Lockdowns, Just in Time for the US 2024 election By Brian Simpson

Will the medical technocrats, who gave us the mandates and lockdowns for the first Covid plandemic, and who have never admitted any fault at all, succeed this time round with the new Covid variants? One school of thought holds that people have wised up now. An article at Brownstone.org puts the case against this: “Honestly, I never believed they would get away with it the first time. How in the world do you convince Catholic Bishops to demand the closure of Churches on Easter under the excuse of the widespread circulation of a virus with a 99-plus percent survival rate in which the verified deaths from Covid alone is centered on a population older than life expectancy itself? I never could have imagined such a thing would be possible. 

But the desire on the part of aspirational professionals – in academia, industry, and religion – to stay out of trouble and continue to ascend the ranks is so powerful as to cause multitudes to bury their best instincts for what they imagine will be a temporary but prudent compliance. I do not for a moment believe that bravery on the level of the Amish or the Hasidim is widespread enough in the population to create a mass resistance movement. 

I think the case of our own state Victoria, with one of the world’s longest lockdowns is instructive, since one would have expected the Andrews government to have been crushed, but instead was given a stunning victory. Go figure; it is a concerning matter that raises doubts about the rationality of our state. Hopefully it is just an outlier and does not say something about fundamental human nature.

https://brownstone.org/articles/are-we-facing-lockdowns-2-0/

“National Public Radio was in a frenzy this morning but it felt like the movie Groundhog Day: they were spreading tremendous alarm about the rise of Covid cases. We have to stop the spread, the announcer said, and that’s why masks are coming back to classrooms. However, they added, relief is on the way in the form of a new vaccine. 

Rinse, repeat – as the shampoo bottles say. 

This line of thinking – stop the spread to reduce strain on hospitals, mask up, and so on – is being echoed by all major media organs. Leading the way is of course the New York Times. 

I’m a bit superstitious about stories in the New York Times designed to drum up disease panic. It was February 28, 2020, when this paper threw out one hundred years of editorial policy on infectious disease to counsel panic over calm, thus paving the way for what would come two weeks later: the astonishing wreckage of Covid lockdowns and everything that entailed. 

There was a reason the Times was chosen to be the first media outlet to take this line on Covid. It would be exceedingly naive to think that this was driven by an independent editorial judgment. Someone likely put them up to it. 

Regardless, I knew that day that the darkness was falling, that this was likely the beginning of a grand experiment in public health that would not only fail to achieve its aims but also wreck American liberty and prosperity. After all, sectors of the ruling class had been gaming pandemics for twenty years. They needed to justify the endless hours and billions put into the grand project of pandemic planning. 

The result was a calamity without precedent. We are nowhere near recovered. Substantial numbers of people today fear lockdowns far more than Covid, and for very good reasons. It was the crisis of our lives. 

Even more striking, we’ve yet to have a reckoning. The people in charge today are the same people who did this or their direct successors. There have been no apologies but rather quite the reverse. They worked hard to codify lockdowns as the preferred policy for pandemics, and we have every reason to suspect that they will repeat the experience if they can get away with it. 

That’s why my heart jumped a beat at the above-the-fold headline in the Times yesterday morning. 

 

This happens at the same time we are getting more reports of new mask mandates, school closures, and the rollout of a new Covid vaccine invented by the usual suspects that President Biden has personally suggested that every American take. From all appearances, it does seem like another lockdown could be coming, or perhaps they are just trying to scare us into the reminder that they can do it if they want to. 

Just this morning, the White House spokesman took to the lectern to warn Americans about ominous subvariant BA.2.86, not to be confused with all the other subvariants being tracked in a pseudoscientific track-and-trace operation being run by the usual suspects. 

The Washington Post was chosen to announce the terror behind this one. “While only about a dozen cases of the new BA.2.86 variant have been reported worldwide — including three in the United States — experts say this variant requires intense monitoring and vigilance that many of its predecessors did not. That’s because it has even greater potential to escape the antibodies that protect people from getting sick, even if you’ve recently been infected or vaccinated.”

You will notice that BA.2.86 is not on the current list. That only means it could be the worst yet, whatever that means. 

It will surely be added. And no doubt every commentator on TV in the coming months will have great expertise with all this coded gibberish, spouting off these letters and numbers like they are known friends while the rest of us stare at our screen in amazement at the flashy science these experts are tossing around. 

Our pro-lockdown friend and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb is already at it, letting all these subvariant names roll off his tongue on CNN and thus display his astonishing mastery over the microbial kingdom. . 

This could be the way in which Lockdown 2.0 will be different from 1.0. The last time, the main spokespeople like Deborah Birx spoke to us like children to make sure we got the message. The downside of that approach is that it invites regular people to comment on the wisdom of lockdowns. 

The next time around, they will be much more sciency about it, with all this talk of subvariants, R-naughts, hospitalization rates, wastewater examinations, and so on, and do so in ways that intimidate regular people into thinking our opinions cannot possibly matter much. 

Let’s take a closer look at this New York Times piece. 

“But for Americans who have become accustomed to feeling that the nation has moved beyond Covid,” the newspaper says, “the current wave could be a rude reminder that the emerging New Normal is not a world without the virus.”

Are we really continuing to imagine the goal of eradication still? That seemed to be the purpose of the lockdowns in the first place, if there was any goal at all. It’s utterly impossible to create a world in which there are no viruses. And actually such a world would be stunningly dangerous, for it is the presence of pathogens that themselves train the immune system in the art of resistance, same as exercise makes the body more healthy. 

Sadly, this was the great taboo subject for three years, and, as a result, there was almost no talk of natural immunity during the last Covid mania. And there has been little to no reckoning since those days about the meaning of endemicity, the failure to recommend repurposed drugs as therapeutics, and the positive contribution of widespread exposure to creating the public health benefit of stronger immune systems. All of these topics were denounced and then censored. Oddly, they still are. 

To this day, public health officials continue to pretend that they did everything right. Oh sure, they could have locked down earlier, forced masks earlier, and imposed vaccine mandates with much more ferocity. So far as they are concerned, this was their only failing. And they have no intention of making those supposed mistakes again. 

In my own circles, everyone believes that they will never get away with it all again simply because there is too much resistance. I’m not so optimistic actually. Let’s say that 20 percent of the population is still convinced of the entire Covid religion. These people working with media and Big Tech, combined with daily propaganda from Covid, might be enough to overcome a large portion of the public that swears they will not comply this time. 

Honestly, I never believed they would get away with it the first time. How in the world do you convince Catholic Bishops to demand the closure of Churches on Easter under the excuse of the widespread circulation of a virus with a 99-plus percent survival rate in which the verified deaths from Covid alone is centered on a population older than life expectancy itself? I never could have imagined such a thing would be possible. 

But the desire on the part of aspirational professionals – in academia, industry, and religion – to stay out of trouble and continue to ascend the ranks is so powerful as to cause multitudes to bury their best instincts for what they imagine will be a temporary but prudent compliance. I do not for a moment believe that bravery on the level of the Amish or the Hasidim is widespread enough in the population to create a mass resistance movement. 

“Some institutions have responded to the recent increase in Covid infections by reinstating pandemic-era rules,” writes the Times. Then the article proceeds to celebrate all the cases of pandemic restrictions, without a hint that these didn’t work last time and won’t work this time either. Again, there has been no reckoning, which only increases the likelihood of a new round of lockdowns. 

Lockdowns were the most successful state/corporate policy in world history for convincing the population to give up volition, liberty, and money to the biomedical cartels and all its associated parts. 

Every government benefitted and so did all the biggest companies, particularly the digital ones that had been working for a leg up and a big win from the great reset. Something that is this monstrously successful for them becomes a model for the future, which they try and try until the population gets utterly and completely sick of it, as they did with the religious wars of old. 

Until that day comes, lockdowns will be an ever-present threat.” 

 

https://mises.org/wire/unwelcome-return-covid-restrictions-and-lockdowns

“Covid restrictions are back. Almost a year after President Joe Biden said “the pandemic is over,” several hospitals, businesses, and universities have reinstated mask mandates and social distancing requirements. Meanwhile, nearly sixty universities have announced that students must take a covid vaccine to attend for the fall 2023 semester.

Although these restrictions are still limited to only a handful of organizations, their implementation demonstrates that the destructive public health dogmas responsible for the devastation of the last three years are still with us. The American people must stop tolerating these ruinous policies and the totalitarian paradigm underlying them.

The current dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant is a subvariant of Omicron called EG.5. Informally, it’s been nicknamed Eris after the Greek goddess of strife. The strain was first identified back in February 2023. It overtook the previous dominant variant at the beginning of August. The symptoms of the Eris variant are those of a cold—a runny nose and a sore throat. There is no evidence that Eris is more contagious or severe than the previous dominant variant.

Another Omicron variant called BA.2.86, nicknamed Pirola, has also been detected, but the few confirmed cases have also been very mild.

In recent weeks, an uptick in covid has been detected in wastewater, indicating a rise in cases. The trend is the familiar “summer wave” in viral spread seen as people move indoors to escape the late-summer heat. Still, the case numbers are extremely low, and the virus has the severity of a cold.

And yet some institutions have reinstated restrictions on their customers and workers in response to Eris. On August 17, two New York hospitals reimposed mandatory face masking and covid testing. Then, on August 20, Morris Brown College in Atlanta reinstated its mask mandate and banned large gatherings. The school also reimplemented contact tracing, symptom monitoring, and general social distancing requirements. The next day, the movie studio Lionsgate instituted a mask mandate for its offices. Two days later, a San Francisco medical center followed suit.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration publicly urged people to get fall booster shots last Monday. Then, last Friday, the president said he was requesting funds for a new covid vaccine that he anticipates will be recommended to everyone. And, as of August 26, fifty-eight universities have notified their students that they are required to take the covid vaccine to attend classes this fall semester.

These developments are disturbing because they indicate that the paradigm underlying the totalitarian pandemic response is still very intact. That paradigm was laid out well by both Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty in their lectures at the Mises Institute’s Medical Freedom Summit this year.

Dr. McCullough traced the origin of today’s medical totalitarianism to the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005, which militarized the protocols for fighting a pandemic. Under this new philosophy, the government would mobilize the population to fend off a pathogen as if it were a foreign invader. War, be it on people or germs, breeds totalitarianism. As Randolph Bourne wrote over a century ago, it’s during times of war that “the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become—the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s business and attitudes and opinions.”

Dr. Kheriaty went a bit further back and identified a national public health conference in 1997 as the origin of the government’s repressive approach to fighting viruses. At the conference, a subtle shift in pandemic policy’s emphasis occurred that led public health away from viewing viruses as the enemy to be combatted and toward viewing human beings as possible vectors of disease, as a danger to be controlled. In other words, the field’s priorities switched from working to care for sick people to the top-down control of entire populations.

This new paradigm of public health led to a “new paradigm of governance,” in the words of Dr. Kheriaty, that was rolled out in early 2020. For the first time in recorded human history, which is full of plagues and pandemics, quarantines were imposed on the entire population, not just the infected or those arriving from infected areas.

An overly sedentary population with concerning levels of mental illness was forced to stay inside and isolated from their friends, coworkers, classmates, and families. And to hide their faces from strangers when forced to go out. Six trillion dollars was quickly printed to try and delay the inevitable pain that results when millions of people stop producing the goods and services we all rely on.

The health and development of millions of young Americans have been harmed in ways that will take decades to fully comprehend. All in the name of halting a virus known early on to pose little risk to the young and healthy. And the virus still moved through nearly three-quarters of the American population anyway.

And yet the new public health paradigm is clearly still with us. It just lies dormant while case numbers remain low. The last few weeks have shown that it will resurface even when officials declare a virus low risk.

The doctrine of totalitarianism is too dangerous to be tolerated again. But unlike a pathogen, all this threat requires is our refusal.