NIALL MCCRAE
The outcome of the British government’s enquiry on the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ fulfilled expectations. Inevitably it found that mistakes were made, while reinforcing the official narrative of a deadly contagion requiring radical action. Baroness Hallett performed her role with aplomb, ensuring the right headline from the months of hearings and analysis.
Twenty-three thousand was the number instilled in the public psyche. According to Baroness Hallett, that was how many people died unnecessarily, as a result of Boris Johnson’s government not imposing ‘lockdown’ soon enough. Evidence for this seemingly precise calculation, as explained on OffGuardian, is elusive. In fact, its only appearance is in a supplementary report from Professor Neil Ferguson.
The figure is ludicrous to anyone who doubts the deadliness of Covid-19, but we remain a minority. And the truly awakened are a minority within that minority. That is, anyone who understands – at the time or belatedly – that the entire phenomenon was a hoax. A fake virus for which positive testing was calibrated, masks that would not stop airborne microscopic particles whether real or not, and vaccines claimed to protect from the virus that never existed. Many websites and commentators that were critical of the Covid-19 regime are still labouring with the false premise: Daily Sceptic, for example, has always refused to publish any article denying Covid-19.
Three months ago David Fleming, who started the Together Foundation, wrote the following article with me, and it is timely to republish it following the last act of the Covid-19 stage show.
Blinded by the curve: how Covid-19 sceptics were fooled
David Fleming & Niall McCrae
From the very beginning of the Covid-19 spectacle, the central image was not the virus itself but the graphical trajectory of contagion. The idea of ‘flattening the curve’ became the emotional trigger for unprecedented restrictions to be accepted by citizens across the world. Governments justified their radical policies as scientific and caring. Representing real people testing positive for the terrifying disease, real people admitted to hospital and real people dying, the curve was a psychological weapon. The public health response wasn’t really meant to stop or shorten the death curve, but to amplify it.
The Covid-19 curve was a piece of narrative architecture so clever that even critics helped to build it. Drawn to apparent refutations of the deadliness of Covid-19 and the effectiveness of interventions to control its spread, sceptics unwittingly cemented the official truth of a pandemic pattern. By showing that the peak was earlier and lower than claimed by the authorities and lockdown zealots, they took the bait.
Diamond Princess
Cruise ships have proliferated in recent decades. At any time a population of hundreds of thousands is at sea, between ports of call. When the Covid-19 pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation, cruises were cancelled, but several liners were still on the oceans. One ship was on the mainstream media news every day in early 2020, after passengers tested positive for the virus. Built in 2004 for the Princess Cruise Line, with 1351 cabins, the Diamond Princess carried a large number of people in proximity. Having no contact with land, the ship acted as a Petri dish for the Covid-19 contagion.
The Diamond Princess was one of the first Covid horror stories: a luxury vessel turned floating quarantine zone. Scientists, particularly those with a sceptical eye – jumped on the data, finding that the virus wasn’t nearly as deadly as claimed. The world was informed that seven people died on a holiday of their dreams, but death on cruise ships is not unusual – largely elderly passengers with limited access to hospital if they become ill. The majority of people on board (83%) did not contract the virus, and this was used as evidence by scientists such as John Ioannidis that transmission and morbidity did not support the apocalyptic projections pushed by politicians and media.
In fact, incidence on the Diamond Princess was similar to the rates reported elsewhere. The vessel had become a global symbol of Covid-19; its numbers – while small – were grafted on to the emotive schema of the pandemic. The Diamond Princess was used to imply a real curve, a real contagion and a real danger. Sceptics (e.g. in Unherd and Spectator articles) validated this by treating the data as real, when the very premise (a novel, deadly pathogen) was unproven.
While trying to debunk the government’s scare stories, most sceptics accepted the existence of the curve, countering only on its steepness. And that was all that the official narrative needed. From that point onward, every national news outlet in the West presented the same visual logic: a Covid-19 wave, mild or severe, tracked in real time. Although it never resembled the 10% fatality that had been suggested in early projections, the trajectory, as updated live on the UN Worldometer website, became undisputed truth.
Anders Tegnell and the Swedish outlier
For sceptics, Sweden was living proof that lockdown was an unnecessarily draconian intervention that was ineffective in reducing transmission and deaths. It provided the comparator that seemed to undermine the WHO-directed regime. Yet Sweden had its curve, like everywhere else.
Toby Young’s Lockdown Sceptics website treated epidemiologist Anders Tergell as a hero for taking sensible decisions that averted the socially and economically destructive regime imposed by every other developed country. This website was a good source of information and argument rebutting the official narrative, and it continues today under the name of Daily Sceptic, with a broader critique of Green and Woke authoritarianism as well as oppressive public health policies. Arguably, Covid-19 coverage on Lockdown Sceptics was confined to a permissible counter-narrative – any received articles denying the existence of the virus were rejected.
Sweden, far from being a rogue state, was a good choice for Covid-19 narrative reinforcement. First, it was revered by the intelligentsia as a model of liberal European ideals. It was also technologically advanced, with young Swedes keen participants in subcutaneous microchipping, enabling them to wave a hand to pay at the supermarket or gain access to a building. Sweden, with its progress in digital identity and cashless payments, was already an exemplar of the Great Reset, a technocratic future promoted by the World Economic Forum – to which Covid-19 was taking a giant stride.
While critics praised Tergell, mainstream media savaged this allegedly reckless approach, presenting data showing that Sweden had more deaths than in neighbouring countries. Elderly deaths rose sharply while Tergell insisted on keeping shops and schools open. These deaths were not caused by the novel coronavirus, as recorded, but by the same policies enacted in other countries: evicting older patients from hospitals, denying access to treatment, isolating frail or sick people from their families, and euthanasia protocols. For example, a Swedish care worker told the BBC that older people with Covid-19 were given morphine rather than admitted to hospital. Tergell admitted that ‘too many people had died’.
Through supposedly more sophisticated analysis, sceptics found that Sweden was actually doing better. But by claiming that the number of Swedes dying in the pandemic was no higher than in countries that imposed lockdown, sceptics maintained the viral delusion. We believe that Sweden was an important part of the Covid-19 ‘plandemic’, because it was necessary to produce trustworthy data (hence a developed nation) showing that the same curve appeared regardless of interventions. Otherwise, critics could argue that lockdown was the cause of deaths.
In 2022 Tergell was appointed to a senior role in the World Health Organisation. The Daily Mail, referring to him as ‘Sweden’s infamous lockdown-sceptic Covid chief’ reported that ‘in Geneva, he will work on global coronavirus vaccination efforts, coordinating the activities of WHO, UNICEF and the public-private vaccine organization Gavi’. He was no minimalist for medical surveillance.
Florida and South Dakota
Other prominent figures on Lockdown Sceptics were governors Ron DeSantis (Florida) and Kristi Noem (South Dakota), whose states took a similar approach to that of Sweden. DeSantis initially went for state shutdown, but both he and Noem came to be known as Covid deniers, blamed for a high death toll in their jurisdiction. Again, data showed a pattern of Covid cases following the same curve as elsewhere. A better comparator was the Amish community of Ohio and Pennsylvania, who, when asked why they have so little Covid-19, explained that they do not have television.
Great Barrington Declaration
In October 2020, with Covid-19 reportedly spreading fast in the USA, and a month before the presidential election, the Great Barrington Declaration was launched. Medical scientists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard urged ‘focused protection’ for those most vulnerable to the pandemic, while allowing those at lower risk to continue normal activities to develop herd immunity.
The Great Barrington Declaration drew opprobrium from conformists. Gabriel Scally, a member of the British government’s SAGE committee, dismissed the initiators as ‘fringe experts’ with misanthropic motives. The launch was hosted by the American Institute of Economic Research, a think-tank supported by Charles Koch, who has been very critical of the anti-capitalist climate change movement and ‘woke’ ideology. Scally tweeted: –
Let’s be clear where the ‘herd immunity’ let-it-rip nonsense that is the Great Barrington ‘big idea’ comes from. It is a product of the US libertarian right. The AIER’s goal is ‘promoting the ideas of pure freedom and private governance’. Covid-19 is their big chance.
As Great Barrington Declaration signatures neared two hundred thousand (including fifteen thousand scientists), Google made it disappear from searches. After an outcry it returned, but search results were dominated by attacks on the declaration and its supporters. Despite the mainstream media scorn, the Great Barrington Declaration was serving an important purpose for the Covid-19 regime. Signing it seemed an act of rebellion, but instead it was permitted (thus controlled) opposition that confirmed belief in the pandemic.
Four years later, Bhattacharya was appointed to lead the National Institutes of Health in Donald Trump’s second administration. While all three of the Great Barrington proposers were against lockdown, they emphasised the existence and threat of Covid-19 and fully supported the vaccination programme. They too played a role in the pandemic theatre: they were cast as villains by mainstream media and as saviours by the sceptical minority.
Lab leak hypothesis
Why Wuhan? For the most deadly pandemic since the Spanish influenza of 1918-1919, a large but hardly known metropolis (comprising the three cities of Hankou, Hanyang and Wuchang) in the Chinese interior was the source. The official story was zoonotic transmission of a bat coronavirus, blamed on poor hygiene at the city’s wet market.
Sceptics, wary from the outset of manipulation of a virus to erect an authoritarian regime, were drawn to the alternative explanation. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded by the US government for ‘gain of function’ viral research, seemed an obvious origin. While the lab leak was dismissed as conspiracy theory by political leaders and most mainstream media, a series of reports by investigative journalist Ian Birrell in the Mail on Sunday showed lax practices and broken seals in the Wuhan laboratory, despite biosecurity requirements.
However, the likes of Patrick Henningsen of 21st Century Wire, doctors Sam Bailey and Tom Cowan, Jeff Berwick of Dollar Vigilante and OffGuardian website saw through the lab leak as a hook for ‘awake’ conspiracy theorists. David Icke, in his Perceptions of a Renegade Mind, argued that it was easier to enact a technocratic coup with a fake rather than real virus. A released pathogen would be unpredictable, likely to lose lethality, and scientific analysis would soon diverge from an initially contrived consensus. There is no evidence that viruses (if they exist) can be made more lethal; as cartoonist Bob Moran quipped, gain of function is really ‘gain of fiction’.
In 2023 the Department of Energy suggested, after years of denial by the US government, that a lab leak was ‘possible’. The hypothesis was then elevated to ‘probable’ by FBI chief Christopher Wray. Cue a deluge of ‘told you so’ from the sceptical margins. Robert Malone, mRNA pioneer, tweeted on the ‘narrative collapsing’, asserting that ‘the lab leak killed millions of people’. Jay Bhattacharya remarked on the shift ‘from putative conspiracy to legitimate science’. Fox News and Republican politicians such as Rand Paul renewed their calls for prosecution of Antony Fauci and demand for reparations from China.
As Henningsen observed, the lab leak is nothing but a planted conspiracy theory. The narrative, far from collapsing, was unwittingly reinforced by halfway house sceptics, causing obfuscation and futile debate, diverting attention from the iatrogenic scandal of the vaccines while also preparing the ground for a global pandemic treaty. Lab leak believers emphasised the number of deaths, sometimes asserting a much higher mortality than that of official data, to accuse China and /or the US ‘Deep State’ of mass murder. Their curve was steepest of all.
ZOE app
Another Covid-19 reinforcer was the ZOE smartphone app, which was presented as an objective, independent collation of data on morbidity and mortality in the UK, using official NHS statistics. Some Covid-19 commentators with large audiences (e.g. John Campbell) built their channels on ZOE data, which differed from government reports to an extent, but not substantially. The virus was killing people, albeit fewer on ZOE than on health secretary Matt Hancock’s announcements. Of course, the ZOE app showed the same curve.
The blind curve
The scary death curve, initially indicating a mortality rate as high as ten per cent, was used to justify emergency powers. It was meant to be seen as a gross overestimate by critics, who would latch on to to the Diamond Princess, Sweden and Florida to present the true pattern. The high curve created fear, as pushed by mainstream media. The low curve was the calming retort of supposedly critical thinkers, which eventually became the desired consensus. The public was terrified. The sceptics were analytical. But both sides agreed: there was a curve.
The curve was real in that a large number of deaths was caused by Covid-19 policies: hospitals denying treatment to all but Covid-19 cases, excessive use of ventilators, rush to end-of-life treatment protocols, perverse incentives for Covid-19 deaths, and patients dying from pneumonia or any other condition recorded as Covid-19 cases (through use of a corrupted testing device).
The curve, therefore, was manufactured – not by a virus, but by policies. The graphs, numbers and models were theatrical props in the daily stage show of government press conferences. Too many sceptics were blinded by the curve.
This article (Twenty-Three Thousand Is a Lie: There Is Only One Truth About COVID-19) was created and published by Niall McCrae and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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