Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors. This is how many analysts – including Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Scott Atlas, and popular Substack commentator Eugyppius – explain how leading public health experts could prescribe so many terrible pandemic response policies.
And it’s true: the so-called experts certainly have made themselves look foolish over the last three years: Public health leaders like Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci make false claims, or contradict themselves repeatedly, on subjects related to the pandemic response, while leading scientists, like Peter Hotez in the U.S. and Christian Drosten in Germany, are equally susceptible to such flip-flops and lies. Then there are the internationally renowned medical researchers, like Eric Topol, who repeatedly commit obvious errors in interpreting Covid-related research studies.
All of these figures publicly and aggressively promoted anti-public health policies, including universal masking, social distancing, mass testing and quarantining of healthy people, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
It seems like an open-and-shut case: dumb policies, dumb people in charge of those policies.
This might be true in a few individual cases of public health or medical leaders who really are incapable of understanding even high school level science. However, if we look at leading pandemic public health and medical experts as a group – a group consisting of the most powerful, widely published and well-paid researchers and scientists in the world – that simple explanation sounds much less convincing.
Even if you believe that most medical researchers are shills for pharmaceutical companies and that scientists rarely break new ground anymore, I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim that they lack basic analytical skills or a solid educational background in the areas they’ve studied. Most doctors and scientists with advanced degrees know how to analyse simple scientific documents and understand basic data.
Additionally, those doctors and public health professionals who were deemed experts during the pandemic were also clever enough to have climbed the academic, scientific and Government ladders to the highest levels.
They might be unscrupulous, sycophantic, greedy or power-mongering. You might think they make bad moral or ethical decisions. But it defies logic to say that every single one of them understands simple scientific data less than, say, someone like me or you. In fact, I find that to be a facile, superficial judgement that does not get to the root cause of their seemingly stupid, incompetent behaviour.
Returning to some specific examples, I would argue that it is irrational to conclude, as Dr. Prasad did, that someone like Dr. Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has published over 1,300 peer-reviewed articles and is one of the top 10 most-cited researchers in medicine, cannot read research papers “at a high level”. And it is equally unlikely that Anthony Fauci, who managed to ascend and remain atop the highest scientific perch in the federal Government for many decades, controlling billions of dollars in research grants, was too dumb to know that masks don’t stop viruses.
There must, therefore, be a different reason why all the top pro-lockdown scientists and public health experts – in perfect lockstep – suddenly started (and continue to this day) to misread studies and advocate policies that they had claimed in the past were unnecessary, making themselves look like fools.
Public health experts were messengers for the biodefence response
The most crucial single fact to know and remember when trying to understand the craziness of Covid times is this: The public health experts were not responsible for pandemic response policy. The military-intelligence-biodefence leadership was in charge.
In previous articles, I examined in great detail the Government documents that show how standard tenets of public health pandemic management were abruptly and secretly thrown out during Covid. The most startling switch was the replacement of the public health agencies by the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security at the helm of pandemic policy and planning.
As part of the secret switch, all communications – defined in every previous pandemic planning document as the responsibility of the CDC – were taken over by the National Security Council under the auspices of the White House Task Force. The CDC was not even allowed to hold its own press conferences!
As a Senate report from December 2022 notes:
From March through June 2020, CDC was not permitted to conduct public briefings, despite multiple requests by the agency and CDC media requests were “rarely cleared”. HHS stated that by early April 2020, “after several attempts to get approvals”, its Office of Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs “stopped asking” the White House “for a while”. (p. 8)
When public health and medical experts blanketed the airwaves and internet with ‘recommendations’ urging universal masking, mass testing and quarantining of asymptomatic people, vaccine mandates and other anti-public health policies – or when they promoted obviously flawed studies that supported the quarantine-until-vaccine biodefence agenda – they were not doing so because they were dumb, incompetent or misguided.
They were performing the role that the leaders of the national security and biodefence response gave them: to be the trusted public face that made people believe quarantine-until-vaccine was a legitimate public health response.
Why did public health leaders go along with the biodefence agenda?
We have to imagine ourselves in the position of public health and medical experts at top Government positions when the intelligence-military-biodefence network took over the pandemic response.
What would you do if you were a Government employee, or a scientist dependent on Government grants, and you were told that the quarantine-until-vaccine policy was actually the only way to deal with this particular engineered potential bioweapon?
How would you behave if an unprecedented event in human history happened on your watch: an engineered virus designed as a potential bioweapon was spreading around the world, and the people who designed it told you that terrifying the entire population into locking down and waiting for a vaccine was the only way to stop it from killing many millions?
More mundanely, if your position and power depended on going along with whatever the powers-that-be in the NSC and DHS told you to do – if your job and livelihood were on the line – would you go against the narrative and risk losing it all?
And, finally, in a more venal vain: what if you stood to gain a lot more money and power by advocating for policies that might not be the gold standard of public health, but that you told yourself could bring about major innovations (vaccine countermeasures) that would save humanity from future pandemics?
We know how the most prominent Covid ‘experts’ answered those questions. Not because they were dumb, but because they had a lot to lose and a lot to gain by going along with the biodefence narrative – and they were told millions would die if they failed to do so.
Why understanding the motives of public health leaders during Covid is so important
Paradoxically, deeming public health experts stupid and incompetent actually reinforces the consensus narrative: that lockdowns and vaccines were part of a public health plan. In this reading, the response may have been terrible, or it may have gone awry, but it was still just a stupid public health plan designed by incompetent public health leaders.
Such a conclusion leads to calls for misguided and necessarily ineffectual solutions: even if we replaced every single HHS employee or defunded the HHS or even the WHO altogether, we would not solve the problem and would be poised to repeat the entire pandemic fiasco all over again.
The only way to avoid such repetition is to recognise the Covid catastrophe for what it was: an international counterterrorism effort focused myopically on lockdowns and vaccines, to the exclusion of all traditional and time-tested public health protocols.
We need to wake up to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (if not earlier), we have ceded control of the agencies that are supposed to be in charge of public health to an international military-intelligence-pharmaceutical cartel.
This ‘public-private partnership’ of bioterrorism experts and vaccine developers is not interested in public health at all, except as a cover for their very secret and very lucrative biowarfare research and countermeasure development.
Public health was shunted aside during the Covid pandemic, and the public health leaders were used as trusted ‘experts’ to convey biowarfare edicts to the population. Their cooperation does not reflect stupidity or incompetence. Making such claims contributes to the coverup of the much more sinister and dangerous transfer of power that their seemingly foolish behaviour was meant to hide.
Debbie Lerman is a Brownstone Fellow who has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practising artist in Philadelphia, PA. This article first appeared at the Brownstone Institute.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Thanks for this. Interesting. It seems highly plausible to me and I totally agree that people like Whitty and Vallance are neither stupid nor incompetent. There certainly was plenty of stupidity and incompetence, lots of opportunism and self interest, but it’s still hard to believe that there was nothing more sinister behind it that we don’t know about.
The author is in the US and naturally has a US focus. I would be interested in her thoughts on how what she speaks about might have interacted with the U.K. sudden change of direction, Ferguson’s modelling, the Chinese “lockdown” theatre, the Italian decision to copy China, and the general lockstep. Did US warmongers manage to get their tentacles into all of these places, and how.
The military industrial complex has an interest in promoting wars, the “bio defence”, “public health”, medical/pharma industrial complex has an interest in promoting pandemics.
At least one of the two that you mentioned above had a lot of experience in the pharma trade – perhaps even some investments in them, so that’s a financial conflict against public interest. As a shareholder in a US company, he would be paying tax on any revenue in his stocks registered over there as well.
This all appears to be close to the truth .Does it not confirm that , as many believe , it was an unscheduled release of a US funded “bug” .
The reaction taken was a case of “oh ShXX”now we are in the poo!. Hence the Biodefence industrial complex, creators of the mess, had to try and sort it out .
To do this they imposed harsher Biodefence responses into the situation not the normal medical health plans.Ferguson was a useful”tool” in this as his forecasts supported the Biodefence response .
So …..
Was the research being done? Yes .
Was it outsourced to the Chinese labs? Yes as far as I understand .
Was it US funded by whatever convoluted mechanisms ?Yes as far as I can see.
Was the release a cock up or deliberate ?Not sure but “something” got out .
In short I think that all the above are true and the Global reaction was driven by mainly the US Biodefence blob as initially they did not know what “bug” had been released and how dangerous it was .
Luckily it was very mild but the overreaction has been a giant face saving exercise. They will never admit it publicly or pick up the global tab .Thats the basic outline of what happened….in my opinion .
Or am I just a dumb conspiracy theorist ??
Yes, all very plausible. Maybe at first they thought it was dangerous but once it was clear it wasn’t it was either face saving or they thought they might as well play out their exercise.
This helps to explain why public health experts behaved as they did, but it doesn’t really explain why the NSC and DHS gave them their orders.
In particular, exactly why did they want to inflict so much damage on the health – physical, psychological, moral, economic and social – of their own populations and, in particular, the physical health of their military personnel?
It’s a fair question. If you have powerful equipment and organisations that you enjoy being in charge of, testing it from time to time and proving it is useful or needed might be something you would be tempted to do. Evil stuff if true.
“I wonder if we could easily fuck-up everything? ”
“Yay, we can easily fuck-up everything!”
“Errm, we’ve fucked-up everything”
They want to use mRNA jabs as a platform technology. It was therefore “necessary” to speed up their production and carry out a mass human trial.
It was intended to be a global medical experiment – except they didn’t manage to make it global. Much of Africa didn’t participate and around 25% of the western population resisted the coercion/mandates.
It was planned. mRNA patents are not new – they go back to 1990. PCR test patent for SARS II dates to 2015.
Why did every country march in lockstep?
1-Yes the ‘leaders’ are stupid. Most of them truly are – and evil. I don’t believe Whitty is smart, nor Fauci, nor Walensky, nor Ferguson, nor Doris etc. I don’t. I see them for what they are – greasy pole climbing monkeys.
2-Money – how many millions did they make each? The entire quackcine industry dating from the quack twit Jenner is built on money and payments, not on health or science.
3-It was a DoD CIA project and they have the nasty habit of killing any who oppose them. The objective was a global vaccine template to be accepted by the sheeple as well as LDs and loss of freedom.
4-The vehicle was the G20 and the interlocked deep state and civil service.
5-If a nation state opted out they were subject to reprisals, financial, trade and other opprobrium.
6-The cult and religious moniker of ‘science’ most of it is so fake and corrupted it is ridiculous.
Not that difficult to figure out. Plandemic.
But why does the US DOD want a “global vaccine template”?
If you are asking that question you are still lost.
I have always had some sympathy for people’s whose livelihood and reputation was on the line – I fortunately was not in a position to have to make that choice, so do not want to judge those that were.
But there is a difference between Joe Bloggs on the street and high ranking doctors and public health officials. They knew by February 2020 that the virus was simply not that dangerous that they needed to go along with terrifying the population, the proclaimed problem was that the hospitals would collapse, not that millions would die. They will have known that the vaxx was never going to stop infection/transmission due to how it worked; that soon after introduction there was an increase in infections that could not be explained by the claim that people were being careless and not waiting until they ‘were fully protected’, that the immune suppression was a known and intentional effect of the vaxx; they will have known of the serious adverse effects that manifested almost immediately and will have known there were far more than would be acceptable for any other vaxx; they will have known that the risks posed by this novel vaxx did not outweigh the by and large benign outcome of corona infection for pretty much everyone under 70 (as much was stated in the Hancock WhatsApp texts). In other words, people who should have known and in all likelihood did know all along that the vaxx posed far greater and unknown risks for virtually the entire population and certainly for those under 20, they saw these risks manifest themselves in serious events and nevertheless kept schtum.
This I cannot get my head around – apparently the meaning of ‘First Do No Harm’ has gone the way of ‘Lest We Forget’ – a quaint phrase that many say and few live by.
As for the second possibility, a mad scientist approach to use the world’s population as guinea pigs to prevent future pandemics (presumably by killing off most of the world’s population through experimentation), coupled with a major ego and huge sums of money goes a long way toward explaining why some went along with it.
“…high ranking doctors and public health officials…knew by February 2020 that the virus was simply not that dangerous that they needed to go along with terrifying the population…”
I don’t think that’s true. In February we were all hearing about huge numbers of ‘Covid deaths’ in Italy, and that cases would increase exponentially, which meant exponential increases in Covid deaths, and in April there were a huge number of ‘Covid deaths’ in the UK.
With hindsight it’s easy to argue that many of the ‘Covid deaths’ may not have been caused by Covid, but at the time it seemed that most of them were caused by Covid, and the fear was that if something wasn’t done, there could be a surge of deaths “of Biblical proportions” (as Northern Ireland’s Health Minister warned and probably feared).
Fear can impair people’s judgement.
If you fear that there are going to be huge numbers of deaths from a new disease you don’t:
1) Change the rules to make it much easier to misstate cause of death; or
2) Kill – through a combination of murder, manslaughter, neglect,and shaming/terrifying people out of attending A andE – tens of thousands.
And Whitty made it clear in early March 2020 that the disease posed a trivial threat to the vast majority and was nowhere near dangerous enough to justify a rushed jab.
What we were hearing about and what was actually happening are two different things.
The data from China (although I’m sure it was not trusted) was that the virus was primarily affecting the elderly and was having little to no effect on the young. It was that the virus was spreading rapidly among a population with no/little immunity, this led to a huge surge in hospital admissions, to hospitals that were unprepared.
It will have been clear early on in Italy and Spain (both of which went into panic mode and started the herd running in Europe) that the Chinese data were correct in terms of who was vulnerable. Certainly that was the message here in NL from early March on, when children under 12 were encouraged to play together in groups and the OMT emphasised that the majority of people would not get very ill. That message never really changed here, the focus was on preventing the hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. The idea that everyone needed to fear for their life became the message to coerce people to obey, not to save lives. They knew full well who was vulnerable, Anders Tegnell in Sweden knew, yet they tried to convince the entire world that we were all at equal risk.
Nearhorburian is correct, people were outright told to stay home, which undoubtedly led to avoidable deaths – I know of a GP who was dealing with a telephone consult and was on the verge of telling the gentleman to take some paracetamol – fortunately, he decided to tell the man to come in, at which point he found out the man was having a heart attack. In addition, people were told to stay away from hospital if they actually were or suspected they were infected until they were literally on the verge of dying. Who knows how many people might not have died in the early days if they had bothered to treat them with known treatments for respiratory ailments, with things such as steroids and antibiotics, that had initially been advised against?
Yes, fear clearly can impair people’s judgment, but that fear was intentionally whipped up from a central source, most likely for a nefarious reason.
Especially if you choose to ignore evidence, e.g. Diamond Princess
The British Government downgraded Covid to a Low Consequence Infectious Disease a week BEFORE the first lockdown was imposed. The justification for the downgrading was that it had low mortality rates.
Since the downgrading was done a week before the lockdown, the $cientists would have collated the evidence and held their discussions some time before that. That would have then been communicated to the Government, the decision taken and the official downgrading implemented.
Having worked in the CS, I reckon the $cientists were holding their discussions in early March, 3 weeks before the lockdown.
Add to this the indemnities given by governments to the vaxx manufacturers, for the first time ever. Indemnities based on 3 months of safety data, as opposed to the usual 3+ years…
Apply common sense and simple deduction to reach the obvious conclusion. It wasn’t “Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors”, it was a coldly-calculated, globally-coordinated “plandemic”, orchestrated at deep state level and facilitated by treasonous politicians and public authorities all round the world.
International lawyer Dr Reiner Fuellmich figured this out two years ago and last year conducted a model Crimes against Humanity trial with hundreds of hours of video evidence. A summary of the evidence is available here: https://metatron.substack.com/p/reiner-fuellmichs-grand-jury-court.
In his closing arguments Dr Fuellmich explains the aims of the globalist conspirators:
“The ultimate goal of these people’s megalomaniac fantasies is population control, involving massive population reduction and getting the survivors to agree to two things. One, a one-world government, under the WEF-controlled UN; and two, get the agreement to a one-world digital currency issued by their one-world bank, according to the guidelines of the Chinese social credit system. In order to get there, they need to create as much chaos, fear and panic as possible, so that the people will ultimately give in to their demands. As Herman Göring said when asked how Hitler and he how got the Germans to commit all those unspeakable atrocities, he said: “Fear, that is all that it takes. Fear, regardless of what kind of government you have.”
The political class is waging undeclared war against us, the people, at the behest of their globalist overlords and paymasters. Don’t believe anything they say.
Hear hear. I’m totally onboard with that. Shame the nanobots don’t factor into this and amounted to nothing, but hey ho, you can’t have everything.
It’s Joel Smalley’s latest, and he’s well and truly debunked the narrative here. In this article he focuses on the death waves pre vax roll-out vs post roll-out in Florida.
Conclusion;
”However you might speculate about the true cause of death in the first year of “COVID”, it was never the “worst pandemic since the Spanish flu” as proclaimed by the official narrative. Moreover, the patterns of mortality and even the official counts, do not support the notion that COVID is responsible for much of the apparent excess deaths in the younger age groups.
Similarly, no matter what mental gymnastics you exercise to rationalise the unprecedented spike in mortality from May 2021, the fact remains that official COVID mortality is materially higher in the era that the official narrative tells you it should have been pretty much non-existent.
Again, this is especially so for the younger cohorts for whom the virus, per se, was never an issue in the first place.
The “vaccine” is not effective. No need to make claims about it causing COVID and other fatal adverse event outcomes. It is simply sufficient to state that the myth that the “vaccine” saved any lives is just that, a myth.”
https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-narrative-once-and
Mortality rates across all age groups lowest in the unvaxxed. Shame the data only goes up to May 2022 but I think this is when the UK stopped recording deaths by vax status. In fact, is this not the case in all countries now? Not sure…
https://theleadingreport.com/2023/06/25/mortality-rates-are-lowest-among-the-unvaccinated-in-all-age-groups/
Great article. Along with information control and promise of financial reward, a third aspect to consider is the role of black-mail: together they make up the Blue-Yellow-Gold strategy favoured by the CCP according to (now imprisoned) Miles Guo. The spate of scandals about the private lives of MPs and celebrities in recent years, including the very public trial of one celebrity who was already dead followed by that of another who was in his 80s, is unlikely to be coincidence – more likely intended to scare those who still held sway . The credulous, the craven, the corrupt and the compromised are always easiest to control.
If I had to pick just one quotation from the “Zero Covid” campaign, it would be that from Neil “Professor Pantsdown” Ferguson.
Now, I accept that even Ferguson’s mum might wonder if her boy was the sharpest tool in the drawer, although Neil seems quite bullish about his own brilliance.
But there he was (and still is). His X-box incompetence played a key roll in persuading all the Arts Grad Fearless Leaders (like Bunter) to opt for “Three Weeks to Squash the Sombrero”.
Somebody chose Ferguson and his dismal team to represent “The Science.” And it wouldn’t have been some third assistant junior minion.
The quote starts with a brief review of the Chinese Lockdown, the businessmen suddenly dropping dead in the street, acknowledged that China was an authoritarian communist dictatorship, briefly touched on the actions taken in Lombardy, the No.1 European terminus of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative.
And then he dropped it out:-
“WE REALISED WE COULD GET AWAY WITH IT.”
And he did. And will no doubt get away with it next time, unless someone stops him.
TLDR: Money/job/career.
I don’t think the headline is overly helpful.
The article is partly about what the headline says it is but partly about who and what they were going along with
China seized the opportunity to run a civil defense drill, for reasons now obvious.
An epidemiologist friend in Beijing in December, 2019, wrote me, “I actually find the response by the Chinese government to be extremely interesting. It seems like it’s overblowing the matter on purpose. Considering the low number of cases (compared to China’s population) and low death rates, it feels like the Chinese government is overblowing fears on purpose, with maps filled with dark areas and shutting down everything everywhere (and this is during China’s most important holiday season).
I suspect it’s practicing for when a Really serious disease breaks out, the sort with people dying like flies. So I find all this fuss quite interesting. We’ve been warned about a potential superbug outbreak for years, and now we can see how the response will look like. No doubt the Chinese government is busy taking notes on what it could have done better.
Not to mention, I don’t think most Westerners realize just how big Wuhan is, just how significant Chinese New Year is in terms of people moving around and just how many people go in and out of those wet markets every day. That’s like, tens of thousands of people leaving the wet markets, taking public transport then going home to expose all their visiting relatives, and all those people in turn going to all sorts of crowded areas too. With a high enough contagion rate, we’d easily be at 1 million infected. The fact that we haven’t reached such numbers means that this virus isn’t That bad.
Thank you for posting this. I also felt that we were in a dress rehearsal.
This is a very important article which spells out precisely why western nations all followed the same, ostensibly lunatic, policies: with the 5 Eyes Nations (USA, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ) amongst the worst culprits.
Anyone with a few functioning brain-cells, who did a bit of their own research and wasn’t terrified by the psy-ops, worked out something approaching this conclusion a long time ago.
But it doesn’t excuse the collaboration and cowardice of the Public Health $cientists who fronted the campaign. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
They didn’t just “do nothing.” They participated, and in many cases, orchestrated the EVIL.
As someone once said, if agreement means you get to pay your mortgage and feed your children then disagreement is almost impossible
There have been statements from this biodefense group & it’s observers over recent years, that weapons of mass destruction were changing from explosions to bioweapons. These were becoming increasingly easy to manufacture by a rogue group or government and potentially be very devastating. This whole covid debacle could well be an exercise in dealing with this potential threat. What works and what doesn’t. MRNA technology was thought to be a good countermeasure so that a vaccine could quickly be developed to counter the bioweapon. JFK Jr. Writes about this in his book. War and weapons have essentially changed. Once the planned response was implemented and tested, the spooks could not turn it off. The politicians were drunk on power and unfettered spending. Another conspiracy theory that may come true.
Good analysis. Along with yesterday’s article about stupidity in all it’s forms. And for the bigger picture I suggest Ivor Cummins recent interview with Dr Jacob Nordangard now on Youtube “The greatest history never told”. It doesn’t go into as many rabbit holes as some would like (see comments) but it’s a reasonably succinct overview of how we got to where we are and what the global powers are trying to do to us.
There is another explanation as to why these people did what they did.
They were ill.
Not ill with an organic illness but ill with a psychological condition called Mass Psychosis, better understood as Mass hysteria.
It IS a real illness, the best known former example would be the Medieval Witch Trials where normally sane people went insane in their belief in a collective delusion. It led to many deaths of innocent people before sanity was restored and people came to their senses.
It is based on irrational fear and needs authority figures (doctors, experts) to confirm it’s existence. Once they have given their blessing all hell can break loose.
Ironically, Mass Psychosis acts exactly like a virus transmitted from person to person until the whole group are infected with the delusion. With social media and the internet we now have a means to transmit irrational fear to anyone around the globe, instantaneously. That irrational fear was once Witches and today it is viruses.
In a Mass Psychosis outbreak Confirmation bias overtakes rational logic to ‘confirm’ the existence of the delusion and so witches are thereby ‘proved’ to exist by torture, confessions and natural phenomenon attributed to witchcraft.
For Covid, confirmation was achieved by PCR (proved to be 0% accurate) and common symptoms, wrongly attributed to Covid, such as very low blood oxygen levels, radiographs and of course, the definitive symptom, the ludicrous loss of taste and smell.
Covid is just a modern day delusion that, as it recedes, becomes ever more clear that these people, mainly the medical profession, politicians, the scientists and the media had just simply gone temporarily insane and in their madness killed millions around the globe trying desperately to eradicate the common cold.
Any wonder that they want it all swept under the carpet?
Covid was developed in America as a weapon. Fauci was involved in this, and why he told so many lies to try to cover it up. Once the Americans had developed it far enough, they sent it to China, so they could deny involvement when it was released.