The Great Reset, page 16
“But schools were not shut down nationwide, other than a few dozen because of too many sick teachers. Face masks weren’t required or even common. Though Woodstock was not held during the peak months of the H3N2 pandemic (the first wave ended by early March 1969, and it didn’t flare up again until November of that year), the festival went ahead when the virus was still active and had no known cure,” Spitznagel wrote. “It was like the pandemic hadn’t even happened if you look for it in history books.”
“I am still shocked at how differently people addressed—or maybe even ignored it—in 1968 compared to 2020,” explained Nathaniel Moir, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.20
Fauci claimed he was surprised at “how rapidly [COVID-19] just took over the planet.” In fact, as author Michael Fumento pointed out, “it appears to spread with the same speed as seasonal flu, which covers the world map annually. And, of course, seasonal flu is also respiratory and has significant mortality.”
“The ‘Asian flu’ of 1957–1958 (H2N2) had a death rate of about 0.67%, well over twice that the CDC estimates for COVID-19. Asian Flu killed an estimated 116,000 Americans and 1.1 million worldwide, according to the CDC. That’s 223,000 Americans and 3 million worldwide adjusted to today’s population,” Fumento noted.
“The ‘Hong Kong flu’ of 1968–1969 (H3N2) killed an estimated 100,000 Americans and 1 million worldwide, or 165,000 Americans and 2.1 million people worldwide adjusted to today’s populations,” he added. “Those estimates are not for deaths ‘with’ the virus or ‘suspected’ as having been caused by the virus even without a test, as the CDC explicitly allows in its COVID-19 guidelines. They indicate death directly from the flu.”
Fumento concluded, “Yet life in those times continued essentially as normal. For neither flu pandemic were there mandatory facemasks in the U.S., no ‘social distancing,’ no quarantining of the healthy that triggered rises in alcohol and other drug abuse, domestic violence, depression, and suicide, or what Fauci himself described as ‘irreparable damage.’ They occurred without panic, caused no recessions, much less the possibility of a worldwide depression.”22
“How Many Lives Were Saved?”
“2020 was the year when I learned that viruses respect directional arrows on supermarket floors.” —researcher Tony Heller of Real Climate Science23
As Ron Coleman tweeted, “Did they release the official figures yet on how many lives were saved by taping arrows to the floors of supermarket aisles?”24
The question looms, how did COVID-19 create a mass panic, starting with “two weeks to flatten the curve” and turning into a massive, unrelenting power grab by all three levels of the U.S. government and countries around the world seemingly acting in unison? Obviously, the Great Reset was in position, with a don’t-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste attitude poised to capitalize on COVID-19 fears. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. summed the COVID restrictions as “a coup d’etat against liberal democracy.”25
How “The Science” Gets Corrupted
But more specifically, how did our most basic human liberties get tossed out seemingly overnight—with government stay-at-home orders, curfews, mask mandates, restrictions on travel, regulations on weddings, funerals, and backyard barbeques, and neighbors encouraged to snitch and be rewarded—all supposedly to fight a virus?
The answer is that the science—“The Science”—has been deeply corrupted. “The fact that the pandemic guidelines of the WHO and nearly every developed nation were simply tossed aside to permit CCP-inspired lockdowns, and the public was neither consulted nor even informed of this decision, suggests to me the corruption of public health runs very deep,” attorney and author Michael P. Senger explained.26
“Please, Keep to Your Bubbles”
“Stay local. Do not congregate. Don’t talk to your neighbors. Please, keep to your bubbles. It comes down again to those very simple principles. We know from overseas cases of the delta variant that it can be spread by people simply walking past one another. So keep those movements outside to the bare minimum. Wear a mask and make sure you keep up that physical distancing.” —New Zealandprime minister Jacinda Arder27
The New England Journal of Medicine put its weight behind lockdowns in an October 2020 editorial. “China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay. These measures were severe but effective,” the editors of NEJM claimed. The journal even praised New Zealand’s “zero COVID” strategy. “New Zealand has used these same measures… to come close to eliminating the disease,” the journal claimed.
The NEJM did not stop there, but went full political, calling for the ouster of then president Trump because of his administration’s unwillingness to support stricter lockdowns.
“This election gives us the power to render judgment,” the journal declared. “When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”28
“Medical Dictatorship”
In response to New England Journal of Medicine’s pro–China-lockdown, political-lobbying editorial, I tweeted a point-by-point rebuttal on October 8, 2020:
NEJM: “China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay. These measures were severe but effective.”
Morano Response: Locking people in their homes in dramatic fashion while being filmed for drama is not “effective.”
Morano:It is awesome that the U.S. did not have China’s “Strict quarantine and isolation.” It’s amazing you ignore Sweden’s rational & scientific approach of avoiding lockdowns!
NEJM: “New Zealand has used these same measures… to come close to eliminating the disease.”
Response: Trying to zero out cases using fascist govt tactics of quarantining healthy people & isolation & mandatory testing is not something worthy of praise. N. Zealand is wacko.
NEJM: “The U.S. instituted quarantine & isolation measures late & inconsistently, often without any effort to enforce them….”
Response: Yes! That is the beauty of the USA! We don’t like locking our people down & using police as viral fascist enforcers of mask mandates & lockdowns.
NEJM: “Our rules on social distancing have in many places been lackadaisical at best…”
Response: Great! There should never have been any such “rules” mandated by the govt. End all mandates for lockdowns, social distancing & masks.
NEJM: “Our leaders have stated outright that masks are political tools rather than effective infection control measures.”
Response: They are “political tools” & they are NOT “effective” against viruses when the general public wears them. Science says so!
NEJM: “Yet our leaders have largely chosen to ignore and even denigrate experts.”
Response: “Experts” like Fauci, Redfield & surgeon gen Adams should be IGNORED & DENIGRATED! They are contradicting themselves & manipulating science to support policies they have already made.
NEJM: “Much of that national expertise resides in government institutions.”
Response: No! I have corrected your statement: “Much of the national unelected politicized safety dictators reside in government institutions who no one ever voted for.” Unelected public health bureaucrats should not be ruling our lives. Don’t blame Americans, they did not vote for Fauci!
NEJM: “U.S. still suffers from disease rates that have prevented many businesses from reopening…”
Response: Stop it! The U.S. is “suffering” from a technocracy coup led by the very “experts” you seem to love. The only thing “preventing” businesses from opening is out of control governors, mayors and officials who are acting like dictators.
NEJM: COVID is “the largest public health crisis of our time.”
Response: The biggest “crisis” the USA faces is NOT COVID! It is a medical dictatorship of unelected “experts” ruling every aspect of our lives from backyard BBQs to church to restaurants to funerals to weddings, etc. Enough already! We need to STOP public health “experts” & governors who declare a public health “emergency” and then become dictators.29
Steve Milloy of Junk Science warned that the government response and suspension of liberty during COVID revealed that “the incompetent, corrupt and politicized public health bureaucracy… want[s] to create a precedent for permanent control of society via ‘public health.’ ”30
“As with education, conservatives abandoned public health as a profession decades ago. I don’t know any conservatives with expertise in public health. We are now paying the price,” Milloy wrote.31
“We have ceded the field (of public health) to leftists who have only one tool… government crackdown.”32
“All public health bureaucrats are Dems and worse sorts of leftists,” Milloy wrote.33 “We can still ‘social distance’ without devolving into a police state or destroying the economy.”34
The Surprising Origins of “Social Distancing”
Liberty or Lockdown author Jeffrey Tucker called the origin of the unprecedented COVID lockdowns a “bizarre tale,” noting that the first time the phrase “social distancing” had appeared in the New York Times was February 12, 2006, during the avian flu scare.35
“If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is ‘social distancing,’ which is the new politically correct way of saying ‘quarantine,’ ” reported the Times in 2006.
“But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators—and the [elbow] bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us.”36
On April 22, 2020, the Times updated its reporting in a revealing exposé on the history of “social distancing”:
Fourteen years ago, two federal government doctors, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, met with a colleague at a burger joint in suburban Washington for a final review of a proposal they knew would be treated like a piñata: telling Americans to stay home from work and school the next time the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.
When they presented their plan not long after, it was met with skepticism and a degree of ridicule by senior officials, who like others in the United States had grown accustomed to relying on the pharmaceutical industry, with its ever-growing array of new treatments, to confront evolving health challenges.
“Snap Lockdowns”
“ ‘One Virus Case Puts New Zealand into Nationwide Lockdown’ ” blared the headline at Bloomberg in 2021. “The snap lockdown will begin at midnight tonight as authorities rush to identify the source of a single infection in largest city Auckland, [New Zealand prime minister Jacinda] Ardern said.”37
I tweeted: “If you thought lockdowns were bad, get ready for ‘snap lockdowns.’ They can come at any moment and for any reason. On the whim of a tyrant.”38
The New York Times report, by Eric Lipton and Jennifer Steinhauer, then compared lockdowns to medieval practices.
“Drs. Hatchett and Mecher were proposing instead that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages. How that idea—born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak—became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.”
But the story got more absurd, as the Times reported how a high school kid’s computer-simulation project became the basis for COVID-19 international policy.
“It required the key proponents—Dr. Mecher, a Department of Veterans Affairs physician, and Dr. Hatchett, an oncologist turned White House adviser—to overcome intense initial opposition. It brought their work together with that of a Defense Department team assigned to a similar task. And it had some unexpected detours, including a deep dive into the history of the 1918 Spanish flu and an important discovery kicked off by a high school research project pursued by the daughter of a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories.
“The concept of social distancing is now familiar to almost everyone. But as it first made its way through the federal bureaucracy in 2006 and 2007, it was viewed as impractical, unnecessary and politically infeasible.”39
Let’s repeat: Social distancing—the politically correct term for quarantines or lockdowns—was judged “impractical, unnecessary and politically infeasible.”
The fourteen-year-old high school student was Laura M. Glass. The Albuquerque Journal reported about how her paper would later become law of the land:
Laura, with some guidance from her dad, devised a computer simulation that showed how people—family members, co-workers, students in schools, people in social situations—interact. What she discovered was that school kids come in contact with about 140 people a day, more than any other group. Based on that finding, her program showed that in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, 5,000 would be infected during a pandemic if no measures were taken, but only 500 would be infected if the schools were closed.40
“Laura’s name appears on the foundational paper arguing for lockdowns and forced human separation,” Jeffrey Tucker reported. The 2006 paper “set out a model for forced separation and applied it with good results backwards in time to 1957. [The paper’s authors] conclude with a chilling call for what amounts to a totalitarian lockdown, all stated very matter-of-factly,” Tucker explained.
“In other words, it was a high-school science experiment that eventually became law of the land, and through a circuitous route propelled not by science but politics.” Tucker pointed out.41
The origin of “The Science” is becoming clearer.
“It Made No Sense”
The plan for this version of lockdowns was viciously criticized in 2006 by Dr. D. A. Henderson, who had led the effort to eradicate smallpox.
Tucker, quoting the New York Times, pointed out that “Dr. Henderson was convinced that it made no sense to force schools to close or public gatherings to stop. Teenagers would escape their homes to hang out at the mall. School lunch programs would close, and impoverished children would not have enough to eat. Hospital staffs would have a hard time going to work if their children were at home…. The answer, he insisted, was to tough it out: Let the pandemic spread, treat people who get sick and work quickly to develop a vaccine to prevent it from coming back” [emphasis Tucker’s].
As Tucker observed in retrospect, “Confronting a manageable epidemic and turning it into a catastrophe: that seems like a good description of everything that has happened in the COVID-19 crisis of 2020.”
He added, “Again, the idea was born of a high-school science experiment using agent-based modeling techniques having nothing at all to do with real life, real science, or real medicine.”
The April 22, 2020, New York Times report explained how, despite the concerns, the Bush Administration approved the lockdown plans.
“The [Bush] administration ultimately sided with the proponents of social distancing and shutdowns—though their victory was little noticed outside of public health circles. Their policy would become the basis for government planning and would be used extensively in simulations used to prepare for pandemics, and in a limited way in 2009 during an outbreak of the influenza called H1N1. Then the coronavirus came, and the plan was put to work across the country for the first time.”42
Maybe “Science” Is a Liberal Conspiracy
A bumper sticker promoted by progressives reads: “Science is not a liberal conspiracy.”
“Oh yes it is. Or, yes, it can be, and much of it is. And here is where that bumper sticker is wrong. When the regulatory state—i.e., the Environmental Protection Agency, the United Nations, the U.S. federal government—when they want to regulate, they look for justifications and causes, and that’s the natural state of any government…. So essentially the regulatory state is using the climate scare now to achieve its ends…. The science must support the government policy, and the network of government and academic funding peer-pressure is designed to ensure ‘The Science’ ends up supporting the politicians’ favored policy. Any dissenters have to face intimidation and censorship.” —Marc Morano in a 2019 interview43
To put politicized science in perspective, we must look at the science before anyone had a political reason to care what the answer was.
The Data on Masks
Just as lockdowns were rejected by health experts before COVID-19, mask mandates on the general public were also viewed as ineffective. Before COVID, masks were determined to be ineffective against infections and viruses in studies going back to the 1970s. But later, when “The Science” needed to be molded to fit the needs of politicians, “The Science” was adjusted through modeling studies and dubious correlations studies to find that mask mandates now miraculously work.
“I’m sure some politicians wish they could take a few things back. Joe Biden might wish he’d never said that thing about the repeal of mask mandates being ‘neanderthal thinking,’ given that those states have done no worse than any others, but since no reporter has challenged him on it, he’s gotten a pass,” author Tom Woods commented in 2021.44
