Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), has no idea how many of the adverse events reported to its database are actually caused by the Covid vaccines.
Despite refusing to answer straightforward questions about how many reports it has assessed for causality, the TGA has confirmed that it does not have the information required to properly assess all adverse events (AEs) reported to its safety surveillance database, the DAEN (Database of Adverse Event Notifications).
Yet, there is a widespread perception that the TGA assesses all reports, particularly of serious AEs, for causality.
This is the stated belief of Country Medical Director of Pfizer Australia and New Zealand, Dr. Krishan Thiru, who told a Senate Committee Hearing on August 3rd 2023, “The TGA carefully analyses all of the reports that it receives and makes a determination if there is a link to the therapeutic product or not.”
But by the TGA’s own admission, this is not the case.
Following Dr. Thiru’s statement to the Senate, I asked the TGA to specify how many Covid vaccine adverse event reports it has assessed, and how many it has determined as causally linked to the vaccines.
The TGA expertly deflected, responding (emphasis mine):
The TGA has received over 139,000 adverse event reports for COVID-19 vaccines. It is common for the reports to have limited information on which to conduct a causality assessment. For this reason, almost all reports received by the TGA are assigned a causality of ‘possible’, even where the reporter provides limited information, or information that suggests the adverse event was not related to vaccination. This enables the TGA to include a broad dataset in our statistical analyses which are used to identify signals. The TGA’s COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring system has delivered clear results for the Australian public, including first in the world action on several emerging safety concerns.
This wordy response confirms that, contrary to Dr. Thiru’s claim, the TGA does not assess all reports to determine if there is (or is not) a link to the therapeutic product because it does not have the information required to do so.
Rather, the TGA assigns “almost all reports” a causality status of ‘possible’, neither confirming nor denying causality. This allows enough uncertainty for the TGA to maintain that high AE reporting rates cannot be construed to indicate causality, while also avoiding the burden of proving that the reported AEs are not causally linked to the Covid vaccine products.
As the TGA failed to answer my specific questions, I went back a second time, asking, “How many AEs have you assessed and how many did you determine to be causally linked to the Covid vaccines?”
This time, the response was even wordier, while managing to say nothing at all:
The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), which is part of the Department of Health and Aged Care, has robust processes for monitoring the safety of medicines and vaccines. Many of these processes have been enhanced dramatically for COVID-19 vaccines, making this the most intense safety monitoring of therapeutic goods ever conducted in Australia.
Enormous amounts of real-world data, based on more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered globally, continue to show that the benefits of vaccination strongly outweigh the potential risks, including rare serious adverse events. This is supported by the recent statement by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA), which is available here.
The Department has made extensive information available to the public about the COVID-19 vaccines, which is available here. The TGA also publishes comprehensive regulatory information on its website here. Since March 2021, the TGA has published a regular COVID-19 vaccine safety report, which is available here.
In addition, the Department has provided detailed technical responses through appearances before the Senate Estimates Community Affairs Legislation Committee (transcripts and written answers to Questions on Notice are available here).
I asked the TGA my questions a third time, this time with clear directions, in red. Additionally, I requested that if the TGA was refusing to answer my questions, that it provides an explanation as to why.
After following up a further three times, I received the following reply from a Department of Health spokesperson:
We worked with our colleagues at the TGA to provide these two responses and we won’t be providing anything further for this query.
The TGA outright refuses to tell the Australian public how many of the AEs reported to its safety surveillance database have been assessed for causality, and how many have been determined to be linked (or not) to the Covid vaccine products.
A “horribly conflicted” business model
The unwillingness of the TGA to even explain why it won’t answer my straightforward questions and the lengths it went to in obfuscating to protect Dr. Thiru, who appears to have misled the Senate (whether deliberately or not) raises a new question: Who does the TGA work for? The Australian public? Or the drug sponsors?
A much-cited investigation into drug regulator funding conducted by Maryanne Demasi for the British Medical Journal found that the TGA receives more industry funding than any other regulator in the world, at 96%. More than nine out of every 10 applications for new drugs are approved by the regulator.
In the above-mentioned Senate Hearing, after Pfizer’s Dr. Thiru asserted (falsely) that the TGA assesses every reported AE to determine causality, Liberal Senator Alex Antic asked the panel representing the TGA, “does the TGA accept that it is horribly conflicted by virtue of that industry-funded model?”
The TGA panel disputed Senator Antic’s assertion, with Professor Tony Lawler, who replaced outgoing Professor John Skerritt as TGA head in June this year, countering that the portion of the TGA’s funding coming from industry is “somewhat lower” than 96%.
However, Lawler appears to be quibbling over 2%. In an email to a member of the public in September 2022, a TGA staffer stated that 94% of its $210 million annual budget is funded by industry.
Little to no follow-up of injuries and deaths
As at August 20th, the TGA states that there were 139,404 reported AEs in relation to Covid vaccine products, at a rate of two reports per 1,000 doses administered. For the average Australian who has received three doses of vaccine, that’s a six people per 1,000 reporting rate. For people onto their fifth dose, that’s a one person per 100 reporting rate.
But Covid vaccine-injured scientist Rado Faletic says that proper follow-up of these reports by the TGA is rare. Faletic co-founded COVERSE, a charity dedicated to supporting Australians who have been injured by the Covid vaccines, after determining from personal experience that the TGA was not taking necessary and appropriate action on reported AEs.
Faletic’s Covid vaccine injury was one of the first to be covered in Australian mainstream news, in June 2022. He said that the TGA seemed “simply uninterested” in investigating his symptoms, telling news.com.au:
I’ve done 50 rounds with the TGA on this.
They’ve said, “We can find no safety signals”, which I think is disingenuous if not outright lying. In my small personal circle I know over a dozen people with different long vax problems, [ranging from] ongoing headaches, memory problems or brain fog to some people who were basically bedridden for months.
More than a year on, and after engaging with many other Covid vaccine-injured Australians through his work with COVERSE, Falectic’s view has not changed. Learning of the TGA’s response to my questions about AE report assessment, Faletic told me:
Meaningful follow-up or investigation by the TGA seems far rarer than very serious and highly debilitating health conditions caused by these vaccines. It’s simply illogical that agencies such as the TGA can make claims about the safety of these products on the basis of not conducting timely investigations of very serious health issues that are strongly correlated with vaccination.
While the TGA won’t say how many AEs it has assessed for causality, it is more forthcoming about the number of death reports that have been assessed and assigned causality. From the Covid vaccine safety report dated August 24th 2023, “The TGA has identified 14 reports where the cause of death was linked to vaccination from 997 reports received and reviewed”.
However, it is unclear what the TGA means by “reviewed” when parents of deceased children say that the TGA has done no follow-up after their childrens’ post-vaccination deaths were reported to the DAEN.
One such parent is Raelene, mother of 23-year-old Caitlin Gotze, who died six weeks after suffering a bad reaction to her Pfizer vaccination. Eventually, the Coroner officiated the cause of death as asthma. However, Raelene says that Caitlin never had asthma, and that no one from the TGA has ever contacted her to gather more information on Caitlin’s reported death. Raelene needs to raise $20,000 to reopen the coronial inquest into Caitlin’s sudden death.
Sophie and Bruce, parents of 24-year-old Amy Sedgewick, tell a similar story. Amy’s untimely death followed nerve damage and other complications that onset with her Pfizer shots. As reported in the Australian in March 2023:
Bruce reported Amy’s condition, and its suspected link to the vaccine, to the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s adverse events database in November 2021, five months before her death. He received nothing more than a pro forma automated response.
As far as they are aware, their daughter’s decline and death has never been individually assessed by the TGA, the commonwealth authority tasked with monitoring vaccine side-effects and deaths.
“World class” safety monitoring safeguards Big Pharma reputation and profits
The TGA says that it has “delivered clear results for the Australian public, including first-in-the-world action on several emerging safety concerns”. By this we can assume it’s referring to its eventual public acknowledgment that the AstraZeneca vaccine had unquestionably killed 13 Australians, and that Covid vaccines can be associated with myocarditis and pericarditis in ‘rare’ cases.
However, despite withdrawing other medicines from the market after a single reported death, the TGA did not withdraw its provisional approval of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine, Vaxzevria. When the therapeutic became unavailable in March 2023, a spokesperson for the Department of Health advised me that in fact it was AstraZeneca who decided to discontinue the product in Australia, not the TGA, and that Vaxzevria remained provisionally approved.
The TGA maintains that there have been no Pfizer deaths and only one Moderna death since the Covid vaccine rollout began. But how would it know? A systematic review of 325 autopsies following deaths related to Covid vaccination up to May 18th 2023 found that, “a total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination”.
But when asked if the TGA advises families of the deceased or medical professionals to have autopsies performed on individuals who died after Covid vaccination, a spokesperson for the TGA stated, “The TGA does not request autopsies, coronial investigations or make formal determinations of the cause of death”, adding that in most cases, a health professional or a coroner will determine the cause of death. In other words, the TGA has no process in place to ensure that a procedure key to determining cause of death in recently vaccinated persons is being undertaken.
The TGA hid child deaths reported in relation to Covid vaccines for fear that “disclosure of the documents could undermine public confidence”.
The TGA says that it constantly searches for safety signals, but refuses to say how often, by what methods, or to share what it has found when asked. Below is an excerpt from correspondence between myself and the TGA spanning several months, in which I asked a very specific set of questions about proportional reporting ratio (PRR) analysis. The TGA sent a paragraph in reply not answering the questions, and then a chain ensued with me reiterating my questions and the TGA reiterating the reply that didn’t answer the questions. Eventually, my request was denied both via media and Freedom of Information (FOI) processes.
Former head of the TGA, Professor John Skerrit, denied that cardiac arrest is a safety signal for Covid vaccines. Yet here is the TGA’s own PRR data on cardiac arrest, graphed (FOI 4032). It shows a PRR of over 2, which is significant because it was decided at a meeting of the Advisory Committee for Vaccines in 2021 that any denominator over 1 would constitute a safety signal.
True extent of harm unknown
The true extent of Covid vaccine harm in Australia is as yet unknown. Vaccine safety surveillance data from the ‘control group’ of Western Australia (WA) during 2021, when the state had blanket vaccination but almost no Covid, suggests that it’s worse than the TGA safety reports indicate.
Concurrent with the Covid vaccine rollout, WA saw a 24-fold increase in reporting rate of AEs per 100,000 doses compared to all other vaccines combined. Background rates of myocarditis and pericarditis increased by 35% and 25% respectively. More than half of those who reported AEs presented at hospital.
There are now over 3,000 papers published in the scientific literature demonstrating mechanisms of Covid vaccine harm.
A peer-reviewed study of mRNA booster effects found that one in 35 participants sustained myocardial damage, confirming earlier reported indications that subclinical injury is occurring but not being picked up in routine testing.
Repeat dosing of the mRNA vaccines in particular has been associated with immune tolerance, immune suppression, immune imprinting and increased infection rates, all of which will likely take a long time to play out and be properly detected and measured at population level.
It is quite possible that, just as promises that the vaccine stayed at the injection site turned out to be false, promises that it won’t integrate with human DNA are also false. New scientific findings on synthetic DNA contamination in the mRNAs, particularly in relation to the SV40 promoter, which is associated with cancer, are concerning.
The TGA, it would seem, is out of its depth, at least as far as public safety is concerned.
Understandably, Australians are now taking matters into their own hands – the lawsuits have begun. A class action lawsuit alleging that the TGA did not fulfill its duty to properly regulate the Covid vaccines is seeking compensation on behalf of Covid vaccine-injured Australians. The action has signed on over 1,000 members, and registration remains open for a limited time.
Contribute to Raelene’s GiveSendGo fund to raise $20,000 for an inquest into Caitlin Goetze’s death.
Rebekah Barnett reports from Western Australia. She holds a BA in Communications. This article first appeared on her Substack page Dystopian Down Under. Subscribe here. Follow Rebekah on X and Instagram.
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The WHO captured by China?
In Feb 2020 the 3 biggest funders of the WHO were:
1. The US
2. The Gates Foundation I.e. Bill Gates)
3. GAVI (I.e. Bill Gates.
When Trump threatened to cut off WHO funding, Gates offered to pick up the slack.
In March 2020 Gates did the rounds on the major news channels, calling for lockdowns.
Any attempt to establish how and why the world adopted lockdowns is incomplete without establishing exactly what Bill Gates was up to in those critical first months.
As far as I am concerned Gates is evil incarnate. Why anyone would allow a computer geek to dictate to us about our health is frankly ludicrous!
Correct. Nobody like Gates does what he has out of the goodness of his heart. If he had, he would not have imposed his own uninformed view, but sought the wide range of highly knowledgeable experts including those who disagree with all these pandemic responses, including lockdowns, vaccines, masks, distancing, etc., and did everything in the open.
But don’t you know that Gates is a world expert on viruses, his products are full of them and you can download patches to ‘solve’ the problem.
The true motivations behind the scientists who drove the utterly unscientific lockdowns and related interventions puzzled me from the start.
However, the penny did slowly drop. Think about the people behind the ‘NPI’s: Fauci, Farrar (Welcome Foundation), Vallance etc. All of these along with the hugely implicated Peter Daszak – as Will points out – were involved in the covert conspiracy to cover up the Wuhan lab leak that almost certainly occurred. The reason they were so keen to cover that up was because they were implicated in the history of the gain of function research. I think that history will eventually prove that they not only knew about it, but were involved. We know that’s true of Daszak, it is likely true of Fauci and therefore likely also involved all who participated in the Wuhan cover up emails.
Theoretically they had a lot to lose. Implicated in the creation of Covid-19 (a virus looking for an existing but unused vaccine technology) even the small chance of a truly devastating pandemic would end up being laid at their feet. So move to lockdowns. There was nothing for them to lose. They wouldn’t suffer, and even if there was only a minimal chance they would work, if they did, it reduced the chances of career-devastating blame heading in their direction.
Of course, the NPI’s had no meaningful effect, Wuhan hasn’t yet been really pinned on them, and instead of career opprobrium, knighthoods were the order of the day. It’s a funny old world. . .
I think the lab leak theory explains a lot.
Agree the rest doesn’t look like a single script, but I think there are overlapping scripts and directions of thinking – technocracy, safetyism, idiot populations convinced they can be “kept safe” by the government, general drift towards collectivism and away from individual freedom and responsibility, greed, the Medical Industrial Complex, elites liking the control.
How would this fit in with the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 being around in the last quarter of 2019 in Italy and elsewhere including the USA?
It doesn’t fit in at all, so best not to mention it. Remember China is the fall guy here and we don’t want people spoiling the blame game.
Not just in Italy ….. I live in Dorset, England and I’m pretty sure I had it in November 2019, along with a number of friends here. In the locality is an International School where most of the students are Chinese who returned to the school after the 2-week half-term break at the end of October/early November 2019. At the time people were saying “there’s a nasty virus circulating.”
I have absolutely no doubt that it was present in the U.K. in October November 2019 simply from the patients I saw and my conversation usually included the phrase “there’s a nasty virus going round”. This would coincide with the military games being ground zero. If it was present in Italy in September 2019 and possibly in the summer of 2019 in the USA then that surely moves the focus away from Wuhan as the initial source to the USA?
Will, none of this changes the fact that national governments are in thrall to an unelected global power base.
…which is a problem.
…which is a problem
You seem a master of understatement, as it’s actually a genocidal nightmare. Already it is likely too late for those who naively believed in the innate goodness of genocidal oligarchs and their agents in governments.
“What drove each of these people to get behind the closing down of society as the ‘solution’ to a respiratory virus?”
I think Mike Yeadon’s explanation – “convergent opportunism” is probably the likeliest.
The virus most likely was engineered and escaped from a lab. And there was clearly a certain group of people who have for some time been aiming to engineer a pandemic and use it as a vehicle to push vaccines primarily for profit but with an element of population engineering involved.
The response started out mainly as an attempt by those responsible to cover things up.
A lot of other bad actors spotted the opportunity to move forward their agendas on the back of the “crisis”
It all gained a life of its own and got completely out of hand.
There was an element of “mass formation” going on whereby even those responsible at a senior level got carried away by the hysteria.
Governments everywhere are run by people who have little background in science, don’t understand basic statistics, and were therefore putty in the hands of the Big Pharma and Big Science lobbyists.
Very good point about the desire to get the toxic mrna gunk into people. There is an ESPN video from end Oct/early Nov. 2019, some conference or another, with a group of ‘scientists’ on stage, including Pfauci. He goes on at length about how wonderful mrna is and more or less describes his wet dream of hoping that a lovely bird flu virus or some such would emanate from Asia so he can “blow up” the use of this toxin. From Pfauci’s lips to Satan’s ears it would appear.
Yes there was some kind of “disaster planning” conference which simulated a pandemic remarkably similar to the one which actually happened, only a few months before it happened.
A remarkable coincidence.
So I suspect the whole thing was planned by the bad actors in the virus/vaccine community, but the virus escaped (or was let out) earlier than planned without the whole response having been properly planned and that’s when the chaos ensued.
That would also explain the change of emphasis from “stay calm” to “PANIC!”.
I reckon in the beginning not all governments knew it had escaped from a lab, and of course those responsible for the virus were denying it, so govts headed down the “stay calm” route – but then at some point the bad actors decided to let govts know behind the scenes that actually it had come from a lab and that it’s a very nasty virus and they really should panic.
A lot of the other bad things which happened beyond that point were probably primarily down to grifters just taking advantage of the situation to flog PPE, launder government money, advance their socialist / political / ecological / technological agendas.
Indeed, kinda like how the mon(k)eypox outbreak was simulated less than a year before it happened as well.
Say there was a laboratory leak in the USA or at another facility in a NATO country rather than China. What if Wuhan became the epicentre because the virus was taken into China at the military games in October 2019? What could the political landscape have made of that in this scenario?
The US and China were clearly both heavily involved in the birth of this virus and therefore culpable for everything that happened since – but they are locked in a deadly embrace whereby they can’t blame the other because of all the inconvenient truths that might come out about their own involvement.
In other words, they both checkmated each other, and are now perpetually stuck lying in the bed they had made together.
Is that the reason almost every country followed China’s policy of lockdown? If Donald Trump had been re-elected would there or could there have been a different outcome? This is going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory!
Overall, I see no indication of a grand plan from the earliest days in which all are working from a common script to a common goal.
The WEF had rehearsed it, in Event 201; if evidence of a grand plan is sought, I might start there. Maybe, it’s just that not everyone in the bureaucracies was attached to the WEF, so initially there were indeed some independent initiatives and it took time for the message to percolate through? In the UK, the Gates-funded media seemed to take control of policy, howling for lockdowns. By May we had Tony Blair announcing his embedded teams in more than 20 countries.
The proposed WHO pandemic treaty is an attempt to ensure that next time, there will indeed be a grand plan from the start.
Oh yes. Whether all this was planned from the start is one thing, but political megalomaniacs have certainly got a taste for the totalitarian powers they can derive from ‘medical emergencies’ and they want more, more, more.
Vaccines are the problem, not the cure
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/vaccines-are-the-problem-not-the-cure/
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It is one thing to question why we embarked on this
radical newmedieval disease management system (the annals of history show many instances of the simplistic reasoning of locking away people and strapping bits of cloth in front of their mouths to ward off disease – it may well have been radical in its global and extreme implementation, new it was not).My question is why did countries like Germany and NL switch from their more softly-softly approach that was closer to Sweden’s than to Italy or Spain’s? It was clear by the autumn of 2020 that none of the approaches had worked to eliminate the virus (which the morons should have expected and spent the summer of 2020 preparing the health service for, instead of spending billions on setting up pointless (but every lucrative) testing and track and trace systems). Indeed, by autumn 2020 it was clear that the countries that locked down the hardest not only fared worst in terms of economic devastation, they also fared worst in terms of hospitalisation and deaths.
Why did countries that had initially followed, more or less, the best course of action, abandon it and set upon law-breaking initiatives that had not only failed throughout history, but had demonstrably failed more recently in the first wave in March 2020? I shall never forgive the Dutch government for its intentional trampling on the constitution by placing an entire nation under house arrest at night for approx. 8 weeks in the winter of 2021, when they knew 100% that it would achieve absolutely nothing – a point that was confirmed on 3 separate occasions by the current health minister (rather amazing he was honest about the fact that the incarceration made no difference). They first tried to introduce the house arrest in November 2020 and the lame reason given by the head of the OMT was “so that people would understand the sense of urgency” – so literally nothing to do with any type of health benefit, but purely a matter of manipulation and illegal population control. But why the change? My opinion has always been that NL took orders from Brussels (just as Rutte is doing now with regard to the nitrogen/destruction of farmers issue).
What was the reason Brussels tried to impose draconian measures across Europe? To gain back the facade of European leadership it lost within hours when all countries made their own pandemic choices? To strip away national rights even further? To make sure all countries would be on board with the “coerced vaccination is the only solution” approach? The approach where Von der Leyen purchased enough pfisser vaxxes to poke every European 2x, even though in April 2021 the EU had already secured enough of the poison to give everyone more than 2 pokes? How did she know in April 2021 that 2 pokes would not be enough, why is no one asking that question? Why is no one asking why she agreed to a 25% mark-up on vaxxes that were not needed in the first place?
This thing may have started out as a global panic with most countries adopting the monkey see, monkey do approach, but subsequent violations of constitutions and fundamental rights were, imo, coordinated and followed with much clearer minds.
Governments panicked and each tried to outdo the other in terms of restrictions to be seen to ‘do something’. So, in effect, if France locked up one million people, Germany would lock up three million and Scotland would lock up five million. It was like a match dropped on dry scrubland: the whole world went up in flames.
Another issue, I suspect, is that the likes of Fauci knew what sort of viruses were being cultivated in Wuhan and no one knew which one had been (deliberately) leaked. So Fauci, Daszack and others started to cover up the experiments that had been refused DARPA funding. If people begin to see these virology labs for what they really are: bioweapons facilities creating deadly diseases masquerading as medical facilities looking for cures to those diseases, there would be a purge throughout the global science community.
With the world locked up and economies tanking, the WEF, the investment banks and corporations, race-baiters, transgender activists and climate activists took the opportunity to push their agendas on traumatised populations. Behavioural programming experts got involved, hence masking people was pushed. Masks were there to intimidate: ‘I’m wearing one because I’m a good person! Why aren’t you wearing one?’
At the end of the day, follow the money. This stinks of dodgy lab financing, greased palms, paid activists, cover ups and people given backhanders to look the other way.
Hmmm. Two articles in two days (https://dailysceptic.org/2022/07/21/the-wefs-illusion-of-mastery-is-as-much-a-fantasy-as-paranoid-conspiracy-theories-about-the-great-reset/) that appear to be persuading readers that there is no globally coordinated Great Reset. I do hope DS isn’t being somehow influenced – I don’t believe they are, but nothing’s off the table in current times.
There is nothing that I’ve read in either of these two articles that make any sense to me other than if there was a globally coordinated campaign. Occam’s Razor points the way, and any other theory is trying to make a smooth canvas out of a patchwork quilt. All global leaders following the same totalitarian actions at exactly the same time, every government issuing the same words (e.g. Build Back Better), each dictator issuing totalitarian measures in almost perfect lockstep with other dictators, each dictator knowing the stats., knowing the real risk; we must remember these people KNEW there was very little risk from the so-called virus (hence the xmas parties etc.). There is also the actual public manifesto of course – the book “The Great Reset”. Nope, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.
DS – in the spirit of true journalism (of which you have been an ambassador over the last couple of years), how about a counter-narrative article? One which argues the case for a more malevolent explanation to the Orwellian times of the last 2+ years?
Toby’s always been sceptical of any conspiracy around the WEF and COVID-19. James Delingpole thinks the other way. Both views have merits. I think it’s a combination of the two extremes: incompetence and panicked cover-ups, alongside opportunistic organisations attempting to create a new fascist-run society out of the chaos.
Sure, but this one’s by Will, whose always seemed on the fence to me (maybe slightly more on the Great Reset side, but hard to tell). My belief is that an opportunity was identified very early on – probably before the UK went into lockdown – and events were set in motion for global social and economic change. The identical behaviour and phrases being used was/is just way too coincidental for it to be a coincidence. They had a plan that they had previously roleplayed many times over and they saw a small window to make their wet dream a reality. The rest is history. We will see, but I think the people that do not believe there is anything malevolent under foot will find themselves simply renaming The Great Reset to something like… ‘The Financial Revolution’ or something. That way they can refuse to listen to the inevitable told you so’s.
The Chinese people buy western products when they can. In practise they look up to the west, so for the CCP to be able to say “Look, the west is following our lead!” is a strong signal to the population that the CCP is doing it right.
Sounds highly plausible Will.
I’m prompted to comment already and I’ve only got as far as Will’s sentence about China being sincere in its use of total lockdown to fight Covid and that they really want to fight the disease. I love Will’s articles and he’s been amazing, but I really do think this is naive. I would suggest that the CCP are simply trying to cull their population. They haven’t been trying to prevent disease at all – viz shoving people who test positive into huge warehouse-type quarantine centres with no isolation or medical care (Unherd did a video with a Ukrainian girl in such a place a while back). It was as if they wanted Covid to spread among these people. I cannot attribute any good motives to what China (or most other countries) is doing. Bring on more like president Bolsonaro!
Your presumption wrt China omits the possibility of population control and the various “conspiracy” theories suggesting that this is all part of a scheme to reduce the world’s population. What is your view on this and do you see any persuasive evidence of this?
Super piece of writing, I’m more and more admiring of Will as a stylist, must memorize at least part of this one.
There is an additional factor at work here, self delusion. China is a fanatical regime shaped by Mao’s cultural revolution and a narrative that the Party leadership can not be questioned. The West should have known better. Instead they acted like rabbits caught in headlights. How many of the world’s politicians and scientists, even those who now say we should never lockdown again, cling to the notion that it was the right thing to do at the time? Almost all of them. They can not admit to themselves that they made a mistake and why would they when so many are willing to keep the myth alive whilst continuing to depict those of us with more than a single braincell as lockdown deniers who refused to follow “the science”. Even though ” the science” amounted to little more than modelling (ie guesswork) and lobbying from health and social care systems that are not fit for purpose.
An excellent piece from Will.
But there are some awkward facts that need to be considered, when trying to fathom the CCP’s intentions.
First, the well recorded (by Western ‘correspondents’) Covid Theatre in the streets of Wuhan. ‘Business’ type men with briefcase dropping dead in the street. Never seen elsewhere. Apartment block entrances welded closed whilst shouting and screaming from inside. Allegedly screaming ‘it’s all fake’.
Then there’s the documented fact that internal travel was banned, whilst planes full of Chinese flew all around the world and especially to Lombardy, the key Belt and Road terminus in Europe. Followed by the mayor of Milan’s famous “go hug a Chinaman” campaign.
Only a straw in the wind, but, as it happened, my wife and I flew into Singapore for the nights 25-27 January 2020, to break the trip Auckland to Heathrow. And to enjoy the Chinese New Year. Coming from New Zealand, we hadn’t heard much about a ‘new’ virus and, what we had heard was that there was no human to human transmission. (Thanks WHO & CPP).
The authorities in Singapore had ditched that idea, but were encouraging people to keep one meter apart, wiping down handrails, measuring forehead temperature before allowing entry to museums, a bit more mask wearing on the metro, but only just noticeable. Loads and loads of people packed into the parks to enjoy the son et lumiere. (Meter apart be blowed.)
The taxi driver taking us to the airport on the 28th pointed out the Pandemic hospital, filling with patients for the first time since being built after Sars 1 a decade earlier.
I’m not sure that any of this supports Will’s thesis.
My conspiracy theory? Wuhan Institute of Virology developed this thing and released it deliberately to thin out the economically unproductive. With (at least initially) a preference for male victims.
OK, my conspiracy theory interests no-one. But just consider the old question.
Cui Bono?
And you think Bill Gates would push back against an idea that would reduce the numbers of old men (excluding the Billionaires, naturally)? Wrecking the West a bonus?
Someone earlier suggested our Bill listens to “experts”.
Actually, I remember reading a long piece that Bill Gates had set on an expert team to advise him how best a modern economy could run just on Ruinable Energy.
Experts reported back that this was absolutely impossible without fantastic advances in technology.
You think Billy Boy listened?
I watched as the media started the fear mongering long before any lockdowns. This included all of the staged pictures from China of welding people’s door closed and people dropping dead in the streets. This was all then picked up by bloggers and widely distributed on social media. You just cannot ignore the panic that was created by this barrage of fear mongering. People who were literally screaming at politicians to do something.
The biggest culprit in my mind is main stream media who created the panic in populations. It became a huge cash flow and More so after governments decided to lockdown and spend billions on propaganda to promote their policies. You just cannot ignore the influence of media and the panicked population in starting this.
Thank you for this excellent summary.
I agree with your thought process, which is in line with a discussion I had with a high ranking UK civil servant. The UK government panicked.
My follow up question is why they used these NPIs again and again after the first one? They had time to analyse, do a cost-benefit analysis, listen to other scientists, look at real world data. It appears they choose not to. Instead they inflicted massive damage to society as a whole.
Why? Hysterical groupthink by scientifically incompetent politicians led on by quasi scientists with axes to grind and no responsibility for their predictions.
Unravelling the politics of what’s happening seems an impossible task, especially when there is so much uncertainty around modern virology and epidemiology. So much is hidden behind smoke and mirrors with pseudo science, manipulated data and ever changing definitions to suit the narrative. It is not just a question of following the money but also the evil ideology of wealthy globalists that most normal humans struggle to accept has taken hold of our institutions. Read “The real Anthony Fauci” by Robert Kennedy Jr and ask yourself why Fauci doesn’t take him to court.