The lockdowns of March 2020 shocked the American people and most public health agencies, not to mention infectious disease doctors. The idea of school shutdowns, business closures, plus mandatory remote work and other restrictions have previously seemed inconceivable. It was especially remarkable to have such an ‘all-of-Government’ response to a virus that we already knew posed a threat mainly to the elderly and infirm.
Issues like public health precedent, American legal tradition and medical knowledge about dealing with respiratory viruses, not to mention natural immunity and collateral damage of lockdowns, were all thrown out the window.
Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci mentions a tabletop exercise called Crimson Contagion from January through August 2019. I had not previously heard of it and I found the mention remarkable, simply because it proves that not everyone was shocked by lockdowns. They were not part of official planning documents of either the CDC or WHO but they were clearly in the plans of someone.
I’ve only followed up on this report in light of growing focus on the person who coordinated Crimson Contagion: Robert Kadlec, who served in the Trump administration as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, Preparedness and Response. It was he who also ran the Covid response between HHS and the Department of Homeland Security.
Kadec’s lifetime government service (and, yes, he is said to be CIA) extends all the way back to the G.W. Bush administration when in 2007 he took the position of Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Biodefense Policy on the Homeland Security Council from 2007 to 2009. The very notion of lockdowns originated in that administration.
The 2019 tabletop exercise involved a huge number of public sector agencies across all states plus many private-sector associations. It postulated a disease scenario in which a respiratory virus begins in China and spreads around the world by air travellers. It is first detected in Chicago. The World Health Organisation declares a pandemic 47 days later. But then it was too late: 110 million Americans became sick, with 7.7 million hospitalised and 586,000 dead.
The conclusion of the exercise was that Government was not well prepared for a pandemic and urged more planning and fast acting to implement what we now call lockdowns as we await a vaccine. Presumably, the vaccine then fixes everything.
The public knew nothing of this exercise until March 19th 2020, when the New York Times reported on it for the first time. This was one day following the detailed release of stay-at-home orders by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The next day, National Public Radio also ran a report on Crimson Contagion.
The Times reported:
The Crimson Contagion planning exercise run last year by the Department of Health and Human Services involved officials from 12 states and at least a dozen federal agencies. They included the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Security Council. Groups like the American Red Cross and American Nurses Association were invited to join, as were health insurance companies and major hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.
The war game-like exercise was overseen by Robert P. Kadlec, a former Air Force physician who has spent decades focused on biodefense issues. After stints on the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Council and the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was appointed assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response.
Also participating were former Trump administration officials Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State, 2017-2018) and John F. Kelly, who was White House Chief of Staff from 2017 to 2019. The NYT even ran a picture of the two of them at the event.
Here are some direct quotes from the October 2019 report of Crimson Contagion (emphasis mine):
The exercise revealed several workforce protection challenges under conditions where medical countermeasures, such as the pandemic vaccine, antiviral medications, and personal protective equipment, are limited. To protect the public prior to vaccine distribution, public health officials issued guidance on the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions intended to slow the spread of the virus.
In keeping with non-pharmaceutical intervention recommendations, employers – including Government entities – sought to practice social distancing by having a significant portion of their employees work remotely. Employers encountered cascading impacts associated with making, communicating, and implementing such work-distancing decisions.
At multiple levels of Government, officials wrestled with identifying employees who are essential and those who are nonessential in the context of an incident forecasted to span many months. In addition, officials faced challenges in determining which employees could perform their duties remotely and hierarchical organisations, such as state and federal departments and agencies, were uncertain as to the process for determining and implementing remote-workforce decisions.
Also:
During the exercise, CDC recommended that states delay school openings for six weeks, a follow-up to the initial (pre-exercise) recommendation that states delay the opening of schools for two weeks if the disease is present in the area. Many local jurisdictions and school districts have the authority to decide to close schools (or keep schools open). This distributed approach to school closure decisions caused confusion centered on discrepancies between schools that remained open and those that closed. In addition, while school delays and dismissals may be necessary over the course of the pandemic response, state participants identified any continued school delays and dismissals as having serious cascading impacts that require a concerted public messaging campaign and Government coordination. Multiple states realised that dismissing schools is much more complex than they previously appreciated.
The participating private sector organizations and businesses:
- Aetna
- Allegheny Health Network
- Amador Health Center
- American Hospital Association
- American Red Cross
- Association of Public Health Laboratories
- Association of State and Territorial Health Officials Carestream Health
- Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists
- Ephraim McDowell/James B. Haggin Hospital
- Giant Eagle Pharmacy
- Grand Strand Health/HCA
- Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council Healthcare Ready
- International Safety Equipment Association
- Juvare
- Kidney Community Emergency Response Program
- Mayo Clinic
- Moldex-Metric Inc.
- National Alliance of State Pharmacy Associations National Association of County and City Health Officials
- National Community Pharmacists Association
- National Indian Health Board
- North Shore University Health System Patients’ Hospital
- RBC Limited
- San Mateo County Health – EMS Agency Seqirus Inc., USA
- Spectrum Health
- TriStar Skyline Medical Center
- University of Minnesota
This exercise took place entirely out of the public eye but had strangely prescient foretelling of events only five months later. Kadlec, who had organised the entire tabletop exercise, was also later the author of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions report: “An Analysis of the Origins of the COVID-19 Pandemic“, which came out earlier this year.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., reports: “second only to his longtime crony and comrade in arms Anthony Fauci, Robert Kadlec played a historic leadership role in fomenting the contagious logic that infectious disease posed a national security threat requiring a militarised response.”
He is the signer of the report to HHS, in a letter dated December 9th 2019:
By the time of this letter, U.S. intelligence already knew of the Wuhan virus. Four months later, U.S. lockdowns began, starting with the March 8th cancellation of South-by-Southwest by the Austin, Texas mayor, and extending to the March 12th imposition of travel restrictions, the March 13th takeover by FEMA and the March 16th press conference by Trump, Fauci, and Deborah Birx, which announced nationwide lockdowns.
The same day, Politico ran an article about another pandemic exercise from 2017 in which some incoming Trump officials participated, including Kelly and Tillerson. The article claims that such exercises are required by law. By the time of Covid lockdowns, they had both been pushed out, only to reemerge as key participants in Crimson Contagion along with most national security and health-related agencies of the federal Government.
The lockdowns – to which Trump agreed only reluctantly and were extended far past the point in which he believed they would control the virus – were the most ruinous of the administration. Trump’s pollsters for 2020 all agreed that these lockdowns created the conditions that drove him from office.
What does it all mean? Perhaps it is all just a series of coincidental data points, that what is called the worst pandemic in 100 years came only a few months after an elaborate multi-agency trial run of the same in which former high officials of the Trump administration participated. And perhaps the best person to run the Covid response also happened to be the very person who organised and managed the trial run in the previous season.
Many people will surely say there is nothing to see here. There is so much not to see these days.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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Good for him. Reform’s problem is Tice. The electorate suspects he’s a globalist in sheep’s clothing, and that manifested in the local elections.
Tice’s night time “olympian” partner Isabel Oakshott seriously dented any pretence of Reform’s anti-establishment stance when she wrote Handicock’s diaries.
Standing down 317 candidates in 2019 also added deeply to this suspicion.
Tice does indeed to pee or get off the pot.
With respect that seems to me like wishful thinking.
People who are naturally on the political right keep voting Tory in huge numbers. They have to stop for another political force to emerge on the right. They have had many chances and if the penny hasn’t dropped by now, I can’t see it happening in my lifetime. We probably need a disastrous societal collapse for people to wake up.
“We probably need a disastrous societal collapse for people to wake up.”
Oh, I think such a collapse is absolutely inevitable tof.
Looks that way
This has been going on for so long that there’s even a German word for it: Politikverdrossenheit (Fed-up-with-politics-ness). People are generally convinced that they keep getting shafted by corrupt/ otherwise non-desirable career politicians and have mentally disengaged themselves from political public life, yet, enough of them keep making the same crosses on the same boxes of ballot papers and then hope that this will somehow magically fix things (which it never does).
This is mirrored on the side of the actual political actors: By the time some group of people with a positive vision regarding what they want society to become and how to achieve that has percolated through the parliamentary system to positions of actual power, it’ll have turned into yet another group of short-termist establishment politicians playing to the tune of the machinery they believe to have conquered while it has really conquered them.
The system is f***ed and making more crosses on pieces of paper so that someone else will hopefully do something about it is not going to help.
Yep the system is indeed f…ed. ————-But as Churchill said “Democracy is the worst form of government…apart from all the rest”. ———We have to somehow operate within that f…ked system or become anarchists instead.
I’m not sure the electorate at large know what a globalist is.
Our area didn’t even have a candidate from Reform – I might have held my nose and voted for them, despite revising my opinion of them fundamentally.
I was born in London.
At age 1 I moved to Australia with my parents as a “10 pound Pom”.
I had a holiday there when I was 8, and another when I was 52, 9 years ago.
How times change!
As with San Francisco, Melbourne, New York and Seattle, Lefties certainly know how to destroy a decent city.
The fact that Khan looks set for another term says it all.
No desire to live there again.
if only those of the small government centre Right had one third of the commitment, energy and activism of those on the Left we may be in a better place.
We’re too busy working
I fully acknowledge that small c conservatives are busy but they are effective, practical hardworking people and that is why I considered that one third of the commitment, time and energy spent by the Left would be enough to turn the ship around.
Good point!
We also don’t like telling other people what to do or how to think.
Well done Howard Cox!
Just waiting for the Fake News to call him Hitler, anti-semitic, far right and an anti-vaxx science denier who wants to kill Gaia. They can dust off their 10 year old copies and regurgitate.
Too many people, too many cars, too many trains, too many planes, too many beggars, too many criminals, too many drugs, too many knives, too many guns, too many of almost everything you can think of…………..How can a total clutter like that be sorted out? Especially when boat loads of more clutter arrive in their thousands each week.
Time for a change. Sadiq has shown his incompetence and is destroying a once great city. Vote for the new guy or forever be ruled by the WEF.