Brownstone Institute
A Big Picture Look at the Disastrous Public Health Response to COVID-19
An underlying principle of public health is, or was, to provide the public with accurate information so that they can make good health choices for themselves and their community.
The past 3 years have seen this paradigm turned on its head, with the public’s money being used to deceive and coerce them, forcing them to follow public health dictates. The public has funded their own incarceration and impoverishment through their taxes, with public funds driving the unprecedented nonpharmaceutical, and then pharmaceutical, response to a virus that kills mainly old sick people near the end of their lives.
Children have had their education downgraded, and economies have been mangled, ensuring future generations will also pay. So, what did the public actually pay for?
COVID-19 was not novel, but a variation on previous respiratory disease.
Most healthy people infected with SARS-CoV-2 recover without any intervention, gaining natural immunity which, in the absence of vaccination, generates a more robust and long-lasting protection with less risk for reinfections as compared to individuals protected by vaccination alone. Globally, the infection fatality rate (IFR) of SARS-CoV-2 is about 0.15% and comparable to seasonal influenza (IFR 0,1 %). The IFR of those under twenty years was only 0.0013 %, and highest for those beyond 70 years. The IFR of COVID-19 among community-dwelling elderly is lower than previously reported in elderly overall.
A higher IFR was found in countries with many long-term care facilities, perhaps because exposure tends to occur through other immune-suppressed elderly, rather than immune competent children with lower viral loads. An aging population goes through the process of immunosenescence and increased incidence and severity of infectious diseases is expected.
Severe COVID-19, or COVID-19 Associated ARDS, is a syndrome within the known ARDS spectrum. Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and associated cytokine storm has been recognized for more than 50 years. It occurs when a diverse array of triggers causes acute, bilateral pulmonary inflammation and increased capillary permeability leading to acute hypoxemic respiratory failure.
Although supportive care improved the prognosis, mortality and disabling complications in survivors in intensive care are still high, and have remained relatively unchanged in the last 20 years. In 2013 an estimated 2.65 million deaths worldwide were attributed to Acute Respiratory Tract Infection.
As with other ARDS etiologies, people suffering from (COVID-19) ARDS are mostly elderly people with comorbidities including being overweight, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, often using multiple medications. Other restrictions on the immune system, such as vitamin D deficiency, put people at increased risk.
As of July 2022, WHO reported over 601 million confirmed cases and over 6.4 million deaths associated with COVID-19 globally. More than half (3.5 million) died after the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, though 67.7 % of the world population has received at least one vaccination. The WHO estimates a total of 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020-2021 associated with COVID-19 directly due to the disease or indirectly due to the impact of the public health response on health systems and society.
Footing the bill for the disposal of orthodox public health
Since COVID-19 was recognized in Western countries in early 2020, expenditures on public health in many of them have more than doubled, imposing over $500 billion in monthly costs on the global economy. Some trillions more have been spent on compensation and stimulus packages for those left without income due to the public health response, whilst economies, and therefore future employment opportunities, have been heavily damaged. This is nearly all funded by taxpayers, or borrowed to be funded with interest by the taxpayers of the future.
Politicians and various experts have claimed that the coercive COVID-19 public health policies are the only way to curb COVID-19, though such measures were advised against by the WHO in its pandemic influenza guidelines of 2019. They would increase poverty and inequality, whilst having (still) unproven efficacy.
Citizens have paid the bill via taxes for novel nonpharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, mask mandates and frequent testing) and repeated vaccinations of immune people with rapidly waning vaccines, whilst seeing their own incomes reduced. The increase in the money supply to cover relief for forced unemployment has driven inflation, contributing to increased food, water, energy, health and insurance costs. These responses have disproportionately harmed low income families.
Governments take over medical management
Early in the pandemic it became clear that intubating a COVID-19 patient could increase long-term harm and mortality. Unfortunately, many hospitals continued a low threshold for the use of ventilators for the fear that other methods of oxygenation would spread the virus. In 2020 the US spent billions of dollars stockpiling unused ventilators.
In many countries a relatively new antiviral drug, remdesivir, developed with State funding, became the first choice of treatment for hospitalized people with COVID-19. The safety and toxicity of the expensive remdesivir was widely disputed. Yet even after the first results of the WHO’s Solidarity study found little or no effect on reducing hospital stay or Covid deaths, the EU continued a €1.2 billion agreement with Gilead for 500,000 treatments and it continued to be prioritized for use in the United States.
Final results of the Solidarity study confirmed the finding of little or no effect. In contrast, the use of cheaper drugs with antiviral activity, like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, was suppressed. Although ivermectin is now included in lists of the US National Institutes of Health in August 2022, governments are silent on its use, preferring to transfer funds to Pharma for newer on-patent drugs.
Expanding lockdowns from prisons to society
Lockdowns may prove to be one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times. A cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 found lockdowns to be far more harmful to public health (at least 5-10 times) in terms of well-being than COVID-19. Significant collateral damage is not unexpected, as mass business closures and restricted movement have affected billions of people globally through poverty, food insecurity, loneliness, unemployment, educational interruption, and interrupted healthcare. What did not make media headlines is the more than 3 million children who have died from malnutrition in the first year of the pandemic. Together with increasing malnutrition, the world is facing rising burdens of child marriage and child labor, developmental and mental problems, poverty, suicide and chronic disease.
Reviews of the effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality concluded there is no broad-based evidence of noticeable COVID-19 benefit. Pandemic models that guided poverty not only overestimated COVID-19 impact but failed to take into account the collateral damage of lockdowns. The sense of fear, anxiety and helplessness brought to families and 2.2 billion children around the globe with removal of future earning capacity and limited access to healthcare will impact lives in an unprecedented manner for generations.
A recent study analyzing the 50 states of the US, with 10 states that had no lockdown impositions, strongly support the hypothesis that lockdowns place a sudden and severe stress burden on vulnerable demographics and were associated with significant increases in death in those states that used lockdowns as a disease control measure.
Mental health problems, noncommunicable inflammatory diseases, cancer and sudden deaths have increased in people across all age groups, indicating millions of people may now have more compromised immune systems. The links between stress/anxiety, ill-health and early death have long been recognized.
Within Western countries, the most deprived people and neighborhoods have higher risks for severe COVID-19, and higher mortality rates. The underprivileged in society are disproportionately affected by infectious diseases due to poverty, malnutrition, chronic stress, depression and anxiety, a deprived immune system and poor access to health-care. Rather than enhancing the resilience of these populations, the public health response has compounded their poverty, removed education opportunities, and so increased their vulnerability to this and future pandemics.
Testing for sake of testing
State investments were made for COVID-19 diagnostics: PCR tests and point-of-care tests including rapid antigen tests. While billions of tests have been used, they are poor in distinguishing infectiousness and inaccuracy provides a false sense of security, with positive results unnecessary driving fear and sick leave.
The WHO had previously, sensibly, advised against contact tracing once extensive community spread is present – people will be infected eventually, and gain immunity. Spending resources to find a small proportion, not possibly sufficient to stop transmission, is epidemiologically pointless. No reason was provided for reversing this orthodox and logical advice.
Hiding faces to pollute the environment
While there is no sound scientific support for the effectiveness of face mask mandates in the community, including children, state governments invested in the availability of free face masks for all citizens. The two published randomized controlled trials of face masks during COVID-19 showed minimal or no impact, while meta-analyses of previous studiesshow no significant efficacy. Yet in the first half of 2020 importation of face masks in the EU grew 1,800 % to €14 billion, while the industry in 2021 was worth $4.58 billion globally. Face masks with microplastics and nanoparticles are now polluting the environment, and potentially increasing the risk of impaired immune systems.
Getting an awkward technology past the regulators
Despite severe COVID-19 being highly concentrated in elderly people since early 2020, with significant comorbidities and strong evidence of effectiveness of post–infection immunity, the WHO stated in early 2021 that vaccinating the global population against COVID-19 is the only long-term strategy to contain the coronavirus crisis; “No one is safe until everyone is safe”. Rising vaccination rates were said to be necessary to improve healthcare, job prospects and future educational plans.
Unfortunately, the peak efficiency of 97% and 96% respectively claimed for the Moderna and Pizer COVID-19 vaccines against COVID hospitalization waned rapidly after vaccination. The 6-month follow-up reports showed no reduction in all-cause mortality. The COVID-19 adenovector vaccines from Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson showed better protection against mortality but aren’t used for booster vaccinations in most countries due to the risk of vaccine-related side effects.
A recent peer-reviewed article by Fraiman et al. noted excess risk of serious adverse events analyzing the trial data of both mRNA vaccines that points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. The authors request the public release of participant level datasets from the sponsoring drug companies, which is still not openly available.
Moreover, the vice president of Pfizer, answered the question of Rob Roos, a Dutch Europarlementarier during the European Commission on October 11, 2022, concerning whether the mRNA vaccine of Pfizer had been tested for prevention of transmission of the virus before the release of the vaccine in 2021. She said no, thus indicating the vaccine promotion and coercion was based on false arguments.
For authorization to use medical interventions the benefits need to outweigh the risks. These mRNA vaccines don’t clearly meet this bar for people under 70 years of age. A recent study by nine health experts from major universities found that per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, between 18 and 98 serious adverse events were observed. In Scandinavian countries the use of the Moderna mRNA vaccine has been restricted for the potential risk of heart inflammation in adolescents
Although official reports on the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines by Public Health Institutes have been limited, there is growing data on myocarditis, menstrual irregularities or the excess of all cause mortality and severe outcomes in vaccinated groups. The recent leakage of Israeli safety data and release of US CDC V safe Data show serious safety problems with COVID-19 vaccines that deliberately need further investigations.
Countries with the highest vaccination rates and strongest coercive measures have experienced high numbers of hospitalization and deaths, while some with a low vaccination rate, including many sub-Saharan countries maintained low Covid-19 mortality. Antibody responses are shown to be lower in elderly people while decreased responses or higher infection rates have occurred after repeated vaccinations. The CDC disclosed just how fast mRNA boosters can fail.
This calls into question the mass all-population vaccination and boosting strategy. Pascal Soriot, the CEO of Astra-Zeneca, has suggested that “booster jabs for healthy people on a yearly basis are a waste of tax money.
A temporary reprieve
On August 11, 2022, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated that the virus now poses significantly lower risk due to high levels of immunity from vaccines and infections. On August 19, it changed its recommendations to reflect this, no longer differentiating between vaccine status or post-infection immunity. President Biden declared in September 2022 “The pandemic is over,” though it remains unclear what this means with ‘emergency’ measures remaining in place.
While the global economy has suffered, this is only clear from a specific standpoint. In contrast to the mass of the population, private companies are involved in the response, particularly in the pharmaceutical, biotech and web-based sectors. These companies have increased their wealth by hundreds of billions of dollars in 2020 and 2021, as did high-net-worth individuals, many of whom were advocating for the response that ensured this.
The beguiling vision of fleecing taxpayers to benefit the private sector
The current COVID-19 response has wiped out the gains from decades of global progress in health and income, especiallyfor women and has exacerbated persistent inequities. Unfortunately, a world that is facing the most serious health crisis in a century and the most serious economic and social crises since the second World War is now also on the hook to fund those who would repeat this.
Together with the WHO, world leaders have now called for a global pandemic preparedness treaty to make this state of affairs more readily repeatable. They justify this call for further diversion of public funds through the harms, financial and other, accrued during the COVID-19 outbreak.
This is driven by a vision that health is a political choice based on solidarity and ‘equity’ to be established in a centralized global response delivered via international organizations including the WHO, UNICEF, Gavi, (a global Vaccine Alliance) and the public-private partnership Coalition for Economic Preparedness Information (CEPI), launched in 2017 at the WEF by Bill Gates, the Wellcome Trust, Norwegian Government and others. Finance institutions, including the World Bank, have now stepped in to accelerate the growth of this burgeoning pandemic industry. A new World Bank-hosted Financial Intermediary Fund (FIF) for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response was installed at the G20 Health Ministerial Meeting in June 2022.
A real concern is growing that the new vision of drug and vaccine approval by the FDA and EMA will expand a commercialized market driven by drug manufacturers at the expense of rigorous independent scientific and regulatory review. This risks irreparable harm for many people while boosting the profits of pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Prescribed medications are already estimated to be the third most common contributor to death globally after heart disease and cancer.
Despite their stated intent, the investments in COVID-19 vaccinations and nonpharmaceutical interventions of the past three years have not improved human capital, economic and societal performance. Moreover illnesses, disabilities and mortality show steep rises in the working age group (25-64 years) as observed by insurance companies. Predictions by consultancy firms of the support Covid-19 vaccinations would provide to the economy have been unrealistic. Countries are now facing shortages of healthcare workers in part due to vaccine mandates, reducing healthcare access to people with ill-health who have paid insurance and tax money for healthcare. It might even result in bankruptcy of hospitals.
Good Health, the most precious asset of life
The CEO of CEPI stated in an interview with McKinsey that “The emergent issue of waning immunity and the threat posed by the evolution of the virus tell us that we need to produce broader and more enduring immune responses.” Mass surveillance, lockdowns, wearing face masks and poorly effective COVID-19 vaccines have contributed to chronic stress, fear and anxiety that reduce the resilience of immunity. Unfortunately, when the immune system (immunosenescence) is weakened vaccinations are also less able to generate effective protection.
More state investments in frequent vaccinations, mass distribution of vaccines, developing new vaccines within 100 days, development of simulating models, and more clinical trials will be poor alternatives to strengthen the underlying immune systems through a life in freedom with high social capital, a healthy diet, education, sports, play, social interactions, equity in decision-making and fair earnings.
Health is key for resilient economies worldwide. The relationship between health and the economy is bidirectional, whereby economic growth enables funding in investments that improve health; and a healthy population contributes to and enhances an economy. Therefore, public and private investments in health for all needs to transform from maximizing value for money to positive cumulative impacts on people’s lives.
Optimizing health is the ultimate goal and a human right. The global response to the coronavirus pandemic has revealed an ethical crisis in public health, in which the pre-pandemic norms of public health ethics have been cast aside.
This has wrecked health, human rights and economies, whilst the people public health was supposed to serve it had to pay for its implementation, and will pay for its harms. It will be a long way back, and recovery will require public health to return to its servant nature, and leave the limelight where it caused such disaster.
Authors
From the Brownstone Institute
How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process?
Trump enjoys the momentum. Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys. The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point. We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.
Here are some thoughts:
- JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory.
- Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.
- Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.
- How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce.
- We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.
- Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat?
- What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans.
- How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats.
- Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian?
- Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war.
- Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?
- Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades.
- Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr.
- How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?
- How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular.
- Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022.
- What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.
- Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
Authors
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