The World Health Organization (WHO), and the growing pandemic preparedness industry sponsoring it, have faced considerable challenges in maintaining support for its COVID-19 response.
It has addressed this difficult situation with simple and uniform messaging. The compliance thus achieved by WHO has been vital to the successful wealth concentration of the COVID-19 response, benefiting its major sponsors but also the army of global health staff who have remained obedient throughout.
Threatening this progress, a skeptical minority within the public sphere has been using evidence and rational argument to undermine the pandemic industry’s potential. As the pandemic preparedness and response narrative is poorly defensible on rational criteria, such criticism and opposition must be dealt with and dismissed by other means.
Big Lies Become Matters of Faith
The development and mass deployment of vaccines has been a key component of the COVID-19 response, underpinning much of the transfer of wealth from lower-income people, and countries, to Big Pharma, their investors, and the global health workforce they sponsor.A significant cognitive decoupling has been necessary across this sector to achieve sufficient uniformity of voice and purpose, as the institutions involved were ostensibly intended to improve health and uphold the rights of those less financially fortunate. For success, staff of the WHO and other international organizations, therefore, had to be enabled to signal virtuous intent while acting in concert for corporate gain.
Vaccines traditionally protect the vaccinated against a target pathogen, and humans tend to develop good immunity after respiratory virus infections. These two realities create an urgent problem for the pandemic preparedness industry, as the increased financing set to expand their reach is dependent on successfully convincing the world that these truths are indeed fallacies.
It’s essential to focus people on simplistic slogans if the aim is to suppress their tendency for independent thought and to make any venture in that direction a cause of stress. If people can see their respected authority figures standing behind a statement that is otherwise obviously false, it becomes easier to accept that the false must be true than to stand alone against authority and the crowd.
Once one’s colleagues are on board, the Asch Conformity phenomenon kicks in—if everyone else is saying “X,” then it surely must be “X,” even if it looks like “Y.” If a health program flies in the face of all existing medical knowledge, it must therefore be supported by a sufficiently strong dogma to negate an evidence-based argument.
COVAX—Selling the Golden Goose
“No one is safe, until everyone is safe,” the WHO’s COVAX motto, fulfills all the above criteria.Most people want to be safe—and to achieve industry aims, the public must be convinced that others, not just themselves, are the key to their personal safety. They must support the blame or coercion being applied to these others. But the brilliance of “No one is safe, until everyone is safe” is not just in its appeal to self-preservation and its divisiveness, but in its simple stupidity.
Therefore, in promoting its “No one is safe” slogan, WHO staff must collectively proclaim a lie. This builds loyalty and cohesion, as a lie is more easily maintained within a like-minded group.
To be “safe” from a virus, one must either be intrinsically at very low risk (as most people are to most viruses) or gain immunity.
Bolting Down the Golden Goose
Science, including public health, was previously held to be based on processes of logic, based on an acceptance that aspects of our world are grounded in discoverable truth. This concept is a threat to COVAX and the wider pandemic preparedness narrative. It’s a threat to the return on investment of the pandemic industry’s sponsors. Greed is a stronger driver than truth and must be allowed to run free if society is to be truly reset in favor of those who wish to concentrate and control its wealth.Despite its massive internal contradictions, disproportionate cost, coercion, and requirement for its promoters to live obvious lies, COVAX and the entire mass-vaccination paradigm have created a strong model for success of the wider pandemic preparedness project. If truth in public health can be so readily dispensed with, and those working in the field so willingly corralled, the potential for milking the public’s trust and desire for safety presents unprecedented potential for profit.
As this wealth accumulates, it supports the continuing advocacy and manipulation required to keep its adherents loyal. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle—we can expect to see more outbreaks, health emergencies and pandemics declared, more vaccines rolled out, and more wealth concentrated as a result. This becomes an unstoppable cycle, burying the truth under a growing fog of fear and falsehood.
That, at least, is the plan. The eventual outcome will depend on whether truth, human rights, equality, and trust were ever fundamental to maintaining societal cohesion and peace. If they were, then let us hope the chaos that follows their abandonment is somehow contained. For now, business is business, and the golden goose, bolted down in a hall of lies, will keep on laying.