Coronavirus: Thread

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How Fanatics Took Over The World
https://dailyreckoning.com/how-fanatics-took-over-the-world/
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker

"When people catch on, the fires of vengeance will burn very hot."

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about
lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev
Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself
as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation.

Now I was listening.

I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s
(mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the
founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White
House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of
influence – serving an apocalyptic president — he was the driving
force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics.

He literally unleashed hell.

That was 15 years ago. At the time, I wrote about the changes I was
witnessing, worrying that new White House guidelines (never voted on
by Congress) allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine
while closing their schools, businesses, and churches shuttered, all
in the name of disease containment.

I never believed it would happen in real life; surely there would be
public revolt. Little did I know, we were in for a wild ride…

The Man Who Lit the Match

Last year, Venkayya and I had a 30-minute conversation; actually, it
was mostly an argument. He was convinced that lockdown was the only
way to deal with a virus. I countered that it was wrecking rights,
destroying businesses, and disturbing public health. He said it was
our only choice because we had to wait for a vaccine. I spoke about
natural immunity, which he called brutal. So on it went.

The more interesting question I had at the time was why this certified
Big Shot was wasting his time trying to convince a poor scribbler like
me. What possible reason could there be?

The answer, I now realized, is that from February to April 2020, I was
one of the few people (along with a team of researchers) who openly
and aggressively opposed what was happening.

There was a hint of insecurity and even fear in Venkayya’s voice. He
saw the awesome thing he had unleashed all over the world and was
anxious to tamp down any hint of opposition. He was trying to silence
me. He and others were determined to crush all dissent.

This is how it has been for the better part of the last 15 months,
with social media and YouTube deleting videos that dissent from
lockdowns. It’s been censorship from the beginning.

For all the problems with Lewis’s book, and there are plenty, he gets
this whole backstory right. Bush came to his bioterrorism people and
demanded some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. When Bush
saw the conventional plan — make a threat assessment, distribute
therapeutics, work toward a vaccine — he was furious.

    “This is bulls**t,” the president yelled.

    “We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about
foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”

Hey, if the president wants a plan, he’ll get a plan.

    “We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this
threat,” Venkayya reports having told colleagues.

    “We were going to invent pandemic planning.”

This was October 2005, the birth of the lockdown idea.

Dr. Venkayya began to fish around for people who could come up with
the domestic equivalent of Operation Desert Storm to deal with a new
virus. He found no serious epidemiologists to help. They were too
smart to buy into it. He eventually bumped into the real lockdown
innovator working at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
Cranks, Computers, and Cooties

His name was Robert Glass, a computer scientist with no medical
training, much less knowledge, about viruses. Glass, in turn, was
inspired by a science fair project that his 14-year-old daughter was
working on.

She theorized (like the cooties game from grade school) that if school
kids could space themselves out more or even not be at school at all,
they would stop making each other sick. Glass ran with the idea and
banged out a model of disease control based on stay-at-home orders,
travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.

Crazy right? No one in public health agreed with him but like any
classic crank, this convinced Glass even more. I asked myself, “Why
didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?” They didn’t figure it out
because they didn’t have tools that were focused on the problem. They
had tools to understand the movement of infectious diseases without
the purpose of trying to stop them.

Genius, right? Glass imagined himself to be smarter than 100 years of
experience in public health. One guy with a fancy computer would solve
everything! Well, he managed to convince some people, including
another person hanging around the White House named Carter Mecher, who
became Glass’s apostle.

Please consider the following quotation from Dr. Mecher in Lewis’s
book: “If you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room
and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.”

At last, an intellectual has a plan to abolish disease — and human
life as we know it too! As preposterous and terrifying as this is — a
whole society not only in jail but solitary confinement — it sums up
the whole of Mecher’s view of disease. It’s also completely wrong.

Pathogens are part of our world; they are generated by human contact.
We pass them onto each other as the price for civilization, but we
also evolved immune systems to deal with them. That’s 9th-grade
biology, but Mecher didn’t have a clue.
Fanatics Win the Day

Jump forward to March 12, 2020. Who exercised the major influence over
the decision to close schools, even though it was known at that time
that SARS-CoV-2 posed almost risk to people under the age of 20? There
was even evidence that they did not spread COVID-19 to adults in any
serious way.

Didn’t matter. Mecher’s models — developed with Glass and others —
kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop
virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period — some
of them still not public — and what you observe is not science but
ideological fanaticism in play.

Based on the timestamp and length of the emails, he was clearly not
sleeping much. Essentially he was Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik
Revolution. How did he get his way?

There were three key elements: public fear, media and expert
acquiescence, and the baked-in reality that school closures had been
part of “pandemic planning” for the better part of 15 years.
Essentially, the lockdowners, over the course of 15 years, had worn
out the opposition. Lavish funding, attrition of wisdom within public
health, and ideological fanaticism prevailed.

Figuring out how our expectations for normal life were so violently
foiled, how our happy lives were brutally crushed, will consume
serious intellectuals for many years. But at least we now have a first
draft of history.

As with almost every revolution in history, a small minority of crazy
people with a cause prevailed over the humane rationality of
multitudes. When people catch on, the fires of vengeance will burn
very hot.

The task now is to rebuild a civilized life that is no longer so
fragile as to allow insane people to lay waste to all that humanity
has worked so hard to build.