Fear and Threat

Abstract

Western governments have long used manufactured fear as a means of keeping the population susceptible to propaganda. A “pandemic” is a powerful fear concept; yet, there is no credible evidence of a viral pandemic in 2020. “Covid-19” does not meet any credible (pre-2009) definition of a “pandemic,” and attempts to present “Covid-19” as a new “Spanish flu” are bogus. The exaggerated threat of “Covid-19” was a function of military-grade propaganda, emanating from governments and the media, involving a barrage of terrifying images, messages, and “alert levels.” The BBC played a particularly culpable role in spreading fear. Death statistics were manipulated. Propaganda about hospitals being overwhelmed by “Covid-19” admissions camouflaged a sinister attack on public health. The primary purpose of face masks and PCR tests was to spread fear. Waves of fear/terror were sent by “new variants,” “immunity escape,” and the open letter by Geert Vanden Bossche. The spurious concept of “long Covid” projects the danger out into the future.

Western governments have long used manufactured fear as a means of keeping the population susceptible to propaganda. A “pandemic” is a powerful fear concept, yet there is no credible evidence of a viral pandemic in 2020. “Covid-19” does not meet any credible (pre-2009) definition of a “pandemic,” and attempts to present “Covid-19” as a new “Spanish flu” are bogus. The exaggerated threat of “Covid-19” was a function of military-grade propaganda, emanating from governments and the media, involving a barrage of terrifying images, messages, and “alert levels.” The BBC played a particularly culpable role in spreading fear. Death statistics were manipulated. Propaganda about hospitals being overwhelmed by “Covid-19” admissions camouflaged a sinister attack on public health. The primary purpose of face masks and PCR tests was to spread fear. Waves of fear/terror were sent by “new variants,” “immunity escape,” and the open letter by Geert Vanden Bossche. The spurious concept of “long Covid” projects the danger out into the future.

Existential Threat and Social Control

Totalitarian regimes have historically ruled through terror in the form of direct threat of physical violence, viz. the GPU, the Gestapo, and Orwell’s (1984, p. 390) image of “a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” Under totalitarianism, Meerloo (1956, p. 28) writes, “The terrorized victims finally find themselves compelled to express complete conformity to the tyrant’s wishes.” Western governments, in contrast, have not ruled through terror in the same way, because more effective means have been found. As Huxley (1958, p. 5) writes, “government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children.”

That “non-violent manipulation” (absence of direct physical threat) has much in common with Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlov, Huxley (1958, p. 30) comments, found that “the deliberate induction of fear, rage or anxiety markedly heightens the dog’s suggestibility”; and if kept in that state for long enough, “the brain goes ‘on strike,’” allowing new behaviour patterns to be installed with ease. Similar is true of humans: “threat, tension, and anxiety, in general, may accelerate the establishment of conditioned responses, particularly when those responses tend to diminish fear and panic,” and those responses “can develop even when the victim is completely unaware that he is being influenced” (Meerloo, 1956, p. 50). Even as CIA mind control programmes in the 1950s and 1960s explored these premises through experiments on individuals, similar techniques were already being rolled out against the entirety of U.S. society.

For example, Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s 1947 recommendation to “scare hell out of the American people” (his nephew, Hoyt Vandenberg, was CIA Director at the time) was officially justified by the alleged threat posed by the USSR. Mechanisms for keeping the population and policymakers in fear, not least of imminent death, included the “Doomsday clock” (1947), the apocalyptic rhetoric of NSC-68 (1950), the contagion metaphor for communism, the “Second Red Scare” based on alleged fifth column communism, the 1952 Duck and Cover film used to terrorise school children, graphic accounts of the potential effects of a nuclear attack on the United States in the Wall Street Journal and Reader’s Digest, and Kissinger’s (1957, Chapter 3) description of the effects of a 10 megaton nuclear weapon detonated in New York. All of these threats were hyperbole. As Talbott (1990, p. 36) retrospectively admits, “For more than four decades, Western policy has been based on a grotesque exaggeration of what the U.S.S.R. could do if it wanted.” Kennedy’s alleged “missile gap,” for instance, was massively in favour of the United States in the 1960s.

With the end of the “Cold War,” a new existential threat had to be found. In 1991, the Club of Rome proposed a new “common enemy against whom we can unite,” i.e. “humanity itself” for its disastrous inference in natural processes (King & Schneider, 1991, p. 115). But when the green agenda failed to gain traction, multiple premonitions of a “new Pearl Harbour” appeared between 1997 and 2001 (Hughes, 2020, pp. 76–77). According to Cyrulik (1999, p. 6), of CIA partner think tank CSIS, “A threat that causes Americans to live in fear, to trade liberty for security, and to change our way of life would make for a powerful tool.” “9/11” duly took place and the “War on Terror” made “transnational terrorism” the new existential threat. “Entrapment terror” ensued, i.e. “the mental effect of routine exposure to a 24/7 corporate news cycle of psychological operations against the masses, weaponizing the language of terror and trapping news consumers in a near-blinding state of fear” (Broudy & Hoop, 2021, p. 371). Rational dialogue and critical questioning of the official 9/11 narrative were crippled as society became divided into propagandised true believers and heretical “conspiracy theorists,” to use a term weaponised by the CIA as long ago as the 1960s (deHaven Smith, 2013, p. 25), yet still deployed uncritically by far too many academics in their servile defence of authority.

The same principle of finding an “existential threat” with which to terrorise the public was again operationalised during the “Covid-19” operation, only this time, the “invisible enemy” was neither “fifth column” communists, nor “terrorists,” nor “humanity itself,” but, rather, a “deadly virus.”

The “Covid-19 Pandemic”

“Pandemic” as a Fear Concept

A “pandemic” is a very powerful term when it comes to creating fear, because it suggests ubiquitous disease and death (pan demos—across all people). Epidemics, according to England’s Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty (2018), “cause substantial panic, and have substantial social and economic impacts, very often way out of proportion to their actual medical importance.” Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 14) know that “The spread of infectious diseases has a unique ability to fuel fear, anxiety and mass hysteria.” Much rides, therefore, on the responsible usage of terms such as “epidemic” and “pandemic.” When the WHO formally declared pandemic status for “Covid-19” on March 11, 2020, its Director-General noted: “Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear […]” (WHO, 2020a).

When that same WHO Director-General claimed on February 25, 2020, that the world should do more to prepare for a possible coronavirus pandemic (“Coronavirus: World must prepare for pandemic, says WHO,” 2020), the Dow Jones index went into a tailspin and lost 36% of its value in a single month (to March 23, 2020). On March 12, 2020, the day after the WHO “pandemic” declaration, U.S. stock markets experienced their largest single-day percentage fall since Black Monday (1987). Yet, when the “pandemic” declaration was made, there were only 4291 “Covid-19” deaths worldwide, only 1440 of which were outside China, only 29 of which were in the United States (Chossudovsky, 2021, p. 22). For perspective, the 4291 deaths represented 0.000055% of a global population of 7.8 billion in 2020. There was no sound scientific reason to invoke the fear-generating language of a “pandemic.”

No sooner was the “pandemic” declared than “Covid-19” cases and deaths began to surge worldwide at an unnaturally fast rate that cannot plausibly be accounted for by viral spread and the “extraordinary forecasting ability of the global health-monitoring system” (Rancourt, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, p. 3). As Engler (2022) writes of Lombardy: “A virus doesn’t spread across thousands of kilometres within days [generating] peaks [of deaths] at the same time”; rather, like a 2003 heatwave in France that was blamed on neglect, the cause was probably attributable to the state. In Britain, the surge in care home deaths “everywhere all at once” in early April 2020 was “more likely the result of synchronous policy panic than a deadly virus” (Kenyon, 2022). The surge in deaths in the United States, Rancourt (2020a, p. 1) argues, owed not to a “novel virus,” but was, rather, a “likely signature of mass homicide by government response,” a contention fleshed out in a later paper (Rancourt et al., 2021) and supported by Senger’s (2022b) argument that “over 30,000 Americans appear to have been killed by mechanical ventilators or other forms of medical iatrogenesis throughout April 2020, primarily in the area around New York.” If, as some critics claim, SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating in 2019—in Brazil (Fongaro et al., 2021), France (Deslandes et al., 2020), Spain (Allen & Landauro, 2020), the United States (Rice, 2022), and Italy (Apolone et al., 2021), specifically Lombardy (Amendola et al., 2022)—and if “fatal infections were in decline before full UK lockdown” (Wood, 2021), then the sudden worldwide spike in deaths in the spring of 2020 makes even less sense from an epidemiological perspective.

What Counts as a “Pandemic”?

The WHO published a document on “pandemic preparedness” in 1999, which was revised in 2005 and 2009. The 1999 version defines a pandemic in terms of “unparalleled tolls of illness and death” (cited in Cohen & Carter, 2010, p. 1275). The 2005 version requires “several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness” (WHO, 2005). The May 2009 version, in contrast, which was released one month before the “swine flu pandemic” was declared, states that “Pandemics can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they cause, and the severity of a pandemic can change over the course of that pandemic” (cited in Flynn, 2010). Thus, since May 2009, according to the WHO, a “pandemic” has technically been possible without anyone getting seriously ill or dying.

Under the 2009 criteria, a pandemic goes through six stages and is only declarable once it reaches phase 6 (sustained community-level outbreaks in two or more WHO regions). Germán Velásquez, Director of the WHO Secretariat on Public Health, Innovation, and Intellectual Property until 2010, was asked in 2018, “Could they have declared the pandemic level 6 also with the old [pre-2009] definition?” Velásquez replied, “No, because the severity, the number of deaths, would have been a factor. Since that was no longer one of the criteria, it made it easier to declare a pandemic” (cited in Day, 2020).

When WHO Director-General Margaret Chan declared a pandemic on June 11, 2009, only 144 people worldwide had died from swine flu. Chan described the disease as “unstoppable” but also as “moderate.” According to the WHO in August 2010, well past the peak of the “pandemic,” swine flu had claimed 18,449 lives in laboratory-confirmed cases (WHO, 2010). The risk of swine flu causing serious illness was shown to be no higher than that of the seasonal flu (DeNoon, 2010). In Germany, where around 10,000 people die each year from seasonal influenza, only 189 people died of swine flu between 2009 and 2010 (Keil, 2010, p. 2).

The WHO declaration of a swine flu “pandemic” triggered an estimated £14 billion worth of pre-arranged contracts obligating governments to purchase swine flu vaccinations from pharmaceutical companies in the event of a level 6 pandemic (Day, 2020). By the same logic, had the WHO declared sneezing to be a pandemic, that, too, would have been sufficient to trigger a vaccination campaign (Keil, 2010, p. 2).

In the wake of this scandal, a British Medical Journal investigation uncovered multiple conflicts of interest involving the WHO and big pharma (Cohen & Carter, 2010, p. 1279). The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s Subcommittee on Health, called on the Council to investigate the WHO’s ties to pharmaceutical companies, noting in a formal motion that “the definition of an alarming pandemic must not be under the influence of drug-sellers” (Wodarg et al., 2009).

Calling “Covid-19” a “pandemic” served to inculcate fear in a public not wise to the scam. Scientifically speaking, however, the WHO’s “pandemic” concept is close to worthless, because it tells us nothing about serious illness and death. For reasons that follow, it is far more accurate to use Davis’ (2021a) term and to call “Covid-19” a “pseudopandemic.”

The Bogus “Spanish Flu” Analogy

“Covid-19” was misleadingly compared to the “Spanish flu,” which Wikipedia (as of June 2023) calls “one of the deadliest pandemics in history.” For example, Ferguson et al. (2020, p. 3) claim: “The last time the world responded to a global emerging disease epidemic of the scale of the current COVID-19 pandemic with no access to vaccines was the 1918–19 H1N1 influenza pandemic.” According to Mike Davis, “COVID-19’s currently guesstimated 2% mortality rate is comparable to the Spanish flu, and like that monster it probably has the ability to infect a majority of the human race unless antiviral and vaccine development quickly come to the rescue” (cited in Fuchs, 2021, p. 3). Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 13) ask, “Is the pandemic like the Spanish flu of 1918 (estimated to have killed more than 50 million people worldwide in three successive waves)?” There was a massive surge of interest in “Spanish flu” on Google Trends in spring 2020.

Black (2020) observes that the Wikipedia page on the “Spanish” flu was heavily edited in the months preceding the WHO “pandemic” declaration (from December 2019). Given that Wikipedia is a “micro-managed propaganda organ” and that most edits served to downgrade the severity of the “Spanish flu,” this is worthy of note. The case fatality rate for the “Spanish flu” on Wikipedia was reduced from “an estimated 10–20%” to “2–3%,” even though the latter figure, implying 12–18 million deaths, cannot be reconciled with the generally accepted death toll of over 50 million (Johnson & Mueller, 2002). Wikipedia’s downgraded 2–3% CFR, Black (2020) proposes, can be cited by the media and others as “evidence that COVID-19 is as dangerous as, or more dangerous than, the Spanish Flu.”

In March 2020, the WHO provided a “meaningless” (because based predominantly on bad outcomes) estimate of the CFR for “Covid-19” at 3.4% (Ioannidis, 2020). As more “cases” were identified, this figure fell to just above 2%, where it stabilised in 2021. According to data collected by Johns Hopkins University (n.d.), the mean CFR average across all countries (as of February 2021) was 2.15%. Based on data retrieved from the WHO (n.d.-a) Coronavirus dashboard in February 2021, the CFR was 2.2%; by November 2021 it was 2.0%. Thus, the official CFR for “Covid-19” fell precisely in the 2–3% range of Wikipedia’s downgraded CFR for the “Spanish flu,” enabling a false comparison of “Covid-19” to the “Spanish flu” in line with Black’s (2020) prediction. Once “Covid-19” was replaced by the Russia-Ukraine conflict as the primary focus of the 24/7 news cycle in February 2022, Wikipedia put “Spanish flu” deaths back up to “17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million,” implying a CFR of 3–8% to 16%, though CFR was no longer mentioned.

According to the CDC (2018), the “Spanish flu” killed “at least 50 million” people out of a global population of ca. 1.5 billion. Today, the world’s population stands at just over 8 billion, over five times higher. This means that a “Spanish flu” equivalent today would kill well over 250 million people, although this number would need to be revised downwards to account for developments in modern medicine including the advent of antibiotics to treat secondary infections, as well as differential access to such medicine in different parts of the world. A 2006 study factoring in such considerations estimates, based on the 2004 world population of 6.46 billion that a “Spanish flu” equivalent would claim 51–81 million lives (Murray et al., 2006). Given that the global population has increased by 22% since 2004, it seems reasonable to extrapolate that range to 66–99 million lives today. A ballpark figure, therefore, would be 82 million lives. Yet, according to the WHO (n.d.-a) Coronavirus Dashboard in March 2022 (24 months into the “pandemic,” a time frame comparable to the “Spanish flu”), “Covid-19” had killed ca. 6 million people, barely one-fourteenth of this figure. Furthermore, given that the average age of death for “Spanish” flu victims was 28, compared to a median age of death of 83 for “Covid-19” in England and Wales (ONS, 2021a), the former was far more deadly in terms of life-years lost.

Exaggerating the Danger

The Role of the UK Government

Under the pretext that the public had to be terrified into compliance for its own good, the UK Government unleashed a campaign of fear against its own citizens. As former Q.C. Lord Sumption observes,

Fear was deliberately stoked up by the government: the language of impending doom; the daily press conferences; the alarmist projections of the mathematical modellers; the manipulative use of selected statistics; the presentation of exceptional tragedies as if they were the normal effects of Covid-19; above all the attempt to suggest that that Covid-19 was an indiscriminate killer, when the truth was that it killed identifiable groups, notably those with serious underlying conditions and the old, who could and arguably should have been sheltered without coercing the entire population. These exaggerations followed naturally from the logic of the measures themselves. They were necessary in order to justify the extreme steps which the government had taken, and to promote compliance. (Sumption, 2020, p. 10)

The methods used by the UK Government, as well as their terrible impact on members of the public, are documented in Dodsworth’s book, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic (2021). The term “weaponised” here indicates psychological warfare against the public.

The Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), which is a behavioural science subgroup of SAGE, bears significant culpability for helping to wreck the mental health of the nation. Yeadon (2020) blames SAGE for psychologically “torturing the population.” On March 22, 2020, SPI-B advised the Government that “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging” (2020, pp. 1–2). Cue the sickening propaganda campaign described in Chapter 3 that aimed to instil the fear of death in people and make them believe that they could unwittingly kill others if they did not follow the “rules.” These methods, in Scott’s (2022) view, made the population “psychologically and physically unwell,” their aim being “to harm people.” SPI-B’s Gavin Morgan admitted that “using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism” (cited in Rayner, 2021). Steve Baker MP remarked on the issue: “If we’re being really honest, do I fear that Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is” (cited in Rayner, 2021).

Who sits on SPI-B and SAGE? Publicly available names can be found on the UK Government website (Government Office for Science, n.d.), and include an array of academics, members of the Behavioural Insights Team, the Cabinet Office, etc. More interesting, however, is that, for SPI-B, “4 participants have not given permission to be named.” SAGE minutes from March 13 and 16, 2020, end: “Names of junior officials and the secretariat are redacted. Participants who were Observers and Government Officials were not consistently recorded therefore this may not be the complete list” (SAGE, 2020a, 2020c). Who are the mystery attendees? How many of them are there? What is their role? Why is the public not allowed to know their identities? The SAGE minutes themselves would not be publicly available were it not for a legal challenge by Simon Dolan in 2020 to get them released. The secrecy and lack of transparency are red flags; one suspects the influence of British intelligence.

In May 2020, Boris Johnson announced “five alert levels” for “Covid-19” (Prime Minister’s Office, 2020b). Those alert levels were modelled on the same colour-coded system that operated during the “War on Terror,” allowing fear levels to be dialled up and down. Layered onto this was the tier system of “lockdown” imposed in autumn 2020, with the four tiers (as of December 2020) being classified, respectively, as “medium alert,” “high alert,” “very high alert,” and “stay at home.” There was no “low alert” or “zero alert.” In May 2021, the UK Government (n.d.-b) announced an Emergency Alerts system that “will warn you if there’s a danger to life nearby. In an emergency, your phone or tablet will receive an alert with advice about how to stay safe.” The system continues to be developed, but it essentially trains the population to be fearful upon command. Given that the public gets its news from diffuse sources, an Emergency Alert to everyone’s smartphone at a moment of acute tension could cause mass panic and hysteria, which social engineers have decades of experience in exploiting. The model is Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation of H.G Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898), which caused panic in the United States when people were unable to distinguish fiction from reality, not least because the radio served as an accepted vehicle for important announcements at a time when millions were worried about war in Europe (Cantril, 2005, p. 68).

The Role of the Media

One means of “maximizing the psychological effects of a terror campaign,” Digital Citizen (2003) notes, is “repetition of terrifying images, the kind that would make a person recoil, and then compelling that person to continue viewing them. Such terrifying images weaken the ability of the mind to reason, making it more susceptible to suggestion and manipulation.” Much like the endlessly replayed videos of the planes striking the Twin Towers, or of the final moments of those buildings (including their occupants), the media in 2020/21 was awash with imagery of mass death, disease, ICUs, patients on ventilators, people wearing face masks, frightening-looking graphs and forecasts, and the ubiquitous computer-generated image of the “SARS-CoV-2” virion.

In the “shock and awe” early stages of the “Covid-19” operation, the threat from “SARS-CoV-2” was wildly exaggerated by the media. As Yoram Lass, the former Director-General of the Israeli Health Ministry, put it in March 2020, “SARS-CoV-2” is a “virus with public relations” (cited in Magen, 2020). For example, ludicrous staged footage emerged from China of people falling dead on the street (some putting their arms out to break their fall) and being surrounded by figures in hazmat suits (cf. Agence France-Press, 2020). Similar images of forensic experts in hazmat suits removing bodies from the streets came out of Ecuador (Ibbetsen, 2020). On April 10, 2020, the BBC published an article titled, “New York ramps up mass burials amid outbreak,” again featuring workers in hazmat suits. In fact, many news outlets ran with aerial footage of the mass burial site in New York, as though to suggest that people were dying too fast to be given ordinary burials. However, Hart Island has been used for mass burials of unclaimed and unidentified bodies since 1869, with some 69,000 people having been buried there since 1980 (Nolan Brown, 2020). Footage of patients gasping for air in ICUs in Lombardy was broadcast without providing the context that Lombardy is one of the most air polluted regions in the world, and, as Lass points out, “Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country” (cited in Magen, 2020). Other footage from an Italian hospital was presented by CBS as from a hospital in New York and by 7 News as from a hospital in Melbourne. None of this deception would have been necessary if “Covid-19” were as deadly as claimed.

“Mortality-salience increases ideological conformity,” Kyrie & Broudy (2022) write: it therefore pays for the authorities to “issue frequent mortality-reminders to keep thoughts of harm and death salient (e.g. frequent TV terror alerts or daily COVID cases and death counts).” In 2020/21, it was impossible to escape such messaging in state and corporate media. In 2022/23, in contrast, with excess mortality (consisting mostly of “deaths not involving Covid-19”) consistently running well above the five-year average in England and Wales in the wake of the “lockdowns” and the “vaccine” rollout (ONS, 2023, Fig. 1), the frequent mortality-reminders were quietly dropped.

To see the despicable lengths to which the media would go in order to amplify fear of “Covid-19,” consider the following Mail headline from March 2021: “Grandmother, 66, who was terrified of infecting her family with Covid killed herself by stepping in front of a train when she felt ‘a little under the weather’ with a cold, inquest hears” (Saunt, 2021). The article goes on to reveal that the woman had reported anxiety issues to her GP since 2007 and that she had admitted visiting a train track with suicidal thoughts in 2013. Her suicide probably had little, if anything, to do with “Covid-19,” yet the depraved Mail headline spun it that way to spread fear.

The Role of the BBC

An Office of Communications report from 2018 finds that 27% of UK adults “nominate BBC One as their single most important news source”; 62% watch it (Ofcom, 2018). Across social media platforms, the BBC is the “most commonly followed news platform” (37% of UK adults). Of those who get their news not through social media, 63% use the BBC website/app. The BBC News website reaches 74% of the total digital audience of UK adults one way or another. These are astonishing statistics. They suggest that somewhere in the region of two-thirds of UK adults get their news from the BBC, with over a quarter rating the BBC as their most trusted source. In terms of the top current affairs programmes across all channels, 72–78% believe that the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, Channel 5, BBC Radio, and LDC are “impartial.” This shows how easy it is for a handful of broadcast corporations to manipulate a gullible public.

The BBC was a lead culprit when it came to instilling fear of “Covid-19.” For example, consider how often the phrase “record number” (or equivalent) featured in BBC headlines: “NI [Northern Ireland] hits another record number of cases” (16/10/20), “Record numbers in hospital in Wales” (12/11/20), “UK announces daily record number of Covid cases” (29/12/20), “The UK has recorded its highest number of Coronavirus deaths in a single day” (8/1/21), “Uruguay registers record number of new Covid cases” (11/1/21), “Record number of daily deaths reported in UK” (13/1/21), “UK records daily high of 1820 deaths” (20/1/21), “UK counts record number of COVID deaths” (21/1/21), “‘Record number’ of Covid intensive care patients transferred” (22/1/21), etc. Throughout the state and corporate media, in fact, “record numbers” and “new highs” were stressed wherever possible; “cases,” hospitalisations and death rates seemed constantly to be “surging,” “sharply up,” “rising alarmingly,” etc., without any necessary context or sense of perspective being provided.

A search on the BBC News website for “how worried should” reveals that the BBC likes to use that phrase to scaremonger wherever possible, e.g. “How worried should we be about melting ice caps?,” “Nuclear N. Korea: How worried should we be?,” “North Korea-U.S. tensions: How worried should you be?,” “How worried should NATO be about Russia’s military ZAPAD exercises?,” “How worried should we be for our health service?,” “The falling FTSE: How worried should we be?,” “Global debt: How worried should we be?,” “China’s economic slowdown: How worried should we be?,” “How worried should the West be about China?,” “Obesity: How worried should we be?” “How worried should be you be about knife crime?,” “How worried should we be about deadly cyber attacks?,” “How worried should we be about ‘Big Brother’ technology?,” “How worried should we be about deepfakes?,” “Swine flu: How worried should we be?,” “Covid: How worried should we be?,” and “New Covid strain: How worried should we be?.” It is clear that a primary function of the BBC is to keep the population in a perpetual state of anxiety.

Exaggerated Death Statistics

It has been known since 2005 that official death figures are “more PR than science” when it comes to selling vaccines (Doshi, 2005; cf. Hammond, 2018). But in order to sustain the illusion of a “pandemic,” the manipulation of official mortality data since 2020 was unprecedented (Davis, 2021a, Chap. 12). For example, until August 2020, anyone in England who died following a positive test result for “Covid-19” was labelled a “Covid-19” death on the death certificate, even if they died of other causes (Davis, 2021c). When Loke and Heneghan (2020) drew attention to this problem, Public Health England ruled that “Covid-19” could still appear as the underlying cause of death provided there had been a positive “Covid-19” test within 28 days of death or the death occurred within 60 days of a first positive test (Newton, 2020). This is as arbitrary as claiming that someone died within 28 or 60 days of getting a haircut: there is no proof of causation.

Any medical doctor could certify the cause of death, even having only met the patient “via video/visual consultation,” or indeed having never “seen the deceased before death,” based purely on the “best of their knowledge and belief” (ONS & HM Passport Office, 2020, p. 2). Section 19 of the Coronavirus Act withdrew Form 5 of the cremation medical certificate (requiring the opinion of a second medical practitioner), meaning that there was no way for relatives to challenge “Covid-19” on the death certificate, the evidence quickly being incinerated (Beeley, 2020).

Despite all these artifices to inflate the number of official “Covid-19” deaths, the all-cause age-standardised mortality rate in England and Wales in 2020 was lower than during any year between 1970 and 2008, and only the tenth highest year of the twenty-first century (ONS, 2021b)—inconsistent with an extraordinary “pandemic” year. According to the ONS on January 11, 2021, the median age of death “due to COVID-19” in England and Wales was 83; the mean was 80, vs. an average life expectancy in 2018–2020 of 79 for men and 83 for women (ONS, 2021c). Thus, “Covid-19” did not affect life expectancy, other than to help men who contracted it live longer. Yet, as late as August 2021, the Department of Health and Social Care (2021) still maintained that “COVID-19 is the biggest threat this country has faced in peacetime history.”

Once the “vaccines” were rolled out, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational subgroup (SPI-M–O, 2021) worried that, with a “large proportion of the adult population […] vaccinated, the current definition of death (i.e. death within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test) will become increasingly inaccurate […] It will also potentially distort estimates of vaccine efficacy.” An unnamed senior SAGE source reportedly claimed: “If the definition remains the same, these people would be counted as ‘vaccine failures,’ whereas the vaccine prevented death from Covid, but they really died from something else” (Merrick, 2021). Thus, whereas “died within 28 days of a positive test result” was enough to classify a “Covid-19” death, regardless of the true cause of death, the same criterion was not allowed to apply after “vaccination.” On the contrary, being “unvaccinated” was classed as either “having no record of receiving any vaccination or having had a first dose administered within 14 days of receiving a positive covid test” (Christie, 2022). In other words, a person could test positive for “Covid-19” up to two weeks after their first “Covid-19 vaccine” and still be classed as “unvaccinated”—conveniently enough, given that most reported serious adverse reactions to the “vaccine” occur within the first few days of it being administered (OpenVAERS, n.d.). The statistics were clearly massaged to exaggerate deaths from the “virus” and to minimise deaths from the “vaccine.”

Hospital Propaganda

An important device for elevating fear levels in the United Kingdom was propaganda that hospitals were on the brink of being overwhelmed by “Covid-19” admissions. On March 23, 2020, the Prime Minister announced that Covid-19 restrictions were necessary to “protect our NHS and to save many many thousands of lives” (Prime Minister’s Office, 2020a). The slogan, drilled into the public at every available opportunity, was “STAY HOME. PROTECT THE NHS. SAVE LIVES.”

Yet, by April 13, 2020, around 40% of NHS beds lay unoccupied, “about four times the normal number” (West, 2020). An additional 8000 private hospital beds and 20,000 staff, including 700 doctors, were commissioned by the NHS, yet those beds remained empty and staff were left “bored” and “twiddling their thumbs” (Adams, 2020). According to leaked documents, “Two-thirds of the private sector capacity that was block-purchased by the NHS—costing hundreds of millions of pounds—went unused by the service over the summer [of 2020], despite rocketing long waits for operations” (Thomas, 2020). Videos emerged online of alleged hospital workers performing complex choreographed dance routines (which must presumably have taken time to learn and rehearse) without a patient in sight. John Wright of Bradford Royal Infirmary wrote in March 2021 that “the Covid pandemic has transformed our hospitals. Car parks are empty, once-bustling corridors are quiet…” (“Coronavirus doctor’s diary: Has Covid changed hospitals for the better?,” 2021).

SAGE’s “reasonable worst-case planning assumptions” in spring 2020 projected “up to 90,000 beds with ventilators to care for COVID-19 patients” (National Audit Office [NAO], 2020, p. 6). Anticipated ventilator shortages did not occur, however, with only 2150 new ventilators of the 30,000 ordered being dispatched to the NHS based on demand; and even at the peak of the “first wave,” 43% of ventilator beds remained unoccupied (NAO, 2020, p. 23).

Seven Nightingale hospitals were erected by the military as a supposed emergency overflow to deal with the imminent inundation of regular hospitals with “Covid-19” patients. Yet, by October 2020, most had “never had a patient” (Quinn, 2020). By the end of 2020, only 28 patients were being treated across all Nightingale hospitals (an average of four patients per hospital), only 249 patients had been admitted all year, and the London Nightingale had reportedly been “stripped of most of its 4000 beds, ventilators and even signs” (Andrews, 2020). Why, given the greatly increased waiting times for treatment for diseases other than “Covid-19” (Triggle & Jeavans, 2021), were the Nightingales not made dedicated “Covid-19” treatment centres, to alleviate the burden on the rest of the NHS? Instead, in March 2021, it was announced that four of the Nightingale hospitals would close permanently (Blanchard, 2021).

It is the NHS’s responsibility to protect the taxpayers who fund it. Yet, the government’s “Protect the NHS” message led to a precipitous drop in hospital admissions, (Matthews, 2020). In September 2020, the number of hospital operations carried out was “25% lower than in previous years” (Butcher, 2021). According to the ONS (2021d, Fig. 6), excess deaths in hospitals in England and Wales remained below the five-year-average between mid-May and mid-October 2020. Ambulance callouts in England in 2020 remained at or below normal levels (Public Health England, 2021c, Fig. 1). According to NHS England (2020), “Hospital treatment and intensive care has been available to any individual who clinicians determined would benefit from it throughout the pandemic as it normally would be.” Public Health England data (2021a, Fig. 1) show that emergency department admissions in 2020 at no point rose above pre- “pandemic” levels and fell from mid-September 2020 into 2021 as “Covid-19 cases” officially rose. None of this is consistent with a healthcare system on the brink of being overwhelmed by a “pandemic.”

Those with WEF webpages acted as primary propagandists. NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens (https://www.weforum.org/people/simon-stevens) claimed in November 2020 that “the equivalent of 22 of our hospitals” were “full of [11,000] coronavirus patients” (cited in Iacobucci, 2020b). Spread across 875 hospitals in England (Interweave Healthcare, 2021), this averages out at only 13 per hospital—hardly overwhelming. According to Daniel Sokol (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/daniel-sokol), “The government is petrified at the prospect of the NHS being overwhelmed. Yet, it already is. Elective operations have all but stopped in many hospitals and resources reallocated towards the covid-19 effort” (Sokol, 2021). Elective operations did not stop because of “Covid-19,” however; they stopped because the NHS cancelled “non-urgent” procedures based on a grotesque exaggeration of the “Covid-19” threat. Trish Greenhalgh (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/trish-greenhalgh) claimed on January 18, 2021, that “the NHS is truly overwhelmed for the first time in its 70-year history because of the rise in COVID hospital admissions” (Greenhalgh, 2021).

Greenhalgh’s claims regarding “Covid-19” need to be treated with caution. The Oxford professor was, after all, an early promoter of face masks (Greenhalgh et al., 2020), an advocate of joggers and cyclists wearing masks (Greenhalgh, 2021), a perpetual source of unreliable information about masks (Citizen Journalists, 2023), and a champion of “lockdowns” until high “vaccine” uptake is achieved among adolescents (Gurdasani et al., 2021). Face masks (Jefferson et al., 2023; Kisielinski et al., 2021; Children's Health Defence, n.d.), “lockdowns” (Bhattacharya & Packalen, 2020; Stringham, 2020; Rancourt et al., 2021; Dettmann et al., 2022; Bardosh, 2023; Harrison, 2023), and “vaccinating” young people (Dowd, 2022; Hughes, 2022a) were all unnecessary and dangerous.

Greenhalgh’s claim about the NHS being overwhelmed by “Covid-19” hospital admissions is easily disproved. For example, Craig et al. (2021) show that the number of Accident and Emergency patients presenting with an acute respiratory infection in early January 2021 was “well below normal levels,” and the total number of hospital patients “remains the same or even lower than in previous years.” Even the BBC admits that “hospitals were at about 87% occupancy in December [2020] and early January [2021],” i.e. “noticeably lower than a usual year [of] between 93 and 95%” (Butcher, 2021). By February 2021, NHS hospital bed use in England still had not surpassed 2019 levels (NHS England, 2021). Greenhalgh’s false claim is, then, not dissimilar from contemporaneous propaganda about temporary morgues being set up in parts of Britain because hospitals were running out of space (Reuters, 2021). A year later, the playbook was the same, viz. headlines such as “NHS England makes plans for field hospitals in preparation for wave of Omicron Covid cases” (Parsley, 2021).

Pressures on the NHS in late 2020 and early 2021, such as they were, owed not to an unmanageable flood of “Covid-19” patients, but, rather, to the “enhanced Infection Prevention Control measures” (NHS England, n.d.-b) put in place to deal with such patients. There were around 10,000 fewer NHS beds in 2020 than in 2019 owing to the alleged need to maintain distance between patients (Johnston, 2021). NHS staff were expected to change PPE between treating patients (Craig et al., 2021). Staff testing positive for “Covid-19” were told to “self-isolate,” leading to a reduction in workforce capacity.

It is unclear how many “Covid-19” hospital admissions should have been labelled as such in the first place. Dee (2021), for instance, analyses a large data set of electronic admissions records for an unnamed NHS Trust between January 1 and June 13, 2021, and finds that “Only 9.7% (204 of 2102) of declared COVID cases actually exhibited the fundamental basis for symptomatic disease.” The rest, presumably, were misdiagnosed using the PCR test. At any rate, the figures are unreliable.

Ostensibly to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed by a tsunami of “Covid-19” cases that never came, NHS clinical services and scheduled operations designated “non-urgent” were postponed or cancelled (Stevens & Pritchard, 2020). This meant that large numbers of people could not get screened for illness, or get an operation, creating a “ticking time bomb of health problems” (Shayler, 2022, p. 23). Britons could not see their GP in person or obtain necessary dental care because of government orders that had no statutory basis, yet which left many people in pain or discomfort (Sumption, 2020, pp. 6–7). Five million patients were waiting for surgery in England in March 2021, the highest figure since records began (Pym, 2021). By May 2021, 10% of NHS patients had to wait over a year for treatment, while disruption to cancer services had produced 45,000 “missing cancer patients” following drops in GP referrals and screening services (Triggle & Jeavans, 2021). Heart attacks in England, up 9% on the previous year, reached record levels in 2021/22, owing to difficulties in getting GP appointments and prescriptions for vital medication (Donnelly, 2023). Four in ten patients surveyed in England in November 2022 claimed that their health had worsened while waiting to be admitted to hospital (Care Quality Commission, 2023). Meanwhile, the number of deaths registered in private homes in England has (as of December 30, 2023) remained above the five-year average every single week since March 2020 (Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, n.d. [search by place of death]). This all fits the model of clandestine Omniwar, with deprivation of necessary healthcare being used to weaponise public health, causing widespread illness and death by stealth.

The Spectator (n.d.) shows some disturbing graphs highlighting the devastating impact of Government/NHS “Covid-19” policies on public health in England. Takeaway points include:

• Hospital waiting lists increased from just over 4 million pre-Covid to 7.75 million in September 2023—nearly double.

• The number of patients spending 12 hours or more from decision to admit to admission each month in A&E departments rose from a previous high of 2800 in 2020 to 54,500 in December 2022 (42,850 as November 2023).

• The average wait time for an ambulance increased from 20 to 30 minutes pre-Covid to around 50–60 minutes in 2022 (90 minutes in December 2022), falling back to below 40 minutes in 2023.

• Patients waiting more than 18 weeks on a hospital waiting list increased from 745,000 in February 2020 to 3 million in April 2023. Patients waiting longer than 52 weeks increased from 1600 in February 2020 to 436,000 in March 2021 and have held steady at around 350,000 to 400,000 per month.

• The number of hip and knee replacements halved between 2019 and 2020, comparing unfavourably to other countries.

• GP appointments have gone from being 80% face-to-face and 14% by phone to 64% face-to-face and 32% by phone.

• There have been 8 million fewer monthly referrals for non-emergency, consultant-led treatment than before the “pandemic.”

Taken together, we are looking here at the perfect cocktail for a sicker population. This damage to the NHS, inflicted not by a virus but by government policy, looks very much like an attack on the health of the population, duplicitously delivered under the guise of “public health.”

The government’s attack on the NHS ramped up in autumn 2021, when Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, announced that “Covid-19 vaccination” would be made mandatory for NHS workers (Baker, 2021), despite risking an exodus of healthcare workers from the profession. In the United States, for instance, vaccine mandates for hospital workers meant that thousands of hospital workers resigned or were fired, resulting in critical staff shortages and “dangerous reductions” in ICU beds (Blaylock, 2022). There was already a shortage of 35,000 nurses in England in June 2021, with NHS Trusts resorting to hiring people unqualified for nursing roles, potentially jeopardising patient safety (Campbell, 2021). The abortive attempt to mandate “Covid-19 vaccination” for NHS workers revealed a flagrant disregard for public health, not only because of concerns surrounding the safety of the “vaccines” (Seneff & Nigh, 2021), but also because of the detrimental impact on the NHS.

The dismantling of the NHS took another leap forwards with the passage of the Health and Care Act in April 2022, which removes the statutory requirement for the NHS to offer treatment to all citizens and for emergency services to be provided for everybody in a given area (Pollock & Roderick, 2021). Instead, the principle of universal free healthcare is replaced with “the limited concept of ‘core responsibility’ for specified groups of people and the conferring of ‘discretions’ on providers, enabl[ing] further reductions in and closures of services, pushing those who can afford to do so into paying or their health care” (Pollock & Roderick, 2021). In other words, it is a major move towards privatising the NHS. The birth of the NHS in 1948, like the first welfare state under Bismarck, did not happen by accident. Both were major concessions by the ruling class at a time of social instability and revolutionary potential. The attempt to privatise the NHS reflects an attack on the lower classes who will struggle to afford healthcare and will consequently be made sicker.

The attack on the NHS long predates “Covid-19.” For example, between 2000 and 2021 the number of NHS hospital beds fell from 240,000 to 158,000, a cut of just over a third (Statista, 2020). Meanwhile, the UK population rose from 58.9 million in 2000 to 67 million in 2021, a 13.8% increase (ONS, n.d.). This means that the number of NHS hospital beds per 1000 people fell from 4.1 in 2000 to 2.4 in 2020, a significant 41% reduction. The United Kingdom now has one of the lowest rates of hospital beds per capita of any OECD country (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, n.d.). The Royal College of Surgeons and the British Medical Association both complained of chronic bed shortages in 2016, and the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine in 2018 reported that 80% of ICUs were sending patients to other hospitals because of bed and staff shortages (Kayser, 2020). Pressures on the NHS have arisen, not from disease within the population, but, rather, from a longstanding agenda to undermine the NHS in the interests of the ruling class.

“Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions” as Instruments of Fear

Face Masks as Instruments of Fear

Reflecting on her experience of living in East Asia during the SARS epidemic, Laurie Garret of the Council on Foreign Relations told an audience at the National Academy of Medicine in 2018:

The major efficacy of a mask is that it causes alarm in the other person, and so you stay away from each other [...] It is alarming. When you walk down the street and everyone coming towards you has a mask on, you definitely do social distancing. It is just a gut thing. But did the mask help them? Did the mask keep the virus out? Almost certainly not. (cited in Senger, 2022a)

The lessons of East Asians’ willingness to wear masks and “social distance,” believing they were doing the right thing in the absence of any hard scientific evidence, were weaponised against Western populations in 2020, when Garrett suddenly became adamantly pro-mask.

As official “cases,” hospitalisations, and deaths involving “Covid-19” tailed off in England in summer 2020 (daily deaths approached zero in August [UK Government, n.d.-a]), face masks were mandated to maintain fear levels and the performance of the “pandemic.” Psychologically, face masks act as a “crude, highly visible indicator that danger is all around,” even when it is not (Sidley, 2020). Without the masks (and the signage and the plexiglass and the performance of danger through “social distancing”), there would have been no visible indication of a “pandemic.”

The mask mandates were never about public health. In the spring of 2020, senior public officials around the world explicitly recommended against such mandates. On March 4, 2020, England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, stated: “our advice is clear, that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection really reduces the risk almost not at all” (cited in Davis, 2020a). On March 12, 2020, England’s deputy chief medical officer, Jenny Harries, claimed that masks can “actually trap the virus” and that, “for the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea” to wear one (cited in Baynes, 2020). On April 23, 2020, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, claimed: “The evidence on face masks has always been quite variable, quite weak. It’s quite difficult to know exactly, there’s no real trials on it” (cited in Davis, 2020a). According to Health Secretary Matt Hancock on April 24, 2020, “The evidence around the use of masks by the general public, especially outdoors, is extremely weak” (cited in Davis, 2020a). On April 28, 2020, England’s deputy chief scientific adviser, Angela McLean (previously chief scientific adviser to the MoD) asserted that “there is weak evidence of a small effect in which a face mask can prevent a source of infection going from somebody who is infected to the people around them” (Reuters, 2020). Yet, despite this high-level medical establishment consensus by late April 2020, mask mandates on UK public transport were announced on June 4, 2020 (to begin on June 15); for shops it was July 24.

The WHO (2020c, p. 1) followed a similar pattern. On January 29, 2020, it advised: “a medical mask is not required [in the community setting], as no evidence is available on its usefulness to protect non-sick persons.” On February 7, 2020, the WHO’s Christine Francis explained,  “If you do not have these symptoms [cough, fever, difficulty breathing], you do not have to wear masks because there is no evidence that they protect people who are not sick” (cited in Langton, 2020). On March 30, 2020, Mike Ryan, the executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme, claimed, “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite […]” (cited in Howard, 2020). On April 6, 2020, the WHO (2020e, p. 1) reiterated its position that “there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.” Yet, on June 5, 2020, the WHO’s Maria Van Kerkhove unexpectedly claimed: “We have new research findings. We have evidence now that if [masking] is done properly it can provide a barrier [against] potentially infectious droplets” (Kelland, 2020).

As with the UK “lockdown” decision of March 23, 2020 (see Chapter 2), it is worth asking who exactly was responsible for the mask mandates, given that senior public health officials, both in the United Kingdom and at the WHO, saw no reason for them in April 2020. Clearly, we are not actually dealing here with public health. Rather, we are looking at a transnational deep state (Hughes, 2022b) capable of intervening at the highest levels of governments and international organisations at a moment’s notice, exercising veto power over decisions previously taken and issuing new policies on a whim. Face masks were never about public health; rather, they are an extremely potent instrument of psychological warfare.

According to WHO interim guidance of June 5, 2020, “At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID-19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19” (WHO, 2020f, p. 6). Nine studies plus one meta-analysis are cited that “could be considered to be indirect evidence for the use of masks (medical or other) by healthy individuals in the wider community” (my emphasis). The meta-analysis was commissioned by the WHO itself and is seriously flawed (Swiss Policy Research, 2020). On this pathetic evidence base, the WHO (2020f, p. 6) recommends that “governments should encourage the general public to wear masks in specific situations and settings.” To be clear, the worldwide mask mandates, based on WHO guidance, were instituted based on no direct evidence of their efficacy.

To make matters worse, the WHO’s recommendation that the public be masked was accompanied by a list of potential harms caused by face masks. These include: self-contamination either through hand practice or reusing masks that are wet, soiled, or damaged; facial skin lesions, irritant dermatitis, or worsening acne through prolonged usage; droplet transmission to the eyes; and discomfort (WHO, 2020f, p. 4). To these harmful effects, the WHO interim guidance of December 1, 2020, which again concedes the “limited evidence of protective efficacy of mask wearing in community settings,” adds “headache and/or breathing difficulties,” “facial temperature changes,” “difficulty with communicating clearly, especially for persons who are deaf or have poor hearing or use lip reading,” and “improper mask disposal leading to increased litter in public places and environmental hazards” (WHO, 2020g, pp. 6, 10). Thus, not only was there no direct evidence of the efficacy of mask mandates, but there was also no evidence of their safety.

A mere six days after the WHO’s anti-scientific recommendation that governments encourage the practice of public mask wearing, Rancourt (2020b) found that “No RCT [randomised controlled trial] study with verified outcome shows a benefit for HCW [healthcare workers] or community members in households to wearing a mask or respirator. There is no such study. There are no exceptions”; moreover, “no study exists that shows a benefit from a broad policy to wear masks in public.” A literature review published in April 2020 had reached a similar conclusion: “The evidence is not sufficiently strong to support widespread use of facemasks as a protective measure against COVID-19” (Brainard et al., 2020). Royo-Bordonada et al. (2020) note: “At present, there is no evidence on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.” According to Heneghan and Jefferson (2020), “there is no available good quality evidence on whether, for example, masks prevent transmission of Covid-19 in the community and (if so) which types.”

Although post hoc studies emerged seeking to justify mask mandates, so did studies finding against face mask usage (Children’s Health Defence, n.d.; LifeSite News, 2021). The key point is that there was no scientific basis for mask mandates when they were introduced. The belated pro-mask studies amount to little more than a rationalisation of arbitrary power. The fact that “case” rates surged in country after country after masks were mandated confirms that masks were never effective in “stopping the spread.”

The WHO, Rancourt (2020c, p. 4) observes, violated the Golden Rule of medical ethics: “You don’t recommend an intervention without policy-grade evidence for both harms and benefits.” In Britain, no risk assessment was carried out by the government before mask mandates were introduced, and my MP was unable to provide one when I asked for it in July 2020. Rancourt (2020c, p. 5) is correct that mask mandates represent “the worst decisional model that can be applied in a rational and democratic society,” i.e. “forced preventative measures without a scientific basis, while recklessly ignoring consequences.” Indeed, the failure of public policy to heed the potential harms of face mask wearing was stark. As Cayley (2020) observes, “most of the studies touting good effects like reduced viral load have paid no attention to potential ill effects.” According to Kisielinski et al. (2021), “Up until now, there has been no comprehensive investigation as to the adverse health effects masks can cause.”

James Meehan, MD, writes: “In February and March [2020] we were told not to wear masks. What changed? The science didn’t change. The politics did. This is about compliance. It’s not about science” (cited in Manley, 2020). Compelling behaviour change was fundamental. Independent SAGE’s Gabriel Scally claimed in August 2020 that the face mask “acts as a reminder that these aren’t normal times and that we’ve all got to change our behaviour” (“‘Re-think Face Masks in Shops,’ Says Scientist,” 2020). A government “Covid-19” taskforce advisor was even more explicit: “Masks are a behavioural psychology policy. We need to stop pretending that it’s about public health. Nudge is a big thing in government” (cited in Dodsworth, 2021b). However, face masks were not mere “nudges” to encourage the public to adopt supposedly beneficial behaviours for the good of society. Rather, face masks are instruments of menticidal attack, designed to break the public down psychologically. One obvious function (among many) is to trigger visceral fear of disease and a sense that the environment has become strange and threatening. The increased stress and anxiety make the public more susceptible to propaganda and psychological manipulation.

There are physiological, as well as psychological, reasons why mask wearing increases fear levels. Covering the mouth and nose with a mask can lead to hypercapnia, i.e. abnormally high CO₂ levels in the blood (Kisielinski et al., 2021). In mice, “rising CO₂ concentrations elicit intense fear” and it has been shown that “the amygdala [acts] as an important chemosensor that detects hypercarbia [hypercapnia] and acidosis and initiates behavioral responses” (Ziemann et al., 2009). In humans, “the amygdala has a central role in anxiety responses to stressful and arousing situations” and can activate the “fight-or-flight” response (Linsambarth et al., 2017; Moyer, 2019). Therefore, by increasing CO₂ levels, face masks can physiologically trigger fear and anxiety in the wearer.

PCR Tests as Instruments of Fear

Another instrument for spreading fear was the PCR test, which was wrongly used to diagnose “cases” of “Covid-19” (hence the misleading phrase “tested positive for Covid-19”). The inventor of the PCR test, Kary Mullis (1993) never intended it to be used for diagnostic purposes, calling it “a process used to make a whole lot of something out of something. […] It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick.” In Mullis’ words, “PCR detects a very small segment of the nucleic acid which is part of a virus itself” and doubles the amount of it in successive cycles of the RT-PCR process (cited in Farber, 2020a). Thus, David Crowe explains, “PCR is really a manufacturing technique […] If you double 30 times, you get approximately a billion times more material than you started with” (cited in Farber, 2020a). This can be useful for experimental purposes, but it cannot distinguish whether the genetic material detected implies active infection or mere “dead particles” following recovery from infection (Heneghan & Jefferson, 2020). Canadian microbiologist Jared Bullard testified under oath that PCR tests can detect non-viable viral fragments for up to 100 days, even though a person with “Covid-19” is infectious only for one to two weeks (Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms [JCCF], 2021).

The “Covid-19” PCR test manufacturers themselves clearly indicate that their product cannot diagnose disease:

The instruction manual of “RealStar” by Altona Diagnostics: “For research use only! Not for use in diagnostic procedures.” “Multiplex RT-qPCR Kit” of Creative Diagnostics: “This product is for research use only and is not intended for diagnostic use.” The product announcement of the “LightMix Modular Assays” by Roche: “These assays are not intended for use as an aid in the diagnosis of coronavirus infection. For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.” (Steinhagen, 2020)

It is, therefore, curious that Public Health England (2021b) claims that “COVID-19 cases are identified [diagnosed] by taking specimens from people and testing them for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. If the test is positive, this is referred to as a case. If a person has had more than one positive test they are only counted as one case.”

The idea that a positive test for the “SARS-CoV-2” virus—whether using PCR, lateral flow, or any other form of test—implies the presence of the disease known as “Covid-19” is ludicrous, because it ignores the role of the human immune system. It is commonplace for viruses to be carried asymptomatically, with the virus remaining present in harmlessly low levels, because the immune system prevents it from replicating. Harrit (2021) makes this point succinctly:

To be sick is to have symptoms. If you are not sick, you are not contagious. It used to be common sense that you are healthy unless you are not. Sense is not common anymore during the alleged Covid-19 pandemic. Now you are sick until proven healthy – and contagious by default. The vehicle for this scam is the RT-PCR test run at >35 cycles and beyond.

According to biochemist David Rasnick, “You don’t start with testing; you start with listening to the lungs,” i.e. clinical symptoms first (cited in Farber, 2020a). Yet, against such elementary principles, the ONS and Oxford University partnered on a well-remunerated study in 2020 to “find out how many people have Covid-19, either with or without symptoms across the UK” (Slater, 2020). The aim seems to have been to normalise the concept of symptomless disease.

The number of cycles the RT-PCR test involves is known as the cycle threshold, with each cycle doubling the amount of genetic material under examination. The more cycles that are run, the higher the chance of a positive test result, because there is more material to detect. At a certain cycle threshold, the test becomes too sensitive and may yield false positive results, detecting material that was not originally present in sufficient quantity to be infectious. There is no absolute value to that cycle threshold, and different laboratories use different cycle thresholds (itself problematic in terms of consistency of standards). Nevertheless, according to the authoritative MIQE (Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments) guidelines of 2009, “Cq values > 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported […]” (Bustin et al., 2009, p. 618). One of the authors of those guidelines, Stephen Bustin, claims in an April 2020 interview, “I would be very unhappy about a 40-cycle PCR […] Above a cycle of about 35, then you start to worry about the reliability of your results […] Try to be sure that the results you get are in the twenties to thirties” (The Infectious Myth, 2020, 30:00).

Yet, NHS England worked to a cycle threshold of 45 when testing for “SARS-CoV-2” (Science & Technology Committee, 2020). A WHO summary table of protocols being used around the world shows France using 50 cycles, Germany, Thailand, and the United States using 45 cycles, and Hong Kong, and Japan using 40 cycles (WHO, 2020b). The Canadian province of Manitoba used between 40 and 45 cycles (JCCF, 2021). Kim et al. (2020), in the early “isolation” of “SARS-CoV-2,” perform PCR amplification with 40 cycles. This implies the likelihood of high false positive rates in PCR testing across the world.

Did the PCR tests test exclusively for “SARS-CoV-2,” as any reliable test must? For the “Covid-19” PCR test to be valid, Bustin claims, “the SARS-CoV-2-specific primers and probes […] must be 100% specific for the virus and so amplify only viral sequences” (Bustin & Nolan, 2020). However, research published by the Spanish medical journal D-Salud-Discovery (Blanca, 2020), whose findings are independently verified by Davis (2020b), casts doubt on whether this is the case. It finds, for instance, that the PCR test protocol of the Pasteur Institute tests for genetic sequences present in “dozens of sequences of the human genome itself and in those of about a hundred microbes.” The Japanese PCR protocol yields similar results: 93 human genome sequences and 100 microbe sequences with 94–100% similarity (Blanca, 2020). These findings are achieved by entering key genetic sequences from WHO-approved PCR protocols into the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), which enables a given sequence to be compared to all sequences stored in the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Although the PCR test was unfit for purpose, the authorities were eager to use it everywhere. On March 16, 2020, the WHO Director-General pleaded, “We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test” (WHO, 2020d). The UK Department of Health and Social Care (2020a) published a document on April 4, 2020 titled, Coronavirus (COVID-19) Scaling Up Our Testing Programmes, and NHS Test and Trace was established on May 28. Operation Moonshot aimed to administer 10 million tests a day by 2021 at the astronomical cost to the taxpayer of £100 billion, but the scheme was abandoned after the Good Law Project threatened legal action over misuse of public funds (Iacobucci, 2020a). In July 2020, the Rockefeller Foundation (2020) called on everyone to get tested at least twice a month—a new mass industry involving “perhaps as many as 300,000” people (ca. 0.1% of the population) to administer 30 million tests per week and run contact tracing in the United States.

Why the urgency to “test, test, test” using an obviously flawed testing protocol? One reason is that tests create “cases” and “cases” create fear. The more tests that are carried out using a test liable to produce false positive results, the more “cases” there will be (the so-called “casedemic”). “Cases” here, however, are not the same as active infections that cause illness. They are, rather, an artifice to inflate fear levels, e.g., via media reports of “surging case numbers” and “deaths within 28 days of a positive test for coronavirus.” When the United Kingdom ended free testing in April 2022, the “Covid-19 case rate” plummeted by 38% in a single week (Matthews, 2022).

There is nothing new in this scam. Reflecting on HIV testing between 1984 and 1996, Mullis remarks: “The number of cases went up epidemically, you know, exponentially, because the number of tests that was done went up exponentially” (“PCR inventor Kary Mullis talks about Anthony Fauci,” 2020). Yet, the number of active HIV infections in North America, Mullis adds, remained steady during the same period, at around a million. The reported “cases” nevertheless generated huge public fear around the virus, driving demand for pharmaceutical products and, thus, profit for Big Pharma.

In 2007, nearly 1000 healthcare workers at a medical centre in New Hampshire were furloughed following an apparent whooping cough outbreak. However, it proved to be a false alarm: “Not a single case of whooping cough was confirmed with the definitive test, growing the bacterium, Bordetella pertussis, in the laboratory. Instead, it appears the health care workers probably were afflicted with ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold” (Kolata, 2007). The reason for the false alarm was PCR testing and the fact that epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists “placed too much faith in a quick and highly sensitive molecular test that led them astray.” The sensitivity of the PCR test “makes false positives likely, and when hundreds or thousands of people are tested […] false positives can make it seem like there is an epidemic.”

The strategy for dealing with the 2009 “swine flu pandemic” (neither endemic in pigs nor a pandemic in any pre-2009 sense of the term) can be summarised as: “Publicise all cases where the virus has been detected. That is, set up surveillance stations everywhere and notify the community of every case of the virus found in the population—even if the infection does not cause any disease […]” (Wilyman, 2020). This chimes with Marc van Ranst’s cynical media strategy for spreading fear of H1N1 (EvidenceNotFear, 2020).

During “Covid-19,” the mass testing regime became self-sustaining, as those found to have been in contact with a positive “case” were themselves asked to take a test, even if neither party was symptomatic. On and on it went: healthy people producing false positive test results, drawing in even more people for testing. To encourage more and more people to get tested, some 700 test centres were set up under NHS Test and Trace, the average distance to one being just 2.4 miles (Department of Health and Social Care, 2020b). However, if amateur video footage of empty testing centres is anything to go by, this was largely just propaganda.

Viral Terror

Waves of Fear

Totalitarian menticide involves creating successive waves of fear and terror. As Meerloo (1956, p. 147) notes, “Each wave of terrorizing […] creates its effects more easily—after a breathing spell—than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience.” Linked to these “waves of terrorizing” is the totalitarian “strategy of fractionalized fear,” whereby victims’ minds are more easily conditioned “in a quiet period between acute tensions,” when their guard may be down (Meerloo, 1956, p. 168).

The threat of new “waves” of “SARS-Cov-2” served a similar function, i.e. to terrify and demoralise the public and wear it down psychologically. The alleged virus need not be especially virulent for the mere threat of its resurgence (with attendant implications associated with “lockdown”) to be used to keep the population fearful and apprehensive. Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 91) appear to explain the desired effect: “On a planetary scale, our collective sense of mental wellbeing has taken a very severe knock. Having dealt with the first wave, we are now anticipating another that may or may not come, and this toxic emotional mix risks producing a collective state of anguish.” That “very severe knock,” however, was caused by government policies, not by a virus which, by the authors’ admission, had killed only “0.006%” of the global population at that point (2020, p. 99). It is the anticipation (created by propaganda) that causes the anguish, not anything in nature.

Invoking “waves” of the virus means that the threat of some future dread can be used to keep the population anxious and uncertain. The idea of a “second epidemic peak” was seeded by SAGE (2020b, p. 4) as early as March 13, 2020: “it is a near certainty that countries such as China, where heavy suppression is underway, will experience a second peak once measures are relaxed.” This chimes with “Report 9” three days later: “Once interventions are relaxed (in the example in Fig. 3, from September onwards), infections begin to rise, resulting in a predicted peak epidemic later in the year” (Ferguson et al., 2020, p. 10). During the summer of 2020, when “Covid-19” case, hospitalisation, and mortality rates all plummeted in England (UK Government, n.d.-a), the propaganda was that “Hospitals will need as much capacity as they can get if there is a second wave” (Chalmers, 2020a). In one possible scenario envisaged by Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 21), “the first wave is followed by a larger wave that takes place in the third or fourth quarter of 2020, and one or several smaller subsequent waves in 2021 (like during the 1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic).” This is essentially what happened in England (only with the “second wave” peak coming in mid-January 2021, rather than Q4 of 2020), forming a supposed three-peak distribution over a two-year period much like the “Spanish flu” a century earlier (UK Government, n.d.-a; Taubenberger & Morens, 2006, Fig. 1).

The three “waves” of “Covid-19,” like those of the “Spanish flu,” are a form of pseudoscience: “Viruses do not do waves. That’s just a myth based on poor understanding of influenza at the end of WW1, a century ago” (Yeadon, 2020). It makes no sense, other than to spread fear, to treat “Covid-19” as a single ongoing event with multiple “waves.” “Modern human mortality in mid-latitude temperate-climate regions,” Rancourt (2020a, p. 4) notes, “is robustly seasonal,” and this is why, for instance, we speak of the “flu season” rather than amalgamating the last several flu seasons’ data (as the WHO [n.d.-a] Covid-19 Dashboard does for “Covid-19”). In the Czech Republic, “the three individual waves (autumn 2020 to spring 2021) […] lacked direct genomic relationship between each other,” and the Omicron variant “did not reveal direct evolutionary connection to any of the previous SARS-CoV-2 variants” (Kämmerer et al., 2023; cf. Tanaka & Miyazawa, 2023), rendering it doubtful that “new variants” were responsible for new “waves” of the virus.

Once “Covid-19″ had apparently formed the classic Gompertz curve in the spring of 2020, there was no reason, based on the principle of viral entropy, to expect a “second wave” larger than the first in the winter. Prior and naturally acquired immunity meant that “endemic equilibrium” should have been imminent” by the autumn of 2020 (Yeadon, 2020). According to Oxford-AstraZeneca’s Sarah Gilbert, “viruses tend to become less virulent over time as they spread through a population becoming more immune” (cited in Knapton, 2021). An open letter to the Prime Minister, dated November 8, 2020, and signed by 469 medics, states: “It is notable that [the] UK death rate is currently sitting around average for this time of year. The use of the term ‘second wave’ is therefore misleading” and the government response to the virus is “disproportionate” (Davies, 2020). The so-called “second wave” that purportedly followed in winter 2020 is, therefore, not scientifically credible.

In 2021, fear of a future virological threat was linked to the potential return of influenza, which, in a historically unprecedented turn of events, had supposedly vanished in 2020 (see Chapter 6). In February 2021, SAGE’s John Edmunds predicted “an out-of-season [influenza] epidemic perhaps in the autumn, rather than winter” (Patel, 2021). Susan Hopkins, in charge of Public Health England’s “Covid-19” strategy, claimed in March 2021 that the United Kingdom must prepare for a “hard winter” of “flu and other similar illnesses” (cited in Topping, 2021). Boris Johnson claimed in June 2021: “You can never exclude the possibility that there will be some new disease, some new horror we haven’t budgeted for or accounted for […] Things like flu may come back this winter, we may have a rough winter for all sorts of reasons” (Jones, 2021). A July 2021 report by the Academy of Medical Sciences (2021), commissioned by Patrick Vallance, predicts the perfect storm: a “third peak of COVID-19 infections over the summer of 2021,” followed by a possible “new variant,” while “outbreaks of RSV in the autumn and influenza in the winter could be around twice the magnitude of a ‘normal’ year, and might overlap (at least partially) with a peak in COVID-19 infections.” Mike Tildesley, a modeller from the University of Warwick, claimed in August 2021: “If [flu and other respiratory infections] return on the scale we expect we could see really major pressures build on the NHS that could raise some very difficult questions” (Triggle, 2021b). Actual influenza rates for the winter of 2021/22 were lower than for any of the six winters preceding “Covid-19” (WHO, n.d.-b), thus confirming the well-established pattern of using public health forecasts to spread fear during the “Covid-19 pandemic.”

Since the “Covid-19” operation was wound down in early 2022, artificially manufactured waves of fear have continued to roll across Western societies, viz. the Marburg and monkeypox scares, the “climate emergency” (Plimer, 2021), the threat of food and fuel shortages, fear-mongering rhetoric of nuclear war attached to the Ukraine conflict, runaway inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, “disinformation” (the pretext for online censorship), concerns about immigration (see Chapter 8), threats of cyber-attacks/outages (Cyber Polygon, n.d.), etc. This goes beyond Mencken’s (2009, p. 24) contention that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Rather, we are looking here at psychological warfare: “These fear-waves and threats (negative stimuli; conditioning à la Pavlov) are designed deliberately to grind people down, to make them submit, to induce breakdown, to coerce them to give up […]” (Scott, 2022).

“New Variants” and “Immunity Escape”

In order to maintain fear levels among the population, the concept of “new variants” was introduced in Britain in December 2020, based on Public Health England data (2020a, pp. 5, 48) regarding unusually high “case” rates in Kent. Matt Hancock wrote in a WhatsApp conversation on December 13, 2020: “When do we deploy [a military term] the new variant” in order to “frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain”? To which his special adviser, Damon Poole, replied: “Yep that’s [sic.] will get proper behaviour change” (Haigh, 2023). Hancock announced the new variant and Tier 3 restrictions the next day.

The term “new variant” is interesting in and of itself, since influenza routinely develops new strains, yet there is no comparable level of fear-mongering attached. The underlying idea, propagated by the media, is that “SARS-CoV-2 consistently evolves into an ever more dangerous iteration of itself” (Davis, 2021b)—the opposite of viral entropy. The idea was thus seeded that the virus mutates in such a way as to evade all forms of acquired immunity, be they cross-reactive T-cell immunity, naturally acquired immunity to the virus, or vaccine-derived immunity.

The first “Variants of Concern” originated in the United Kingdom, Brazil, and South Africa (Golemi-Kotra, 2021), the same three countries used in AstraZeneca’s phase 3 trials (Voysey et al., 2021). The odds of this precise combination of countries appearing randomly together are 7 million to one against (1/193 * 1/192 * 1/191), suggesting either that the AstraZeneca “vaccines” cause immune escape or that this incredible coincidence was scripted in order to promote the idea of immune escape.

Official sources did not portray the “Kent variant” as especially virulent. Public Health England (2020b) on December 20, 2020, for instance, offered “no evidence that this variant causes more severe disease or higher mortality.” Gates (2020) claimed on December 22, 2020, that the new variant “seems to spread faster but not to be more deadly.” Johns Hopkins Medical Centre saw “[no] indication that the new strain is more virulent or dangerous in terms of causing more severe COVID–19 disease” (Bollinger & Ray, 2020). Analysis of relevant UK data by Davis (2021b) reveals that up to early December 2020, “the new variants had accounted for an increased rate of transmission—but significantly lower rates of hospitalisation and mortality.”

Yet, SAGE (2020d) treated the “new variant” as a pretext for authoritarianism: “Given the increase in risk associated with the new variant,” it claimed, “a commensurate strengthening in the measures taken […] may be needed.” This was despite inherent scientific uncertainty, reflected in SAGE’s use of hedging phrases such as “not yet known whether […],” “not yet any evidence which suggests […],” “not yet clear whether […],” and “currently no evidence of […].” Neil Ferguson likewise claimed: “the new variant without doubt will make the relaxation of restrictions more difficult” (cited in Glaze, 2021). “New variant” thus became synonymous with scientifically baseless restrictions on liberty, providing a “psychological justification for actions the government may wish to take anyway” (Dodsworth, 2021a, p. 116).

Notwithstanding the dubiousness of the “new variant” concept, the idea was propagated that “new variants” might somehow evade all forms of acquired immunity. The “specter of vaccine escape mutants” was mooted as early as June 2020 (Branch, 2020). Once the “vaccines” were rolled out in December 2020, an early concern was that too long a gap between “vaccine” doses could create “more potential for viral evolution” (Saad-Roy et al., 2021). In early January 2021, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (2021) warned that “SARS-CoV-2 variants may arise which evade monoclonal antibody therapies, convalescent plasma therapy, vaccine derived immunity, or naturally acquired immunity.” The BBC warned in February 2021: “Growing levels of immunity from further rollout of the vaccine will favour variants that can sneak past the vaccine” (Triggle, 2021a). Whitty expressed confidence that a vaccine-resistant variant would emerge (cited in Boyd, 2021). Ferguson warned of “the worst case scenario [that] we have a new variant pop up which does manage to evade the vaccines […]” (cited in Walsh, 2021). An Express headline pointed to a “vaccine-resistant variant” about to “smash” the United Kingdom (Falvey, 2021). This is all scripted and intended to maintain fear of the “virus” even as the “vaccines” intended to deal with that virus were being rolled out.

The WHO’s Maria Van Kerkhove warned in August 2021 that “new variants could emerge which evade vaccines,” claiming that so many new variants had emerged that the Greek letter scheme introduced to label them a few months earlier would soon be exhausted and that the WHO might have to name them after star constellations (“COVID-19 Variants could be named after constellations,” 2021). The Sun warned with respect to the Lambda variant that “‘unusual’ mutations can ‘dodge vaccines’” (Zorzut, 2021). According to the New York Post, the Epsilon variant, despite being removed from the WHO’s “variants of interest” in July 2021, “could evade vaccines” (O’Neill, 2021). In September, the WHO claimed it was monitoring the new “Mu” variant, which has “the potential to evade immunity provided by a previous Covid-19 infection or vaccination” (Lovelace Jr., 2021). The propaganda strategy is clear, i.e. to maintain constant fear of immune escape via a proliferation of “new variants.”

Geert Vanden Bossche

The issue of immune escape received special attention following publication of an open letter by Geert Vanden Bossche (2021). Vanden Bossche, a virologist with experience of working for Big Pharma, GAVI, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, claims that mass vaccination with leaky vaccines could lead to more virulent strains of “Covid-19” developing in vaccinated people, which in turn could kill the unvaccinated, leading to a never-ending need to vaccinate against ever more dangerous strains. It was first theorised in 2001 that vaccines could in principle select for the evolution of increased virulence (Gandon et al., 2001). Empirical confirmation was provided in 2015: immunisation of chickens against Marek’s disease “enhances the fitness of more virulent strains, making it possible for hyperpathogenic strains to transmit”; this is because leaky vaccination “prolongs host survival but does not prevent infection, viral replication or transmission” (Read et al., 2015). If similar were to occur in humans, then “the normal ‘life cycle’ of a virus, from highly virulent and dangerous, to more infectious but less dangerous (‘virus entropy’) may be fundamentally affected or even reversed” (van der Pijl, 2022, p. 247). This contravention of Virology 101 seems prima facie unlikely, however.

The Vanden Bossche open letter reads more as fear propaganda than as science. For example, it refers to “killer vaccines” and claims that mass vaccination threatens to “wipe out large parts of our human population” by “turning a relatively harmless virus into a bioweapon of mass destruction.” If so, how might those behind the “bioweapon” expect to survive? Do they have the antidote? Vanden Bossche (2021) dramatically appeals to professional reputation rather than carefully supported scientific argumentation: “In this agonizing letter, I put all of my reputation and credibility at stake.” Yet, an unreferenced, five-page letter is not the place to do this; rather, a peer-reviewed journal article, or at the very least a preprint would have been more appropriate, notwithstanding the urgency of the subject matter.

Like a tabloid newspaper, Vanden Bossche’s open letter places multiple, sometimes sensationalist, phrases in capital letters to grab attention, e.g. “THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY OF INTERNATIONAL CONCERN.” Phrases such as “racing against the clock” and “there is not one second left for gears to be switched” add to the drama but detract from scientific credibility. The virus itself is anthropomorphised as a kind of master criminal that will “take on another coat” as part of its “strategy” to replicate and increase its “return on selection investment.” The open letter also makes emotive reference to the vulnerability of children to “Covid-19,” even though there is little to no credible scientific evidence to support this assertion (Hughes, 2022a).

Vanden Bossche’s scientific claims are spurious. For example, he presents a jaundiced view of the human immune system (Frei, 2021), focusing on initial “passive immunity” but not subsequent “adaptive immunity” in which T-cells are produced. He tries to downplay cross-reactive T-cell immunity as “short-lived,” only mentioning T-cells twice, even though it is known that “CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells, and neutralizing antibodies all contribute to control of SARS-CoV-2 in both non-hospitalized and hospitalized cases of COVID-19” (Sette & Crotty, 2021). Because “SARS-CoV-2” is a coronavirus, there is already a certain degree of cross-reactive T-cell memory (found in ca. 28–50% of people) and therefore “some degree of pre-existing immunity in the population” (Sette & Crotty, 2021). The “Variants of Concern” do not change this, for they “do not significantly disrupt the total SARS-CoV-2 T cell reactivity” (Tarke et al., 2021).

Despite criticising leaky “Covid-19” vaccines for endangering all human life, Vanden Bossche (2021) reaches a surprising conclusion: “Paradoxically, the only intervention that could offer a perspective to end this pandemic (other than to let it run its disastrous course) is …VACCINATION.” Thus, he does nothing to challenge the “Covid-19” vaccination agenda. Instead, he proposes “large vaccination campaigns” that will prime NK (natural killer) cells so that they “acquire immunological memory” and thereby become able to “recognize and kill Coronaviruses at large (include all their variants) at an early stage of infection”—even though there is still no cure for the common cold.

If Vanden Bossche were right, deaths among the “unvaccinated” would have spiralled out of control. Instead, not only did Omicron fit the viral entropy model of more transmissible but less deadly (it was likened to the common cold), but health outcomes among “unvaccinated” people proved better than for the “vaccinated” (see Chapter 7). It is therefore hard to escape the conclusion that Vanden Bossche is yet another medical establishment figure responsible for propagating a pseudoscientific fear narrative. Almost no one had heard of him before he entered the scene, and he disappeared just as quickly, having played his part.

“Long Covid”

The threat severity of “Covid-19” was hyped via the new concept of “long Covid,” which NHS England (n.d.-a) vaguely defines in terms of “symptoms that develop during or following an infection consistent with COVID-19 which continue for more than 12 weeks and are not explained by an alternative diagnosis.” Those symptoms are said by NHS England to be “wide-ranging and fluctuating, and can include breathlessness, chronic fatigue, ‘brain fog,’ anxiety and stress,” as well as “generalised pain, fatigue, persisting high temperature and psychiatric problems.”

All of those symptoms, however, can be explained by alternative diagnoses. According to one GP, “most [of those] symptoms are so common that we see them in general practice all the time” (cited in Cox, 2021). Without a control group, it is impossible, in the words of NIAID’s Michael Sneller, to “attribute any abnormality to the viral infection”; for example, “about 12% of our COVID group complains of tinnitus, and about 14% of the control group has tinnitus” (cited in Couzin-Frankel, 2021). Blankenburg et al. (2022) find “no statistically significant difference (Fisher’s exact test) in the occurrence of any neurocognitive or pain symptoms” among 1560 school children with “long Covid” symptoms, regardless of whether they tested seropositive or seronegative.

The term “long Covid” was coined by a patient advocacy organisation called Body Politic in a May 2020 report based on online surveys of people self-reporting persistent symptoms. However, of those surveyed, “nearly half (47.8%) never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for Covid-19,” meaning that less than a quarter had tested positive (Devine, 2021). In a December 2020 report by the same organisation, only 15.9% of respondents “had tested positive for the virus at any time” (Devine, 2021). To be clear, only 16–25% of those self-reporting “long Covid” in these early surveys had tested positive for “SARS-CoV-2.” Proponents of “long Covid” sometimes attribute such low rates to the initial scarcity of testing kits, as though more testing would undoubtedly have revealed many more “cases” (Re’em, 2021). Yet, in the May 2020 report above, more people tested negative than positive, suggesting that less than half of tests overall would have come back positive.

A later scientific study corroborates this hypothesis: in 467 12–25-year-olds, “long Covid” symptoms after six months (based on the WHO definition of “Post-COVID-19 Condition”) were found in 49% of those who had previously tested positive for “SARS-CoV-2,” but also 47% of those had tested negative (Selvakumar et al., 2023)—offering no convincing evidence that “long Covid,” if it exists, has anything to do with “Covid-19.” Rather, Selvakumar et al. (2023) conclude, “initial symptom severity and psychosocial factors” are the key predictors of “long Covid,” there being no hard evidence what caused those symptoms, while the “psychosocial factors” mean that it could all be in the mind. An even larger study of 5086 11–17-year-olds delivers a similar verdict: “these symptoms may be causally related to multiple factors and not just the original SARS-COV-2 infection” (Pereira et al., 2023).

The existence of “long Covid,” which has no equivalent in, say, “long rhinovirus” or “long influenza,” was not established through scientific investigation; rather, it was promoted by patient advocacy groups like Body Politic bringing together people convinced they have the illness. To a sceptic, this looks “a lot like amalgam poisoning, electricity allergy, and chronic Lyme disease—i.e. conditions that some people diagnose themselves with (doctors rarely diagnose them), but for which there are no diagnostic tests, and for which there is no scientific evidence” (Rushworth, 2020). Devine (2021), too, compares “long Covid” to chronic Lyme disease, “a term whose usage is discouraged because it describes a range of symptoms without requiring evidence of prior infection with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease; some see it as quackery […].” One “long Covid” advocacy group, Patient-led Research, ran a study in which “the majority [73%] of participants did not report receiving a positive SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic or antibody test result,” nevertheless claiming that this “should not be used as an indicator to rule out Long COVID in patients who otherwise have suggestive symptoms” (Davis et al., 2021, my emphasis). There is no plausible connection here between the virus and the alleged long-term symptoms. Rather, “long Covid” turns out to be “basically whatever the person who thinks they have it says it is. Anything and everything can be attributed to long covid” (Rushworth, 2020).

Despite the lack of science, “long Covid” patient advocacy organisations rapidly gained disproportionate influence. For example, take Lisa McCorkell of Body Politic and Patient-Led Research, whose highest academic qualification is a Master of Public Policy in 2020. In April 2021, McCorkell gave evidence to Congress as one of seven “expert witnesses” alongside the heads of the NIH and CDC, as well as two professors from Stanford and Yale. In her testimony, McCorkell (2021) notes that Body Politic formed part of the WHO’s “long Covid” working group and held “ongoing meetings” with the CDC’s Post-COVID Conditions Unit, producing research that has been cited in “over 70 scientific publications, guidance for clinicians, and policy documents.” Thus, a patient advocacy group run by five young people without prior academic publications, whose work on “long Covid” contains obvious methodological flaws, supposedly informed scientific debate and policymaking at the highest levels of public health, including the WHO, CDC, and NIH. This is not credible. A more plausible explanation is that there is a high-level agenda to promote “long Covid,” and patient advocacy groups are either being exploited or were astroturfed to push the agenda.

To see why many people believe they have a condition called “long Covid,” consider why so many people believe they may have had “Covid-19” in the first place. Not only is it “hard to tell the difference” between “Covid-19” and influenza “based on symptoms alone” (CDC, 2021; see Chapter 6), but the media also encouraged the public to identify any and every symptom with “Covid-19,” including hives (Haglage, 2020), chilblains (Young, 2020), parosmia (Brewer, 2021), insomnia (McCann, 2022), hiccups, tinnitus, and stammering (Hagan, 2021), mouth disease, hearing loss, blood clots, conjunctivitis, and diarrhoea (Mullin & Chalmers, 2021), erectile dysfunction (Ruiz, 2020), “green poop” (Sweeney, 2022), eye swelling (Hockaday, 2022), and brain fog (Parsons, 2022). Some of these symptoms were crudely renamed “Covid toes,” “Covid eye,” “Covid brain,” etc.

The media was relentless in promoting the existence of “long Covid.” According to the Manchester Evening News, there are “more than 200 symptoms associated with long Covid” (Cox, 2021). The Guardian published a series of articles on “long Covid,” relating “harrowing tales of people who never fully recovered from a Covid infection, experiencing pain, ‘brain fog,’ irritable bowel syndrome, and a huge range of other disorders with no end in sight” (see Ritchie, 2021). The Mail insists “‘Long Covid’ IS real” and that three quarters of patients admitted to hospital with “Covid-19” symptoms were still showing symptoms three months later (Chalmers, 2020b). According to National Geographic, “people who only suffered mild infections can be plagued with life-altering and sometimes debilitating cognitive deficits” (Mullin, 2021).

A population saturated in propaganda of this kind (in particular, the majority that has no idea it is being propagandised) will naturally include many people who believe they have had “Covid-19” and “long Covid,” regardless of whether or not they tested positive using an unreliable test. It is significant that some of the alleged symptoms of “long Covid,” such as brain fog, fatigue, and body aches, are also found in chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition which for years was not taken seriously. Similarly, a common complaint among the “long Covid” community is that the condition was at first not taken seriously by medical professionals owing to lack of a positive test result (Guenot, 2021). To what extent, then, is “long Covid” embraced and promoted by communities legitimately seeking due recognition of their suffering from other causes?

It must also be acknowledged that “Covid-19” and “long Covid” are likely to be embraced by hypochondriacs and those with Munchhausen syndrome, i.e. people morbidly anxious about their own health or who feign disease in order to gain attention. This consideration is particularly important in view of Pentagon neuroscience adviser James Giordano’s (2017) plans for psychological warfare:

What I put over the internet is: this is a virus, bacteria, an agent that I have infiltrated into your fill-in-the-blank. I say it’s a weapon of mass destruction, and what I tell you it’s going to do is, it’s going to produce paranoia, anxiety, and sleeplessness. What I’ve just done is I’ve recruited every paranoid hypochondriac to think that they have whatever that is [...] I create a legion of essentially what’s known as the worried well.

Sneller et al. (2022) find that patients with a history of anxiety disorder (as well as women) are more likely to report PASC (“long Covid”) and that there is “no evidence of persistent viral infection, autoimmunity, or abnormal immune activation in participants with PASC,” casting doubt on any connection to the virus. In the absence of hard scientific evidence, “long Covid” could be psychogenic and based on “pseudoscience” that will “perpetuate patient denial of mental illness and psychosomatic symptoms” (Devine, 2021).

There is, in any case, something suspect about the vast array of symptoms attributed to “Covid-19” and “long Covid.” On the one hand, Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 21) seek to convince us that

COVID-19 is a master of disguise that manifests itself with protean symptoms that are confounding the medical community. It is first and foremost a respiratory disease but, for a small but sizeable number of patients, symptoms range from cardiac inflammation and digestive problems to kidney infection, blood clots and meningitis. In addition, many people who recover are left with chronic kidney and heart problems, as well as lasting neurological effects.

According to the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (2021, p. 7), “COVID-19 also causes pneumonia, cardiac injury, secondary infection, kidney damage, pancreatitis, arrhythmia, sepsis, stroke, respiratory complications, and shock.”

Yet, how can a respiratory disease produce such far-reaching effects across multiple failing organs? As Rushworth (2020) writes, “covid is not some magical entity, it’s a coronavirus, and it behaves like other coronaviruses, and other respiratory viruses more generally. It would be strange for covid to cause symptoms that other respiratory viruses don’t.” Since when have coronaviruses caused coagulopathies, blood clots, and crossed the blood brain barrier to produce neurological disease? The danger of the virus in terms of clinical symptoms appears to have been greatly exaggerated.

A Scientific American headline from July 2021 reads: “A tsunami of disability is coming as a result of ‘long Covid.’ We need to plan for a future where millions of survivors are chronically ill” (Pomeroy, 2021). The idea of “long Covid” as “mass disabling event” (Lin II & Money, 2022) was, thus, propagated at a stage in the “vaccine” rollout where most U.S. adults had taken at least one shot—as opposed to, say, in December 2020, when “long Covid” had supposedly been around for at least seven months without “vaccines.” Some of the most distressing videos of “vaccine”-injured people show them convulsing uncontrollably, indicating a neurological disorder unlikely to have been caused by a coronavirus. According to Scientific American, “Long Covid now looks like a neurological disease” (Sutherland, 2023). Readers must draw their own conclusions.

If “long Covid” were as serious as is made out, one might have expected that, after three years, the more than $1 billion poured into “long Covid” research by the NIH would have yielded some tangible results. Instead, Cohrs and Ladyzhets (2023) observe, “There’s basically nothing to show for it […] The National Institutes of Health hasn’t signed up a single patient to test any potential treatments.” This bears the hallmarks of a scam.

Societies in Distress

The “Covid-19” operation represents “a well-organized, very sophisticated propaganda campaign that has drawn on the human fear of death and disease” (Curtin, 2021). Building on fear tactics deployed during the “Cold War” and the “War on Terror,” the pseudopandemic (Davis, 2021a) sought, in the most literal way, to put the fear of death into everyone, and would not have been possible without the media to amplify fear levels. Manipulated death statistics, propaganda about “overwhelmed” hospitals, face masks, PCR tests, viral “waves,” “new variants,” “immune escape,” “long Covid”—all of it was about keeping populations in a state of heightened fear and anxiety so that they might be psychologically weakened and manipulated in various ways and ultimately rendered powerless to resist the transition to technocracy.

The real-life effects of this fear-mongering were evident in, for instance, “people body swerving in a supermarket to maintain distance from one another; hugging each other through plastic; washing one’s shopping and leaving for three days before touching again; [and] shop owners washing physical cash in a fish tank” (Scott, 2021). Demand for underground bunkers and “prepping” products exploded (“The plague of fear breeds paranoia,” 2020). People wore face masks when out walking without another human being in sight and while driving in their car alone (Sardi, 2021).

The Health Advisory & Recovery Team (HART, 2021) makes the indisputable point that “it is unacceptable for a civilised society to strategically inflict heightened emotional distress on its citizens as a means of inducing the behaviours that the government has, paternalistically, decided are the ‘right’ ones.” The point is, however, that we no longer live in civilised societies. We live in wartime conditions, with the rule of law breaking down, in societies that can increasingly only be ruled by force, until a new settlement is reached (cf. Hughes et al., 2022).