Tag: Lockdown

In Covid as in Climate Change: Truth Will Out

The Senate oversight hearing of Dr Anthony Fauci last week offered a rare and bracing spectacle: a man once hailed as the embodiment of scientific authority (“I am the science”) reduced to invoking the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times.

From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

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The Senate oversight hearing of Dr Anthony Fauci last week offered a rare and bracing spectacle: a man once hailed as the embodiment of scientific authority (“I am the science”) reduced to invoking the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times. The immediate catalyst was the release, days earlier by Republican Senator Rand Paul, of over a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Those entries, near-daily jottings of a public official at the height of his influence, contradict much of what he told the American people and Congress about masks, school closures, infection fatality rates and the origins of the virus itself. What had been presented as settled science now appears as a series of improvisations, self-promotions and strategic omissions.

Fauci’s private record versus public assurances

Consider the school closures that scarred a generation of children with learning losses estimated in years rather than months. In 2022 interviews Fauci insisted he had “nothing to do” with them. Yet a March 15th 2020 diary entry, emblazoned “BIG DAY!” in red ink, records how he “convinced” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools “based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight”. The same day he spoke with Ann O’Leary, chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom, Fauci noted, “decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants” on the strength of the doctor’s television appearances. Later entries show Fauci urging delays in school re-openings even as data revealed children faced minimal risk and schools were not major vectors of transmission. He privately criticised governors who sought to reopen, calling Florida governor Ron DeSantis “a jerk” and “a complete disgrace”.

The human cost — speech and language delays from prolonged masking, surging mental health crises among adolescents — was waved aside in the moment of technocratic exhilaration. Fauci’s public denials of responsibility cannot erase the contemporaneous record of his enormous influence. Similar discrepancies appear on masks and infection rates. Early public statements dismissed the utility of masks for the general population; private notes later assert that officials “probably were too strong in saying masks do not work”. Diary entries also suggest Fauci’s private estimates of Covid’s infection fatality rate were lower than the figures he emphasised in congressional testimony and media appearances that fuelled public panic.

On the virus’s origins, notes from January and February 2020 reveal him privately entertaining the possibility of a laboratory incident linked to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research his own agency had helped fund through intermediaries — while publicly dismissing such notions as conspiracy theories. When pressed at the hearing on these inconsistencies, Fauci chose silence. Truth, it seems, is a luxury one can afford only when the cameras are off and the diary is locked away.

Parallel reckonings in climate science

The Fauci affair finds a striking parallel in the legal unravelling of climate scientist Michael Mann’s suit against Mark Steyn last year which was covered in these pages (see here and here). Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ chart, which flattened a millennium of natural temperature variation into a dramatic 20th-century uptick, became the iconic image of catastrophic anthropogenic warming and a staple of IPCC summaries, school textbooks and political rhetoric. When journalist Mark Steyn and writer Rand Simberg criticised it as fraudulent in construction and deployment, Mann sued for defamation in the District of Columbia courts. A jury in 2024 awarded him $1 million in punitive damages against Steyn and a smaller sum against Simberg.

Yet subsequent rulings by Judge Alfred S. Irving Jr. turned the tables decisively. The judge found that Mann and his counsel had acted in “bad faith” by presenting the jury with a demonstrative exhibit claiming nearly $10 million in lost grant funding when the corrected figure, known to them during discovery, was $112,000. Judge Irving described the misconduct as “extraordinary in its scope, extent and intent”, reduced the punitive award against Steyn to a token $5,000, sanctioned Mann and ordered him to pay hundreds of thousands in defendants’ legal fees. The court effectively found Mann and his legal counsel untruthful in the conduct of his own case.

The cases of Michael Mann and Anthony Fauci are not mere personal comeuppances of hubristic figures. They illuminate a deeper pathology: the twin mass hysterias of COVID-19 and climate change, each cultivated by a constellation of bureaucratic, academic, philanthropic, media and corporate interests that derived moral authority and material benefit. In both domains, the vast majority of ordinary people — workers facing lost livelihoods and shuttered businesses, parents confronting closed schools and developmental setbacks for their children, developing-world populations denied reliable and affordable energy — bore the costs while a relatively small elite harvested prestige, research grants, consulting contracts, green subsidies and regulatory rents. The pattern is familiar from earlier episodes of ideologically driven planning, from Soviet Lysenkoism to the influential Club of Rome’s resource-exhaustion forecasts that never materialised.

Twin hysterias and the machinery of silencing

Public health orthodoxy before 2020 emphasised focused protection of the vulnerable and the preservation of societal functioning. The Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020, drafted by epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, simply restated that wisdom: shield the elderly and infirm with targeted measures, allow the young and healthy to live, work and build population immunity, and thereby minimise collateral damage. It was met with an orchestrated campaign of character assassination. NIH Director Francis Collins privately called for a “quick and devastating published take down”; Fauci circulated critical pieces and helped frame the authors as “fringe epidemiologists”. Social media platforms censored discussion; professional associations issued denunciations.

Yet Sweden’s lighter-touch approach, closer in spirit to the declaration, produced mortality outcomes comparable to or better than those of heavy-lockdown jurisdictions, without the educational catastrophe that left millions of children behind, the excess non-Covid deaths from delayed care or the economic scarring that continues to weigh on growth, public finances and social trust.

Climate policy has followed a comparable arc of exaggeration and institutional capture. For more than a decade the most extreme emissions pathway — RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 — served as the default ‘business-as-usual’ scenario in IPCC reports, alarmist media coverage, corporate risk disclosures and government planning documents. It assumed a world of surging coal consumption to levels several times current use, projecting warming far beyond any trajectory consistent with observed energy trends. The committee designing scenarios for the next IPCC assessment cycle recently retired the RCP8.5 and related high-end pathways as “implausible”. Roger Pielke Jr. and others had demonstrated the fantasy character of these pathways years earlier; the establishment’s belated correction is welcome, if long overdue.

That scenario underwrote claims of imminent ‘global boiling’ (a la the UN Secretary General António Guterres), justified Net Zero mandates that have accelerated deindustrialisation across Europe, raised energy costs for households and industry, and diverted trillions into intermittent renewables while reliable baseload capacity withered. Developing countries, for which cheap energy remains the ladder out of poverty, were lectured on restraint by nations that industrialised on fossil fuels.

The machinery of silencing dissent operates with equal efficiency in both spheres. Professor Norman Fenton, a mathematician of international standing whose expertise in Bayesian networks and risk analysis produced more than 400 peer-reviewed publications, discovered the limits of institutional tolerance when he applied rigorous statistical scrutiny first to IPCC confidence statements in a BBC documentary and later to Covid infection fatality rates, PCR testing protocols and vaccine risk-benefit calculations. Colleagues distanced themselves, papers were rejected without review, and an invitation to address an NHS Health and Care Analytics conference was withdrawn on the eve of the event because of his “controversial views” on vaccines and climate.

In December 2022 he was forced into early retirement from Queen Mary University of London amid student activism and administrative pressure. The tragic case of Prof Fenton’s cancellation was covered in the Daily Sceptic. It reads like a modern Galileo narrative: evidence subordinated to orthodoxy, career destroyed for the crime of asking inconvenient questions about both climate and Covid. Similar treatment was meted out to the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and to countless physicians and scientists who questioned the Covid lockdown and ‘climate emergency’ orthodoxies.

Truth will out: towards evidence and realism

Historical analogies are instructive. The Lysenkoist corruption of Soviet biology subordinated empirical genetics to political ideology with catastrophic consequences for agriculture. The Club of Rome’s ‘limits to growth’ forecasts of the 1970s predicted imminent collapse that never arrived. Successive panics over global cooling then catastrophic warming reveal the recurring temptation of elites to manufacture H. L. Mencken’s hobgoblins that justify the expansion of their own power and the constriction of others’ freedoms.

Covid models that predicted millions of deaths in the absence of lockdowns were falsified within months by actual data; climate models that have consistently run hotter than observed temperatures continue to shape multi-trillion-dollar policies long after their excesses are documented. In each case the institutional incentives — funding streams tied to alarm, career advancement for those who reinforce the narrative, moral signalling opportunities for the politically aligned — favour exaggeration over calibration.

Yet the tide may be turning. The Fauci diaries and the Mann sanctions are visible markers that truth will out. Governments that ruled by hysteria now confront its fiscal, educational, social and geopolitical bill: stagnant productivity in the West, educational deficits that will echo for decades, eroded public trust in science and institutions, and the relative rise of energy-abundant powers less encumbered by self-imposed green constraints.

A realist response begins with the primacy of cheap, reliable energy as the indispensable foundation of human welfare and economic development. It recognises that market signals, technological innovation and the dispersed knowledge of millions of individuals outperform central planning, whether the planners wear white coats or green ones. Classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek understood that complex systems cannot be managed by a cadre of experts claiming monopoly on truth; the same principle applies with equal force both to the pandemic response and to Net Zero policies.

The parallel between Covid and climate is not that both threats were illusory — viruses do kill, a changing climate can cause hardship, particularly for poor societies where adaptation is difficult — but that both were systematically inflated into existential emergencies requiring the suspension of democratic norms, economic rationality and open scientific debate. The interests that prospered from these ’emergencies’ will not surrender their narrative easily. But the evidentiary record, once sealed in private diaries or buried in courtroom exhibits, is now public. For the sake of prosperity, of children’s futures, of the developing world’s right to energy abundance, and of the integrity of science itself, the reckoning must continue. Truth, however delayed, has a way of asserting itself against even the most formidable constellations of power.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic ( https://dailysceptic.org/2026/08/05/in-covid-as-in-climate-change-truth-will-out/ )

‘Stay at home’ during cold snap, public told

This Arctic blast has also affected parts of Europe and North America, but the “stay at home” messaging in the UK has drawn comparisons to Covid-era advice in some outlets, though it’s primarily focused on safety during extreme weather rather than mandates.

A snowy residential road lined with frosted trees and houses, with visible footprints in the snow.

A severe cold snap has gripped the UK in early January 2026, prompting authorities and charities to urge the public to stay at home where possible to avoid risky outings on icy roads and paths.

This Arctic blast has also affected parts of Europe and North America, but the “stay at home” messaging in the UK has drawn comparisons to Covid-era advice in some outlets, though it’s primarily focused on safety during extreme weather rather than mandates.

The Met Office and other forecasters indicate the cold conditions may persist into mid-January in some areas, with ongoing yellow warnings for snow and ice. If you’re in the affected regions, standard advice includes keeping homes heated to at least 18°C, layering clothing, and limiting outdoor exposure.

A snowy street scene in the UK during a severe cold snap, with footprints in the snow, icy road conditions, and trees covered in frost.

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Snow causes hundreds of school closures and travel disruption with temperatures set to dip as low as -12C

Snow and ice warnings remain in place for Tuesday after snowfall caused travel disruption and hundreds of school closures across large parts of the country on Monday. The Telegraph has the story.

Yellow warnings for snow and ice are in place across all of Scotland and much of northern England, with further warnings covering the east of England and the west of Wales as well as Devon and Cornwall.

Ice warnings are also in place for all six counties of Northern Ireland, with warnings continuing through to Tuesday morning.

Temperatures could dip as low as -12C (10F) overnight, according to the Met Office, which said there was a chance that central and northern Scotland would be disrupted by snow until Tuesday evening.

Advice about how to stay safe in the cold ranged from suggestions to stay at home where possible and walking like a “penguin”.

Adam Stachura, the policy director at Age Scotland, urged people to stay at home where possible.

He said: “With such cold temperatures and icy conditions ahead, try and make sure you have enough food and any important medications at home to reduce the need for unnecessary and potentially risky trips.

“This is particularly important if you have mobility challenges or are unsteady on your feet.”

The NHS advised people to “waddle like a penguin” to avoid accidents and hospital stays.

“Walking like a penguin helps keep your centre of gravity over your feet, reducing the risk of falls that can lead to serious injuries,” NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said.

“It might look funny, but waddling really works,” Laura Halcrow, the falls prevention lead, added, warning that slipping on ice was dangerous especially for older people.

The NHS has previously suggested that the public “keep their feet on a stool” to stay warm, as well as reminding people to wear socks.

The lowest temperatures recorded overnight into Monday were -10.9C in Shap, Cumbria, -10.3C in Sennybridge, Powys, and -9.9C in Bala, Gwynedd, according to the Met Office.

Loch Glascarnoch in the Scottish Highlands saw 34cm of snow, while Dyce in Aberdeenshire and Altnaharra, Sutherland, recorded 27cm, the Met Office said.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has issued an amber cold health alert that runs until Friday, with an early warning that adverse temperatures were likely to affect health and wellbeing in England.

Agostinho Sousa, the head of extreme events and health protection at UKHSA, urged people to check in on vulnerable friends, family and neighbours.

He said: “The forecast temperatures can have a serious impact on the health of some people, leading to increased risk of heart attacks, strokes and chest infections, particularly for individuals over the age of 65 and those with pre-existing health conditions.”

Temperatures are expected to drop to as low as -5C in Scotland and -4C for large parts of the south on Monday night, with the mercury dropping to -5C in Yeovil.

Heading into the week, temperatures are set to improve, remaining above 0C by Wednesday night in most of England and a milder -2C for most of Scotland, apart from in some isolated locations like Lairg which are set to drop to -6C.

The Met Office said that Monday night would be “very cold with a widespread frost and icy stretches”. The south of the country was expected to stay dry and clear but become “cloudier in the north as a band of snow moves in”.

Its website said Tuesday would be “another cold day with a mixture of rain, sleet and snow across the north”. It was expected to be drier in the south before similar conditions arrived in the evening.

Temperatures are expected to fall to -7C around Oxford on Tuesday and will not rise above 4C in any part of Britain.

Read the full story here.

The Great Reset Didn’t Work: The Case of EVs

We are living through one of history’s longest and most excruciating versions of “We told you so”. When in March 2020, the world’s governments decided to “shut down” the world’s economies and throttle any and all social activity, and deny kids schooling plus cancel worship services and holidays, there was no end to the warnings of the terrible collateral damage, even if most of them were censored. 

From The Daily Sceptic

By JEFFREY A. TUCKER

We are living through one of history’s longest and most excruciating versions of “We told you so”. When in March 2020, the world’s governments decided to “shut down” the world’s economies and throttle any and all social activity, and deny kids schooling plus cancel worship services and holidays, there was no end to the warnings of the terrible collateral damage, even if most of them were censored. 

Every bit of the warnings proved true. You see it in every story in the news. It’s behind every headline. It’s in countless family tragedies. It’s in the loss of trust. It’s in the upheaval in industry and demographics. The fingerprints of lockdowns are deeply embedded in every aspect of our lives, in ways obvious and not so much. 

Actually, the results have been even worse than critics predicted, simply because the chaos lasted such a long time. There are seemingly endless iterations of this theme. Learning losses, infrastructure breakages, rampant criminality, vast debt, inflation, lost work ethic, a growing commercial real estate bust, real income losses, political extremism, labour shortages, substance addiction, and more much besides, all trace to the fateful decision. 

The headlines on seemingly unrelated matters go back to the same, in circuitous ways. A good example is the news of the electric vehicle bust. The confusion, disorientation, malinvestment, overproduction and retrenchment – along with the crazed ambition to force convert a country and world away from oil and gas towards wind and solar – all trace to those fateful days. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, “As recently as a year ago, automakers were struggling to meet the hot demand for electric vehicles. In a span of months, though, the dynamic flipped, leaving them hitting the brakes on what for many had been an all-out push toward an electric transformation.” 

Reading the story, it’s clear that the reporter is downplaying the sheer scale of the boom-bust.

That’s not to say that Tesla itself is going bust, only that it has a defined market segment. The technology of EVs simply cannot and will not become the major way Americans drive. It might have seemed otherwise for a moment in time but that was due to factors that traced exactly to pent up demand caused by lockdowns and huge errors in supply management due to bad signalling. 

Looking back, the lockdowns hit in the spring of 2020 and supply chains were entirely frozen by force. This might have been a major problem for car manufacturers that had long relied on just-in-time inventory strategies. However, at the very time, the demand for travel collapsed. Commutes came to an end, and vacations too. At that same time, pre-arranged Government subsidies and mandates for EVs flooded the industry, all of which were later ramped up by the Biden administration. 

As demand picked up, retailers sold their old inventory of cars and looked to manufacturers for more but the chips needed to complete the cars were not available. Many cars were put on hold and lots emptied out. This continued through the following year as used car prices soared and stock was otherwise depleted.

By the time matters became desperate in the fall of 2021, manufacturers discerned a heightened demand for EVs and began to retool their factories for more. There was even a time when cars were being shipped without power steering, just to meet the demand. 

It might have seemed for a time like the crazed period we just lived through was birthing a completely different way of life. A kind of irrationality, born of shock and awe, swept industry and culture. The EV was central to it.

This demand seemed to pan out in 2022 as Americans grabbed whatever cars were available, perhaps willing to give the new doohickies a shot. So on it went as more carmakers threw more resources at production, benefitting from massive subsidies and staying in compliance with new mandates for reducing their carbon footprint. 

There was no particular reason to think anything would go wrong. But then the next year began to reveal uncomfortable truths. Cold weather dramatically cuts the range of the EVs. Charging stations are not as readily available on longer trips, charging takes longer than one expects, and having to plan such matters adds time. In addition, the repair bills can be extremely high if you can find someone to do it.

Tesla as a manufacturer had planned out all such contingencies but other carmakers less so. Very quickly the EVs gained a bad reputation on a number of different fronts. 

“Last summer, dealers began warning of unsold electric vehicles clogging their lots. Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen and others shifted from frenetic spending on EVs to delaying or downsizing some projects,” writes the Journal. “Dealers who had been begging automakers to ship more EVs faster are now turning them down.”

In short, “the massive miscalculation has left the industry in a bind, facing a potential glut of EVs and half-empty factories while still having to meet stricter environmental regulations globally.”

Today, lots are selling the cars at a loss just to avoid the costs of keeping them around. 

Truly, this has been one spectacular boom-bust in a single industry. There seems to be no real end to the bust either. These days it appears that everyone has given up on any chance of actually converting the mass of American cars to become EVs. All recent trends are headed in the other direction. 

Meanwhile, the EV is deeply loved by many as a second car for well-to-do suburban commuters who own homes, can charge overnight and have a petrol or diesel car as a backup for cold weather and out-of-town trips. That is to say, the market is becoming exactly what it should be – a street-worthy golf cart with very fancy features – and not some paradigmatic case for the ‘Great Reset’. That’s simply not happening, despite all the subsidies and tax breaks.

“A confluence of factors had led many auto executives to see the potential for a dramatic societal shift to electric cars,” writes the Journal, including “Government regulations, corporate climate goals, the rise of Chinese EV makers and Tesla’s stock valuation, which, at roughly $600 billion, still towers over the legacy car companies. But the push overlooked an important constituency: the consumer.”

Indeed, the American economy, much to the chagrin of many, still primarily relies on consumers to make choices in their best interest. When that doesn’t happen, no amount of subsidies can make up the difference.

This story is impossible to understand without reference to the crazed illusions caused by lockdowns. Those are what provided the respite of time to allow automakers to retool. Then they boosted demand artificially for transportation after a long period in which inventory had been depleted. 

Then the whole ridiculous ethos of the ‘Great Reset’ convinced idiotic corporate executives that nothing would ever be the same. Maybe we would get 15-minute cities powered by sunbeams and breezes after all, along with a social-credit system that would allow the authorities to decommission our ability to drive in an instant. 

It turns out that the entire bit, including the fake prosperity of the lockdown economy, made possible by money-printing and grotesque levels of Government spending, was unsustainable. Even sophisticated car companies bought into the nonsense. Now they are paying a very heavy price. The new market depended on a panic of buying that turned out to be temporary. 

In short, the illusions of these horrible policies have come crashing down. It was born of liberty-wrecking policies under the cover of virus control. Every special interest seized the day, including a new generation of industrialists seeking to displace the old ones by force. 

More and more, it’s obvious what a disaster this was. And yet no one has apologised. Hardly anyone has admitted error. The big shots who wrecked the world are still in power. 

The rest of us are left holding the bag, and paying very high repair bills for cars that are non-optimal for driving from one town to another and back again in the cold weather that was supposed to be gone by now had the ‘climate change’ prophets been correct. They turn out to be as correct as those who promised us that we would no longer need ‘fossil fuels’ and that the magic inoculation would protect everyone from a killer virus.

What astonishing illusions were born of this nutty and destructive period. At some point, not even corporate CEOs will be tricked by the experts.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.

UN Set to Agree New Political Declaration on Pandemics Next Week – and it’s a Horror Show

In four days’ time, on Wednesday September 20th, our representatives meeting at the United Nations will sign off on a ‘Declaration’ titled: ‘Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.’

From The Daily Sceptic

BY DR DAVID BELL

In four days’ time, on Wednesday September 20th, our representatives meeting at the United Nations will sign off on a ‘Declaration’ titled: ‘Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.’

Final-text-for-silence-procedure-PPPR-Political-DeclarationHerunterladen

This was announced as a “silent procedure”, meaning that States not responding will be deemed supporters of the text. The document expresses a new policy pathway for managing populations when the World Health Organisation (WHO), the health arm of the UN, declares a future viral variant to be a “public health emergency of international concern”. The WHO noted in 2019 that pandemics are rare and insignificant in terms of overall mortality over the last century. Since then, it decided that the 2019 old-normal population was simply oblivious to impending annihilation. The WHO and the entire UN system now consider pandemics an existential and imminent threat. This matters, because:

  1. They are asking for far more money than is spent on any other international health program (your money);
  2. This will deliver great wealth to some people who now work closely with WHO and the UN;
  3. The powers being sought from your Government will reimpose the very responses that have just caused the largest growth in poverty and disease in our lifetimes; and
  4. Logically, pandemics will only become more frequent if someone intends to make them so (so we should wonder what is going on).

Staff who drafted this Declaration did so because it is their job. They were paid to write a text that is clearly contradictory, sometimes fallacious, and often quite meaningless. They are part of a rapidly growing industry, and the Declaration is intended to justify this growth and the centralisation of power that goes with it. The document will almost certainly be agreed by our Governments because, frankly, this is where the momentum and money are.

Whilst the Declaration’s 13 pages are all over the place in terms of reality and farce, they are not atypical of recent UN output. People are trained to use trigger words, slogans and propaganda themes (e.g., “equity”, “empowerment of all women and girls”, “access to education”, “technology transfer hubs”) that no one could oppose without risking being labelled a denier, far-Right or colonialist.

The Declaration should be read in the context of what these institutions and their staff have just done. It is difficult to summarise such a compendium of right-speak intended to veil reality, but it is hoped this short summary will prompt some thought. Wickedness is not a mistake but an intended deception, so we need to distinguish these clearly.  

Fomenting darkness behind a veil of light

Put together, the following two extracts summarise the internal contradiction of the Declaration’s agenda and its staggering shamelessness and lack of empathy:

In this regard, we:

PP3: Recognise also the need to tackle health inequities and inequalities, within and among countries…

PP5: Recognise that the illness, death, socio-economic disruption and devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic…

‘Recognition’ of devastation is important. SARS-CoV-2 was associated with mortality predominantly within wealthy countries, where median age of Covid-associated death was between 75 and 85 years. Nearly all of these people had significant co-morbidities such as obesity and diabetes, meaning their life-expectancy was already restricted. Most people contributing significantly to economic activity were at very low risk, a profile know in early 2020. 

These three years of socio-economic devastation must, therefore, be overwhelmingly due to the response. The virus did not starve people, as the Declaration’s writers would like us to believe. Deteriorating disease control was predicted by WHO and others in early 2020, increasing malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malnutrition. Economic disruption in low-income countries specifically results in more infant and child deaths.

In Western countries, adult mortality has risen as expected when screening for cancer and heart disease are reduced and poverty and stress increase. Knowing this, WHO advised in late 2019 to ”not under any circumstances” impose lockdown-like measures for pandemic influenza. In early 2020, under the influence of its sponsors, it advocated them for COVID-19. The Declaration, however, carries no note of contrition or repentance.

Undeterred by incongruity, the Declaration goes on to describe COVID-19 as “one of the greatest challenges” in UN history (PP6), noting that somehow this outbreak resulted in “exacerbation of poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty”. In fact, it acknowledges that this caused:

(a) negative impact on equity, human and economic development across all spheres of society, as well as on global humanitarian needs, gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, the enjoyment of human rights, livelihoods, food security and nutrition, education, its disruption to economies, supply chains, trade, societies and the environment, within and among countries, which is reversing hard-won development gains and hampering progress (PP6)

To restate the obvious, this does not happen due to a virus targeting sick elderly people. It occurs when children and productive adults are barred from school, work, healthcare and participation in markets for goods and services. Economic, social and health catastrophe inevitably results, disproportionately harming poorer people and low-income countries, conveniently far indeed from the halls of Geneva and New York.

No, we were not all in this together.

Not all were negatively impacted by this catastrophe. People and corporations who sponsor much of the WHO’s health emergency work, and that of its sister organisations such as CEPI, Gavi and Unitaid, did very well from the policies they advocated so strongly. Software and Pharma companies made unprecedently high profits while this mass impoverishment played out. The international agencies have also gained; construction and recruitment are strong in Geneva. Philanthro-capitalism is good for some.

The main aim of the Declaration is to back the proposed WHO International Health Regulation (IHR) amendments and treaty (PP26), key to ensuring that viral outbreaks that have such small impact can remain highly profitable. An additional $10 billion dollars per year in new financing is requested to support this (PP29). There is a reason why most countries have laws against scams. The UN and its agencies, fortunately for its staff, are outside of any national jurisdiction.

Based on their sponsors’ assessments, the staff of these agencies are doing their job well. For the rest of humanity, their work is an unmitigated disaster. In 2019 they said never lock down, then spent 2020 defending top-down lockdowns and mandates. For three years, they theatrically pretended that decades of knowledge on immunity, disease burden and the association of poverty with mortality did not exist. Now they write this UN Declaration to fund their industry further through taxpayers they so recently impoverished. Once tasked to serve the world’s vast populations, particularly the poor and vulnerable, the UN vision has been consumed by public private partnerships, the allure of Davos and a fascination with high-net-worth individuals.

When words are used to obscure actions

While the Declaration underlines the importance of educating children during pandemics (PP23), these same organisations backed school closures for hundreds of millions of children at minimal risk from COVID-19. Among them, several million more girls are now being farmed off to nightly rape as child brides, others in child labour. Women and girls were disproportionately removed from education and from employment. They weren’t asked if they supported these policies!

The girls are being raped because the people paid to implement these policies did so. They know the contradiction, and the harm. But this is a job like many others. The only unusual aspects, from a business standpoint, are the sheer amorality and lack of empathy that must be engaged to excel in it.

To justify wrecking African children’s lives, the UN claims out that the continent has “over 100 major public health emergencies annually” (OP4). Africa has a rising burden of endemic diseases that dwarf mortality from such outbreaks – over half a million children die every year from malaria (increased through the COVID-19 lockdowns) and similar burdens from tuberculosis and HIV. By contrast, total COVID-19 deaths recorded in Africa over the past three years are just 256,000. The 2015 West African Ebola outbreak, the largest such recent emergency pre-Covid, killed 11,300 people. MERS and SARS1 killed less than 1,000 each globally. However, induced poverty does cause famine, raises child mortality and wrecks health systems – is this the health emergency that the UN is referring to? Or is it simply making things up?

Through the IHR amendments, these agencies will coordinate the locking down, border closures, mandated medical examinations and vaccination of you and your family. Their Pharma sponsors reasonably expect to make several hundred billion more dollars from these actions, so we can be confident that emergencies will be declared. By claiming 100 such events annually in Africa alone, they are signalling how these new powers will be used. We are to believe the world is such that only the abandonment of our rights and sovereignty, for the enrichment of others, can save us.

The UN and WHO do recognise that some will question this illogic. In PP35, they characterise such scepticism as “health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatisation”.

The WHO recently publicly characterised people who discuss adverse effects of Covid vaccines and question WHO policies as “far-Right”, “anti-science aggressors” and “a killing force”.

https://x.com/WHO/status/1602991915808456705?s=20

This is unhinged. It is the denigration and hate speech that fascist regimes use. The reader must decide whether such an organisation should control his or her freedom of expression and decide what constitutes truth.

It is not helpful here to give details of all 13 pages of right-speak, contradiction and fallacy. You will find similar rhetoric in other UN and WHO documents, particularly on pandemic preparedness. Straight-talk is contrary to business requirements. However, the first paragraph in the Declaration’s ‘Call to Action’ sets the tone:

We therefore commit to scale up our efforts to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response and further implement the following actions and express our strong resolve to:  

OP1. Strengthen regional and international cooperation, multilateralism, global solidarity, coordination and governance at the highest political levels and across all relevant sectors, with the determination to overcome inequities and ensure the sustainable, affordable, fair, equitable, effective, efficient and timely access to medical countermeasures including vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics and other health products to ensure high-level attention through a multisectoral approach to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics and other health emergencies, particularly in developing countries;

There are 48 more. You paid taxes so that someone could write that!

Those millions of girls suffering at night, the hundreds of millions of children who had their futures stolen, the mothers of those malaria-killed children, and all suffering under the increasing burden of poverty and inequality unleashed by this farce are watching. The Declaration, like the IHR amendments and pandemic treaty it supports, await the signatures of the Governments that purport to represent us.

Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.

Fauci declares lockdowns were ‘absolutely justified’ & suggests they should be used again to force vaccinations – Also claims ‘climate change’ is ‘playing a role’ in causing virus outbreaks

Fauci claims ‘climate change’ is ‘playing a role’ in causing virus outbreaks – Urges more climate treaties!

From ClimateDepot

By Marc Morano

Fauci claims ‘climate change’ is ‘playing a role’ in causing virus outbreaks – Urges more climate treaties!

“Lockdown has a purpose,” Fauci continued. “One of the purposes, if you don’t have a vaccine, it’s to get more ventilators, get the hospitals better prepared … until you decompress the pressure on the hospitals.” … “If you have a vaccine available, you might want to lock down temporarily so you can get everybody vaccinated,” Fauci suggested

Fauci calls for an “international commitment to decrease the carbon imprint in society so you don’t have the kinds of crazy weather we’re having in this country.” …

Fauci on climate: “The climate change countering has to come from an international commitment to decrease the carbon imprint in society — so you do not have the kinds of crazy weather that we are having in this country. If you look at it, everything from the fire, the tragic fire in Hawaii, to Texas, which had something like 75 days in a row, over 95 . It is completely amazing, what is happening with climate change.”

Fauci went on to blame the tragedy in Maui on climate change. “It’s completely, really amazing what’s happened with climate change,” he concludes.

2022: Fauci merges COVID & Climate: Infectious diseases ‘largely the result’ of human ‘encroachment on nature’ & ‘often aided by climate changes’ – Published in New England Journal of Medicine

Flashback 2020: Anthony Fauci: COVID-19 is due to ‘extreme backlashes from nature’ – ‘Will require changes in human behavior’ & ‘Other radical changes’ – ‘Rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence’

By JORDAN SCHACHTEL

Recently retired government bureaucrat Anthony Fauci just appeared at a university virtual event titled, “Pandemic Lessons and Role of Faculty in Pandemic Preparedness with Dr. Anthony Fauci.” During the conversation, Fauci, who is now affiliated with Georgetown University, made it clear that he still supports locking down society in the name of a virus, adding that lockdowns are a great tool to forcibly “vaccinate” people.

I’ll save you 40 minutes of your life and quote some of the “highlights” from the interview, in which a Wayne State University professor asks Fauci about what he’s learned from his time overseeing a “pandemic response.” The video of the chat is available via YouTube below:

Fauci falsely claimed that New York City was overrun and had “cooler trucks outside because they had no places to put the bodies.”

“You had to have something to immediately shut down the tsunami of infection,” he states, adding, “that lockdown was absolutely justified.”

“Lockdown has a purpose,” the pseudoscientist continued. “One of the purposes, if you don’t have a vaccine, it’s to get more ventilators, get the hospitals better prepared … until you decompress the pressure on the hospitals.

Fauci wasn’t done yet. Here comes the truly evil insanity…

“If you have a vaccine available, you might want to lock down temporarily so you can get everybody vaccinated,” he suggests.

Rejecting the idea that lockdowns are a moral question, he added that “lockdowns have a place, but they are not a permanent solution.”

The conversation continued, with the longtime NIAID chief declaring that “climate change” is “playing a role” in causing outbreaks.

He then calls for an “international commitment to decrease the carbon imprint in society so you don’t have the kinds of crazy weather we’re having in this country.”

Yes, that’s a real quote.

He went on to blame the tragedy in Maui on climate change. “It’s completely, really amazing what’s happened with climate change,” he concludes.

2022: Fauci merges COVID & Climate: Infectious diseases ‘largely the result’ of human ‘encroachment on nature’ & ‘often aided by climate changes’ – Published in New England Journal of Medicine

Flashback 2020: Anthony Fauci: COVID-19 is due to ‘extreme backlashes from nature’ – ‘Will require changes in human behavior’ & ‘Other radical changes’ – ‘Rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence’

If Biden declares a ‘Climate Emergency,’ he would seize 130 new powers – Seeks repeat of COVID-style lockdowns with bypassing of democracy – Morano Responds

The Biden administration believes that when democracy fails to achieve its climate goals, it’s time to bypass democracy and Congress and follow the COVID model.

Biden – Aug 9, 2023: I’ve Declared a Climate Emergency ‘Practically Speaking’

What it would mean for Biden to declare a national ‘climate emergency’ – ‘Triggers ability for him to deploy around 130 different powers’

Dem Sen Majority Leader Schumer urges Biden ‘to call a climate emergency’ – ‘He can do many, many things under the emergency powers…without legislation’

‘Listen to science’: Activist Bill McKibben echoes calls for Biden to declare a ‘Climate Emergency’

NASA Scientist Peter Kalmus: ‘Biden must declare a climate emergency’

#

Climate Depot’s Morano: “The Biden administration believes that when democracy fails to achieve its climate goals, it’s time to bypass democracy and Congress and follow the COVID model. Climate activists have lusted after the COVID lockdowns as the model for climate lockdowns. The plan is to declare a ‘climate emergency,’ toss out elected representatives and follow China’s one-party rule model by implementing energy restrictions through the bureaucracy. They don’t need no stinkin’ democracy. Throughout history, emergency declarations have been used and abused to crush freedom. For those who loved how unelected officials ruled our lives under COVID lockdowns, prepare for the attempts to make climate lockdowns permanent. For an idea of what the world would look like under a climate lockdown.” See: 2021 International Energy Agency’s ‘Net-Zero’ report urges ‘behavioral changes’ to fight climate: ‘A shift away from private car use…. upper speed limits’ & thermostat controls; limits on hot water & more!

2022 Intl Energy Agency report urges ENERGY LOCKDOWNS: ‘Banning use of private cars on Sundays…Reducing highway speed limits…more working from home…cutting business air travel’ & SUV ‘tax’

Flashback: Morano on Biden’s coming ‘climate emergency’: ‘Seeking exact same powers they had under COVID…to bypass democracy,…to tell the Supreme Court to stuff it’

By: Marc Morano – Climate Depot

Biden: I’ve Declared a Climate Emergency ‘Practically Speaking’

CNN: ‘Biden incorrectly claims he has declared a national emergency on climate’– CNN: While Biden has taken a series of significant legislative and executive steps to combat climate change, he has stopped short of declaring a national emergency, which would unlock sweeping new federal authorities and funds to combat the climate crisis. Climate activists have called on Biden since the earliest days of his presidency to declare a national emergency. … The president seemed close to declaring a climate emergency in the summer of 2022 after it appeared Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, had tanked the Inflation Reduction Act – Biden’s signature climate and health care bill. In a July 20, 2022, speech in Massachusetts, Biden strongly hinted that he could declare an emergency.

Politico: Biden says he has ‘practically’ declared a climate emergency. But he actually hasn’t…YET – ‘Would give him a host of new powers to combat climate change’– “We’ve already done that,” Biden said Wednesday when asked whether he was prepared to declare a national climate emergency during an interview on The Weather Channel. “We’ve conserved more land, we’ve moved into rejoining the Paris Climate Accord. We’ve got a $60 billion climate control facility.” When pressed about whether he has actually declared an emergency, Biden responded, “Practically speaking, yes.”

However, no such declaration has come from the White House. Experts say Biden could invoke the 1976 National Emergencies Act to give himself the power to order the manufacture of clean energy technology, deploy renewables on military bases, block crude oil exports or even suspend offshore drilling — though that would require compensation to the owners. Though the law limits emergency declarations to one year, it could be renewed annually to address the increasingly troubling impacts of climate change.

Flashback: Morano on Biden’s coming ‘climate emergency’: ‘Seeking exact same powers they had under COVID…to bypass democracy,…to tell the Supreme Court to stuff it’

What it would mean for Biden to declare a national ‘climate emergency’ – ‘Triggers ability for him to deploy around 130 different powers’– U.S. presidents have declared 60 national emergencies since 1976, according to the think tank Demos. Historically, those have typically been for acute crises, such as specific natural disasters, rather than a long-term predicament like climate change. …

“If he declares a national emergency, it triggers the ability for him to deploy around 130 different powers,” Jean Su, energy justice program director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said.

Biden could stop “the export of crude oil…phase out all exports and imports of fossil fuels entirely…stop issuing permits for offshore oil and gas wells under already existing leases and halt all drilling immediately…marshaling funding under the DPA to deploy clean energy — for example, rooftop solar installations on low-income housing.”

‘Listen to science’: Activist Bill McKibben echoes calls for Biden to declare a ‘Climate Emergency’

Dumpster Diving NASA Scientist Peter Kalmus: ‘Biden must declare a climate emergency’ – Admits he has ‘bottomless grief’ because ‘we are losing Earth’ & seeks to ‘end’ fossil fuels

What a ‘Climate Emergency’ declaration means for oil & gas production in the U.S.

Fed Reserve Board of Gov. Christopher Waller Drops Bombshell: ‘I believe risks posed by climate change are not sufficiently unique or material to merit special treatment’

You were warned! Climate Lockdowns looming – Wash Post: Biden set to issue ‘climate emergency’ declaration – ‘Unchains the president’ from Congress

Update July 19, 2022: AP source: Biden holds off on climate emergency declaration – Biden “will stop short of issuing an emergency declaration that would unlock federal resources to deal with the issue, according to a person familiar with the president’s plans.”

Flashback: ‘Climate lockdowns’ touted by Gates & Soros funded professors, Govts, media, & academia

Watch: Morano’s full 25 min speech on Climate Lockdowns at Heartland Skeptic Conference in Las Vegas – October 2021

Watch: COVID lockdowns morphing into climate lockdowns – Morano on Tucker Carlson  in 2021

Watch: Morano on Tucker Carlson: We Will Go From COVID Lockdowns To ‘Climate Lockdowns’ Under Biden in 2020

Watch: Morano on Tucker Carlson: Ukraine war, ’emergency declarations’ & crises are being used to bypass democracy to implement Green New Deal

Climate Depot’s Morano July 19, 2022 comments on reports Biden is set to declare a national “climate emergency”: “The Biden administration believes that when democracy fails to achieve its climate goals, it’s time to bypass democracy and Congress and follow the COVID model. Climate activists have lusted after the COVID lockdowns as the model for climate lockdowns. The plan is to declare a ‘climate emergency,’ toss out elected representatives and follow China’s one-party rule model by implementing energy restrictions through the bureaucracy. They don’t need no stinkin’ democracy. Throughout history, emergency declarations have been used and abused to crush freedom. For those who loved how unelected officials ruled our lives under COVID lockdowns, prepare for the attempts to make climate lockdowns permanent. For an idea of what the world would look like under a climate lockdown.” See:

 2021 International Energy Agency’s ‘Net-Zero’ report urges ‘behavioral changes’ to fight climate: ‘A shift away from private car use…. upper speed limits’ & thermostat controls; limits on hot water & more!

2022 Intl Energy Agency report urges ENERGY LOCKDOWNS: ‘Banning use of private cars on Sundays…Reducing highway speed limits…more working from home…cutting business air travel’ & SUV ‘tax’

Wash Post complicit in climate protests!? ‘Staff reporters were initially subjected to a potential arrest’ due to advance alert of crime at Fed art gallery – Fmr NYT reporter suggests WaPo guilty of ‘crimes’

Climate protesters descend on DC to urge ‘Climate Emergency’ declaration – Block roads & vandalize sculpture at National Gallery of Art

Health Canada report: ‘Core values’ like ‘liberty & individualism’ have ‘to be rethought’ to fight climate change – ‘It advances the individual over the collective’

MARK E. JEFTOVIC: Health Canada demands collectivism and an end to capitalism to fight climate change: excerpts from “Perspectives on Climate Change and Public Health in Canada” – 

Shellenberger: We are NOT in a ‘climate emergency’ — We are in ‘a psychiatric emergency’ caused by ‘climate misinformation that is…exacerbating anxiety disorders & exhibitionist narcissism’

How Nonsense Masquerades As Science: Climate ‘Code Red’ Example

‘World Scientists’ Issue A ‘Warning of a Climate Emergency’

Statistician William Matt Briggs responds: “Emergency, as a word, has no place in scientific discourse. And neither does code red, a term used in the article’s opening sentences…But this paper will be taken as science, especially by those rulers who have ‘solutions’ to sell.”

‘Climate Emergency’ Not Supported by Data, Say Four Leading Italian Scientists

Watch: Morano on Newsmax TV on pending ‘climate emergency’ declaration: ‘Biden will have literally 130 new executive powers’ & ‘This is a COVID-like power grab for the climate’

Get Ready For The 100 Year Long Climate ‘Emergency’ – Declaring climate ’emergency’ is ‘a huge insult to the intelligence of the American people’

Lock us down again — to save the climate! ABC News: ‘Climate change targets achievable by keeping global emissions to COVID levels, scientists say’

COVID lockdowns were “a great demonstration that it is possible to reduce our emissions…We need a planned transition across society to implement the changes that are needed…we would need to see this type of reduction in emissions compounded each consecutive year as we drive towards net zero.”

Were the Lockdowners and Vaccinators Really Just Trying to Save Lives?

In this sense, then, Hadas’s thesis seems undeniable: the millions who signed on to lockdowns and demanded their governments force-vaccinate their peers were not just wrong in a direct, empirical sense – that is, for believing that lockdowns and vaccines would improve health in any way. They were also much more profoundly wrong in a moral sense.

From The Daily Sceptic

By EUGYPPIUS

Daniel Hadas, whose sensitive and measured commentary on the pandemic I’ve long valued, recently offered these remarks on lockdowns and mass vaccination on Twitter:

It needs to be understood that the true motivation of the lockdown and forced vaccination Covid response really was Saving Lives.

Saving Lives wasn’t a smokescreen for some other hidden plan.

Of course, there was opportunism: there were those who used the state of emergency to claw power, money, fame to themselves. There were both supporters and opponents of the Covid measures who did that.

Where [there] is opportunity, there will be opportunists.

But mere opportunism is not enough to drive forward the leaders and followers in a revolution on the scale of the Covid response.

That requires faith, and the faith that drove this revolution was the faith in Saving Lives.

To deny the authenticity of the project to Save Lives is to remain perilously ready to sign up to all current and future projects to remake society and morality in the name of Life-Saving.

nd it is to remain blind to the fact that Saving Lives has come to mean hacking away at the limits of what can be done to men, women and children in the name of saving their lives and those of others.

This thesis angered many people, at least some of whom misconstrue what Hadas is arguing. The point is not that a genuine commitment to ‘Saving Lives’ might excuse the response or make it better. Rather, a commitment to Life-Saving public health interventions is in Hadas’s view the ominous root of the problem, because Life Saving is in fact a shallow goal that sounds good enough to rationalise all manner of harmful, destructive policies. Almost anything can be justified – any amount of collateral damage accepted – if it is for Saving Lives, and this is why all of us should cultivate a distrust of self-appointed Life Savers everywhere we encounter them.

In this sense, then, Hadas’s thesis seems undeniable: the millions who signed on to lockdowns and demanded their governments force-vaccinate their peers were not just wrong in a direct, empirical sense – that is, for believing that lockdowns and vaccines would improve health in any way. They were also much more profoundly wrong in a moral sense. Even if lockdowns and vaccines had the potential to stop the virus, nobody deserves house arrest or forced medical treatment for the crime of being a potential vector of infection. Placing Life Saving ahead of all other outcomes is very dangerous and also very stupid, for the simple reason that we are all going to die. As a justification, it functions as a mere pretence to ignore the very real trade-offs that lurk in any alleged solution to anything. Explaining how it could be a good idea to delay the deaths of some elderly and sick people at the cost of the well-being, physical health and autonomy of billions is very hard. Pleading that ‘we need to save lives’ is easy.

That said, I find the thesis less than complete. The public health establishment and its media collaborators carefully manufactured public support for their response by sowing far and wide the belief that it was necessary to Save Lives. Had we acted otherwise – say, by staying open and not doing very much – this, too, would have been marketed as the Best Way to Save Lives, and many millions would have believed it just as sincerely as they believed in lockdowns. To this comes the fact that Life-Saving in one form or another is proffered as justification for a wide range of modern political pathologies, from mass migration schemes to climate change. Especially in ageing European countries like Germany, where an ever-growing number of pensioners and their health anxiety dominate national discourse, there are few better ways to sell noxious political programmes to the masses. Without our naïve Life-Saving ethos, it’s not clear to me we wouldn’t have had lockdowns, though they would have required a much different kind of argument.

The extent to which states can be said to act upon clear motives at all is a further problem. A longstanding Plague Chronicle argument is that modern managerial government doesn’t have goals, motivations or purposes in any human sense. Our countries everyday do all kinds of truly insane things behind paper-thin justifications that bear no scrutiny. A lot of what is maligned as ‘conspiratorial’ discourse, on both the Left and the Right, represents an effort to reimpose logic on state actions, generally by positing that the stated goals are a pretence for some deeper, hidden purpose. Most of the time these analyses just aren’t convincing, and they function to obscure the blunt reality that we find ourselves beset by an incomprehensible post-liberal political order, in which state actions have been farmed out to a vastly complex network of stakeholders, NGOs, academics, bureaucrats and special advisory committees. For every area of policy the constellation of forces will be different, and nobody has any clear understanding of how the system works – not even the most powerful individuals in the midst of it all. Everything the state does is the sum of these thousands of different forces. What complicates this picture even further, is the fact that those responsible for policy formulation don’t act directly to shape outcomes in the outside world. Their motivations are almost always institutionally mediated, and for this reason much more confined and limited in perspective. They want to secure promotion and grant funding, they want to be thought well of by their peers, they want to satisfy their superiors, and many other petty careerist personal things of this nature.

To say that ‘climate change policy’ is motivated by a desire to reduce carbon emissions, then, is merely to outline a descriptive thesis from outside. Such a thesis will sink or swim insofar as it explains actions of the system as a whole, but no such motivation is present in the system itself. The apparatus of modern governance is a vast inhuman machine consisting of human components; it doesn’t have thoughts any more than a storm system does. And in this sense, I think Saving Lives as the motivation behind lockdowns and mass vaccination is not quite right. Popular supporters of mass containment certainly saw these policies as Life Saving, and this helped enable them. The state itself, however, was playing a rather different game, one which fell (depending on the country) somewhere on a scale from ‘virus suppression’ to ‘virus eradication’ – lives be damned. The pandemicists’ abandonment of prior mitigationist plans in favour of mass containment entailed precisely deprioritising Life Saving in favour of a new, pathogen-centred approach.

“That may very well be, Eugyppius, but what of the people at the start of it all, before lockdowns were taken up by the system? Surely they had human motivations, even if the regime cannot.”

This is true. The Neil Fergusons, Tomas Pueyos and Christian Drostens who sold lockdowns to their countries and the world surely did so for specific, personal reasons. The problem is that these reasons are very elusive. In fact, the more I read their early statements and their leaked correspondence, the more elusive they seem to me. Their words and actions, however, have a very clear and persistent sinister undertone, which is not a mere artefact of retrospect. Their mysterious coordination with each other, their willingness to engage in highly manipulative messaging and risk magnification, their reliance on foreign agents to launder research and strategies from China, and their constant efforts to justify with pseudoscientific findings apparently preconceived conclusions, are all very unsettling. The ambient Life-Saving ethos of modern society surely helped them win the argument in the moment and get away with it in the longer term, but whatever they thought they were up to, may have been something much different.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.

Across Europe Deaths Are Far Higher Now Than They Were in the ‘Pandemic Years’ of 2020 and 2021

In the year from week ending June 5th 2022 to week ending June 4th 2023 the U.K. recorded 1,059 excess death per million people. The odd thing about this is that excess deaths in the U.K. in 2023 are higher than the excess deaths in the same period in 2020-21 in 13 of the 27 EU nations!

From The Daily Sceptic

By NICK RENDELL

In the year from week ending June 5th 2022 to week ending June 4th 2023 the U.K. recorded 1,059 excess death per million people. The odd thing about this is that excess deaths in the U.K. in 2023 are higher than the excess deaths in the same period in 2020-21 in 13 of the 27 EU nations!

If the people of Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands and Sweden were so worried about the likelihood of dying that they acquiesced in locking themselves up, voluntarily trashed their economies and stopped their kids going to school back in 2020-21 (well, Sweden didn’t, but the rest did), why don’t we feel the need to do the same now? We have more excess deaths now than they had then.

If YouGov did a poll tomorrow asking whether or not we should, right now, go back into lockdown, how many thumbs up would it receive? Very few, I should hope. But if U.K. citizens don’t think it’s a good idea now, why did the Germans or the Finns or the Greeks think it was a good idea in 2020 and 2021? Could it be that they were manipulated? That they weren’t given the whole picture? That they were ‘had’?

Let’s try and put some perspective on this number. We can think of 1,059 excess deaths per 1,000,000 of population in several ways. As a straight percentage let’s round it down to 0.1%. This means that we expect 0.1% of the population to die in addition to the number of people we might ordinarily expect to die in the year. Or, if you prefer, an additional one person in a 1,000 will die in the year.

In the U.K. roughly one person in 100 dies every year, i.e., 1% of the population. But if we’re experiencing excess deaths at a level of 0.1% then we can expect that about 1.1% of the population will die this year. Let’s take the example of a large town or small city with 100,000 inhabitants. In a normal year we’d expect 1,000 deaths. With this year’s higher level of excess deaths, the funeral directors would expect to see 1,100 deaths. That’s all very straightforward.

In case you’d forgotten, let’s remind ourselves that the period from April 5th 2020 to April 4th 2021 included the two big spikes in fatality in Spring 2020 and winter 2020-21. It’s also the period that ended before the vaccine rollout was in any way complete. While about 50% of the U.K. population had received one dose of vaccine by then, in the EU the figure was only about 20%. This period was very much the year when we would have expected to see peak ‘all-cause’ pandemic excess deaths in the U.K. and across Europe with very little amelioration from vaccines or prior infection.

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows all-cause excess deaths across the EU for the period April 4th 2020 to April 5th 2021. I’ve overlaid the Our World in Data chart with a thick red line representing U.K. all-cause excess deaths from June 5th 2022 to June 4th 2023. You can see that U.K. deaths in 2022-23 would have ranked ‘mid-table’ among EU countries in 2020-21.

What to make of this? It prompts a few questions that surely the Hallett Inquiry should ask. Such as: “If there are more excess deaths per head of population in the U.K. now than in half of the EU in 2020-21, were the Europeans mad to lockdown then, or are we mad not to lockdown now?” Or: “Given that, with the honourable exception of Sweden, all these countries broadly followed the same set of policies, do the Bulgarians, with about 3,500 per million excess deaths and Denmark with below average excess deaths, both consider that lockdown was a valuable tool?” If lockdown was so effective, why were deaths in Bulgaria so high? If the pandemic was so deadly, why were they so low in Denmark?

But the fun doesn’t end there. Figure 2 picks out the U.K. and 13 EU countries with excess all-cause deaths in the 12 months to April 2023 (the latest date for which figure were available for all countries) greater than 750 per million. Back in 2020-21 this level of excess deaths would have put you mid-table in the EU excess death league. Clearly, in 2020-21 it was considered essential to lock down populations with these modest levels of excess death (or indeed, lower).

Figure 2

In figure 2 all-cause excess deaths for the 12 months to April 4th 2021 are indicated by the blue bar and for the 12 months to March 26th 2023 by the orange bar. In eight of the countries – Germany, Finland, Austria, Latvia, Greece, Estonia, Netherlands and Ireland – excess deaths in 2022-23 have been higher than in 2020-21. In Germany for example, excess deaths in 2022-23 have been four times higher than in 2020/21. In Finland in 2020-21 fewer people than normal died, while now they have excess deaths that would have placed them in the top half of the EU death league back in 2020-21. Ireland and Greece have almost twice the level of excess deaths in 2022-23 that they had in 2020-21.

Just for fun, put yourself for a moment in the shoes of the German, Austrian or Irish equivalent of Lady Hallett. How would you, with a straight face, justify to your fellow countrymen spending several hundred million euros looking into the awful events of the ‘once in a century’ 2020-21 pandemic, when death supposedly stalked the land, resulting in excess deaths far lower than they are now?

Ministers Were Warned More Children Would Die From Suicide than COVID-19 if they Shut Schools

Ministers were given a stark warning that more children would die from suicide than from contracting COVID-19 if they shut schools, a damning new report from parent campaigners has revealed. The Mail has more.

From The Daily Sceptic

By WILL JONES

Ministers were given a stark warning that more children would die from suicide than from contracting COVID-19 if they shut schools, a damning new report from parent campaigners has revealed. The Mail has more.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on March 18th 2020 that England’s schools were to close until further notice – and they would remain shut for longer than any other country in Europe.

Many children returned to their classrooms in September 2020, only for schools to be shut again in January 2021. Even when they reopened that March, Covid outbreaks and isolation rules caused chaos.

It has now emerged that the Government was warned in November 2020 that “many more children will die from suicide than COVID-19 this year”, the Telegraph reports.

That message was given in a joint briefing paper by the Department for Education and the Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours – in which they cited a rise in self-harm among young people during lockdown.

Those concerns were shared at a Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) meeting that same month – which senior scientific advisers responsible for briefing Westminster’s key players were in attendance for. 

At least 10 senior officials from the Department for Education, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office and other departments were also at the meeting and therefore heard the warnings first hand.

Despite the alarm being sounded, the Government decided schools would be closed for most of the spring term in 2021.

In 2020, 161 people aged 10-19 died from suicide in England. That figure is almost five times higher than the 34 deaths from Covid for the same age group.

The suicide warning is one of nine opportunities the Government ignored to avert damage caused by closing schools during the pandemic, according to parents campaign group UsForThem.

UsForThem, which was set up by mothers Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley amid mounting concerns, is planning to release a series of reports on the various decisions made during Covid. This will include how SAGE papers documented the impact on school closures on stemming transmission was likely to be “highly limited”.

Worth reading in full.

WHO Pandemic Treaty Will Give it Power to Declare Pandemics, Lockdowns and Vaccine Mandates With Force of Law, Leading Experts Tell MPs

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) proposed Pandemic Treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) will hand the international health body unprecedented powers to declare pandemics, lockdowns and vaccination mandates, with the force of international law, leading experts have told MPs.

From The Daily Sceptic

By WILL JONES

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) proposed Pandemic Treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) will hand the international health body unprecedented powers to declare pandemics, lockdowns and vaccination mandates, with the force of international law, leading experts have told MPs.

Speaking to U.K. lawmakers at a meeting of the Pandemic Response and Recovery All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), Dr. David Bell, a former WHO scientific and medical officer, and Professor Garrett Wallace Brown, Chair in Global Health Policy at the University of Leeds and Director of the World Health Organisation Collaborative Centre on Health Systems and Health Security, said that the changes would fundamentally alter the relationship between WHO and member states and put vital health programmes at risk.

Dr. Bell explained that the two agreements, as currently drafted, will hand the WHO the authority to order measures including significant financial contributions by individual states, censorship of scientific debate, lockdowns, travel restrictions, forced medical examinations and mandatory vaccinations during a public health emergency of its own declaring.

He said:

The WHO was established in 1946 with the best of intentions, to help coordinate responses to major health issues and advise governments accordingly. Over the decades we have seen a significant change in direction as funding streams have shifted to private ‘specified funding’, particularly from private donors. This has led to the WHO becoming a far more centralised and externally-directed body in which private and corporate funders shape and direct programmes. What we have also seen shifting is the definition of a health emergency, making it extremely broad. It is a worrying background against which the IHR amendments and the Treaty are being negotiated.

These pandemic instruments are founded on a fallacy regarding the frequency and impact of pandemics and would, if ratified, fundamentally change the relationship between the WHO and national governments and their citizens. Of particular concern are the amendments to the IHR which constitute a dangerous increase in power and authority bestowed on just one person. The Director-General would be able to proclaim health emergencies, whether real or potential, on any health-related matter that they, influenced by their private and corporate funders, say is a threat. The WHO would be able to issue legally-binding directions to member states and their citizens. In light of the catastrophic harms the WHO’s policies have caused during this pandemic, probably greater than the virus itself, the potential economic and health-related harms of such power cannot be overstated. There is a vast pandemic industry waiting for these buttons to be pushed and I am in no doubt that policymakers should reject WHO’s pandemic proposals.

Professor Brown and his research team has been advising the WHO and others on the $31.1 billion a year plan for pandemic preparedness and whether it is defensible or even feasible. Vital public health programmes are suffering globally as a result of the misguided shift to focus on post-Covid pandemic preparedness, he warned.

The post-Covid policy environment has triggered a remarkable grab by various institutions to capture the pandemic preparedness and response agenda and its corresponding financial capacities. This raises concerns about the legitimacy of the policy processes in terms of the representativeness of the emerging pandemic preparedness agenda. One particular concern involves the $31.1bn per year price tag, particularly the more than $24bn a year required from low-and middle income countries. The concern is whether this number is appropriate or even feasible. Nations need to be able to address their individual public health needs, to encourage better population health and resilience and the sort of sums they will be required to contribute to pandemic preparedness could threaten to divert resources from where they are most needed. We already saw this happen during the pandemic and there is evidence to suggest this has continued.

For example, tracking Overseas Development Aid for health from 2019 to the present shows that vital and established preventive public health programmes have suffered globally as a result of policy shifts to Covid and post-Covid pandemic preparedness and response. Evidence shows that malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, AIDS, reproductive health and non-communicable diseases have been impacted by resource shifting. Overseas Development Aid saw a 34% decrease in funding for basic health and a 10% decrease for basic nutrition in developing countries. The fear is that emerging pandemic preparedness instruments will be a continuation of this trend, which will have significant population health effects.

Listening to the speakers, APPG Co-Chair, Conservative MP and former Government minister Esther McVey said:

In April, I spoke at the Westminster Hall debate on this topic [and] much more parliamentary scrutiny and debate is needed. As the COVID-19 Inquiry begins to hear evidence, how we prepare for future pandemics must be carefully considered. We have heard concerns about the expansion of the WHO’s powers, the encroachment on national sovereignty and the rights of the individual and the sheer cost of the plans. These are vast amounts of public money to prepare for pandemics when we have a proportional, evidence-based pandemic plan, formulated to prevent the avoidable suffering and loss we have now experienced. The Government abandoned those plans in early 2020, despite knowing the likely outcomes.

The Treaty and IHR amendments could cement a disastrous approach to future pandemics. It seems unwise to give an unelected and largely privately-funded supranational body power over sovereignty and individual rights with seemingly no oversight. My constituents are concerned, not least because the WHO has a poor track record when it comes to pandemics. I question whether we want to hand such authority to the WHO, whose focus in recent decades has moved away from its laudable founding principles, to blunt instruments such as lockdowns and a one-size fits all approach to public health with the terrible consequences we are now seeing.

APPG Co-Chair, Labour MP Graham Stringer MP, added:

I am opposed to these plans as they could represent a huge expansion of the WHO’s powers, to the detriment of public health. The authority it could gain would surely pressure countries into complying with diktats of its choosing. We saw the unaccountable and extreme influence of China on the WHO when it refused to investigate the Wuhan laboratory and the origin of SARS-CoV-2. It’s also worrying to see the increase in commercial interests within the WHO.

We experienced the WHO’s unscientific volte face on mask wearing, despite there being no strong evidence that they had suddenly become effective. It was an entirely political decision, much like many of the decisions taken by the U.K. Government, often in the absence of any real parliamentary scrutiny. We appear to have learnt nothing from that experience, in terms of both the eye-watering cost and the vast collateral damage, which the Treaty and amendments seem set to enshrine in the WHO’s principles. If these plans come to be, we would be handing over powers to an organisation with less clinical and scientific expertise than our own.

It may not be clear how the WHO will enforce these powers but we know the potential is there as we lived through it, and not just with Covid but also swine flu previously. The ease with which unelected bureaucrats can dictate damaging public health policy and erode democracy, civil liberties and individual rights is something we never want to happen again. This is why these plans demand robust debate, and an open review in Parliament and in public. As Sweden did during the pandemic, and is an example to us all, we must make our own decisions about how we manage public health threats in this country.