Arguing the conspiracy-or-emergence question with respect to pandemic policy is a little like weeding the garden. You are never quite done with it, and every few months you find you have something more to say.
In this instance, I must thank friend-of-the-blog Igor Chudov for providing the opportunity. He disagrees with my view that Covid policies owe less to creepy conspiratorial globalists, than they do to the unbounded stupidity of our leaders, boring institutional dynamics, and feedback effects. He’s explained why in an extensive post that everyone should read.
I don’t have an issue with most of the points Chudov raises, though I take a different view of their cumulative significance. I’d note only that the World Economic Forum article he leads with dates to April 3rd 2020, long after the entire Western elite had embraced mass containment. In general, the WEF merely echoes current trends and policy fashions, which makes its real-world influence an obscure matter. It’s additionally important that Event 201, held in October 2019, explicitly rejected lockdowns and mass travel restrictions in the event of a deadly pandemic, preferring instead minimal measures like advisories.
From its Call to Action (emphasis mine):
Travel and trade are essential to the global economy as well as to national and even local economies, and they should be maintained even in the face of a pandemic. Improved decision-making, coordination, and communications between the public and private sectors, relating to risk, travel advisories, import/export restrictions, and border measures will be needed. The fear and uncertainty experienced during past outbreaks, even those limited to a national or regional level, have sometimes led to unjustified border measures, the closure of customer-facing businesses, import bans, and the cancellation of airline flights and international shipping. A particularly fast-moving and lethal pandemic could therefore result in political decisions to slow or stop movement of people and goods, potentially harming economies already vulnerable in the face of an outbreak.
In other words, planners as late as Fall 2019 viewed widespread closures in the event of a pandemic as a risk to be countered via nebulous stuff like “improved decision-making, coordination, and communications.” In this, Event 201 was entirely typical.
This raises an important, if often-neglected question: What about the 2020 response was normal and long-planned, and what about it was novel and unexpected?
We don’t need clandestine plots to elucidate measures that the pandemicists have been formulating entirely in the open and promising to deliver for decades. Where they might help, though, is with strange policies and responses that nobody ever heard of before.
Strictly speaking, none of what happened was all that new. Testing, contact tracing, lockdowns, accelerated vaccine development – all were discussed prior to 2020 as part of an increasingly elaborate and authoritarian pandemic toolkit intended to save us (mostly) from pandemic influenza.
The novelty lay entirely in the application of these measures. To understand it, we must internalise the crucial distinction between mitigation and containment. I can’t emphasise this enough; indeed, if I could wave a wand and put one concept into the heads of everyone pondering this matter, it would be this distinction, that’s how important I find it.
Since SARS-1 in 2003 at least, epidemiologists had planned to respond to limited, localised outbreaks via containment. Infection clusters confined to specific apartment complexes, city blocks or villages would trigger total lockdowns of several weeks, with testing and contact tracing to contain the outbreak before it spread any further. Under containment, you can’t go outside to walk your dog. Everyone gets tested all the time; the tracers follow every transmission chain back to the source. Virus botherers in weird virus suits deliver rations to your doorstep on a stick. Everyone who tests positive is carted off to centralised quarantine. The most widely reported example of containment is what Japanese health authorities did to the Diamond Princess after she returned to Yokohama Port in February 2020.
If containment fails and the virus begins to circulate more broadly, planners envisioned a transition to mitigation strategies. Mitigation is a nebulous cluster of milder measures that, it was hoped, would slow the spread and reduce pressure on hospitals. These measures could involve everything from work-at-home advisories to periodic school closures. It’s true that the pandemicists spent the years after SARS-1 developing ever more authoritarian mitigationist plans, but these were not lockdowns designed to stop the virus. They were, explicitly, about flattening rather than crushing the curve, and they were rooted in doubtful retrospective observational studies of the 1918 influenza pandemic in the United States, which purported to show that periodic school closures could delay (note: not prevent) pandemic mortality.
Where this discussion often goes wrong is the tendency to mistake the escalating mitigationist visions of Western pandemicists for an incipient mass containment plot. This is understandable, but if we maintain an autistic focus on our crucial distinction, we can see that it’s not quite right. Even the famous three-day Ebola lockdown imposed on Sierra Leone in 2014 was a mitigationist measure, because the goal was only to slow the rate of infection, not to beat the virus back or drive the curve downwards.
What happened in January 2020 in China, and then in March 2020 to the rest of the world, was an innovation in theory and practice. Pandemicists decided suddenly to ditch mitigation altogether and attempt virus containment not just in one apartment building, but en masse. All those heavy-handed measures that planners, in a prior era of sanity, had rejected as unscalable beyond the level of the city block, would be applied to whole metropolises, regions and nations, with the goal being to ‘crush the curve’ (rather than flatten it) and perhaps even to achieve zero-Covid by forcing the reproduction number under 1. Diagnostic of mass containment is not its most obtrusive feature, namely lockdowns, but rather mass testing and contact tracing, because the goal in a containment regime is not to slow infections, but to prevent them.
Since the completion of the WHO smallpox vaccination campaign, Western planners had envisioned a pandemic response consisting of months or years of minimal mitigationist measures, followed by accelerated treatment and vaccine development. Studying their wargames and related documents shows that pandemicists before 2020 generally saw it as their duty to forestall public panic and keep economic activity alive. They furthermore assumed that everyone would be deeply grateful for a vaccine and that, if anything, people would have to be prevented from killing each other to get priority access.
What had never been planned was nationwide lockdowns, mass testing and contact tracing to stop a virus circulating across entire hemispheres. How our respective public health establishments ended up discarding their long-standing plans in favour of mass containment is a question I looked into a long time ago, in two posts on the history of lockdowns. In the interests of furthering this discussion, I’ve lifted the paywall on both pieces.
What you’ll find there is much evidence that mass containment came to the West via three specific events, the significance of which became apparent only in retrospect:
- In January and February 2020, all of our governments were pressing ahead with their prior mitigationist pandemic plans. Public health officials talked down the risk of the virus as part of a longstanding strategy to prepare everyone for infection with minimal panic. The WHO dithered, torn internally by a Sinophilic faction eager to minimise events in China and a more concerned faction eager to ring the alarm. When the Hubei lockdown appeared to succeed, these two factions were suddenly aligned. The Sinophiles could agree that the virus was dangerous but the Chinese solution was effective; the alarmists could finally cry fire. The result was a crucial WHO report published on February 24th endorsing Chinese-style mass containment.
- Also at the end of February, Italian health officials had begun imposing confined, village-level lockdowns in specific northern hotspots. This was the ordinary localised containment that the pandemicists had always envisioned, but as authorities widened testing, they began to discover SARS-2 community spread just as that WHO report dropped. There’s a great deal that we don’t know about what happened next, but on March 8th, the Italian government embraced the WHO recommendations from two weeks prior, imposing a region-wide lockdown on all of Lombardy. By March 10th, they extended the closures to all of Italy. The closures were accompanied by heavy pro-lockdown propaganda across social media and growing alarm in the press.
- Finally, Neil Ferguson and his dubious, forever-wrong modelling team at Imperial College London – some of whom had been involved in the early village-level containment in northern Italy – published their inaugural SARS-2 pandemic model on March 16th. This document influenced discussion across the world. It turned early anxiety about ventilator shortages (propagated by China via the WHO) into concrete arguments about how Corona would melt down hospitals, and it was an initial step in the great attempt to make mass containment politically possible (and palatable) to Western populations. Ferguson and his team introduced the idea of technocratic lockdowns, which might consist of only partial and periodic restrictions, rather than universal closures as in Hubei; and they also began to equivocate about what the goals of mass containment actually were. As officially stated, the purpose was merely to hold out for vaccines, which it was hoped would arrive in 18 months. Zero-Covid advocates themselves, however – among them a wealth of prominent bureaucrats and politicians across the world – continued to hope explicitly for indefinite virus suppression or permanent eradication.
All three of these events were powerful stimuli, which acted on the public health establishments of our respective countries in different ways. Some places, like Japan, Sweden and Belarus, remained unswayed and stayed open. Italy, at the other extreme, locked down first and hardest, enacting the only Chinese-style lockdown in the West. Everyone else adopted some version of Fergusonian technocratic closures, placing their faith in the voodoo of the pandemic modellers and never-ending, ever-changing litany of One Cool Tricks. Every country that adopted mass containment grafted it onto existing pandemic plans. Accelerated vaccine development continued in the background.
Now, did these three stimuli emerge spontaneously and influence the governments of our respective countries wholly by accident? No, they did not. There were important plots and conspiratorial actors in these early days. By April at the latest, though, mass containment had become a noxious cluster of autonomous, self-reinforcing policies across Western nations, devised and enforced by domestic scientific advisers and public health bureaucrats who were acting on nobody’s initiative but their own. This is what we see, in excruciating detail, in the leaked Hancock lockdown files, and all the other revelations to date.
As for the conspirators: they are to be sought in the earliest months of 2020. China played a very important role here, through its influence within the WHO, and perhaps also via separate channels. A lot has been said about this angle. Less often discussed is the early influence exercised by social media platforms. It’s very unlikely to be an accident that lockdown mania enjoyed such early favour with the Silicon Valley set, including key, mysteriously viral people like Tomas Pueyo; and that all major social media platforms turned into perpetual lockdown promotion machines after March 10th 2020. Tech companies were also some of the clearest beneficiaries of pandemic policies, profiting from local retail closures and increased demand for online shopping, near-universal reliance on work-at-home software, and the idle attentions of billions of house-arrested people.
The people who don’t play any crucial early role are our go-to globalist villains. The WEF and Bill Gates start demanding lockdowns at the same time as everybody else. Beginning in mid-2020, Klaus Schwab was even pushing his political contacts to declare the pandemic over with, so he could return to ESG concern-trolling. Theories have to be parsimonious and explanatory, and this one just isn’t. It succeeds because it collapses what is actually a complex, multilayered history into a single universal narrative that applies to all countries simultaneously; and because it identifies clear villains and supplies a single, unified reason for the insanity befell us.
Reality is harder than that.
While I can’t compete with all the massive platforms and posters who disagree with me, I can at least, here at the bottom, attempt to head off some common objections.
Many of my critics collapse distinctions between different organisations. They’ll respond to this by saying that “the WEF and the WHO and Gates and China are all the same” or insisting that a WEF affiliation on somebody’s résumé makes them a WEF actor. I can’t agree with this approach. It’s not how we discuss organisations or individuals in any other context. If you lower the resolution enough, all you see are blurry shapes and any theory becomes defensible, but that doesn’t make you right.
Others reason backwards from the ‘lockstep’ coordination of our countries in implementing lockdowns to infer a broader, globalist plot. In every country I’ve studied, lockdowns were the subject of heavy reporting, and I’ve tried to describe in the broadest sense how they actually came about. Law and policy throughout Western countries are actually very highly coordinated in many areas. The reasons for this are diverse, but unless you think every swing in stock or cryptocurrency prices is a specific, deliberate, coordinated conspiracy, you must accept that apparent coordination does not necessarily indicate a plot, and may also arise from things like preference cascades and spontaneous order.
There is, finally, a tendency to read grand policy objectives like Agenda 2030 onto specific contemporary events. I understand that this seems compelling, but there are oceans of globalist aspirational detritus out there, and you can force this vague verbiage into a theory explaining literally anything. Nobody would say that this stuff doesn’t matter, but if you take the opposite approach, of beginning with specific regional or national lockdown policies and following them up the chain, you will literally never end up at Agenda 2030. At the earliest moments of the pandemic, this exercise indeed led to some interesting places; since April 2020, though, you’ll find that everything goes back to local and national politicians, various branches of the bureaucracy, and the public health establishment. That matters.
This piece originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Highways Act 1980:
137 Penalty for wilful obstruction
(1)If a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway he is guilty of an offence and liable to [F1imprisonment for a term not exceeding 51 weeks or] a fine [F2or both].”
I’m not a lawyer, so am I missing something here?
I have also wondered why Joe Public can’t just make citizen arrests? It seems that you can only use those powers for an indictable offence and unforunately, it appears that blocking the highway is a summary offence.
This article explains: https://www.westminstersecurity.co.uk/news/citizens-arrest-uk-law/
The state blob – at its core – agrees with what these JSO morons are saying, even if they don’t agree with the methods. Unless the state stands up and says that oil is good, that we need it and it’s morally wrong to deprive our population of fuel and thus warmth, power and freedom of movement, these evil psychopaths have free reign.
What should happen is that the whole lot of them are tear gassed and dragged off to jail. The police were happy enough to kick the crap out of anti-lockdown protestors with a legitimate issue, but not these human garbage climate religion cultists.
Admirable restraint there Dom which I fully endorse.
Spot on. The state groupthink is one of support for these morons.
I remember 2 or 3 years ago that there was a climate protest in Cardiff and I caught a report on the radio news. They interviewed the Chief Constable – and he said something along the lines of “Whilst many of us will agree with what the protesters are saying…..”
I regret not going online after getting home (at the time) and recording his words for my files – as I found his words really shocking.
I was trying to find confirmation of the above – but failed. However, I did find this comment to an article in Wales Online from 2021 – which I found amusing:
“It is a pity the experts haven’t publicly acknowledged the amount of CO2 and other more serious toxic gases that have been pumped into the atmosphere by the volcano on the Island of La Palma for the last 6 weeks. A natural process that has, around the world, been going on since the formation of Earth.
But there’s no doubt in the minds of the great and the good that this can be easily be offset by me changing out my boiler.”
I think that’s the point of the slow march. If they don’t actually stop they’re not obstructing ‘the free passage along the highway’.
I also am not a lawyer.
It’s a great example of the letter rather than the spirit of the law.
However, by their actions the human garbage are restricting the rights of citizens to go about their lawful business.
Nor am I a lawyer, but surely their activities have the effect that they force the traffic to stop? That’s whole point of their action. The fact that the individual protesters keep moving is irrelevant.
It’s a fine point, and one which would need probably need a lawyer to clarify. My own take on it is that they are obstructing free passage along the highway.
The OED definition of “obstruct” includes: “…prevent or retard progress of” (my emphasis), and they are certainly retarding the progress of the traffic behind them.
Helpful.
They certainly fit my definition of retards.
Out of interest, supposing a group of us joined in amongst them but then unfurled a COVID or vaccine sceptic banner? What a dilemma the police would have then!
I like the idea – but it would be even more fun to raise banners pointing out how crap the idea of net-zero is and backing energy and economic security through fossil fuel investment. Probably have to have lots of cameras about to work out who throws the first punch though.
On further thought the police would probably not arrest a JSO prat for assault/ABH/GBH but arrest me for behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace.
I thought JSO activists were non-violent extremists?
Sure.
Just the same as Antifa.
Never, EVER, act like fascists.
Oh!
Wait….
Now we’re talking.
I like your thinking .. I’m currently reading a book written by a psychoanalyst (Phil Mollon) called ‘Pathologies of the Self: Narcissism and Borderline states of mind”. In it he outlines social and political narcissism (and I’m thinking Just Stop Oil/XR). “An idea, a cause, a slogan, or motif is selected as the basis for identification and idealisation”. The group is then idealised – perhaps for its moral superiority. The “idea” is seen as the solution, perhaps an urgent necessary solution, to complex societal problems. Reality and logic are systematically distorted to fit this delusional simplication of complex issues.” It goes on …. “Once the narcissistic movement has coalesced around its overvalued idea, the group and its members no longer care about the reality of their impact on others – since reality itself has been partly discarded. Members of such a group may not appear delusional because their distorted perceptions and compromised cognition are shared by others. It is the group as a whole that is delusional.”
I could go on but you get the gist of this.
Sounds like a plan
Holding a protest on the Coronation would give their cause greater visibility. Aside from the event itself and all the branded plastic waste it has already generated, there will by an RAF flypast pointlessly burning jet fuel they can highlight as a polluting waste of resources. I look forward to their plucky exploits next weekend where they genuinely take on The Establishment rather than inconvenience those who cannot afford to be on the receiving end of their faux campaign.
Oh, I say. This sort of interruption might even be worth switching the telly box on for. On second thoughts – nah, the trusted news initiative would not allow any broadcasting of interruptions of Chuckles’ ‘do.’
Jet fuel?
Surely the RAF will use the whey from His Majesty’s cheese production?
Just like he uses in his Aston Martin?
Allegedly.
The banners they are holding are made from plastic – which is made from? Plus, going slowly makes cars use more fuel, which they will get from a petrol station. Brainless idiots.
If every driver in the hold up just kept their horns blaring it might drown out both the chants and the BBC’s fawning coverage.
Just Stop Oil…
Their orange banners on which they carry their slogans are plastic…made from oil.
Their fluorescent high viz jackets…made from oil.
Their safety hats are plastic…made from oil.
Their safety glasses are plastic…made from oil.
The glue they use to glue themselves to the road surface…comes from petrochemicals which comes from oil.
The road surfaces they glue themselves to, are made from asphalt…which comes from oil.
The mobile phones and laptops they use to run their social media campaigns, are full of plastic components…which come from oil.
Right now, a world without plastic and oil would be unthinkable. It would push billions of people into abject poverty and starvation. They are so moronically ignorant about the role of oil in the world’s economy and society, to the point where stopping it would mean our entire civilisation would collapse without it. I cannot stand these misinformed idiots. How about we just stop Just Stop Oil?!
“would mean our entire civilisation would collapse…”
Bingo.
That’s the plan.
You will note they don’t try this shit in China, Russia, Iran, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Indonesia, Venezuala etc etc.
And if they did, their fuzz and courts might be just a smidgeon less “understanding”.
And that would be a good thing.
The right to ‘protest’? Absolutely. But how about when the ‘protesters’ are directly supporting the policies of the Uniparty, directly against the citizens?
Bang on.
Hear, hear.
Protesting against lockdowns etc, we did just the same as these JSO protesters (ie march around central London), but the bus/cab/ordinary drivers were extraordinarily patient with, indeed often extremely supportive of, us. And our protests were never reported on by the MSM. (BTW, I am no young rebellious type. I often say that, as an until then law-abiding citizen, I resented being forced to become a rebel in my 70s!)
How bizarre that people don’t just clamour for their own impoverishment. They actually DEMAND IT.
Indeed.