Phil Magness is an economic historian and Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He’s also a classical liberal and a lockdown sceptic. During the pandemic, he’s written articles about masks, lockdowns, pandemic modelling and the Great Barrington Declaration. I interviewed him via email.
On 28th January, you gave a talk at Hillsdale College titled ‘The Failures of Pandemic Central Planning’. You’ve since written a full-length paper with the same title. Could you briefly summarise your argument?
I argue that the political response to the Covid pandemic is best understood as an exercise in failed central planning. In a sense, it closely parallels the mindset behind mid-20th century economic planning. It’s the mindset that says complex human interactions may be tweaked, corrected, and managed by expert scientists with sophisticated models of the same society-wide systems. If a problem emerges, simply follow the model’s directions and pull the correct policy levers and all will be fixed – or so they claim.
With Covid, most of the world’s governments adopted an aggressive policy response built upon then-untested modelling that advised when and where to impose the ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ (NPIs) we’ve all come to know – things like social distancing requirements, school closures, event cancellations, and lockdowns. If an outbreak crosses a threshold, then lock everything down and the outbreak can be managed.
The problem, as we’ve seen time and time again, is that the models guiding the NPI approach were wrong – often catastrophically so. I focus on the Imperial College-London (ICL) model of Neil Ferguson, which had an outsized influence on the adoption of lockdowns and other NPIs. I show that, as of its one year anniversary, ICL’s main model overstated mortality projections in 189 out of 189 countries. It also severely exaggerated the effectiveness of NPIs, and even failed to account for the acute vulnerability of nursing home and old age care facilities.
Combined together, Imperial gave us a roadmap for centralized NPI planning that turned out to be fundamentally unsuited for the Covid pandemic. And yet once we were locked into that policy trajectory, politics intervened and made it nearly impossible to change course, despite mounting evidence that the NPIs were failing to deliver as promised.
You work for the American Institute for Economic Research, which hosted the conference that led to the Great Barrington Declaration – a public statement advocating focused protection. Could you tell us what happened at that conference?
In early October 2020, AIER hosted a small academic conference for the purpose of calling scientific attention to the costs of lockdowns. Up until that point, the media and political figures such as Anthony Fauci had been working to create a false impression of strong scientific consensus behind the lockdown measures – even as they were failing to perform as promised (recall “two weeks to flatten the curve”). This new consensus was an outright falsehood. As recently as 2019, the WHO, leading epidemiology research institutions such as Johns-Hopkins University, and even Fauci himself had gone on record stating that lockdowns would not work in a respiratory pandemic, and should be ruled out as a policy response.
The conference would call attention to the largely ignored harms of lockdowns, while proposing alternative approaches that were in keeping with the pre-2020 public health science. We hosted three eminently qualified scientists from top research institutions, who presented the case against lockdowns in a filmed discussion panel. This was followed by interviews with journalists who specialize in pandemic coverage. On the last day of the conference, the three scientists then drafted a general statement of principles that (1) summarized the case against lockdowns and (2) called for an alternative “focused protection” strategy. They dubbed this the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), and released it publicly the next morning.
Much to everyone’s surprise, the Declaration went viral. The scientists’ statement had tapped into growing scholarly dissent from the lockdown approach, which had thus far dominated the Covid-19 response, and quickly amassed tens of thousands of signatures from other scientists and medical practitioners.
While we expected some pushback from the pro-lockdown side, we weren’t anticipating the vilification campaign that followed. Instead of engaging the scientists’ arguments as laid out at the conference, the pro-lockdown side went on the political offensive. They made ad hominem attacks, spun together wild conspiracy theories about the GBD’s supposed funding, and falsely claimed that the GBD scientists were guiding U.S. and U.K. policy responses.
For a few weeks after its October 5th publication, some pro-lockdown scientists even claimed the GBD was “arguing with the past” – that the lockdowns were behind us, and that bringing them up again was just a “strawman.” Of course, we all know how that turned out. Within a month, many of those very same scientists endorsed another round of lockdowns. So not only did they refuse to engage in scholarly debate, they engaged in outright duplicity about their own motives – first denying the prospect of more lockdowns, and then embracing a second round as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
At the same time, however, the GBD provided something that opponents of lockdowns had thus far lacked – a succinct statement of scientifically grounded principles that challenged the dominant political paradigm. It opened the door for more scientists to speak out against lockdowns, while shattering the media-cultivated myth that lockdowns were backed by an overwhelming scientific consensus.
Some people, such as the U.K. Chancellor Rishi Sunak, have claimed there’s “no trade off” between health and the economy. What do you make of this claim?
The understanding of trade offs is an essential tool of economics itself, so to assert that there is “no trade off” associated with lockdowns is to deny economic reality. I suspect that Sunak was peddling what he believed to be a political talking point, with the aim of rationalising the policy decisions of his government, which were both extreme and unprecedented at that point in history.
We’ve seen very clear evidence that lockdowns and other NPIs impose severe economic harms on society, including its least well-off members, who often do not have the luxury of telecommuting from home. This became apparent once some countries and U.S. states began to reopen in the summer of 2020 after the initial lockdown. Employment typically rebounded in those locations, while remaining high in places that still had lockdowns. At the same time, we’ve seen no conclusive evidence that regions under lockdown performed any better on their covid metrics than regions that reopened, and quite a few examples where they performed worse.
In your paper ‘The Failures of Pandemic Central Planning’, you criticise some of your fellow liberals for supporting lockdown. Likewise, the journalist Freddie Sayers recently asked, “why have the most nominally liberal governments consistently reached for the most illiberal interventions?” How would you answer that question?
There’s no single answer to that question, but much of the illiberalism comes from an unwarranted faith in collective action solutions to the pandemic, particularly technocratic ones. I was surprised early on at how many otherwise sensible people fell captive to the ‘externality’ argument for aggressive NPI regimes. All we heard for months was how the spread of disease created an externality, and that the very existence of this externality somehow necessitated an aggressive policy response. They completely forgot Ronald Coase’s warning about the political difficulties of effective externality correction:
The fact that governmental intervention also has its costs makes it very likely that most “externalities” should be allowed to continue if the value of production is to be maximized. This conclusion is strengthened if we assume that the government is not like Pigou’s ideal but is more like his normal public authority–ignorant, subject to pressure, and corrupt.
Unfortunately, the ICL-Ferguson model presented an extremely appealing set of policy interventions – hit a threshold of X number of cases or Y number of hospitalizations, and all you have to do is pull an NPI lever and cases are supposed to go down. Except it did not work as promised, and it turns out that the model wasn’t even suitable for the characteristics of this disease.
Some of the liberal/libertarian supporters of lockdowns were nonetheless unambiguous in their enthusiasm for what ICL was offering. Tyler Cowen, for example, praised Ferguson’s approach as a model of “good policy design.” However, some of these commentators updated their priors and moved away from lockdowns as evidence amassed that they were not delivering what they promised. But others dug in.
In the paper, I’m very critical of self-described neoliberals like Sam Bowman and the U.K. CovidFAQ website. They started from the same externality position at the beginning of the pandemic, but rather than adjusting to account for evidence that lockdowns were not working as claimed, they doubled down with highly unpersuasive rationalizations. For example, they circulated the heavily criticised pro-lockdown paper by Flaxman et al, and they tried to infer causality by simply eyeballing a time series in post hoc ergo propter hoc fashion.
The result, unfortunately, is that many liberal/libertarian voices have ended up defending some of the most aggressive and far-reaching government intrusions on individual liberty in our lifetimes. People who once argued for open borders worldwide now rationalize multi-year travel bans and quarantine encampments, or they end up praising the alleged lockdown ‘successes’ of monstrously illiberal regimes like China, credulously repeating Covid data that shows clear signs of political manipulation.
According to a tweet sent by Imperial College London’s official Twitter account, “Professor Ferguson and the Imperial COVID-19 response team never estimated 40,000 or 100,000 Swedish deaths”. That isn’t quite true though, is it?
It’s not true at all. First the context.
Back in the Spring of 2020, a separate team of researchers from Uppsala University directly adapted the Ferguson-ICL model (which originally only projected numbers for the U.S. and U.K.) to Sweden. They ran the numbers for Sweden and got catastrophic results – 96,000 dead if Sweden failed to act, and around 40,000 dead if they eschewed lockdowns and went with a lighter touch approach. Well Sweden did not follow the lockdown/NPI strategy that we saw in the rest of Europe, and by the summer of 2020, Sweden had only had a few thousand deaths.
I was one of the first people to notice this aspect of the model’s dismal performance, and called attention to it on April 30, 2020.
In the early summer of 2020, Matt Ridley directly questioned Ferguson about the failure of his model in Sweden during a House of Lords hearing. Ferguson responded by denying that he had ever modelled Sweden, and attempted to blame the wildly inaccurate projections on errors in the Uppsala team’s adaptation of his model. Shortly thereafter, ICL’s media team picked up this talking point, and ever since they’ve been denying any connection to a model for Sweden.
Here’s the problem with Imperial’s PR messaging though. Shortly before the Uppsala team ran its own adaptation of Ferguson’s U.S. and U.K. model, Ferguson’s team at ICL also produced a second report containing a trimmed down version of their model for every country on earth. The data file for that model – released March 26, 2020 – is still downloadable from the ICL website. Imperial College projected up to 90,000 deaths in Sweden without mitigation and up to 42,000 deaths under a social distancing approach – almost the exact same numbers that the Uppsala team came up with.
In short, Sweden presented an embarrassing complication for Ferguson and the ICL team’s model because it showed a real world natural experiment for a country that did not lock down. Rather than address that shortcoming in their model though, Ferguson & ICL decided to mislead the public.
You’re an American. Given what we know now, what should Donald Trump have done in March of 2020?
For starters, he should not have listened to anything Anthony Fauci was feeding him. Nor should any president. I base this judgment on Fauci’s horrific track record during the AIDS crisis. In 1983, Fauci helped to unleash a nationwide panic by making the wildly unfounded speculation that AIDS could transmit through regular household contact. His 40 year career from that time until the present has been a succession of similar missteps, almost always arising from his attempts to build his own political influence.
For specific policy advice in March 2020, I would have urged Trump (and any other leader) to heed the cautions against lockdowns that were openly stated in the respiratory pandemic guidelines the WHO adopted in late 2019. These guidelines specifically warned that the evidence behind lockdowns was shaky, untested, and over-reliant on models such as Ferguson’s ICL team. Similar guidelines from Johns-Hopkins warned that lockdowns were likely to be ineffective and carry extreme social costs. We’d be in a much better place today if policymakers had simply followed their own plans from just a few months before the pandemic.
I also would have advised Trump (or any other leader) to focus his measures on nursing homes and similar facilities with acute vulnerabilities. The first major U.S. outbreak was in a nursing home in Washington state, so we knew about this vulnerability early on. Due to the ICL model and similar missteps though, almost all of our early response efforts were focused away from nursing homes and on hospital capacity. In fact, they were so focused on hospital capacity that some states ended up turning nursing homes into de facto overflow facilities. This is how we got the situation in New York state where Gov. Cuomo ordered nursing homes to take in covid-positive patients, with catastrophic death tolls and an ensuing political coverup.
One idea I first floated back at that time was to subsidize nursing home staffers to reside on site as a way of limiting their contact with the outside world, and thus the chance of carrying the virus into vulnerable facilities. A few private nursing homes did this, with high rates of success – including one that rented RVs on site for their staff. The cost of subsidizing this and even paying staffers a premium to isolate would have been a tiny fraction of the cost of lockdowns. But the ICL model, Fauci and Birx in the U.S., Hancock in the U.K., had already settled on lockdowns, and pursuit of that end became a recurring pattern of sunk cost fallacies overlaid with technocratic hubris.
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I see it quite as the opposite. I see it as an amazing triumph of central planning, at least so far.
The roll out of vaccines by age group has been fiendishly clever. It’s a way of limiting protest and push back while at the same creating momentum for acceptance.
The rollout, the approval by the regulators, all done bit by bit, by age groups.
Before anyone really knows what has happened, they’ve got a majority of people on board.
And now in Greece they are applying the same principle with imposing mandatory vaccination. First the over 60s, then the next age group…
It’s the perfect application of the management of cattle to the management of humans.
The same principle has applied to travel.
First no restrictions. Then a test. Then vaccine. Then a vaccine and a test. Then an up to date vaccine.
The same is applying to vax passports.
First big events, then nightclubs, then smaller events, then hospitality, then all public areas then mandated vaccines.
And the same principle is applying to globalising the control.
Start with the developed countries. Then the elites of less developed countries. Then the middle class of the less developed countries. Finally everyone.
There has clearly been a centralised plan to vaccinate the world population and the execution so far has been nothing short of brilliant.
I have just said the same thing in here, but in a shorter form. This is no mistake. Their NWO rollout is going exacly as planned! This site often has contributors who go to great lengths to try and excuse, explain away or downplay the terrible crimes taking place. These people are effectively compilicit in those crimes.
Agreed. (There’s a difference between a centralised plan and a system of central planning, but that need not concern us here.) What is your take on the rulers’ aim?
I’m on an elimination of ~two-thirds of the population.
Spiking with mRNA is the foot in the door.
I think they know we know we’re cattle and are just making sure we can’t do anything about it.
Hence the subscription immune system.
Your digital currency lasts three months and then the “value” evaporates.
Same with your immune system.
Yes – it’s about cattle and money.
There are cattle for milking, for slaughter, and for working (oxen).
All cattle farmers have as one of their considerations the size of their herd.
Biological weapons have never been subject to the amount of public attention and criticism that nuclear weapons received in the second half of the last century. No “Campaign for Biological Disarmament” has ever blocked Trafalgar Square. The same can be said of electromagnetic weapons. Partly this is because people are lazy and they don’t want to think about things that no higher-up personage such as Bertrand Russell has given them the OK to think about. This is true too, albeit in a different way, about the infotech revolution, which leaves a gap for bullshitters to gain a fanbase (and pop-sci book contracts) who talk about “simulation” and “singularity” (the latter term taken from speculation about black holes – cf. the Sokal affair, but nobody dares draw that comparison because it’s supposed to be “serious”).
The rulers don’t have everything under complete control, but nor does the man who fires a submachine gun into an unarmed crowd, or even the organised groups who transport sheep or run abattoirs.
But mRNA “vaccination” is not an “experiment” and the unvaccinated are not a “control group”. The rulers know what they are doing. They probably already have the technology to control the production of viral or virus-“like” particles in previously healthy cells – the power to control what kinds of SARS variants are produced. There has been 20 years of military SARS research by the world’s leading biowar powers. None of it has been public.
Gain of Function research got blocked in 2014 in the US after 300 eminent Scientists from the Cambridge Working Group sent a Consensus Statement on the Creation of Potential Pandemic Pathogens, after so many lab leaks caused various pandemics, of course they redefined GoF research and Fauci et al worked around the ban anyway. [1]
There has been a concerted effort to control the narrative around GoF since DRASTIC raised concerns regarding a lab leak origin of Covid, again calling for a complete moratorium on GoF research. DRASTIC was infiltrated by the compromised Yuri Deigin, who managed to cause enough rift to oust the original researchers, Dan & Karl Sirotkin, & JJ Couey (who was fired from his research position in relation to his reviewing the Sirotkin paper). DRASTIC has since split into two completely seperate groups, yet the compromised Dergin is the only one getting any attention in the media (recently interviewed in a doc featuring D. Trump).
There has been a concerted effort to sideline the original research of Dan & Karl Sirotkin, DOD, DARPA, and CCP connected scientists in the field opperated an email campaign[2] which seemed to be designed to sideline anyone calling for a complete moratorium on GoF research, while promoting those calling for “more legislation” to control it, allowing those in the field to carry on bioweapon research avoiding a complete ban.
In the UK the narrative control is headed by Sir Matt Ridley (the disgraced banker, and liar, who led Northern Rock, and the British economy to ruin)[3], who’s book “Virus” written with the spooky Alina Chan is designed to control the narrative, limiting by omission the full history of lab leaks and the subsiquent pandemics they caused, whilst leaving the door open for continued GoF research by calling for “More Legislation” rather than a full moratorium and a complete ban.
Matt Ridley has also attempted to sideline the Sirotkins research by removing funding from another research group because they had the integrity to refuse to remove the Sirotkins name as coauthors from the research paper prior to publishing it.[4] which spurred Dan to complain to the House of Lords Standards Commissioner[5]
Dan pretty much tells the whole story on his blog[6] via posts and their own published papers, also on his substack page[7]
Clearly there should be a concerted effort by the global scientific community to call for a reniewed moratorium and complete ban on this dangerous research for the greater good of humanity.
[1]http://www.cambridgeworkinggroup.org/
[2]https://harvard2thebighouse.substack.com/p/the-darpa-taped-letters
[3]https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/25/ridl-n25.html
[4]https://harvard2thebighouse.substack.com/p/the-ex-con-who-kicked-the-idiots
[5]https://drive.google.com/file/d/1an-S0fvdwLAPbeQTvrvA1xWq9x36tlPx/view
[6]https://harvardtothebighouse.com/
[7]https://harvard2thebighouse.substack.com/
ImpObs
I think your comments on Matt Ridley are wrong. He is a highly credible author and scientist. He talks perfect sense to me. Personally, I think you are looking for something that is just not there. This Covid disaster is brilliantly explained in the article above. It’s hubris, ego, incompetence, modelling nonsense, belief that we can control everything, fear of admitting mistakes, careerism, selfishness etc. that we should look to.
The links are there for your lying eyes, follow them to be undecieved
https://reason.com/video/2021/11/18/was-it-a-lab-leak-the-mysterious-origin-of-covid-19/
It’s a limited hangout position, non of this crowd are pointing to the inordinate ammound of funding UNC got for this same research with Daszak et al, it’s just as likely the Cov-2 virus was leaked from UNC and exported to Wuhan during the Wuhan military games, but China =Bad sells better in the west than pointing fingers at the US DOD/DARPA crowd who are equally as culpable, they even sent virus samples to the Wuhan lab, but Ridley et al won’t tell you that now will they?
Nothing short of a COMPLETE moratorium on this dangerous research will suffice for the future good of humanity
Excellent post..
In my darkest moments I have visions of the Google life extension operation finally coming up with a solution to the radical extension of life which poses a massive population problem and the need to scale down the human population to a small, manageable number of people that go on to live indefinitely.
In my saner moments I just see human nature and an insatiable appetite of some to have power and control over others. Perhaps even with some benevolent self deluding rationalisation.
Agree entirely.
I’m not personally convinced it was globally centralised – I think the lockstep is just as easily explained by people copying each other and thinking the same, as they are all power-mad professional liars (aka politicians) but I agree that the way public opinion has been manipulated has been thought through and executed very well.
If they all think alike, meet together to discuss agendas and then all conduct the same policies, that is by its very nature a co-ordinated plan.
Yes, when you put it like that, I would agree. I am not convinced they are following orders from some dark power in the shadows. But they are all evil anyway.
This whole lockstep programme is being run centrally and probably from Switzerland where Billy boy is based. Let’s be honest, most on here would agree that politicians as a cadre, by and large, couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery. The suggestion that politicians across the world are working together to coordinate actions is simply naive.
The politicians are order takers being directed from a central command. It might even be a bunker.
I am certain many are getting paid – or their political parties are getting paid.
Starting with Brandon.
The previous 20 years were punctuated by international exercises that initially identified the threat as bioterrorism and subsequently as a virus-driven pandemic. See Paul Schreyer’s ‘Pandemic simulation games‘.
World leaders have just convened to begin agreeing the way forward. ‘Many presidents and prime ministers ignored WHO recommendations regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and have not been held accountable for their actions, according to several analyses. For this reason, the European Council and Tedros, along with several countries, including Germany, France, and South Africa, have expressed their strong support for a legally binding pandemic treaty.’
World commits to a pandemic response pact: what’s next
“I see it quite as the opposite. I see it as an amazing triumph of central planning, at least so far.”
Exactly.
The article is a classic of a ‘taxi thesis’ – anybody can grab a ride in it when it suits their pet notion.
To be more precise – not so much ‘central planning’ in the bureaucratic sense, as a coup involving seizure of the key levers of power, and the elimination of democratic checks.
Worthwhile clarification. When we think of central planning (if one is of a certain age) we think of a centrally planned economy, a la USSR. Or an industry, like healthcare in the UK. As opposed to something that operates through market forces.
In this respect the author is both right and wrong. He’s right in that central planning doesn’t work well and the totalitarian control of our lives for the last 20 months has been a disaster. But he is wrong in thinking that wasn’t “the plan” and in ignoring the forces that have pushed governments to become totalitarian central planners.
The problem with the article is that it treats ‘central planning’ in a binary way, whereas the fact is that all nation states, by definition, centralise a variable range of functions.
But you’re correct – the simple definition is the sort of extreme bureaucratic control of a majority of functions, and the presence (or otherwise) of checks and balances against excesses of control.
The main centralization in the current situation is of control over the levers provided by global capital and its institutions.
PS : UK Column has a final item today on the confluence of Big Data and Big Finance being engineered by government in what looks like and quacks like the duck of Social Credit, Chinese style.
That’s the control nexus, not the ordinary concept of ‘Central Planning’ : it’s Central Control.
The “totalitarian tiptoe” as described by David Icke. Only now it’s a stomp.
Unfortunately I have to agree.
Journalist Harry Vox spotted the plan back in 2014.
The 2010 Rockefeller Document Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development. Page 18 Lockstep.
https://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Rockefeller%20Foundation.pdf
These people always put out these sort of scenarios to set the scene for the planning.
The same was done by The Club of Rome’s ‘The First Global Revolution’ where they spelled out the coming fraud ‘global warming’ and Maurice Strong’s bringing about the collapse of industrialised society’s. The signing of Agenda 21 by 192 nations in 1993. Its planned alright, and our useful idiot politicians are following said plans to the letter because they signed up to it.
https://principia-scientific.com/2010-rockefellers-operation-lockstep-predicted-2020-lockdown/
You have to read Robert F Kennedy Jr’s book The Real Dr Fauci. It’s only a couple of quid on Kindle. Seriously, read this read this read this. Read it out aloud to your wife and kids. Send copies to people. This is the most incendiary book of the year, decade, whatever. Beyond shocking. Extremely well written. Mind blowing. Get it, read it.
I am in the process of reading this and it is mind-blowing.
I cannot fathom why fauci is still in his position as he made fraudulent claims in the past.
Because a small cabal runs the US, and politicians do their bidding. Ordinary sane people have no say in the matter.
It’s available for free as a torrent.
What is a ‘torrent?’
Seconded. I’d highly recommend it is also read in conjunction with Michael Senger’s “Snake Oil:how xi jinping shut down the world”.
He is merely diverting attention from the cabal onto China, which is merely one of their toys.
Apparently Father Christmas is bringing me one. I prefer to have a hard copy, before the online book burning begines!
A printed copy is best, for sure.
The following combination suits me well: experience with finding torrent files, and possession of a rock solid (and very heavy) comb-binder built in West Germany probably in the 1960s.
Safeguards smashed in the race for a gene therapy ‘vaccine’ – The Conservative Woman
I note that in today’s news they report on a trial into booster performance.
It is conventional to do the jabbing after receiving the trial report, not before.
WRT that booster trial, I note that participant numbers were in the order of 100 per combination — this seems rather pathetic given the numbers they want to jab.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d now do cohort analysis of a decent proportion of those that have actually had boosters — that way there could be an analysis of how things are actually going (including ‘rate’ side effect rates) before starting to boost younger age groups — but they won’t do that because for some reason they don’t seem to want to run the risk of hearing bad news.
Since the Gene Therapy labs opened in the UK in 2020, it appears to have been a manic attempt to roll out the production line to beat the competitors and likely sold to Johnson on this pretext, as the answer to the collapsing UK economy and debt
Phil Magness talks as if there are still sovereign governments and they have all made a terrible mistake. He is wrong on both counts. Firstly, our former sovereign governments are now, quite clearly, mere administrative units of an interlocking system of one world governance. Secondly, from the beginning of 2020 these administrative units have in unison carried out staged events, covert psychological operations, practised severe censorship and undertaken relentless campaigns of propaganda. All these coordinated policies have been carefully crafted to ensnare us into a full spectrum surveillance, AI controlled, NWO totalitarian technocracy. So its no ‘mistake’. Its all working exactly to plan.
Lockstep
Yes, a well-executed rollout of central planning – which is the total opposite of what the writer suggests.
Which implies a small number of miscreants in charge.
PLus the failure of central planning was not in having a plan and coercing, it was that central mispricing (like our central “banks” mispricing credit ) led to shortages which led to skipped maintenance which led to things falling apart.
Couldn’t have put this better myself.
The mainstream media is also merely a propaganda unit in this NWO as well of course. A video from the World Economic Forum (WEF), that made 8 predictions for the year 2030, has been commented on quite a lot. Reuters posted an article attempting to dampen down the concerns people had expressed about the video, here I take a closer look at their fact-check:
“Fact Checking The Fact Checkers – You Will Own Nothing”
http://participator.online/articles/2021/12/fact_checking_the_fact_checkers_you_will_own_nothing_20211202.php
Excellent work and I agree with your case.
“Worth Reading in Full.”
Thank you!
from the beginning of
2020Sept 12, 2001 these administrative unitsSometimes, these ‘nudge units’ break cover. One event was briefly covered in 2020 , in Sweden , referring to either a private or a secret Facebook group, that was seeking to manipulate covid response; strangely not much found via a Goog search – perhaps this is the same secret/private bunch (I seem to recall kings & queens & VIPs galore)
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/private-facebook-group-attempts-to-influence-swedish-interests-abroad
”“What we can see in this group’s activities that makes it interesting is partly that they’re approaching international media where they present Sweden as failed and authorities in Sweden as pushing a hidden agenda about the country’s Corona virus strategy,” says Linderstål, adding, “The group’s active courting of both international media and authorities is also very worrying. Among other things, they’re calling for other countries to protect themselves by not letting Swedes in. And these are strong statements that people are making about Sweden internationally,” etc
which means there is nothing we can do about it or manage to fight back against it
Has this site been captured by conspiracy theorists?
I promise you most governments and the elite got there by pursuing self-interest while the level of organisation you all assume is ‘behind the scenes’ simply doesn’t exist.
The Magness interview is fascinating in that it addresses the failure of proper impact assessments in determining policy in the fact of the virus. I would put this down to incompetence, laziness and corruption, and a public that had lost the ability to make its own decisions in day to day life. This is the real scandal of the pandemic response.
You ‘promise’? Errr, who are you? Just some nobody. You don’t know anything. Oh you think you do, with your fancy book learnin’ and your important friends. But you represent the failure of the intelligentsia throughout this insane shitshow. Your model of the world is broken, and all you have left to do is riff through the old insults: conspiracy theorists. You literally know nothing at all about how the world really works, but you think you have your hands on the actual levers. This kind of knowitallism is part of the problem. Toby is bit by the same bug. You and he cannot conceive of levels beyond the levels you can conceive of, therefore, you ‘promise’ they don’t exist. Your promise is worthless.
You are right if you look at the level of governments. They are reacting and muddling through.
However, you have to ask why governments deviated so radically from normal acceptable governance practice.
And for that you need to look a level above governments, to a global oligarchy that has captured multinational organisations both private and public and wield an enormous amount of power.
You can just tell it’s orchestrated, the cleverness of it all.
And we know it’s planned at that higher level because they ran a simulation a few months before called Event 201, which simulated a response that ran contrary to all pande.ic planning. In other words the radically new response we are experiencing.
I don’t really understand why people are so reluctant to accept this is planned. The Iraq invasion was orchestrated, the Nazis conspired to take over Germany, the Bolsheviks conspired to take over Russia. The American revolutionaries conspired to kick out the King. It is in fact rather silly to deny the existence.of large scale conspiracies given that history is littered with them.
By their very nature, conspiracies are normally planned and conducted in secret, but this NWO conspiracy has been done over many decades in the open with many of the participants, like Rockefeller, Kissenger, Sorus etc openly declaring what their aims were. This is why it is so laughable when commentators deny the existence of this conspiracy.
Well done Stewart.
No they’re not. They’re following a road map. Operation-covid is essentially a global military project deployed against populations. It’s a road map that’s sometimes improvised and deviates as evolving military operations have to in order to counter unanticipated variables.
It’s not clever at all. It’s abysmally stupid because anybody who thinks they can manipulate and control a system as complex as the global population i.e. nature itself, is a deluded megalomaniacal moron.
I hadn’t heard of this Event 201 before.
Oh dear looks like I’m going to have to do another fact-check of a fact-check:
“Event 201 didn’t predict the Covid-19 pandemic”
https://fullfact.org/health/event-201-coronavirus-pandemic/
My immediate response is – pull the other one!
It seems you are denying that which is self evident and openly admitted by the conspirators- that they meet in places like Bilderberg, Chatham House and Davos to secretly plot and scheme out our future. Here is a schematic of the global power structure, as per Iain Davis. Big policy decisions like the covid and climate agendas, sustainable development, carbon trading, smart cities etc are forged in these arenas by a Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP) and served up to an unsuspecting the public, via a process of manufactured consent, as a fait accompli.
Sceptics, not conspiracy theorists.
sceptics can be wrong, conspiracy theorists are proved correct after a 6month wait.
“Has this site been captured by conspiracy theorists?” Well the DS editorial line is generally NOT oriented to what YOU might term a “conspiracy theory”. But the posters BTL have varying opinions, which is IMO quite right and proper. What has happened with covid is monstrous in size and nature, and many things have happened that those who like to bandy terms like “conspiracy theory” about predicted in March 2020 and were mocked for. I think any idea as to the motivations behind all of this is a legitimate subject for debate. Your use of the term “conspiracy theorist” is disappointing. Come up with some better arguments as to why you think your position is closer to the truth than others.
You mention corruption. Well, that implies it is KNOWING and that there is COLLUSION. That sounds a lot like a CONSPIRACY to me.
Quite. Corruption generally entails some kind of conspiracy amongst the corrupted and the corrupters. Not to mention required for any subsequent Omerta.
One of the arguments most often raised with me is along the lines of “Well – if this is all a confection, how come almost all nations have signed up to it?”
… which is a fundamental question that, at first sight, is about the only reasonably rational objection to the analysis that this shit-show is based on myths.
However, the answer may be the opposite : this is intensely peculiar because there is this almost universal agreement when, clearly, so many questions and doubts can be easily raised about every aspect.
Yes, lots of people say that to me too. It’s a tricky one to answer. They cannot believe that so many governments would get something so wrong, or be so wicked, despite the evidence. Sometimes I struggle to believe it.
Politicians the world over have one thing in common – they are all prima donnas. They love being on stage and believe beyond all doubt that they are always right.
The likelihood that politicians the world over would act in lockstep is on the face of it ridiculous.
It is also inconceivable that the nominally main opposition parties in every country Support the actions of the party of government.
The only viable explanation for this bizarre behaviour is that ALL governments are under one central control.
but its the fact that they are ALL getting it “so wrong” in precisely. the. same. way. which is the big glaring give away and it make me wonder how can so many people not see it????
In one of Gladwell’s books he describes two very different ways of looking at the same thing through a simple question:
If di is cast and you get 4 sixes in row, what is the probability that the next throw will be a 6?
Answer A: 1/6
Answer B: 100%
If you are innocent, think the world works according to the rules and people generally have good intentions for others, you are likely to reply A
If you think the world is full of self serving crooks looking to get ahead at the expense.of others, and more so I the highest levels of power then you reply B, because you know the di is loaded.
And if you are just routinely dumb you think there’s no way it could possibly be a six because the chance of getting five sixes in a row is so small.
It is an interesting point.
Perhaps it would be an interesting experiment to put to people — get them to predict what the next throw will be, and see how long it takes them to work out that it is always a 6.
As an additional part, you could compare people with statistical training (who know it must be a fluke and thus will happily keep on saying 1/6th) vs people with no training.
Additionally, you could keep on showing videos of important people, film stars, etc, saying that the chance of throwing a six is always 1/6, and see if that influenced the point where people finally realised.
Even better would be to do it in a group of peer-actors, whose job would be to belittle any suggestion that it would be more likely that a 6 is thrown. Again, it would be interesting to see if this delayed the realisation point.
Follow the money.
“Has this site been captured by conspiracy theorists?“
Depends first what you mean by “captured”. Clearly the owners and atl contributors are not on board with the opinions about the world that you characterise in that way. On the other hand, btl comments are largely uncensored and there clearly are plenty here who are of that opinion, in some variety.
On the other hand, you already have 20 upvotes, so equally clearly there are people here who agree with your position on this. I suspect there’s a difference in willingness to comment openly, and there are probably more who share your position than might appear from the comments themselves.
For me, it’s enough that people are free to express their opinions btl reasonably unharassed by the site admins.
“For me, it’s enough that people are free to express their opinions btl reasonably unharassed by the site admins.” 100% agree. One of the issues underlying the covid madness is the gradual erosion of freedom of speech, which has been going on for years and has enabled the Big Lie to flourish more than it would otherwise have done.
Well said.
This is plain, wishful thinking.
What are you smoking ???
Politicians will always say that their policies worked really well and would have worked even better if only there’d been more of it. It is in their nature to say this.
If you have a review of a past decision and the main output is ‘it was okay, but we could have done more of the same’ then the most likely situation is that politicians are in charge of the output.
“Phil Magness is an economic historian and Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He’s also a classical liberal and a lockdown sceptic. During the pandemic, he’s written articles about masks, lockdowns, pandemic modelling and the Great Barrington Declaration. I interviewed him via email.
On 28th January, you gave a talk at Hillsdale College titled ‘The Failures of Pandemic Central Planning’. You’ve since written a full-length paper with the same title. Could you briefly summarise your argument?
I argue that the political response to the Covid pandemic is best understood as an exercise in failed central planning.”
Absolutely clueless.
Thanks so much, “economic historians”, writers of “full-length papers”, users of numbskull superficial concepts who think they are so clever, and formulators of “arguments” from their ivory towers everywhere.
These are the same people who told us nothing was going on in Tibet for all those years.
The official establishment writers of history operate from the same base. Intellectual bullshit signed off by those holding the purse strings..
The “incompetence” argument is getting really tiring.
Especially when the “incompetence” miraculously causes all the dominos to fall in the same direction.
I’ve considered incompetence, and its close relative Kafkaesque “bureaucratic entropy” if you like. No. There is agency here. It’s clumsy and obtuse but there is agency. This is being directed.
Indeed. The other issue with letting “incompetence” do all the heavy lifting is the assumption made by the accuser that they are more intelligent than the incompetent (because they can see the incompetence but the incompetent can’t).
Quite so. This is why the argument some make about it simply being a vast bureaucratic insanity no one knows how to stop is stronger than the incompetence argument. But every day more evidence comes in to bolster the argument that this is being done on and with purpose.
That Swedish secret information influence FB group
”experts Swedish Radio have spoken to and several security analysts think that the tone and the methods of the group are very troubling
In a Facebook post, members of the group are encouraged to contact the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to see to it that Swedish regions with high levels of Covid-19 are on the centre’s red list. The leading person in the group also encourages members to Tweet and send messages to Linköping University to protest that they awarded a prize to state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. There has also been an attempt to prevent a Swedish minister’s participation in an international context. It’s a paper-thin line between what is engagement and what is harassment, according to the (infowar) experts who stress that the group’s messages can be experienced as disturbing.”
No one can tell me that deliberately seeding care home with sick people, banning cheap and effective treatments for covid, instituting covid protocols designed to kill people, faking covid death tolls to drive up levels of fear, binning ‘informed consent’ and the Nuremberg Code,, denying the harm caused to millions of people by the genetic injections, denying healthcare to millions of people including cancelling 740,000 urgent cancer referals and pushing the NHS waiting list to 12 million is mere incompetence. This is a planned genocide.
I think that nails it. Comprehensively.
Ditto..
Off topic but I’ve just realised that I’m abnormal as I don’t believe politicians.
Phil, and Toby I guess, need to read Iain Davis book “Pseudo Pandemic”, it’s a free download from his website. It’s not a “conspiracy Theory” it’s an out in the open Conspiracy Fact, but it requires some serious research to get a handle on it, Iain has done the research for you.
Here’s a shorter piece to give you some flavour
https://in-this-together.com/what-is-the-global-public-private-partnership/
You are seriously mistaken if you think Phil and Toby arent aware of this way of viewing events.
I see no evidence either are aware from this piece, could you provide an alternative piece to back your assertion?
More big pharma contract T&C’s revealed.
Boosters forever? Vaccines Minister Maggie Throup says Brits ‘probably will’ have to get jabbed against coronavirus EVERY YEAR
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/erfahrungswissen_der_menschen_kann_weg
This is a brilliant article in German that offers a completely new perspective on the here discussed and more:
Mankind functions and has improved by applying and exchanging the knowledge gained through working people’s experiences.
Catastrophically, that knowledge and those people are now ignored and or discriminated and replaced by modelers, people measuring things and ideologues.
Very much worth translating and reading in full.
While I agree with many of the assertions made by Magness I would argue that the outcomes (lockdowns, travel restrictions, enforced quarantines and vaccination mandates) are not the result of Central Planning. But are instead the almost inevitable outcome of an unchecked positive feedback loop, involving public health officials, elected politicians, and the media.
If anyone had argued in November 2019 that Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron (or indeed any Western political leader) planned to seize unprecedented and unchecked control over their citizens and state via the emergence of a new viral respiratory disease – then we’d rightly have called them nuts.
What instead happened is that our society became trapped in a vicious cycle of fear, misinformation, and mismanagement. Where our society failed is that too few individuals in positions of authority had either the moral courage, or indeed the incentives (either political or financial) to attempt to break that cycle.
Nobody planned lockdowns. They happened (and will continue to happen) because nobody has the balls to stop them.
That, as far as I see it, is a complete inversion of the reality.
You’re going to have to explain how that works.
Look, I understand the whole conspiracy theory thing. But who is really benefitting from covid?
Big Pharma, for all its flaws, isn’t really making big stacks of cash from Covid vaccines. They do that already peddling opiates, statins, erectile dysfunction, and hair loss drugs. The “profits” from covid vaccines are a rounding error.
Boris Johnson is hardly making himself popular. There are growing ranks of Tories who would be happy to give him the boot. At this juncture he’s just trying to stay ahead of a raging skip fire of hostile press.
The public health people? Well, I guess they are enjoying a temporary boost in their relevance in the wider public discourse. But it’s not really going to top up their pension pots, is it?
The media? Again, I guess people are slightly more interested in news related to the spread of respiratory diseases. But I just don’t really see covid news making Rupert Murdoch any richer. Or preventing a small regional newspaper from going bankrupt. Are people going to be more likely to pay their TV license fee because of covid?
Bill Gates/George Soros/Warren Buffet/The Illuminati? Again, I don’t really see how covid boosts their wealth and/or influence.
No one is really benefitting from covid. It’s a shitshow all round. But one that nobody has the guts, or the honesty, to call out for what it is.
You really don’t get it do you Drew.. this is not about covid per-say. Covid is the key to the vaccine passport, the digital ID linked the coming Central Bank digital currency, linked to a Social Credit System, and at this minute in time the plans are going swimmingly..
Take a look at this video, its an eye opener for those who still think this is about health and money..
The Vaccine Passport Trojan Horse
I think you are making a mistake in characterising covid-19 (and the ensuing lockdowns/restrictions) as a clusterfuck when the reality is that it is, in fact, a shitshow.
Both are highly unpleasant. But a clusterfuck requires a certain level of deliberate, active planning beforehand. A shitshow, by way of contrast is merely the result of incompetence and/or a lack of moral fibre in the relevant authorities.
Another 77 stooge / wannabee.
Thanks for the link to the above film. Very moving.
This notion government couldn’t organize an orgy in a brothel is truly the most naive & idiotic thing I’ve ever read.
We live under the oppression of the most complexly organized system that has ever been. You literally can’t fart without the council fining you, in a country where the deep state knows more about you than you do!
As an example, watch this. Inside Australia’s Covid internment camp
They said internment camps were just conspiracy theories, once again conspiracy theorists are proved right.
This is the future they have planned, Good Morning Clown World, Vol. 42
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGFdWcJU7-0&ab_channel=UnHerd
Freddie Sayers UNherd. Howard Springs camp.
This young woman was incarcerated in the camp for two weeks and threatened with a $500 fine even though she tested negative repeatedly.
When she enquired about this she was told by the Australian CDC it was probably “punishment” for lying to the authorities about having taken a test, when she had not. She never tested positive, but was locked up for 14 days and lost her job
There is an ivermectin panic on the big tech and MSM right now. Massive articles from MSM on Ivermectin trying to push a danger narrative and also negative press on Americans Frontline Dr’s, again, to keep the Covid narrative alive. Just go to the Goog and type ivermectin then look at all the panic news articles. We are over the target. Big-Pharma is panicking. This medicine has been widely used by humans without any problems for 40 years. It’s inventor won a Nobel Prize after 20 years of successful use and after 100 million people were cured of a broad spectrum of problems without any side effects. Get your Ivermectin while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
The accompanying picture is wonderful.
Meanwhile, Florida is prospering. 1,000 people a day are moving to Florida. Governor Rick DeSantis bypassed tony fauci and Joe Biden in favour of Drs. Martin Kuldorff, Jay Battacharya, Scott Atlas. He took these world renowned doctors’ advice to protect the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with their lives. He prevented nonessential businesses from closing, he prevented schools from closing, he prevented mandates such as mask wearing and vaccinations. Instead, Covid testing, vaccinations and masks are ALL optional.
He recently selected Dr Lapado as his Surgeon General for the state of Florida. Governor DeSantis has never looked back. people in Florida are free to live their lives. Cases continue to drop.
The question is why haven’t other states, countries taken a page from DeSantis’ book and follow what appears to be best practice? Is it possible something more sinister is going on? Why would states and countries economically on their knees continue to implement mandates, that even they know, don’t work?