On Thursday, friend-of-the-blog Michael P. Senger posted an important essay to Substack, in which he asks whether the “response to Covid” was “effectively a coup by the Western intelligence community”. Everyone should read it, as it summarises in one place a range of evidence that Senger and others have collected pointing to the role of the defence and intelligence actors in promoting lockdowns, especially in America.
Many readers have asked me in sometimes polite and sometimes highly hostile and dismissive ways to comment on these ideas for a long time now. I find this surprising, as 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. I’ve long held that the bureaucracy succumbed to very radical ideas about how to suppress SARS-2 between February and March 2020, and as the defence and intelligence sectors are part of the institutional apparatus of the Government, it’s only logical to think that they should’ve fallen prey to these ideas too. Perhaps it is true, though, that my overall interpretation of events departs somewhat from the Intelligence Coup Thesis. In what follows, I’ll try to explain why.
The Specificity and Novelty of Mass Containment
Senger and others have surely shown that key members of the American defence establishment were very worried about SARS-2 and willing to follow the lead of China in pandemic policy from the beginning. Their advocacy, however, seems to be of two types. Either it occurs very early but doesn’t seem to be about mass containment specifically, or it occurs rather later and indicates an endorsement of lockdowns around the same time everyone else was endorsing them.
To forestall objections, I will risk trying the patience of my valued readers by explaining once again, in excruciating detail and with many citations, what I mean by ‘mass containment’ and why I think a rigid, autistic, unrelenting focus on this particular concept is necessary to understand the events of 2020.
Almost all reporting and government statements on pandemic policy since March 2020 have worked to cover up the fact that lockdowns were not supposed to happen. The Western public health establishment never planned for them; everybody was supposed to do what Sweden did. To obfuscate the significance of the cataclysmic policy reversal that occurred in March 2020, pandemicists now pretend that lockdowns were merely the ‘social distancing’ and school closures and work-at-home advisories that they had always fantasised about.
These blurred distinctions have necessarily coloured alt-Covid discourse too, but if we want to understand the events of early 2020 in particular, we must maintain firm distinctions among three different hygiene regimes.
These are 1) outbreak containment, 2) pandemic mitigation and 3) mass containment.
Plans for 1) outbreak containment had been current since SARS at least. The idea is that limited, confined outbreaks can be contained by harsh quarantines like those which Japanese authorities imposed on the Diamond Princess in February 2020. Should outbreak containment fail, then in the pre-2020 programme only 2) pandemic mitigation remained an option. Mitigation is a fuzzy set of measures that can be everything or nothing. Work-at-home advisories, school closures and ‘social distancing’ had all occurred in mitigationist plans at one time or another. ‘Social distancing’, which has become a synonym for ‘lockdowns’ in the Anglosphere especially, is an old concept that achieved particular currency with the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic. Before 2020 ‘social distancing’ was never about locking down. In 2009, the WHO recommended “social distancing” as a “mitigation” measure for “low resource communities”. It described it as “keeping at least an arm’s length distance from others” and “minimising gatherings”.
What never clearly existed and nobody in the Western public health establishment had ever explicitly planned before 2020 was 3) mass containment, which is the attempt to make 1) outbreak containment operate on the scale of entire populations, where it was previously thought only mitigation would work.
Contrary to what some of my critics maintain, the Wuhan lockdown was not pandemic mitigation, and it was not outbreak containment either. It was a new, third thing. Thus WHO Director Tedros at first remained noncommittal about Chinese lockdowns, telling the press on January 24th that “China has taken measures which it believes will be effective. But we hope from our side that they’re both effective and short in duration”. WHO team leader Gaudean Galea was even more explicit:
[T]rying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science. It has not been tried before as a public health measure, so we cannot at this stage say it will or will not work. … We will note carefully to what extent it is maintained and how long it can take. There are pros and cons … Such a decision obviously has social and economic impacts that are considerable.
Mitigationist planning is very sensitive to “social and economic impacts”, which is why a lot of early pandemicist discussion of the Chinese lockdowns expressed anxiety about these drawbacks. Mass containment, on the other hand, does not care about anything but virus suppression. Mass containment came to the West via the February 24th report of the joint WHO-China mission, which endorsed the Wuhan lockdowns and recommended this strategy to all nations.
Since the first-wave lockdowns, nobody will acknowledge the distinction between containment and mitigation, but this talk was all over the place in the earliest days of the Corona era.
The American progressive pundit Matthew Yglesias, writing in the odious webzine Vox on February 27th 2020, explained the distinction as follows to his readers:
The ideal thing to do when faced with an infectious disease outbreak is to contain it — isolate one or more areas where the outbreak is occurring, treat patients there, and hope the vast majority of the world will be spared. …
What we are realistically looking at now is not containment of a virus that is already on multiple continents, but efforts to mitigate the harm that it does by slowing its spread. …
In a pandemic of a severe disease without mitigation, a huge share of the population gets sick all at once — overwhelming the health care infrastructure, undermining the reliability of emergency services, and overall causing a degree of devastation beyond the specific medical impact of the virus. …
Even with effective mitigation a lot of people get sick, but the caseload is spread out and society can continue to function.
Note that Yglesias, writing just three days after the crucial February 24th lockdown endorsement, has no conception of mass containment. If containment fails, mitigation is for him the only other option.
Two weeks later, on March 11th, an article appeared in STAT on the turmoil that the WHO lockdown endorsement of February 24th had unleashed among the pandemicists themselves:
For weeks, a debate has raged about whether the virus could be ‘contained’ — an approach the WHO has been exhorting countries to focus on — or whether it made more sense to simply try to lessen the virus’s blow, an approach known as ‘mitigation’.
That argument has been counterproductive, Mike Ryan, the head of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, said Monday.
“I think we’ve had this unfortunate emergence of camps around the containment camp, the mitigation camp — different groups presenting and championing their view of the world. And frankly speaking, it’s not helpful,” Ryan told reporters.
And still later, in the infamous March 16th Imperial College paper that helped tip the debate in favour of mass containment, Neil Ferguson and his team also showed a clear consciousness of the distinction between mitigation and containment, or – in his words – “suppression”:
Two fundamental strategies are possible: (a) mitigation, which focuses on slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread – reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection, and (b) suppression, which aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels and maintaining that situation indefinitely. Each policy has major challenges. We find that that optimal mitigation policies (combining home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease) might reduce peak healthcare demand by two thirds and deaths by half. However, the resulting 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. For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option.
Mitigation is any hygiene regime designed to ‘flatten the curve’, that is to reduce the steepness of its slope. It is about slowing, not stopping, infections. Mitigation is also not great; various pandemic planners had long fantasised about a range of draconian mitigationist interventions. Since 2007, Carter Mecher’s co-authored study of influenza mortality in 1918 made school closures an attractive mitigationist measure for many American planners. However bad social distancing, banning mass gatherings and closing schools and workplaces might be, though, they are not containment unless their purpose is to ‘crush the curve’. Not only lockdowns, but also mass testing and contact tracing characterised mass containment in the West. Contact tracing in particular indicates a strategy to stop infections, and is diagnostic of a mass containment strategy. Any hygiene regime taking credit for collapsing case waves is also by definition claiming to be engaged in mass containment.
The Virus Visionaries of the Pandemic Memoirs
I have no doubt that a wide variety of figures advocating highly interventionist pandemic mitigation, particularly in the United States, have ties to the defence and the intelligence establishments. An important reason for this, is that the defence sector is awash with money and a crucial source of grant funding. When Donald Henderson founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, an important pandemicist think-tank, he called it the Centre for Civilian Biodefence Strategies and initially depended heavily on defence sector grants. Notably, this influence has been attenuated somewhat in recent years, as Big Philanthropy has gotten in on the game of pandemic planning. Thus the Open Philanthropy Project poured millions into the CHS after 2017, hoping to refocus its efforts on “global catastrophic risks”. The philanthropists lent pre-2020 pandemic planning a new third-world focus and intensified their interest in vaccines. There is doubtless a lingering defence influence here, but public health is an overwhelmingly civilian operation, and evidence for defence funding or the intelligence ties of specific people does not automatically make the whole business of pandemic response a defence or an intelligence operation. It is merely one influence among many in a massive enterprise.
At least for the sake of argument, I am willing to accept all the claims made for the intelligence ties and the influence of key pandemicist thinkers and virus hysterics like the physician Carter Mecher. But I have also noticed a pattern in these claims of influence that we would do well to take note of. This pattern is that triumphalist books on the Covid response very frequently feature an archetypal character that we might term the Virus Visionary. The Virus Visionary is often (but not always) rumoured to have nebulous defence or intelligence associations, is invariably involved in cutting-edge Virus Visionary investigations, and begins ringing the Virus Visionary panic bell before anybody else. Pandemic memoirs have yielded a litany of Virus Visionaries – not only Mecher, but DARPA programme manager Michael Callahan, Trump-era Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, British Health Minister Matt Hancock, and others. The phenomenon is apparent even in German literature on the response, which has drawn attention to the alleged early role played by a ‘Health Security’ functionary named Heiko Rottmann-Großner.
The Virus Visionaries are an artefact of how journalists write books. They interview people, and these people are eager to claim credit for themselves and their associates in formulating policy. Journalists are vulnerable to this self-aggrandisement because they’re writing what are essentially non-fiction novels, which require ‘main characters’ (Michael Lewis’s formulation) to reduce the complexities of the bureaucratic response to a comprehensible plot. This doesn’t mean the Virus Visionaries aren’t real, but it does mean that they’re giving their interlocutors a very partial picture. It is also curious that the influence of the Virus Visionaries becomes hard to spot as soon as one begins studying documentary evidence for what happened.
Often the chronology of these accounts is unclear, but it is very hard to find any Virus Visionaries advocating mass containment before the WHO endorsement on February 24th. Characteristic of the Virus Visionaries is that they are isolated figures – lone heroes not clearly connected to other events, and this makes their significance correspondingly difficult to interpret. Thus the author Brendan Borrell has DARPA programme manager Michael Callahan acting like a kind of virological James Bond, always in the right place at the right moment, but what it all adds up to is uncertain. He jets off to China to treat Covid patients in Wuhan in January, he flees Wuhan by boat to escape lockdowns, he travels to Japan to provide advance intelligence about the Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak, and then he returns to the United States to impress on the Trump administration the importance of acquiring ventilators. Matthew Pottinger, for his part, starts demanding travel bans on January 27th, emerges as an early and dogmatic promoter of masking and testing, and advocates Mecher-style school closures. Pottinger also worked to secure Deborah Birx’s appointment to the role of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Birx in turn begins actively promoting lockdowns, but apparently only upon hearing about the Italian lockdown after March 8th.
As far as I can tell, the Virus Visionaries acquired their Covid hysteria along with everybody else. This would be why the narratives which feature them adhere to the same general chronology of escalating radicalism we see everywhere. The key events in this chronology are the WHO endorsement of lockdowns on February 24th 2020, the Italian lockdowns of March 8th-10th, and Neil Ferguson’s pro-lockdown modelling study on March 16th. Tomas Pueyo’s viral Medium posts on and March 10th and 19th played a very important supporting role, especially for Europe. All of this happened in the open, among civilian planners, civilian journalists and civilian scientists, although I have no trouble believing that the intelligence services and actors within the defence establishment helped things along, especially in the United States.
This piece 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.
Hundreds of thousands of people arriving here have to live somewhere and presumably that will be in a HOUSE. If we don’t build hundreds of thousands of houses then it is clear to even the dimmest of people that there will NOT be enough HOUSES. But to Liberal Progressives truth is to be locked in a dark room and the key thrown away.
It is an invasion and a replacement. Musulmans, Africans, Ukes, Asians, a few Whitey’s to salt the dish.
As simple as that. The great replacement.
Erase your culture, your history, the anglo-saxons which did not exist apparently, your nationalism.
Open borders with a purpose with you and the ‘natives’ to be erased.
Make the migrants build their own houses…
It’s easier to use financial incentives or change the law and force homeowners/tenants to take-in immigrants if the government deems them to have space.
Didn’t the BBC do a drama about a migrant wave into Europe/UK 20-25 years ago?
Very concerning, especially when one considers who it is we are getting all over Europe. And it’s not like these men are arriving with any papers whatsoever. A re-share as it’s pertinent to this article;
”Unlike the mass migration occurring at the U.S. southern border, where the majority of Latin Americans crossing are Roman Catholic Christians, Europe’s mass migration comprises people with an Eastern and Islamic background who have a worldview at odds with the Judeo-Christian foundation of Europe. Assimilating into the host culture is problematic for most migrants, many of whom are illiterate even in their own language and find learning a European language too difficult. Islamist and fundamentalist Salafist groups prey on frustrated and angry Muslim youths who are incapable or unwilling to integrate. There has been an increase in sexual crimes and homicides and a precipitous rise in antisemitism and attacks on churches. Instead of reporting on jihadist attacks, the mainstream media provide cover for attackers by remaining silent, fearing accusations of “Islamophobia” or attributing the cause to “psychological problems,” but never to Islamism or jihad.
Although the erosion of European culture has been ongoing for decades, the continent is being permanently changed with the unabated flood of Muslim migrants, propelled along by the lack of political will to stop it. Any program that would interrupt the migration momentum would require “mass economic support to sub-Saharan Africa,” which “is not going to happen.” Absent a Marshall Plan for Africa and Afghanistan, “this is really unstoppable.” Over the next fifteen years or so, if Germany sustains its current migration level, it will be almost twenty percent Muslim. This demographic shift will irrevocably strengthen the presence of Sharia law, which runs “parallel” to Europe’s democratic order. “It’s a very sad prognosis for the future of Europe and for the future of Judeo-Christian culture on this continent.”
https://www.meforum.org/64536/soeren-kern-on-europe-alarming-new-migrant-crisis
Indeed, though very large parts of sub-Saharan Africa are Christian and I would not want to live there either.
In some of those parts Islamists are busily trying to kill off Christianity.
Doubtless, though I wouldn’t want to live anywhere in Africa
I take issue with the phrase “Eastern and Islamic background”. The vast majority of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists etc. have no problem integrating and while they don’t share all Judeo-Christian moral values they’re very rarely hostile to the West and want to replace our laws with their own religious laws. It’s only Muslims, or some of them bolstered by zero real condemnation from the rest, that think their values are superior, hate the West and represent a threat.
If you cannot protect your border, you cannot protect your culture and values. Poland Hungary and a few others are showing us how to do this by not accepting EU migrant quotas, despite the usual spitting fury from the mass immigration progressives that are attempting to destroy national identity which they see as the enemy of global governance.
So UK foreign policy and aid does not create safe homelands that people do not want to leave? Perhaps change foreign policy unless this situation is the intended result.
Yes, I was thinking something on similar lines, ie that perhaps it would be a good idea to cancel all the international debt and stop strip mining/exploiting and unsettling/disrupting all these countries …. unless the aim is in fact to trigger so many into coming here.
Reconquer Africa to end the abhorrent conditions in many parts of it would doubtlessly be a worthy goal but not a profitable one. Not to mention that the US left would go bezerk over it as that’s not a problem it’ll ever have to deal with. And there’s also a question of where to find all the people who would have to become soldiers. English OAPs would obviously be of little use here.
Unsayable in the circles Shriver moves in- the “educated” middle class
What’s the educated middle class?
People who are financially comfortably off with university degrees
The same as the uneducated middle class but with O’Levels.
I made the distinction because in my personal experience people on middle class incomes such as small business owners and tradesmen tend to be more socially conservative and happier to speak freely.
I was just making a joke tof. It was too good to miss.
Sorry
Maybe I have a form of “long Covid” that impairs the sense of humour:)
I found the original question somewhat odd….
No need to apologise tof.
This has been clear as the nose on my face for decades but in all the coverage it seems that the cause of the housing shortage is a mystery ..lol
I also think the “official” current population numbers of around 67 million are already way off.I remember reading somewhere that the supermarkets reckon, based on food consumption we are already scraping 80 million or so.
Plus always remember that the published numbers are all based on estimates as lots of illegals do not , by their nature , get included in census numbers ..
I think the water companies have been saying similar – you could argue that food waste means that supermarkets aren’t necessarily accurate about consumption, but the amount of stuff coming out the other end is indisputable.
A link without a paywall;
”Another defeat saw peers back an amendment stating that actions under the Illegal Migration Bill cannot conflict with the UK’s obligations under the UN Refugee Convention, European Convention on Human Rights and other agreements on child protection, trafficking and statelessness.
The new laws are key to the prime minister’s plan to “stop the boats” and aim to allow the government to detain and deport all small boat migrants, without considering their asylum or trafficking claims.
When the bill was introduced to parliament, home secretary Suella Braverman made an unusual statutory declaration that it may not be compatible with the Human Rights Act, but she said elsewhere that it was compatible with international law.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/small-boats-illegal-migration-bill-lords-b2365903.html
“European Convention on Human Rights and other….”
Which will be abolished if, sorry when, the government signs the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty / International Health Regulations.
Germany’s AfD party gaining popularity as citizens are sick and tired of non-stop migration and the dangers these migrants pose. They seemingly can’t even go to swimming pools anymore;
”The AfD has been the only serious party promoting a halt to mass immigration. The “center-right” CDU, which introduced open borders under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, has zero credibility on the issue. The other parties are looking to dramatically increase immigration numbers, with many of them promoting figures as high as 500,000 a year while also racing to naturalize foreigners just in time for them to vote in the next round of national elections.
The report details how the entire Columbiadamm swimming pool in the multicultural neighborhood of Neukölln, Berlin, was closed down due to over 40 warring youth. Welt lays the blame squarely at the feet of “macho culture” from immigrant youth. In Pankow, a swimming pool had to be shut down twice in one week due to mass brawls between young people.
However, the brawls in Berlin were far from isolated incidents. June has seen sexual and physical assaults at swimming pools across the country, including a case where seven different girls were sexually assaulted all at the same pool by different groups of men, including Syrians.
In the German city of Celle, 20 “rampaging youth” attacked swimmers, sexually assaulting them, including beating one female who rejected their advances. When lifeguards attempted to stop them, they threatened them as well. As a result, the entire swimming pool was shut down.
Just seven days ago, Germany’s Bild newspaper, the best-selling newspaper in Germany, featured an article with the headline, “Germany, your bad swimming pools” with the subheadline: “Can’t we just go to the outdoor pool in peace?”
https://rmx.news/crime/migrant-crime-in-june-from-clan-battles-to-pool-brawls-shows-why-germanys-afd-party-is-surging-in-popularity/
If you ever saw any footage of such swimming pools in summer (I did) you’d have noticed that they’re absolutely overcrowded, with maybe half a square meter per person (about 1 1/2 square feet). No wonder that violence ensues from that. The proximate cause for that is that green-left-extreme left coalitions like the one ruling Berlin simply refuse to invest in any local infrastructure save creating ad hoc housing establishments for more immigrants and painting random stuff in rainbow colours (oversimplification, but principally correct).
‘Court of Appeal has today blocked the Government’s Rwanda plan’.
Is the country run by elected politicians or unelected judges?
This is the war being fought in America, Israel and the UK.
Sunak and his globalist pals are happy to be overruled because it keeps the floodgates open.
Blair knew exactly what he was doing when he created the SC.
If the Conservatives meant business (we all know they don’t) they’d cancel it.
Bliar has been working for the Davos Deviants since he first got in to Parliament. He is probably the most treasonous person ever to hold a British passport.
Along with the traitor Heath
Thanks for reminding me. Yes, Heath too.
Why not simply do what France does and deny them the right to a house? If they are instantly better off coming here than staying in the EU they may well not come here. Even better would be to make them significantly worse off by coming here.
As to the depressed birth rate, no surprises there. Mike Yeadon warned of this before the jabs were even released. Now, what happened medically between 2020 and 2021 I wonder?
“U.K. housing crisis is that prices are so high because demand is strong, and demand is strong…..”
Think you’re a bit behind the times the bottom has just dropped out of the housing market as interest rates rise and government policies are discouraging ‘buy to let’. Trying to sell our house is hopeless even though we’ve dropped the price three times in as many weeks.
As for not building enough houses wherever I go there seems to be acres and acres of house building going on without the infrastructure to go with it. Thus water shortages and hosepipe bans absolutely f all to do with “climate change”.
There is another unsayable factor in the housing situation. I used to live on the South Coast, where there are very few immigrants. The local council leader, a Conservative, explained in public meetings that the reason new houses were needed was because the council now has to house 4 generations rather than three. We are living longer and because older people want to hang on to their assets rather than downsize, we have a housing imbalance for young people
Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi would be so pleased with the execution of his plan ….. if he were still around to see it being implemented so ruthlessly.
A partial solution is staring us in the face.
One simple piece of technology which would alleviate the lack of new builds is 3D Printing of houses. A concrete mix is laid according to a computer led 3D plan and all conduits for services are included in the design, saving time, materials and money.
Pioneered by China and taken up successfully in Egypt, Germany and The Netherlands, this would cut the building time to between a half and a quarter of current times and thereby reduce the labour cost andf selling price to a fraction of current prices.
Win, Win, for the country and for young people wanting to get on the housing ladder. Great!.
BUT, this would also reduce the developers’ profit, wouldn’t it. (surprise !, surprise !),
So, it won’t happen, unless the government directs it to be so, or produces incentives (aka EV cars). Too many brown envelopes and foreign holidays on private yachts, I suspect….
Those who agree with mass immigration, and think they are so ‘compassionate’, should
have the migrants live with them, rent free, no taxpayer support.