the devastation of the response to COVID is attributable primarily to fear rather than to the restrictions themselves, Sweden’s example demonstrates that frightening events happening internationally did not, by themselves, lead to that level of fear. Rather, it was primarily the COVID policies that governments imposed on their own populations—at the domestic level—that resulted in such deadly amounts of fear. By avoiding these terrifying lockdowns and mandates, Sweden successfully avoided that terror and the resulting devastation that accompanied it.

The fact is, no matter how you look at it, Sweden’s example wholly undermines the argument for lockdowns and mandates, making it unmistakably clear that they were extremely harmful to the states and countries that implemented them. (Gee, I wonder why, then, the Chinese Communist Party and their western enablers worked so hard to keep Sweden’s example from existing.)

5. In general, health officials argued for COVID restrictions to be even stricter.

In general, throughout 2020 and 2021, when health officials and other mainstream elites gave their opinion on the response to COVID, they argued that COVID restrictions and mandates should be even stricter. In many cases, leading officials and institutions even explicitly wished that their own nations’ responses were more like China’s. In fact, across institutions, the closer one gets to centers of power during the response to COVID—in government, media, and academia—the more likely the institutions and individuals have been to insist that China’s farcically-forged COVID data is real and that the rest of the world should emulate China.

Given health officials repeatedly called for COVID restrictions to be even stricter, it is disingenuous to argue that the effects of the restrictions should be excused because they were not very strict.

6. Laws and recommendations are requests that governments make of their citizens, and in the instances in which COVID mandates were enforced, those enforcements could be devastating.

Laws and government recommendations are not just about enforcement—they’re requests that governments make of their citizens. People follow laws and recommendations not primarily out of fear, but because they want to be good citizens. It’s a breach of the contract between government and governed to expect that 100% of people will contemplate every policy and simply not follow it if it is based on a lie. Thus, the fact that a policy such as a “stay at home” order is not strictly enforced by no means excuses the psychological and societal damage done by the policy.

Moreover, in the instances in which COVID restrictions and mandates were enforced, the enforcement could be devastating. For example, last week a church in northern California was ordered to pay $1.2 million for holding unmasked church services during COVID. As totalitarian regimes know all too well, this kind of devastating, arbitrary enforcement of ambiguous rules can have vast psychological implications and create vast levels of compliance far beyond the actual probability of enforcement.

7. Western leaders’ best excuse is that foreign influence, rather than their own errors, was the primary driver of widespread hysteria during COVID. But governments have yet to acknowledge that pro-lockdown foreign influence had any significant effect on policy, and have actively downplayed evidence of it.

Back during peak COVID hysteria in summer 2020, I published the article that put my work on the map, highlighting the extent of the CCP’s pro-fear and pro-lockdown disinformation since COVID began—a subject that had only previously been referred to in a couple of obscure limited hangouts by the New York Times. Owing to its timing, the article remains the most influential I’ve written. At the time, some commentators correctly pointed out that it potentially gave leading officials an out, which was deliberate: They could now blame their own policy failures in part on the unprecedented extent of CCP disinformation during COVID, and then we could go back to normal.

Instead, they censored me.

Since that time—and probably long before—it’s been the vast coverup and denial of the CCP’s global pro-lockdown influence and its catastrophic effects that’s been the real crime during COVID, which western political machines refuse to admit to out of embarrassment and, in all likelihood, their own ties to the CCP. I remain confident that the mountain of evidence of this pro-lockdown influence is so vast as to inevitably come out in due time. But, for so long as they continue to deny its existence, western leaders obviously cannot blame pro-lockdown foreign influence for COVID hysteria.

Ultimately, there are only three possible sources for the widespread terror that caused such vast societal devastation during COVID: 1. random hysteria, 2. foreign disinformation, and 3. western leaders’ own actions. The evidence that random hysteria sufficient to result in this level of devastation existed prior to lockdowns simply isn’t there. And, for so long as the establishment continues to deny the effect of the CCP’s pro-lockdown influence, that leaves only western leaders’ own actions—the lockdowns, mandates, and propaganda they ordered—to explain the extent of mass COVID hysteria.

Still, the “pure fear” defense of the COVID catastrophe is worth thinking about. Ultimately, at least some portion of the social and economic devastation that took place during COVID actually was attributable to random hysteria, and no mortal can ever really know how much. But it was western leaders’ own policies that were responsible for a major portion of that fear, and as Sweden’s example illustrates, these policies had no real benefit.

Thus, even if fear was the primary driver of devastation during COVID, because western leaders’ policies were a major contributor to that fear while having no real benefit, then these policies amounted to a policy catastrophe regardless, and the “pure fear” defense fails.

Since the “pure fear” argument—arguably lockdown apologists’ strongest—falls apart for the above reasons, all that remains is the vast coverup and refusal to discuss lockdowns’ actual effects that we’ve witnessed from the establishment for the past three years. It remains to be seen how long this coverup can last; though as I’ve argued, this interminable coverup of reality, being fundamental to the origins of totalitarianism, may have been what the CCP intended from the start.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

Thank you to everyone who’s read, shared, and supported my work throughout this truly unprecedented time in our lives.

As you may know, over the past three years I’ve spent many thousands of hours researching, writing, and reporting on the global response to Covid, particularly with regard to the influence of the Chinese Communist Party, a story on which I didn’t see anyone else focusing. The resulting work has been a kind of cross between investigative journalism, art, and law.

Because I’ve consider this work a public service, I’ve made very little money doing it, nor have I ever requested any. However, a new year brings new obligations. I’ve decided to take this year off from my full-time career as an attorney to take care of my new baby, Sofia, and hopefully continue to write while doing so.

As my longtime followers can attest, I believe what sets my work apart is the quality and honesty of the research and analysis as well as the importance, accuracy, and little-known nature of the facts reported. Unlike many big Substack and Twitter users, I have no outside political or financial affiliations, employees, contracts, or agreements, and this has kept my work completely non-partisan and independent, which I believe to be vital for a story as sensitive as this one. I do sometimes contribute articles to the Brownstone Institute, but I have never received money from that organization.

I realize there’s some fraction of my readers who are convinced that I work for the FBI or some other intelligence operation and may be thinking, “Why would I donate money to the feds?” While it’s a flattering theory, I can promise it is not true. Just a smart kid trying my best to step up to a job I didn’t see anyone else doing.

If you’ve appreciated my work, please consider making a donation via PayPal or with a debit or credit card or becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack.

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I’m not a fan of paywalls, so I do not intend to paywall any of my work at any point for the foreseeable future. Also, the elephant in the room is that there’s a finite amount of information to report about the response to Covid, and we may be approaching the point where there’s simply not much more to report. Thus, I can’t guarantee that I will keep writing so much about this subject for too much longer, though I may begin to expand into other areas.

That said, I still have several important essay topics lined up, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised in the past few weeks by how many huge stories about the response to Covid there still are to uncover when one happens upon the right leads. I will continue to report on these stories in depth as they come in, both here and on Twitter. But for the time being, it would be best to consider any donations or subscriptions as being for the value of my work produced to date. For reference, here’s a list of what I consider some of my best and most important articles so far:

Deborah Birx’s “Silent Invasion”: a Guide to Destroying America From Within

Neil Ferguson, China and a Fanatical Socialist Health Minister: The Untold Story of How Lockdowns Came to Italy and the West

The Masked Ball of Cowardice

China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign

Matt Pottinger: The Intelligence Agent Who Shut Down America

The China Situation Isn’t As Bad As It Looks. It’s Far Worse.

How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard Masked America

Covid-19 and the Will to Power

Template to Export Lockdowns Existed by 2014

The REAL Story of the Birth of ‘Social Distancing’ — the Western Term for Lockdown (封锁)

Lockdown is a National Security Catastrophe

Corruption and COVID: We Are Not ‘All In This Together’

A Deep Dive into Disinformation, Censorship, and Information Warfare in the 21st Century

Balaji Srinivasan: The Man Who Couldn’t Wait for COVID to Ring In the ‘New Normal’

Michael Callahan: DARPA’s Ventilator Guy in Wuhan

“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”—Not

2022 Was the Year the COVID Mandates Collapsed. Let 2023 Be the Year of Reckoning.

No, Lockdown Instigators Do Not Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt

DRASTIC Founder Renounces Lab Leak Theory of COVID’s Origins

Rochelle Walensky’s Terrible Testimony

A Look Back at the Demonization of the Unvaccinated

Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting

Thank you all again for your support, and for everything you’ve done to help keep our world free!

After three years of speculation, an authoritative study has finally confirmed what humanity gained from all those mask advisories during COVID: approximately Zero. That was the verdict of a recent Cochrane review, often referred to as the “gold standard” in evidence-based medicine, which included results from 78 peer-reviewed RCTs with over 6,000 participants. Across the populations studied, masks, regardless of type, had made “little to no difference” in preventing COVID or flu.

The Cochrane review seemed to settle the matter once and for all. Mask opponents had their trump card. But alas, the pro-mask establishment responded with a trump card of their own: a New York Times op-ed by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work, highlighting a statement of clarification from Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, that the review’s conclusion had been “open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize.”

This new trump card was a disaster for mask opponents—the proverbial queen of spades—and it quickly went viral among mask devotees, newly reassured in the righteousness of their talismans. Though the title was a lie—and contradicted by the text of the op-ed itself—as was widely known in the age of “the science,” an op-ed from Zeynep, with her preternatural charisma, was worth decades of scientific evidence. Soon, news about the Cochrane review, and the years of meticulously-collected data and evidence it represented, was drowned out by mainstream headlines about Soares-Weiser’s little statement of clarification.

Yet Zeynep’s op-ed brought new attention to a question that’s been a bit of a mystery since COVID began. Where exactly did all these mask mandates come from? Why did the US CDC suddenly reverse its longstanding guidance and begin recommending masks for the first time in modern history in April 2020?

As it turns out, in a role that Zeynep failed to disclose in her op-ed, it was Zeynep herself and her colleague Jeremy Howard who’d been the deciding factor in initiating that reversal in the CDC’s longstanding guidance on masking. The story of how they did it, and of Zeynep’s larger role in the COVID saga, goes much deeper than her recent op-ed.

Background

Jeremy Howard is a computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert. Something of a Sinophile, Howard is proficient in Chinese and repeatedly advocated for the use of information and expertise from China during COVID. Howard was part of the China-friendly WEF Young Global Leaders program for six years and a member of the WEF’s Global AI Council for three years.

Zeynep Tufekci was born and raised and worked as a programmer in Turkey before beginning an academic career in the United States, where she soon became something of a celebrity writer in the fields of sociology and technology.

Zeynep was consistently ahead on the hot-button topics among the global elite. When Donald Trump won the election in 2016 and the American political class became terrified of Russian disinformation online, Zeynep had already been writing on that topic for years; long before COVID, Zeynep had also been writing about pandemics.

Pandemics and censorship—those were Zeynep’s fields. Both involved tough questions about the suspension of citizens’ rights, a subject from which Zeynep didn’t shy. As she wrote in Wired in 2018, “It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech.” In Zeynep’s view, social media “invalidates much of what we think about free speech—conceptually, legally, and ethically”:

The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns…

Even when the big platforms themselves suspend or boot someone off their networks for violating “community standards”—an act that does look to many people like old-fashioned censorship—it’s not technically an infringement on free speech, even if it is a display of immense platform power. Anyone in the world can still read what the far-right troll Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet has to say on the internet. What Twitter has denied him, by kicking him off, is attention.

This idea that foreign disinformation justified the censorship of American citizens was always an intellectual sleight of hand. “Putin’s regime helped Trump in the 2016 election. Therefore, we need to censor Tim, a ‘far-right’ American citizen.” This conclusion does not logically follow from the premise. Yet we saw this logical fallacy driving the federal government’s “anti-disinformation” activities increasingly in the coming years, and especially during COVID, as has now been evidenced extensively in Missouri v. Biden and the Twitter Files. Commentators have generally attributed this domestic censorship regime to groupthink and bureaucratic excess. It’s thus somewhat rare to see someone spell out this Orwellian sleight of hand so clearly and in so few words, as early as 2018, as Zeynep did here.

#Masks4All

Like Deborah Birx, Zeynep says she first became alarmed about the new coronavirus when she saw Xi Jinping shut down Wuhan, China. Zeynep’s first article on COVID appeared on February 27, 2020, in which she stressed the importance of getting ready for major disruptions during COVID in order to “flatten the curve.” She was among the first individuals to ever use the term “flatten the curve” with regard to COVID, though the term had occasionally been used during prior virus scares. At the time, Zeynep’s advice on masks followed that of the public health establishment:

However, don’t worry if you cannot find masks; those are most important for health care workers… For non–health care people, washing your hands often, using alcohol-based hand-sanitizer liberally and learning not to touch your face are the most important clinically-proven interventions there are.

Over the next few days, Zeynep’s views on masking appear to have changed quite dramatically, and this seemingly whimsical about-face would have a profound impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans and their children for the next three years. As the New York Times later wrote:

Dr. Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science with no obvious qualifications in epidemiology, came out against the CDC recommendation in a March 1 tweetstorm before expanding on her criticism in a March 17 Op-Ed article for The New York Times.

The CDC changed its tune in April, advising all Americans above the age of 2 to wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Michael Basso, a senior health scientist at the agency who had been pushing internally to recommend masks, told me Dr. Tufekci’s public criticism of the agency was the “tipping point.”

Around this time, Zeynep began working with Howard, who founded the American branch of the movement #Masks4All.

It’s not entirely clear how Zeynep and Howard began working together. There’s no evidence of their publicly deliberating these subjects, though they’d interacted in prior years. Zeynep and Howard’s first public interaction with regard to COVID was when Howard cited Zeynep as a contributor to his viral March 9, 2020 article, in which he encouraged readers to shut down their institutions and cancel events based on China’s apparent success “flattening the curve” in Wuhan.

But as Howard tells the story of his initial foray into the subject of masking:

We had a new deep learning course to teach. I needed a case study for how to interpret complex evidence, and on a whim, I picked masks. I had no interest in masks, and assumed the evidence wouldn't show anything much. In Feb, no-one was wearing masks in the West, except for a few Asian expat communities. We were told clearly that they didn’t work and weren’t recommended. When I started studying the data on masks, I was absolutely stunned. It seemed that masks could be our best tool to slow the spread of COVID-19 - but no-one was talking about it! … except for zeynep, who wrote a brilliant piece in the NYTimes [on March 17].

Howard says he’d been inspired by a viral video posted on March 14, 2020, by Petr Ludwig, a founder of the original #Masks4All movement in the Czech Republic, in which Ludwig encouraged everyone to wear homemade masks.

The internationalization of the #Masks4All movement was based on the story that the universal adoption of homemade masks in the Czech Republic had “slowed the spread” of COVID cases there, preventing them from “growing exponentially” as they had in the rest of the world. This story was always false, if not a lie—COVID cases continued to rise throughout this period in the Czech Republic. Today, the Czech Republic is among the 10 worst countries in the world in terms of its recorded number of “COVID deaths.”

Yet this falsehood, that masks had stopped the spread in the Czech Republic, became the original impetus for the global #Masks4All movement and soon a basis for the imposition of mask mandates across the world.

Howard posted his own #Masks4All video. According to Howard, he was then contacted by an editor at the Washington Post: “Imagine my surprise when a washingtonpost editor contacted me, told me they’d seen the video, and wanted me to write an article about it for them!” The WEF Young Global Leaders helped Howard edit the article, which was titled Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve. We should all wear them in public.

In the article, Howard urged Americans to ignore current CDC guidance and to instead adopt universal masking. Howard gushed about a new law in the Czech Republic “making it illegal to go out in public without a mask,” and he cited Chinese CDC Director George Gao—a participant at Event 201—who’d advocated masks to stop COVID based on the prevention of “droplets”:

George Gao, director general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, stated, “Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.”…

The most important message shared in the Czech Republic has been this: “My mask protects you; your mask protects me.” Wearing a mask there is now considered a prosocial behavior. Going outside without one is frowned on as an antisocial action that puts your community at risk. In fact, the community reaction has been so strong that the government has responded by making it illegal to go out in public without a mask…

Given the weight of evidence, it seems likely that universal mask wearing should be a part of the solution. Every single one of us can make it happen — starting today.

We see Gao’s emphasis on “droplets” reflected throughout Howard and Zeynep’s work. For example, the “sources” section of the official #Masks4All website prominently features another quote on droplets from Gao:

The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks. This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role—you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others. – George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention

This emphasis on “droplets” is later reiterated in Howard’s falsely-titled article To help stop coronavirus, everyone should be wearing face masks. The science is clear in the Guardian, as well as Zeynep and Howard’s article Don’t Wear a Mask for Yourself in the Atlantic. Howard then went on a media blitz similar to that of Tomás Pueyo, and he was booked on ABC’s Good Morning America.

As Howard tells it, this GMA interview, in which he was joined by NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, was monumental in that it was the first time Fauci had ever come to advise mask use by the American public. GMA also repeated the quote on masks’ utility in preventing “droplets” from Chinese CDC Director George Gao.

Howard then discussed masking with Senator Pat Toomey, who briefed the CDC and President Trump. The next day, Trump announced that universal masking might be needed.

Howard then began making inroads at the CDC, which was still reluctant to reverse its longstanding guidance on masks because “the science wasn’t strong enough.” So Howard “tried to ratchet up the public pressure.”

I realized that the biggest thing stopping progress on community mask use in the US was the CDC wasn’t recommending them. So I focused on that, and tried to ratchet up the public pressure. I was lucky enough to know folks that had first hand knowledge of what was happening in the CDC, and was told there was a concern that the science wasn’t strong enough. So I reached out to some of the world's top scientists & asked for help reviewing the evidence. They said yes!

Zeynep, Howard, and their coauthors then submitted their preprint, an “interdisciplinary narrative review of the literature on the role of face masks in reducing COVID-19 transmission,” which quickly became the most-viewed paper of all time on preprints.org. Their narrative review begins:

Wu Lien Teh’s work to control the 1910 Manchurian Plague has been acclaimed as “a milestone in the systematic practice of epidemiological principles in disease control,” in which Wu identified the cloth mask as “the principal means of personal protection.”… Masks have continued to be widely used to control transmission of respiratory infections in East Asia through to the present day, including for the COVID-19 pandemic.

In their paper, Zeynep and Howard argued that “everyone, adults and children, should wear masks,” citing as a major benefit masks’ potential to “shape new societal behaviors” as “symbols of altruism and solidarity” serving as “a visible signal and reminder of the pandemic.”

Creating New Symbolism around Wearing a Mask.

Ritual and solidarity are important in human societies and can combine with visible signals to shape new societal behaviors. Universal mask wearing could serve as a visible signal and reminder of the pandemic. Signaling participation in health behaviors by wearing a mask as well as visible enforcement can increase compliance with public mask wearing, but also other important preventative behaviors. Historically, epidemics are a time of fear, confusion, and helplessness. Mask wearing, and even mask making or distribution, can provide feelings of empowerment and self-efficacy. Health is a form of public good in that everyone else’s health behaviors improve the health odds of everyone else. This can make masks symbols of altruism and solidarity. Viewing masks as a social practice, governed by sociocultural norms, instead of a medical intervention, has also been proposed to enhance longer-term uptake.

Zeynep and Howard conclude their paper by recommending mask “mandates” as a means of “shaping new societal norms.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have utilized mask mandates as implementation strategy… Although the use of mandates has been a polarizing measure, it appears to be highly effective in shaping new societal norms.

The CDC officially reversed its masking guidance on April 3, 2020, and insiders reported that Zeynep and Howard’s preprint had been a factor.

Having laid the foundation for shaping these “new societal norms,” Zeynep and Howard then turned their focus toward getting governments to mandate them. As Howard recalls:

Meanwhile, in the US, it was clear that CDCgov just “recommending” masks wasn’t enough. People still weren’t wearing them… We decided to try and write a letter and get lots of scientists to sign it. I wrote the first draft of the letter, and Vincent got to work finding signatories. He knows just about everyone, so he quickly had sent a request off to nearly a hundred medical experts to sign our letter. About 95% of the recipients said YES right away! We wanted to make sure that people actually saw this letter, so zeynep and I decided to write an OpEd about it. USATODAY were kind enough to agree to run it.

USA Today published Zeynep and Howard’s op-ed, titled Over 100 health leaders to governors: Require masks to help contain the coronavirus, in which they wrote that it was necessary to have “80% of the population wearing masks to stop the spread of the virus,” and in order to make that happen, masks had to be mandated:

Getting acceptance for public health actions has historically been difficult. For example, during the 1910 Manchurian Plague, Dr. Wu Lien Teh realized the microbe spread by air and that a simple cotton mask could reduce transmission. But many doctors didn't believe him…

But to be truly effective, they need to be worn by almost everyone. Recent modeling suggests that we need at least 80% of the population wearing masks to stop the spread of the virus.

To make that happen, just “urging” their use is not enough. We can see this in recent survey results showing that in the majority of states that do not require masks, fewer than half the population are using them. 

Over the next three years, mask use exceeded 80% of the population in countless states and countries, but in no instance did it “stop the spread” of COVID.

Throughout his advocacy, Howard didn’t merely convince governments to mandate masks; he proclaimed the “science” on masking to be clear—and this false claim was repeated by pundits. Further, given Howard had no relevant credentials in the field, he was forceful. When virologist Angela Rasmussen questioned his analysis, Howard went so far as to email her boss to demand a “public retraction” of her critique.

In July 2020, Zeynep and Howard were invited to present their masking preprint and to advise the World Health Organization; after this point, Howard largely retired from COVID advocacy. When WHO officials expressed concern that people wearing masks might start behaving recklessly, Zeynep advised them, “No, listen, I’m a sociologist, I know that’s not true.”

Zeynep’s COVID Career

Throughout Zeynep’s work, we see this repeated insistence that masks have no “plausible” downsides, harms, or risks. Zeynep claimed that the WHO’s list of potential downsides to masking was “not a good list” and argued that the WHO “just went out of their way to inflate a harms list.” In a later article, she complained that people were “looking for harms and finding them even when no major ones plausibly exist,” and decried doctors who were focused on “all sorts of alleged ‘harms’ from masks” which she believed to be “nonsense” and “ridiculous.” She boasted multiple times about being credited with changing the CDC’s masking guidance.

Though it’s been well known since COVID’s earliest days that the virus poses virtually no risk to schoolchildren, Zeynep repeatedly advocated child masking, arguing in her original op-ed which was the “tipping point” in changing CDC guidance that “everyone should use masks” due to “increasing evidence of asymptomatic transmission, especially through younger people.” In their preprint, Zeynep and Howard argued that “everyone, adults and children, should wear masks.”

Later, once vaccines were introduced, Zeynep again advocated in the New York Times for schools to “mandate masks for all elementary school children” on the false basis that “even the vaccinated may pose a danger to unvaccinated children.”

In three obscure tweets, Zeynep opposed masking toddlers, a practice the CDC advised and which became mandatory in some states. But it’s hard to square her argument that masks have no “plausible” downsides with this stance against masking toddlers. And for someone who’s written about masks frequently in America’s most prestigious media outlets, one might expect a bit more vocal opposition to toddler masking, especially given her decisive role in the CDC’s guidance.

Zeynep’s indifference to harms during the response to COVID wasn’t limited to masking. Though the policy had no precedent in the modern western world until Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan and wasn’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan, in a since-deleted tweet, Zeynep argued that the United States “should be in full lockdown” in spring 2020.

Later, Zeynep wrote in the Atlantic about Three Ways the Pandemic Has Made the World Better, citing “mRNA vaccines,” new “digital infrastructure,” and the fact that we’d “unleashed the true spirit of peer review and open science” as reasons to be thankful for COVID.

Like Matt Pottinger, Zeynep pushed for more COVID interventions in part based on information from China, though she simultaneously fashions herself as something of a China hawk and supports the “lab leak theory” of COVID’s origins. In debating the lab leak theory, Zeynep noted, “No journalist or scientist in China can operate truly freely,” and “We know people are compelled in China on sensitive topics, including threats to family,” and she joked darkly that Chinese scientists face a risk their “loved ones will be jailed for a decade on trumped up charges.”

Yet despite knowing that “no scientist in China can operate truly freely,” when it came to arguing in favor of more COVID interventions, Zeynep repeatedly advocated the use of information from Chinese scientists, apparently without questioning any of it.

For example, Zeynep advocated for increased ventilator use in early March 2020 based on information from Chinese scientists, noting in a widely-shared tweet that “Chinese scientists” had advised “many COVID-19 patients need to stay on mechanical ventilators as long as four weeks.”

Indeed, in journal articles, “Chinese expert consensus” had advised ventilators as the “first choice” for COVID patients with respiratory distress. This advice was slurped up by the WHO and spat out all over the world in the WHO’s initial guidance on ventilators for COVID patients.

As one doctor later told the Wall Street Journal, “We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patients’ benefit, but in order to control the epidemic… That felt awful.”

This guidance proved extremely deadly. A study in JAMA later revealed a 97.2% mortality rate among those over age 65 who’d been put on mechanical ventilators in accordance with this initial guidance before the practice was largely stopped after spring 2020. To put these results in perspective, patients over age 65 were more than 26 times as likely to survive if they were not placed on mechanical ventilators. Overall, mortality among COVID patients in New York hospitals fell by over two-thirds between spring 2020 and summer 2020.

The initial guidance from Chinese scientists advising early intubation led to the deaths of countless thousands of COVID patients. Yet despite having specifically advised that “many COVID-19 patients need to stay on mechanical ventilators as long as four weeks” based on information from “Chinese scientists”—and despite her knowing that “no scientist in China can operate truly freely”—no apology or admission of error was ever forthcoming from Zeynep Tufekci.

The Cochrane Review

So far, not so good. Despite having no relevant epidemiological expertise, Zeynep had played a decisive role in railroading the CDC and the WHO into changing their longstanding guidance on masking; convinced state governments to mandate masks for “everyone, adults and children,” in part as a means of “shaping new societal norms”; advocated the “old-fashioned censorship” of American citizens for legal speech; encouraged doctors to downplay potential harms of masking; argued that America “should be in full lockdown” when the policy had no precedent other than Xi’s lockdown of Wuhan; wrote falsely that schoolchildren were at risk from vaccinated adults; celebrated “ways the pandemic made the world better”; and explicitly advised early mechanical intubation based on information from Chinese scientists, despite knowing Chinese scientists cannot “operate truly freely,” with no acknowledgment or apology after this guidance proved extremely deadly. It’s like she was just so darn charismatic that no one paid attention to what she was actually doing.

Nonetheless, we were ready to let bygones by bygones. “Mistakes were made” as they say. But then, after scientists spent years meticulously collecting data on masking from countless RCTs all over the world, Zeynep wrote her op-ed on the Cochrane review.

The op-ed is about what one might expect. The title, Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work, is a lie; Zeynep calls for scientists to “continue to collect data on mask wearing,” which wouldn’t be necessary if the science were in fact clear that masks worked. Zeynep relies on a selection of clinical studies, none of which are RCTs; this same level of evidence would show that any number of silly things work against COVID, from ginseng to magnesium to melatonin to fish oil. Zeynep cites a trial from Bangladesh which found an 11% reduction in COVID cases when villagers were given masks, without disclosing a re-analysis that found no benefit and attributed that finding to bias.

Zeynep specifically names the Cochrane review’s lead author, Tom Jefferson, several times. But in an email, Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, with whom Zeynep spoke, said she specifically took personal responsibility for the wording of the conclusion and that she’d been “blindsided” by Zeynep.

Perhaps most glaringly, Zeynep appears not to have disclosed her own conflicting narrative review which concluded that “everyone, adults and children,” should wear masks—or her past advocacy for mask mandates—when she contacted Soares-Weiser, eliciting Soares-Weiser’s clarification statement about the wording of the review’s conclusion. In short, Zeynep’s op-ed may have been an exercise in disinformation.

Conclusion

With regard to Zeynep and Howard’s masking of America, there are only two possibilities—neither good—and the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. The first is that their advocacy was essentially scripted theater, a pretext for seemingly-spontaneous actions that a network of institutional leaders was actually planning to take anyway, unbeknownst to the public. In that case, the existence of such a “script” is antithetical to our democratic principles, and it’s imperative that we determine how such a plan came to be and who was behind it.

The second possibility is that it really was this easy for ambitious activists with no relevant expertise to convince institutional leaders to reverse longstanding public health guidance in the early days of COVID—these being the same leaders who then spent years closing their eyes and ears to any evidence that their interventions weren’t working, even from some of the world’s most-qualified scientists. For example, years later, when asked if the CDC would consider revising its guidance to mandate masks in schools in light of the Cochrane review, CDC Director Walensky told Congress, astonishingly, that the CDC’s “masking guidance doesn’t really change with time.”

The CDC arguably bears the lion’s share of the blame in this story for being so malleable. Furthermore, Zeynep and Howard were not the only ones advocating for masks in the initial weeks of COVID. Matt Pottinger had simultaneously launched his own pro-mask crusade in the White House based on information from his connections in China; others such as Scott Gottlieb and academics and affiliates of the #Masks4All movement had pushed for universal masking as well.

Nonetheless, Zeynep and Howard played a decisive role in affecting this vast shift in scientific guidance that so intimately affected the lives of every American, which the Cochrane review has now shown to have afforded no benefit at the population level, for dubious reasons such as “shaping new societal norms.” Throughout COVID, Zeynep pushed false information and harmful policies that were far afield of her expertise based on information from China, despite knowing such information was unreliable, without ever admitting or apologizing for the errors once the harms became manifest.

Innocent in the ways of information warfare, Soares-Weiser may have issued her clarification statement as an attempt to appease opponents of the Cochrane review. But as the above record makes clear, these are not the kinds of people one should ever try to appease. History teaches that this kind of moral cowardice by institutional leaders can indelibly affect millions of lives.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

Going back to the initial weeks of 2020, prior to the western world’s first lockdown in Lombardy, Italy, on February 21, it’s remarkable how normal things were. COVID had appeared in headlines, but to the extent people were discussing it—even those who would later spend years demanding harsh restrictions and mandates—they were generally doing so in rational and reassuring terms.

The Atlantic, for example, published an excellent piece titled You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus. Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch predicted that by the end of the year, some 40 to 70% of people would be infected with the virus. And that was ok. Just mother nature doing its thing.

There was, of course, the surreal news that General Secretary Xi Jinping had just imposed the most draconian lockdown in human history in Wuhan, China. But even the conversation about that historical anomaly was as normal as one could expect. Most commentators opined on how brutal and illiberal the lockdown seemed. Many expressed fears about how dangerous China’s response made the virus appear. Some, especially those connected to China, reacted hopefully about China’s response.

But one thing virtually no one in the world was doing prior to the lockdown of Lombardy was looking at the lockdown of Wuhan and hoping the rest of the world would come to adopt that policy. And for good reason. Lockdowns had no precedent in the modern western world and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan. For its part, the World Health Organization didn’t endorse China’s lockdown policy as precedent until February 24, 2020, three days after the lockdown of Lombardy.

The number of individuals in the world who publicly advocated or hoped for the international adoption of China’s lockdown policy prior to the lockdown of Lombardy is so small, in fact, that you might literally be able to count it on one hand. To those who’ve studied the response to COVID, some of the names may come as no surprise. Physicist Yaneer Bar-Yam and his colleague Nassim Taleb had long worked on the bizarre “science” of mass quarantine, and looked gleefully at the Wuhan experiment as something the rest of the world might come to emulate. Physicist Neil Ferguson, architect of the wildly-inaccurate COVID models that sent the world into a tailspin, was already working on global social distancing policies, though it’s not clear if he’d yet advocated for emulating China.

Yet among this extremely tiny group who looked positively on the prospect of global adoption of China’s lockdown policy before the lockdown of Lombardy, one person stands out in particular: Balaji Srinivasan, a venture capitalist and tech mogul who couldn’t tweet enough about all the details of the “new normal” that the world would soon see by the end of the year.

Balaji first began tweeting about the new coronavirus on January 30, 2020. For reference, this is the same day that an anonymous stock tip was posted by someone who said they had “friends and family in the medical industry and field, including at CDC and one close friend at WHO,” and that the WHO was already privately planning to begin recreating China’s response across the western world, first by locking down Italian cities:

There are very high profile investors who’ve been silently pulling out ahead of time… the WHO is already talking about how “problematic” modeling the Chinese response in Western countries is going to be, and the first country they want to try it out in is Italy. If it begins a large outbreak in a major Italian city they want to work through the Italian authorities and world health organizations to begin locking down Italian cities in a vain attempt to slow down the spread at least until they can develop and distribute vaccines, which btw is where you need to start investing… I just think it’s a really shitty thing to not be sharing this information with the public because they arrogantly think we’re all irrational and shouldn’t be informed as they are.

That same day, Balaji began his tweet campaign. Balaji presented himself as a kind of eccentric financial savant who was terrified of the new virus and had pieced together an earthshaking story that was being downplayed by the media. Balaji’s first tweets on the subject came in the form of a detailed and widely-shared thread about all the changes the world would soon see if this turned out to be “the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years.”

Like the anonymous stock tip posted that same day, an unbelievable number of Balaji’s seemingly-wild “predictions” turned out to be near-perfect prognoses. Though they’d been ruled out by existing public health literature across the western world, everyone did soon begin wearing face masks following a sharp, unscientific reversal by the public health establishment in April 2020. With the entire world following China’s containment model, remote work did soon take over the world. And, governments across the world did sharply reduce the approval time for vaccine development.

Days later, Balaji posted another thread in which he observed that the Wuhan lockdown would precipitate a flip into digital life, in which the population moved “away from handshakes, restaurants, and public gatherings” into a new form of “remote life.” He also “predicted” that the rest of the world would soon follow.

Balaji’s language about moving away from “handshakes” mirrored that which would soon come from leading public health officials including Anthony Fauci, who two months later suggested that Americans should never shake hands again due to COVID. And, just as Balaji wrote, it did take a year for a vaccine to arrive, by which time the entire world had indeed followed China’s containment model into a “new state” of “remote life.”

This idea that COVID would soon lead the world into a “new normal” is one that Balaji repeated several times.

Like his messaging about moving away from “handshakes,” Balaji’s exact term, the “new normal,” would soon be used by leading pro-lockdown officials all over the world—such as by vocal “Zero Covid” advocate Walter Ricciardi, liaison between the WHO and the Ministry of Health in Italy.

Balaji was especially excited about all the new technologies he saw being deployed during China’s lockdowns, owing to their “wartime levels of medical innovation.”

After the WHO issued its February 2020 report endorsing the global adoption of China’s “uncompromising and rigorous use of nonpharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus,” New York Times reporter Donald McNeil wrote an article promoting the WHO’s report titled To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It, admiring how “China is a place where a leader can ask himself, ‘What would Mao do?’ and just do it.” At the time, many commentators found the idea of copying China’s lockdown policy so ridiculous that they thought McNeil’s article had to be satire. Balaji, on the other hand, cited McNeil’s article positively as part of a thread about how Saint Louis had supposedly saved many lives by canceling parades and other events during the Spanish flu, a kind of propaganda story that was shared widely as part of the initial justification for lockdowns.

Balaji later cited one of McNeil’s interviews for the proposition that “we should know *exactly* what the Chinese did, and determine which of those features are compatible with our ethics and which are not, and then execute.”

Balaji expressed great admiration for Bill Gates, second largest funder of the WHO, and on multiple occasions proposed the idea of making Bill Gates America’s “virus czar.” Gates was a vocal advocate for the global adoption of China’s lockdown policies throughout 2020 and 2021, and his broad influence pushed many institutions in a pro-lockdown direction.

Gates later complained that “freedom” was hindering the western response; China, by contrast, “did a very good job of suppressing the virus,” he said, thanks, in part, to the “typical, fairly authoritarian” approach and the “individual rights that were violated.”

On many occasions, Balaji stressed that leaders needed to be more afraid of the coronavirus, quoting WHO Director Tedros Adhanom: “All countries must use the window of opportunity created by the containment strategy to prepare for the virus’s possible arrival.”

When a tech reporter wrote an article poking fun at Balaji’s tweets, he wrote a long, detailed thread in retort, citing many sources purporting to show why panic about COVID was justified—while also taking the opportunity to plug “tech the Chinese are using to fight virus.”

Yet by the end of spring 2020, Balaji appears to have lost interest in the subject and generally stopped tweeting about COVID with anywhere near the same frequency.

To recap, Balaji, a high-profile investor, began tweeting on January 30, 2020—three weeks before the modern western world’s first-ever lockdown in Lombardy, Italy—and the same day an anonymous stock tip was posted saying:

There are very high profile investors who’ve been silently pulling out ahead of time… the WHO is already talking about how “problematic” modeling the Chinese response in Western countries is going to be, and the first country they want to try it out in is Italy. If it begins a large outbreak in a major Italian city they want to work through the Italian authorities and world health organizations to begin locking down Italian cities in a vain attempt to slow down the spread at least until they can develop and distribute vaccines, which btw is where you need to start investing.

Balaji was supposedly so scared of the new virus that, within days, he’d accurately predicted COVID would be deemed a global pandemic; the entire world would adopt China’s lockdown policy; everyone would soon wear a mask; work and everyday life would go remote; the world would “move away from handshakes, restaurants, and public gatherings”; governments would reduce the approval time for vaccines; it would take a year for a vaccine to arrive; and by that time the world would have shifted into a “new normal.”

Frankly, I don’t buy it. Balaji’s supposed fear of the coronavirus seems belied by the excitement he so frequently expressed about all the new technologies being unveiled in China which would soon see global adoption—and the investment opportunities that entailed—as well as the fact that he appears to have utterly lost interest in COVID after the strict lockdowns of spring 2020. Balaji’s elaborate twitter threads in early 2020 took a lot of work, and there’s nothing about his background to suggest he’s that prescient or altruistic.

In my opinion, it’s far more likely that Balaji is exactly the kind of “high profile investor” described in the anonymous stock tip, who’d caught wind of the seismic plans being hatched by the WHO and their collaborators to recreate China’s COVID response across the world. He then may have decided to have a bit of fun playing Nostradamus.

Astonishingly, in March 2020, Balaji even referred to lockdown in the United States as a “bottom-up” policy—an argument utterly belied by the fact that he was one of only a few people in the world who’d publicly expressed anything close to a desire to emulate China’s lockdowns prior to the sudden lockdown imposed in Lombardy, Italy.

Unlike Tomás Pueyo, it’s unlikely that Balaji’s Twitter prophecies had a major effect on policy—though he did spread a bit of panic to bring these outcomes about. Rather, aside from the uncanny global coordination we observed in COVID policies and propaganda, Balaji’s tweets might be the best evidence so far that this plan to recreate China’s response did, in fact, exist, down to the particular terms and details of how the world would transform. There may be no question more important today than how the WHO and its collaborators were able to plan and execute something so cataclysmic, illiberal, and inhuman without any of our institutions stepping in or informing the public.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

Leaked messages from December 13, 2020, show former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock planning to “deploy the new variant” in Covid messaging to “frighten the pants out of everyone” in order to “get proper behaviour change” in the British public’s compliance with lockdown measures.

The new leak is the most damning revelation to come so far from the Daily Telegraph’s recently-announced ‘Lockdown Files,’ which are based on an archive of over 100,000 messages sent between Hancock and other officials. Journalist Isabel Oakeshott ostensibly obtained the WhatsApp messages to assist with a book about Hancock, comprising the biggest leak of UK Government data in over a decade and shedding new light on the UK’s lockdowns, mandates, and fear messaging.

As the Telegraph summarized:

The Lockdown Files – more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between ministers, officials and others – show how the Government used scare tactics to force compliance and push through lockdowns.

In another message Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that “the fear/ guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the third national lockdown in Jan 2021. 

The previous month, Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, appeared to suggest in one message that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would be helpful in preparing the ground for the looming lockdown, by scaring people into compliance.

In a WhatsApp conversation on Dec 13, obtained by The Telegraph, Damon Poole - one of Mr Hancock’s media advisers - informed his boss that Tory MPs were “furious already about the prospect” of stricter Covid measures and suggested “we can roll pitch with the new strain”.

The comment suggested that they believed the strain could be helpful in preparing the ground for a future lockdown and tougher restrictions in the run-up to Christmas 2020.

Mr Hancock then replied: “We frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain.”

Mr Poole agreed, saying: “Yep that’s what will get proper bahviour [sic] change.”…

Psychologists have already warned that some Government messaging during Covid, including using alleged “fear tactics” in poster and health campaigns, were “grossly unethical” and that inflated fear levels contributed to excess non-Covid deaths and increased anxiety disorders…

Four months later, in Oct 2020, Mr Poole suggested in a group chat that a decision to stop publishing a so-called watchlist of the areas with the highest prevalence of the virus would be helpful to the Government, because it would make every area of the country concerned about the spread of Covid in a second wave. 

“It helps the narrative that things are really bad if we don’t publish,” messaged Mr Poole.

In a second article on the new revelation, the Telegraph went on:

Throughout the course of the pandemic, officials and ministers wrestled with how to ensure the public complied with ever-changing lockdown restrictions. One weapon in their arsenal was fear. 

“We frighten the pants off everyone,” Matt Hancock suggested during one WhatsApp message with his media adviser. 

The then health secretary was not alone in his desire to scare the public into compliance. The WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph show how several members of Mr Hancock’s team engaged in a kind of “Project Fear”, in which they spoke of how to utilise “fear and guilt” to make people obey lockdown.

An Imperial College survey of Covid infections in the community – called the React programme and led by the eminent professor Lord Darzi – provided “positive” news for Mr Hancock and his team… But when the media focused on a separate report by Public Health England and Cambridge University showing a high transmission rate in some parts of the country - prompting speculation that local lockdowns could follow - Mr Hancock said: “That’s no bad thing.” Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, agreed…

With recorded Covid cases now down to just 689, the Government was days away from reopening pubs, restaurants and hairdressing salons. 

But on June 30 2020, Leicester had just gone into a local lockdown. In a WhatsApp group called “Local Action Committee”, Emma Dean, Mr Hancock’s special adviser on policy, reported back to the group a rumour that Milton Keynes may be the next town plunged into a local lockdown. 

Jamie Njoku-Goodwin, Mr Hancock’s media adviser, replied that it would not be “unhelpful” for the public to think they could be next…

They agreed that minor adjustments, such as banning angling, would be “parodied galore” - so decided that “fear” and/or “guilt” were vital tools in ensuring compliance. 

They discussed making mask-wearing mandatory in “all settings” because it had a “very visible impact”.

Along with Hancock’s terror campaign are several other eye-opening revelations. In one conversation, then-PM Boris Johnson declined to lift lockdown restrictions after being told that reopening was “too far ahead of public opinion.”

Johnson later expressed regret about his decision to implement a second lockdown after being informed that the decision had been based on “very wrong” mortality data.

In another incident, a mask mandate was imposed on British schoolchildren for the first time after Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty reasoned that the issue was “not worth an argument” with First Minister of Scotland and strict lockdown advocate Nicola Sturgeon.

By any measure, the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files provide invaluable and astonishing new insight into the depths to which the British Government and its counterparts all over the world sunk as they weighed the perceptions of these unprecedented, unscientific, futile measures against the opinion of the increasingly-terrified and ravenous segment of the public that kept demanding more of them, while devising ever-more-manipulative means of terrifying the more skeptical segment of the public into complying.

Still, critics of the Telegraph have valid reasons for skepticism. While the Telegraph has revealed astonishing evidence of what happened during Britain’s Covid response, after the initial lockdowns of spring 2020, the Telegraph has yet to reveal any information as to why those initial lockdowns happened.

This is a conspicuous oversight, as the Telegraph itself, and most of its journalists, supported the initial lockdowns of spring 2020. Additionally, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which most citizens judged the threat of Covid was their own government’s decision to impose strict lockdowns. The measures thus created a feedback loop in which the lockdowns themselves sowed the fear that made citizens believe their risk of dying from Covid was hundreds of times greater than it really was, in turn causing them to support more lockdowns, mandates, and restrictions.

For that reason, thoughtful commenters tend to believe that determining how the initial lockdown decision was made in spring 2020 remains the most important question of the entire Covid story. Everything else was downstream from the unprecedented terror sown by that initial decision. And, because widespread terror could be used as an excuse for all the decisions that came after, the activities that instigated the initial lockdown decision in spring 2020 may be the only ones in which criminal conduct is likely to be found.

Thus, insofar as the Telegraph fails to shed any light on the activities that led to the initial lockdowns in spring 2020, the value of the Lockdown Files in obtaining justice for the response to Covid will be severely limited. That said, some of the Telegraph’s revelations of what happened—such as Hancock’s desire to “deploy the new variant” to “frighten the pants off the public”—are so damning that hopefully the public will begin taking seriously the question of why this all happened as well.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

Depending on your level of familiarity with the story of the global lockdowns of spring 2020, you may or may not have heard of Tomás Pueyo. Pueyo is an MBA and thinkfluencer who came to sudden fame for his March 10, 2020, article Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now, in which he implored political leaders around the world to emulate China’s “success” against the coronavirus by implementing strict lockdowns.

Pueyo had no relevant credentials or prior interest in epidemiology—and there was little to indicate where he’d gotten his ideas about virus containment—but, strange as it may seem, Pueyo’s article soon became one of the most-shared articles of the entire year, and it was one of the most influential causes of the global lockdowns of spring 2020, especially in Europe. Now, having been relatively quiet for the past three years, Pueyo has returned with a new viral thread purporting to debunk the recent Cochrane review concluding that mask mandates made “little to no difference” in preventing COVID or flu.

As one academic at Sheffield University summarized Pueyo’s story in 2020:

The experts are back in fashion. So the story went during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis… This turned out to be an unsustainable position… Pueyo made no claims to special expertise or relevant credentials, and a glance at his Medium profile showed no previous interest in epidemiology, but rather a range of posts with titles such as What the Rise of Skywalker Can Teach About Storytelling and What I Learned Building a Horoscope That Blew Up on Facebook. This all seemed like a poor fit for the new age of expert deference that we were supposed to be experiencing, but… [Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now] received a stunning 40 million views in the first nine days since publication and has been translated into over 40 languages.

In his 2020 article, Pueyo urged leaders to adopt methods of virus containment modeled on China’s.

The total number of cases grew exponentially until China contained it. But then, it leaked outside, and now it’s a pandemic that nobody can stop.

Pueyo’s article went viral at an astonishing pace and was shared by many influencers and celebrities. But reactions were mixed. Many top commenters expressed shock at Pueyo’s lack of qualifications, and accused him of being a “liar and a fraud.”

Others questioned how someone with no experience or previous interest in epidemiology was suddenly one of the most influential voices in a public health emergency.

When asked about his credentials, Pueyo responded: “You might have also noticed my two MSc and the several viral applications I built that gathered millions of users—with very similar dynamics”—invoking his experience with viral media applications as a qualification to discuss the spread of viruses in the biological sense.

Undeterred, within days, Pueyo had posted links to high-quality translations of his article in dozens of languages. Pueyo’s 6,000-word article had been so popular, so the story went, that readers had, within days, produced immaculate translations in nearly every language.

Pueyo then went on tour advising state legislators and national leaders on implementing lockdowns.

Pueyo’s article contained many oddities. It several times referred to the coronavirus as a “pandemic,” but as of March 10, the World Health Organization had not yet declared a pandemic, and per the article, confirmed cases accounted for less than 0.0015% of the world’s population. In the article, Pueyo implored political leaders:

But in 2–4 weeks, when the entire world is in lockdown, when the few precious days of social distancing you will have enabled will have saved lives, people won’t criticize you anymore: They will thank you for making the right decision.

Not only was the coronavirus not yet a pandemic, but as of March 10 there were fewer than 200 confirmed cases in the entire developing world outside China—fewer than one case per 20 million people. There was no good reason to believe the entire world would be in lockdown in two to four weeks, given the policy had no precedent in the modern western world.

Pueyo’s article contained a trendy GIF purporting to show how China’s lockdown measures could be used to “flatten the curve,” which many influencers included when sharing the article.

Days later, CGTN, the Chinese Communist Party’s largest global propaganda network, shared much the same graphic in a news segment encouraging the global adoption of China’s lockdown policies.

On March 19, 2020, Pueyo posted another Medium article titled The Hammer and Dance, explaining the strategy Pueyo named “the Hammer”—quick, aggressive lockdowns when outbreaks occur—followed by “the Dance”—tracing, surveillance, and quarantine measures.

Three days after Pueyo published The Hammer and Dance, a strategy paper by the German government (dubbed “the Panic Paper”) was secretly distributed to members of parliament and certain media outlets—playing a major role in Germany’s lockdown.

Despite being published just three days after Pueyo’s article, the German Panic Paper relied heavily on Pueyo’s work, discussing the “Hammer and Dance.” However, the term “Hammer and Dance” had no history in epidemiology—Tomas Pueyo had invented it in his March 19 article.

One of the German Panic Paper’s authors was Otto Kölbl, who had no background in epidemiology or public health, but taught for many years in China and ran a blog in which he’d described Hong Kong as “parasitic” and praised the CCP’s exemplary governance of Tibet.

Another author of the Panic Paper, Maximilian Mayer, also had no epidemiology or health background but spent years working at University of Nottingham in Ningbo China, Tongji University in Shanghai, and Renmin University Beijing.

Later, hundreds of pages of emails containing communications leading up to the Panic Paper were obtained via FOIA. In one email, Mayer wrote that he was delivering “secret” information about the Chinese response, and in another specifically recommended: “We suggest the motto ‘collectively distanced.’” Of the 210 pages of emails leading to the German Panic Paper, 118 were blacked out. The emails contained frequent references of China, but nearly all of these are were redacted. The stated reason: “May have adverse effects on international relations.”

To this day, it remains unclear where Pueyo got the ideas for virus containment for his 2020 articles. To some degree, Pueyo’s ideas mirrored those of major lockdown proponents like Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson—architect of the wildly-inaccurate COVID models that instigated lockdowns across the free world—who’d already endorsed global lockdown measures. Yet outside of a niche epidemiology community, these ideas were far from well-known. For the most part, it wasn’t until Pueyo’s articles that these ideas for strict virus containment measures reached the mainstream.

Over the ensuing years, the strict lockdowns of 2020 proved to be one of the greatest policy catastrophes of the past century. As the Wall Street Journal put it: “The pandemic lockdowns were a policy blunder for the ages, and the economic, social and health consequences are still playing out.” And as the UK’s Daily Telegraph wrote: “Basket-case Britain is the definitive proof lockdown was an epic mistake.” Even the center-left London Times expressed regrets: “I totally backed the lockdown (and quite enjoyed it). But was I just a mug?” And even the New York Times quietly acknowledged a study showing that the response to COVID had led to over 170,000 excess deaths among young Americans which were not attributable to the virus: “All of this suggests that large and sustained changes in living habits designed to avoid a single virus had not only ‘economic’ opportunity costs, but also cost a shockingly large number of young lives.”

Even these dismal assessments may be a vast understatement. Ultimately, the lockdowns and restrictions imposed by governments in response to COVID-19 killed millions, pushed tens of millions into extreme poverty, strained the mental health of billions, and transferred trillions of dollars in wealth from the world’s poorest to the very richest, all while failing to have any meaningful effect on the spread of the coronavirus.

Since his pro-lockdown activism in 2020, Pueyo had been relatively quiet on the subject of COVID measures. Pueyo spoke in support of “Zero Covid,” but generally focused on sometimes-viral posts on other topics. One could speculate as to the meaning of this silence. Perhaps he’d simply been mistaken, or even harbored some regrets?

But now, Pueyo has roared back onto the scene with a new viral thread purporting to debunk the recent Cochrane review which concluded that mask mandates made “little to no difference” in preventing COVID or flu, and attacking the reporting of the Cochrane review by the New York Times and others.

Like his 2020 Medium articles, Pueyo’s thread has been shared widely by celebrities, influencers, and even scientists.

However, many users have already pointed out the many glaring flaws in Pueyo’s “analysis.” Professor Francois Balloux called Pueyo’s work “uninformed nonsense.”

As the New York Times and others have noted, Cochrane reviews are considered the gold standard of systematic reviews. Yet aside from these many errors, those gushing over Pueyo’s thread are missing the most glaring point of all. Even if they can pretend to poke some methodological holes in the Cochrane review, that still leaves them with what they had before: precisely zero RCTs showing that mask mandates had any significant effect in slowing the spread of COVID.

Yet the most illuminating point of all may be in what this new thread tells us about Pueyo’s intentions. In light of the unimaginable devastation wrought by the lockdowns in which his 2020 articles played an outsized role, one may have thought that Pueyo might harbor some reservations about weighing into matters of public policy outside his field. Pueyo’s embarrassing attempt to cast shade on Cochrane and the New York Times should tell us all we need to know: Despite the countless millions of lives destroyed, one of the chief instigators of global lockdowns appears to feel absolutely no remorse about his actions.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

For those who live in developed democracies, the corruption that plagues so much of the world can be difficult to understand. What is “corruption” exactly, and what causes it?

At a high level, corruption stems from the systemic disrespect of a nation’s institutions and legal system, especially by those in power. But while the causes and roots of corruption are complex, the results are consistent and banal. The hallmark of virtually all corruption is “playing dumb”: Officials make decisions in their official capacity that are inexplicably poor for the institutions and the public which they’re meant to represent, but which actually benefit another party in which the corrupt official has an interest. The poor decisions of these corrupt officials, and the connections that led to them, are protected from legal scrutiny either by dysfunctional civic institutions or by other corrupt officials.

Fortunately for those of us in the developed world, while there are important exceptions, most of our officials tend to conduct themselves in a decent and honest manner.

That is, of course, until March 2020, when governments across the western world decided to shut down all of their economic and social institutions for an indefinite period, ostensibly on the belief that the lockdown of one city in China had effectively eliminated a fast-spreading respiratory virus from the entire country (but nowhere else). They then proceeded to import a swathe of illiberal “public health” mandates including forced masking, mandatory testing, quarantine facilities, and digital vaccine passes for everyday activities, none of which did anything to control COVID, but which did terrify the public into normalizing and extending these psychologically self-perpetuating policies.

“We have only ourselves to blame!” “We have to take personal responsibility.” “This is the power of fear!” “This is the endgame of modern liberalism.” “Don’t blame China. Blame our own governments.”

Anyone who’s been at all involved in the debate surrounding the response to COVID has seen these kinds of overtures with some frequency. Superficially, these calls for “personal responsibility” have a veneer of virtue—even nobility. But given the particular nature of the crimes committed during the response to COVID, these calls to personal responsibility are insufficient. In fact, owing to the particular nature of corruption, calls for “personal responsibility” can even be used by corrupt officials or their agents to avoid scrutiny for their actions.

1. To collectively “blame ourselves” for decisions made by a small number of individuals is to be ruled by those individuals.

Historians who’ve studied the subject of divine rule have identified no particular point in time in which the concept of divine kingship could be said to have arisen. In fact, across continents, with some exceptions, wherever human civilization arose, there were god-kings. That is to say, whenever humans organized themselves into agrarian civilizations of significant size, a strongman was liable to claim the civilization as his own, and the population was forced to treat him and his will as divine.

Under this traditional system of divine kingship, in all matters public and private, the will of the ruler was the will of the people. For a mistake to be made was definitionally impossible. For the ruler to be questioned or “blamed” was taboo to even think—equivalent to questioning a god. Should the will of the king result in peril or even death for anyone in the kingdom, even deliberately, then they had only themselves to blame.

Over countless centuries, mankind developed institutions to check this kind of centralization of power. The purpose of these institutions was best expressed by the thinkers of the western Enlightenment. In the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” And in those of John Locke: “Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.” And as James Madison put it:

“If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

The goal of these institutions was to establish checks and balances that preserved the rights and the will of individuals, empowering them with at least some organizational structure should the need arise to hold those in power accountable under the law.

But these institutions are meaningless unless citizens utilize them. Should the public instead choose to accept the decisions of those in power as a substitute for their own free will, then even the best-designed institutions are powerless. It is thus in the interest of any would-be tyrant or ruling clique, through either propaganda, coercion, or demoralization, to convince the people to accept their decisions as a substitute for their own will. Once the public accepts decisions made by any particular individual or group as a substitute for their will, then they are effectively ruled by them, just as they were ruled by the god-kings of ages past.

Personally, I never accepted the COVID lockdowns of 2020 or any of the mandates and dictats that followed. I will not blame myself for these policy catastrophes, nor do I believe my fellow citizens who did not support these polices should blame themselves. On the contrary, I believe these policies were illiberal and fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system, and I see them as an underhanded means of superimposing decisions instigated by a small and conspicuously anonymous clique for the will of the people. I therefore believe that our institutions should be utilized to demand a comprehensive inquiry into the provenance of these policies, so the intentions and lawfulness of the clique who initiated them may be examined by the public.

2. Those who call for us to “blame our own governments” may be overly-optimistic about the chance of seeing justice based solely on the policies themselves—or, alternatively, overly-pessimistic about the chance of getting any justice at all.

One of the most common complaints I receive about my work is that we can’t “blame China” for the response to COVID and should instead “blame our own governments.” This has always baffled me, because the whole point of my work is that the response to COVID was so inexplicably awful as to reveal our governments to be corrupted to an unprecedented degree, and we should therefore heap blame on our governments even to the point of launching investigations. That said, the argument that we should “blame our own governments” for the response to COVID comes up enough to warrant examination.

In the United States, there is no historical precedent for prosecuting an official on the sole basis that a policy the official implemented was so bad. The constitutionality of a policy can be challenged in court, but even if successfully challenged, the policy is simply reversed; there are no repercussions for the officials who implemented it aside from losing their office. Even in the cases of the worst policies in American history, such as the Trail of Tears and Japanese internment, there are no instances in which officials have been charged simply for issuing policies that were extremely bad.

The lockdowns and mandates that were implemented during the response to COVID were extraordinarily illiberal and destructive. Those who call for us to “blame our own governments” may be thinking that individual officials should be charged simply for being so ethically vacuous as to implement such awful policies. But there is no historical precedent or legal basis for such a charge. Of course, the officials should be removed from office, but if the goal is to charge an official for a policy that he or she implemented, then it’s corruption or bust. Legally, there is no alternative.

On the other hand, those who call for us to “blame our own governments” for the response to COVID may be implying that obtaining justice for what was done is impossible, and that we should therefore begrudgingly accept whatever our governments decide to do. But I find this view fatalistic; civic activism has always been necessary for our institutions to function properly.

Significant evidence of corruption and malfeasance during COVID has already begun to emerge. A well-designed inquiry into the response to COVID, if demanded by the public, could reveal criminal wrongdoing on the part of key officials who instigated that response. And a finding of corruption on the part of one or more officials during COVID would likely to lead to more investigations in other states and countries—a domino effect that could cause the entire conspiracy, if any existed, to unravel. On the contrary, to simply accept our fate, however begrudgingly, would be exactly what the conspirators would want.

Finally, those who call for us to “blame our own governments” may be thinking the illiberalism of the response to COVID proves our constitutional republic system is broken. But there’s no better system on offer, nor is there anywhere near the political will to replace our system. The response to COVID has revealed the need for important long-term reforms, such as limiting emergency powers and the legal purview of “public health.” But aside from those long-term reforms, fixing our institutions means working within the system we have.

3. Because of the specific nature of corruption, the criminality of any given action by an official depends entirely on whether it was influenced by an outside interest.

Because of the nature of the crime of corruption, the same action taken by an official would not be a crime if that action was devised solely of the official’s own free will, but would be a crime if it was influenced by the official’s outside interests. Counterintuitively, it can thus be in the self-interest of a corrupt official, or those protecting the corrupt official, to insist that he or she take “personal responsibility” for his or her actions. The following is an example to illustrate this phenomenon (any resemblance to real persons, places, or events in this example are purely coincidental).

In response to news about a novel virus, Governor Gavin Dandrews believes that all churches in the state of Danistan should be indefinitely shut down. Dandrews discusses his plan with his wealthiest funder, Robert Banks, who thinks it’s a great idea. Mr. Banks takes the idea to his newspaper, the New Donk Times, and journalist Donald Squealer pens a very convincing piece arguing that shutting down all churches in Danistan is the right thing to do. But years later, to everyone’s dismay, it turns out that shutting down all the churches in Danistan did nothing to stop the spread of the virus.

In the above example, all the individuals involved showed very poor judgment in calling for the shutdown of all churches in Danistan. But no one is guilty of corruption. On the other hand, take the following example.

Robert Banks would like to produce his latest uPhones at the lowest possible production cost. Mr. Yi, General Treasurer of the city of Muhan, can produce the uPhones at the lowest production cost, but on one condition: Mr. Banks must endorse Mr. Yi’s model for the response to an outbreak of a novel virus, which involved shutting down all churches in Muhan to eliminate the virus—or so Mr. Yi claims. Mr. Banks agrees, and in return for Mr. Yi’s producing the uPhones in Muhan, Mr. Banks tells Governor Dandrews that, in exchange for ongoing campaign funding (and a little something in the Panama fund), they need to copy Muhan’s response to the virus by indefinitely shutting down all churches in Danistan. Mr. Banks also contacts Donald Squealer at the New Donk Times to pen a very convincing article that shutting down all churches in Danistan is the right thing to do. Later, between bites at his favorite restaurant, the Dutch Laundry, Governor Dandrews expresses remorse that shutting down all churches in Danistan did not slow the spread of the virus.

In this example, now we can see the corruption that’s gripped the once-innocent state of Danistan. The result is the same—all churches have been shut down to no avail—but now we can see that they didn’t do it because they actually thought it would stop the virus, they only did it so that Mr. Banks could keep producing low-cost uPhones in Muhan!

Intrepidly, we call for an investigation into corruption in the matter of the shutting of churches in Danistan. But upon hearing of our campaign, Squealer pens a compelling piece in the New Donk Times imploring Governor Dandrews and his fellow citizens to take personal responsibility for what’s transpired. Everyone had been gripped by fear, Squealer argues. “Don’t blame Muhan. Blame our own government, right here in our beloved home of Danistan.” Governor Dandrews takes the stage and personally assumes responsibility for shutting all Danistan’s churches, tearfully explaining to the crowd that it was the best decision based on what he knew at the time. The citizens of Danistan applaud this display of statesmanship and put the matter to rest. By the next election, hardly anyone remembers the affair.

Here, you can see how the poor citizens of Danistan have been played. Squealer and Governor Dandrews may have convinced the people that they and their government were taking personal responsibility for the closure of churches in Danistan. But it was never actually about taking personal responsibility, it was only about avoiding an investigation that would have revealed the churches had been shut so that Mr. Banks could keep producing low-cost uPhones in Muhan.

Conclusion

The prosecution of corruption is an established and necessary part of our institutional framework. In certain, extreme circumstances, if the promulgation of a policy has been influenced by an ulterior interest, then it must be considered criminal. Official decisions that exhibit the hallmarks of corruption by being otherwise inexplicably catastrophic—or based on inexplicably naïve premises, such as the treatment of China’s COVID data as real—cannot go ignored.

If corruption is not properly prosecuted, then constitutional democracy will inevitably be consumed by regimes or criminal networks that are willing and able to use methods such as bribery and blackmail to affect policy. No amount of institutional tinkering could avert this.

Certainly, we should all take personal responsibility for what transpired during COVID by examining our society, our institutions, and ourselves to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. But the most important way we can take “personal responsibility” for the response to COVID is by making sure the officials who instigated these policies see a comprehensive inquiry into their decision-making.

Those who initially acted to impose lockdowns during COVID took bold steps that they knew would indelibly affect millions of lives. Given their confidence, they should be more than happy to reveal themselves and explain their motivations and reasoning to the public. We’re waiting.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

It took nearly three years, but in light of the recent Cochrane review including 78 peer-reviewed randomized controlled trials (RCTs) concluding masks made “little to no difference” in preventing COVID or flu, the New York Times has finally been forced to surrender to reality: The mask mandates did nothing. In a show of capitulation, the Times deputized their top conservative columnist, Bret Stephens, to pen an article on the Cochrane review. By all accounts, the result is blistering:

The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”…

What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates?

“They were convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.”

What about the utility of masks in conjunction with other preventive measures, such as hand hygiene, physical distancing or air filtration?

“There’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.”

Stephens minces no words in his criticism for the CDC and its director Rochelle Walensky, likely a reflection of the Times’ growing disenchantment at having been led down the garden path by the public health establishment. Stephens even includes a specific reference to Walensky’s awful testimony, which I highlighted last week, in which she insisted that the CDC’s guidance to mandate masks in schools would “not change with time” regardless of new evidence:

In congressional testimony this month, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called into question the Cochrane analysis’s reliance on a small number of Covid-specific randomized controlled trials and insisted that her agency’s guidance on masking in schools wouldn’t change. If she ever wonders why respect for the C.D.C. keeps falling, she could look to herself, and resign, and leave it to someone else to reorganize her agency.

Stephens blames the CDC’s performance during COVID for a growing distrust of science and of public institutions more generally, and takes a subtle swipe at those who looked to China as a legitimate model for a public health response:

But the costs go deeper. When people say they “trust the science,” what they presumably mean is that science is rational, empirical, rigorous, receptive to new information, sensitive to competing concerns and risks. Also: humble, transparent, open to criticism, honest about what it doesn’t know, willing to admit error.

The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.

It also betrays the technocratic mind-set that has the unpleasant habit of assuming that nothing is ever wrong with the bureaucracy’s well-laid plans — provided nobody gets in its way, nobody has a dissenting point of view, everyone does exactly what it asks, and for as long as officialdom demands. This is the mentality that once believed that China provided a highly successful model for pandemic response.

In light of all this, we get the closest to an outright mea culpa that we’ve seen from the New York Times since COVID began:

[T]he verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.

Oh—“occasionally censored” you say?

Stephens’ article is good to see, and a promising step in the right direction. Still, the lockdowns and mandates that the New York Times supported since COVID began were a policy catastrophe of unprecedented proportion. Globally, these policies led to millions of deaths, pushed hundreds of millions into extreme poverty, wrecked the mental health of billions, and transferred trillions of dollars in wealth from the world’s poorest to the very richest, all for virtually no benefit.

For evidence of the psychological destruction that’s been wrought by these policies, one need look no further than the comments to Stephens’ article, which read like they’ve come straight from a psychiatric ward:

In the words of Jennifer Sey, it’s unbelievable that this needs to be said, but if a policy doesn’t work in the real world, then it doesn’t work.

From these comments, it’s clear that most of these people will take many years to psychologically recover. While a good psychiatrist never gives up on a patient, it also does no good for a doctor to blame themselves for those patients they couldn’t save. So we probably need to accept the fact that many of these people are broken beyond repair.

The New York Times and other institutions that supported lockdowns and mandates thus have a very long way to go if they wish to make amends for what they supported during COVID. At an absolute minimum, below is a list of the terms that might be acceptable should the New York Times wish to fully atone:

• Unequivocal apology for all harm that was done by lockdowns and mandates

• Endorsement of a comprehensive inquiry into the response to COVID, including a detailed accounting of the provenance and harm done by these policies

• Full disclosure of all relationships and communications that led to the editorial decision to endorse lockdowns in early 2020

• Full disclosure of all relationships and communications that led to the editorial decision to treat China’s COVID data as real and its COVID response as legitimate public health policy

• Comprehensive review and disclosure of any violations of the New York Times’ editorial standards throughout its coverage of COVID

• Full-length review of my book

So yeah, once the Times does all that, then maybe we can start to talk about amnesty.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

Last week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky gave testimony to Congress that was jaw-dropping even by the abysmal standards to which we’ve been accustomed during COVID. In just a few hours, Walensky managed to tell Congress that the CDC’s guidance to mandate masks in schools would never change regardless of new evidence, that the CDC had conducted no randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as to whether masks were effective because it was so obvious that they worked, and that COVID vaccines had been added to the child immunization schedule so they could be given to uninsured children.

First, in light of the recent Cochrane review including 78 peer-reviewed RCTs with over 600,000 participants concluding masks made “little to no difference” in preventing COVID or flu, Walensky told Rep. Cathy Rodgers that the CDC’s guidance to mandate masks in schools would “not change with time” regardless of the new evidence.

Walensky’s response is astonishing for several reasons. First, to say that the CDC’s masking guidance “does not change with time,” despite the recent Cochrane review, is effectively to admit that the CDC’s guidance does not change with new data or evidence, either. This is a far cry from the commitment to “science” which the American people had long been told they were following.

If that’s not bad enough, Walensky’s statement is, of course, also flatly untrue. After discouraging Americans from obtaining facemasks in the initial weeks of COVID, the CDC made an abrupt about-face in April 2020, and facemasks soon became mandatory for day-to-day activities, which the CDC at the time had attributed to a change in “science.” Making all this even more horrific is the fact that the United States stands out conspicuously as the only developed nation in which its national public health agency recommends masking children as young as two years old.

Next, Walensky goes on to tell Rep. Gary Palmer that no one in the US federal government would have thought to propose an RCT to determine if masks were effective because “there wasn’t equipoise to the question anymore.”

Effectively, Walensky is saying that the CDC wouldn’t consider conducting an RCT, widely considered the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine, because it was so obvious that masks worked. It’s unclear if Walensky’s butchering of the word “equipoise” was simply a result of her trying to use a big word in order to sound scientific. But if taken literally, the actual meaning is even worse: To say there was no “equipoise” to the question is to say that conducting an RCT to determine if masks worked would have been a violation of research ethics.

Finally, Walensky tells Rep. Dan Crenshaw that the only reason COVID mRNA vaccines had been added to the routine pediatric immunization schedule for all children over six months old was so that they could be given to uninsured children.

As has been known since early 2020, COVID poses virtually zero risk to young children. That there have been 2,000 pediatric deaths from COVID is belied by the CDC’s own data—and the vast majority of these children had severe comorbidities.

But moreover, adding COVID mRNA vaccines to the routine immunization schedule has broad implications far beyond simply making them available to uninsured children. Seeing these shots on the routine immunization schedule is certain to make it more likely for individual schools and municipalities to mandate those shots for young children to attend school, while affording legal protection to those that do. Healthcare providers will also be more likely to lump those shots in with other routine childhood vaccinations, giving them to young children with only minimal disclosure and parental consent. And finally, having COVID mRNA vaccines on the routine immunization schedule may afford certain legal protections to vaccine manufacturers, such as Pfizer and Moderna, for any harms they might cause.

Walensky has a long history of testimonies nearly as terrible as these. Back in 2021, Walensky couldn’t explain to the Senate why the CDC hadn’t conducted any field studies on natural immunity from COVID.

And then there was the time when Walensky explained that the CDC’s initial bravado for vaccine passes, mandates, and grandiose promises about vaccine efficacy back in 2021 had been based on a “CNN feed” claiming the vaccines were “95% effective.”

These galling testimonies aside, it’s not surprising why Rochelle Walensky was picked to be CDC Director. On the surface, she’s articulate and presentable. So it’s a real testament as to how far public health has fallen over these last three years that someone in her position would be telling these kinds of falsehoods and defending such atrocious policies.

Yet for all her poise, Walensky demonstrated at least one horrendous error in moral judgment that may help illuminate how she wound up on this path. In 2020, Walensky was a signatory to the John Snow Memorandum, a kind of rebuttal to the Great Barrington Declaration. The John Snow Memorandum endorsed the efficacy of lockdown, denied evidence of natural immunity following COVID infection, and essentially acted as the blueprint for “Zero Covid.” All of these positions were, of course, resoundingly discredited in the ensuing years.

Walensky’s signing the John Snow Memorandum was in keeping with what may be her most damning quote of all. In a radio interview just before being appointed as CDC Director, Walensky contrasts Sweden’s light-handed response to COVID negatively with China’s “really strict lockdowns,” and gives her stamp of approval to the CCP’s data purporting to show that the lockdown of Wuhan had succeeded in eliminating the virus from all of China.

Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

The scars that have been left on all of us by the response to COVID are incomprehensibly varied and deep. For most, there hasn’t been enough time to mentally process the significance of the initial lockdowns, let alone the years-long slog of mandates, terror, propaganda, social stigmatization and censorship that followed. And this psychological trauma affects us in myriad ways that leave us wondering what it is about life that just feels so off versus how it felt in 2019.

For those who were following the real data, the statistics were always horrifying. Trillions of dollars rapidly transferred from the world’s poorest to the richest. Hundreds of millions hungry. Countless years of educational attainment lost. An entire generation of children and adolescents robbed of some of their brightest years. A mental health crisis affecting more than a quarter of the population. Drug overdoses. Hospital abuse. Elder abuse. Domestic abuse. Millions of excess deaths among young people which couldn’t be attributed to the virus.

But underneath these statistics lie billions of individual human stories, each unique in its details and perspectives. These individual stories and anecdotes are only just beginning to surface, and I believe that hearing them is a vital step in processing everything that we’ve experienced over the past three years.

I recently sent out a query on Twitter as to how people had been affected by the response to COVID at an individual level. The conversation that emerged is a luminating and haunting reflection of what each of us experienced over the past three years. Below is a tiny selection of the responses that I found especially powerful.

Specifically, the query was: “Which aspect of the response to COVID affected you most at a personal level?”

Mark Trent: “Watching the last remnants of my belief in democracy get peeled away. Seeing the collusion across the globe roll out in lockstep made me realise just how powerful and comprehensively in control those that orchestrate the darkness are.”

Dr Jonathan Engler: “The realization that nearly everyone I knew would give up literally all their individual rights for the illusion of safety.”

Muriel Blaive, PhD: “How my friends, including many colleague historians who know very well the history of the 20th century, proved ready to believe any propaganda, to refrain from questioning government nonsense, and to public shame anyone who did. It's as if all the studies we led were for naught.”

Myrddin the Weathered: “How easily people were propagandized. Particularly people who I thought carried the ability to properly scrutinize the situation. Frankly, it was down right chilling how easily most people fell in line. No question how the Nazis were able to control their populace.”

Watcher: “Closures. My business was thrown for a loop the outlets I used to deal with depression like the gym or going for coffee w/friends were closed and it was beyond hard to get through the day with everything going on and no outlet to deal with any of it Talking about it is traumatic.”

Christine Bickley: “Everything. My business that I spent 30 years building hasn't recovered and is unlikely to. I used to have health insurance and save. Had to cancel the ins and am using my savings to top up income. I'm not the worst off by far. It was criminal.”

Jemma Palmer: “Lockdown = no income, no home, health declined, mental health declined, didn’t see my family or friends for years, changed my life for the worse, not sure I will get to have kids now, I’d like to be who I was before lockdown & for my life to be what it was.”

Sarah Burwick: “The restrictions on travel and rules governing visiting patients in the hospital. I believe my mom would be alive today had I been able to visit her and advocate for her care in person. It haunts me.”

ProfessorYaff1e: “Not being able to visit my dad in hospital as he lay dying until the last couple of days when he was so far gone he didn't know what was going on.”

Sursum Corda: “Having my mom locked up in an assisted living center & not being able to hug her or talk to her except by phone through a closed window-all while HCWs traipsed in & out unmolested. I was so angry!!”

PJS: “The lies.”

Karinaksr: “Segregation, exclusion.”

Tin hayes: “Tribalism.”

Ally Bryant: “Had to be the crimes against humanity...”

Nick Hudson: “The darkness of it all.”

Remnant MD: “The disintegration of Autonomy. One of the four pillars of medical ethics. Those who partook, have made a mockery of medicine.”

MD Aware: “The willingness of so many to comply with all of it, no questions asked - even when things made no logical sense. The unwillingness of the same individuals, especially colleagues, to listen to any reason. I never imagined society could be so influenced and so horribly misled.”

Love4WesternCanada: “My mother dying alone, after have been cut off from all family for 7 weeks.”

ThinkingOutLoud: “The devastating human misery created by the closures of people’s businesses. Being unable to talk to any friends or most family because every single one of them agreed with what was happening, I was treated like a leper. It’s why I turned to twitter, to feel less alone.”

RantingLogician: “My ex fell for it, I didn’t and refused to comply or close my business, and she kept my young children from me the entirety of the first lockdown.”

Debbie Mathews: “Losing a 30 year friendship because we had a difference of opinions on the issue. She considered me a selfish grandma killer.”

Number 99: “It harmed my career, irrevocably. Tied with, it harmed my son's college career, irrevocably. Tied with: it harmed my marriage, irrevocably.”

Hillary Beightel: “Masks. Not just the fact they were useless. They became a political symbol, but they served as a tool to keep people scared. Masks mean everyone is sick. They played such a huge psychological role… I hate them!”

Year Zero: “Vaccine passports. I still can’t believe that most people just went along willingly with segregating their friends and family members out of society. There’s been no atonement for this. It’s deeply fractured close relationships in a way I’m not certain I’ll ever get over.”

Kristen Mag: “For me it was being cast out of public spaces for five months. Dark days.”

Natalya Murakhver: “School closures and child mask policies.”

Mike O’Hara: “Everything that was done to children. Masking, separation, isolation.”

BundlebranchblockMD: “Watching my then teenagers go from happy, healthy, engaged kids to isolated, depressed, emaciated kids. Biggest mistake of our lives not moving them to private school immediately. We have spent many times more than the cost of tuition on therapy and tutors.”

Spence O Matic: “My son was a 2020 high school grad. All the signatures of that, plus his senior year of baseball….wiped out because of a severe cold with zero threat to him. No grad night. No prom. Nothing. No apologies will suffice for me. Ever. The data was clear.”

Rob Hazuki: “The persistent doom figures on the news, the advertising on tv that messaged as of the world had been nuked and the way the media didn’t ask any intelligen questions during press conferences other than to beg to be locked down harder.”

IT Guy: “I was booted out of my niece’s wedding for not being vax’d. My wife hasn’t seen her grandkids since the Before Times because she’s not vax’d. My first cousin died of cardiac arrest right after 2nd Moderna dose. That’s 3 I know, but all pretty impactful.”

M_Vronsky: “I no longer speak to my father or my brother, both of whom abandoned all of their supposed Liberal pretenses and became authoritarians up to the point of arguing for my segregation from society (my father argued that to my face the last time we spoke).”

Instavire: “The overwhelming # of people (family not excepted) willing to turn Milgram’s dial up to “potentially lethal,” when it came to punishing the non-vx’d — and worse, that they did so with such glee. The success of the experiment sickens me and most of these people are still among us.”

Foundring: “My parents/family didn’t care when I lost my jobs over the vax mandate.”

DDP21: “The way friends and family turned on each other over vaccine status. Our already small family has been destroyed by it. My kids are growing up without their aunt, uncle and cousins.

EatSleepMask: “Being a teacher & seeing kids who need the consistency of school, being forced to stay home. Then having to reassure not only them but my own kids that things would be ok, when I was just as shell shocked as they were. Not to mention balancing educating my students & my kids.”

LFSLLBHons: “Masking children and the fact that most parents did it willingly and turned on those who tried to save the children.”

PiA: “It shuttered my ~15 year old business. It isolated my loved ones after the death of my mother. It was a tough road to navigate for everyone. But the worst part: it ruined too many lives.”

Manny Grossman: “Losing my business, career, career trajectory, friends, business contacts, reputation and the ability to shop in my local stores etc. All because I advocated for reality and truth.”

Captain Ancapistan: “It broke the brains of almost everyone I know, and forever changed my perspective of western medicine.”

Nicky Frank: “April 22, 2020 and May 6, 2020. Those were the days my friends Ryan and Jen committed suicide because they couldn't bare the isolation anymore and people were telling them they're weak. Ryan's words "I can't infect anyone if I'm dead" still haunt me.”

John Baird: “The snooping, snitching, silencing, and bullying of sceptics, neighbours, and people with hidden disabilities. Curtain twitchers, do-gooders, and virtue signallers held sway. Never again.

SunnySideUp: “Lockdown down!! Having to deal with my 15 yr daughter self-harming, sucidal thoughts, eating disorder and fear of fire... I hate what they did. Also how it has affected her twin sister! Both seeing counsellors... not what I have ever wanted!!”

Beth Baisch: “Social bubbles. Nobody included me in theirs. It was an awful, lonely way of finding out where one stands. Some friends saw me out walking one day and rather than come over and say hello they DM’d later because I wasn’t in their bubble. Still suffering effects.”

Lex: “My brother disowning me. Family specifically not allowing *me* into their homes. My 'spectrum' child freaking out at homeschooling. The hangover of being dead inside half the time & despondent the other. Worrying friends & family have that poison pulsing through them. Etc Etc Etc...”

Camelia: “Restrictions on live performance. I worked in music and became completely black pilled on the entire industry.”

Fashion Felons: “My company went bankrupt and lost my job. Family and friends wouldn't see me because I was from a 'hot zone'. Got the jab and lots of horrible side effects. Need I go on?”

Miki Tapio Walsh: “Universal masking of healthy people and forcing us to live in a faceless society hit me hard. I was also frustrated that I lost the ability to do my normal exercise routine for 2 years… I know not the most important thing in the world, but it truly affected my mental health.”

James F. Kotowski: “My son's having been kept out of school, missed out on most of his wrestling season, etc. On a more societal level, the exacerbation of the schism between 'republicans' and 'democrats', and the degraded status of dialogue between 'opposing' pts of view.”

Russ Walker: “The school lockdowns, my daughter lost her junior and senior year. Followed by all the General lock downs and vaccine mandates. Unforgivable!”

Daniel Hadas: “Closure of universities. A fundamental betrayal of students' and lecturers’ vocation.”

Stevemur: “School/university response. Those who had the most at stake (i.e., learning, childhood, socialization) had a LOT summarily taken away from them, with very little evidence to support it. And when the evidence became clear, it has taken (and IS taking) way too long to restore it.”

Rowan: “I think seeing people get hurt, the hypocrisy and discrimination. At this point people not willing to admit they were wrong and being so terrible.”

Trish the Dish: “I’m probably going to get married (ask me again in a month) and my one remaining Alive Parent I’m not going to invite because he disowned due to disagreements about the shot.”

Snek: “My oldest is on the spectrum and he never got used to going to school again after the closures. It's cost me all my vacation days and my ex has had a burnout due to it. Everyone is emotionally exhausted and he's having to go to special counselors. He was doing great before.”

Molly Ulrich: “When folks got a kick out of being authoritarians when they told me to pull up my mask over my nose.”

Increase Laws: “The mask humiliation ritual & watching my kids have to do it. Got cut off from family members. Lost a rental & threatened with job loss plus the inability to travel. 2020 was quite the year.”

Maret Jaks: “Me, I'm fine, but watching our gov't give young people despair and loneliness and being helpless to do anything about it - awful. My kids are grown and fine and managed their teens well. Many of my friends fed into the fear and one couple found their only child dead (suicide).”

Elizabeth Forde: “Constantly wondering what small freedom was going to be taken away next, and the isolation from friends and family. It reminded me of when I was in a domestically violent relationship with a lot of coercive control. My PTSD came back because Lockdown felt so similar to me.”

Dawn: “Hospital protocols. My mom (vaccinated, recovered from COVID, & rec’d monoclonal antibodies) was denied seeing my dad until the day before he died. 3.5 weeks he laid there by himself. Unforgivable.”

Golden Bull: “There were many aspects but one that both crushed & infuriated me were old friends in nursing homes that were locked up unable to see their family & friends. Two of these friends passed on only seeing one family member & staff for more than 6 months. A sad end to life. Criminal.”

Helpful_signage: “Being locked out as my grandfather died alone, then not having a funeral. Our church emptying out. Watching my covid fanatic brother push everyone out of his life, culminating in an abrupt divorce. Our neighbors across the street divorced. My kids had 2 years of birthdays alone. Me & everyone at my job took a 20% salary cut. We couldn't visit grandparents across the border. i lost a bunch of longtime friends. The nights our kids would break down in tears because they thought their friends didn't like them anymore. Beaches, parks, trails all roped off. Our neighbours yelling out the window at us for going outside. No bathrooms open if we tried to travel. Not being able to buy clothes because they were non-essential. Having no toilet paper. Threatening, bewildering government propaganda commercials and signs everywhere. Can't forget our stupid complicated border situation where we were required to 'quarantine' in a friend's basement for 14 days (despite not having covid), during which the gov't would call us every day to ensure we didn't leave and would make us wait hours to take tests on webcam. Every day brought a new horror. There's so much more. It was all so ridiculous, and yet nobody objected. People cheered for it, became deputized civilian enforcers of it even. Watched so many people's lives get ruined while they stood by applauding.”

It will take many years before we can fully process the trauma of what we experienced during COVID. But hopefully, sharing our individual human stories can help us get at least part of the way there.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

With the mainstream quickly coming to the realization that the lockdowns of 2020 were a cataclysmic failure, despite the broad popular support they supposedly had when they were implemented, the question inevitably arises: How important is it for any given individual—and for political leaders especially—to have opposed these policies at the earliest possible date? When is a proverbial “purity test” appropriate?

For an ordinary individual, this question is simply a moral one, and can be answered almost entirely based on what they subjectively believed at the time. But for those who may retain or be given positions of leadership, the standard must be higher. By virtue of their station, their personal judgment and moral courage have a considerable impact on the wellbeing of the public. Thus, the judgment and courage, or lack thereof, that they demonstrated during COVID is of considerable significance, irrespective of what they may have subjectively believed at the time.

The question of “purity testing” with regard to lockdowns can therefore be broken down into when a given person subjectively realized the policy was a catastrophe, what they then did about it, and why. Each scenario carries implications as to the morality, courage, and judgment they demonstrated during the crisis, the latter of which are of considerable relevance in evaluating who should retain or be given leadership roles.

1. Those who realized lockdowns were a catastrophe and immediately acted to stop them.

In the first category are those who immediately recognized lockdowns were a policy catastrophe, despite the policies’ broad popular support, and did whatever was in their power to put a stop to them, even at risk of considerable personal expense. These individuals showed great moral courage and sound judgment, and we’re all better off for it.

Naturally, as a consensus forms that lockdowns were a catastrophe, more and more individuals are portraying themselves as having been in this category from the start. Some of this revisionism may be malicious, but much of it is simply psychological. Revisionism is a question of degrees; even those of us who did a great deal to oppose these policies from the start may embellish our heroism a bit when telling the story to our grandkids. In truth, the majority of people were conflicted about lockdowns, even as they tacitly supported them, and their retroactive portrayal of themselves as having been early lockdown opponents, while exaggerated, may simply be selective memory at work.

For example, historians have often observed that although only 2% of French citizens were officially part of the Resistance during the Second World War, most French citizens claimed to have supported the Resistance after the War ended. Some of this revisionism may have been motivated by the avoidance of embarrassment or the desire for social benefits, but much of it was simply psychological. Most French people may have privately wanted the Resistance to succeed, and may have even taken some little steps to help out, even if their day-to-day actions, on balance, benefitted the Nazi war machine. Emotional factors might reasonably have led them to better remember these little acts of courage than their day-to-day grind of cowardice. So it is with lockdowns.

2. Those who initially fell for lockdowns, but acted to stop them as soon as they realized they’d been fooled.

In the second category are those who initially fell for lockdowns, but realized their error soon enough and did everything they could to oppose them once they did. This category includes many of the most prominent anti-lockdown activists, and the anti-lockdown cause has benefited tremendously from their contributions.

From a purely moral perspective, assuming they’re being honest, there’s nothing separating these individuals from those in the first category. After all, an unprecedented campaign of terror was unleashed by governments to drum up support for lockdowns and convince the public that they were “the science.” If an individual subjectively believed that following lockdowns was right at the time, then did everything in their power to stop them as soon as they realized their error, then they’ve done no moral wrong.

As many have observed, however, the fact that lockdowns would be a catastrophe now looks overwhelmingly obvious in hindsight. If more leaders had been in the first category during the crisis, then the catastrophe would have been averted entirely. Thus, if one were to evaluate two otherwise equal candidates for a position of leadership, a candidate in the first category would be the superior choice, as they demonstrated better judgment during an unprecedented psychological blitz.

That said, there are very few leaders on offer who are in the first category. For the most part, the public thus appears to be gravitating toward the crop of candidates in the second category. Ron DeSantis is the paradigm of a candidate in the second category. DeSantis appears to have legitimately fallen for the lockdown operation in the first couple months, then realized his error and become a champion of the anti-lockdown cause. DeSantis’s judgment might not be as good as a hypothetical candidate in the first category, but—assuming he’s being honest—there is nothing to fault him for in terms of moral courage.

3. Those who knew lockdowns were wrong, or eventually realized they were, but still supported them anyway.

In the third category are those who knew lockdowns were wrong, or eventually realized they were, but supported them anyway, either out of cowardice or puerile self-interest. This category appears to include most of the political, financial, academic, and media elites who’ve been in place throughout COVID. Because these actions are morally indefensible, it’s safe to call them “evil.”

The reality, however, is a question of degrees—and in truth, there’s a tiny bit of this third category in all of us. Nary a person exists who can say they did everything in their power to end lockdowns, or that they didn’t comply with some dictat simply because they weren’t up for a fight that day. Like the Vichy regime in France, the COVID regime was enabled by small day-to-day acts of cowardice.

But none of these little foibles can compare with the evils of the policy elites who breathlessly defended these policies or abetted the broad scientific coverup that enabled them, either out of careerism or social expedience. Those who fall roundly into this third category demonstrated unbelievably poor judgment about the harm these policies were doing to our way of life and a degree of moral cowardice that no one saw coming before 2020. Ideally these people should never again be anywhere near any position of power, and there’s some question whether they can ever be relied on in a time of crisis even on a personal level.

Still, in the vast majority of cases, these individuals didn’t break any laws. As the anti-lockdown consensus solidifies, room must be made to bring even these blighted souls back into the fold. What do we make of their belated apologies, should they be forthcoming?

From a moral perspective, the weight of an apology lies entirely in its sincerity. Even a person who did evil may ultimately be no less morally righteous than one who was consistently on the side of good, if the former were sincerely haunted with remorse for their actions, and that remorse guided their conduct going forward. This is in stark contrast to those who apologize simply out of social expedience, ready and willing to support totalitarianism all over again the next time around.

4. Those who supported lockdowns for a while, then quietly manipulated the historical record to make it appear as though they were the ones who’d always opposed lockdowns.

In the final category are the liars and outright historical revisionists. These are the lockdown supporters who, content not only with whatever financial and social gains they may have made by supporting lockdowns, have sensed which way the wind was blowing and subtly manipulated the historical record to convince the public that they were actually the ones who always opposed lockdowns, juxtaposing themselves for those in the first category and serving their own self-interest both on the way up and the way down. This behavior can be referred to as “sociopathy.”

The difference between the third category and the fourth category is that it’s simply evil, continued—evil with no act of contrition, now content to do even more evil. Alas, there always have been and always will be sociopaths among humanity, and they’re disproportionately represented in positions of political leadership. The entire purpose of our democratic institutions is to limit their power to the best extent possible. As always, every precaution should be taken to ferret out these creatures and keep them as far away from positions of influence as we can.

Alas, even sociopathy is often a question of degrees, and it’s never too late even for these benighted souls. Assuming they’ve broken no laws, should they eventually admit their misdeeds and feel something close to real remorse for their actions, they too can be let back into the fold. Until then, the rest of us just have to do with sociopaths what decent people have had to do since time in memorial: Work around them.

5. Is anyone beyond redemption?

All these evils, from cowardice to complicity to historical revisionism, are a matter of degrees. What’s more, these lockdowns seemed almost designed to eviscerate our civic norms and institutions so as to bring out the cowardice and evil in ordinary people.

As I’ve argued at length, the magnitude of the harms done by these policies is such that our democracy cannot survive unless we obtain the whole truth as to how they came about. What’s more, the damage the policies would cause was far too well known and too uneven to simply assume that their chief instigators must have had good intentions without a proper inquiry.

Thus, our civilization is faced with much the same once-in-many-decades moral conundrum that the Allies faced at Nuremberg: How to obtain justice when an entire population has been manipulated to bring out their most evil—even their most criminal—tendencies? The answer the Allies came to is that it simply isn’t possible to evaluate the morality of a person’s actions under such extraordinary circumstances.

The number of officials faced with a full inquiry must therefore be kept extremely small; I would propose limiting the inquiry to those officials who may have had actual knowledge that the policies were crafted with malicious intent, but helped instigate them anyway. For the sake of keeping civilization intact, everyone else should be pardoned. I’ll be the first to admit that, even after a legitimate inquiry, no such officials may be found guilty. But the inquiry itself is crucial; without it, we’re not living in a real democracy.

In the meantime, we face the question of how to purity test our leaders—both official and unofficial—in light of all the devastation we’ve witnessed during the response to COVID-19. If you believe, as I do, that the importance of this issue presently eclipses that of any other, then every step should be taken to select for leaders who opposed lockdowns as early and as vocally as possible.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

Then, just like that, around February and March, the mandates collapsed. One by one, governments began copying each other, rolling back their public health orders almost as quickly as they’d first implemented lockdowns back in spring 2020.

The Omicron variant gave them a cop-out, but with “cases” at all-time highs, governments had no real scientific reason to roll back the mandates when they did. At some level, the decision was simply made that popular resentment toward these policies could no longer be contained. They decided the best strategy, politically, was to essentially “split” from the crime scene—roll back the mandates in the blink of an eye, pretend nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened, and let the public gradually forget and move on.

Part of that gaslighting campaign meant ramping up censorship across media platforms even as the restrictions and mandates were being rolled back. I, personally, became a target of that censorship campaign, and was banned for most of the year from Twitter—by far my largest platform—with the COVID cabal apparently hoping that by silencing the most knowledgeable anti-lockdown voices, the debate surrounding the provenance of these policies would gradually be drowned out and die off.

That strategy was somewhat effective. With the end of the restrictions, the debate surrounding COVID policies received less attention. Many have, quite sensibly, moved on and tried to reclaim normal lives. The COVID debate did, to some degree, get drowned out.

But interest in the subject hasn’t waned. The response to COVID was no ordinary policy failure. An entire generation of children and young people was robbed of some of their brightest years. Countless small business owners and those who depended on them lost their livelihoods. Honest citizens were degraded and ostracized by their own governments for refusing an injection they did not want or need. Trillions of dollars were transferred from the world’s poorest to the very richest. The principles of the free world were shredded. And it was all for absolutely nothing.

People know they’ve been taken for a ride, and they’re demanding answers. At some level, citizens seem to intrinsically understand that to let their officials, media enablers, and billionaire financiers implement such catastrophic, illiberal policies with no explanation, accountability, or debate is to simply give up on democratic governance. Anti-lockdown sentiment has gradually moved into the political mainstream. Most people want to see an official inquiry into how these policies came about. And now that the online accounts of many of the original anti-lockdown activists have been restored, they’re more likely to get it.

At the start of the year, few were feeling optimistic. But 2022 turned out to be the year in which most COVID mandates collapsed. Now I believe 2023 may be the year in which we begin to see a real reckoning for some of the unimaginable harm that’s been done. With that in mind, I wish everyone a happy new year.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

https://rumble.com/v21wdv0-how-the-us-and-china-colluded-on-covid-with-michael-p-senger-052-stay-free-.html

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.