Do you think we need a Pentagon for public health to wage war on new pathogens? Not likely, and that is based on recent experience. The pandemic planners wrecked our lives. We have yet to recover.
Cities are still suffering from business closures, learning losses and school absenteeism, and rampant crime. Trust in once-revered institutions is at an all-time low, as is public health generally (depression, obesity and substance abuse). We could go on and on.
One man thinks the problem is that we didn’t go far enough. Next time, he says, we should go much farther in locking down. No travel. Jail doctors for dissenting. Force everyone to accept whatever pharma dishes out. Censor all critics. Nonprofits who object should be targeted by the IRS. All dissenters should face “severe consequences”.
That’s because “the Western focus on personal liberty above all else can kill”. You might say that sounds fascistic. He admits it too: “The longer I cover disease, the more of a public health fascist I become.”
And that sentence is what is weirdly wonderful (if chilling) about the book The Wisdom of Plagues by Donald G. McNeil. As outrageously wrong as the book is about nearly everything, it is brilliantly written, engaging, gripping and frank. It’s his way, and it is probably why he was fired from the New York Times. This is his apologia pro vita sua.
You see, McNeil was the very first English-language voice who on February 27th 2020, in a NYT podcast, alerted the whole of the Western media as to what was coming: lockdown.
It was not so much a warning but a promise. The public health wisdom of one 100 years was about to be tossed in the fire. In its place would come a new experiment in totalitarian control of our lives.
It was McNeil who penned the February 28th 2020, article ‘To Take on the Coronavirus, Go Medieval On It‘. Suffice it to say that he bears a great deal of responsibility for what happened, given his status and position.
Now of course he repudiates everything the U.S. did on grounds that we only had a soft lockdown. China did it the right way with its “airtight lockdown” but even the Chinese later sold out the great cause, for which our author criticises the CCP.
To his mind, when there is a virus on the loose, we need a full end to human volition until government can “roll out a vaccine or find a cure. In the meantime, you must educate your populace, gain their trust, and get as much support as you can for measures that will save lives — even if you ultimately have to impose them by fiat.”
If you want the short version of the book, he has written it in a New York Post article: ‘The U.S. needs a “Pentagon” for diseases‘. “I generally back ironfisted responses to epidemics,” he writes.
Here is a man who very nearly tasted the power that comes with running the world. He was extremely close to all of it, pen pals with Anthony Fauci, and the Walter Duranty of virus control at the New York Times, the world’s most influential media voice. The experience has plainly made him crazy.
It’s true that everybody wants to rule the world, but he is an unusual person who came very close. We notice that his book nowhere mentions Sweden, which went on with daily life while eschewing the global virus control machinery at every turn, and with excellent results. He cannot stand to think of that so it has disappeared from his mind.
Let’s save a full critique for some other time. In many ways, it’s already been written: Fear of a Microbial Planet by Steve Templeton. Just read that. I wish our author would, not that this would change his mind.
That aside, he is an experienced journalist who was there all along and he does dollop out a few interesting pieces.
For nearly four years, I’ve been curious about who spoke to him to give him the green light to whip up the nation into a disease frenzy. How did it come to be that the NYT let him? Here he spills the beans.
Then on February 24th [2020], the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,000 points, the first lurch in what would ultimately be a 30% drop. President Trump responded with a tweet: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC and World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock market starting to look very good to me!”
The next day, in a phone call with reporters, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s Chief of Respiratory Diseases, effectively contradicted him, saying a major outbreak in the United States was “not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather a question of exactly when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illness”. She suggested that Americans “start thinking about” how they would cope if their schools and businesses closed, gatherings were canceled, and travel was limited. The markets tumbled further, enraging the President.
On February 27th, prompted by Dr. Messonnier’s words and the shaky markets, Michael Barbaro invited me onto his podcast, The Daily. He began by asking how many epidemics I had covered and how bad I thought this one could be.
So there we have our answer. It was the CDC’s own Nancy Messonier. She was in touch with Anthony Fauci and he with McNeil, as we know from emails. So the entire apparatus of how the administrative state undermined the Trump administration during this period is right there in black and white.
Actually, even 10 days earlier, Dr. Messonnier was already holding phone calls with the media that contradicted everything the Trump administration was saying. On February 12th 2020 she told the media as follows: “The goal of the measures we have taken to date are to slow the introduction and impact of this disease in the United States but at some point, we are likely to see community spread in the U.S. or other countries and this will trigger a change in our response strategy.”
McNeil was right there all along. It’s a fascinating case of how administrative agencies dictate the news. In McNeil’s own telling, the NYT was not willing to let him go to print with his alarmism and panic until he had confirmation that it was on target from the CDC and Fauci. He obtained that, and then went straight to podcasting and print. It was a done deal at that point.
So the great question of who started this whole fiasco is thus answered in the most obvious way possible: it was the CDC and Fauci. To be sure, you could say that they had their marching orders too but that layer of the onion is yet waiting for full documentation.
Now, who is this Dr. Messonier? She left the CDC in 2021, said to be pushed out by incoming CDC director Rochelle Walensky for reasons we do not know. Messonier landed at the Skoll Foundation as the Executive Director for Pandemic Prevention and Health Systems.
Her brother is Rod Rosenstein, a former United States Deputy Attorney General who two years earlier (2017) wrote the letter that President Trump used as a reason to fire James Comey as FBI Director. Rosenstein clearly did not want to do this but he did it anyway, and probably deeply regretted the attention he got for it.
What is the connection between the CDC’s push for lockdown and the firing of the director of the FBI? I do not know. Is there one? Probably. Certainly people in February 2020 thought there might be.
And McNeil himself offers an interesting little clue in this paragraph:
The CDC Director should not change with every new administration… It leads to craven silence from the Director when the President claims a pandemic will just ‘fade away.’ As with the FBI, the Director should come from within the ranks and serve a fixed term.
Oh but surely it is merely a coincidence that McNeil analogises the CDC to the FBI Director with the claim that neither should be subject to firing by the President? Maybe. It’s still uncanny.
Keep in mind that all this swirling around to warm up the press corps to lockdowns took place during and after the US/UK/EU junket to China from February 16th-24th. Top bureaucrats were shown around Wuhan and told how great the CDC handled the virus. The WHO wrote a glowing report, and the rest was history.
The Trump administration did not come around to an ‘all-of-Government’ approach until March 10th, by which time the whole of the national media and administrative state was raring to go. As a friend put it, Trump was boxed in from all sides: his own agencies, national media, Big Tech and essentially everyone who mattered. Why he has refused to admit this is also a mystery.
Finally, there are a crucial few weeks completely missing from McNeil’s narrative history: the days between his podcast of March 11th 2020, and the lockdown orders themselves. He references the lockdown only in passive voice: businesses were closed, events were cancelled and so on. Those are the exact days on which we should be focused because that’s when the world was wrecked by the public health bureaucrats for whom he carried water.
Otherwise, there is a peculiar way in which we should be grateful for McNeil’s strangely blunt book. It’s a map for what is very likely in store for us courtesy of the ‘pandemic planning’ industry. Read it and weep. Or read it and resist.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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He should be locked down, hermetically sealed in his own personal cocoon, then he would be quite safe and need not worry about the rest of us. We’ll manage.
This guy knows perfectly well that Sars-CoV2 was never a substantial danger for anyone. He’s just convinced that our way of life is too unhealthy on a planet notoriously ridden with pathogens and thus, needs to be abolished because he and he only is the guy who knows exactly how everything needs to be done to be done properly. A megalomaniac who’s really convinced that he’s a god. People like this should be locked away in padded cells to ensure that they’ll neither harm themselves nor anyone else.
A Padded Cell lined with sharp stuff !!..
I think he would welcome being put to sleep as he would no longer need to fear us or the numerous virus that share the earth with us, I am happy to chip in a couple of quid for him to have a seat on the plane to dignitas.
I will second that.
You could say that the more someone seems intent on “saving” others the more of a danger he is to others.
Someone who is fanatical about saving the entire global population is a egomanical lunatic and an absolute menace.
The worst tyranny always comes from those who terrorises you “for your own good”, because they never sleep.
C.S. Lewis said it best. It is better to be ruled by robber barons than by omnipotent moral busybodies.
He’s not scared. He is, in his own words, a Fascist and a power junkie.
I think he is mostly terrified of his impending demise.
The proper way to handle dangerous, stubborn idiots who are unwilling to learn from their mistakes is to go a bit all medieval on them.
It’s a shame he’s not British
Let these people expose themselves for what they are, and a few more people will wake up
If I met this man in the street I would be very tempted to biff him on the nose…and I’m not a violent man at all. To think of all the pain, loneliness and broken lives it caused for something with well over a 98% survival rate. If indeed there is a next time, let’s lock him up in a small trunk and he can enjoy his lockdown all by himself.
“It’s a map for what is very likely in store for us courtesy of the ‘pandemic planning’ industry. Read it and weep. Or read it and resist.”
I don’t care what their plan is.
I will NOT comply!
Well said, HP! I’m with you.
Thanks Aethelred
Seriously, NEVER AGAIN. Full stop, with NO asterisks!
An interesting ‘stack from Dr Malone, as he focuses on Davos, ‘Disease X’ and also highlights the important work of Brian Bantugan in exposing the corruption of the WEF and the WHO. ”We won’t get fooled again”. ( That’ll be the legit ‘Who’ )
”It is Davos (World Economic Forum) week and the MSM hysterical propaganda push from the globalists regarding “disease X” is in full swing.
Almost every major news outlet in the world has run black propaganda pieces about disease X. Why do I write black propaganda – because the “experts” aren’t actually named, the peer-reviewed papers supporting the thesis of “a deadly pathogen causing 20 times more deaths than COVID-19” or “killing 20 times more people than COVID-19” or “killing 50 million people” are non-existent. Yet these narratives are all headline news in main stream media.
Right now, Disease X and One Health are being propagandized in the main stream media as being the solution to save the world from a massive die off – this propaganda is being driven by the WEF in collaboration with the WHO. The Ecohealth Alliance is also at the forefront of the One Health initiative and has collected millions of dollars for their research projects into One Health. The Davos meeting is being used to prop up support for the WHO Pandemic treaty that removes national sovereignty over public health by promoting.
The WEF and the WHO envision solutions to the imaginary “Disease X” that involve more loss of freedoms. They want control over food systems, more money, more censorship, more surveillance, control over the climate change agenda – all in the name of public health. But even worse, they want all this codified in a document that the turns over national sovereignty to the WHO.”
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/disease-x-and-the-corrupt-lancet
Massive die off?? Maybe the “Disease X” is actually going to be the consequences from the jibby jabbys, wrapped up as a new illness, an opportunistic leap following the failure of the vax pass licenses to live.
Indeed, the powers that be are literally saying the quiet part out loud now.
You can’t fix stupid
I assume Mc Neil speaks from inside a pressurised, clean oxygen safe room in which he lives for 24 hours a day and has no contact with any living life forms, if not then step up onto the plate another rank hypocrite with a hatred for humanity, the “virus” is still with us, but so are lots of other diseases, so Mc Neil must surely be terrified that he may contract or carry one of these little critters. But of course he doesn’t live that way, he just wants to play God with other people.
GFY
And the horse he rode in on.
Sometimes it does seem appropriate if a lone wolf just takes someone out – for the greater good, of course.
Imagine the benefit to humanity if a lone wolf had dealt with Hitler, before he achieved unfettered power.
There were a few attempts long before the bomb in the Wolf’s Lair. And early ‘conspiracy theorist’, saw Hitler as some kind of Antichrist and planted a bomb in a Clock, but Hitler often changed arrangements at the last minute and the plot was discovered.
He actually thinks Medieval medicine is the gold standard for fighting pandemics?
He must be all in with the Science Must Fall movement?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14&t=101s
Science Must Fall?
Again, quiet part out loud.
‘……..the Western focus on personal liberty above all else can kill”
An exponent, then, of Socialist Fascism.
‘Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts.’
Benito Mussolini 1932
McNeil’s epitaph (and that of Pantsdown): ‘He thought he was an expert.’
Here is the other Socialist, Mr A. H. giving a speech where he talks about freedom of the individual (or not, in this case). ANd notice the use of socialist words.
“…For you must also understand this, my people’s comrades: No leader can use more strength than his followers give him! What am I without you? What you do not give me, I can never use for your own benefit! If you refuse me your unanimous unity, what should I do?! I am a single man, I can possess the best will. The will is not worth more to you than your will is worth to me! And that brings us to the problem of freedom! Freedom, yes! Insofar as the interest of the national community gives the individual freedom, it is given! Where the freedom affects or even impairs the interests of the national community, the freedom of the individual ceases! Then the freedom of the national community takes the place of the freedom of the individual!…”
(1937)
And that also goes for Jeremy Vine and regular guests like Yasmin Alibhai Brown. What is funny about her is that she is so fast to call other people fascist. Yet she is one of the most vocal advocates for this collective nightmare.
“Here is a man who very nearly tasted the power that comes with running the world”
Surely this should say “the power that comes with ruining the world”.
Is this a concern for the planet or is the ageing scribbler becoming aware of his mortality and impending demise and will ride roughshod over everyone’s rights, no matter the horrendous damage, to try and ensure a little longer on this world? Selfishness and the gibbering terror of a threatened organism garbed in the finery of philanthropy is my take.
He literally said the quiet part out loud, and his mask fell right off, pun intended. When someone shows you who they really are, believe them.
Tyrants & authoritarians using the fallacy that they are saving you from harm if you just obey them were some of the most evil people that emerged during this whole covid madness. I was shocked as I watched ordinary people turn into cold hearted vicious fascists willing to destroy and even kill to fulfill their need for power and control. McNeil is just another one of these but with an outlet through his writing. He tasted this power and wants more.
Indeed, next time someone says, “You can either give up some of your rights temporarily, or give up all of your rights permanently”, RUN, it’s a trap! Or better yet, FIGHT!
I don’t want to be hater, but this guy…