Arguing the conspiracy-or-emergence question with respect to pandemic policy is a little like weeding the garden. You are never quite done with it, and every few months you find you have something more to say.
In this instance, I must thank friend-of-the-blog Igor Chudov for providing the opportunity. He disagrees with my view that Covid policies owe less to creepy conspiratorial globalists, than they do to the unbounded stupidity of our leaders, boring institutional dynamics, and feedback effects. He’s explained why in an extensive post that everyone should read.
I don’t have an issue with most of the points Chudov raises, though I take a different view of their cumulative significance. I’d note only that the World Economic Forum article he leads with dates to April 3rd 2020, long after the entire Western elite had embraced mass containment. In general, the WEF merely echoes current trends and policy fashions, which makes its real-world influence an obscure matter. It’s additionally important that Event 201, held in October 2019, explicitly rejected lockdowns and mass travel restrictions in the event of a deadly pandemic, preferring instead minimal measures like advisories.
From its Call to Action (emphasis mine):
Travel and trade are essential to the global economy as well as to national and even local economies, and they should be maintained even in the face of a pandemic. Improved decision-making, coordination, and communications between the public and private sectors, relating to risk, travel advisories, import/export restrictions, and border measures will be needed. The fear and uncertainty experienced during past outbreaks, even those limited to a national or regional level, have sometimes led to unjustified border measures, the closure of customer-facing businesses, import bans, and the cancellation of airline flights and international shipping. A particularly fast-moving and lethal pandemic could therefore result in political decisions to slow or stop movement of people and goods, potentially harming economies already vulnerable in the face of an outbreak.
In other words, planners as late as Fall 2019 viewed widespread closures in the event of a pandemic as a risk to be countered via nebulous stuff like “improved decision-making, coordination, and communications.” In this, Event 201 was entirely typical.
This raises an important, if often-neglected question: What about the 2020 response was normal and long-planned, and what about it was novel and unexpected?
We don’t need clandestine plots to elucidate measures that the pandemicists have been formulating entirely in the open and promising to deliver for decades. Where they might help, though, is with strange policies and responses that nobody ever heard of before.
Strictly speaking, none of what happened was all that new. Testing, contact tracing, lockdowns, accelerated vaccine development – all were discussed prior to 2020 as part of an increasingly elaborate and authoritarian pandemic toolkit intended to save us (mostly) from pandemic influenza.
The novelty lay entirely in the application of these measures. To understand it, we must internalise the crucial distinction between mitigation and containment. I can’t emphasise this enough; indeed, if I could wave a wand and put one concept into the heads of everyone pondering this matter, it would be this distinction, that’s how important I find it.
Since SARS-1 in 2003 at least, epidemiologists had planned to respond to limited, localised outbreaks via containment. Infection clusters confined to specific apartment complexes, city blocks or villages would trigger total lockdowns of several weeks, with testing and contact tracing to contain the outbreak before it spread any further. Under containment, you can’t go outside to walk your dog. Everyone gets tested all the time; the tracers follow every transmission chain back to the source. Virus botherers in weird virus suits deliver rations to your doorstep on a stick. Everyone who tests positive is carted off to centralised quarantine. The most widely reported example of containment is what Japanese health authorities did to the Diamond Princess after she returned to Yokohama Port in February 2020.
If containment fails and the virus begins to circulate more broadly, planners envisioned a transition to mitigation strategies. Mitigation is a nebulous cluster of milder measures that, it was hoped, would slow the spread and reduce pressure on hospitals. These measures could involve everything from work-at-home advisories to periodic school closures. It’s true that the pandemicists spent the years after SARS-1 developing ever more authoritarian mitigationist plans, but these were not lockdowns designed to stop the virus. They were, explicitly, about flattening rather than crushing the curve, and they were rooted in doubtful retrospective observational studies of the 1918 influenza pandemic in the United States, which purported to show that periodic school closures could delay (note: not prevent) pandemic mortality.
Where this discussion often goes wrong is the tendency to mistake the escalating mitigationist visions of Western pandemicists for an incipient mass containment plot. This is understandable, but if we maintain an autistic focus on our crucial distinction, we can see that it’s not quite right. Even the famous three-day Ebola lockdown imposed on Sierra Leone in 2014 was a mitigationist measure, because the goal was only to slow the rate of infection, not to beat the virus back or drive the curve downwards.
What happened in January 2020 in China, and then in March 2020 to the rest of the world, was an innovation in theory and practice. Pandemicists decided suddenly to ditch mitigation altogether and attempt virus containment not just in one apartment building, but en masse. All those heavy-handed measures that planners, in a prior era of sanity, had rejected as unscalable beyond the level of the city block, would be applied to whole metropolises, regions and nations, with the goal being to ‘crush the curve’ (rather than flatten it) and perhaps even to achieve zero-Covid by forcing the reproduction number under 1. Diagnostic of mass containment is not its most obtrusive feature, namely lockdowns, but rather mass testing and contact tracing, because the goal in a containment regime is not to slow infections, but to prevent them.
Since the completion of the WHO smallpox vaccination campaign, Western planners had envisioned a pandemic response consisting of months or years of minimal mitigationist measures, followed by accelerated treatment and vaccine development. Studying their wargames and related documents shows that pandemicists before 2020 generally saw it as their duty to forestall public panic and keep economic activity alive. They furthermore assumed that everyone would be deeply grateful for a vaccine and that, if anything, people would have to be prevented from killing each other to get priority access.
What had never been planned was nationwide lockdowns, mass testing and contact tracing to stop a virus circulating across entire hemispheres. How our respective public health establishments ended up discarding their long-standing plans in favour of mass containment is a question I looked into a long time ago, in two posts on the history of lockdowns. In the interests of furthering this discussion, I’ve lifted the paywall on both pieces.
What you’ll find there is much evidence that mass containment came to the West via three specific events, the significance of which became apparent only in retrospect:
- In January and February 2020, all of our governments were pressing ahead with their prior mitigationist pandemic plans. Public health officials talked down the risk of the virus as part of a longstanding strategy to prepare everyone for infection with minimal panic. The WHO dithered, torn internally by a Sinophilic faction eager to minimise events in China and a more concerned faction eager to ring the alarm. When the Hubei lockdown appeared to succeed, these two factions were suddenly aligned. The Sinophiles could agree that the virus was dangerous but the Chinese solution was effective; the alarmists could finally cry fire. The result was a crucial WHO report published on February 24th endorsing Chinese-style mass containment.
- Also at the end of February, Italian health officials had begun imposing confined, village-level lockdowns in specific northern hotspots. This was the ordinary localised containment that the pandemicists had always envisioned, but as authorities widened testing, they began to discover SARS-2 community spread just as that WHO report dropped. There’s a great deal that we don’t know about what happened next, but on March 8th, the Italian government embraced the WHO recommendations from two weeks prior, imposing a region-wide lockdown on all of Lombardy. By March 10th, they extended the closures to all of Italy. The closures were accompanied by heavy pro-lockdown propaganda across social media and growing alarm in the press.
- Finally, Neil Ferguson and his dubious, forever-wrong modelling team at Imperial College London – some of whom had been involved in the early village-level containment in northern Italy – published their inaugural SARS-2 pandemic model on March 16th. This document influenced discussion across the world. It turned early anxiety about ventilator shortages (propagated by China via the WHO) into concrete arguments about how Corona would melt down hospitals, and it was an initial step in the great attempt to make mass containment politically possible (and palatable) to Western populations. Ferguson and his team introduced the idea of technocratic lockdowns, which might consist of only partial and periodic restrictions, rather than universal closures as in Hubei; and they also began to equivocate about what the goals of mass containment actually were. As officially stated, the purpose was merely to hold out for vaccines, which it was hoped would arrive in 18 months. Zero-Covid advocates themselves, however – among them a wealth of prominent bureaucrats and politicians across the world – continued to hope explicitly for indefinite virus suppression or permanent eradication.
All three of these events were powerful stimuli, which acted on the public health establishments of our respective countries in different ways. Some places, like Japan, Sweden and Belarus, remained unswayed and stayed open. Italy, at the other extreme, locked down first and hardest, enacting the only Chinese-style lockdown in the West. Everyone else adopted some version of Fergusonian technocratic closures, placing their faith in the voodoo of the pandemic modellers and never-ending, ever-changing litany of One Cool Tricks. Every country that adopted mass containment grafted it onto existing pandemic plans. Accelerated vaccine development continued in the background.
Now, did these three stimuli emerge spontaneously and influence the governments of our respective countries wholly by accident? No, they did not. There were important plots and conspiratorial actors in these early days. By April at the latest, though, mass containment had become a noxious cluster of autonomous, self-reinforcing policies across Western nations, devised and enforced by domestic scientific advisers and public health bureaucrats who were acting on nobody’s initiative but their own. This is what we see, in excruciating detail, in the leaked Hancock lockdown files, and all the other revelations to date.
As for the conspirators: they are to be sought in the earliest months of 2020. China played a very important role here, through its influence within the WHO, and perhaps also via separate channels. A lot has been said about this angle. Less often discussed is the early influence exercised by social media platforms. It’s very unlikely to be an accident that lockdown mania enjoyed such early favour with the Silicon Valley set, including key, mysteriously viral people like Tomas Pueyo; and that all major social media platforms turned into perpetual lockdown promotion machines after March 10th 2020. Tech companies were also some of the clearest beneficiaries of pandemic policies, profiting from local retail closures and increased demand for online shopping, near-universal reliance on work-at-home software, and the idle attentions of billions of house-arrested people.
The people who don’t play any crucial early role are our go-to globalist villains. The WEF and Bill Gates start demanding lockdowns at the same time as everybody else. Beginning in mid-2020, Klaus Schwab was even pushing his political contacts to declare the pandemic over with, so he could return to ESG concern-trolling. Theories have to be parsimonious and explanatory, and this one just isn’t. It succeeds because it collapses what is actually a complex, multilayered history into a single universal narrative that applies to all countries simultaneously; and because it identifies clear villains and supplies a single, unified reason for the insanity befell us.
Reality is harder than that.
While I can’t compete with all the massive platforms and posters who disagree with me, I can at least, here at the bottom, attempt to head off some common objections.
Many of my critics collapse distinctions between different organisations. They’ll respond to this by saying that “the WEF and the WHO and Gates and China are all the same” or insisting that a WEF affiliation on somebody’s résumé makes them a WEF actor. I can’t agree with this approach. It’s not how we discuss organisations or individuals in any other context. If you lower the resolution enough, all you see are blurry shapes and any theory becomes defensible, but that doesn’t make you right.
Others reason backwards from the ‘lockstep’ coordination of our countries in implementing lockdowns to infer a broader, globalist plot. In every country I’ve studied, lockdowns were the subject of heavy reporting, and I’ve tried to describe in the broadest sense how they actually came about. Law and policy throughout Western countries are actually very highly coordinated in many areas. The reasons for this are diverse, but unless you think every swing in stock or cryptocurrency prices is a specific, deliberate, coordinated conspiracy, you must accept that apparent coordination does not necessarily indicate a plot, and may also arise from things like preference cascades and spontaneous order.
There is, finally, a tendency to read grand policy objectives like Agenda 2030 onto specific contemporary events. I understand that this seems compelling, but there are oceans of globalist aspirational detritus out there, and you can force this vague verbiage into a theory explaining literally anything. Nobody would say that this stuff doesn’t matter, but if you take the opposite approach, of beginning with specific regional or national lockdown policies and following them up the chain, you will literally never end up at Agenda 2030. At the earliest moments of the pandemic, this exercise indeed led to some interesting places; since April 2020, though, you’ll find that everything goes back to local and national politicians, various branches of the bureaucracy, and the public health establishment. That matters.
This piece originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Yes, I think Eugyppius has been broadly correct from the start in his Team Toby-like analyses of the covid nightmare, convincingly arguing against the Team James take on things, including in his article on DS yesterday and in this follow-up to various objections today. (Having said that, I tend to disagree with him when he wanders off into other subjects).
I don’t feel the need to read any further on the various merits of the two sides of the argument. I’ll go with my gut – the chances of it all being a cockup, coincidentally coordinated at a global level, with no prior planning is as close to nil as you can get. No, an opportunity was seized upon to deploy mechanisms to trigger social and economic reform. All based around the biggest pysop in human history. The only question being when the opportunity was recognised.
Strange how all those thousands of WhatsApp messages don’t seem to contain anything about the ‘vaccines’ isn’t it? How does cockup/idiot theory explain all the glaring omissions? Even idiots knew the ‘vaccine’ was experimental, most people didn’t need it, and that it was a huge risk to public health. All the coercion and all the propaganda, all singing from the same hymn sheet at the same time. Come on!. It all stinks to high heaven and I can smell the sh*t a mile off.
I don’t even think Hancock’s WhatsApp message saga is a cock up. Someone is playing someone.
Maybe it’s part of Boris trying to be the Comeback Kid? He’s been in the news as of late, mocking wokery and the like. So far he doesn’t seem to have come out of the messages too badly – supposedly he did not want things to go so far and at this point he’s more guilty of spinelessness rather than the nasty, spiteful power grabs of Wancock and his ilk. Unless he can actually show he’s grown a spine, I wouldn’t bother if I were him, but that’s another story.
Could also be related to Labour – a lot of people are placing this whole thing on the Tories now, conveniently overlooking the fact that Labour wanted even more draconian measures and presented zip in the way of opposition. The only one who seemed to question anything was Corbyn and look where that got him.
Yep – no way Oakenshott would be allowed to release that without a nod from the security services.
“huge risk to public health” – accompanied by financial immunity to the manufacturers and the promoters.
The poison and the nazti pass were certainly a centrally coordinated thing. Why would almost all countries in the world wish to adopt something that required a lot of money being put into the set-up of an IT system that was never going to work for the alleged purpose?
Why was the nazti pass still being pushed in the UK and NL in October/November 2021, when it had already been established beyond any doubt that the vaxxed were passing on the virus at the same rate as the unvaxxed? The claim went from it was going to prevent infections to it would protect the unvaxxed from getting ill and having the audacity to need hospital care, for which we pay good money. Yet if the pass was needed to supposedly protect the unvaxxed, why were they pushing so hard for everyone to run and get a third shot? If only the unvaxxed were getting sick in October 2021, what was the third shot about? A question, I might add, that no one in the media felt the need to ask.
The Dutch public health authority wanted those who had had corona (with a government approved PCR test) given a green check in the pass for a year and a half, why did Brussels insist on it being 6 months? When Von der Leyen made her secret vaxx deal with Bourla, enough vaxxes had already been sourced to give every citizen of the EU (including children) 2 shots, even though the poison had not yet been cleared for children under 16. I read that Ursie’s deal was enough to procure shots to give every man, woman and child in the EU 4 shots – meaning a total of 6 shots had been procured for every citizen – how did she and Bourla know in April 2021, when making this deal, that 2 shots would not do the job? Why did she not share this information with public health officials? How did she know the poison would be okayed for children?
She knew, because at this point it had already been planned. And no, I don’t believe it was planned in January 2021 when the UK’s world-beating vaxx programme proved such a ‘success’, it must have been earlier, when these b’stards saw just how much they could get away with – at that point there was most definitely collaboration and coordination. Which is exactly why some harsh examples need to be set now – pour encourager les autres.
I don’t ever remember it being claimed the vax pass was to protect the unvaxxed. It was obviously used to segregate, stigmatise, a tool used both as an incentive to get jabbed and to blackmail citizens. “No more participating in society for you unless you produce your QR code to prove you’re not a health hazard!”
I knew someone who ate a meal out on the terrace, when it was allowed ( I never gave these Nazis my custom, on principle ) but the staff wouldn’t let her go in to use the toilet because she didn’t have a QR code. I had to do a PCR under duress just so I could host my daughter’s birthday party at a venue. None of these things were anything to do with protection, just blatant abuse of people’s civil liberties with the onus on treating those who valued their right to bodily autonomy as social pariahs.
I suppose ‘protection’ was the wrong word, although that is undoubtedly what the authorities would claim now when pushed.
At the time, even as the RIVM was urging vaxxed people to still get tested, even though they were assured to keep their green check even if they tested positive, the argument was that letting the
Jewsunvaxxed go out would expose them to the lurgy, they would become sick and would take up hospital beds. They tried to sell it as protecting us from ourselves.Now some twat who is a columnist for the Volkskrant and a brown-noser of Marion Koopmans (vet/virologist with ties to the WHO, Fauci and the Wuhan lab) is saying that the pass was never intended to help against the pandemic, it was only supposed to make people feel safer when they went out. If a vaxxed person needs to be made to feel safe using an electronic device, that means they don’t believe their vaxx works…
Right now they’re trying to get a big corona scare again, people are in hospital with corona – fewer than in the summer for goodness sake and about 80% of them are over 80 – half are over 90 fcs.
This is what happened.
Nobody in the west in Feb 2020 believed the population would put up with lockdowns.
Then when the Italians (the bastards) tried it and got away with it, it was off to the races. Some machinery somewhere kicked in and rode the authoritarian train as far as it would go.
They had thought of it for sure, they had dreamed of it, but never dared really suggest it because – it’s hard to believe this now, I know – they thought western populations loved their freedom and would never give it up.
But boy were they ready to pounce when they discovered they were wrong about that.
Tis what I think too
Me third. Eugyppius says that Italy had the most stringent measures – I believe Spain went even further, at least in spring 2020.
Spain had just as strict a lockdown as Italy, but if I remember correctly, Italy at least allowed people to go out for exercise and the like – Spain did not allow even that. Children were locked indoors for 3 months, if they played in an indoor courtyard of an apartment building, the neighbours would call the cops. People could take their dog out, but go no further than 150 metres from their home.
That astonished me. I’ve been caught up in a number of different demos and marches in Barcelona by accident over the years – the people there love to take to the streets for just about anything. I could not believe that they did not do so over such outrageous violations of fundamental rights – I certainly would have expected the younger people to go out, but nada.
One note on the second event listed: the Italian lockdown was extended from Lombardy to the whole country after two days because, as soon as the Lombardy lockdown was announced, anyone who could flee Lombardy, did. It was a complete embarrassment for the government.
Southern Italy wasn’t substantially hit by covid until later waves.
What happened in January 2020 in China, and then in March 2020 to the rest of the world, was an innovation in theory and practice.
Not exactly. I quote from the Rockefeller Foundation’s ‘Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development’ (2010) and its Lock Step scenario.
‘In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. … A few countries did fare better — China in particular. The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries. …
‘During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. …’
Yes, Event 201 discouraged cross-border travel restrictions. But – again I quote –
‘Governments should provide more resources and support for the development and surge
manufacturing of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics that will be needed during a
severe pandemic. … in coordination with [Gates-funded] WHO, CEPI, GAVI. …’
‘Governments and the private sector should assign a greater priority to developing methods to combat mis- and disinformation prior to the next pandemic response. Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation. This will require developing the ability to flood media with fast, accurate, and consistent information. Public health authorities should
work with private employers and trusted community leaders such as faith leaders, to promulgate factual information to employees and citizens. Trusted, influential private-sector employers should create the capacity to readily and reliably augment public messaging, manage rumors and misinformation, and amplify credible information to support emergency public communications. National public health agencies should work in close collaboration with WHO to create the capability to rapidly develop and release consistent health messages. For their part, media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though the use of technology. …
‘Accomplishing the above goals will require collaboration among governments, international organizations and global business. …’
Any serious discussion of this question needs to discuss it in the light of Robert Kennedy’s The Real Dr Fauci, in particular chapter 12, ‘Germ Games.’ Anyone interested in the spiritual significance of the covid crisis should read my own book, When the Towers Fall: A Prophecy of What Must Happen Soon.
“It’s true that the pandemicists spent the years after SARS-1 developing ever more authoritarian mitigationist plans, but these were not lockdowns designed to stop the virus. They were, explicitly, about flattening rather than crushing the curve”
That’s what the covid lockdowns were supposed to be for – flattening the curve.
Yes, that flattening of the curve was supposed to be temporary in spring 2020, when the world was unprepared for a pandemic. No PPE, insufficient hospital staff after years of cuts, probably little by way of hospital surge training. It was sold to us as necessary to buy time and get things in order. Billions and billions spent, yet after 2 years they were still trying to flatten the curve. The only thing that needs flattening is every parliament in the West, so that we, the people, can build back better.
Indeed, “flatten the curve” was simply the hook for the slippery slope into the abyss that followed.
Not really. Three weeks to flatten the curve was never meant to be three weeks to flatten the curve. As Deborah Birx has pointed out in her book, this was just a phrase used to sell lockdown to politicians who were hesitant to implement it. It was (rightly) conjectured that once the initial hurdle for lockdown of both the general public and the economy had been overcome, getting it extended and extendend and then extended again, would be easier.
And that’s how it worked out. Lockdown 1 until Summer 2020, Nobody wants another lockdown! lockdown 2 in autumn 2020, Deadly variants! lockdown 3 Christmas 2020 and then the long drawn out We first need to vaccinate more people! period until Summer 2021. And lockdown was ready to make a comeback in winter 2021, again piecemail, 10pm curfew, mask mandate renewed, lockdown over Christmas extended until God-only-knows-when was the plan. Thankfully, it only went to step 2.
A slight change in direction, but does anyone know of any published quality reflections and recommendations as to what would have been a better approach to the virus in early 2020 and subsequently?
Maybe a editorial piece with this topic in mind would be useful to understand what had been learnt. We know basically everything that was carried out has little benefit to the populous.
I’d start with the UK’s Plan A that was thrown into the bin at the start.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/213717/dh_131040.pdf
Thanks, but I was more thinking about what non government thinking was.
We seem to be dwelling on how we got here, was it stupidity, conspiracy, planed Mr evil etc. Worth some investigation but like what was the source of the virus? hard to pin down and the key is not to let those who did this to us get off scott free and make sure we know what would have been a better approach, for next time.
Try the Great Barrington Declaration
BINGO
With regard to the author’s three specific events I note the prominent role played by the WHO and Ferguson both receive funding from Gates. Money links the individuals and institutions and money buys influence.
“When do we deploy the new variant?”
Ok, so what was the motivation here? If the Covid policies were a reaction to a frightened public, if it’s clear the public are now less frightened, why wouldn’t you take that as a win and announce victory? Why prolong it?
I don’t agree. Depite the overhyped narrative in 2003 re SARS’ mortality, the authorities here did nothing. I returned to the UK from the Far East a few months after Sars was MSM news, to learn that according to my colleagues whom the airline had called, I was seated immedialetly behind someone who was taken to hospital suffering from SARS. I asked what the airline had said I was supposed to do; they muttered something about “symptoms”. I did a few hours work, went home to bed and told them that if I wasn’t in the next day then they would have something to worry about. No, I did not come done with anything and the authorities never conatcted me. I was unaware that ‘containment’ was used here or in HK/Guangdong and had not heard of any form of testing beyond in vitro culture.
While I agree that incompetence and arrogance seem necessary attributes for politicians and public health placemen, the degree of lockstep this time cannot be explained by cock-up.
“since April 2020, though, you’ll find that everything goes back to local and national politicians, various branches of the bureaucracy, and the public health establishment.”
Tony Blair would disagree. He says amongst other things, in the 2020 report for the Gates-funded Tony Blair Institute (available on the Companies House website) that “One key area where the Institute led the debate early and changed policy – not only in the UK but around the world – was on the importance of COVID-19 testing… advocating for a Moonshot strategy which the UK government subsequently adopted… this successful template was used as the basis to advise countries around the world”.
The same report says on vaccines: “In late December 2020… Mr. Blair published a piece in the Independent calling for a drastic change in the UK’s vaccine policy…Following the article’s publication, the government accepted a new national vaccination strategy…which reflected our recommendations in full.” This was the Gates proposal to vaccinate everybody, not just vulnerable groups. The Independent article also mentions vaccine passports.
One correction: Spain basically copied Italy and China, except they skipped the local lockdowns and went straight to national lockdown, with martial law in all but name. Not exactly Fergusonian. And Nicaragua and Tanzania were also basically in the same category as Sweden, Belarus, and Japan. Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua actually *encouraged* mass gatherings. And in the long run, they ended up none the worse for wear than their stricter neighbors.
While there is no question the bunch full of useful idiots have no idea what’s go on, they are selected for their usefulness based on their levels of idiocy, narcissism, capitulation to and enjoyment of power and stuff the security services haveon them often dating back Eton, Harrow & Oxford days. It is not a conspiracy to observe that those who have money & power – from the aristocracy to the technocracy – would like to hold onto it. From the British Empire to the Bank of England, Rhodes, to the Federal Reserve & BIS (and soon to be CBDCs) the money supply has been created to keep the world in debt and therefore control. Should anyone step out of line such as Lincoln (greenbacks) or Kennedy (and end to secret societies), they are assassinated. Every war, pandemic or (next up) Green Revolution, leads to the same outcome: A transfer of wealth. The little WEF isn’t even a player, merely a house of distractions filled with ‘conspiracy’ corridors leading the wishing-to-be enlightened to a darkening forest of signposts. Left-Right, Ukraine-Russia, Remain-Leave – divide and rule and play both sides has served those who wish to hold onto and extend their wealth and power, for centuries, the layers of obfuscation from law to ‘science’ merely adding to the tower of babel.
There are no conspiracy theories (other than those concocted by the current conspirators to lead us in the direction) only conspiracies. And yes, there is a grand conspiracy which has lasted centuries. If not for that, how could a handful of aristocrats, bankers and technocrats control a population of 8 billion.