It’s a shift worth marking. New York Magazine is featuring an article called ‘Covid Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure‘. The authors are two excellent journalists, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, who have also written a new book called The Big Fail, which I have not read but intend to. The ascent of the book and thesis is hugely important, if only to further blunt the impact of Michael Lewis’s The Premonition, which came out in 2021 with the purpose of valorising the absolute worst of the lockdowners.
The worry at the time was that Lewis’s book, like The Big Short, would become a major movie that would codify lockdowns as the right way to deal with infectious disease. That does not seem to be happening, and the cleverly titled book by Nocera and McLean seems to assure that this will never happen. Thank goodness. This is progress. Be grateful when we see it. It is also a tremendous credit to all those who have been pushing the Nocera-McLean thesis since the spring of 2020.
Lockdowns were always an impossible means of pandemic management. We knew that from a century ago. It was not even controversial. The orthodoxy in public health survived even up to a few weeks before the lockdowns began.
Out of nowhere, settled wisdom was completely upended. Suddenly, as if straight from Orwell, lockdowns became “common sense mitigation measures”. Meanwhile this country and most other countries around the world were being utterly tortured by a crazed bureaucracy determined to master the microbial kingdom by bullying people and wrecking their businesses, schools, churches and lives.
If nothing else, this era proves for this generation the astonishing capacity of the human mind to undertake utterly insane policy experiments on a grand scale without the slightest evidence that they could ever succeed, even while they trample on all established norms of rights and liberties.
This is a revelation, at least to me. We’ve never seen anything like it in our lives. Speaking personally, this reality utterly shattered a worldview that I didn’t know I held: namely, I genuinely believed humanity was on a path, even an inevitable one, toward greater knowledge, learning and the embrace of freedom. After March 2020, I and everyone discovered otherwise. That was both intellectually and psychologically traumatic for me and for millions of others.
We are still figuring out how and why all this happened. In order to do that, we at least need a consensus that this was a terrible mistake. Even three and a half years later, we haven’t even had that. To be sure, it is very difficult to find defenders of lockdowns [in the U.S.] They have mostly evaporated into the hedges. Even those who pulled the trigger and defended them at the time are all denying that they had anything to do with them. My favourite: we never had a real lockdown.
Regardless, the mere appearance of the Nocera-McLean article takes us quite a distance to where we need to be at least for now. Yes, it is 42 months late, but we take progress wherever we can find it.
Just some quotes from the article:
One of the great mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s example. In the U.S. and the U.K. especially, lockdowns went from being regarded as something that only an authoritarian government would attempt to an example of ‘following the science’. But there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of policy failures of which to take stock. We do an accounting of many of them in our new book, The Big Fail. But one that looms as large as any, and remains in need of a full reckoning in the public conversation, is the decision to embrace lockdowns. While it is reasonable to think of that policy (in all its many forms, across different sectors of society and the 50 states) as an on-the-fly experiment, doing so demands that we come to a conclusion about the results. For all kinds of reasons, including the country’s deep political divisions, the complexity of the problem, and Covid’s dire human toll, that has been slow to happen. But it’s time to be clear about the fact that lockdowns for any purpose other than keeping hospitals from being overrun in the short term were a mistake that should not be repeated. While this is not a definitive accounting of how the damage from lockdowns outweighed the benefits, it is at least an attempt to nudge that conversation forward as the U.S. hopefully begins to recentre public-health best practices on something closer to the vision put forward by [Donald] Henderson.
You will notice the hedge here: “for any purpose other than keeping hospitals from being overrun.” Another way to put it: lockdowns are fine for rationing healthcare. There is reason to emphatically disagree. Hospitals wildly exaggerated how overrun they were. There were two hospitals in New York boroughs that had high traffic, but this was due to exigencies of ambulance contracts. The rest were largely empty as they were around the country. This was due to lockdowns that restricted medical services to Covid only even in places where there was no community spread, plus public fear of leaving the home.
(I had a conversation last week with the head of a company that sells ventilators and diagnostic equipment to hospitals in New York. He said that in the early months of lockdown, he had never seen hospitals so empty. This was confirmation to me of what we already knew.)
This whole subject needs some serious unpacking. To my knowledge, we still don’t know where the edicts came from to lock down hospitals all over the country. That is a research project all its own. In other words, carving out an exception for “overrun” hospitals is deeply dangerous: it only incentivises the lockdowners next time to game the reporting in a way that is favourable to more lockdowns. This is precisely what happened in the U.K., where the main and even only justification for lockdowns was the rationing of healthcare services.
So this proviso is actually dangerous in every way.
Now we must deal with another piece of this article that is far from correct. I quote (with emphasis added):
As the United States gains more and more distance from the Covid pandemic, the perspective on what worked, and what did not, becomes not only more clear, but more stark. Operation Warp Speed stands out as a remarkable policy success. And once the vaccines became available, most states did a good job of quickly getting them to the most vulnerable, especially elderly nursing-home residents.
The perspective is what we might be called the exogenous theory of the jab. The idea is that the lockdowns and masking and the whole apparatus of disease control exists in a separate system of ideological confusion, whereas the vaccine came from the outside to intervene but otherwise was not part of the planning apparatus.
I certainly once shared this view. About the vaccine in 2020, rumoured to come along at any point, I care next to nothing about it. I assumed it would be useless because my reading on the topic showed that a coronavirus is in the class of pathogens against which one cannot vaccinate.
That aside, there is a real danger associated with attempting to vaccinate your way out of pandemic. You can create the conditions that drive mutations even more, and introduce the prospect of what’s called original antigenic sin. What I had not anticipated was that the shot would be actually deeply dangerous, much less that it would be mandated.
The more research we do, the less plausible this theory of exogenous intervention is. From the very outset, the vaccine was planned and a huge part of the entire pandemic control agenda. And consider this question. Would it have been possible to drive the emergency use authorisation, indemnify the results from any liabilities, retain patents, elicit tax funds for development, plus push innumerable institutions to mandate the shots in absence of the national emergency, the frenzy, the demoralisation and the population-wide panic? I’ve asked many people this question, and the answer is always: no way.
There is no world in which Warp Speed would have taken hold absent the lockdowns. They are all part of the same system and policy. So, yes, it is strange for our authors to isolate the vaccine as good in the context of everything else which they label bad. Emergencies elicit bad actors and bad actions. They are all of a piece.
At this point, most of us have become jaded about media and messaging from mainstream sources. So an easy tag to put on this important article in New York Magazine is: limited hangout. Let’s admit failure where possible, concede mistakes and disasters along the way, even while sneaking in an approving and passing remark about the thing which in the end is the most important part of the whole epoch, namely the vaccine itself. That way, the rubes will be satisfied that there is some accountability going on, even while the biggest and deepest caper of them all gets away without a scratch.
There is no need here to chronicle the innumerable and now widely known failure of the shot. In any case, among those who still want to claim it to be a great success, their messaging is not long for this world. The evidence is too overwhelming, and felt in every part of society the world over.
What we have with this book and article is an important step. It is just one step. Lockdowns utterly shattered the protocols of public health, settled law and freedom itself all over the world. They wrecked myriad institutions, wrought an incredible economic and cultural crisis, demoralised the whole population and built up a leviathan of command and control that is not only not backing down but growing ever more. Far more will be required to utterly and completely repudiate the methods and madness of our epoch.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
We know why the don’t want to talk about it – because in the space of two days they went from going about their bisiness to being petrified and staying at home. I know this because I saw the drop-off in the humber of people using trains. And then shortly thereafter they would cover their face. Not as an infection control measure because usually they would cover their face, stick the covering in some sweaty pocket, and then put it back on their face when ordered to do so. And then of course disgard the mask on the pavement on the way home. They behaved like the debased lowlifes that they are. And deep down they know that the wages of cowardice is death a thousand times. They are still the same but their cowardice asks them to postpone their exposure as long as possible.
Indeed. The entire Corona fascism left undiscussed, ignored. Memory holed as many of us predicted. Why?
-most of them including Farage and Reform fully supported the narrative
-they all believe in fake flying viruses (from bats, birds etc)
-the utter devastation to freedom, society, families, our mental health, our laws and constitution are so painful, complicated and fascistic that it is easier just to pretend it didn’t happen
For me personally and many others, the Corona plandemic and fascism is a seminal defining moment in history. Everything that needs to be discussed about our freedom, rights, real science, real medicine, the fraud of virology and the stabs etc. is all there.
The fact that no one will discuss it publicly is just another symptom of how sick, debauched, ignorant and compliant society at large is and how corrupt, arrogant and self-serving are the elite and NHS.
Only Bridgen and a few other courageous knights stood and stand in the breach.
Joint Omerta innit. Obvious.
All parties (maybe with some Reform leaders to a lesser degree excepted, but remember Tice…) thoroughly complicit – “Well, I’ll not mention it if you don’t – phew, thank God for that”.
They don’t want to remind the sheep that they royally screwed the lot of them and human nature being what it is they’ll actually be grateful for that. Incredible, but that’s 80% of humanity for you.
Still, as the dead and injured pile up maybe a few will actually wake up.
Hey Starmer, I wonder how you’ll handle being the next water carrier for the RPTB come Bird Flu and Ukraine.
At least 20% of us will never obey.
Nor will we forgive nor forget.
At least 20% of us will never obey.
Yes about 20% of us are awake and critically rational. Maybe 10-20% on the edge, knowing like Neo, that something is wrong, but can’t quite convince themselves to swallow the red pill, probably were injured or know people dead from the LDs and stabs. Another 10% are open to some argumentation and ‘proof’ though they support the narrative. About 50% of the pop is full on retarded sheeple. Nothing can be done for them. They believe the fake news and fake science and are imo mentally ill though they classify themselves as rational-humanist-atheist-tolerants etc etc.
more are waking up every day, its just a very painful process as those of us who have been awake for some time, to have to unlearn everything that you believed from childhood, that the State and politicians were there to care for your best interests and the country, that the NHS was benign, that the BBC told the truth.To realise and accept that you have been lied to by them all, about everything, that at the root of what they do is driven by money, power and ambition for themselves and whatever is and was necessary will be done to achieve that, and that people are just meat puppets to be used up and thrown away. That’s tough it means you can only rely on yourself, and can trust hardly anyone. That’s too scary for most, its easier pretending that its a nice world, and that the powers that be care for you. But more are waking up, and for that we should celebrate.
Just consider the term ‘health securty agency’ and what it implies and what it essentially vandalises in terms of the deeper meaning of health. Of course ‘health’ has the same etyomological stem as whole, and holy, full of spirits, bushytailed. You can see this in greeting from northern and southern Europe. Health is damaged by any notion of a health security agency. And anyway they concoted this poison and understood what the public reaction would be and how they would use this to further the agenda. This is pure evil. Even Satan wouldn’t do this because he has more style. This is scientific reductionism in concert with moral nihilism, a true enemy of life.
Worked there on a Rona reporting project at the height of the scam. The data was all BS on what they showed on the fake news. No one in the Orwellian HS cared. The data was junk from source to report.
It was about the budgets, more profits, and more projects i.e. urine and faeces sniffing tech (test your waste, find a ‘pathogen’ lock down your house and street); cough-in-a-box (at the rail stn for eg. and be told through the analysis of your voice waves that you have Rona or sthg, must go home isolate etc etc).
No one in the HS cared about reality or morality. Follow those budgets.
Look at the lockdown and the behaviour exhibited as a sign of where we are in terms public consciousness. To be fair a lot of people who went along with it all are starting to question it now. It requires an adjustment of the frequency of spirit, the things that you find enjoyable have to change. It has its compensations. The world of truth and beauty is re-opened, you will discover your own tempo again. Things feel freer to release their characteristics. You can wear a leather jacket and it will smell of cow and that will be a good thing. It is the reverse engineering of the attempt to subsume us all into the digital.
Some people want to say that the Covid thing is overblown but I disagree. I have seen the symptoms and more importantly the ever decreasing gaps between reinfection. There is no putting it back in the bottle this is withus for the rest of the life of humankind and it is getting progressively worse. I do have faith that our understanding will one day reach a point where we can remove it but this is a very long time in the future. Just be prepared to be debilitated and sub-optimal for a very long time. You can fight most things buit one thing you really can’t fight is a lack of energy and they know that.
It is an attack on a certain type of tissue. It is like the upper palate of your mouth and the lining of your heart. This is the reason that we are encouraged to take measures against tonsilitis. This bacterium affects the tonsils but if allowed t spread it can go to the heart. This pathogen shares this characterisitic. And it is only just getting off the ground in terms of lethality. This might sound paranoid or alarmist but it really isn’t. Serious people affirm this to be the case. This is what they did to us. No amount of revenge can stop the damage. It really is an ongoing serious battle. We will be sicker in a years time than we are now.
They don’t want to discuss it, because there was no opposition in the normal political field at the time. Only in places like this did any real criticism develop. It will take a long time to establish more of the truth about the methods used, and highlight the risk of similar tactics. Not just health related ones, but the whole area of excess use of bureaucratic force against the general public, perhaps based on an invented hazard of some kind.
The simple reason for the silence is the transferrance of wealth that occurred during that period. Trillions upwards with small business being destroyed. Your business is never coming back. Your standard of living isn’t coming back it is going to get a lot worse. Obviously they don’t want to talk about it.
They were all in it together, and Joe Public either still thinks there was a pandemic or finds it too painful to face the awful truth that they have been had and that those that “rule” us are evil liars. I never expected it to be discussed, not now, not in my lifetime.
“They were all in it together…”
As stated previously, there are very few, maybe only a handful of those who sat in the H of C in the last term who do not have blood on their hands. We are not talking minor crimes. For the most part we are talking mass murder. The only ones not deemed guilty are the ones who actually spoke out. Those who said or did nothing are guilty.
That is FACT.
You should listen to ‘Murder Most Foul’ by Dylan. It describes the JFK assasinaton but also describes the rape of our society step by step.
There’s a party going on behind the grassy knoll.
The protective love of one brother for another means a lot and they destroyed his brothers too.
At least Reform ARE talking about it now, even if they didn’t 4 years ago.
The rest of the regime are just desperate to bury the whole scamdemic
Slightly Off-T
I found this on Dr Mike Yeadon’s Telegram channel and if Dr Yeadon finds it interesting then so should I. Difficult not to conclude that what John Coleman wrote in 1993 was clearly based on facts. What is playing out now is exactly as he forecast.
Disturbing.
https://www.henrymakow.com/2021/06/john-coleman-4-billion-useless-eaters.html
Good article, and Markow looking at some of his Covid tweets around 2020 were ahead of the curve.
Thanks Ron.
I don’t piss about. The point is in that the time to come you will have friends and enemies. Maybe you knew them all along. Like JC said, depart from me I never knew you, you practitioners of lawlessness. . You either grasp it like a nettle or you die.
some years ago I read of a fan having a players face tattooed on him in the belief he would join his club; the player never joined. Those who took the Death Jab and those who illegally incarcerated nations, via the use of lies and coercion, are in the same boat as that fan. They did something unbelievably shameful and stupid and, therefore, refuse to talk about it.
I warned my sister, who had been fighting cancer, not to take the Death Jabs. She’d beaten the cancer and, guess what, it came back worse than before. I recently mentioned an article by an eminent Oncologist which stated this is increasingly common and is due to the Jabs. She is now back in the regular checks phase having been through Chemo once again. As you can guess, she won’t discuss it.
Will she take the drugs again next time? Will the majority take the drugs or new drugs next time? I think we all, on here, know the answer to that one.
The banksters called for an economic restructuring at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA in August 2019 as the world’s financial system (the shit) was about to hit fan. Lockdowns were the result.
They are also now completely silent about their operation ‘warpspeed’. Safe and effective?
My conclusion is that they know it was all wrong, we know they know and they know we know they know…
More importantly, no politician wants to talk about bodily autonomy. I guess it is so unimportant, they don’t feel it is an issue.
Politicians may not want to talk about it…but people do. I’m currently in Tenerife for a week..already several people have brought it up in conversation. It’s not going to go away quickly.
They don’t want to talk about it because to do that would draw attention to the massive damage they have done to the country and its people, both Parties plus the Lib Dems are complicit, their agreed Covid response, bankrupted the Country, introduced worklessness and living off state handouts as the career of choice for millions, they have encouraged and caused the weakness and breakdown in mental health which is further hampering the nation, they put people who were needed to do the jobs we don’t want to do, i.e wiping the mouths and bottoms of the elderly, out of work due to refusing an experimental drug, which they are now doing their utmost to deny its consequences. All this and more they the Conservatives, Labour and the MSM did. You think they want to remind people of the destruction they visited on us, and then try and persuade us that they know how to rebuild it all? Not a chance, they are neither ashamed, or sorry they are like Cats in the litter tray.
“We changed our behaviour on a sixpence listening to the modelling of a discredited epidemiologist….”.
He’s not an epidemiologist, just a previously discredited physical modeller – check out his thesis that got his degree.
Why anyone listens to this dangerous twerp is beyond me! To my shame he comes from my local town of Llanidloes in Mid-Wales.
Democracy does not work.
‘”A few months after the publication of A State of Fear, a government advisor told me that the behavioural scientists are “very pleased with themselves” and “Britain is seen as leading the way in how to manipulate people. There is skipping in Whitehall corridors.”‘
https://www.thefreemind.co.uk/p/the-news-is-being-nudged