Austria’s Herbert Kickl exposes government’s corona lies

[Herbert Kickl is leader of Austria’s FPÖ party (“Freedom Party of Austria”), the third largest in that country. Below is my translation of his speech at a press conference on 22 October 2021. My translation has evened out much of the repetition common to free-flowing speech, to make the written text flow more speedily and smoothly. In other words, the translation is fairly free aesthetically, but tightly loyal to the original in meaning.]

Austrian federal government goes on the rampage

The reason for today’s press conference is what I call the Austrian federal government’s recent rampage, but first and foremost the rampages by the Federal Chancellor and the Minister of Health. Rampages in our country against freedom and human dignity under the guise of public-health policy. I use the term “rampage” deliberately. I could also say that this is a frontal attack on the fundamental rights and freedoms of the entire population, especially on the unvaccinated.

What fundamental rights and freedoms are being attacked here? The right to individual freedom, the right to physical integrity, the right to work and the right not to be discriminated against. All of it is being trampled on by Mr Schallenberg and Mr Mückstein, to force free people, who have chosen not to take an experimental vaccine, onto its needle. In the end, that’s what we are witness to; a brutal regime of mandatory vaccination being established in Austria.

It is nothing more than mandatory vaccination

It doesn’t matter whether we are now talking about the package of measures called “3G” in the workplace [Geimpft (vaccinated), Genesen (recovered), Getestet (tested): in Germanic countries, entry to work, businesses, events, etc. (it varies from country to country) is permitted only if you can demonstrate you are one of those three things], or whether we’re talking about continued progression along the “step-by-step plan” by two further steps, levels 4 and 5: It is nothing more than mandatory vaccination, even if the Austrian federal government is too cowardly to call it by its right name. I put it to you: What kind of sadistic person do you have to be to subject unvaccinated, healthy, symptomless people to mandatory testing, every day, just so that they can go to work, so that they can feed themselves and their families, so that they can earn money to cover their living expenses, so that they can pay taxes to the state, so that they can pay their social-security contributions from which, among other things, our health system is financed?

To subject these unvaccinated, symptomless, healthy people to a compulsory test that is deliberately designed so that many of them cannot even fulfil it, is an act of political cynicism. I have been travelling around the country a lot in the last few days, talking to the people concerned. They explain their situations to me in palpable despair. Their despair at the problems they face from the government’s implementation makes a deep impression. The worst thing about it is that this is precisely the situation the government desires. This so-called alternative of the third G [Gestestet (tested)] is designed in such a way that it is simply inaccessible to many people.

An act of cynicism, an act of blackmail

It is a pure act of cynicism when you consider, for example, the problems faced by shift workers who have irregular work schedules that change every week. They cannot adapt to test-facility opening hours, and such facilities are not even available in more rural areas. When you consider people who often have to drive 20 or 30 kilometres to the nearest test facility, when you consider people who start work so early that nothing is open and finish so late everything is closed, you see that a very, very sinister game is being played here, played on the backs of the population. This is what Mr Mückstein means when he says testing will be made inconvenient, and when Mr Schallenberg says that things will get uncomfortable for the unvaccinated.

What is happening here, in fact, is nothing more than an act of blackmail. Get vaccinated or lose your job. That is the truth behind this regime: 3G in the workplace. I ask you: How cold do you have to be, what kind of a heartless doctor, to disallow unvaccinated, symptomless, healthy people, in this level 4 situation, from visiting their loved ones in the nursing home, for example, from visiting them in an old people’s home, when you know perfectly well these old people suffer from loneliness more than anyone else? You know they need closeness and affection. How cold and heartless do you have to be to set up something like that for level 4?

Bottom-of-the-barrel people treat others like work slaves

And what a bottom-of-the-barrel character you have to be to blackmail healthy, unvaccinated, symptomless people into getting vaccinated by telling them that, for level 4, ”You’re only allowed to have a family member visit your children, acquaintances or friends in hospital if they are vaccinated.” Imagine a car accident, or anything of that severity, and a family member of yours ends up in hospital. We’re dealing with a government that tells them, “If you’re not vaccinated, then you can’t visit them.” This is scraping the bottom of the barrel at its very worst, ladies and gentlemen.

Allow me to ask you something else: What kind of human being do you have to be to treat unvaccinated, healthy and symptomless people – here I’m talking about lockdown for the unvaccinated – almost like work slaves. You are granted the right to go to work, granted the right to pay taxes. Maybe you’re allowed to go to the supermarket, but that’s it. Otherwise you’re locked up. That’s what awaits us in level 5 of the government’s emergency plans.

Is vaccination effective, or not?

Then listen to the explanations as to why all these measures are apparently required. There’s Governor Schützenhöfer. Admittedly, he’s not the brightest candle on the cake, but the explanation he gave is grotesque: He said: “We will not allow the unvaccinated to infect the vaccinated.” Only to say two sentences later, “Only vaccination protects.” Which is it? Governor Schützenhöfer: Which is it? Is vaccination effective, or not?

And the other explanations that have been presented are almost as weak. The second version is that we are to protect the healthy unvaccinated from the vaccinated, from the “fully immunised”. Excuse me? What does fully immunised mean then? It makes no sense. The third version is that you protect the healthy from the healthy by locking them up. Do you not see how absurd, how deranged the whole thing is, the circus that’s underway in our country?

Useless and counterproductive health policy

Ladies and gentlemen, what we are witnessing is constitutionally and morally indefensible. It is deeply reprehensible, and furthermore, completely useless as health policy. It is completely useless health policy, not to mention counterproductive. And we must not forget that all these attacks are not only directed against the wholly unvaccinated, they are also directed against all those who only have a first vaccination but do not want the second “jab”. It is also directed against those who have had two vaccinations and are now hesitating about taking the third. And it is also directed against all those who have recovered and whose reprieve – as I like to call it – granted them by the government, has expired. And that is a very, very large number of people.

Now I will explain why the federal government is doing this. The federal government has an enormous problem. With this government, all those who have pushed the Corona measures in unison with and in support of them over the past months have this problem too. And this problem is called: They are trapped in a dead end.

The plan was to make the greatest possible profit from the crisis

The plan was quite simple. First: You spread fear and panic. That done, you go out and try to herd people into this vaccination experiment so that, later, you can present yourself as the saviour and garner the greatest possible political profit. The problem is that reality does not obey government propaganda. Reality cannot obey a redemption script certain parties penned for themselves. Reality, in fact, works the other way around. Reality supports critics of the script penned by the ÖVP, the Greens and the SPÖ. The true findings are quite different; this vaccine therapy, or “vaccination” as it is called, is not a game changer. Nothing like it. The game-changer story is fake. It is a clear untruth. Yet another on the government’s appalling record of untruths.

Second: Vaccination works, but doesn’t work well enough. You can read about this in the relevant scientific publications. Third – and this is the crucial point: We do not have a pandemic of the unvaccinated. What we have is a major deficit in the effectiveness of the vaccination. And that is why the vaccinated also belong to the group that I call “the deceived” of this government, in connection with its corona policy. And anyone who continues to rely entirely on vaccination, as this government does, those who continue to propagate vaccination as a panacea to the pandemic, are committing a continuing fraud against their own population. This policy will lead us into a health disaster.

The numbers expose government failure

Let’s take a look at a few numbers together. We’ll start with infection rates. The number of so-called ‘cases’ one year ago on 22.10.2020 was 21,835. Today, the 22.10.2021, we have 36,298 cases. That’s significantly more this year, even though we know only unvaccinated people are currently being tested. And the government is deliberately, I say deliberately and knowingly, drawing the wrong conclusion from this data, that we are dealing with a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and building their scapegoat strategy on that. No doubt they will admit their error long after the fact.

Let’s turn to the number of hospitalisations: One year ago, on 22.10.2020, 841 people were hospitalised, and 161 were in intensive care. This makes a total of 1,002 hospitalised. Today, on 22.10.2021: 795 people in hospital, with 220 in intensive care: a total of 1,015. This means that the total number of covid patients in hospitals has increased slightly and that we have seen a significant increase in the number of intensive care patients since last year.

Numbers have worsened after vaccination

And what is the difference between then and now? Ladies and gentlemen, what is the difference? The difference is that in the meantime between 62 and 65 percent of the population, the vaccine-eligible population, is “fully immunised”. That is the difference. One year ago, not a single person in Austria had been vaccinated. Now, common sense tells us that in light of a continuing “full immunisation” programme, this data, the infection numbers, just like the hospitalisation numbers, should actually be declining. They should be declining, but the opposite is true.

I know the government is saying: It’s the unvaccinated. This is the pandemic of the unvaccinated. But that’s not true either. What we are seeing is something quite different. For that you have to examine the number of so-called “vaccine breakthroughs”. Again, this is a trivialising term; vaccine breakthroughs are supposed to suggest that this phenomenon is an exception and not a mass phenomenon. So here, too, there is deliberate language manipulation. Let’s take a closer look at this. In the last four calendar weeks, that is weeks 38 to 41, there were 30,270 symptomatic, laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 cases. So, those are the vaccine breakthroughs. 30,270. Of those 30,270, 10,189 are fully vaccinated. That's 33.66 percent, and that's across all age groups.

Vaccine breakthroughs in older people: predominantly vaccinated

Now we turn to the high-risk group, the 60+. These are the people for whom the government always said vaccination must be particularly thorough, these are the highly vulnerable people. Here we have a proportion of fully vaccinated people in these vaccine breakthroughs of 65 percent. 65 percent; that’s close to two-thirds of this group. And this despite the fact that we have the highest vaccination rate of all in this age group. There we have reached a vaccination rate of well over 80, almost 90 percent. There should really be no more vaccination breakthroughs at all, if vaccination protects as well as the government repeatedly claims.

These figures do not come from the Freedom Party of Austria, but from the health agency, the federal government, the AGES. And the AGES itself says something very important about these figures: it tells us vaccine breakthroughs are being reported, but we can be confident that nowhere close to all breakthroughs are reported. This phenomenon is called “underreporting”. This means we have to assume that the number of actual breakthroughs is significantly higher. And there is something else. You should also know that only those who have been vaccinated and infected twice, and who also develop symptoms, are recorded as vaccine breakthroughs.

International scientific findings are ignored

So people who have the virus but no symptoms are not counted as a breakthrough. This means that you can add a considerable number of people. Only then you can clearly see how ineffective this vaccination is. And all of this completely confirms what the CDC announced in August of this year after investigating the Massachusetts cluster. You can read about it on the CDC’s homepage. They investigated the outbreak there in fine detail and reported that fully vaccinated people can still be infected, and that vaccinated infected people are just as infectious as unvaccinated people. That is the current state of knowledge of the most important health authority in the world. But this fact is completely ignored by the Austrian federal government.

Mr Schallenberg and Mr Mückstein act as if none of these facts exist. Instead of taking these findings into account, an apartheid system, a caste system I would almost say, is being enforced in Austrian society, in which the lowest of the lowest castes is the unvaccinated. They are denigrated and disenfranchised without justification. This is public-health policy in Austria in 2021, entirely evidence free.

Israel: More and more clusters and diseases despite vaccination

Ladies and gentlemen, not long ago I pointed out in a press conference that we can see from the example of Israel that a high vaccination rate offers no protection against high infection rates. I discussed Israel referencing their scientists’ statements – which you can read in Science – to demonstrate that of the high hospitalisation rates, which include particularly severe and critical progressions, a high percentage so affected are double vaccinated. It was not so long ago that I made this announcement to you in a press conference. This data comes from August of this year, in Israel. It is precisely this development that is now catching up with us.

Israel was just a few months ahead. What has already happened there is now coming to us. The number of clusters of the fully-immunised is constantly growing. You know what it’s like: bus trips of some senior-citizens group, in which only vaccinated people are included, and yet a cluster occurs. They’re finding more and more cases of this kind as the vaccine breakthroughs increase. And, of course, the number of hospitalisations and severe disease progressions are also increasing.

There is no science behind the claim that vaccination makes illnesses milder

I already know people will say: “Yes, yes, but the severe progressions and death rates are down in the double vaccinated.” I would like to hear what the primary source for this claim is. I would like to know. Perhaps you know? What is the primary source for this claim, made repeatedly by our political leaders? What studies back this up? I would really like to know! And the second thing is: Which studies tell us that people are better protected from severe disease progression by vaccination than by appropriate drug treatment? Which studies back that idea up? I would like to hear about them. 

I believe these studies do not exist, ladies and gentlemen.

And because we shouldn’t talk about Israel alone, we should also look at Singapore. A very recent example: Singapore has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, well over 80 percent. But Singapore is currently rushing headlong into a fourth wave; the infection rates there are going through the roof. I can quote Alex Cook, an expert on infection models at the University of Singapore: ”Singapore shows that even high vaccination rates don’t help that much.” So we’re seeing this sort of thing in Singapore, too. And in Denmark, a country where they said they would let people go about freely because the vaccination rate is so high; there, too, the numbers are going up. You see the same thing in Germany. The Robert Koch Institute recently published some data: 60+ [age group]: 55 percent of those who fall ill are double vaccinated. In the Robert Koch Institute’s weekly report, they find around 100,000 vaccine breakthroughs in just one week. The Robert Koch Institute itself is now talking about an overestimation of vaccine effectiveness.

Without any measures, Sweden is better off than Austria

It’s very interesting, what’s happening here. You’ll understand that I’m happy that in another country – which has now disappeared from the radar a bit – the development there is a very, very positive one. I’m talking about Sweden. They took a completely different path from the very start and have a similar proportion of fully-vaccinated people in the total population as Austria. If you look at their current figures, they have 29 people in intensive care as of 22.10. In Austria, as I said, there are 220. If you look at the mortality figures, since 1 July 2021 we have 332 deaths in Sweden and 480 in Austria.

In Sweden, mere suggestions to the population have been in force since 29 September. In our country, the federal government is interfering with a programme of injustice, in which fundamental rights and freedoms are trampled underfoot, and unvaccinated people are stigmatised as scapegoats. Ladies and gentlemen, all this means that while vaccination has some effect, it is by no means the game changer that can end this pandemic.

Has the government always known about low vaccine efficacy?

Vaccination is far less effective than claimed, and is effective for far less time than claimed. And this fact won’t change when, after the third jab, they get a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. The fundamental problem will remain. I believe the Austrian government knows this. If you look at the fact that 41 or 42 million doses were ordered for 2022 and 2023 and do the maths on that figure, you come to the conclusion that you can actually vaccinate seven million Austrians three times a year. They must have already known that the effectiveness lasts a few months at most.

There’s no victory to be had by following this strategy. At the same time, we have a growing side-effects or vaccine-damage scandal. Incidentally, here too we also have the phenomenon of underreporting. Not every event that should be reported is being reported, and by a significant margin. It frightens me when I talk to internists who tell me, for example, that the number of myocarditis cases, especially among young vaccinated people, is very high. This is actually an alarming development, which should immediately lead to an end of the vaccination programme in this age group.

Number of deaths from vaccination damage will increase

The number of deaths by vaccination will also continue to rise. This, too, is something that is completely taboo, about which we hardly hear or read anything. And, of course, we continue to face this problem of medium- and long-term health consequences, where frightening results in connection with tumour growth have now come to public attention, i.e. where there is quite obviously a connection between vaccination and tumour growth.

So, ladies and gentlemen, there is no pandemic of the unvaccinated. Anyone making that claim is spreading government propaganda. The government needs it to be true because it builds all its horrors on top of that claim. What we actually see is an ineffective vaccine and thus rapid spread of the virus among and through the vaccinated. That is the problem we face. That is the real problem. And I don’t blame the vaccinated here. The vaccinated are people who feel protected because of what the government tells them. They are people lulled into a feeling of safety by statements from the Minister of Health, as from all those who have participated in this campaign.

People are being deceived by the government

The vaccinated have been deceived. Deceived , lied to and lulled into a false sense of security. The mendacity continues to this day. This fact is particularly reprehensible. You only have to look at the core claims made in the government’s current vaccination campaigns. The government, in concert with the Red Cross, is running a major vaccination campaign. In addition to the coercive regime being rolled out, this campaign is, as it were, an auxiliary strategy for manipulating people into participating in this vaccination experiment.

So let’s take a look at the core messages from these vaccination campaigns. People are being told – funded by their own tax money by the way – that vaccination will make the pandemic go away. That is one of the posters from the campaigns. Its slogan reads: "So that the pandemic will pass". Hogwash and lies!

Untruths are propagated in garish ads

People are also told that if they get vaccinated, older people will no longer be infected by younger people and children. That’s in those malicious commercials, where we see old people in front of a microphone saying: “Now my grandchildren can finally come and visit me again.” There is no evidence supporting this ad, either.

People are being told as part this vaccination campaign that full protection is provided after the second vaccination. Not even the pharmaceutical companies makes this claim. And yet the Austrian government, in concert with the Red Cross, makes exactly this claim in their vaccination campaign. People are being told that if they don’t get vaccinated, they will get sick. As if there were no symptomless disease progressions. As if there were no T-cell immunity. As if there were no cross-immunity.

Young people are misled about the current legal situation

Yet another message from these vaccination campaigns is evidence free, and particularly ‘creative’ in catching the attention of the young. The campaign aims to exploit young people’s need for entertainment, in the form of discos and clubs. The government misinforms the young by telling them: “You can only get into a club if you’re vaccinated.” That’s not actually the current legal position, but on the poster we see, “Everybody went to the club but Irene, who says ‘vaccination gives you migraines’." That is classic misinformation. This messaging does not accurately depict the current state of the law. What this poster claims is not true.

Unscrupulous and criminal

There are other such examples. “Everyone went to the club but Jochen. He hasn’t been jabbed." Ladies and gentlemen, this is evidence-free manipulation of one’s own population to drive people onto the needle. I think it is disgraceful behaviour. It is unscrupulous and criminal.

It is for this reason that we are filing a complaint with the Federal Office for Safety in Health Care in accordance with paragraph 6 of the Medicines Act. Paragraph 6 of the Medicines Act concerns deception. If what is being disseminated here by means of the vaccination campaigns is not determined to be misleading, when the floodgates will be opened for every form of manipulative misinformation in the field of medicine and vaccination.

Health-budget cuts during humanity’s ‘deadliest’ pandemic

Ladies and gentlemen, the government’s strategy is leading us into disaster. I predict the following: We will crash into a fourth wave. Cases will rise dramatically and the health-care system will face huge difficulties. One reason for this is that it has been cut to the bone and not upgraded these last two years … one and a half years. Please think about that. Cuts in the health budget and not a single intensive-care bed left, despite a pandemic that is allegedly the biggest humanity has ever faced.

Who is responsible for this? And then you get into a situation where a few hundred intensive-care patients cause a modern society to topple over, leading to fundamental rights and freedoms being eliminated in that country. Where have we arrived? Where are we, ladies and gentlemen? This is a total failure! And all this simply because the government continues to rely on vaccination as a panacea.

Public menaces who have human lives on their conscience

Anyone who fails to change course now is a reckless danger to public health. Those who fail in this regard will have human lives on their conscience. I choose my words carefully here. They will deliberately divide society. Whoever fails to change course now will be trampling on fundamental rights and freedoms. Such people will lead our country into the next lockdown. A lockdown not only for the unvaccinated – that will be of no use – but also for the vaccinated. That’s where this will end. And with that we have the next attack on prosperity in this country, which generations have built up and which is now being put at risk by an irresponsible and stubbornly closed-minded federal government.

WHO Director: Vaccination will not end pandemic

Ladies and gentlemen, I suspect the European Director of the WHO won’t be labelled a tinfoil-hat wearer, not even our government would do that. He is Dr Hans Kluge. This particular Director of Health of the WHO said the following: Vaccination will not end the pandemic. Governments need to change their strategy to deal with the spread of the virus.

So what is our government doing? Our government is doing the exact opposite. Our government is betting the farm on vaccination. They risk a reckless gamble, with the population’s health, fundamental rights and freedoms on the line.

The Freedom Party of Austria call for a Plan B

What we Freedom Party members want is the immediate implementation of a Plan B. A Plan B without reprisals. 

Our Plan B has the following essential points. Firstly, an immediate end to any kind of compulsory vaccination. There must be no disadvantage, no reprisals for anyone who does not want to undergo vaccination, for whatever reason. Those who want to be vaccinated should do so. Preferably after detailed consultation with their doctor on the basis of their own medical history. That would be the sensible approach. But not at the supermarket checkout, not on a vaccination bus in front of the school. Not in front of a disco at night, like when whalers used to “shanghai” drunk sailors in the harbour pub. This is similar to what is done now with vaccination, when they try to entice young people outside discos.

Immediate use of medication to aid the infected

The second item is: Immediate use of medication for the infected. Immediate use of medication to prevent severe disease progression. Ladies and gentlemen, you know that existing medicines have been used successfully against covid19 for a long time, that new medicines are being tested and developed. Using these medicines has a major advantage: There’s no need to vaccinate the whole population. Medicines are targeted at those people who have an infection and have been diagnosed with a disease. This means we don't have to expose the entire population to the risk of side effects. That is a huge plus, especially when we know that, statistically speaking, large parts of the population under 60 have zero risk of a severe course of the disease, including death.

If you argue that medication doesn’t work or that you absolutely have to vaccinate: please, ladies and gentlemen, HIV was not fought with vaccination. HIV is fought with medication. This is so important to me, because our government has staked its lot on the claim – I’m referring to those manipulative vaccination campaigns – that only vaccination can protect us. That’s just not true. We know that covid19 is easily treatable with medication. We also know that if these drugs are administered early on, we can prevent severe disease progression and significantly reduce mortality. We know that if we administer these drugs early, we can prevent severe cases, reduce mortality, reduce hospitalisations, prevent overloading vaccination units, that we can prevent all the negative effects currently being triggered.

We know more about administering medication than about third-dose vaccination

You are probably aware that one of 2021’s most read scientific publications is by Professor Peter McCullough. It is an overview of the drugs administered in connection with the fight against covid19. This is in the US, but there are other studies on all these drugs. There are scientific publications and there is real-world experience. And that is much, much more than we can say of the third jab. We don’t have rich experience to draw on here. We don’t have that at all. The crucial point is that these drugs are administered at an early stage and not only in hospital. Then it is too late. Then we find ourselves in the middle of a severe progression.

You also know that American medical associations have established a drug regimen. And there are very, very good doctors in Austria, as in other countries of the European Union, who have adapted this course of medication to European conditions. The main thing is that you do not need intravenous treatments, and you do not need house calls from doctors; you can basically handle everything with tablets. It would be enormously liberating if this course of drugs were applied. So that is one of our central demands, to immediately introduce these drug regimens and launch a broad information campaign to the population, telling them that this is possible, and to promote this form of therapy appropriately.

Record and research population immunity

Ladies and gentlemen, another element of our Plan B is the detection of antibodies throughout the population. This should in fact be a matter of course for a decent health policy; it is incredibly positive news for people to know they themselves are actually better protected from any infection by an immunity they could never attain via vaccination. Sadly, this just doesn’t fit government strategy.

That’s why they also claimed: “Immunity from defeating a disease is over after six months.” That’s a whopper! There is no medical evidence natural immunity lasts only six months. But if we did things differently, people would realise that it can be advantageous to have already been infected, because then you have long-lasting immunity. But then the government would be stuck with all those vaccine doses, a troublesome outcome that obviously has to be prevented at all costs.

Another essential element of Plan B is that vaccinated people are also tested, if relevant symptoms present. Otherwise, we can’t compile a comprehensive dataset.

Solidarity among all those deceived by the government

Ladies and gentlemen, in conclusion, the Freedom Party of Austria believes there must be solidarity among all those who have been deceived by the government in connection with its corona policy. And this solidarity of the deceived is the exact opposite of the societal division Schallenberg and Mückstein promote.

To repeat: the deceived include the unvaccinated, who are now being scapegoated without any evidence, and who are being vilified and disenfranchised. The deceived include those who have recovered, who are told that their natural immunity only applies for a few months after they have been in quarantine, then they have get vaccinated. The deceived include those who had an asymptomatic progression, who have antibodies but have did not quarantine. That makes no sense whatsoever. They have also been deceived.

The deceived are also the vaccinated

The deceived are also the vaccinated, simply because they have been led to believe that after two jabs they would be safe, that there is no longer any danger to themselves and others. And no one mentions side effects, they don’t even happen! They are mentioned in every advertisement for sore throat tablets, but not when the government promotes these gene vaccines. Then you hear nothing about dangerous risks and side effects.

We want to foster this solidarity politically. We are fighting for it. Therefore, at the next opportunity, we will table be a motion of no confidence in the Minister of Health. We are preparing a ministerial indictment against Mückstein, just as we did against his predecessor, Anschober. I have already mentioned that we will file a complaint with the Federal Office for Safety in Health Care because of misleading information in connection with all these vaccinations. And I believe that the point will be reached again where the Freedom Party will also bring its protest to the streets.

Words fail us

(Intimacy is a virus.)

It is a cliche that words are not enough. When the task is to communicate across a bitter divide in the midst of the fiercest and most unrelenting propaganda campaign in human history, as globalist tyrants bet their mightily deranged farm against the rest of humanity in dogged pursuit of a pristine, ordered global system that does away, once and for all, with all that is ugly, uncouth and untamed in homo sapiens, words can only fail us. Words have become our enemy as  surely as we are our own worst enemies. This moment is truly civilisation’s bitter harvest.

I am being provocative because words fail us.

I am trying not to shout because words fail us.

Always: I fumble my righteous anger, misguide my noble efforts to let right be done; words are not enough. The way out of this predictable collective breakdown begins within, in silence. (Another cliche.)

Michael Jackson sang, “If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make that change!” It, too, is a cliche because words have been abused almost beyond repair.

Where is honesty? What is honesty? A commodity? Something talented actors and politicians sell? Will you be buying the Left or Right today? Which half of reality would you like to condemn?

What hasn’t been said. Yes, there are endless ways of saying the same thing, but it has all been said. 

We are children sat sulking in a boundless playroom, surrounded by an infinity of toys, malcontents forevermore, inconsolable in our cornucopias of individualised fun.

I am being provocative because words fail us. Words betray us. It is their retribution, payback for the abuse.

For a while, a few years ago, I admired academic rigour. Now, mostly, I see it as self-preening noise splintering itself out into vacuity, oddly out of options in its endlessly divisible rubric. 

Is there anything that can’t be proved? 

Casuistry is a deadly skill. Who trusts lawyers? Who trusts politicians? Sorry, The Science. Who trusts salesmen? Sorry, saleswomen. Er, salesfolk? And yet the entities pushing drugs for profit are orchestrating us to believe that infection and contagion are now morally reprehensible. How dare you risk someone somewhere dying! You unhuman! You animal! 

Each one of us is either an actual or potential domestic terrorist because we are alive. Better put your unthinking obedience brightly on display! Only then will you be safe.

The insanity is so absolute it is beyond comprehension. It is a dumb scream collapsed to white noise.

But the tyrant lives symbiotically within and without. The outer signals to the inner and we respond, darkly beguiled by what we refuse to know we have become. We are tended neuroses grown obsessional with our unique preferences. Double-de-caff latte with thrice-blended goat’s milk boiled then cooled to 72 degrees celsius and served in a pig-pink recycled-recyclable cup, NOW!

A narcissistic system spawns narcissism, and narcissists are insatiable. Emptiness is the fuel. And of course this too is a platitude; it’s all been said before.

Become too afraid to know our divinity, we choose to deny there is only god. Too afraid of opprobrium, of jeers, of being a conspiracy theorist, of being the fool, the odd one out exposed in our secret atom-loneliness, we choose ordered mechanics.

Spiritually bankrupt, desperate for safety, we are skilfully nudged through swirls of words away from all memory of love.

How much longer can we bear life this way? How far too late?

Only the intensity has changed. Nothing will ever be the same again.

“There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming [Trump] administration in the arena of infectious diseases [ … T]here will be a surprise outbreak.”
Dr Anthony Fauci at Georgetown University in 2017. (Apparently, Trump has initiated an investigation into Fauci’s 2015 decision to send $3.7m funding from NIH coffers to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for studies into the corona virus, in violation of a moratorium on such research.)

“Eventually, what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person, because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for those people to go there and come back and move around. So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”
Bill Gates, TedTalk interview, April 2020. The last sentence has since been edited out.

Anti-vaxxers are a scourge and a strong argument for re-education camps, the immediate seizure of their property, and putting their children into protective custody.  

Tweet by Republican Rick Wilson, December 2019.

Both Public Health England (PHE) and the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) were satisfied that COVID-19 (C19) presented a “low risk” of mortality and downgraded it from the status of a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) on March 19th. [… snip …] C19 is the first disease in history from which you can officially die without any firm evidence that you actually had it.
Iain Davis, Off-Guardian, 29 April 2020

We are staring down the barrel of a momentous bifurcation point. Should we have seen it coming? It’s been gathering for years, decades, perhaps since civilisation began. Now here it ‘suddenly’ is, right in front of our eyes. But can we actually make it out, bring all its details into focus? Do we want to? Do we have the courage, the will? After all, it’s us we’re gazing at, mesmerised by the image in the mirror of our just deserts. We are Narcissus undone at last, too panicked to admit the truth: the self-love affair is over.

When I first skimmed the headlines from Wuhan, I thought, Meh … another epidemic to sell a new vaccine. Then I watched reports on peakprosperity.com, and that meh became, Wow, this really IS big! Some 14 days later, draconian measures bloomed across the planet as global lockdowns were rolled out. The straws that broke the back of my growing uncertainty about what was really happening were Denmark’s hastily (long prepared?) new laws permitting forced testing, vaccination and treatment of their citizens using either their police, military or private security firms. The other was the UK’s Corona Virus Act. 

I started to listen more closely to critical expert voices, mostly German, and analyse the official data. (For those interested: articles and official data on Covid-19 (C19) can be found at: Off-Guardian, rubikon.news (German), kenfm.de (German, with some English translations), and Swiss Propaganda Research (22 languages).) But in the end, the charts below on C19’s R0 figure – the number used to determine governmental response –, combined with the growing convergence from several studies that C19’s global IFR is around 0.1% - 0.3%, placing it in the same danger zone as a bad seasonal flu, should be sufficient to give pause. 

But the purpose of this article is not to crunch numbers. Others are doing a sterling job of that important work. My focus is how those of us for and those of us against the lockdown appear incapable of constructive communication across the gulf that divides us, even though we both hold health dear in our reasoning. We all want healthier outcomes, and yet the gulf is deep and wide. We are polarised, afraid, angry. It is this division I find most troubling. The only chance each of us has of bridging it is to humbly, openly share our perspectives in a non-sensational way, and so invite discussion and correction.

As I see it, those wholly opposed to the idea that “powerful people plan stuff” – aka conspire – believe C19 data either justifies the lockdown, or exposes governmental incompetence. There are no other possible explanations. Besides, global plots require so much secrecy they are impossible to pull off. And why, exactly, would governments across the world, of every political colour, do something so drastic as to destroy their economies, unless they deemed it absolutely necessary? 

Why indeed.

What follows is an exploration of why a group of (perhaps well-intentioned) people might seek to deliberately set in motion a controlled sequence of global “creative destruction”. Perhaps you already think I’m crazy. But what chance do I have of discovering how wrong I am if I do not publicly share my best case, to have it either disproven or reinforced by subsequent discussion?

We will approach the task in two main sections. The first develops plausible ‘globalist’ motives, and looks at how such a group might be capable of controlling the narrative and thus executing their plans. We’ll also tease out our complicity in co-generating and sustaining those motives. Section 2 looks at how shaky the narrative justifying both the lockdown and the much touted vaccination of the planet’s population is. 

1. Motivation and complicity

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Edward Bernays, creator of “public relations”, the term he coined for propaganda.

Humans are social animals: we fare better in groups than as lone operators. Hence, the vast majority of us belong to any number of groups. Each of these groups has some kind of (evolving) identity to which we subscribe with varying degrees of conviction. If we do not commit sufficiently to a particular group, we are warned in some way, and perhaps eventually expelled if we refuse to cooperate. Expulsion has all sorts of different consequences, up to and including death. This is an uncontroversial fact of social life, and also a source of eternal tension between the needs/desires of the individual as these conflict with the needs/desires of the group.

For groups – and thus humanity itself – to prosper across generational time, effective stories/narratives are required that bind their members into an evolving whole (see the Dunbar number). This is as true of hunter-gatherer bands as it is of nuclear and extended families, tribes, religions, political parties, businesses, nation states, multi-national corporations, football clubs, etc. As stated, humans fare far better in groups than solo. Consequently, groups have a kind of survival instinct: when threatened, they seek to expel or negate the perceived threat. Threats come in many forms, one of which is criticism of the binding story. Narrative control (control of the binding story) is thus essential to group survival. In other words, control of the narrative is a matter of life and death.

These are my basic operating assumptions. They can be extrapolated into a foundational observation: Intergroup trust – and with it honest, transparent and sincere communication between groups – is both very difficult to establish and decays over time as groups diverge culturally.

Focussing on today’s world, we can state quite broadly that the overwhelming majority of groups extant across the globe are hierarchical. By definition, hierarchies must be composed of rulers and ruled. The necessary antipathy between these groupings is by now a tired cliche, but their tendency to culturally diverge bears repeating. By way of example, the lives experienced by Britain’s working people and the British Royal Family could hardly be more different. Across what channels do they communicate? How do they keep their interests aligned? Well, each is a subset of a larger-order group that binds them: Great Britain. “Great Britain” is an evolving story or narrative, a complex set of ideas. But the living narrative that defines any nation – unites its citizens into One People – is primarily created and tended by that nation’s rulers via the tools they use to disseminate that narrative, whoever these rulers may be. Thus, for any (national) group to survive across time, its binding story must somehow sufficiently mitigate the unavoidable antipathy between its ever-diverging subgroups.

So, just as we have tension between group and individual needs, so we have tension between groups that survive across great tracts of time, diverging culturally while being bound – symbiotically?, co-creatively? – into a fractious whole upon which they depend for their survival. It is a natural, repeating pattern we might call The Mother of Invention, a perpetual ‘divine itch’ that forces us into continuous creativity, no matter how noble or cynical, foolish or wise our creativity is. And it must bring both tragedy and wonder in its wake.

More broadly then, intergroup antipathy – divergent interests – encourages strategic communications that, generally speaking, are designed to advance in-group interests – typically and perhaps preferably at the expense of out-group interests – by withholding pertinent information, by deception and lies, and any other effective manipulation. Political manifestos are hardly renowned for being accurate predictors of subsequent political action. Negotiations between unions and big businesses are fraught with mistrust and strategic deceptions. Commerce is ruled by the advice, “buyer beware!” Etc., etc., etc. These sorts of continuing tussles between antithetical groups of all types have a cumulatively corrosive effect on the trustworthiness and health of our information ecology.

This tendency is well known: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”. At the scale of nation states, for example, complex checks and balances have been very carefully established, developed and protected over the centuries to mitigate this tension. Sustaining these checks and balances is a continuing struggle to ensure no single grouping attains total power. Tyranny, we are rightly told, is an ever-present risk against which we must be ever vigilant. There is much power to be had and many who are drawn to that power for their own ends.

But what if those responsible for propagating the stories that bind a nation together – government, media and academia/science – are both actively corrupted by e.g., lobbyists, and passively corrupted by historical tendencies of decadence and moral decay? What if judicial systems that protect hard-won rights also become corrupted via, e.g., corruption of sufficient numbers of politicians, particularly of those who hold ministerial office? How then are we to sustain the readiness and ability to be effectively vigilant? From where is the true and complete information to assist that vigilance supposed to come? And vigilance would be doubly difficult should the impulse to be vigilant become a minority impulse, such that all critical questioning of the nation’s – now corrupted – binding stories is experienced, reflexively, as a threat to the group’s survival. How might such a sorry state of affairs arise in which all such criticism is dismissed as “conspiracy theory”?

In a state of war?

Are we now in a state of war? If yes, for how long has this been the case? There was/is the Cold War, the War on Drugs, the War on AIDS, the War on Cancer, the War on Terror, the War on the Corona Virus, and others besides. What do we accept and even deem necessary in times of war that we would otherwise experience as an attack on our liberties? How much are we prepared to relinquish once a state of war has infected our thinking and we become volatile, hyper-alert, fearful, bewildered? How open are we to new information while deeply opposed to some other group that (apparently) threatens our existence?

And who has more control of the narrative, the rulers or the ruled? Who benefits from this ability to adapt the narrative by setting the group on a war footing, rulers or ruled? If both, how?

Consider our general information environment: How honest is a culture shot through with phrases like “to be honest”, “if I’m honest”, “to tell the truth” and “wanna know what I really think?” A culture is unlikely to be fundamentally honest if its people must signal they are being honest. Are politicians honest? Is the media honest? Are advertisements honest? Is product packaging honest? Are scientific journals honest? Is Big Pharma honest? Powerful multinational corporations? Remember, all groups require control of their narrative to survive over time, feel threatened by out groups, and so use strategic – not honest – communications to survive and prosper. Yes, even that group we call “scientists” that tells us what is and is not science. “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Are my arguments here ‘pseudoscience’? Would that pejorative condemn them as irrelevant, irretrievably wrong? Is only ‘clean’ data the ‘truth’? Or is the ‘consensus’ or ‘settled’ interpretation of that ‘clean’ data invariably the ‘truth’? Someone somewhere has to decide.

Perhaps we should let the leading (ruling?) experts do that. But are all experts beyond corruption, beyond error, or always in agreement?

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
(Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness…
The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…
(Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

So an essential quality or characteristic of the narrative about ruling groups – such as politics, science and media: those that control the narrative that defines the superset group – is that they are honest. How effective would their narratives be otherwise? Another is that they serve the ruled. But how often is either assertion true, especially in times of war when defence against the enemy is more important than truth? “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” For how long now have we been in a state of war? Decades? As a competitive endeavour, isn’t business a form of war? And how many of us experience life itself – that “survival of the fittest” – as a kind of perpetual war? Doesn’t war corrupt our information ecology, that dynamic and living exchange of information across all channels that helps or harms our ability to be vigilant against creeping tyranny? How honest are we when surrounded by enemies on all sides?

As I have suggested, this challenge is as old as humanity. It is also intractable; as the saying goes, the devil is in the detail, detail that is all too often diabolical. Indeed, the etymology of “diabolical” has Indo-European roots encompassing “to throw”, “reach” and “division”; divide and conquer via propagation (“throwing”) of divisive, deceptive information. Ruling groups’ perhaps most infamous strategy is to continually sow deception among the ruled and thereby create new antithetical groupings that become so occupied with their (manufactured) antipathies, they have neither time nor desire to expose the techniques that keep them divided. This helps rulers stay rulers, which further means they are more effective at keeping the fractious whole whole. It’s an extremely difficult balancing act. History’s many revolutions and collapsed empires attest to how difficult it is to keep large groups of people together ‘as one’. Logically, those that survive must be very good at it. So good that hardly anyone would notice. After all, we’re too busy violently disagreeing with each other.

What if, while we’re distracted by our violent disagreements, a group of rulers, or if you like ‘globalist elites’, took it upon themselves to rescue humanity from itself? They know full well, for example, that omelettes can only be made by breaking eggs. They believe, fervently, there are just too many of us, that humanity is by and large a virus on this beautiful planet they love, and know too that most of the ruled cannot handle this bitter truth… Perhaps, over recent decades, sufficient control of, e.g., the WHO, the UN, Big Pharma, key governments such as those of the US, UK, France, Germany, Belgium and others, has been attained, an amount of control sufficient for them to be suitably confident that a crisis they set in motion would act as a smokescreen, behind which urgently needed structural changes could be made to switch us from ‘free market capitalism’ – perpetual-growth economics – towards some new variant of fascism – their preferred (hierarchical) version of steady-state economics. Is that an unreasonable set of suppositions? Could it explain the data and governmental/media/science behaviours we see surrounding the C19 ‘pandemic’? Section 2 will look at this in closer detail.

In sum, can we ever be sure that any of our sources of information are reliable? Isn’t open-minded scepticism – vigilance – always the right posture to adopt? Without it, we have been divided into the peoples of Lockdown Good and Lockdown Bad. The tension causes us to hunker at the banks of our mighty data rivers, plotting against a virus that will surely mutate before we can prime our vaccine guns. Isn’t our sense of what a virus is part of the problem? Are we not, each of us, the other’s virus? Are we not each deathly afraid of change, of being wrong? Is it not the sense of our opponents as potentially life-threatening viruses carrying deadly information that drives us (mad)?

We are all co-contributors to The Way Things Are. We all play a role. All our choices, combined, open out continually into the next moment, on and on: a river of endless nows. What is it we want, how are our desires and fears shaping the future? What is the healthiest way of changing course, and how conscious are we of how our choices continually create the world we inhabit?

Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people. 

Yet there are individuals who ask with patronising, incredulous smiles, do you really think that the people at the top have secret agendas, are aware of their larger interests, and talk to each other about them? To which I respond, why would they not? This is not to say that every corporate and political elite is actively dedicated to working for the higher circles of power and property. Nor are they infallible or always correct in their assessments and tactics or always immediately aware of how their interests are being affected by new situations. But they are more attuned and more capable of advancing their vast interests than most other social groups. 

The alternative is to believe that the powerful and the privileged are somnambulists, who move about oblivious to questions of power and privilege; that they always tell us the truth and have nothing to hide even when they hide so much; that although most of us ordinary people might consciously try to pursue our own interests, wealthy elites do not; that when those at the top employ force and violence around the world it is only for the laudable reasons they profess; that when they arm, train, and finance covert actions in numerous countries, and then fail to acknowledge their role in such deeds, it is because of oversight or forgetfulness or perhaps modesty; and that it is merely a coincidence how the policies of the national security state so consistently serve the interests of the transnational corporations and the capital-accumulation system throughout the world.
Michael Parenti, 1996, Dirty Truths

2 Critique of the reasoning in support of the lockdown

Before we critique the specific justifications for the current lockdown, I want to address a larger-order question about how we might justify lockdowns generally as a protection measure against epidemics. 

Life is often tough and ‘unfair’ for the vital and unavoidable reason that it is fundamentally out of our control. Overcoming challenges is how we mature, become stronger, and by growing up, profoundly enjoy a life rich with accomplishment. A life without challenge is a life not worth living.

For example, we might reasonably compare lockdowns to teaching babies to walk using robotic exoskeletons designed to protect them from all injury. The measure would certainly keep our children safe from harm, but would also gravely impair their development. These two opposing outcomes make it difficult to judge the wisdom of the measure: how do we value each objectively?

How wise is it to shield ourselves from as many dangers as possible? Isn’t it healthier in the long run to deal with life as it is? Obviously, we can be reckless, which is unwise, but we can also be too cautious, too timid, too controlled by our fears. Worse than recklessness, fearful caution can quickly become a positive feedback loop where we become ever more afraid of life, stay hidden away from all perceived dangers, and become progressively less able to deal with life as it is: a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, an accelerating tailspin of fragility and weakness. The very success of the measures guarantee their cumulative failure; we become perpetual children easily controlled by authority of whatever intent: good or evil, competent or incompetent.

Which sounds wiser to you: taking ever more drugs to suppress the symptoms of various illnesses and the growing ‘side effects’ of those drugs – with all those illnesses likely the result of poor choices in diet and lifestyle –, or living a life oriented around staying strong and fit, by eating only whole foods; tending wisely to your career, family and relationships; exercising regularly; and being mindful about your ecological footprint? Does this fundamental decision scale up to state governance and kicking cans down roads? I detect a devil’s pact between an increasingly dependant and volatile People and an overly controlling Government symbiotically dependant on the compliance of its People: a vicious circle centuries in the making, growing ever more intense, reaching fever pitch right about now.

When wolves keep a forest’s deer population under control, deer, wolves and forest benefit equally – even though the deer don’t thank the wolves for their service to the whole. With no predators to hold them in check, deer over-populate until their numbers crash and the bio-diversity and carrying capacity of their environment is greatly reduced. Viruses – whether exosomes or exogenous – may well play a similar role in the form of epidemics, somewhat like forest fires. So even if we were to escape them, would such a pharmaceutical ‘success’ be good for us, for the planet? Besides, viruses are as vital to life’s functioning as bacteria. Rather than seek to escape them, should we instead view viral and bacterial activity as a kind of report card from Mother Nature on how healthy our way of life is? Is it wise to glare fearfully at such richly informative feedback, then declare war against the messengers?

How might we execute such a combative strategy? Instigate preemptive lockdowns every time scientists conclude a virus just mutated, or that conditions are just right for an imminent mutation, or perhaps just after there’s been an outbreak of 10 (20? 100?) deaths somewhere in the world? What if there were three weeks between those deaths and when the infections started? How much international travel might have happened during those weeks? 

In other words, now that we’ve locked down once, how do we prevent ourselves from locking down too often, or too late, or too soon, in the future? Had the UK and the rest of the world locked down in unison far earlier, say in January, how would we come out of it? How costly would such a long lockdown be? And if a second wave is indeed possible – because of the lockdown? – should we ever end the lockdown if almost no level of risk is permissible? If a second wave is due, if we then lockdown again, do we ensure a third, a fourth? Rinse and repeat until we have a vaccine, for as long as it takes to be certain it works: maybe for three to five years.

To be really confident this were the safer strategy, we would have to know in advance that a vaccine can be 100% effective against the novel virus as well as safe, be clear about the financial and health costs of the lockdown, and the length of time required to develop the vaccine. But what if we have no infected people to test due to preemptive lockdown (assuming lockdowns work)? What data would we have on the virus in that case? How could we test the vaccine if everyone everywhere has been locked down for months on end? There’s no second Earth we can use as a laboratory. Would testing on monkeys and other non-human animals in laboratory conditions be sufficient to be certain of the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety? Would vaccine modelling be good enough? 

Lockdowns are very costly. Can society afford lockdowns every few years, every decade? How do we know lockdowns work, and what does “work” even mean in such a complex case? You can’t fight the same virus twice, in the same country, under the same conditions, once with and once without lockdown. All we have are comparison countries like Sweden, Japan, and Belarus with very mild or no containment measures, and the UK, France, and Germany who instigated lockdowns. The results strongly favour the former group’s more relaxed approach, an interpretation dismissed by many because, e.g., “Sweden is different.” But if countries cannot be meaningfully compared, we can never scientifically prove that lockdowns work. We just have to believe or disbelieve those who say they do, or those who say they do not. An experiment with no meaningful control group is not scientific. As such, we can only remain in the dark about the effectiveness and perhaps even the costs of lockdowns. They are subjective, group-think, political decisions, motivated by an extremely complex and dynamic mix of collective emotions.

All in all, this is not an obviously easy circle to square. This is not a situation in which certainty about the options presented is easily achieved.

And yet this lockdown is needed. It must be: despite the facts that hospitals are under no threat, replication numbers are down around 1, the risk group is known so protecting them in a targeted manner would be easy, and data on HCQ (hydroxychloroquine) administered in the right dosages in combination with zinc is very encouraging, the lockdown is extended and extended. The need was never entirely – it seems to me – grounded in the official data, in science, or in common-sense reasoning. Considering all we have covered, how could it be? In my view, some other political considerations or motivation makes lockdown, and extending the lockdown until we have a vaccine, ‘necessary’ or propitious. Logic dictates that the deeper reason must be some strategy that benefits the deciding in group by advancing their interests. The logic-based rhetoric I have developed thus far is my attempt at demonstrating the plausibility of this interpretation, an interpretation we now examine by critiquing the justifications for the lockdown advanced by governments across the planet.

Essentially, lockdowns are said to “flatten the curve” and so “save lives” by protecting hospitals’ capacity to tend to the sick. I just reasoned above that, even if this were demonstrably effective for some period of time, the long-term consequences of this approach risk being (far?) worse than any short-term success. But let’s leave that aside, for now, and proceed.

First of all, the imperative to “save lives” rather than the economy does not withstand scrutiny. Vilifying those who argue otherwise is evidence this is so. No politician or even teenager capable of basic deductive reasoning can sincerely claim otherwise. Constant repetition of this assertion does not make it true; it is instead strongly suggestive of deliberate mass manipulation along the lines of behavioural programming. Why present it as an either/or choice? Wellbeing emerges from a flourishing economy; it does not float wholly disconnected from it. In early to mid March, data supporting a more nuanced approach than a blanket lockdown was there from Italy and China, and is certainly available now as various lockdown regulations are, nevertheless, extended and extended in countries across the globe.

It is anodyne to observe that the more affluent a country is, the more effective the health-care infrastructure it can afford. This is an easy concept to grasp and yet the UK is bitterly divided across this line: heartless people are for the economy, decent people are for saving lives. And yet, social distancing, rising unemployment, bankrupted businesses, millions of postponed operations and destroyed futures – all obvious and direct consequences of lockdowns – are huge stresses on our physical, psychological and emotional health. It is uncontroversial that extreme stress severely compromises our immune system. Suicide numbers are rising, as is consumption of anti-depressants. Tens of thousands of people in the UK, New York, Sweden and elsewhere have died at home or in care homes, too poor and too afraid to go to hospital, or because care homes are not equipped to treat the old and vulnerable in the numbers they were asked to; tens of thousands were moved from hospitals into care home to “save lives”. 

At a briefing hosted by the Science Media Centre on 12 May [David Spiegelhalter] explained that, over the past five weeks, care homes and other community settings had had to deal with a “staggering burden” of 30,000 more deaths than would normally be expected, as patients were moved out of hospitals that were anticipating high demand for beds.
Of those 30,000, only 10,000 have had covid-19 specified on the death certificate. While Spiegelhalter acknowledged that some of these “excess deaths” might be the result of underdiagnosis, “the huge number of unexplained extra deaths in homes and care homes is extraordinary. When we look back … this rise in non-covid extra deaths outside the hospital is something I hope will be given really severe attention.”
Shaun Griffin, British Medical Journal 

Screenshot from a now-deleted YouTube presentation by Professor Knut Wittkowski, June 2020

Currently, official data on co-morbidities in the UK suggests a figure of around 90% – though Off-Guardian calculates 95% from NHS figures – of deaths recorded with C19 as the underlying cause included one or more co-morbidities, which is in line with data from Italy and elsewhere. As of 8 June 2020, total UK deaths for people who tested positive are just above 40,000, which represents 0.063% of the population. As of 5 June 2020, total deaths in Japan – no lockdown – are 907, which represents 0.0007% of the population. Total deaths in Germany as of 8 June 2020 are 8,763, which represents 0.01% of the population. These wildly differing death rates in three countries, only two of which executed lockdowns, strongly suggests that factors other than the virus itself are co-causal, and thus that the virus’ lethality may well be far lower than 0.1%. Serology tests support a similar conclusion.

To repeat, how can we ever know for certain that lockdowns “save lives”? At a maximum we might argue, narrowly, it prolongs some lives by a few months, but this observation doesn’t account for the damage caused by, and lives lost due to, the lockdown. And what about quality of life … must quantity trump quality? Are six months of lonely, sterilised isolation better than one final month accompanied by loved ones? Finally, to what degree are we risking future lives to “save” those now close to death – the C19 risk group –, those we might better protect by not destroying the economy? And how does a lockdown protect care homes? Looking forward, how does wrecking the economy protect the near future’s old and vulnerable people? Do health-care systems, including care homes, fare well in times of austerity? Results in England strongly suggest otherwise.

We all die, without exception. It is not in our power, at the collective level, to dictate how and when this inevitability happens, just as King Knut could not hold back the tide. That, in our folly, we try anyway – and with such fearful fervour we wilfully turn a blind eye to the consequences of that fervour – is a kind of collective sickness humanity knows too well. But what right do we have to advocate and pursue such a lopsided policy: every death is one death too many (except those caused by the lockdown)?

To the degree that counter-information is in any way helpful in this divided environment, data from Sweden, Belarus, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, eight states in the US and elsewhere demonstrates the wisdom of trusting the population to make its own common-sense decisions based on sound information, rather than ordering everyone to hide away in their homes, sowing fear, and switching off a large proportion of the economy in so doing. Their less draconian approaches downplay fear, prevent panic, and keep their economies ticking over. This hindsight knowledge doesn’t make these incredibly difficult decisions easier, but does help us adjust current strategy and learn lessons for the future. 

Neil Ferguson, who became known as “professor lockdown” after convincing Boris Johnson to radically curtail everyday freedoms, acknowledged that, despite relying on “quite similar science”, the Swedish authorities had “got a long way to the same effect” without a full lockdown.
Henry Bodkin, The Telegraph, 2 June 2020

Or should help us. The UK seems curiously reluctant to embrace the good news. The same is true in Germany where the death rates are far less intimidating, and yet several lockdown measures that are very damaging to the economy are kept in place, while the awaited vaccine is touted as the only route out. A global, live presentation by GAVI – the global vaccine alliance – involved multiple heads of state announcing how vital a vaccine is for ending the lockdown across the planet, even though SARS-CoV-2 has proved itself to be harmless to the vast majority of the population. Even in the UK where the figures are certainly unusual, are they really justification for a lockdown that will likely cause more deaths that the virus, and is clearly responsible for a significant proportion of those already endured?

As we know, by the time lockdowns were implemented, the R0 figure was at or below 1. The virus had therefore already spread throughout much of the affected populations and immunity had begun to develop. (According to Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, corona viruses are typically thwarted when roughly 20% of a population has immunity.) So the lockdowns came too late, making any attempts to “flatten the curve” redundant. This information was either known or available to governments at the time, or shortly thereafter. The subsequent explosion in case numbers reported by the mass media was thus more the consequence of late (and misleading) RT-PCR testing for infections, rather than the sudden, dramatic onset of the virus. Norway’s lockdown came a couple of weeks earlier than the UK’s, for example, but even they have begun to question the wisdom of locking down:

[W]as lockdown necessary? What did it achieve that could not have been achieved by voluntary social distancing? Camilla Stoltenberg, director of Norway’s public health agency, has given an interview where she is candid about the implications of this discovery. ‘Our assessment now, and I find that there is a broad consensus in relation to the reopening, was that one could probably achieve the same effect – and avoid part of the unfortunate repercussions – by not closing. But, instead, staying open with precautions to stop the spread.’ This is important to admit, she says, because if the infection levels rise again – or a second wave hits in the winter – you need to be brutally honest about whether lockdown proved effective.
Fraser Nelson, The Spectator, 27 May 2020

The deeper we drill, the harder it is to prove lockdowns save lives and flatten curves. It is an economic fact that everything comes with a price. Expressed differently, every decision brings consequences in its wake. When confronted with an epidemic, and deciding between general lockdown on the one hand and finely targeted measures protecting vulnerable groups on the other, either path will lead to an unknowable number of deaths. Some decisions, thankfully very few, are like that. And while it’s as clear as day that we all die, the multiple, complex causes that lead to each individual’s unique death are impossible to track. In other words, we will never be able to control or fully understand all outcomes, nor do I want to live in a reality where we could. Uncertainty makes life worth living, but is at times hard to handle.

Along similar lines, the best autopsy in the world can never explain the precise reason a person died at which exact nanosecond. Even if the victim is shot in the head, we can never know precisely when what exact amount of damage caused death, nor how much of the damage occurred after death, nor exactly why, in full detail, the trigger was pulled. This set of trivial uncertainties becomes a significant black box when conducting autopsies of people who die from a combination of viral infections and other co-morbidities. Determining cause of death is harder still when no autopsy is performed. 

Without autopsy data, can we ever know how deadly SARS-CoV-2 is, what its actual IFR is? Understanding SARS-CoV-2’s lethality by looking only at its purported death toll – without examining the details that figure conceals – is like examining a photograph of a human silhouette to understand humanity. What we have currently as our data pool is a combination of hastily completed death certificates, a set of symptoms – dry cough, fever, dizziness, loss of taste and smell – that is far from distinguishing, and unreliable test results, all of which are subject to considerable error.

The NHS issued guidance to assist doctors to comply with the new legislation [the Corona Virus Act 2020]. Any doctor can sign the MCCD [Medical Certificate of Cause of Death]. There is no need for the scrutiny of a second Medical Examiner. The Medical Examiner, or any other doctor, can sign the MCCD alone. The safeguards introduced in 2016 were removed, but only in the case of COVID 19.
Iain Davies, Off-Guardian, 5 May 2020 

For example, if before death the patient had symptoms typical of COVID19 infection, but the test result has not been received, it would be satisfactory to give ‘COVID-19’ as the cause of death, tick Box B and then share the test result when it becomes available. In the circumstances of there being no swab, it is satisfactory to apply clinical judgement.
Office for National Statistics, Guidance for doctors completing Medical Certificates of Cause of Death in England and Wales

Even if, for compelling evidence, we look at the data on deaths in excess of five-year averages revealed in figures from the UK, Italy, Spain, New York, etc. – although these figures are in fact unremarkable if we look at average data over 25 years – we are still forced to conclude they are, as we have established, the result of multiple factors, including: prescribed hospital protocols favouring and remunerating intubation, fear’s negative impact on the immune system, mass hysteria, the state of each nation’s health-care facilities, air pollution, Do Not Resuscitate agreements, demographics and the health conditions of relevant populations, care homes not being able to cope with the very sick, etc. In other words, it is far from clear these excess deaths are the direct result of the virus. And more importantly, why are there no excess deaths in Germany, Finland, Norway, Japan, and many other countries exposed to this global ‘pandemic’? We are all exposed to the same virus, I assume. It cannot possess wildly differing lethality according to its longitude and latitude alone.

How can we answer these vital questions when regulatory changes stipulated in the UK’s Corona Virus Act, and NHS guidelines, have made these details almost impossible to determine. Why muddy the data? Surely early exit from lockdown would be the best thing for the economy and thus the people, a difficult decision made far easier by good data? Surely to properly ascertain the best strategy for defeating the virus, we need the cleanest data possible? The only explanation I can think of that would make muddy data beneficial, is if the motivation for the lockdown is not rooted in the science, but in some ulterior intention.

All in all, the facts we do have, such as they are, paint an ugly picture whose eruption in collective consciousness these last few months, which reveals so much about us as a species, needs explication. The reason I favour as an explanation for the chaos, fear mongering, and economic destruction is the need for an economic reset and new economic system. And, as if on cue, organisations such as The World Economics Forum and the IMF have just started casting this crisis as an opportunity for a much needed reset, with even Prince Charles voicing the same message. 

We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis. Its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change.
Prince Charles, The Guardian, 3 June 2020

The best time to implement radical change is when people are confused and afraid; we are less critical, more malleable and more eager to be rescued in that emotional state. The question is, will the new boss be any better than the old boss, or will things get much worse?

My contention is that The Powers That Be, the ‘elites’, the ‘globalists’, or whatever label we choose, know full well that perpetual economic growth is impossible. The ‘free market’ model has served its purpose in that it was ‘right’ for humanity, in their view, for a while. But not any more. This is not to say the whole thing is a master plan centuries old, far from it. It’s more that those in a position to do so nudge history in such a way that it continues to proceed more or less in their favour … with mixed results; they are not omnipotent, nor or they an homogenous hive-mind. The process is, generally speaking, probably characterised by a combination of opportunism; very long-term global strategising; patiently establishing sufficient control of key societal infrastructure such as the money system, mass media, and governmental systems of pivotal world powers; and insatiable ambition. Another critical element, it must be said, is our – the ruled – complicity in the process. We are the ones who allow it, who choose to bury our heads in the sand, who prefer the numbing conveniences of modern technology and entertainment over “eternal vigilance”, who want quiet lives, or perhaps fun-filled lives that rock no boats and upset no apple carts. And this is easy to understand. Who wants to believe that the state, our very own protective Big Brother, is the enemy?

But it is simply unimaginable that the great historical dynamics that generate ever mightier hierarchical systems – from chieftaincies to kingdoms to nation states to multinational corporations – are suddenly no longer driven by ambition and greed, and that the intergroup tensions that must bedevil culturally diverging groups have just disappeared. These powerful historical momenta are still in force; where could they have gone? The checks and balances inhibiting tyranny have eroded, as they always do, because eternal vigilance is hard work; today, people have to hold down two or more jobs to pay the rent, are educated poorly and very selectively, with the important stuff kept well out of sight, and are nicely distracted by things like Netflix and pizza, modernity’s bread and circuses.

Also of relevance is the lower-order fact that Big Pharma’s survival depends on vaccinations as their main revenue stream – as set out in detail in e.g. “The Truth About Vaccines 2020” –, add in the fact that “anti-vaxxer” has somehow become such a hate-filled pejorative its usage is as hotly felt as “antisemite”, and we discern another piece of the puzzle. Surely there is a strong connection between this manufactured hatred and the fact we are now instructed to wait for a vaccine before we may again enjoy what is inalienably ours: our freedom. How can it be reasonable that demanding informed consent on vaccinations is equated with being a child or granny killer? And all this despite the overwhelming evidence that vaccines are neither safe nor effective, despite the existence of the “Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System” in the US, and despite the US Supreme Court ruling of March 2011 that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe”. Despite all this, and much more, vaccinating all of humanity against a relatively harmless virus – which can be treated effectively with cheap drugs – is pushed by all major nations as the only way out of this crisis, which is a crisis only because governments, media and global health organisations have created it as such, in wilfully blinkered defiance of their own data.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll briefly add that there is likely a loose alliance of various power groups, including Google, Apple, Microsoft (ID2020), and financial corporations, whose interests currently align around the Fourth Industrial Revolution they favour, whose advent requires a rapid and radical restructuring of society. Today’s world also happens to be powered by a financial system that is broken far beyond repair. It too needs a radical overhaul. This sort of revolutionary change either happens in bloody chaos of uncertain outcome, or can be stage managed in an attempt to ensure a preferred outcome. For the ‘elites’, therefore, theirs is no evil plan. It is history itself, it is needed and inevitable progress, and they are its shepherds. Their obvious success and lofty status qualify them, and only them, for this role. We, The People are so fearful of change that almost any means justify the noble ends their vision promises.

We are staring down the barrel of a momentous bifurcation point. How should we react? Allow ourselves to be expertly shepherded into pens devised by those who do not have our best interests at heart, with walls, windows, doors and locks built out of “digital immunity proofs”, compulsory vaccinations against whatever Big Pharma / the WHO categorises as dangerous pathogens, food manufactured by Big Ag, information controlled by Big Data, and law by Big Government? 

Or do we fight for a say in how this historical moment unfolds?

Whatever we choose, we will get what we earn, fair or unfair.

Conclusion

Only the intensity has changed. The heat has been raised and tensions brought to a boil, but history’s vector is undisturbed. We have crossed a pivotal juncture, a modern Rubicon. Whether we asked to play this game or not, we are partners in this process simply because we are alive. 

What do you want your contribution be?

Entrenched divisions are the root problem, and yet diversity remains a key value to protect and cherish. We should not seek some pulpy fusion of our varied perspectives, nor attempt compromise so deep no one can commit to anything. The best way through is as it has always been: dispassionate assessment of impartially agreed facts. But this process easily leads astray unless tempered by sensitive and sympathetic subjectivity when dealing with the endless interpretations of those facts.

To choose this way, we have to want to do the work. Wanting to do the work means wanting to become adults. Currently, we are emotional children – confused, frightened, uncertain of our authority and power –, kept this way by the education system, social and mass media, and relentless propaganda. Adults are hard to rule. The rulers-ruled dynamic requires perpetual children: easy to manipulate, easy to control. If we want a society oriented around honesty and transparency, that part has to change.

Whether I’m right or wrong in my analysis here, the mere existence of this unprecedented situation changes everything. But my heartfelt conviction is that we all want healthy outcomes; this common ground should be our centre. Ensuring healthy outcomes requires healthy diets, staying fit, establishing and sustaining good relationships, developing skills needed by our communities, treating the environment mindfully and intelligently, and staying emotionally honest, humble and courageous both with self and other.

Prevention, not cure, should be the focus. Health is far more than just taking your meds. It is a highly complex homeostasis that requires constant adjustment to constant change. It has nothing to do with control freakery; true health wisely accepts that tragedy and beauty are two sides of the same coin. We actively tend to it, just as a gardener tends a garden. In other words, health is our responsibility, not something we can buy from someone else, something we can fix quickly and get on with other things. And it can never emerge from fear of death and disease. Only love engenders health. Love is gladly embracing the countless interconnections between self and the rest of reality.

How much money-profit can a truly healthy world produce? This would be a radical change indeed, a new direction of travel that cannot have total control as its guiding light. Health is the emergent property of right living; there is no way to mechanically automate the process, lean back, and watch the health coins pour in. It is precisely uncertainty and endless change that guarantee life’s impossible beauty. Accepting this helps us see and appreciate that beauty, and respond wisely to tragedy. But while there’s no such thing as total control, we must be aware of our power at all times. We can harm others and so have responsibility for our free will.

I find these constraints to be liberty’s true soil. They are the friction needed to attain purchase on our personal growth, and so become mature co-creators of our world.

My deep thanks to Rupert for his unstinting support, Annette for that and her ferocious editing – so generous in the face of my tetchy responses –, and Grant for his invaluable feedback.