The Covid Coup: How a Global Cartel Hijacked Public Health and Locked Down the World! By Brian Simpson and Mrs. Vera West
It's the question that won't die, no matter how many booster ads you see on telly or how often the ABC wheels out a mask-clad "expert" to tell you it was all necessary: What if the pandemic wasn't a public health crisis at all?
Debbie Lerman's new book, The Deep State Goes Viral: Pandemic Planning and the Covid Coup, is a forensic, eye-popping investigation into what might be the most sinister bait-and-switch operation of the 21st century. Far from being a messy public health failure, Lerman argues that the Covid response was a pre-planned, military-grade psychological operation, rolled out with precision by an unaccountable cartel of intelligence agencies, billionaires, globalist institutions, and biotech barons.
If Lerman is even half right, we are no longer living in democratic nations governed by elected officials. We're under the thumb of a globalised network of unelected technocrats who run pandemic simulations like war games, and then unleash the results on the rest of us.
Lerman, a former science writer and long-time contributor to the Brownstone Institute, opens the case with a killer premise: Covid wasn't treated like a virus—it was treated like a weapon. And that's because, from day one, the response wasn't led by health authorities but by national security and military agencies using counterterrorism protocols. In the U.S., the National Security Council quietly took over the pandemic response in March 2020. Public health experts were sidelined. The playbook wasn't "isolate the sick"; it was "lock down everyone, censor dissent, and push experimental countermeasures."
That word, countermeasures, isn't accidental. In Pentagon-speak, it refers to tools used against chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attacks. Lerman reveals that mRNA vaccines, rapid tests, and much of the Covid "toolkit" were classified this way, not as public health interventions, but as emergency war-time technologies exempt from standard safety protocols. They were deployed under the authority of biodefence laws, not medical regulation.
The book doesn't stop at America. Lerman draws the lines between what happened in Five Eyes countries, Australia included, and NATO-aligned states, showing a disturbingly synchronised rollout of the "lockdown-until-vaccine" narrative. From London to Canberra, from Berlin to Ottawa, the script was the same. Panic, lockdown, silence dissent, jab, repeat.
That's no accident. Lerman tracks the connections between public-private partnerships like CEPI, GAVI, the WHO, and countless Western intelligence agencies. At the centre of it all? The "biodefence industrial complex" — a tangled web of pharmaceutical giants, venture capitalists, military contractors and public health bureaucrats acting as foot soldiers for a global cartel.
It sounds fantastical, until you remember that Dr Peter Daszak, the same man implicated in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute, was also sent to investigate the origin of the virus on behalf of the WHO. Lerman dissects this and dozens of other "conflicts of interest" that would be laughable if the consequences weren't so deadly serious.
Lerman is especially strong when she turns her attention to the media. She doesn't just allege bias, she documents a full-spectrum propaganda blitz unlike anything outside wartime. The New York Times, the Washington Post, even bestselling books like Michael Lewis's The Premonition are exposed as part of a coordinated effort to promote lockdown narratives and glorify public health authoritarians.
Deborah Birx, one of the architects of the U.S. Covid response, gets her own chapter. Lerman painstakingly contrasts Birx's official statements with the factual timeline, revealing a pattern of deception and narrative engineering. The most disturbing part? Birx openly admits in her memoir, Silent Invasion, to manipulating data and overstating risks to justify lockdowns. That's not policy failure. That's premeditated strategy.
And Australia? We know the story. Curfews. Military on the streets. Children in isolation. Vaccine passports. Borders closed to our own citizens. The question Lerman forces us to ask is: Who authorised all this? And why were we all singing from the same sheet music?
Lerman's conclusions are a punch to the democratic ego. She argues that governments didn't simply overreact, they acted on orders. From who? The answer is well known to us here: a transnational cartel of corporations, intelligence networks, billionaire philanthropists and unelected bodies like the WHO and WEF, operating above national law, beyond media scrutiny, and without the slightest concern for civil liberties. The New World Order.
This wasn't about health. It was about control. About testing the limits of compliance. About shifting power away from elected governments and toward unelected global institutions.
Lerman warns that focusing on "the science" or "who made what mistake" misses the forest for the trees. This wasn't about Tony Fauci, or Greg Hunt, or Brett Sutton. It was a system-wide capture of governance by what she calls the "Global Biosecurity State." The only "public" involved was the one being manipulated.
And worst of all? They're not done. Lerman predicts the next move will be another "global emergency," maybe climate, maybe cyber, maybe financial. Each one will be another excuse to roll out the same architecture of control, fear, censorship, and compliance.
If Lerman's right, The Deep State Goes Viral is less a post-mortem than a warning shot. The structures that enabled 2020 still exist. The same networks are intact. And the public, traumatised, gaslit and exhausted, remains dangerously unaware.
Lerman ends the book with a call not to reform the system, but to opt out of it entirely. Build parallel decentralised institutions. Stop playing political whack-a-mole. Get local. Get resilient. And most importantly, stop falling for fear.
Because the next "emergency" is already being written.
https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/the-deep-state-goes-viral-the-real
What if the pandemic response was run by national security agencies according to a biodefense/counterterrorism playbook, rather than by public health agencies according to public health guidelines?
This is the question at the core of a new book by friend and Brownstone Institute colleague
Debbie's contention is this: If it had been a regular public health response, Covid would not have differed that greatly from any of the viral epidemics or pandemics of the last century.
The public would have been told to remain calm, wash hands frequently, and stay home if sick. Public health agencies would have tracked clusters of severe disease and treated them accordingly. This would have happened at different times, in different locations. Most people would barely have been aware that there was a novel virus circulating among them.
Instead, the response to Covid was the exact opposite. The media and public health agencies whipped the population into levels of panic massively disproportionate to the threat actually posed by the virus. Everyone was convinced that the only way to "beat the virus" was to lock down the whole world and wait for a never-before-tested or manufactured vaccine.
Why?
As a former science writer with a knack for deep investigative thread-pulling, Debbie is well-placed to attempt an answer to this question, in her new book, The Deep State Goes Viral: Pandemic Planning and the Covid Coup.
While readers may have come across Debbie's articles before on her Substack or on the Brownstone Journal, the book ties everything together in a way that reading disparate articles across time (and platforms) cannot quite.
I had the privilege of working on this book in its final stages and, having read it from start to finish, can attest that this is recommended reading for anyone with an interest in the bigger, 'network level' picture. Debbie also deep dives into the weeds when required to demonstrate with forensic detail the degree to which the official Covid narrative simply does not add up.
Following is my interview with Debbie Lerman:
RB: Congratulations on finally publishing your book Debbie, and on hitting #1 in Amazon's Public Policy reads in the first week of the Kindle edition launch!
DL: Thanks Rebekah - your help was invaluable!
RB: What is the main thing you want people to know about the worldwide Covid event - and why does it matter?
To quote the COVID Dossier, which I published with independent researcher Sasha Latypova, COVID was not a public health event, although it was presented as such to the world's population. It was a global operation, coordinated through public-private intelligence and military alliances and invoking laws designed for CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) weapons attacks.
This is so crucial because it shifts the focus from the false narrative of public health to the real story: the underlying global powers whose networks of control were at least partially revealed during the Covid operation.
When we think about all the terrible totalitarian actions that were taken by nearly every government around the world during Covid, we need to realize that it was not a series of misguided or mistaken public health decisions. It was an intentional, coordinated global project run by a huge public-private partnership network.
Realizing this means that we cannot blame any individual (e.g. Fauci) or government or company for what happened. We have to address the much bigger and less easily solvable problem of how power and control are shifting away from national governments and into the hands of global cartels.
The implications are so disturbing that most people don't want to face them: Our national governments are not working on our behalf. They are working for the global cartels that are amassing more power and resources and working on ways to surveil, censor and propagandize us so we do not see or oppose what they are doing.
It's had to wrap one's mind around this, but I believe it is essential if we are to move toward any kind of solution: We have to stop focusing on the short-term political "fixes" in each of our countries (all political parties are just different sides of the same global technocratic control coin), opt out of the completely corrupted political systems, defend ourselves against control and surveillance operations (of which Covid was one), and build alternative systems on a local level that are based on real community and human values.
RB: Your book focuses mainly on the American experience and legislation, but you have also documented similar legal frameworks in other countries. What does your book tell us about how and why so many countries end up taking the same 'lockdown until vaccine' approach?
DL: In the book, I cover the Covid military/intelligence operations in the US and I touch on the equivalent systems in the UK, Holland and Germany. After the book manuscript went to the publisher, I worked extensively on the COVID Dossier, which documents parallel structures in charge of the Covid response in many countries around the world.
My book and subsequent work on the Dossier show that all countries in the Five Eyes and NATO military and intelligence alliances followed identical lockdown-until-vaccine response protocols, which indicates global coordination of these protocols.
RB: I learned so many nuggets that I'd never heard of before from reading your book. For example, that Dr Peter Dazsak - who has been debarred from HHS funding for his alleged role in facilitating gain of function research in Wuhan - served as a US representative on the WHO Covid origins investigation. Conflict of interest much? I can't believe he got away with that. What were some things you turned up in your research that really surprised you?
DL: First, I just want to clarify that Dazsak never actually got debarred from anything. In a May 16, 2024, Substack article entitled 'Peter Daszak Gets DOD and CIA Funding. Why Don't They Ask About That?' I went into great detail showing how everything the "US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability" said they were doing to "punish" Daszak for conducting dangerous gain-of-function research was pure theater.
Most of Daszak's funding – and funding for all gain-of-function research – comes from military/intelligence agencies, because it's all about bioweapons and countermeasures, and such research is not subject to any public health oversight or regulations. It's all part of the operations of the biodefense public-private partnership, as detailed above.
One of the lessons of Covid – and hopefully of my book – is that hundreds and thousands of scientists, biowarfare experts, military/intelligence operatives, pharma execs, consultants, academics and medical professionals from around the world populate all of the global biodefense companies and agencies, which means that apparent conflicts of interest are immaterial, because the global-public private partnerships are not subject to any national or Constitutional laws or oversight.
As far as surprises: When I first started my research on Covid, I was completely shocked to discover that Deborah Birx, the Coordinator for the US Government's Covid-19 Response Task Force, wrote a book called Silent Invasion that was pretty much outright lies from beginning to end. Several chapters in The Deep State Goes Viral document that discovery. They are based on articles first published by Brownstone.
Then I discovered that famous journalists and authors also wrote blatant propaganda about Covid. The one I researched most deeply was Michael Lewis, and his book The Premonition – which, like Birx's book, is full of obfuscations and falsehoods. I devoted a section of my book to that investigation and other discoveries I made about blatant propaganda in the New York Times and other major publications.
And, of course, I was completely floored when I discovered the government document that showed that the National Security Council was in charge of the U.S. government's Covid response policy, and when I subsequently found that FEMA/Department of Homeland Security had replaced the public health agencies as leaders of the response. That's what really got me going on all the research in the book.
RB: I see the hard copy of your book is being presented in the World History section on Amazon. Why are narratives so important to our understanding of history, and what do you see as the main competing narratives for our understanding of the pandemic era?
Great question! At first I was surprised to see that Brownstone chose to list the book under World History, but then I realized that it does document one of the most significant global events of the 21st century, if not of all time.
I know that sounds bombastic, but the coordination of the vast global Covid operation, which affected nearly every human being on Earth, was enabled through digital tools of surveillance, censorship, propaganda and control that were not available to earlier totalitarian leaders or societies.
If people want to understand the direction in which human society is headed, the Covid narrative is essential, because it reveals our evolution toward global technocratic totalitarianism.
The competing narrative is the product of the global propaganda and censorship industrial complex which does not want us to focus on its global totalitarian nature and is trying to distract, misdirect and bamboozle us into thinking that Covid was all just a bunch of bad public health decisions, and that we can fix it by voting for a different political party or publishing more studies about how masking doesn't work.
In the book, I summarized it this way: "One of the most ingenious aspects of the global Covid operation is that it was so brazen, so extreme, and so inconceivable – that it can actually hide behind its own implausibility."
RB: Once people learn that the Covid response was a military countermeasure, not a public health response, then what? What are you hoping people will do with the information they learn from your book?
DL: To be precise, the word "countermeasure" applies to the Covid vaccines and all other treatments used against the "deadly virus."
The Covid response was a globally coordinated coup by the biodefense cartel (as described above) against the populations of the world.
I'm hoping that when people realize this, they will understand that their governments are not acting on their behalf, but rather on behalf of the global corporations and billionaires that partnered with the military/intelligence agencies in nearly every country on earth to deprive all of us of our rights and liberties.
Our governments lied to us. They told us we had to wear masks, lock ourselves up for months and years on end, deprive our children of education and socialization, and suffer loss of jobs, loss of income, loss of health and loss of life to combat a virus that was known in early 2020 to be dangerous only to very old people with multiple ailments.
Then they bombarded us with propaganda to cover all that up and force everyone to take unregulated, dangerous injections.
If we do not want such totalitarian measures to be unleashed on us again, we need to stop falling for the political, partisan distractions that pit us against each other instead of against our oppressors. I know it's hard for people to hear this, but Covid should be a wake-up call in this sense: the important battle being waged in the world right now is not right vs. left, liberal vs. conservative, socialist vs. capitalist etc. etc. etc.
The only real battle is between the global elites and the rest of us.
We need to call our governments out on every lie, every act of censorship or propaganda, and every attempt to digitally surveil and control us, no matter which political party or politician is in charge.
RB: Do you anticipate we will see a repeat of the Covid response in our lifetime?
DL: I hope people will not agree to another Covid response. But I do anticipate other global events that will further consolidate the wealth, power and control of the global cartels. There might be a "climate crisis" or a "cyber terrorist attack" or a financial crisis. Or all of the above.
What I desperately hope people might take away from my book is that:
Emergencies allow those in power to foment panic, activate mechanisms of control, and vacuum more wealth and power out of the population and into their own hands. That's what we need to resist.
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