Covid: "How Covid Lockdowns Came to Italy"

The author of this piece, attorney Michael Senger gets rather crabby when writing about the Chinese and covid. But his headline reminded me of the Chinese - Italian guy in Florence who had the signboard that said  “I’m not a virus. I’m a human. Eradicate the prejudice.”. I just checked and he appears to be alive and kicking.

Anyhoo, from Mr. Senger's The New Normal substack, May 4, 2022:

In Snake Oil, I detail the evidence that the Chinese Communist Party used multiple modes of influence including online propaganda, mainstream media, and fraudulent “science” to popularize lockdown policies that were unprecedented in the western world. But for many, one big question remains: Yes, this may all be true, but what about Italy? In the words of Neil Ferguson, architect of the wildly-inaccurate Covid models that sent the world into a tailspin:

It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could…

This is, of course, true. Italy’s adoption of China’s containment policy was one of the most important events instigating lockdowns across the free world—and, I would argue, one of the most darkly clever aspects of the lockdown operation. Limited information as to how Italy’s lockdowns transpired has been a hindrance. Thus, our case takes us to Europe’s ancient capital.

As historical background, the last time Italy had a strong, competent national government was roughly 179 AD, after which Marcus Aurelius passed away and emperorship passed to his son Commodus, the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. For 1300 years after the fall of Rome, Italy was largely governed as a smattering of city-states owned by rivaling, illustriously-wealthy families. When Italy became a republic in the 19th century, the private security forces of these wealthy families evolved into the loosely-knit clandestine network referred to as the mafia, serving as liaisons between the Italian elite, the government, and purveyors of various illicit activities. As a result, Italy has long been unique as one of the world’s most prosperous and talented countries, but with a level of corruption more characteristic of a developing nation—a match made in heaven for an organization like the CCP.

In 2013, a new political party formed by comedian Beppe Grillo called the Five Star Movement (M5S) began to rise. Like most of Italy’s political parties, M5S marketed themselves as populist and anti-establishment, but Grillo and M5S had long sought and formed close relations with China. As M5S gained political power, they sold relations with China to the Italian people as a way to foster Italy’s economic independence.

After M5S member Giuseppe Conte became Prime Minister in 2018, the party’s overtures to China reached an apex when Conte gave Xi Jinping a royal welcome and signed onto his Belt and Road initiative, becoming the first major European country to do so.

On March 23, 2019, the same day Conte signed Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, Italy’s Health Minister, M5S member Giulia Grillo, signed a Plan of Action on Health Cooperation between Italy and China, binding Italy to cooperation with China in certain fields including “prevention of infectious diseases.” This plan was a continuation of health cooperation plans between Italy and China first launched in 2000 under former Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema. D’Alema had been a longtime member of the Italian Communist Party and was the first known Communist to ever become prime minister of a NATO country. D’Alema now served as honorary president of the Silk Road Cities Alliance, a Chinese state organization, and was a leader of the newly-formed political party Article One (A1).

Giulia Grillo left her post and another A1 member, Roberto Speranza, became Italy’s new Minister of Health in September 2019. Shortly after, in October 2019, Prime Minister Conte paid a visit to the headquarters of Technogenetics, a Chinese-owned company in Italy that developed the initial Covid PCR test swabs which were sent to Wuhan in January 2020.

On November 8, 2019, Health Minister Speranza signed an Implementation Programme of the Plan of Action on Health Cooperation between Italy and China, binding Italy to specific actions in the area of infectious disease control. As is now widely-acknowledged by intelligence sources, the CCP was aware that Covid was spreading by November 8, 2019, but had not yet shared that information with the rest of the world. Among Italy’s commitments to China in the Implementation Programme were the following:

a. Develop and support prevention strategies, policies and actions to counter the following situation: exposure to etiological agents; individual and general population behaviors and attitudes related to the transmission of infections; the low compliance of health professionals with respect to the surveillance of communicable diseases and measures of prevention … and the non-standard behaviors and unserious attitudes of health professionals in care practices regarding risk and infection control.

b. Develop and support epidemiological surveillance, organization for infectious emergencies, communication for the population, training of health workers, the coordination between different institutional levels and various territorial competences during the implementation of prevention interventions, collection of information, systematic monitoring of the quality and the impact of the actions implemented…

f. Carry out cooperation activities like academic exchange, training and manoeuvres on emergency medical rescue and response of major public health emergency, i.e., natural disaster, accident-related disaster, nuclear biochemical emergency, infectious diseases pandemic like influenza.

On November 23, 2019, M5S founder Beppe Grillo—who had no official government position—met with China’s ambassador to Italy and attended a long meeting at the Chinese embassy, the details of which remain unknown.

Prime Minister Conte announced Italy’s first two confirmed Covid cases after a couple of tourists from China tested positive on January 30, 2020; months later, this couple donated $40,000 to the hospital in Rome that treated them. After announcing the two cases, Conte declared a state of emergency, “allowing the government to cut through red tape quickly if needed.”

Hours after Conte confirmed Italy’s first two Covid cases on January 30, 2020, an anonymous stock tipster posted that he or she had “friends and family in the medical industry and field, including at CDC and one close friend at WHO,” and felt guilty not disclosing what they knew:....

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And the latest at The New Normal: "Michael Callahan: DARPA’s Ventilator Guy in Wuhan"

Prepare To Get Angry: The Government Employees Who Dumped Their Stocks Ahead Of The Covid Lockdowns

I mentioned in the introduction to the story of how Dr. Deborah Birx was maneuvered into her commanding role in the covid disaster (White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator) by the state security apparatus:

...Michael Senger, a San Francisco attorney who was one of the first people I saw who pointed out that the Chinese response to Covid-19 was not just weird, not just unprecedented but actually seemed a bit like economic warfare.

From Michael Senger's Substack, October 19:

Health Officials Dumped Stocks in January 2020, Before COVID Was Declared an Emergency

In a shocking new report from the Wall Street Journal, leading health officials began offloading stocks at truly unprecedented rates in January 2020—well before the COVID-19 emergency was declared—with officials at the US Department of Health and Human Services selling 60% more stocks in January 2020 than average over the previous 12 months.

One deputy to NIAID Director Anthony Fauci reported selling between $157,000 and $480,000 in stocks before the end of January.

Weeks later, stock prices around the world went into freefall at the fastest rate since the Great Depression as word got round that officials were planning a complete shutdown of the global economy.

The ensuing lockdowns were unprecedented in the western world prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan. They weren’t given any official imprimatur as western policy until February 24, 2020, when WHO Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward—famous for later disconnecting a live interview when asked to acknowledge Taiwan—reported back about Wuhan’s lockdown from Beijing:

What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this. If you do it, you can save lives and prevent thousands of cases of what is a very difficult disease.

That leading officials were already privately planning to recreate China’s lockdowns across the western world by January 2020, however—and making stock trades based on those plans—further confirms the all-too-prescient stock tip by someone who claimed to have “friends and family in the medical industry and field, including at CDC and one close friend at WHO” on January 30, 2020, which proved to be a near-perfect foretelling of subsequent events:....

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"Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting"

I've stopped using the term 'gaslighting', preferring the more straightforward "lying to your face."

From attorney Michael Senger, links to previous visits after the jump: 

More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.

But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.

The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.

Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream left is that any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.

This perplexing narrative was perfectly encapsulated in a recent viral tweet by a history professor who griped about the difficulty of convincing his students that government mandates had nothing to do with the fact that they couldn’t leave their homes in 2020.

Similarly, in an interview with Bill Maher, celebrity scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson argued that we can’t assess the effects of lockdowns and mandates because the counterexamples, like Sweden, are too different to be applicable.....

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That Brent guy teaches in Canada, second only to Australia in the Anglosphere for the severity of their lockdowns.

Previous links to Michael Senger:

• Prepare To Get Angry: The Government Employees Who Dumped Their Stocks Ahead Of The Covid Lockdowns
• Fake Science And U.S. Intelligence: How Dr. Deborah Birx Got The Covid Job (some answers to: who the hell is Pottinger?)

And just one example of Fauci flat-out lying (video):
"Covid-19: Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci And The Shutdown Of America" 

....In Dr. Fauci's case he is straight-up duplicitous - two-faced - same root as duplex etc. 

It's a mental illness. Narcissistic to the point of being delusional "I am the science" along with the manipulative behavior of the true sociopath makes for an interesting study in multiple psychopathologies. The ultimate political bureaucrat.

Dr. Birx may be even worse.

In addition to the lockdowns deceit she has stated: "I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection and I think we overplayed the vaccines ...".

 

Yuck. For a more lighthearted look at abnormal psychology there's that time a researcher in a state mental institution brought together three paranoid schizophrenics who thought they were Jesus, written up as The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. After a rather tense beginning they each became slightly more accepting of the others but eventually it all broke down:

....The relative friendliness that the men showed to each other – which Rokeach put down to the patients attempting to appear amenable, as befitting their status as the son of God – soon broke down and led to verbal and physical fights between the three "Jesuses".

In one meeting, Clyde declared that Leon "oughta worship me, I'll tell you that" ....

....MUCH MORE, IFL Science, July 6, 2021

 

For some reason I hear Clyde speaking in Fauci's Brooklyn accent.

Let's see what the other voices have to say 

That's all I've got for mental illness this week. 

Since that was posted we've collected another half-dozen other instances of a) Fauci proudly taking credit for lockdowns and b) denying he ever heard of the term.

"Nuremberg II: What a Real Inquiry into the Response to Covid Would Look Like"

I hope the people who spent over two years on their covid jihad, destroying lives and livelihoods, retarding the education of an entire generation of children, twisting facts to fit a corrupt agenda, I hope they understand there were millions of people keeping receipts, and that the receipt-keepers won't be trying to shame their persecutors, for they know they feel no shame. They will be seeking justice, and possibly vengeance, against the entire class that oppressed them.

I think I will retreat to the castle keep for a couple years and just observe how things play out.

If you'll excuse me, there's a drawbridge to be raised, can't take too many precautions against the risk of misidentification. I'd prefer the last sound I hear not be the mob baying "À la lanterne!"

We've visited the author of this piece, Michael Senger a few times, usually identifying him as a San Francisco Attorney. I'm wondering now if he somewhat fancies himself in the role of the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Jackson.

From Mr. Senger's substack, The New Normal, October 11:

Disturbing questions remain as to who did what, when, and why in the days leading up to the lockdowns of spring 2020 and beyond.

In the aftermath of the world’s catastrophic response to Covid-19, some governments have begun conducting inquiries into what went wrong. Yet owing to a combination of politics, face-saving, and outright corruption, these inquiries have generally been toothless. For example, a report published last year by the UK House of Commons concluded, backwardly, that if the UK had gone into strict lockdown three days sooner, disaster would have been averted.

Conclusions like these are as insulting to the public’s intelligence as was the response to Covid itself. The response to Covid led to the sharpest economic collapse since the Great Depression, global famine, a mental health crisis, runaway inflation, a transfer of over $3 trillion from the world’s poorest to the very richest, the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of young people, and the worst education crisis since the Second World War.

Given the magnitude of the harm that’s been done, the public deserves to know exactly who knew and did what, when, and why in the days leading up to the lockdowns of spring 2020 and beyond. Though it may not be politically feasible, ideally this would one day take the form of an international tribunal. Below are just some of the many disturbing questions to which any leader who claims to represent the public ought to demand answers:

1. Why did the CDC suddenly adopt “measures to increase social distance” as official policy in 2004, contrary to all the epidemiological guidance it had developed throughout the 20th century?

2. Who was behind the campaign to export the concept of “lockdown” to Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014?

3. Some intelligence reports have indicated that members of the western national security community were aware a new virus had emerged in China by fall 2019. What was being said about the virus at that time?

4. If some national security officials had been worrying about a new virus in China since fall 2019, how could they have possibly believed China’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan eliminated the virus several months later?

5. By January 2020, tips began to emerge that the World Health Organization was planning to recreate China’s lockdowns across the world, starting in Italy. When and on what basis did the World Health Organization make this decision?

6. Lockdowns had been ruled out by the pandemic plans of the WHO and every developed nation. Why weren’t these pandemic plans followed?

7. Why were health security officials talking about “curfews of indefinite duration” by February 24, 2020?

8. Why does the WHO’s February 2020 report rely on logical fallacies in its promulgation of China’s lockdown measures as global policy?

9. Why was the current Director of National Intelligence sitting next to China’s CDC director at the Event 201 simulation of a coronavirus pandemic in October 2019, shortly before a real coronavirus pandemic emerged?

10. Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx has made conflicting statements about how she got her job. For example, the former Deputy National Security Advisor offered her a job in the White House as public health security advisor as far back as November 2019. How was Birx chosen for this role?

11. Who was behind the terror campaign of fake videos showing Wuhan residents spontaneously dying and convulsing in the streets January and February 2020?

12. Why is there no record of the hero doctor Li Wenliang before he appeared in Chinese state media at the end of January 2020? On what basis did western media outlets adopt this story as true?

13. High-level members of the national security community including the former Director of National Intelligence and the former Secretary of State have stated as fact that Covid came from a lab in Wuhan. At the same time, high-level scientific officials including NIAID Director Anthony Fauci have stated that it is “molecularly impossible” for Covid to have come from that lab. How can we still have this disconnect at the highest levels of the federal government?

....MUCH MORE

Here's his latest in response to the Atlantic article suggesting we let bygones be bygones, October 31: 

“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”—Not

And here are the final words of Justice Jackson's closing statement at the Nuremberg trial of the the Nazis in 1946:

"....It is common to think of our own time as standing at the apex of civilisation from which the deficiencies of preceding ages may patronisingly be viewed in the light of what is assumed to be progress. The reality is that in the long perspective of history the present century will not hold an enviable position unless the second half is to redeem its first.

They stand before the record of this tribunal as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: "Say I slew them not." And the Queen replied: "Then say they were not slain. But dead they are."

If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, that there are no slain, that there has been no crime."

Fake Science And U.S. Intelligence: How Dr. Deborah Birx Got The Covid Job (some answers to: who the hell is Pottinger?)

....the National Security Council recruited and appointed her to the job, through Deputy National Security Advisor for Asia, Matt Pottinger. 

But why? Why would someone with no relevant medical or scientific background be appointed to a top pandemic-response position? The answer, I believe, is that Birx was installed in that position in order to impose the untested, unscientific, totalitarian pandemic mitigation measures copied directly from China – measures chosen by the biosecurity community because they feared the havoc and backlash of a leaked genetically altered virus. But that’s jumping too far ahead into the realm of speculation.

— Dr. Birx’s Fake Science Revealed in Her Own Words

That's Debbie Lerman writing at the Brownstone Institute, August 12, 2022.

She also wrote a piece for Brownstone August 4: "How Did Deborah Birx Get the Job?" and it is here that we begin.

Reading Deborah Birx’s badly written, poorly edited The Silent Invasion, published at the end of April 2022, is not easy. In fact, it’s mind-numbingly tedious, especially if you try to read every word and not skim over the myriad digressions, repetitions, and multi-paged meanderings.

Nevertheless, according to The Atlantic, it is “the most revealing pandemic book yet,” detailing how “Trump’s team botched the pandemic.”

I agree that this 521-page “excruciating story” (as The New York Times calls it) is indeed revealing. However, it has little to do with Trump or what The Atlantic might consider pandemic botching. 

The most revealing parts of the book are: 

1) the claims about Birx herself that, upon close inspection, make little sense, contain strange inconsistencies, or contradict other claims made in the book and elsewhere; and 

2) the absurd claims about epidemiology and public health generally, and SARS-CoV-2 specifically, endlessly repeated by Birx as scientific truths when in fact they are anything but. 

Investigating these claims is important because they touch on crucial pandemic questions: Who made the terrible pandemic policy decisions and, perhaps most mysteriously and importantly, why?

Here I investigate the obfuscation surrounding  Deborah Birx’s appointment as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, and then the garbage science she so forcefully pushed once she got there.

How did she get the job?
I have not interviewed Dr. Birx in person, but I have read her book, as well as articles about her and interviews with her. Based on all of these, I put together a Q&A in which the questions are mine, and the answers are verbatim quotes from The Silent Invasion, as well as Dr. Birx’s testimony before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis in the US House of Representatives on October 12, 2021, and other interviews.

Page numbers from the book and line numbers from the hearing transcript are in parentheses. Links to other articles and interviews are also included.

Q: Dr. Birx, you were officially hired as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator on February 27, 2020. Who offered you the job?

A: My friend Matt [Pottinger], the deputy national security advisor (p. 32)

In the Congressional hearing on October 12, 2021, you said you did not know why Matt Pottinger was the one to approach you for this job (lines 1505-1507). It does seem odd that Matt would be in charge of appointing a pandemic response coordinator, since public health and epidemiology were not at all part of his experience. As Lawrence Wright reports in The New Yorker in December 2020, “in a very noisy Administration, he had quietly become one of the most influential people shaping American foreign policy.” So why did he hire you again?....

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We've already looked at Dr. Birx's game plan in August 14's "Covid-19: Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci And The Shutdown Of America"

Deborah Birx’s Guide to Destroying America
The former White House coronavirus coordinator’s monstrous autobiography explains how lockdowns happened

So here's more on how she was maneuvered into the position from Michael Senger, a San Francisco attorney who was one of the first people I saw who pointed out that the Chinese response to Covid-19 was not just weird, not just unprecedented but actually seemed a bit like economic warfare.

Via his substack, The New Normal:

Matt Pottinger: The Intelligence Agent Who Shut Down America
The Manchurian candidate?

In 1948, the US House of Representatives received a tip from a man named Whittaker Chambers that several federal officials had been working for the communists. One of these officials was more than happy to appear before Congress to clear his name—a leading State Department and United Nations representative named Alger Hiss.

The rakish Hiss was the exemplary American statesman: Polite, pedigreed, well-spoken, and a Harvard man to boot. During the 1945 United Nations conference, the Chinese delegation had proposed the creation of a new international health organization. After the Chinese failed to get a resolution passed, Hiss recommended establishing the organization by declaration, and the World Health Organization was born.

In Congress, Hiss coolly denied the allegations and denounced his deadbeat accuser for the libelous claims. The House came away newly reassured that the State Department was in excellent hands.

(Spoiler alert: He was then and always had been a communist.)

The next year, intelligence leaks from the federal service led to the Soviet Union’s first successful nuclear test, ending the security afforded by America’s nuclear monopoly 15 years earlier than experts expected. Shortly thereafter, Kim Il-Sung and Chairman Mao used the cover of Soviet nuclear weapons to invade South Korea. The ensuing war claimed over 3 million lives and resulted in the permanent recognition of the nation of North Korea.

Around this time, a little-known Congressman from California’s 12th district named Richard M. Nixon pressed Chambers for more information. Chambers reluctantly led Tricky Dick to a package of State Department materials he had hidden in a pumpkin patch—including notes in Hiss’s own writing. Alger Hiss became the most high-level American official ever convicted in connection with working for the communists.

---

2022

To be honest, I barely knew who Matt Pottinger was until I read that he’d appointed Deborah Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator in her bizarrely self-incriminating memoir Silent Invasion, which reads like it was written by the Chinese Communist Party itself. There’s little information about Pottinger’s role in Covid online.

Yet Pottinger is portrayed as a leading protagonist in three different pro-lockdown books on America’s response to Covid-19: The Plague Year by the New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, Nightmare Scenario by the Washington Post’s Yasmeen Abutaleb, and Chaos Under Heaven by the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin. Pottinger’s singularly outsized role in pushing for alarm, shutdowns, mandates, and science from China in the early months of Covid is extremely well-documented.

Pottinger’s enormous influence during Covid is especially surprising not only because of his absence from online discussion about these events, but because of who he is....

....MUCH MORE

 If interested see also a fascinating story in "Covid-19: How Did Tedros Come To Be Head Of the W.H.O.? (Think China's Belt and Road Debt Trap Diplomacy)"

Earlier today: 

"We must make public health authorities accountable for their COVID lies" (and who the hell is Pottinger?)

Monkeypox: Fortunately The Amendments To The WHO Pandemic Treaty Are Being Deliberated At This Very Moment

The author of this substack, Michael Senger, a San Francisco attorney was one of the first people I saw who pointed out that the Chinese response to Covid-19 was not just weird, not just unprecedented but actually seemed a bit like economic warfare.

Here he is on the report to the 75th World Health Assembly, Governing Body of the W.H.O., which began today and is expected to run through May 28.

What Does the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty Really Do?

Nothing. And everything.

Social media has been abuzz with terrifying news about a new Pandemic Treaty (officially the “Zero draft report of the Working Group on Strengthening WHO Preparedness and Response to Health Emergencies to the Seventy-fifth World Health Assembly”) currently being deliberated by the members of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

According to some commentators, the treaty “risks superseding parliamentary democracy, public health laws and human rights within 194 countries.” “If the WHO pandemic treaty is signed,” writes another commentator, “your vote will never ever count again.”

As the author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World, I’m not going to complain about the alarmism, as all these comments seem to be implicit endorsements of my work. But the good news is that’s not what the Pandemic Treaty really does.

What does the Pandemic Treaty actually change? Nothing, really. The treaty contains 131 proposals in ten broad categories: 1. Political leadership, 2. Cooperation and collaboration, 3. WHO at the center, 4. Financing, 5. Sustainability of COVID-19 innovative mechanisms, 6. Global surveillance, 7. Strengthening the International Health Regulations, 8. Universal health and preparedness review pilot, 9. Travel measures. 10. Equity.

The proposals are technical and banal. More funding for the WHO “to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health.” Regular simulation exercises. More research to “inform and expand” public health and social measures during pandemics. More capacity for genomic testing. More sharing of public health data with the WHO. Digital vaccination certificates and contact tracing. More vaccines for developing countries.

Technically, none of this is binding on member nations. The consultants behind the Pandemic Treaty even cite “national sovereignty” as a limitation on the treaty’s effect.

Of all the proposals, the most immediately alarming is the plan to strengthen “approaches to and capacities for information and infodemic management… in order to build public trust in data, scientific evidence and public health measures and to counter inaccurate information and unsubstantiated rumours.” This particular provision involves private, supranational organizations and therefore does bypass national sovereignty.

In other words, the Pandemic Treaty is everything the WHO has already been doing—but more of it. So what’s actually at stake if the treaty is passed?

Everything.

The real significance of the Pandemic Treaty is that its passage is a ratification and approval of everything the world has experienced over the past two years during COVID-19. A brief refresher on those events....

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 Previously on the treaty:

Tedros and the W.H.O. Have A Plan
"'Pandemic Treaty' Will Hand WHO Keys To Global Government" 

 

And on the World Health Assembly:

Covid-19: How Did Tedros Come To Be Head Of the W.H.O.? (Think China's Belt and Road Debt Trap Diplomacy)

He prefers you call him Tedros and so we shall.

The former Ethiopian Minister of Health and perhaps more importantly Minister of Foreign Affairs, 2012–2016, announced his candidacy for Director-General of the World Health Organization in 2016.

If you recall those were were the years when the New Silk Road became the OBOR, One Belt One Road Strategy. The world was amazed, the Chinese were talking of a trillion dollar investment and we had not yet seen the debt effects on places like Sri Lanka and  Djibouti and Kenya and Pakistan was raring to go and, well, it was 2016.
And China's Margaret Chan was going to wrap up her second five year term as D-G in 2017 and that spelled opportunity.

But first they had to change the rules and this is where we'll start the story....

"Barack Obama: evidence on Covid school closures was ignored"

The school closures were nothing short of a disaster. A disaster for the children, from the academic retardation to the lack of socialization to fact that for many they never went outside, all day to the...it's a long list.

And for the country it resulted in enormous lost potential income:

"Covid’s Hit to Education Is Still Hanging Over the Economy" (These Kids Got Screwed Out Of $31 Trillion in GDP)

And here is the former President at UnHerd, September 25:

The evidence on whether school closures were necessary during the pandemic was ignored, Barack Obama has claimed. He added that open conversation was shut down as the debate became overly politicised. 

Speaking to British historian David Olusoga at the O2 Arena in London last night, the former US president said that “sometimes we weren’t looking at some of the evidence that said: ‘You know what, most kids really need school.’” He added that “it got politicised and became ideological and was viewed as a Left versus Right issue.”

On 30 January 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded the first instance of Covid-19 in the US, and by the end of March all states had closed schools until further notice. In mid-September 2020, about 60% of US schools were fully virtual and only 20% were operating a traditional in-person schedule, while around 20% were hybrid. Well into 2021, many schools — primarily in Democratic states — were operating on reduced timetables with mask mandates and social distancing rules.

In May 2020, Obama called the federal government’s response to the pandemic “an absolute chaotic disaster”. Speaking to college graduates in an online commencement address, he said: “More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.” Earlier that year, in March, the former president advocated for the cancellation of large gatherings so as to “slow the spread of the virus and save lives”. He added: “We have to look out for each other.”

Five years later, there is a wide consensus among experts that closing schools during the pandemic hampered children’s education and social development while failing to stop the spread of the disease. A report in the New York Times in March 2024 said that “today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.”

Earlier this month, data from The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known informally as America’s report card, showed that reading and maths scores for senior high school students were down significantly from 2019. Average scores are down dramatically since 1992 among the worst-performing students, but experts suggest that pandemic closures exacerbated an already worsening decline in attainment. For example, a McKinsey study showed that by the autumn of 2020, students in the sample had only learned 67% of the maths curriculum they were due to cover by that point....

....MUCH MORE 

 As to lockdowns in general, you quarantine the sick, not the healthy. Period.

Some earlier posts:

October 2021 - Covid-19: The Stupidity Of Lockdowns

December 2021 - "COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink"

December 2021 - WSJ: "The Fickle ‘Science’ of Lockdowns"

The tricks were: First, conflate lockdowns with quarantines when in truth no one in history had ever attempted to shut down entire HEALTHY populations and Second, use the camel's nose under the tent technique, also known as, among political scientists, the 'I'll just put the tip in' method of coercion. 

Just two weeks, that's all. Two weeks to bend the curve.

***** 

Previously:

Covid-19: "China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign"

Covid-19: "Lockdown Harms and the Silence of Economists"
Covid-19: The Stupidity Of Lockdowns
Money, Money, Money: "A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation"
Is this why we had lockdowns? 

November 2022 - "Nuremberg II: What a Real Inquiry into the Response to Covid Would Look Like"

I hope the people who spent over two years on their covid jihad, destroying lives and livelihoods, retarding the education of an entire generation of children, twisting facts to fit a corrupt agenda, I hope they understand there were millions of people keeping receipts, and that the receipt-keepers won't be trying to shame their persecutors, for they know they feel no shame. They will be seeking justice, and possibly vengeance, against the entire class that oppressed them.

I think I will retreat to the castle keep for a couple years and just observe how things play out.

If you'll excuse me, there's a drawbridge to be raised, can't take too many precautions against the risk of misidentification. I'd prefer the last sound I hear not be the mob baying "À la lanterne!"

We've visited the author of this piece, Michael Senger a few times, usually identifying him as a San Francisco Attorney. I'm wondering now if he somewhat fancies himself in the role of the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Jackson...."Nuremberg II: What a Real Inquiry into the Response to Covid Would Look Like"

November 2023 - Lockdowns: The Epidemiologist and Public Health Giant Who Knew What Would Happen

The Joe Nocera/Bethany McLean piece posted late Wednesday, "COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic." mentioned Donald Henderson and his arguments against lockdowns. Unfortunately for the world he died five years before Covid-19 began its rampage. He was a Professor of Medicine and Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. One of his gigs was eradicating smallpox.

He probably should have received a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

A repost from October 2022...

And many, many more. 

"Covid’s Hit to Education Is Still Hanging Over the Economy" (These Kids Got Screwed Out Of $31 Trillion in GDP)

OpEd from Barron's, April 12:

About the author: Alix Guerrier is the chief executive of DonorsChoose.

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It’s been four years since the height of the Covid pandemic left schools closed across the country. School doors have long since reopened, but the consequences of a disrupted education are still lingering for the cohort of Covid students. This learning loss is on course to cause even greater disruption to our students’ futures and to our economy as a whole.

The U.S. education system drives our economy. Our skilled workforce enables us to lead the world in innovation and to be at the forefront of a wide range of industries. But pandemic learning loss threatens our ability to meet workforce demands and remain competitive on the global stage. Preventing this long-term economic problem requires collective urgency beyond the education sector.

As a former teacher, I know firsthand how much kids depend on consistency in their educational environment, and how challenging it can be for them when that is interrupted. We owe it to our students and our nation to invest in learning recovery so that they are back on track to reach their full academic potential.

Recent data confirms that Covid-19 set student progress in math and reading back by decades

. Most students from that cohort are still behind their 2019 counterparts and likely will be for years to come. Students who already faced challenges are falling even further behind. Existing gaps in test scores based on student race, ethnicity, and economic background are widening in Covid’s wake.

It’s getting harder to catch up. Students in the Covid-era cohort are losing talented teachers, many of whom are burning out and leaving the field. Mental health issues are growing, with more than 40% of students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the CDC’s latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Chronic absenteeism worsened during the pandemic, which can lead to falling grades and test scores and make students more likely to drop out.

The repercussions are alarming for our students and economy. What happens to our industries if Covid-cohort students cannot catch up? Economists predict this generation will experience long-term economic losses. One estimate is that Covid-era students will see 6% lower lifetime earnings, with Black students likely to suffer a drop two percentage points worse. Another analysis suggests that a near $200 billion drop in GDP for every year that the Covid-cohort is in the workforce is possible. The economic drag from this lower-skilled workforce is projected over time to cost the economy six times more than the entire economic losses of the 2007-2009 recession....

....MUCH MORE

The estimated hit to GDP faced by these cohorts as quoted in the Education Next piece, "Generation Lost: The Pandemic’s Lifetime Tax" is $28 trillion though is based on this paper (page 3 of 24), published at Hoover February 29:

....Based on the available research on lifetime earnings associated with more skills, the average student in school during the pandemic will lose 5 to 6 percent of lifetime earnings. Because a lower-skilled workforce leads to lower economic growth, the nation will lose some $31 trillion (in present value terms) during the twenty-first century. This aggregate economic loss is higher than the US GDP for one year and dwarfs the total economic losses from either the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic or from the 2008 recession.

It is also possible to assess how the economic costs of the pandemic were spread across the United States. Students from different states can expect to lose widely different proportions of their future earnings. Whereas the students from Utah, who on average suffered the lowest learning losses in the nation, can expect 2 percent lower lifetime earnings, this economic loss climbs to 9 percent for the students in Delaware and Oklahoma....

Here's the lead author  https://hanushek.stanford.edu/. Other researchers seem to cite him a lot. A lot.

The per year figure is from McKinsey (2001) totaling $7.5 trillion in lower lifetime earnings, which seems exceptionally low compared to other research, perhaps because it came out relatively soon after the lockdowns. We happened to catch it when it came out.

If interested see also 2022's:
"Nuremberg II: What a Real Inquiry into the Response to Covid Would Look Like"

I hope the people who spent over two years on their covid jihad, destroying lives and livelihoods, retarding the education of an entire generation of children, twisting facts to fit a corrupt agenda, I hope they understand there were millions of people keeping receipts, and that the receipt-keepers won't be trying to shame their persecutors, for they know they feel no shame. They will be seeking justice, and possibly vengeance, against the entire class that oppressed them.

I think I will retreat to the castle keep for a couple years and just observe how things play out.

If you'll excuse me, there's a drawbridge to be raised, can't take too many precautions against the risk of misidentification. I'd prefer the last sound I hear not be the mob baying "À la lanterne!"

We've visited the author of this piece, Michael Senger a few times, usually identifying him as a San Francisco Attorney. I'm wondering now if he somewhat fancies himself in the role of the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Jackson....