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.
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Dungford must have licked Plaid Cymru arse till his tongue was sore.
And even then he could only introduce Nazipapiere by cheating.
What a surprise.
Sing hey for Gulag Wales: government of the mentally handicapped by the morally disabled.
Wales and Scotland remain verboten and likely indefinitely so.
Scot here. Some form of state control is going to stick around forever, that’s the reason why Nicola hasn’t relinquished mandatory masks on schools or shops – to show she can control us. And even if COVID was somehow completely extinguished, Nicola shall use climate change as a reason to further restrict our liberties. Scots will continue voting the SNP, however, for the very slim chance they get independence .There’s no point hoping Scotland shall be open or free at some point.
England longs to be independent of Scotland.
Not Wales and Northern Ireland then? And then there’s the delicate matter of the Shetlands…
Wales just needs to junk devolution. Bozo and his coven are foul enough, but better one layer of fascist devilry than two.
Scotland will never be free or independent.
As a Scot who wants actual independence I accept now it will never happen.
Scotland is a poor nation and like all poor nations socialism creeps and only gets worse with time.
That’s why the SNP wants to join the EU. Its the biggest gravy boat there is. Take money from other countries and give it to others. EU will go full communism before its collapse. Scotland will be right in amongst it. Getting money and getting Afghans aplenty. Despite being told our population is declining we are building houses on green belts all around Edinburgh.
If no one can see that all these measures, which the SNP want permanently,are all designed to I crease their control and decrease yours is sadly never going to see.
We are doomed, prepare for riots, stealth wars and camps.
I hope I am wrong, so should you
I hope that you are wrong, but I fear that you are bang on.
Scotland’s fertility rate in 2020 plummeted to a sporran-shrivelling 1.29, putting us in the bottom 5 in the world. And that includes the bennies bairns being farmed by sink estate neds and the New Scotch.
Our demographic pyramid is now inverting. You can’t print or borrow your way out of a demographic crisis: fiat currency is worthless if there’s nobody young and hale enough to do the work.
And the SNP solution? More taxation, more punishing the productive, more doom and gloom about the WuFlu and ecological disasters.
Happy, secure people have babies. Miserable, terrorised people don’t. The SNP is running a campaign of self-genocide through propaganda, either deliberately or inadvertently.
I hope they introduce it for restaurants rather than just big venues so that I can deliberately break the rigged law.
Elin Jones behaved like Reichsmarshall Herman Goering.
They will eventually for sure. Now its “won” they can expand it. Notice the legislation has no end date or criteria.
Jones sums up the entire organisation. Failed B grade politicians drunk on power and determined to use it.
Even Plaid voted against this sh*tshow.
wtf!?
Well.. well.. well.. who’d have thought it eh! Seems even the gremlins are against your average Joe trying to make a living. I wonder how many of those who voted for this disgusting affront to freedom are sucking on taxpayers teet, no worries about not getting paid.. a nice little stipend for services rendered.. scum..
What an appalling farce!
This exposes an issue with modern society in general: Due to the usually shoddy quality of the software running on all kinds of general purpose computers controlling appliances, everybody is use to accepting software again didn’t work as qualitatively equal to an act of God (literally meant — if the computer doesn’t do it, the Zeitgeist-deity has spoken and must be pacified by performing some elaborate set of rituals or its decree must be obidiently accepted. There’s no third option, cf recent discussion about issue with the EUSS software).
Of course, if a vote is won because a software error prevented someone from voting, that’s again a deus vult decision which must not be quesitoned. As someone already wrote: A sorry farce.
Unexpected objection in Fascist area.
Well the response to this will set a precedent in this regard, certainly for the Welsh body. I don’t think there’s been such a clear case of a technical failure changing the result of a legislative vote at the top level.
Does the Welsh regime try to get away with your “deus vult” argument? In that case there will be serious legitimacy questions hanging over this law from the start, even for those who don’t believe (as I and many others do) that these powers are inherently illegitimate. It will be challenged.
Do they set a precedent for rerunning any vote where there is a credible claim that a technical error changed the result? Seems like they surely must do that, but administratively they won’t want to, even regardless of their wish to get this one through.
It’s not just problems with software. The internet has been terrible where I live in recent days. I don’t know what’s going on but something seems “off”. This is highlighting the dangers of ever increasing reliance on the internet, something the government is pushing for with all this “work from home where at all possible” nonsense. This is dangerous, as highlighted by the disastrous (remote) Senedd vote today. Democracy is dead.
You can’t blame software here – the presiding officer was aware a member was trying to vote, was aware what his vote would be and instead of arranging other methods or waiting chose to deliberately push through immediately and ignore it.
It was a deliberate action to ignore a vote, the direction of which was known.
Thank you for making the only salient point here Splattt
IOW, the presiding officer treated this exactly like he had treated a road accident preventing said member from showing up on time. Or sudden death of the MP in question. Or any other number of unforseeable, natural obstacles no one’s responsible for. And that’s inappropriate for a technical defect. Which happened to be my point.
Actually, the presiding officer even handled the situation worse than that as he – as per Zeitgeist-deity conditioning – implied that it wasn’t even an act of God but to blame on the MP in question: It worked for me, so, surely, it must be his fault! This attitude extended to lightbulbs – with exactly as much technical justification – could prove truly endarkening!
Isn’t it interesting how all these IT errors only ever benefit the globalists, and never the anti-globalists?
The hundreds (if not thousands) of times I had to waste my time in a supermarket because the electronic scales again wouldn’t work certainly benefited no political faction. Nor the cash machine who ate my card. Nor … and so on.
I didn’t say “ALL IT errors”.
Insofar there’s qualitative difference between all software errors and all these software errors, I have no idea what it’s supposed to be. Sabotage is obviously also possible. But IMNSHO (‘in my not so humble opinion’) much less likely.
You are splitting hairs for absolutely no reason on what is an obvious statement.
It’s not obvious to me. But please feel free to believe otherwise.
That’s a “you” problem. Have a nice day.
No, that’s not my problem because I don’t care for opinions of people who can’t be arsed to express themselves clearly. That’s a pit the latter day ‘feminists’ already fell into.
Wow you need a hobby.
Talking of pits you really are digging yourself into a hole.
The word “these” qualifies the errors to be only the subset of errors referred to previously, and specifically excludes “all”. Are you not a natural English speaker?
To clarify, if I hold in my hand two rotten apples and say “These apples have gone off” it doesn’t mean the all apples in the world have gone rotten.
England next although the 3rd ‘wave’ seems to be running out of what little steam it had. Will the booster roll out save the day and help kick start our Covid winter?
The third wave of “cases” was conjured up by massive testing of kids, much of it self-testing with all the innaccuracies and deliberate mis-testing that involves. The third wave of deaths was a ripple and was made up mainly of older people dying from mis- and un-diagnosed non-Covid conditions and vaccine induced deaths.
Vaccine passports only introduced in Wales because of a Zoom error.
Vaccine passports only introduced in Scotland because the SNP gave the Greens a few governmental positions, in exchange of them voting in the passports.
The sad thing is that the dictatorial governments in charge shall always find a way to push through whatever measure they wish. No doubt if the Zoom glitch had prevented a Labour MS from voting, and that got passports kicked out, Labour would be crying and demanding for a re-vote.
I can tell you one thing – it’s about to be a disaster. The passport’s app in Scotland is almost a hacker’s fantasy – you’re forced to send either your passport or your driving license, and then a picture of your face, alongside other private data, just to get your barcode. Knowing the Scottish government, I doubt the app’s security, and shall never download it. Hopefully the Welsh see common sense and refuse to implement this procedure.
They can pass these laws, but you can equally ignore them… and you are morally obliged to ignore them in this case.
You can’t “equally ignore them”.
That’s the whole problem
No ‘zoom error’ bro…….
Invalid vote. . Meanwhile, carry on as normal en-masse. Ignore this non-law. By not doing the decent thing and giving the Senedd member a chance to cast his vote despite technical difficulties, Drakeford and the entirety of welsh labour reveals his utter contempt for democracy. I’ll be daily emailing the entire senedd with two words until this farce is settled. ‘Re-vote needed,’. If it’s only me, it’ll have no effect, but if as many of us as possible do so, they might listen. Senedd members emails available on the Big Brother Watch site.
https://twitter.com/RWTaylors/status/1445445022535413762
WAGs own TV feed where you can clearly here the presiding officer being told a member is trying to connect to vote and being told “NO NO NO NO NO”.
So the chair was fully aware a member was trying to vote and to vote now and chose deliberately to conclude the vote before he had a chance.
Blatant corruption! Disgusting.
England: care home workers need to be “vaccinated” to keep others safe, but we don’t need vaccine passports yet because enough people have taken up the vaccines.
Wales: care home workers don’t need to be mandated to be vaccinated because enough have taken up the vaccine, but we need to bring in vaccine passports to keep people safe.
Orwell would have a bloody field day!
Links to Emails of entire Senedd here. There’s only 60 of them.
https://business.senedd.wales/mgCommitteeMailingList.aspx?
Answer os obvious, just down load your pdf, having had both your vaccine jabs. Else stay and watch television.
Says someone who has absolutely no idea of the far more serious issue at play here.
(And what does jab matter – just randomly scan an LFT and tick the box saying negative online. Its not as if you have to actually DO the test to certify yourself covid free).
I think you need to tell your FULL medical history.
I think a potential male partner should be able to find out whether you’ve had an abortion.
It’s the moral thing to do.
Fucking disgrace
Here’s the regulations. Barking mad. Plenty of loopholes. I got sent this identical email from both local Labour SMPs I emailed yesterday.
“If these regulations are passed, all adults over 18 will be required to show a Covid Pass from October 11 to enter:
Under the regulations, a nightclub or similar venue is a premises where music is provided for dancing – but only if they serve alcohol and are open between midnight and 5am. The requirement to have a Covid Pass applies to the premises at any time, including times outside these hours, if they are open and are providing music for people to dance. This means that a pub, for example, with a dancefloor but which closes at 11.30pm, would not have to require Covid passes. This is because there are other actions that pubs can take to mitigate the spread of the virus in their venues – such as social distancing, ventilation, table service and wearing face coverings – that are less practical in most nightclubs. Applicable venues that are open until 1am, for example, will need to require Covid passes for people arriving earlier.
People working, volunteering or performing in the venues are exempt and will not need to show a Covid Pass. They are encouraged to take lateral flow tests twice a week to check they do not have the virus. If they test positive, like everyone else, they will have to self-isolate and not go to work.
The Covid Pass will be used in higher-risk venues, where it is harder to put in place some of the important mitigation measures such as social distancing and ventilation which can help to prevent the risk of people spreading and catching coronavirus.
The following venues and events are exempt:
The Covid Pass has been used by many festivals and concerts over the summer, including the Green Man Festival which took place in the Brecon Beacons in August. Many Welsh concert venues, such as the Motorpoint Arena in Cardiff, currently use it when bands play and everyone attending a concert is asked to show their pass as a condition of entry.
The Covid Pass is already in extensive use in Wales and England. It has been in use in Wales for more than three months and has been downloaded by thousands of people to access events and travel abroad. There are clear instructions on the Welsh Government website about how to access the pass and Welsh Government communications will continue to raise awareness of the use of the pass to enter certain events and venues.
It is important to note that a Covid Pass is not a vaccine certificate. A vaccine certificate raises many legal, ethical, and technical questions, not least because it excludes all those who cannot be vaccinated. The Welsh Government has therefore decided to rule out using vaccine certification at this time and opted for the use of the Covid Pass instead.
The Covid Pass is different to vaccine certification in a number of important ways.
The aim of the Covid Pass is not to make it harder for people to access these venues and events but to give people the confidence to attend them, knowing everyone else attending them will either have had a very recent negative test result or has been fully-vaccinated (or both).
Wales is currently at alert level zero – there are fewer restrictions now than at any time during the pandemic. We all want to keep Wales open and to keep Wales safe. The Covid Pass is one of the measures that does just that, alongside the other measures the Welsh Government retained, including the coronavirus risk assessments and all the things we each do (such as washing our hands, vaccination and wearing face coverings) to help to reduce the risk of people catching and spreading coronavirus.
Throughout the pandemic, the Welsh Government has sought to balance people’s freedoms with the need to protect lives and stop the NHS being overwhelmed. The use of the Covid Pass is a continuation of that approach.”
As far as efficacy goes, pure performative theatre.
As far as principle and liberty are concerned, an appalling precedent.
People who would push such measures have no place in authority of any kind.
We all know its nonsense.
A UK parliamentary scientific committee found they wouldn’t work.
A Welsh government one found exactly the same.
A vaccination status says NOTHING about a persons current covid status.
In addition the LFT tells you nothing because you just scan the code and tick a box on a website – you don’t even have to do the test.
…whilst at the same time excluding the people least likely to have covid in the first place – the unvaccinated but people who have had covid.
So this is nothing about public health. Its about a framework for more government control.
There is NO expiry date on this and NO criteria where it would end.
It’ll be hillarious next month watching them try to get 70,000 people into the Millennium stadium for rugby trying to check each and every one of those QR codes and looking them up on a website.
I read somewhere they will randomly check
https://t.me/s/hackntrace
back on line soon I hope!
The following venues and events are exempt: …protests and picketing…
That alone sums up the utter stupidity of the welsh government statement about covid passes. Utter bunch of morons.
Maybe i’ll go to the Wales v New Zealand game next month for a protest then and not have to get one.
Nice one!
Given the popularity of so many events, not least football matches, before this came in,the risk of infection doesn’t seem to be deterring many people.
A pathetic excuse from a group of control freaks.
I’m not sure which is the more appalling: that such an evil authoritarian measure can be implemented because of a software glitch or that so many politicians supported it that the vote was so close.
Welsh Labour were the only ones supporting it (not a shock).
The software glitch didn’t cause the implementation – the presiding officer was fully aware of a glitch AND the members voting intentions but refused to allow time for him to vote. It was a deliberate, human action that implemented it.
Who would have thought that a simple technical problem would have the consequence of killing so many people.
It’s time to!
Not that easy for us stuck in Wales.
Although i do my best – i drive 30 mins each way to England to go shopping to avoid the mask rules.
Any indoor tourist or activities i do in England as well.
Good for you Splattt
Wales. A banana republic.
Bananas won’t grow here. It’s a leek republic. A leaky vaccine republic.
This will be the first of ongoing ‘blocking’ of dissenting votes. We are on the brink of losing our own votes (rigged for many years) completely and the introduction of technocratic global communism.
Wow
Am I the only one who is so mistrusting now that I can imagine this technical glitch having been faked or invented?
Cui bono? strongly implies this and Johnson being behind it.
He really wants them/has to deliver them in the whole of the UK, but also wants/must be perceived as being against them for party political and electoral purposes, which this maneuver accomplished, with the added benefit of embarrassing the left.
This vote must not stand. We cannot have legislation passed because technology has crashed.
Team Delingpole chalks up another win. When will everyone wake up and realise that we are living through a great reset in which we are all set to become digital slaves. The first step is the digital ID under the guise of the health passport. It’s the founding step and the one that HAS to be stopped!
Technology helping bring about tyranny? Perish the thought
Anybody know the penalties for non-compliance? Do they sanction the individual or the venue owner?
Time to remember our school-days, children are mischievous and adept at playing pranks to evade ‘authority’.
‘Mobile’ phones are not self-propelled; they stay put exactly where put until we move them. We, not government, control them. Sending and receiving are separate issues. So are being fed and eating. (particularly when it comes to ‘greens’)
Now government believes mobile phones are part of our anatomy and uses them to track us, we can put phones where we want government to believe we are, leave them there and go elsewhere ourselves.
Same with ‘nuisance’ callers – leave old phone at home with voice-mail off, switch phone on as you go out and off when you get back.
They can ring it and send texts to it to their hearts’ content. We receive none of it; texts deleted all-in-one without seeing any.
Old number given to all potential nuisances, new one kept for only those we trust. Planning logical route for a phone and sharing that phone with friends leaves government clueless whose hands it’s in.
We can think, software can’t. It can be outwitted and ‘authority’ believing itself superior to us makes it vulnerable to being out-witted too
Does anyone with a brain actually believe it was a ‘zoom error’ that stopped the Tory MS from voting? If this sticks, with no revote or legal challenge, the Welsh deserve their fascist country.
It was a zoom problem. Not a surprise as its not exactly reliable.
Its all on the CCTV chamber feed and confirmed by the MS directly.
The problem was the presiding officer in the Christmas jumper refusing to allow the problem to be solved and pushing ahead with the vote in the full knowledge the outcome would be changed by that.
The Tories cannot blame a “technology error”, the Presiding Officer or anything else.
Gareth Davies knew that the only important thing he had to do that day was vote.
Back in the 1970s, MPs were delivered to Westminster in ambulances to make sure they voted in knife-edge votes. Why did the whips not make sure they had a full house in the Bay this week
If Davies thought that the technology was unreliable, he should have been in Cardiff Bay. He certainly should have made sure he had a Zoom connection long before the vote was due. Either he wanted the vote to pass or he was grossly incompetent.Either way, he should go.