Prolific blogger, Bill Muehlenberg recently published a bracing post appropriately titled, “Understanding the Covid Catastrophe”.
Thank you, Bill Muehlenberg, for your post and for your allowing us to re-publish.
(Link to his blog is below)
By Bill Muehlenberg
Who knew just a few short years ago that the entire world would be turned upside down, with an infectious disease as its base. Plenty of astute observers and experts who have been analysing all this have made the case that the illness itself was not what was so catastrophic, but how governments responded to it, even using it for their own ends.
Many thousands of articles and podcasts and papers and speeches now exist on all this. And plenty of solid books looking at the hype, the hysteria, the fear-mongering and the Chicken Little scenarios being pushed around the world are available.
Not all that long ago I listed 21 of the best books to be aware of on the Covid wars and the Great Reset globalists who are behind so much of this: Top 21 Books on the Great Reset and the Covid Wars – CultureWatch
Excellent books and articles continue to appear. One of the newest and best articles is by science writer Debbie Lerman. While I encourage you to read the whole piece, let me provide some key excerpts from it here. She begins:
So much basic scientific data and so many best practices and ethical standards in public health were abandoned during the Covid pandemic, it would be difficult to list them all. Nevertheless, we must remember just how much reality has been warped since March 2020 and try to understand how that warping occurred. Maybe if we understand what happened, we can prevent it from happening again. Maybe we can unwrap the narrative enough so that more people can see clearly what went wrong.
For my own sanity, I need to understand what happened, so I can come to terms with why people behaved the way they did, and why so many of my own assumptions were shattered during the pandemic. I want to know why real science got thrown out as misinformation, propaganda turned into absolute truth, the free press morphed into a government mouthpiece, and supposedly liberal and scientific institutions abandoned ethical standards and critical thought to impose zero-evidence, zero-Covid authoritarian lockdowns and mandates.
How did my family, friends and neighbors – who I thought shared my liberal, humanist values – turn into a group-thinking, bullying herd? What forces were exerted to erase scientific and intellectual integrity from the minds of literally millions of doctors, scientists, economists, journalists, educators and other normally curious and compassionate people worldwide?
To help answer these questions she examines “four extremely powerful forces [that] converged catastrophically to initiate, and then perpetuate, the snowball that became the avalanche of Covid insanity.” Let me look at each one briefly.
1. Panic
She writes: “I believe pandemic panic was driven from above – from the highest echelons of the most powerful governments – and below – within populations primed for disaster and perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
She discusses the Wuhan lab leak and then says:
Further strengthening this hypothesis is the fact that the countries with the strictest and most prolonged lockdowns, including Australia, New Zealand and Canada, were all members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance, along with the US and UK. It makes sense that precisely those countries sharing the earliest and most detailed intelligence about the lab leak felt not only justified, but compelled, to carry out the strictest lockdowns.
All of this leads me to conclude that a small group of top intelligence and public health officials, fearing a catastrophically deadly engineered virus had been released (regardless of its observed effects in the real world), convinced themselves, their governments, and in turn their populations (without publicly revealing the virus’ origin) that the strictest containment measures were needed or else millions would die.
2. Politics
Lerman looks in detail at the Trump years and what followed, and concludes:
To top it all off, the pandemic happened during an election year. So Trump hatred and pandemic hysteria were effectively bundled together to get Trump voted out and Biden, a Democrat more aligned with the public health establishment, in. Subsequently, anyone elected on a pro-lockdown, zero-Covid agenda was incentivized to continue advocating for the strictest measures for as long as possible.
3. Propaganda
The third force contributing to global Covid hysteria was, as Michael Senger points out in his eye-opening book Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World, a concerted propaganda campaign by the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, that managed to turn the pandemic (at least until recently) into a celebration of China’s inimitable social cohesion and a showcase for the supposed success of its authoritarian anti-pandemic measures.
Previously, China had suffered loss of face and international condemnation due to a pandemic outbreak and coverup. This time, the CCP seized control of the narrative by imposing draconian, unprecedented zero-Covid measures no democratic government would ever dream of, then claiming, contrary to logic and basic epidemiological science, spectacular victory.
Everything from social media bots to China-friendly editorial boards at prestigious medical journals was leveraged to denigrate any state or nation with a less restrictive approach. Deviations from the Chinese methods were labeled – in a brilliantly insidious 21st-century demonstration of Newspeak – heartless, pro-death, anti-humanitarian and materialistically motivated.
The World Health Organization, largely supported by and beholden to China, vociferously praised the CCP and the Chinese people for their discipline, commitment, and ultimate victory. Fawning scientific and general press coverage marveled at how sometimes authoritarianism could be good, if it meant saving millions of lives.
Thanks to the propitious convergence of panic and politics described above, the CCP propaganda succeeded spectacularly in convincing democratic governments to adopt hitherto unthinkable authoritarian measures and to pretend, or convince themselves, that such measures actually worked.
4. Profits
She looks at some of the big money-makers here:
Big Tech
In October 2021 the New York Times reported: “In the last year, the five tech superpowers — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook — had combined revenue of more than $1.2 trillion. … some of the companies are growing faster and are more profitable than they have been in years.”
Test Makers and Sellers
In January 2022 CBS reported “Windfall profits for test makers,” including Abbott Laboratories ($1.9 billion in third-quarter sales related to COVID-19 testing, up 48% compared to the year-ago period). Other beneficiaries with skyrocketing profits were labs that process PCR tests and drugstore chains like CVS and Walgreens.
Vaccines
In February 2022 The Guardian reported that Pfizer made nearly $37 billion in sales from its Covid-19 vaccine in 2021 – making it one of the most lucrative products in history. Pfizer’s overall revenues in 2021 doubled to $81.3 billion, and it expects to make record revenues of $98 – $102 billion this year.
Billionaires
In January 2022 OxFam reported: “The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day— during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty. If these ten men were to lose 99.999 percent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 percent of all the people on this planet. They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”
Her conclusions are ominous indeed:
· An engineered pandemic potential pathogen leaked from a high-security US-funded lab in Wuhan long before it was acknowledged by China. By the time it became known, it was too late to contain. Having outlined the cataclysmic convergence of forces I believe came together to create the Covid catastrophe, I now have a Covid story that makes sense to me.
· When they found out, top US intelligence and public health officials affiliated with the Wuhan research panicked, fearing millions of deaths, international mayhem and personal culpability. This caused them to disregard real-world data about the virus and to abandon basic epidemiological principles and best practices in public health.
· The Chinese authorities adopted scientifically nonsensical zero-Covid policies not because they thought they would work but to deflect attention from China’s role in the viral leak and coverup. In a brilliant propaganda coup, they turned the pandemic into a celebration of their authoritarian measures, convincing the world to follow their example.
· All Democrats in the US and their allies elsewhere reflexively and uncritically favored all the policies that President Trump – viewed as their mortal enemy – opposed. These were the very same scientifically bogus policies that the panicked officials and Chinese propagandists were pushing.
· Many who controlled the narrative in media, academia, public health and medicine were particularly susceptible to panic, politicization of the pandemic, and Chinese propaganda, which all came together to induce widespread groupthink and herd behavior. As cogently explained in The Great Covid Panic, such behavior is detached from logical reasoning and the ability to objectively evaluate reality.
· Major industries and individuals with enormous wealth and influence saw huge gains from the pandemic. It was, and still is, in their best interests to push for more testing, more treating, more vaccinating, more remote work and learning, more online shopping, and more of everything else pandemic-related.
Bear in mind that dozens of references go along with this piece. So she has very well documented what she is saying here. Please have a read of the whole article: The Catastrophic Covid Convergence ⋆ Brownstone Institute
I and others have been warning for years now that the use of fear and the exploitation of a crisis – real or imagined – makes for the perfect soil for Big Brother statism to be raised in and to flourish. We have seen that played out in sickening details over the past 30 months, and it is certainly not over yet.
Unless we wake up and start to take a stand, all this will only get worse. And if it does, we will only have ourselves to blame.
