3 Years Ago This Week, the World Ended

3 Years Ago This Week, the World Ended
A page of the Danish Daily Newspaper Jyllands-Posten from the Jan. 27, 2020 edition shows a cartoon made by Danish editorial cartoonist Niels Bo Bojesen of the Chinese national flag with a coronavirus, in Copenhagen, on Jan. 28, 2020. Ida Marie Odgaard/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Updated:
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Commentary

For two months before lockdowns came to the United States, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was broadcasting the lie that its Wuhan lockdowns killed the virus. Control the people, they said, lock them up, prohibit all human movement, and do it brutally for as long as it takes, and the virus called SARS-CoV-2 would be suppressed and eliminated.

The CCP began its global campaign with preposterously fake videos of people collapsing in the streets from sickness, as if this common respiratory virus kills quickly like the one in the movie “Contagion.” It was a campaign of terror, or, as Robert Malone likes to call it, 5th generation warfare.

No one should have believed it, especially not trained virologists. Lab leak or not, the trajectory of all viruses must follow evolutionary law: that which is very severe will not become prevalent and the reverse is also true. In addition, every virus that has ever come into existence always exists, save the only two which have been eradicated.

There was never a chance for zero COVID. It was always the case that this virus would circulate until there was herd immunity. Getting rid of freedom accomplishes no public health goal. It only wrecks society. It ends the world.

China’s COVID was a creation of theater, both the virus behavior and the response. It’s astonishing that most of the world believed both. The bought-and-paid-for World Health Organization (WHO) sent a delegation of dupes to Wuhan to observe the great achievement. With the CCP as the tour guide, mucky mucks from the United States and UK, including Fauci’s own deputy assistant, believed every word.

And the WHO produced a report dated Feb. 20, 2020, and signed by everyone there, that celebrated the great achievement. Donald Trump himself praised the wonderful job that Xi Jinping had done in taking on the virus. The Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the entire “pandemic planning” biosecurity state was activated. By Feb. 28, 2020, the plans were in place.

All that remained was a campaign of fear to warm up the American people as to what was coming. Fauci himself revealed it first to the actress Morgan Fairchild, whom he instructed to tell her followers the closures were coming. A week later, the conference called South by Southwest was canceled by executive edict by the mayor of Austin, Texas. This was the first hardcore deployment of extreme authoritarianism in the United States. But it was just the beginning.

The frenzy built quickly over the next week, and every news outlet was tagged. The New York Times published wild fear-mongering content daily. Rumors of mass quarantines and lockdowns were everywhere, to the point that the governor of New York had to repeatedly deny that he was about to lock down. Even then, it was clear what was happening.

On March 11, the NBA canceled its season, much to the shock and anger of players and fans. Many people supposed there had to be a good reason, which only increased panic. On March 12, Broadway closed its doors. That evening, the president announced a block of all travel from Europe, the UK, and Australia. By accident, he said this would also include a block on goods imports. The stock market crashed the next day as the White House scrambled to clarify.

These were the grimmest days because the lights were going out on everything called civilization. Everyone in any kind of governing position was in panic mode but it was always unclear about what precisely. Everyone says today that it was panic about the virus but it was also a tremendous fear about what was happening in the realm of policy. The two fed on each other to create a loop of fear.

We know now that the virus had long been in circulation in the United States, probably since October of 2019. We just didn’t have a name for it. People were coming down very sick but the press was paying no attention any more than the mainstream media pays attention to vaccine injury and death today. What is amplified and what is buried is an editorial decision, not a reflection of reality.

On March 13, the HHS released a secret document that transferred policy authority over the pandemic response from the CDC to the National Security Council. Within government circles, the military footing and quasi-martial law became official. All that was left was to get the president to greenlight the lockdowns. That took a weekend of counsel with Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, Jared Kushner and his friends, plus Scott Gottlieb from Pfizer.

Just do what Xi did, they said, and all will be well. He did it, and so should you. Tragically, Trump reversed his earlier judgment that this was just another flu, an opinion that Fauci too had held, one that turned out to be true. As a result, we got the tragic press conference of March 16 in which the White House issued an edict that goes down in history: “all indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate should be closed.”

The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential. The hospitals were closed to everything but COVID and various other emergencies. Travel was out of the question. It was even difficult to get from state to state. Regular citizens became the Red Guard of lockdowns, ratting out neighbors for holding parties and shaming anyone out and about for nonessential reasons.

What about law and liberty? The Bill of Rights? Commercial freedom? Religious freedom? It was like those suddenly stopped being a concern. The entire country was windswept within days. And as if to entrench the panic, the modelers started coming out with their “flatten the curve” analytics, predicting total doom if you should leave your house. And the media ate it up, and so did large technological companies. For the foreseeable future, we would all huddle at home if we could, and make the workers and peasants deliver unto us our sustenance.

How long could this go on? They talked Trump into another 30 days. Congress allocated trillions to pay everyone off. The Fed cranked up the printing press. The U.S. Treasury dropped thousands in our bank accounts. All this largess guaranteed that the schools and businesses would stay closed. The goal was to wait for the vaccine, which just so happened to appear days after the election in which mail-in ballots and hence voter fraud became the norm. So Trump was swept out of office in the sketchiest presidential election in U.S. history.

In the end, the vaccine flopped, as everyone now knows, and the virus mutated again and again until it became endemic like it was always fated to do. We were left with the wreckage. Biden could have stopped it all once he was elected but he did not. He went further with mandatory masking and extremely cruel vaccine mandates that forced an untested gene therapy on millions at the pain of losing their livelihoods.

Just how severe was COVID? Nowhere near as severe as they said. The average age of death around the world was slightly higher than the average lifespan. The young were never in any danger and neither were healthy adults. And yet what of the wave of death that began in the Spring months of 2020? To this day, it is still unclear how much resulted from panic and neglect of early treatment and how many actually died of COVID as such.

What if every state had followed the way of South Dakota and essentially ignored the federal government? We’ll never know for sure but the United States could look a lot more like Sweden, which has the lowest excess mortality in Europe between 2020 and 2022.

No question that the lockdowns killed. And as the chaos unfolded, they were partying in Wuhan and sending out these videos to the world, same as they had with the fake ones with people dying. In some sense, this was the greatest achievement of the CCP. It trolled the world to end the world as we knew it.

And today, we are surrounded by the resulting disaster: young people with lost education and acute sexual dysphoria, adults with job insecurity, public health with a complete loss of trust, and institutions all over the country and world having collapsed. The recovery will take decades.

We had no idea just how fragile civilization was. And we had no idea just how stupid and evil our leaders are. We cannot count on them to rebuild. That is up to the rest of us.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Author
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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