Brownstone Institute
No, Lockdown Instigators Do Not Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt
In the United States, some 2,000,000 people—over 1% of adult men—currently reside in prisons and jails. In America’s poorest cities, crime and law enforcement are intertwined with life to such a degree that many children grow up more familiar with the justice system than the education system. For kids who grow up in these circumstances, getting through school while staying out of jail is a feat worth celebrating.
Some of this is, of course, necessary to maintain a peaceful society in a country as open and unequal as the United States. But the American political-prison-industrial complex is also riddled with perverse incentives. As Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch put it: “We live in a world in which everything has been criminalized. And some professors have even opined that there’s not an American alive who hasn’t committed a felony under some state law.” We’ve even developed an Orwellian lexicon for this system; the term “crime of moral turpitude” is a tacit admission that America’s statutes are riddled with crimes that do not actually involve “moral turpitude”—it’s puzzling why these should be considered crimes at all.
Worse yet, an estimated 5% of convicts are actually innocent. That means there are currently some 100,000 Americans in prisons and jails who didn’t even commit the crimes for which they were charged. The sad truth is that just living in one of America’s poorest neighborhoods comes with some risk of incarceration; the more people around who are convicted, the greater the odds of becoming an innocent convict oneself. Juries do their best, but they’re beset by the usual human biases. Judges know all too well that verdicts often come down to such irrelevant factors as the defendant’s charisma, physical attractiveness, or even what the jury had for breakfast that morning.
Mass incarceration is one sad byproduct of inequality and community deterioration in the 21st century. But an even worse byproduct of that inequality is an entire caste of Western elites who’ve begun to manipulate the system to exempt themselves and their supporters from the rule of law to a degree not seen since the rise of the fascist regimes of the 1930s. And in no instance has this been made more clear than in the promulgation of Covid lockdowns into policy in early 2020.
The Crime
Lockdowns, or the shutting of businesses and community spaces with the force of law, were unprecedented in the Western world prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan; rather, these pandemic plans suggested only voluntary social distancing measures. While lockdowns bore some facial resemblance to the voluntary social distancing measures contemplated in pandemic plans, this similarity was no coincidence, as the concept of “social distancing” in its origin was lifted by the US CDC straight from the Chinese Communist Party policy of “lockdown” as imposed during SARS in 2003. Further, some leading federal officials have disclosed that at the time they recommended temporary social distancing measures for Covid, they did so with the intent that state governors would enforce them as indefinite forced lockdowns.
As former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has documented in scrupulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause were all well-known and reported at the time they were first adopted as policy in early 2020. These included accurate estimates of mass deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an economic recession, global poverty, hunger, and starvation.
Yet regardless, for reasons we’re still only beginning to understand, some key scientists, health officials, national security officials, media entities, international organizations, billionaires and influencers advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented, devastating policies from the earliest possible date, ostensibly to stop or slow the coronavirus as the CCP claims to have done in Wuhan, while censoring any contrary opinions, spinning a false illusion of consensus amongst an unknowing public. A report later revealed that military leaders saw this as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public, shaping and “exploiting” information to bolster government messages about the virus. Dissenting scientists were silenced. Psyops teams deployed fear campaigns on their own people in a scorched-earth campaign to drive consent for lockdowns.
These early advocates of lockdowns inverted the definitions of key public health principles in sophisticated, Orwellian fashion. While the lockdowns they advocated were deliberately intended to overturn existing public health practices, they instructed the public to “follow the science,” leading the public to believe that their policies were grounded in established scientific practice. They used the rhetoric of equity and vulnerability to advocate policies that disproportionately harmed the most vulnerable and increased existing economic divides. They then retroactively cited the broad public support for lockdowns that had been sown by their own propaganda as justification for their propaganda in support of those lockdowns.
Ultimately, these lockdowns failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and killed tens of thousands of young people in every country in which they were tried. We now know the virus had already begun spreading undetected all over the world by fall 2019 at the latest and had an infection fatality rate under 0.2%.
However, the lockdowns caused the public to believe that the virus was hundreds of times deadlier than it really was. Simultaneously, the World Health Organization issued global PCR testing guidance—using tests later confirmed by the New York Times to have a false positive rate over 85%—pursuant to which millions of cases were soon discovered in every country. Additionally, the WHO issued new guidance on the use of mechanical ventilators to member nations; over 97% of those over age 65 who received mechanical ventilation in accordance with this guidance were killed.
Terrified by this surge of deaths and the psychological terror campaigns deployed by governments on their own people, populations across the Western world proceeded to impose an ever-darker swathe of illiberal mandates including forced masking and digital vaccine passes for everyday activities. Young children, who were at virtually no risk from the virus, lost years of primary education in the worst education crisis since the end of the Second World War. An indefinite state of legal emergency was imposed which continues to this day. The global fight for human rights and the end of poverty was set back decades.
Over $3 trillion in wealth was transferred from the world’s poorest to a tiny number of billionaires and their supporters, predominantly in China and in the tech and pharmaceutical industries. Several key early lockdown proponents indicated that they saw Covid as an opportunity to “entrench a new idea of the left … reconstructing a cultural hegemony on a new basis.” Authoritarian regimes grew more autocratic, and democratic governments took on authoritarian characteristics.
Worst of all, a norm was grafted onto Western democracy that the fundamental rights to movement, work, association, bodily autonomy, and free expression, for which our forebears fought so tirelessly, can be suddenly and indefinitely suspended, without precedent, analysis, or logic, based on nothing but vague promises that doing so will “save lives”—rendering them all but moot.
Meanwhile, the lockdowns and mandates led to the deaths of over 170,000 Americans and proportionate numbers in countries that imposed them across the Western world. By 2021, lockdowns had killed over 228,000 children in South Asia. Studies of excess deaths indicate that lockdowns led to several million deaths in India and proportionate numbers in other developing nations.
A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking real atrocities.
These numbers do not even begin to count the total damage that will ultimately ensue due to the economic devastation of lockdowns, which we will continue to witness for many years to come. Many early lockdown proponents may never be among the 2,000,000 Americans currently residing in jails and prisons, but we can be sure that thousands more would-be innocent children will one day be added to the prison rolls as a result of the economic destruction their policies unleashed.
Ladies and gentlemen, this case ultimately comes down to whether, unlike the other 2,000,000 Americans currently in state custody, we can be sure that by virtue of their socioeconomic position and the panic over a virus which panic they deliberately stoked with their own policies, this handful of key early lockdown proponents acted in good faith when they convinced the world to adopt these unprecedented, catastrophic policies based on the belief that China eliminated the virus from an entire country by shutting down one city for two months—so sure that the question demands no further inquiry. I leave that for you to decide.
Reprinted from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
A recent essay titled “The Real Purpose of Net Zero” by Jefferey Jaxon posited that Europe’s current war against farmers in the name of preventing climate change is ultimately designed to inflict famine. Jaxon is not speculating on globalist motives; he is warning humanity of a rapidly unfolding reality that is observable in the perverse lies against cows, denigration of European farmers as enemies of the Earth, and calls by the WHO, WEF, and UN for a plant-based diet dependent entirely on GMOs, synthetic fertilizers, and agrichemicals.
Revelations about the evil doings of the Orwellian-monikered “United States Agency of International Development” (USAID) reveal a roadmap to totalitarian control unwittingly funded by America’s taxpaying proles. USAID’s clandestine machinations have long focused on controlling local and global food supplies as “soft colonization” by multinational chemical, agricultural, and financial corporations. European farmers revolting against climate, wildlife, and animal rights policies are harbingers of this tightening globalist noose.
The roots of the current globalist plan to “save humanity from climate change” link directly to the infamous Kissinger Report, which called to control world food supplies and agriculture as part of a globalist collaboration between nation-states and NGOs to advance US national security interests and “save the world” from human overpopulation using “fertility reduction technologies.” Kissinger’s 1974 Report was created by USAID, the CIA, and various federal agencies, including the USDA.
Fast forward to 2003, the Iraq War justified using fear-mongering propaganda about weapons of mass destruction and neo-conservative malarky about rescuing the Iraqi people. The US-led occupation of Iraq became a rapacious profiteering smorgasbord for colonizing corporations husbanded by USAID. Iraq is heir to the birthplace of human civilization, made possible by early Mesopotamian agriculture: many of the grains, fruits, and vegetables that now feed the world were developed there. Iraq’s farmers saved back 97% of their seed stocks from their own harvests before the US invasion. Under Paul Bremer, Rule 81 (never fully implemented) sought to institute GMO cropping and patented seed varieties, as Cargill, Monsanto, and other corporations descended upon the war-ravaged nation using American tax dollars and USAID.
That playbook was more quietly implemented during the Ukraine War, once again orchestrated by USAID. Before the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe, prohibiting GMO technologies and restricting land ownership to Ukrainians. Within months of US intervention, USAID assisted in the dismantling of these protections in the name of “land reforms,” free markets, financial support, improved agricultural efficiency, and rescuing the Ukrainian people. In just two years, over half of Ukraine’s farmland became the property of foreign investors. GMO seeds and drone technology were “donated” by Bayer Corporation, and companies such as GMO seed-seller Syngenta and German chemical manufacturer BASF became the dominant agricultural “stakeholders” in war-torn Ukraine. Russia may withdraw, but Ukraine’s foreign debts, soil degradation, and soft colonization will remain.
The UN, WTO, WHO, and WEF all conspire to peddle a false narrative that cows and peasant farmers are destroying the planet, and that chemical-dependent GMO monocropping, synthetic fertilizers, and patented fake meats and bug burgers must be implemented post haste (by force if necessary) to rescue humanity. The argument that pesticides and synthetic fertilizers (manufactured from natural gas, aka methane) are salvific is patently false. They are, however, highly profitable for chemical companies like Bayer, Dow, and BASF.
Jefferey Jaxon is exactly correct. The Netherlands committed to robust agricultural development following a Nazi embargo that deliberately inflicted mass famine following their collaboration with Allied Forces in Operation Market Garden. France boasts the highest cow population in all of Europe. Ireland’s culture is tightly linked to farming as part of its trauma during the (British-assisted) Irish Potato Famine. The corporate/NGO cabal now uprooting and targeting farmers in these nations and across the EU in the name of staving off climate change and preserving wildlife is a direct outcropping of Kissinger’s grand dystopian scheme launched through USAID in 1974.
Americans watch European farmer protests from afar, largely oblivious that most all of US agriculture was absorbed by the Big Ag Borg generations ago. Currency control linked to a (political, environmental, and economic) social credit scorecard promises the fruition of Kissinger’s demonic plan: “Control the food, control the people.”
Modern humans suffer a double hubris that blinds them to the contemplation of the truth of Jaxon’s hypothesis: a cultish trust in technology, coupled with an irrational faith in their self-perceived moral superiority to past civilizations (Wendell Berry calls this “historical pride”). Yet, as long as mankind has had the capacity to harm another for personal gain, humans have devised ways to control food for power or profit. Siege warfare generally depended on starving defenders of castle walls into submission.
Even if globalist food control proposals are well-intentioned, a monolithic, monocultured, industrial-dependent worldwide food system is a lurking humanitarian disaster. Berry observed:
In a highly centralized and industrialized food-supply system there can be no small disaster. Whether it be a production “error” or a corn blight, the disaster is not foreseen until it exists; it is not recognized until it is widespread.
The current push to dominate global food production using industrial systems is the cornerstone of complete globalist dominion over all of humanity. The “Mark of the Beast” without which no American will buy or sell goods – including guns, bullets, or factory-grown hamburgers and cricket patties – is mere steps away. Mr. Jaxon is correct that these leaders “know these basic historical and current facts,” and that “[f]armers are becoming endangered because of government [climate] policy … and it’s being allowed to happen.” USAID has been actively seeding and watering this dystopia for decades.
Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates are as fully cognizant of this fundamental truth as Henry Kissinger was in 1974. USAID has aided all three. Having lost almost all of their small farms over the last century, Americans are well ahead of Europeans in their near-complete dependence on industrial food.
That’s the plan.
Author
From Brownstone Institute
I am expert in influenza, and have consulted with the WHO over the past two decades on the topic of flu vaccines. This is one subject matter I am extremely knowledgeable about. This goes back to my medical school days, when I worked with Robert Lamb, one of the top influenza virus specialists in the world. It extended through much of my career, including my serving as Director of Clinical Influenza Vaccine Research for Solvay Biologicals, in which I oversaw over $200 million in federal (BARDA) alternative (cell-based) influenza vaccine research funding.
What is happening now with “Bird flu” is another psyops campaign being conducted by the administrative/deep state, apparently in partnership with Pharma, against the American people. They know and we know that the “vaccines” being produced will be somewhat ineffective, as all flu “vaccines” are. The government is chasing a rapidly evolving RNA virus with a syringe, just like they did with HIV and Covid-19.
Generally, the currently circulating avian influenza strain in the US does not include any cases of human-to-human transmission. And the current mortality, with over 60 cases identified, is 0%. NOT 50%.
All the while they are getting prepared to roll out masks, lockdowns, quarantines, etc.
All the while getting ready to roll out mRNA vaccines for poultry and livestock, as well as for all of us.
The more they test, the more “Bird flu” (H5N1) they will find. This “pandemic” is nothing more than an artifact of their newly developed protocols to test cattle, poultry, pets, people, and wildlife on a massive scale for avian influenza. In years past, this was not even considered. In the past, the USG did fund a massive testing and surveillance program called “Biowatch.” That program was a colossal failure and a massive waste of money. Billions of dollars.
Of course, these facilities producing the tests have been repurposed from the Covid-19 testing facilities.
Key questions include:
Will we all comply?
Will we be forced to comply?
Will President Trump go along with the PsyWar/psyops campaign again?
We will know soon enough.
As the United States is testing everyone who has even the mildest symptoms for the H5N1 (avian) influenza, guess what – they are finding it! This is what we call in the lab, a “sampling bias.”
Globally, from 1997 until the present, there have been 907 reported cases of H5N1. And in fact, this particular outbreak was not the worst – and it is the only one where a massive testing campaign has occurred. It appears that this is partly due to the new diagnostic capabilities developed and deployed during Covid-19. The more you test, the more you find. But is it clinically significant?
The Case Study of Tetanus: Supply Chain Issues.
The CDC recommends a booster for the tetanus vaccine every 10 years for adults.
However, research published almost a decade ago suggests that the protection from tetanus and diphtheria vaccination lasts at least 30 years after completing the standard childhood vaccination series.
“We have always been told to get a tetanus shot every 10 years, but actually, there is very little data to prove or disprove that timeline. When we looked at the levels of immunity among 546 adults, we realized that antibody titers against tetanus and diphtheria lasted much longer then previously believed.”
-Mark K. Slifka, Ph.D, study author
This research, published in a highly reputable journal, suggests that a revised vaccination schedule with boosters occurring at ages 30 and 60 would be sufficient. As this was published in early 2016, the US government, at the very least, could have commissioned easily designed prospective and retrospective studies to confirm these results. And those results would have been published by now, with the tetanus adult schedule revised to reflect what is now known about the durable immunity of tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. Reducing the boosters to just two shots would save the government vast sums of money.
Not only that, but both the tetanus and diphtheria vaccines carry risks for adults. It is estimated that 50%–85% of patients experience injection site pain or tenderness, 25%–30% experience edema and erythema. Higher preexisting anti-tetanus antibody levels are also associated with a higher reactogenicity rate and greater severity (reference).
Anaphylaxis after tetanus vaccination represents a rare but potentially serious adverse event, with an incidence of 1.6 cases per million doses. That means if 100 million adults receive the booster every ten years, 320 cases of anaphylaxis will be avoided over the 30-year period – from those two boosters being eliminated. Tetanus has always been a “rare” disease, spread through a skin wound contaminated by Clostridium tetani bacteria, commonly found in soil, dust, and manure. Before vaccines were available, there were about 500 cases a year, with most resulting in death. Concerns about vaccine-associated adverse events when immunizations were performed at short intervals led to a revision of the tetanus/diphtheria vaccination schedule in 1966 to once every 10 years for patients >6 years of age.
It has recently come to my attention that the traditional stand-alone tetanus vaccine (TT) that one used to receive as an adult has been discontinued due to WHO recommendations. Their reasoning being:
Use of TTCV combinations with diphtheria toxoid are strongly encouraged and single-antigen vaccines should be discontinued whenever feasible to help maintain both high diphtheria and high tetanus immunity throughout the life course.
The CDC blames the shuttering of the only plant producing TT for the current lack of a stand-alone TT vaccine.
Now, in order to get a booster tetanus shot, an adult must take the following.
- Td: Sanofi’s Tenivac protects against tetanus and diphtheria. Given to people 7 years and older as a booster every 10 years. *A version also includes pertussis (eg DPT), but due to the risk of encephalitis, it is not recommended as a booster.
Why is the DPT combination vaccine discouraged in adults due to encephalitis risk, but is it recommended for children? Another one of those inconvenient issues that plague the CDC-recommended childhood vaccine schedule.
While supplies of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (Tdap) vaccines (Sanofi’s Adacel and GSK’s Boostrix) aren’t limited, they are more expensive, and a very small fraction of patients can develop encephalopathy (brain damage) from the pertussis component.
In the United States, diphtheria is virtually non-existent, with only 14 cases reported between 1996 and 2018. Of those cases reported, most were from international travelers or immigrants.
The market for a stand-alone TT vaccine vanished worldwide due to WHO recommendations to stop the sales of the TT vaccine. Which was due to the relatively few, economically stressed countries where diphtheria is still an issue. So, therefore, the only facility manufacturing the TT vaccine was shut down within the last year.
The blowback from the WHO recommendations is that now there is a shortage of tetanus and diphtheria (Td) vaccine in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.
This all comes down to poor planning. And illustrates why supply chain issues and infectious disease countermeasure stockpiles are essential considerations for governments.
The good news is that unless one is immunosuppressed, most of us have almost lifelong immunity against tetanus and diphtheria.
My recommendation is that unless one gets a very deep and dirty puncture wound and has not had a tetanus shot in over ten years or longer, avoid that booster.
Here is the ugly secret about influenza vaccines. They are given to protect one group of vulnerable people. Those who are immunosuppressed, and that cohort includes the very elderly.
If those influenza vaccine manufacturing plants only make enough vaccines for those susceptible to a severe case of the flu, there would not be enough of a market to sustain their production costs. Furthermore, if there were a pandemic of some sort of highly pathogenic influenza, there would not be sufficient capacity to make enough vaccines to meet demand.
Egg-based influenza vaccine production requires super “clean” eggs; about 100 million “clean” fertilized eggs are needed annually for vaccine production in the US alone. Candidate vaccine viruses are injected into the eggs. If the process is shuttered, the whole production comes to a screeching halt. Many vaccines can be stored for long periods. Even as long as a decade. This stockpiling system works well for DNA viruses with a low mutation rate. Stockpiling is rarely a solution for vaccines developed for RNA viruses that mutate rapidly.
Therefore, the influenza vaccine is pushed on the American people year after year. As a way to maintain “warm base manufacturing” and ensure sufficient market size to support industrial operations.
I have spoken on this subject at the WHO and US government agencies, as well as many, many conferences. Unfortunately, because the mRNA and RNA vaccine platforms require a lot of freezer space (commonly -20°C) to stockpile for even short periods, this limits the ability to stockpile. Furthermore, the frozen storage requirements are only for up to 6 months. That means stockpiling for more extended storage is not currently done, and it is back to square one on the supply chain issue.
The issue with freezer space and mRNA vaccines is one that most likely won’t be solved. This benefits the manufacturers of this vaccine technology – the US government has an endless need for new vaccines as the old ones expire.
My small hope is that the mRNA platform will be too costly to justify its continued use, as appeals concerning safety (or lack of) seem to fall on deaf FDA ears.
In the meantime, don’t believe the hype generated by ex-officials from the Biden and Trump administrations.
Both Dr. Lena Wen, CNN correspondent, and Dr. Redfield, ex-director of the CDC, have gone on to mainstream media shows and promoted the narrative that the case fatality rate for avian influenza is over 50 percent. This, frankly, is a lie that the WHO is promoting. Bird flu generally is not tested for when someone has flu symptoms. When an outbreak of avian flu occurs on a poultry farm, testing of farm workers who are seriously ill will commence. This has led to the generation of the 890 case reports since 2003. Of those seriously ill patients reported to the WHO, over 50 percent died.
This is not an actual case fatality rate of avian flu around the world. It is, again, a sampling error due to a tiny data set derived from those who are at greatest risk due to general health. And just like the WHO reported on an exaggerated case fatality rate for mPOX, which was also based on a sampling error, or for Covid-19, again a sampling error, it is now used to justify psychological bioterrorism on the world population. Please don’t fall for it.
El Gato Malo on X succinctly points out that Dr. Leana Wen and her public health ilk are advancing:
1. Do more of the same lousy testing used in Covid-19 to overstate a disease and cause panic.
2. Develop another non-sterilizing non-vaccine that does not work to be pushed on “the vulnerable.”
3. Doing it “right now” under EUA, so whoever makes these tests and jabs can cash in and be shielded from liability.
4. Claiming that proxies like “triggers antibody production” demonstrate clinical clinical efficacy.
It’s just one last smash-and-grab for cash before the Brandon (Biden) administration ends. Anyone who falls for this one will truly fall for anything.
Question: what are Leana’s conflicts of interest? Who is paying her or giving her grants?
For those that haven’t viewed Dr. Redfield speaking of the avian flu case fatality rate, have a watch below. It is genuinely shocking. This fear-mongering comes from an ex-director of the CDC. Shame on him.
Frankly, it reminds me of the 51 intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake.
One has to wonder what conflict of interest motivated him to say this on national TV?
Remember in the US, there have been 62 cases of avian influenza discovered, and all but one case were very mild.
This deep dive into the supply chain issues is meant to show that public health has put itself into a groupthink situation that it can’t escape.
Many solutions to this quandary do not involve an evermore expanding schedule of vaccinations, stockpiled for some future use. I have some general thoughts before I sign off.
- The use of early treatments via safe, proven drugs is a good solution.
- We now have many antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. Vaccines do not always need to be our first defense.
- Our medical system is very good at treating infectious diseases. The risks from such diseases are much less than it once was. People do not have to live in fear of infectious disease. I like to ask people, how many people do you know have died of flu? If you know of any (I don’t), how old were they?
- The need to scare people into more and more vaccines is a dangerous trend.
- And yes, the more vaccinations one receives, the more likely an adverse event.
- Vaccinating pregnant women and babies should always be a last resort.
- It is time for Congress to rethink the vaccine liability laws.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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