Daniel Hadas, whose sensitive and measured commentary on the pandemic I’ve long valued, recently offered these remarks on lockdowns and mass vaccination on Twitter:
It needs to be understood that the true motivation of the lockdown and forced vaccination Covid response really was Saving Lives.
Saving Lives wasn’t a smokescreen for some other hidden plan.
Of course, there was opportunism: there were those who used the state of emergency to claw power, money, fame to themselves. There were both supporters and opponents of the Covid measures who did that.
Where [there] is opportunity, there will be opportunists.
But mere opportunism is not enough to drive forward the leaders and followers in a revolution on the scale of the Covid response.
That requires faith, and the faith that drove this revolution was the faith in Saving Lives.
To deny the authenticity of the project to Save Lives is to remain perilously ready to sign up to all current and future projects to remake society and morality in the name of Life-Saving.
And it is to remain blind to the fact that Saving Lives has come to mean hacking away at the limits of what can be done to men, women and children in the name of saving their lives and those of others.
This thesis angered many people, at least some of whom misconstrue what Hadas is arguing. The point is not that a genuine commitment to ‘Saving Lives’ might excuse the response or make it better. Rather, a commitment to Life-Saving public health interventions is in Hadas’s view the ominous root of the problem, because Life Saving is in fact a shallow goal that sounds good enough to rationalise all manner of harmful, destructive policies. Almost anything can be justified – any amount of collateral damage accepted – if it is for Saving Lives, and this is why all of us should cultivate a distrust of self-appointed Life Savers everywhere we encounter them.
In this sense, then, Hadas’s thesis seems undeniable: the millions who signed on to lockdowns and demanded their governments force-vaccinate their peers were not just wrong in a direct, empirical sense – that is, for believing that lockdowns and vaccines would improve health in any way. They were also much more profoundly wrong in a moral sense. Even if lockdowns and vaccines had the potential to stop the virus, nobody deserves house arrest or forced medical treatment for the crime of being a potential vector of infection. Placing Life Saving ahead of all other outcomes is very dangerous and also very stupid, for the simple reason that we are all going to die. As a justification, it functions as a mere pretence to ignore the very real trade-offs that lurk in any alleged solution to anything. Explaining how it could be a good idea to delay the deaths of some elderly and sick people at the cost of the well-being, physical health and autonomy of billions is very hard. Pleading that ‘we need to save lives’ is easy.
That said, I find the thesis less than complete. The public health establishment and its media collaborators carefully manufactured public support for their response by sowing far and wide the belief that it was necessary to Save Lives. Had we acted otherwise – say, by staying open and not doing very much – this, too, would have been marketed as the Best Way to Save Lives, and many millions would have believed it just as sincerely as they believed in lockdowns. To this comes the fact that Life-Saving in one form or another is proffered as justification for a wide range of modern political pathologies, from mass migration schemes to climate change. Especially in ageing European countries like Germany, where an ever-growing number of pensioners and their health anxiety dominate national discourse, there are few better ways to sell noxious political programmes to the masses. Without our naïve Life-Saving ethos, it’s not clear to me we wouldn’t have had lockdowns, though they would have required a much different kind of argument.
The extent to which states can be said to act upon clear motives at all is a further problem. A longstanding Plague Chronicle argument is that modern managerial government doesn’t have goals, motivations or purposes in any human sense. Our countries everyday do all kinds of truly insane things behind paper-thin justifications that bear no scrutiny. A lot of what is maligned as ‘conspiratorial’ discourse, on both the Left and the Right, represents an effort to reimpose logic on state actions, generally by positing that the stated goals are a pretence for some deeper, hidden purpose. Most of the time these analyses just aren’t convincing, and they function to obscure the blunt reality that we find ourselves beset by an incomprehensible post-liberal political order, in which state actions have been farmed out to a vastly complex network of stakeholders, NGOs, academics, bureaucrats and special advisory committees. For every area of policy the constellation of forces will be different, and nobody has any clear understanding of how the system works – not even the most powerful individuals in the midst of it all. Everything the state does is the sum of these thousands of different forces. What complicates this picture even further, is the fact that those responsible for policy formulation don’t act directly to shape outcomes in the outside world. Their motivations are almost always institutionally mediated, and for this reason much more confined and limited in perspective. They want to secure promotion and grant funding, they want to be thought well of by their peers, they want to satisfy their superiors, and many other petty careerist personal things of this nature.
To say that ‘climate change policy’ is motivated by a desire to reduce carbon emissions, then, is merely to outline a descriptive thesis from outside. Such a thesis will sink or swim insofar as it explains actions of the system as a whole, but no such motivation is present in the system itself. The apparatus of modern governance is a vast inhuman machine consisting of human components; it doesn’t have thoughts any more than a storm system does. And in this sense, I think Saving Lives as the motivation behind lockdowns and mass vaccination is not quite right. Popular supporters of mass containment certainly saw these policies as Life Saving, and this helped enable them. The state itself, however, was playing a rather different game, one which fell (depending on the country) somewhere on a scale from ‘virus suppression’ to ‘virus eradication’ – lives be damned. The pandemicists’ abandonment of prior mitigationist plans in favour of mass containment entailed precisely deprioritising Life Saving in favour of a new, pathogen-centred approach.
“That may very well be, Eugyppius, but what of the people at the start of it all, before lockdowns were taken up by the system? Surely they had human motivations, even if the regime cannot.”
This is true. The Neil Fergusons, Tomas Pueyos and Christian Drostens who sold lockdowns to their countries and the world surely did so for specific, personal reasons. The problem is that these reasons are very elusive. In fact, the more I read their early statements and their leaked correspondence, the more elusive they seem to me. Their words and actions, however, have a very clear and persistent sinister undertone, which is not a mere artefact of retrospect. Their mysterious coordination with each other, their willingness to engage in highly manipulative messaging and risk magnification, their reliance on foreign agents to launder research and strategies from China, and their constant efforts to justify with pseudoscientific findings apparently preconceived conclusions, are all very unsettling. The ambient Life-Saving ethos of modern society surely helped them win the argument in the moment and get away with it in the longer term, but whatever they thought they were up to, may have been something much different.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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.
The plan was to demoralise, and to pave the way for climate lockdowns – useless modelling over a disease that was harmless to the vast majority of people.
Call me a cynic but I can’t see the same noble concern for human life when it comes to the mandated mRNA jabs -and they seem to have totally missed the fact that their lockdowns will inevitably lead to many deaths caused by poverty – especially in Africa. Still, if it makes them feel good eh.
Oh, and I nearly forgot – Autoimmune disease and excess deaths anyone?
After the black South African genocide of white farmers. forgive me for not caring how many natives die.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/unvaccinated-transplant-patients-being-murdered-canada/5826724
Save lives?
Read this heart-breaking article and make your mind up.
It’s murder alright.
Damn right it is.. and meant..
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/south-africa-willing-slave-of-the-new-nazis/
I normally pick up TCW articles in the morning but anyway here it is.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/07/25/the-insidious-truth-behind-free-school-meals/
And here’s another one.
To paraphrase Nick Hudson:
If free school meals are to become a solution to a problem the Davos Deviants have created – hungry children – we can conclude with absolute certainty that they are pulling a Scam as Kit Knightly makes absolutely clear in his usual incisive manner.
In the truest Orwellian New Speech:
Spot on.
It’s truly frightening. One of my sons has announced that he and his wife are thinking of moving to Canada and I’m appalled. Why would you want to live in a country that euthanises certain members of its population and kills them by denying medical treatment? Sadly, if they do go I won’t be visiting them.
That’s a sad story.
Eugyppius has always struck me as desperately naive.
Yes.. and then some..
Sinead O’connor dead at 56.
So what?
Cripes man, try this one for size then!
https://twitter.com/_B___S/status/1684008592880312320
Thanks Mogs.
Made me cry… I recently lost my dog of 16 and a half years and it hurts. There is a huge gap in my life where a dog used to be.
The boys’ reaction was like that of my boys when we surprised them with a puppy. It was one of the best things we ever did.
Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that. Yes when you’re used to having a pet to make up a family, especially one as companiable as a dog, you feel the loss even more because they are a big part of daily family life. Perhaps you’ll feel ready to get another furry family addition in the future..
I do like the videos with little kids and animals because you know they’re genuine and not staged.
If you cannot find any beauty in ‘Nothing compares 2 U’ then you are in a very sad place.
This one doesn’t seem suspicious. She most likely checked out voluntarily.
Eugyppius.. have you fallen out of a tree and hit your head or had one two many boosters.. asking for a ‘very concerned’ friend..
Drosten had a very good reason for his behaviour which is absolutely not elusive: He invented the heart of the so-called pandemic, the Sars-CoV2 PCR test plus testing protocol, working with gene data released by the Chinese, together with a business partner of him whose company sells such tests.
Ah yes.. Drosten.. yet another architect of the deceit whose slithered back under the rock he came from..
One of the most amazing things about the whole lockdown / jabs experience was how co-ordinated it was across the globe, right down to the imagery and messaging used. There were certainly plenty of cock-ups along the way though it’s hard to escape the conclusion that overall events were deliberately planned. The seeding of strawman narratives about bond-villains in Davos, millennia old cults of trans-dimensional lizard people, aliens and the ’13 families who rule the world’ (unsubtly appearing on the CIA’s own website), whilst easily dismissed of themselves, point to orchestrated conspiracy by they very fact that they aim to misdirect and discredit genuine scepticism of official narratives. Who exactly is behind it is still somewhat elusive as all we can see are the motley crew of the corrupt, compromised, credulous and craven, each with the own petty motives for falling in line, and the public facing organisations apparently pulling their strings: the Communist Party, especially its Chinese branch, the US military, the WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Central Banks, big Pharmaceutical companies, the Trusted News Network, big technology companies, etc.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/10/us/ufo-report-emergency-relief-bill-trnd/index.html
Why was there a mandate to release UFO information in 180 days in the covid 2020 legislation? It appears the intelligence community will be faking a UFO attack.
They are destroying Western Civilisation.They know exactly what they are doing.
Getting a tad stale, all this harping on about lockdowns. Having said that this is what I would LOVE to see done to anyone supporting the human rights abuse and outright cruelty that was lockdowns and other restrictions. Only with the addition of a steamroller;
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1684200898723971072
It’s sad news that Sinaed O’ Connor has died. She was only 56yrs. There’s no cause of death released but wasn’t she suffering from cancer for a long time? Perhaps I’m misremembering that though…
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/2023/07/26/sinead-oconnor-acclaimed-dublin-singer-dies-aged-56/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Possibly vaccine related, but I don’t actually care.
Hmm, tough customer. This one is for you.
https://twitter.com/_B___S/status/1684226115706011648
Oh dear. Perhaps this narrows it down;
https://twitter.com/_aussie17/status/1684314321487028225/photo/1
1 in 35 suffered vaccine associated Myocardial injury..
And they knew about it..
” trying to save lives?”………. The debate is over…
https://youtu.be/cd_RTf_ForA
A debate may be over, but it’s early days for any claims. A news item that came to light today was Rishi appearing at the infected blood inquiry https://www.infectedbloodinquiry.org.uk/news. The timeframe of that is an example of how they will delay it well into the future. I wouldn’t be surprised if they will try the same trick with injuries caused recently.
It’s moving faster in the US in regards to claims..
The 5 year average will normalise in time..
They can run, but they can’t hide…
I think it has a lot to do with the shadow side of human nature. By this, I’m specifically referring to our reptilian instinct to serve at the expense of all else our so-called reptilian brain’s instinct to serve one’s own needs first and act on the biological imperative. This is the fear and anxiety that we feel individually and collectively as an instinctive reflex built into our brains to maximize the chance of our OWN survival.
This in turn leads to the motivation – irrational in the long term – to exert control and influence upon one’s environment. “Environment” here can mean any context in which one is embedded and experiences their lives being shaped by it, be it the climate, ecosystem, atmosphere, society or, indeed, the informational milieu of the media and the internet.
The irrational human motivation to keep us safe from danger by exerting long-term control over any of these things, has led to the fallacy that collectivist actions in the name of the Greater Good is the noblest course of action. Of course, none of those actions that we were manipulated into taking over the past three years resulted in either individual or collectivist benefit, and this is because the Greater Good was only a sell-line in order to facilitate the greater levels of power and control subconsciously aspired to by the ruling classes.
When this survival imperative infests our governments and networks of corporations, the “survival of the fittest” dynamic explains everything: The imposition of lockdowns, the attempted control of all information, the owning of The Science and the soulless dissemination of unnecessary medication, all fit in with the picture. They all lead to greater levels of surveillance, control, wealth, power and influence by a group of people who consider themselves, and aspire to remain, at the top of the “food chain”.
I think the main motivation was to not get sued for negligence.
They overdid it, backed the wrong horse with the jabs and terror campaigns to scare us into obedience but it all went wrong and they can’t admit it. “Never admit liability when exchanging insurance details after an accident”.
Now they are behaving like a murderer trying to cover up the evidence, praying that if we can be distracted for long enough, it will all go away or they will be safely beyond the reach of justice.
Tick, tock…..
That certainly explains the behaviour of petty local officials but this was a global coup and I don’t believe it happened as the emergent result of compounded bad incentives. It was a campaign; we still don’t know whose..
As Eugyppius yesterday put it: Humans have a tendency to find patterns were none exist. The Pandemic[tm] is a recurring campaign of the WHO. Another string would be a golden opportuntiy to get rid of Donald Trump by scaring away people from voting in person and then win via postal vote. A lot of it were moneymaking opportunities for people selling products of no real use, eg, PCR and lateral flow test, Chinese imitations of US health masks, experimental mRNA injections good for the state of mind of people infected with mental long COVID etc. And – of course – all kinds of political opportunists trying to make the most of the situation. The teetotaler’s crusade against the hospitality industry and anything else they believed to be just camouflage for Drinking Alcohol (Waeh!!!) would come to mind here.
Humans are notoriously bad at putting complex plans to action, hence, when everything seems to go according to some plan, that’s a strong indication that there really is none. Eg, concentration camps for the unvaccinated were built here and there. But they again disappeared almost as quickly as they had appeared. If anything can be learnt from the pandemic years, it’s The people who rule us really don’t give a shit about us. If they’re generally friendly disposed towards their subjects, that is. Not all of them are.
Yes I agree and in spite of my comments on the subject, am not really one for conspiracy theories. However, the unified use of language, the fraudulent counting methods, the preemptive outlawing of any treatment at all (ffs) for the alleged disease, the immediate and fraudulent ‘race to develop a vaccine’.., etc etc I could go on. I think it would be wrong to suggest that there wasn’t centralised planning. In fact we can watch some of it on Youtube.
What I’m interested in is the why. I’ve never believed that this was simply about making money, although of course it was extremely profitable for the already very wealthy and certain well-known corporations. I think they just leeched from it, as you’ve suggested.
Something more profound was at work I think, and I don’t believe it’s deluded or futile to want to know what.
Darwin’s theory was about survival of the best adapted and even this only indirectly: They were supposed to survive in form of their offspring due to having the most opportunities for procreation as they’d live longer. As this transcends the individual, it is a form of Greater Good. The actions of the coroclowns, eg, trying to ban sex between people not already living together with the supposed aim to prolong the lifes of people past reproduction age somewhat, were rather not conductive to that. But fear not! The contraceptively-egotistical hedonists won’t surive as they don’t procreate and going to the gym to get fitter won’t help.
I keep seeing footage of this happening in UK cities. Does anybody know what it actually means? And wouldn’t you think they’d better do it in their mosques or rent a sports hall or something? Perhaps anyone in Bradford, Birmingham, London etc could shed some light?
https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/1683571946301059072
Fucjrrs
Motivation is no excuse for incompetence.
Humans can develop a monomania or idée fixe about things. Literature throughout the ages is filled with people who develop an obsession and destroy everything around them to get what they want and are left with nothing.
I’m sure some people wanted to save lives and nothing else. But they’d class ‘being alive’ as someone being locked in an airtight coffin with an oxygen mask strapped over his face, unable to move. ‘Being alive’ and ‘living’ are different things. Since America’s 9/11 nervous breakdown, states across the world think ‘safety’ and ‘being alive’ trump living.
The plan was clearly to inject as many arms as possible in western populations with a bioweapon whose patents stretch back to the 1990s, using economic, psychological and physical terror to force their owners to comply. That doesn’t seem particularly controversial to me and was obvious in early 2020 to those of us who were paying attention.
So we are looking for culprits who wanted to weaken and destabilise the social and economic structures of west, transform western populations into obedient collectivist sheep, and inflict lasting damage to the short and long term health prospects and fertility of those populations. It seems to me that China fits the bill on all these counts, with help of course from paid for western agencies, opportunists, cutouts and useful idiots.
I suppose, at macro level, the western debt-based economic system we’ve all enjoyed for so long is over, China is to be the new superpower and that makes us surplus to requirements and a potential problem when the bubble finally bursts. It would make sense to radically lower the size of western populations and use them as guinea pigs for policies, technologies and medicines.
The coup de grace, I have long thought, will be a flipping of the script in which it is revealed that the injections were a colossal mistake, leading the way to recriminations and lawsuits that will bring down governments.
In a way, I kinda hope this was a kind of Chinese postmodern invasion; it would somehow be more palatable than a profit driven power grab by the financial elites. If it was, my god, it was brutally effective.
Funny how those most keen on “saving lives” are generally also keen on unlimited access to abortion, even up to full term. This form of child sacrifice is a major killer.
Yes and if they survive birth, they can then be indoctrinated and chemically castrated if they feel like it.
Surely it’s clear that politician’s aim is power. Covid gave them the chance to find out how much power they had and I think it is too much. They destroyed personal freedom, they organised shutting down and censoring of far more intelligent people than they were, formed a committee of incompetent scientists to try to justify what they were doing while ignoring the real experts in the field of virus control and reduction. None of the politicians who did not oppose what happened from lockdowns or forced injections deserve our vote when the time comes.
Let’s cut to the chase.
The lockdown policies gave an almost obscene level of control to an alarmingly large proportion of our Governments. They achieved their real purpose of making the feeble amongst us, especially the Media, beg for our experimental injection salvation, while any alternative early treatment was burned at the stake. “The war against Ivermectin” Dr P Kory.
The jabs were a delicious financial bonanza for the medical fraternity, top to bottom, and so well aligned with the the WEF depopulation agenda it’s deeply sinister.
We must have Nuremberg 2.