Are there words in the English language that fully describe what happened during the Covid years that are not already overused? Calamity comes to mind. Disaster. Cataclysm. Ruin, devastation, catastrophe, unprecedented debacle, fiasco and utter wreckage – all fine words and phrases but nothing quite captures it.
Given that, there is probably no report on the thing that can properly characterise the whole of it. On the other hand, it’s worth trying.
Meanwhile, the results of Covid commissions of governments around the world have become unbearably predictable. So far, they have mostly said their government failed because they didn’t act fast enough, did not enforce lockdowns hard enough, did not communicate and coordinate well enough and so on.
Everyone in the corporate world knows that when a committee reduces all problems to “communication and coordination” you are being fed a load of bull.
So far, it’s been almost entirely bureaucratic blather, and that helps account for the global loss of confidence in political systems. They cannot even be honest about the most catastrophic policies in our lifetimes or several.
The amount of corruption, waste and destruction from this period of our lives, lasting from 2020 until 2023 but with remnants of bad policies all around us, is so unspeakable that not one report has yet been fully honest about what happened, why it happened, who really won and lost and what this period implies for how vast swaths of the public see the world.
Among other astonishing revelations to come from this period was a full presentation of just how many institutions have been corrupted. It was not just governments and certainly not just the elected leaders and career bureaucrats. The problems are very deep and reach more deeply to intelligence agencies, military-based bioweapons systems and preparedness agencies that guard their activities under the cloak of what is called classified.
This is a major reason why so many questions are being left unasked and unanswered. Then we have the ancillary failures in a whole series of additional sectors. The media went along with the nonsense as if they are wholly owned and controlled by government and industry. Industry mostly went along too, at least the highest reaches of it, even as small business was crushed.
The tech companies cooperated in a massive censorship operation. The retail end of the pharmaceutical companies enforced the government’s edicts, denying people basic medicines, as did the whole of the medical systems, which heavily enforced mandates on an experimental and failed product mistakenly called a vaccine. Academics were largely silent and public intellectuals fell in line. Most mainline religions cooperated in locking worshippers out. Banks were in on it too. And advertisers.
In fact, it’s hard to think of any institution in society that leaves this period untarnished. It’s probably not possible for a government report on the subject to be fully honest. Maybe it is too soon, plus the hooks that created the whole problem are still embedded too deeply.
All that said, we’ve got a solid start with the highest-level government report produced to date: After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward, by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic as assembled by the U.S. House of Representatives. The report was written by the majority and it shows.
Coming in at 550 pages with 2,000-plus footnotes (we have made a physical version available here), the preparation involved hearing from hundreds of witnesses, reading thousands of documents, listening to thousands of reports and interviews and working at a furious pace for two years. Based on the outline and breadcrumbs of the Norfolk Group, while adding in additional material based on critiques of media and economic policy, it is a comprehensive blast against the public-health features of the pandemic response.
The conclusion of the report: nothing worked and everything tried resulted in more damage than the pandemic could ever have achieved on its own. In this sense, and given the low bar of expectations for all such political commissions, every champion of truth, honesty and freedom should celebrate this report. It is an excellent breaking of the ice around the topic. Note that this report has received very little press attention, which only further underscores the problem.
Coming in for heavy criticism: gain-of-function research, the deference to the WHO, the lab-leak coverup, the funding of pharma cutouts, business and school closures, mask mandates, the lack of serious attention to disease monitoring, vaccine mandates, the sloppy approval process, the vaccine injury system, the banning of off-the-shelf therapeutics, social distancing, the rampant fraud in business loans, the effects of monetary policy and more.
The report contains nuggets that we cannot help but praise:
Ignored in the report: the rental moratorium, the frenzy of Plexiglas and air filtration, the push for sanitising all things, the reopening racket designed to prolong lockdowns, domestic capacity restrictions, the division of the workforce between essential and nonessential, the role of CISA and the intelligence agencies, the CDC’s push for mail-in ballots that might have been decisive in the national election and the astonishing gibberish over the infection fatality and case fatality rates.
There is so much more to chronicle and criticise that the report could have been 10 or 100 times as long.
To be sure, the report has plenty of problems aside from these exclusions. Operation Warp Speed comes in for praise for saving “millions” of lives but the citation is to a modelling exercise that assumes what it is trying to prove. Look at the footnote: it’s bad science.
The real trouble with this section is not even its incorrect claim that the vaccine saved lives. The core issue is that the whole point of the lockdowns and all that followed was to create conditions for the release of the countermeasure. The plan from the beginning was: lockdown until vaccination. Praising the goal while criticising the ineffective means diverts the point.
This is precisely what was explained to me in the early days in a phone call from a member of George W. Bush’s biosecurity team, a man who now runs a vaccine company. He said we would stay locked down until the world’s population got a shot in the arm. This phone call happened in April 2020.
Quite simply, I thought he had lost his mind and hung up. I did not believe that 1) the plan was always to stay in lockdowns until vaccination, and that 2) anyone seriously believed that governments could vaccinate their way out of a wave of respiratory infections insofar as the pathogen had a zoonotic reservoir.
The very idea struck me as so preposterous that I was incredulous that an educated and responsible adult could ever advance it. And yet that was precisely the plan all along. Sometime in the last week of February 2020, a global cabal decided to pull the trigger on a worldwide campaign of shock and awe – tapping every asset in civil society for assistance – to bring about worldwide forced medicalisation with a new technology.
This was never really a public health response. That was only the cover story. This was a coup against science and against democracy, for purposes of industrial and political reset, not just in one nation but all nations at once. I get it: that is an ominous statement and hard to wrap one’s brain around the whole of it. In completely ignoring this point, the Select Subcommittee has missed the forest for the trees.
Let’s attempt a different metaphor. Let’s say your car is hijacked in Manhattan and you are thrown in the backseat. The goal is to drive all the way to Los Angeles for a drug deal. You could object to the means and goal but instead you spend the entire trip complaining about potholes, reckless driving, warning of the need for an oil change and complaining about the bad music playing on the car radio.
At the end of the trip, you put out a report to this effect. Do you think that would be strange, to wholly ignore the theft of your car and the destination and purpose of the hijacking and instead focus on all the ways in which the grand larceny could have been smoother and happier for everyone involved?
In that spirit, the Subcommittee’s separate recommendations list is weak, leaving governments wholly in charge of anything labelled a pandemic while only suggesting a more cautionary approach that takes into consideration all costs and benefits. For example, it says on travel restrictions: “It is far easier to undo the restrictions that may have been unneeded than it is to take a ‘wait and see’ approach once the unknown virus of concern has entered our borders and thoroughly spread.”
It seems like the core lesson – governments cannot be masters of the microbial kingdom and allowing them to pretend otherwise for purposes of an industrial and political reset cues up a moral hazard that is an ongoing threat to freedom and rights – is not yet learned, or even so much as admitted. We are still being invited to believe that the same people and institutions who created calamity last time should be trusted again next time.
And keep in mind: this is the best report yet issued!
My friends, we have a very long way to go to absorb the fullness of the reality of what was done to individuals, families, communities, societies and the whole world. Nor is it truly possible to move on without a full accounting of this disaster. Has it begun? Yes, but there is a very long way to go.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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.
So who is going to gaol?
Speculation in the US is that Joe Biden will give Fauci and others a pre-emptive pardon.
It’s a start, and we should be grateful for that, but as Jeffrey Tucker says there is a long way to go before government’s and their letter agencies have any sense of contrition or that they got things so badly wrong that we will be dealing with the after effects of their mistakes for many generations to come.
It’s a start to what exactly???
Are you that deluded that you think someone will be held accountable and prosecuted…
I was trying to be positive but maybe that’s beyond you.
Nobody got anything wrong. The activities of all agents of government were set out for them. To we Sceptics, or should that be realists, government activities were patently corrupt but to the sheep it was all ‘ desperate times call for desperate measures’ and I don’t doubt many of the individual actors were well aware they were acting in a pantomime.
This was the greatest Scamdemic ever played against the people of this world ever although the nut zero scam will supersede it.
Quite, far too many people still mistake this for incompetence..
To us skeptics. Accusative pronoun after preposition.
They weren’t mistakes …. it was all deliberate.
Reading this while thinking about the incoming bird flu epidemic makes me frankly sick to the stomach.
” Industry mostly went along too, at least the highest reaches of it, even as small business was crushed”
And even more shamefully so did the Church. Then again, WW1 saw the Church glorifying the meatgrinder and shaming those that objected. Wars are started by the rich and fought over by the rest of us.
Unfortunately whilst our Christian beliefs and values are of fundamental importance to our civilization, the church whether that be COfE or the left footers, has always been hand in glove with the political establishment, just another way of shaking down the populace and keeping them in line.
Church made a 1934 Concordat with Hitler which effectively neutered the Church and put it under the Reich’s control.
2020 the Church did the same. I had many a fight with priest and bishop over this. The miserable cowardice to get some quid. They were paid to comply. Sermons were preached in which I (sitting undiapered, unstabbed) was classed as Satanic.
Arselings and limp wristed effiminates that most of them are.
As Hitler sneered the priests and bishops always vote with their pensions and salaries. So they do.
As Maajid Nawas puts it….”They shown their hand”. The 2009 Swine Flu faux pandemic was almost like a trial run when you look at what they tried to do.
HIV-AIDs.
$300 billion industry created saved CDC, NIAID from being defunded.
67 symptoms for HIV which does not exist. There is no simian virus flying around. The genesis story changed from the Gay Canadian Gaetan airline steward having sex with Africans and bringing it back to New York; to HIV has always existed in North America. Fake PCR tests. Massive propaganda. Choose a group – queers – which do poppers, pills, drugs, bath houses, and anal sex (rectal cancer etc). Lots of ‘symptoms’. Add in AZT their drug which killed thousands and made everyone ill. Magic Johnson was the poster boy, he got off the program, cleaned up his life and presto, became healthy.
Evil but admirable in a way that they were able to pull that off with nary a dissent. Fauci again of course. ‘The $cience’.
Yes there was an article on TCW a while back questioning any objective evidence of the existence of HIV beyond a cocktail of various illnesses.
Yawn yawn yawn….. There is absolutely nothing to add to this debate, it’s utterly exhausted, it’s been done a thousand times over, this is now all about distraction.
The only debate to have in regards to the Scandemic is how we should be ensuring they never do anything similar again.
“how we should be ensuring they never do anything similar again”
Totally agree, but surely the first step is for there to be a more general recognition of what happened?
Isnt 4 years enough???… 4 years and a ton of evidence??
If they havent got it by now, they never will… Only gotta look at Monro’s post 🤦♂️..
Bottom line… There’s no hope.. At all
4 years appear not to be enough – I find this somewhat puzzling but I guess we’re all different. I think the problem is that most people were hoodwinked and a lot of them probably know that but who wants to admit it, and who wants to face the fact that everything and everyone they trusted is rotten to the core (excuse the hyperbole)?
Probably not much hope in our lifetime, I agree, but doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. You may view it as a distraction (not sure from that) but surely coming to terms with being more sceptical is a good foundation for thinking about everything else that is happening in our world?
In Britain, the problems were stupidity and incompetence at the highest level.
That’s it.
‘Matt Hancock speaking, in the House of Commons, “The Great Barrington Declaration is underpinned by two central claims and both are emphatically false. First, it says that if enough people get COVID, we will reach herd immunity. That is not true. The second central claim is that we can segregate the old and vulnerable on our way to herd immunity. That simply is not possible.’
(Note: this is also the man who said that he had put ‘a protective ring’ around care homes and then later admitted that to be nonsense: 18 May “We absolutely did throw a protective ring around social care, not least with the £3.2 billion-worth of funding we put in right at the start, topped up with £600 million-worth of funding on Friday.”
19 May “I am glad that we have been able to protect the majority of homes, and we will keep working to strengthen the protective ring that we have cast around all our care homes.”
’30 Nov 2023Mr Keith quoted England’s former deputy chief medical officer, Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, who said in his statement to the inquiry: “My view is a ring is a circle without a break in it.”
Addressing Mr Hancock, the barrister asked: “However you describe the protective processes you put in place around the care sector, they did not form an unbroken circle, did they?”
Mr Hancock replied: “It is quite clear from the evidence that Professor Van-Tam is right.”)
‘Well, first of all, he doesn’t understand what herd immunity means, right? So herd immunity…..Yeah, so I think he’s using it as a synonym for zero COVID. The COVID’s gone away because enough people are infected. COVID is a coronavirus. The other coronaviruses that are in common circulation in human populations produce colds. And they’re controlled by herd immunity. They’re not always increasing exponentially so that everyone gets it. What happens is they rise and fall with the season. Enough people get it and what herd immunity means is when one person has the infection, they spread it to one or fewer additional people…….So herd immunity is not a synonym for zero COVID. I think Hancock, I think, that’s the mistake he made there……it was clear in October of that year of 2020, and even more clear now that if you are infected, you actually gain substantial protection against re-infection. So there was a study that was just released actually recently, but verifies a whole long line of studies… This is out of Italy. At one year after infection, 0.3% are reinfected. So you’re infected, you recover from COVID and within the context of the full year, three out of 1,000 get reinfected. And almost always, it’s less severe than the first time, because your body still remembers how to fight it off.
(Now what about Hancock’s second claim…that you can’t protect the old and vulnerable)
That’s turned out to be catastrophically false. 80% of the deaths in the United States are people over 60. 80% of the deaths are people over 60. We did not protect the vulnerable because we didn’t even attempt to protect the vulnerable. Just to give you some sense of how backward it was, we sent people in the early days of the epidemic that were infected with COVID back into nursing homes who then infected a large number of vulnerable people, instead of realizing who the vulnerable were and seeking to protect them, that was the scarce resource. We thought hospital beds with a scarce resource. Most parts of the country in March, April 2020 were empty hospital beds.’
Jay Bhattacharya 21 Oct 2021
A Health Secretary in charge of a common cold coronavirus epidemic who is incapable of understanding herd immunity and who thinks it a really good idea discharging the elderly and infirm, many already infected with the coronavirus, out of hospital and back into care homes to free up hospital beds that, in most cases, were never required…..
If you were going to have a conspiracy, the well named Hancock would be far too stupid to participate.
And Britain’s Prime Minister…….enough said.
The whole idea of a coup is, apart from anything else, a mathematical impossibility:
‘I wanted to take the opposite approach, to see how these conspiracies might be possible. To do that, I looked at the vital requirement for a viable conspiracy – secrecy’
‘He then looked at the maximum number of people who could take part in an intrigue in order to maintain it. For a plot to last five years, the maximum was 2521 people……Even a straightforward cover-up of a single event, requiring no more complex machinations than everyone keeping their mouth shut, is likely to be blown if more than 650 people are accomplices.’
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2016-01-26-too-many-minions-spoil-plot#:~:text=If%20you're%20thinking%20of,very%20quickly%20give%20themselves%20away.
There was no coup…..only a whole bunch of hopelessly over-promoted ‘yes men’.
Wrong.. Again… There was no “incompetence”
Stick to Ukraine…
There was a lot of incompetence, Hancock is an utter, utter imbecile, but it’s quite true that the scamdemic hypothesis fits the (at present) known facts better than all the others.
That said I am still unconvinced by most of the hypotheses so far advanced as to the who and why.
Here’s some incompetence, although ”incontinence” might be more accurate as everyone’s walking like they shat themselves. What’s going on in Scotland ( another country I happen to not live in ), please? Anyone?…. Anyone?…
”SCOTLAND- The infantilisation of a nation.
The NHS instructs people to walk like penguins, to <checks notes> erm … protect’ them from the weather.
I shit you not, this is actual advice from the NHS in Scotland.”
https://x.com/Artemisfornow/status/1865742429543964722
Strange how global “incompetence” happened at the same time and exactly the same specifics…
Youve believed the forced narrative..
Of course it was “incompetence”.. Anything else is just a conspiracy theory… 🙄
Ps, Hancock is an imbecile agreed… An obedient imbecile..
Have you not seen the Dominic Cummings interview???
I quote.. “The Deep State runs the UK”
“Cabinet is just staged theatre”
From the horses mouth…. From the horses mouth….
The scandemic was NOT incompetence
Here you go…. What u make of this then….
https://youtu.be/zEnLI0eD-9k?si=SGOOd1f-b5J5CDtf
Do you really think the elected politicians made any decisions?
Do you think the elected politicians are making the decisions on the level of immigration, for example ???
Wake up..
And even if i told you the who and why, not only would you disbelieve it as you’re so wedded to the “incompetence” red herring but youd get offended too..
Maybe you just need another 4 years….
You’re wrong again pal, I’m not wedded to the incompetence narrative.
However I do not delude myself that I fully understand yet what is going on.
Although to be fair so far the conspiracy theorists (and I) have turned out right pretty well every time and the next chapter of the conspiracy is truly dark, and we’re going to need to start fighting back.
So yes, trying to hold off believing that just yet.
“A Health Secretary in charge of a common cold coronavirus epidemic who is incapable of understanding herd immunity”
Incapable, or unwilling, or uninterested, or good at playing the fool? “Herd immunity” is not rocket science. Christ I understand it, or think I do, and I’m just a f***wit with crap A level grades in non-STEM subjects.
“Hancock…took A-levels in Maths, Physics, Computing, and Economics.[3] He later studied computing at the further education college, West Cheshire College.[6][7] Hancock then studied at the University of Oxford where he was an undergraduate at Exeter College, and graduated with a first class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). He later earned a Master of Philosophy degree in Economics from the University of Cambridge, where he was a postgraduate student at Christ’s College.[7][8] ”
I know people who went to Oxford and Cambridge. All of them were “intelligent” using the normally accepted definition of the word. I’ve also met “stupid” people who can barely read, write or speak anything beyond basic sentences. Hancock may not be wise, certainly not honest, but he is not “stupid”.
He is rich, and not in prison, as far as I know healthy. The “stupid” people I know are generally poor.
There are many different measures of intelligence.
There are many different measures of ability.
Academic qualifications are but one.
Probably the best measure of all is empirical observation.
By that measure, the well named Hancock and the man who appointed him are both a pair of total feckwits.
We’ve observed what they did publicly, and what they said publicly about what they did and why they did it. We can’t know what they really think or what their real reasons were. We can speculate. My speculation is that they knew it was bullshit, based on the leaked WhatsApp messages and the fact they were all partying and shagging (assuming of course the leaked messages are not just another windup).
What worries me about your position as I understand it is that let’s say we get someone in government you deem “competent” – is that then job done? I would say not. The default position should be to question and doubt motives at every turn.
The vast majority of the population are perfectly happy with this representative democracy.
If you are not, then you will need not just a better alternative but to convince 70 million souls that it is a better alternative.
Do you have a better alternative?
Democracy: the least worst form of government.
I don’t see where I’ve written that I am not happy with “this representative democracy” – I just think it works much better if people are less trusting. I have always voted, previously for the least-bad candidate and latterly only for candidates who meet minimum standards, or I spoil my ballot paper. I certainly agree that the key task is to convince my fellow citizens of the rightness of my political views, especially regarding what the proper function of government is and what the limitations should be on political power. I’m not expecting politicians to stop being politicians without a fight.
The “too many minions” theory assumes that one whistleblower or one leak will blow the gaff. However, as we have seen with the climate scare, the truth can easily be drowned out in a sea of propaganda. Thousands of people with science degrees can declare that there is no climate crisis, but the scare continues.
As President Trump has just remarked, the world has recently gone a bit crazy.
However the U.S. is about to undergo a sea change regarding climate and healthcare policy in particular.
What happens in America never stays in America.
If the federal budget no longer supports either the existing covid or climate change narrative, then, as if by magic, that narrative will change.
As the man said, America is not a country, it’s a business.
Let’s see if any of the many covidians I know mention this report to me. I’m still waiting for the apologies and the admission they were wrong. An acquaintance of mine just texted me to postpone a meet up – he has “covid”. I don’t know how many boosters he has had but it’s definitely a few.
I think the wheels will somewhat come off the net zero wagon because I don’t think even Labour will want to have regular power cuts, so we will hobble along with the mess we currently have – overly expensive energy and subsidised EVs and useless technology receiving our money, but I think they won’t go the whole hog. Still, I thought that about “covid” too….
They were following Orders, almost certainly from the American Military Industrial Complex, – as did the rest of the Five Eyes and NATO members (although East Europe NATO members were “less successful” in complying with the instructions).
Sweden didn’t comply … and presumably didn’t get the Order … because at that point, Sweden although in the EU, wasn’t in NATO.
A very fair review of the report.
I would identify its worst errors as the uncritical lauding of Operation Warp Speed, and the failure to see the crucial role of the security state hiding behind the desperate attempts of Fauci and co to cover up the virus’s origins, and behind the “control the masses anyhow until the vaccines arrive” policy (and then we can control them forever).
The first probably reveals the political partisanship of the report, since Trump regarded Warp Speed as his success. The second? Willful blindness, or maybe the fear of congressmen ending up in a plane crash, like Assad.
To my mind the report gives a good deal of insight into the UK and Western bungling, especially when one factors in the military and intelligence involvement. Farrar and Vallance were deeply involved in the Fauci obfuscation, and were in a good position to manipulate wise fools like Hancock. And we know well from Ukraine, Iraq and now Syria how Western governments jump when US pressure is applied (for they all have dirty secrets known to the Washington/London Deep State).
Staggeringly good article. Alas, with the latest buzzword ‘quad-demic’ doing the rounds I have noted a significant return of the ghastly and ultimately useless face nappies, particularly in bus queues.
I wish this piece was mandatorily broadcast under balanced reporting rules. If just one mask wearer woke up it’d be worth it.
Dominic Cummings explains…. “The Deep State runs the UK”
“cabinet is just a staged theatre”
From the horses mouth….
Apply this to the “incompetence” theory…..
https://youtu.be/zEnLI0eD-9k?si=SGOOd1f-b5J5CDtf
“mistakenly called a vaccine.”
There was no mistake about that. They called it a vaccine to (a) get around the laws on medicinal testing and (b) so that the sheeple wouldn’t get worked up about it and be difficult. If they’d called it what it is … experimental human gene manipulation ….. they wouldn’t have been able to carry out their experiment on very many of them!
The people who authorised and carried this out … all of them, including the politicians who fronted the abuse and lied to their people …. are no better than Mengele and the Nazis.
This was a coup against science and against democracy, for purposes of industrial and political reset, not just in one nation but all nations at once
And most of us fell for it and perhaps, continue to fall for it.
Well, not most of us on here.
Scam after scam after scam. It seems our lives have been reduced to dealing with this constantly. The elite level people in positions of power have learned that the masses can be easily controlled and manipulated. Huge amounts of cash are available from government treasuries to those creative enough. As Morrison points out in his article today, the ozone hole over Antarctica was a total scam and that dates from the early 1990s. The easy cash has to dry up before this will stop.