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.
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2023 is the year of the ‘polycrisis’, according to the WEF. Or should that be ‘polypsyop’?
”And what is the WEF’s “solution” to the very polycrisis that they created?
Or about 100% manufactured by the well over 80% “global leaders.”
In other words, according to the WEF the only answer is more of the same unelected and installed “penetrators”ushering in their hypercentralized One World Government dystopia.”
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/2023-year-of-the-polypsyop
Honestly, their bullshit percentages don’t mean anything, they’re just the saliva flecked rantings of a megalomaniac. All of these ‘crises’, taken one by one, can be dissected and shown for what they are as you say – manufactured – in order to create the conditions ripe for the One World government. You couldn’t make it up!…er…actually…
The Mail again doing its best to induce another virus scenario , nicely timed leading towards May when the who (I’m not using capitals for that twisted shower) will I’m sure get their Global health power treaty ratified . Tedros is now joined by our very own Farrar & Michie “ Let the good times roll “
“Killing pet cats”: I did actually worry quite seriously about the safety of my cats in April 2020, when the “cats spread the virus” myth started, as by then we had all seen how so many people had total faith in Saint Boris’s lies, and handed over all their rights on a plate, begging for him to take even more from them. I was far more worried about the public believing everything the government said, than any mythical danger posed by a virus. Probably one reason the cat cull did not happen is that the government would have had to send executioners into people’s homes to do this, which would have clashed with the “nobody must see anybody” commandment, and said executioners might have been killed by angry cat owners, who would of course be at home, on Saint Boris’s orders. Perhaps the government knew they would never be able to get enough vets onside.
“Boris Johnson must take credit for not locking down for the Omicron variant”: Oh yes, give him a medal, as well as the £5 million he has allegedly earned since being PM, which was probably his only reason for becoming PM: he wanted the glory of it, and none of the work. It would have been better if he had resisted the calls for the first, second and third lockdowns, if he had made his trademark “I do things my way” into the decision not to copy the rest of the world. He would be far more respected now. Poor diddums, it’s a shame he never got the chance to stand at his podium and make a big announcement about the end of restrictions, because the spin machine was then all Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.
As for the Whatsapp messages: we need to be sceptical about this. It may be a double-bluff, a deliberate leak (haven’t we seen those before?), a stage-managed scandal, a damage limitation exercise, possibly planned three years ago, to make us angry about what might have been, so that they can say “we should have locked down harder, faster, longer”, and we are breathing a sigh of relief that they didn’t kill our cats, that all those who were in government are now out, having been replaced with more compliant puppets. I find it very hard to believe that killing cats was ever a serious consideration; this has “deliberate leak” written all over it. The spin “we didn’t know how bad the virus would be, so we had to lock down” is as clear as daylight here, and is probably the first in a long line of other things they “might” have done, so that we thank the Devil for not doing these things.
It all smacks of useful idiots being fed their lines by the stage prompter.
They killed the cats and dogs in the 1660s too, thereby helping the rat population. Nice to know we’ve moved on from such superstitious nonsense.
I still remember that bloody dreadful event in Australia where they shot the dogs in the animal shelter rather than have people travel over there to take them home. Because ‘public health’! Absolute sickos. What sort of a psychopath do you have to be to even consider doing something so evil?
There was similar madness on show during the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001. Locally, a man with a rifle dispatched a small herd of ‘contiguous’ sheep in an enclosure. His aim was poor but he was determined, and randomly fired at the poor beasts running about in panic until he had either killed them, or disabled them enough to stop running so he could administer the coup de gras. There was no penalty for his cruel actions.
I believe if the government had said to kill all cats, a large amount of covidians would have done the job for them, with local ‘seek and destroy’ groups set up to ‘keep us safe’. Sad to say, despite attitudes cooling a bit, I still think it wouldn’t take much to whip up a certain portion of the population into a similar hysterical response.
Having said that, the cat story is a very good psy-ops line to keep the population worried and anxious, isn’t it?
“… Saint Boris’s lies,”
They weren’t his. The populations of nearly all sovereign nations became entrapped by the WHO (CCP) narratives that were propagated using lurid imagery from China and northern Italy. With populations made suitably petrified and therefore suggestable most governments went along with what their citizens demanded – ‘lock me down harder, Boris’, or whoever. Opposition parties complained that Boris was not severe enough. This was all driven by Master Tedrous at the WHO and the CCP.
Kate Wand put together an excellent expose of Fauci and his relationship with the CCP. It is a conspiracy and it’s not a theory. In this video Chinese Professor Zhong Nanshan asserts that economies must not open up until everyone has been vaccinated which may take 2 to 3 years (Fauci agrees), while China was fully open and has not vaccinated it’s entire population. ‘Prof’ Nanshan goes on to say natural herd immunity will not work because it is unscientific and inhuman.
Evidence here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb-JExoBhmU&t=36s
“Humza Yousaf says trans rapist Isla Bryson should have right to self-identify as female”
So, don’t ditch Nichola Sturgeons gender laws just because of one bad egg?
What a tit! Has he learned nothing?
If you look closely you can see sturgeon hand up is back controlling him!
Come on Scotland, don’t fall for more of this shyte again!
He is a massive Cuckoo in Scotlands nest !! How is he even there ?? Robert The Bruce , Haggis , Porridge , Kilts , Bagpipes , Archie Gemmill & now this anti British SH1T house is going to front their politics
A legislator with blind loyalty to an ideology, zero understanding of nuance and the inability to perceive cause-and-effect doesn’t deserve to occupy this position. This guy needs taking down several pegs
“The UN Discusses Darkening The Skies to Combat Climate Change”
And what God has given them the right to darken my part of the sky?
There’s actually some Hollywood film that is about darkened skies but that is because the Sun is dying not because of an idiot attempt at darkening our own skies in the belief that it would make a difference. It’ll just spread nano-particles all over the world and we have no idea what they will do. The ideas just get more and more ridiculous. Who are these scientists who suggest such things? More importantly however, who are the people who take the scientists seriously? Is there no common sense and balanced thinking going on in the UN corridors?
“Bird flu has mutated to infect people
Thankfully its not something us blokes need to worry about…
Of course it has. The assault is relentless – swine flu, avian flu, goat flu, dog flu, guinea pig flu, chimney flue…. Once the WHO gets its treaty signed, they’ll be able to dictate the response. That must never be allowed to happen.
With respect, I think you missed the word play on ‘Birds/Blokes’.
I agree we can see where this is going and I for one will not be playing along with anything the WHO says must happen. I do expect that our so called government will sign up to this horses arse of an agreement.
No, Neil, I totally got it but I was responding to the headline not your joke.
WHO flu!
Yeah, watch out for the manflu
Worth a watch – we need more kids like this.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/hmfuRhMJbTbY/
Toby says there was no plandemic. This is Robert Malone’s testimony:
The blocking of “early treatment” and/or “drug repurposing” as well as advocacy for genetic vaccines which were presumed (without adequate testing) to be “safe and effective” was supported by an aggressive, harmonized global censorship and propaganda campaign, with significant funding (~US $10 Billion) provided by the US Government.
In addition to US and global suppression (notably except in Mexico) of the prompt use of known (often off-patent) drug therapies to treat the respiratory symptoms of COVID-19 disease, and the disproportionate emphasis on genetic vaccine development and deployment, a number of other counterproductive actions were taken in the name of public health. Most or all of these were modeled after measures implemented by the CCP in China. In many cases, these actions were previously not recommended by the WHO or national health authorities, but these policies were changed in response to the fear of COVID-19. These included arbitrary “lockdowns”, prevention of public assembly, mandated use of particle masks which were neither effective nor designed for preventing viral transmission, arbitrary six foot “social distancing” policies, school closure, alterations in normal medical procedures (diagnostic testing and evaluation, elective surgeries), travel restrictions, vaccine passports and tracking, and many other related procedures justified as advancing “public health” objectives but which were not supported by established scientific evidence.
Much of the national US and global response was managed by the National Security apparatus and Department of Defense of the United States, acting together with the Department of Homeland Security, and these activities included a massive propaganda, psychological operations and censorship program which acted as part of a globally harmonized program in coordination with the World Health Organization, GAVI, CEPI, CDC, EMA and the BBC-Managed Trusted News Initiative to restrict public access and counter any information different from the WHO-approved narrative regarding SARS-CoV-2, COVID, drug treatment protocols and vaccine safety and efficacy. Distribution of any information contradicting official WHO or CDC messaging was deemed mis- dis- or mal-information and defined as potential domestic terrorism. The US Government, and many separate US federal agencies, coordinated closely with WHO, large technology and social media companies to censor and control all information concerning virus, drugs, and vaccines.
On top of a whole series of exercises simulating a globally coordinated response to the ‘next pandemic’ (Event 201 being the last) which Toby ignores, the above is powerful evidence that the governments did not merely take decisions on the hoof, uninfluenced by advisers who after 20 years of simulations already had a script to follow.
….agreed Steven..the withdrawal of treatments, of all kinds, is one of the most egregious things to have happened during the con..and I believe it cost many people their lives……they knew when they took HCQ and Ivermectin from the shelves in the US, that they could be used for treatment..
This study from 2005 shows that chloroquine is a ‘potent inhibitor of SARS’…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/
The fact that the study had been ‘fact-checked’ many times during the scam, tells me that they knew about it from the start and tried very hard to discredit it…
As an aside at least two people I know have recently had letters from the NHS telling them that they’ll be receiving testing kits as ‘there are now treatments for Covid-19 that can be prescribed” should you get Covid!!
Both of these people have had cancer in the past, but both are fit and well..and unvaccinated….
The treatments are Paxlovid, Veklury (Remdesivir), Lagevrio (Molnupiravir) and Xevudy, a monoclonal antibody……
As far as I’m aware, all new, and all experimental, with few studies, and no long term safety data…and in some cases some well known serious side effects.
My two friends are on the ball, but how many more will be suckered in?
Related to digital pound, on the two petitions to the House of Commons being looked at on Keeping Cash, they have commissioned a Survey on Acceptance of Cash. This must be completed by 10am on Thursday 9 March, but is very quick and easy to do. My including a link is likely to result in whole message being censored, but the link is available through yesterday’s UK Column News, being the last item on the topic of Parliamentary Petitions in the Summary
The first petition (making it unlawful for shops top refuse cash) is closed. The second one requiring businesses and public services is still open. The link is here: petitionDOTparliamentDOTukSLASHpetitionsSLASH622284 – .’s and /’s obviously
Lori Lightfoot has failed in her bid to be re-elected as Mayor of Chicago. I like to think her attitude and policies towards those who declined the gene therapy injection might have had something to do with it.
https://twitter.com/chicagosmayor/status/1473382110576594948?lang=en
Revolting person. I will be celebrating the news later.
She’s that really weird looking woman isn’t she? I’m going to sound like a bitch but her face doesn’t suit her name…I can see why the Americans call her ”Beetlejuice”.
She’s a real sinner.
Loved this reply…
Can you please do something about the murder rate instead? Thank you.
We’re tired of your gaslighting, fascist, bullshit: targeting individuals who have naturally-acquired immunity & who don’t want a jab that doesn’t confer immunity, & want to be left alone.
Merry Christmas
seems fair to me!! LOL!
“Natural immunity”
“Covid vaccines”
You can only charge for one of those “cures”
Babylon Bee’s take on the next Pfizer press conference: –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsQjnv9Dwco
Do electric cars know the weight they are carrying? Do they adjust their distance parameters depending on whether/weather the car has four people and luggage compared to,. one person?,seen in most ev car ads?.. I did asked Toby this for a fiver but he was about to go on TV! an article about electric cars, so he didn’t have time to answer my £5 question! SO, can evs replace internal combustion vehicles like for like?
!
Capacity was a seller once upon a time! spacious boot, leg room, visibility, power, enough for the wholesome family
What ever happened to the real meaning of a personal transportation system?
A car, personal,
Freedom!
How did it turn into limited? Close? Near? 15 min city?