This morning, the Daily Sceptic republished Eugyppius’s reply to Michael Senger’s claim that the Covid response was “effectively a coup by the Western intelligence community”. It’s well worth reading both articles as they each draw on a considerable amount of research into the origin of the lockdown idea and how it came in 2020 to be accepted as the standard global response to a ‘pandemic’, despite its extraordinary and plainly unjustified economic and human cost.
Michael Senger, noting the close defence and intelligence links of many of the early proponents of lockdown measures, argues that these are indicative of what amounts to a coup or power grab by the people behind the measures, who are some combination of Western security-linked figures and people associated, possibly covertly, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Eugyppius on the other hand sees no evidence that what was novel about the Covid response – the lockdowns and contact tracing characteristic of a mass containment or suppression strategy, as opposed to the milder ‘social distancing’ of a Sweden-style mitigation strategy – was being pushed by any of the biodefence-linked actors identified by Senger before the moment the WHO endorsed the Wuhan lockdown in its February 24th report. He thus argues that the early Covid alarmists “acquired their Covid hysteria along with everybody else” and only began pushing extreme Wuhan-style containment and suppression when it was greenlighted by the WHO.
Eugyppius explains that he isn’t really disputing Senger’s claims about the role of intelligence and defence agencies (“I don’t disagree with any of Senger’s specific observations, and I don’t think they’re necessarily in conflict with my own theses of What Happened in 2020”) so much as questioning the idea that the lockdowns and the rest of the unprecedented mass containment measures were specifically the fulfilment of a longstanding plot by intelligence and biodefence figures.
This is an argument between friends and there is little between the two positions. However, Eugyppius clearly sees it as important to stress that what happened in 2020 was not strictly in line with what those in the pandemic preparedness movement had been pushing for in the preceding years.
My feeling is that the distinction that Eugyppius draws between mitigation and containment strategies is being pushed too far. He regards the difference as one of kind, a fundamental split in approach, whereas it seems to me that it is really one of degree. Both are aiming to reduce the spread of the virus in the general population via reducing social contacts (i.e., they are not ‘focused protection’ or ‘let it rip’ strategies). Both aim to reduce the reproduction (R) number to lower the incidence of disease at any given moment. This is clear in Prof. Neil Ferguson’s infamous Report 9 of March 16th 2020, quoted by Eugyppius, where he defines a mitigation strategy as focusing on “slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread” (italics mine). Thus stopping spread is seen as a possible outcome of mitigation, just not a necessary one. Ferguson goes on to define a suppression strategy as aiming to indefinitely reduce case numbers “to low levels”. Notoriously, Ferguson and team concluded that even a “mitigated epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over”. Thus: “For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option.”
However, the difference between these two strategies is really only a matter of degree – how much you distance people and for how long. Actually, there isn’t really a difference in how long either, as pandemic preparedness protocols had always, since they were first developed in the 2000s, envisaged that social distancing mitigations (including bans on large gatherings, closure of schools and ‘non-essential’ businesses, recommendation to work-from-home and quarantine of exposed (not just sick) individuals) would have to remain for the months or years that it would take to develop, test and rollout a vaccine. Thus from a U.S. 2007 plan:
During a pandemic, the goal will be to slow the virus’ transmission; delaying the spread of the virus will provide more time for vaccine development while reducing the stress on an already burdened healthcare system.
Report 9 shows that Ferguson et al. were very ready to recommend suppression “for countries able to achieve it”. This is in line with Ferguson’s later comments that before Italy locked down he and his colleagues thought “we couldn’t get away with it in Europe”. Referring to China’s Wuhan lockdown, he told UnHerd that: “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
The implication here, of course, is that the earlier reluctance of pandemicists like Ferguson to push for more extreme spread-reducing measures was due to what it was believed Western governments would accept rather than any strong distinction between the approaches. As a rule, they pushed for the strongest measures they thought they could “get away with”.
It’s worth noting, as Eugyppius has previously, that at Event 201 – the timely pandemic exercise of October 2019 – that lockdowns and travel restrictions were put on the table by the pandemicists running the simulation but rejected (at that time) by the Government representatives participating.
In this way the sharp distinction between mitigation and suppression strategies collapses, and both are seen as just different intensities of the one basic pandemic preparedness strategy of reducing spread by reducing contacts. As soon as biodefence fanatics thought they could “get away with it” and ramp up the social distancing into full-on lockdowns, they did.
Furthermore, what led them to see they could get away with it was, as Ferguson says, Italy doing it, and Italy did it first on February 21st, before the WHO Wuhan report. This was, as Michael Senger points out, due in large part to the work and influence of Stefano Merler, a kind of Italian Neil Ferguson. Thus they made their own possibilities.
I don’t always agree with Michael Senger on the role of the CCP. Senger sees the CCP to have been promoting a false narrative from the start and to have been secretly promoting alarm in the early days while only pretending to play it down, which doesn’t ring true for me. Likewise, he sees the story of ‘whistleblower’ doctor Li Wenliang, punished by the CCP for warning colleagues about the new SARS-like virus, to be a later CCP fabrication rather than something real – even though it embarrasses the Party by making it look incompetent and fickle. Even if the CCP was capable of that level of media manipulation – which I doubt – I don’t think it would want to when it makes it look stupid.
But I do think Eugyppius may be leaning too much on the mitigation-suppression distinction, which on closer inspection collapses into differing degrees of biodefence extremism separated only by what Ferguson and Co. think they can “get away with”.
I don’t know if I’d call it a coup exactly, as the instigators of a successful coup end up in charge of the Government, which hasn’t happened. But certainly 2020 was the fulfilment of the draconian plans of the biodefence and pandemic preparedness industry, decades in the making. And it’s going to be a long, hard road to undo the terrible precedents of COVID-19 and return to pre-2020 normality.
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