When the corona virus was spreading from China governments and their experts tried to understand the threat and find ways to deal with it. Following the Chinese example, lockdowns were enforced almost everywhere. The main argument was to flatten the curve in order to allow the health institutions to better manage the number of seriously ill people.
After a few months of confusing information and decisions a strange pattern started to emerge. Governments and media began to push a certain narrative and fight/suppress alternative ones. The message was that only governments and their experts in cooperation with pharma were acting in the interest of the people. Everybody acting outside their recommendations was trying to do harm to the patients.
The recommendation essentially was: accept our total control and use only the solutions big pharma is providing.
In the following I will present how this played out in practice and how it did major harm to the people as well as provided big pharma with billions in income. While the focus is mainly on the US similar developments could be observed in many other countries.
Step one: Control through fear
The western governments started with little information about the threat of the new virus. China was not very forthcoming with data. After the media reports about the overwhelmed hospitals in Italy a temporary shutdown to slow the spread seemed reasonable. Accordingly, it was argued that the interruption of all activities in the society was necessary to «flatten the curve». This way the medical system was expected to be able to handle the wave of emergencies.
But soon enough the message started to change. Projections of millions of deaths were officially discussed. The end of the shutdowns moved further and further into the future. Masks for everybody started to be required in more and more countries. Social distancing was mandated for all activities which were still necessary in order to uphold the basic functions of the society. For the others the shutdown was enforced.
Even a solitary surfer on the ocean was apprehended by the police.
The media reported more and more deaths from covid with increasing regularity. The society seems to be in a hopeless fight against an invisible enemy and everybody needed to be very afraid of everybody else. The virus was in the air and on all surfaces. Our maskless neighbour was a deadly danger.
There was no cure once you were infected. Lying in a hospital bed with a tube in your windpipe for days or weeks was the outcome if you got really sick. And still the chance to die was very high. So, we better were afraid and VERY careful.
Step two: Use all means to maintain control against any competing narrative
1. shutdowns
In most countries the fearmongering was very successful in the general public. The shutdowns were, grudgingly, accepted almost everywhere.
However, the “flatten the curve” morphed into something like “contain and eliminate the virus”. Accordingly, the shutdowns were projected further and further into the future. Slowly, people started to question the heavy-handed government interventions. The raising costs became clearer: the negative effects on children unable to go to school, the suspension of medical treatments, people losing their jobs, small businesses dying in droves. The benefits, on the other hand, were based on assumptions and models and a lot of propaganda.
In addition, an increasing number of data supported a modification of the approach. The virus was not equally dangerous to everybody. People with medical preconditions were much more prone to severe sickness (here, here). Old people were by far more at risk than children.
Accordingly, the demand for more focused measures started to increase. It culminated in the Great Barrington Declaration which was published on October 4, 2020 and signed by a number of eminent scientists. It pointed at the many negative consequences of the shutdowns and predicted a “greater excess mortality in years to come”.
The medical authorities in the US did not like this questioning of their decisions. They immediately started to attack the authors of the declaration (here, here) claiming that their own position reflected “science” (here, here, here).
Their “science”, however, consisted of models. Actual research into the effect of physical interventions and lockdowns did mostly show no significant positive result. Some US states (Florida, South Dakota) and countries (Sweden) were more concerned about the negative effects and installed less severe measures. And time proved them to be right (here, here). No or less severe lockdowns did not significantly increase the number of deaths.
On the other hand, there are numerous publications which describe the very bad consequences of the government mandated shutdown on the societies. Specially those following the rules had major mental health issues. Children from dysfunctional families were fully exposed to abusive environments. Thousands did not return to school after covid. Others were missing from school regularly. Psychologists experienced a clear uptake in mental health issues. Accordingly, the number of youth suicides went up. Thousands of children never caught up in school after the shutdown. The number of obese children grew.
Most severe, however, is the death toll. It started to be seen in 2021. The numbers of excess deaths in 2022 and 2023 are staggering (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) (Some experts, however, are linking the high number of excess deaths among young people to the vaccination.)
Conclusion: “Following the Chinese example most governments fought the virus by cancelling basic freedoms like the peoples’ rights to travel, come together, engage in normal enterprise, and speak (censored, cancelled). Scientists arguing that the approach was not effective and the costs for the society would be very high were, especially in the US, not taken seriously or were even attacked. Obviously, there was an interest to use this approach regardless of the cost.
2. medication
In the first year of the pandemic the medical authorities had essentially nothing to offer but to stay home if infected until you needed to go to a hospital.
Many physicians would not easily accept such a situation of helplessness in their care for infected patients. They tried every tool in their toolbox in order to provide some help to the suffering patients. They globally shared their results of trial and error. They started to understand more about the progression of the infection. It became clear that the major danger came not from the virus itself but from the reaction of the immune system to the virus. Over time some methods evolved which seemed to have a positive effect on the outcome of the illness.
– The major story in the first month of the pandemic was about hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).
HCQ is the standard antimalarial drug used by millions over decades. It is effective also against Lupus and some other autoimmune diseases. Early in 2020 Chinese doctors looking for help against Covid found that patients treated against Lupus with HCQ did not become sick with the coronavirus. Based on this observation they started to investigate further and found more and more indications of a positive effect of HCQ against Covid. They globally shared their findings over the first months of 2020. Taking this information up US and other doctors confirmed it with their own observations.
Then Dr. Raoult, a world renowned professor of infectious disease and virology, came on the scene. He expanded the insights of the Chinese by proposing to use a combination of HCQ and azithromycin (antibiotic). He started in March 2020 with a small group of patients and found dramatic positive effects when given in the first phase of the Covid infection. As a very outspoken expert he became the face of the resistance against the official narratives.
In the following months he and others published many additional papers which pointed in the same direction: HCQ definitely seemed to have positive effects. It soon became the most preferred drug by doctors.
Thus, it looked like that a well-established and cheap medication did, finally, provide, at least to some extent, protection against severe disease from the coronavirus. Hooray – or not?
HCQ had two major disadvantages: it did not promise a huge pay-out to the pharmaceutical industry and it was supported by Donald Trump.
Thus, immediately there was opposition. The Trump hating media started to publish hit pieces against the drug. It was dangerous, it did not work, it was “Trump’s drug”, it was “hyped”. They started to attack Dr. Raoult. He was a “Trump doppelganger”, had “funny hair”.
In parallel, major medical institutions started to shoot against HCQ (here, here, here). They obviously did not want HCQ to be a cheap solution for the sick and dying. They did everything to disprove the value of the drug.
Raoult clearly mentioned that HCQ is an effective early treatment. Still, data from trials with patients in the second stage of Covid kept appearing. Their negative results were taken as proof that the drug was not effective. The opposition went even further. A study published in the most prestigious medical journal “The Lancet” tried to prove that HCQ was not helping and was even dangerous for the patient. This paper had to be withdrawn because it was found that it used falsified data. Other trials used extremely high doses which were far beyond those recommended by Raoult and others. Still these publications had consequences. Several countries stopped the use of HCQ. The WHO then aligned its recommendations with the relentless fight against this potentially helpful drug. It recommended “no further scientific studies with HCQ as drug against Covid”. The fight even expanded against doctors using the drug. They were in danger to be jailed. Social media in lockstep with the main stream media banned positive stories about HCQ. Was this all to protect the people from harm? Hardly – and later studies confirmed the efficacy of HCQ.
Dr. Brian Tyson, a primary care physician and former hospital intensivist in Imperial County, Calif., who has championed outpatient treatment, explained the calculation: “If I’m wrong with the treatment I’m giving, people are still going to die. If I’m right, how many lives have we saved? How many can be saved? Why are we erring on the side of death instead of treatment?”
It is hard to believe. People were dying in droves. Ventilation could only save about 20% of the patients which needed it. The official recommendation for the infected was to stay home and wait until they got better or that bad that they had to go to a hospital (and hardly find help there). There was NO MEDICATION officially proven to work. When doctors all over the world identified a drug which seemingly was helping people to survive (and was found by the CDC to be safe in the context of malaria) it was denounced. The authorities tried to remove it from the market.
I want to repeat this incredible fact: There was no medication available against Covid. Thousands of people died. Still, the authorities in cooperation with the media actively fought against a potentially working drug they had earlier declared as safe. Why? It was supported by the wrong people and was not generating revenue for the pharma giants.