patrick.net

Aug. 4th, 2021 07:21 pm
ecosophia: ecosophia

I’ve been watching the unfolding of the current Covid-19 pandemic since the first news stories about it in the late fall of 2019, and like many people, I find the official story that’s grown up around the virus and the response to it impossible to take seriously. Partly that’s because the official narrative has been veering around like a well-greased weathercock on a blustery day, and partly it’s because large elements of that narrative are contradicted by scientific studies or, in many cases, the press releases on which the narrative itself is based. The fact that people are now being banned from social media for quoting pharmaceutical companies’ own documents is a good indication that there’s some serious falsification going on here.

Yet I find it just as hard to believe the main alternative story on offer these days. This is the claim that the virus and the vaccine are part of a sinister plan to take away what remains of civil liberties worldwide, along the lines of Klaus Schwab’s maunderings about a Great Reset. The problem here is that this sort of scheme would require governments and corporations everywhere to behave with a degree of competence they very clearly don’t display in any other context.

On reflection, it seems to me that what’s happened over the last two years makes sense if you simply factor in the shortsightedness, incompetence, and venality that government and corporate sectors alike have displayed in all their other dealings of late. With this in mind, I’ve sketched out a hypothetical reconstruction of what has actually been happening. It’s speculative but it accounts for the facts as I know them. As usual, I’ve focused on events in the United States, the one country I know tolerably well; readers in other countries will need to modify this story to fit their own local conditions. I haven’t footnoted anything; do your own internet searches on the important concepts listed below and you’ll find plenty of data.

At any rate, here’s a hypothesis about the real story behind Covid-19.

*****

Stage One: Business as Usual

The Covid-19 coronavirus was manufactured as part of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Gain-of-function research? That’s one of the currently hot fields of virus research, involving genetic engineering to make viruses more virulent in their effects on tissue cultures. It’s dangerous enough that federal regulations prohibit it in the US, which is why it was going on in China. Funding for the research, however, came from one of the many US government slush funds that prop up the pharmaceutical industry, by way of a pass-through entity to provide a fig leaf of plausible deniability. This is normal practice, part of the culture of kleptocracy that funnels tax dollars into corporate pockets with zero accountability.

Stage Two: A Minor Little Oopsie

Someone made a mistake, and the Covid-19 coronavirus got outside the supposedly secure facility where it was being kept. People in and around Wuhan started getting sick. Early on, there were a lot of deaths, but the death rate slid as the virus adapted to its new hosts in the usual way, ending up about as serious as a bad flu. (Respiratory viruses reliably do this: the sicker a patient gets, the fewer people on average they can infect, and this selection differential very rapidly turns novel respiratory viruses into highly transmissible but not especially dangerous members of the ordinary human respiratory flora.) So we saw an initial wave of stark panic and overreaction on the part of politicians and the media, followed by reassurances that everything would be fine after all, along with various more or less frantic attempts to keep anyone from finding out that the US government funded the creation of the virus.

Stage Three: Cashing In On The Sick

Then the pharmaceutical industry realized that Covid-19 had the potential to be a gargantuan cash cow. Since the Covid-19 virus could be counted on to mutate at the usual pace, if they could come up with a vaccine, they could count on being able to release a new booster shot every single year, and make the kind of reliable profits they now make from the annual flu vaccine. Since big pharma’s profiteering at the expense of patients has become a political hot potato in the US of late, the idea of a new source of extreme profits had a very definite appeal. This is why several effective dietary and pharmaceutical treatments for the virus got deep-sixed, since nobody was going to make billions off them, and it’s also why dud pharmaceuticals such as Remdesvir got hauled off the shelf and heavily marketed—they’re still patented and so can be sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars a dose.

Stage Four: Super Geek To The Rescue

At this point Bill Gates comes into the picture. Most of our current crop of kleptocratic godzillionaires like to play at saving the world in one way or another. (It apparently helps them avoid thinking about the way their firms maltreat their employees, cheat their suppliers, and screw the public.) Gates’ save-the-world hobby is vaccines, and the Gates Foundation is accordingly a major player in the vaccine industry. One of the foundation’s biotechnology patents was well suited to the situation, at least on paper. Pharma corporations thus churned out competing versions of a Covid-19 vaccine using that patent. Mind you, the technology in question has had very mixed results, because it has serious problems with antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a known complication of immunization in which an ineffective vaccine makes it easier for a virus to make you sick. Nor was adequate testing done to find out if the Covid vaccines had that problem. The vaccines went into production anyway, since the pharmaceutical industry has a long history of launching inadequately tested drugs on the market with serene disregard for safety issues. (Remember Fen-Phen?)

Stage Five: Marketing Maneuvers

The political systems of modern industrial nations are riddled with graft, and so corporate interests can reliably get politicians to say and do whatever will help boost their profits. Once the goal du jour became marketing the vaccine to as many people as possible, therefore, politicians did what they were paid to do and turned on a dime, insisting that Covid-19 was sure to kill us all unless we all got vaccinated, and slapping on mask mandates and shutdowns as part of the political theater. That was purely a marketing gimmick. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was one among many official voices telling people in smug tones that if they wanted to have their lives back they’d better hurry up and get vaccinated. Various interesting irregularities in what counted as a case of Covid and what counted as a Covid fatality were also put to work in this cause. This served the necessary purpose of whipping up a classic media panic, to try to make everyone run out and get vaccinated.

Stage Six: The Pushback Begins

The problem is that a great many Americans do not trust the medical industry. There’s good reason for their mistrust, as medical malpractice has long been among the leading causes of death in the United States, and medical profiteering is far and away the leading cause of bankruptcy here as well. Thus an impressive number of people—possibly as many as half the population—flatly refused to get the vaccines. It didn’t help that the vaccines themselves turned out to have serious immediate side effects, including sudden death, at a rate a couple of orders of magnitude higher than any other vaccine currently in use. Though Soviet-style censorship was slapped on social media to keep “misinformation” from spreading, hard questions about the official narrative got asked with increasing frequency, and the number of people getting the Covid-19 shots flatlined: while the US government is now claiming that 70% of adult Americans are vaccinated, other sources of data suggest that the actual number is much less than that.

Stage Seven: Don’t Breathe A Word Of This

There was another reason for people to be suspicious, though that wasn’t clear at first. Everyone who’s had to use Microsoft programs knows that Bill Gates’ management style tends to produce second-rate, bug-ridden products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, and have to be pushed on reluctant consumers via high-pressure marketing and monopolistic practices. It turns out that the same was true of the biotechnology on which the Covid-19 vaccines are based. That would have been discovered in the usual way during the two to five years of testing a new vaccine normally gets, but the Covid vaccines didn’t get that; the first one to be authorized had a total of eight weeks of not especially rigorous testing, the others didn’t get much more, and so a far from minor problem slipped past. In the spring of 2021 word thus began to trickle out that the Covid-19 vaccines had a serious problem with ADE: once the initial protection wore off, a process which took a few months, people who’d been vaccinated were much more likely to get seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid-19 than people who hadn’t. Thus the federal government and the medical industry suddenly had a self-inflicted disaster on their hands.

Stage Eight: Panic In The C-Suites

The first response of the people in power, of course, was to find somebody else to take the blame. That’s when politicians and the media turned on a dime (again) and suddenly started admitting that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s when Bill Gates suddenly stopped being the poster child for the vaccine effort and got dumped in a hurry by his wife and kids, and when Anthony Fauci suddenly had to deal with a flurry of negative publicity and the unexplained cancellation of his ghostwritten memoirs. The goal was to find someone—Gates, Fauci, the Chinese, anyone—who could be made into the fall guy and blamed for the impending mess. Apparently that first round of bad news was followed by even worse news, however; I suspect that the news was that the ADE caused by the vaccine had a noticeable fatality rate, but that’s just a guess. One way or another, finding fall guys wasn’t an adequate dodge any more, since at this stage it wasn’t just careers that were at risk: it was potentially the viability of the entire political-economic establishment.

Stage Nine: Things Get Serious

All of a sudden, as a result, it was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of the US population. Everyone without exception had to get vaccinated—if everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it will be easier to claim that what’s happening is a nasty new variant rather than vaccine-driven ADE, since nobody will be able to point out that the unvaccinated aren’t getting it. All of a sudden, officials dropped the (inaccurate) claim that the vaccines keep you from getting Covid-19. New outbreaks flared in which most people who got sick had been fully vaccinated; stories surfaced in the media about how strange it was that so many people were getting really nasty summer colds; the labor shortage somehow just kept getting worse and other shortages snowballed, but if you suggested that it was because too many people were sick you could count on being shouted down. Authorities began to talk earnestly about how a new variant might show up soon that would kill a third of the people who caught it. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way they could know that in advance. It makes perfect sense, however, if the vaccines have been found to cause serious ADE and they already have a good idea of what the fatality rate will be.

This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect.

Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle

As ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be. Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will believe them one more time.

Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame

When ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the political and economic establishment this could provoke.

*****

So that’s my hypothesis. I hope I’m wrong. If anything like what I’ve sketched out does happen, I have friends and family members I care about who almost certainly won’t survive, given their current health and vaccination status. I also know enough about what happened during the Black Death, the Spanish flu, and other situations where a lot of people got sick and died in a hurry, to hope I can avoid seeing the same sort of events in my own time.

Nonetheless, it’s possible that the scenario I’ve sketched out is going to happen in the months immediately ahead of us. I would encourage my readers to assess this possibility and consider getting ready to weather a crisis several months in length, during which food and other necessities may be available only intermittently, medical care may be completely out of reach, and local, state, and national governments may not be able to do much more than flail helplessly and try to pass the buck. If anything like what I’ve described here happens, it will be a world-class mess, and a few basic preparations might go a long way to keep you and your loved ones safe and sound.

One more thing. I'll be moderating comments on this post very strictly. I'm not interested in arguing about whether the hypothesis I've offered is true or not -- that will be demonstrated by events, not by who yells the loudest. I've decided, after much brooding and some favorable divinations, to put this into circulation on the off chance that it may help some people. Make up your own mind and don't let anyone bully you into doing something you don't want to do.
Current Mood: worried