The Day the World Became China: Tuesday March 10th 2020

I’d like to draw your attention to Jeffrey Tucker’s recent piece at Brownstone, on ‘How They Convinced Trump to Lock Down‘.

The problem he addresses is a chronological one. As late as March 9th 2020, Donald Trump was arguing vehemently to stay open, and emphasising that no shutdowns had ever been enacted to stop seasonal influenza. By March 11th, he suddenly declared himself “fully prepared to use the full power of the Federal Government to deal with our current challenge of the CoronaVirus!”

Tucker asks:

What changed? Deborah Birx reports in her book that Trump had a friend die in a New York hospital and this is what shifted his opinion. Jared Kushner reports that he simply listened to reason. Mike Pence says he was persuaded that his staff would respect him more. No question (and based on all existing reports) that he found himself surrounded by ‘trusted advisors’ amounting to about five or so people (including Mike Pence and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb). …

Something about this story has never really added up. How could one person have been so persuaded … ? He surely had other sources of information – some other scenario or intelligence – that fed into his disastrous decision.

Isolating the date in the trajectory here, it is apparent that whatever happened to change Trump occurred on March 10th 2020, the day after his Tweet saying there should be no shutdowns.

Tucker hypothesises that the sudden reversal is related to a decision, taken around this time, to place American pandemic policy in the hands of the National Security Council, rather than the ordinary public health offices. He suggests these steps ultimately represent suspicion that the virus had been enhanced in a laboratory.

Note, though, that crucial date: Whatever happened to change Trump’s mind, happened on March 10th 2020. This is the precise day that the Italian lockdowns, at first exclusive to Lombardy, were extended to the whole country; and it is also the day that Silicon Valley thinkfluencer and general pandemic cipher Tomás Pueyo posted his first, mysteriously viral Medium essay on ‘Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now’.

I hardly ever bold for emphasis on this blog, but I’ve made an exception here, because these coincidences are hugely important.

Pueyo’s significance is often overlooked by my friends on the other side of the Atlantic, because the pandemic in America and the pandemic in Europe were very different. If you had to pick a single figure most responsible for bringing lockdowns to Europe, though, that figure would be Pueyo and his ominously dumb blog posts.

Pueyo’s March 10th essay and his March 19th follow-up on ‘The Hammer and the Dance‘ racked up tens of millions of views within days, were discussed at the highest levels of multiple European governments, and received translations into nearly 40 languages. Pueyo went on British television to debate Government epidemiologists about their herd immunity approach; in a secret strategy document, German modellers named their ideal scenario of maximum restrictions ‘Hammer and Dance’ after him.

Almost as important as the sheer fact of Pueyo’s influence, is the content of his blog posts, which reveal a definite and well-informed strategy. ‘The Hammer and the Dance’ was a deeply successful attempt to popularise the assumptions behind Neil Ferguson’s notorious March 16th modelling paper demanding lockdowns in the United Kingdom, making his basic idea universally applicable (and no longer specific to the British health system) and more politically palatable. The March 10th piece, timed exactly to Trump’s change in attitude, transparently popularises the basic arguments and thin research underpinning the late-February report endorsing Chinese-style lockdowns issued by the WHO-China joint mission. It was with this report that the WHO abandoned all prior pandemic plans and recommended lockdowns to the rest of the world.

Without Pueyo, it’s very likely the dry WHO report would’ve gone mostly unread. Relatedly, Ferguson’s lockdown mania wouldn’t have even a fraction of the influence without those millions and millions of Medium impressions. Pueyo turned the incipient pseudoscience behind lockdowns into a popular, viral internet phenomenon, which seized the minds of people across the West and created popular enthusiasm for novel mass containment policies.

The sequence of events, then, is this:

The WHO-China joint mission endorses lockdowns at the end of February.
All of Italy locks down in accordance with the recommendations of this report between March 8th and 10th.
Also on March 10th, Pueyo released his viral blog post, explaining in heavily annotated, easy-to-understand pseudoscientific prose and imagery the WHO/Chinese case for locking down.
Donald Trump immediately abandons his prior minimisation of Covid and promises to use all his powers to “deal with” the virus.

One theory would simply be that Tomás Pueyo’s posts resounded within the American national security establishment as much as they did in European governments, and convinced Trump that he had to “act now.” Birx, Pence, Kushner and the rest can’t agree on a story about why he changed his mind, because the truth – that he or his closest advisers were convinced by a sciencey viral blog post – is too ridiculous to admit.

Another theory – not necessarily mutually exclusive – would be that Pueyo’s work was brought to prominence via algorithmic manipulations, bots, influencer amplification, or other means, to support decisions which were taken in the days leading up to March 10th, and which were probably related in some way to the general Italian lockdown announced on that day.

This piece originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.