How Fanatics Took Over the World
Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya (pictured). He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening.
I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group.
From his perch of influence – serving an apocalyptic president — he was the driving force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics.
He literally unleashed hell.
That was 15 years ago. At the time, I wrote about the changes I was witnessing, worrying that new White House guidelines (never voted on by Congress) allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment.
I never believed it would happen in real life; surely there would be public revolt. Little did I know, we were in for a wild ride…
Last year, Venkayya and I had a 30-minute conversation; actually, it was mostly an argument. He was convinced that lockdown was the only way to deal with a virus. I countered that it was wrecking rights, destroying businesses, and disturbing public health. He said it was our only choice because we had to wait for a vaccine. I spoke about natural immunity, which he called immoral. So on it went.
The more interesting question I had at the time was why this certified Big Shot was wasting his time trying to convince a poor scribbler like me. What possible reason could there be?
The answer, I now realized, is that from February to April 2020, I was one of the few people (along with a team of researchers) who openly and aggressively opposed what was happening.
There was a hint of insecurity and even fear in Venkayya’s voice. He saw the awesome thing he had unleashed all over the world and was anxious to tamp down any hint of opposition. He was trying to silence me. He and others were determined to crush all dissent.
Fat chance. His greatest fears have been realized. The movement against what he did is now global, ferocious, and insuppressible. It’s not going away. It is only going to grow, despite his best efforts.
This is how it has been for the better part of the last 21 months, with social media and YouTube deleting videos that dissent from lockdowns.
It’s been censorship from the beginning.
Now we see what happens: the lockdowns have birthed a new movement plus a new way of communicating plus new platforms that are threatening monopoly control the world over. Not only that: political and economic upheaval seem inevitable.
For all the problems with Lewis’s book, and there are plenty, he gets this whole backstory right. Bush came to his bioterrorism people and demanded some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. When Bush saw the conventional plan — make a threat assessment, distribute therapeutics, work toward a vaccine — he was furious.
“This is bulls**t,” the president yelled. “We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”
Hey, if the president wants a plan, he’ll get a plan.
“We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this threat,” Venkayya reports having told colleagues.
“We were going to invent pandemic planning.”
This was October 2005, the birth of the lockdown idea.
Dr. Venkayya began to fish around for people who could come up with the domestic equivalent of Operation Desert Storm to deal with a new virus. He found no serious epidemiologists to help. They were too smart to buy into it. He eventually bumped into the real lockdown innovator working at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
His name was Robert Glass, a computer scientist with no medical training, much less knowledge, about viruses. Glass, in turn, was inspired by a science fair project that his 14-year-old daughter was working on.
She theorized (like the cooties game from grade school) that if school kids could space themselves out more or even not be at school at all, they would stop making each other sick. Glass ran with the idea and banged out a model of disease control based on stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.
Crazy right? No one in public health agreed with him but like any classic crank, this convinced Glass even more.
I asked myself, “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?” They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have tools that were focused on the problem. They had tools to understand the movement of infectious diseases without the purpose of trying to stop them.
Genius, right? Glass imagined himself to be smarter than 100 years of experience in public health. One guy with a fancy computer would solve everything! Well, he managed to convince some people, including another person hanging around the White House named Carter Mecher, who became Glass’s apostle.
Please consider the following quotation from Dr. Mecher in Lewis’s book: “If you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.”
At last, an intellectual has a plan to abolish disease — and human life as we know it too! As preposterous and terrifying as this is — a whole society not only in jail but solitary confinement — it sums up the whole of Mecher’s view of disease. It’s also completely wrong.
Pathogens are part of our world; they are not generated by human contact. We pass them onto each other as the price for civilization, but we also evolved immune systems to deal with them. That’s 9th-grade biology, but Mecher didn’t have a clue.
Jump forward to March 12, 2020. Who exercised the major influence over the decision to close schools, even though it was known at that time that SARS-CoV-2 posed almost no risk to people under the age of 20? There was even evidence that they did not spread COVID-19 to adults in any serious way.
Didn’t matter. Mecher’s models — developed with Glass and others — kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period — some of them still not public — and what you observe is not science but ideological fanaticism in play.
Based on the timestamp and length of the emails, Mecher was clearly not sleeping much. Essentially he was Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. How did he get his way?
There were three key elements: public fear, media and expert acquiescence, and the baked-in reality that school closures had been part of “pandemic planning” for the better part of 15 years. The lockdowners, over the course of 15 years, had worn out the opposition. Lavish funding, attrition of wisdom within public health, and ideological fanaticism prevailed.
Figuring out how our expectations for normal life were so violently foiled, how our happy lives were brutally crushed, will consume serious intellectuals for many years. But at least we now have a first draft of history.
As with almost every revolution in history, a small minority of crazy people with a cause prevailed over the humane rationality of multitudes. When people catch on, the fires of vengeance will burn very hot.
The task now is to rebuild a civilized life that is no longer so fragile as to allow insane people to lay waste to all that humanity has worked so hard to build.
See more here: brownstone.org
Header image: Dayton.com
About the author: Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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Alan
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There were more recent exercises to assess what we should do in the case of a pandemic and they did not recommend lockdowns. Why were they ignored?
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JaKo
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Hi Alan,
It has never been about health. Read Richard’s comment and check out his DailyExpose link — lock-downs do advance the elites’ agenda, while the real and proven true pandemic responses (e.g. quarantining the sick) do not!
Cheers, JaKo
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Charles Higley
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All of this has nothing to do with pandemics, as they changed the definition from a dangerous disease to any disease moving around the world. As a result the flu season, sorry, Covid is a forever pandemic, confirmed by testing that is horrendously nonspecific.
This is all about control (getting people to submit to authority that makes not sense), power (government grabs huge power over everything in the name of the pandemic, including lives and economy), and money (huge wealth transfers to Big Pharma and all its friends, mostly in government.
This is the beginning of the end game of Agenda 21, with Big Pharma and centralized world health being the center of a one-world government. They are popping champagne corks at the UN as we speak. Seguing into climate change lockdowns and major economic destruction, exacerbated by green energy debacles and major stupidity in fuel distribution, which is the icing on the cake.
One should ask if the large container ship that so perfectly blocked the Suez Canal for a week and stopped 400 other ships was not the start of the plan to disrupt the supply chain, as it is disrupted even more today. Now, they are saying we have to get used to shortages and that black outs are going to become a normal situation.
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JaKo
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Hi Charles,
Agree 97% — the Suez blocking is very close, but I would still bet on: „Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.“ (or incompetence)
Cheers, JaKo
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Artelia
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That is a very serious error that we are making. Never ascribe anything to malice. Let us STOP pretending that EVIL does not exist. Its funny how we excuse our own sins so well….and then go on to excuse others theirs.
richard
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“Prof. Desmet, who also has a masters degree in statistics, initially approached the “pandemic” through the eyes of a statistician. He realised the Covid statistics were wrong and began noticing that the long-term costs of the lockdowns compared to the benefits of using these measures to “flatten the curve” were never discussed. The field of attention, of the entire world, was entirely on the victims of the “pandemic” as if everything else no longer mattered. So, he switched to viewing the “pandemic” through the lens of a clinical psychologist and came to the conclusion that society was suffering from mass formation.
According to Prof. Desmet, mass formation is a type of mass hypnosis and has a huge impact on an individual’s intelligence and cognitive functioning. Around 30% of the population will succumb to mass formations while 30% will not. The remaining 40% will realise something is wrong, but may not understand exactly what, and remain silent”
https://dailyexpose.uk/2021/10/26/prof-dr-mattias-desmet-continue-to-speak-out-if-other-voices-are-available-in-the-public-space-then-the-mass-hypnosis-will-be-disturbed/
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richard
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This will be seen by tens of millions –
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/huge-exclusive-archbishop-carlo-maria-vigano-calls-people-faith-unite-worldwide-anti-globalist-alliance-free-humanity-totalitarian-regime-video/
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Chau
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Thnks Richard
C.M. Vigano is a great Catholic and after seeing him months ago talking about the 1% evil men I became stronger and faithful cause the pathetic pope is out of my list as many other ‘leaders’ i tought were cool people. Puny Amy Goodman and Barsanian, Lula, and many others. In essence it was good cause I woke up to the reality who really strong are the real Heroes like Kennedy Jr., Paul Craig Roberts, the always useful team of Off-Guardian, Rebel News and hundreds more. Im was happy to read this article and learn about this psycophat Venkayya and his little buddies and share everywhere possible due to both article and great comments. Cheers.
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Richard Noakes
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Not “that” Richard, the other one!!
The assumption is that the only way to deal with Covid, is after it arrives as Covid in your body, after the initial cold infection, in your head, some 20 days earlier
.Why is that?
Kill the Flu or Coronavirus in the head, soon after getting the virus in the nasal passages inside the head, the brain bulb and brain stem, etc, with my free salt water cure, which flushes out the nasal passages (so no Long Covid) and kills off the Coronavirus infection, immediately, or during the 10 to 14 days of self isolation.
No infection in the head, no Covid – it is as simple as that.
Then the purpose and functions of the vaccines, ceases to be a problem and you simply can’t get sick and won’t ever get Covid.
Mix one heaped teaspoon of “iodine” table or sea salt in a mug of warm or cold “clean” water, cup a hand and pour some of the solution in, then sniff or snort that mugful up into your nose, spitting out everything which comes down into your mouth, from the back of your throat, by so doing, you flush out your nasal cavity, where Coronavirus lives.
If you get a burning sensation (which lasts for 2-3 minutes) then you have a Coronavirus infection.
When the soreness goes away, blow out your head with toilet paper and flush away, washing your hands afterwards and continue doing my salt clean water nasal cavity flush cure, morning, noon and night, or more often, if you want, until, when you do my free salt water cure, you don’t experience any soreness at all in your nasal cavity inside your head.
While you are at it, swallow a couple of mouthfuls and if you get a burning sensation in your chest, then you are killing the Covid/Pneumonia there too, so keep it up, each time you do a salt water sniffle, until the soreness in your head and lungs goes away – job done.
When you flush your head with the salt water remedy, it should feel like you are flushing your head with water – no reaction felt at all.
I have been doing this for 27 years and I am never ill from viruses and there is no reason for anyone else to be either and of course, I never have vaccines – what is the point?
You don’t need to be tested to see if you have a head infection, you will know instantly if you have or not, with my free salt water cure
We will need a cure for Coronavirus or the Flu, which everyone will get sooner or later and this is it – my Covid Crusher.
Pass it around to everyone and take credit for it yourself, if you want.
Richard.
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JaKo
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And finally,
This article had an interesting info: I really thought that these lock-downs were just remains of the hysterics of the CCP as perceiving to be under attack by Biological Weapons (perhaps they were not far from the truth after all), there that strategy may have really worked there, in Wuhan.
I think, OTOH, that these pretend lock-downs (EU or North American style) are making everything much worse — that is from the epidemiological side, as that was why no real expert could come up with that, but it really did hand the power to the wrong persons — I cant bring myself to call them “people” — as with the advancement of Mass Formation — we all can see the hatred for the unvaxxed, non-compliant and skeptics. And, if we add the obvious consequence — economic disaster — it seems that we’re in deeper trouble than we realize…
Cheers, JaKo
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Cj
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Similar article maybe of interest to you and others.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-2006-origins-of-the-lockdown-idea/
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Eric the Red
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Computer models, again !!! Empirical science has been replaced by which computer model bests conforms to your brilliant hypothesis, now called a narrative. And if it doesn’t give you the answers you want, then tweak it again. Huge areas of science have been surreptitiously taken over by computer modeling. No wonder the self-appointed experts natter endlessly about consensus… they don’t care about any real-world empirical data to be used as corrective feedback, instead it’s all about which computer model they’ve settled on to advance their political agenda. Needless to say, it’s all just thinly disguised confirmation bias.
Computer modeling used to be recognized as susceptible to GIGO, garbage in garbage out. Now it’s FIFO, fantasy in fantasy out.
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Protestant
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One awkward fact the fanatics are trying to conceal is that both lockdowns and forced vaccinations violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by 173 countries, which forbids governments from preventing the Free Movement of Citizens within their own country, and forbids any kind of Forced Medical Treatment, among other things.
It has been ratified by all the nations trying to impose lockdowns and vaccinations upon their citizens, including the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Germany and all the rest.
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dnomsed
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All roads lead to… the vaccine… Why?
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