The Emergency Isn’t Really Ending

The Emergency Isn’t Really Ending
President Joe Biden holds a note card as he takes part in a meeting with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington on June 22, 2021. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Jeffrey A. Tucker
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Commentary
The Biden administration has announced that it will end the public health emergency on May 11. Why not earlier? Why not now? Because that “would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system.” What the heck? Yep, they are concerned that it will take time to “retrain [hospital] staff and establish new billing processes.”

Oh, and what about the unspeakable chaos of the past three years? Does that even get the attention of the White House? Nope. Two weeks to flatten the curve became three years and two months to flatten the curve. During that time, the response itself created a massive public health crisis in addition to an economic, cultural, and political crisis.

One paragraph in the press release merits a comment. It seems that the Biden administration has finally gotten a clue that the American people are fed up with restrictions on their liberty. Thus does the release state the following:

“To be clear, continuation of these emergency declarations until May 11 does not impose any restriction at all on individual conduct with regard to COVID-19. They do not impose mask mandates or vaccine mandates. They do not restrict school or business operations. They do not require the use of any medicines or tests in response to cases of COVID-19.”

In other words, mandates are out. Choice is in. Thank you, public opinion. No, thank you, government, over these past three hellish years.

In the before times, we used to speak of unintended consequences of government policy. There was no shortage of examples. But this one looms large in the history of government policy as the most gargantuan, calamitous, and far-reaching failure ever witnessed by any living person. It’s certainly for the ages.

The government response was given legal cover by three separate declarations of emergency. The first came from the Trump administration on Jan. 31, 2020. It was a declaration under Section 319 of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 (which should be repealed forthwith, now that we’ve seen its dangers).
The second came with the health emergency issued under Section 502 of the Stafford Act on March 13, 2020, which put FEMA in charge of the response, a role that it gave over to national security the following week. That action effectively ended Trump’s presidency, transferring his power to the National Security Council, putting the entire country on quasi-military footing.
The third was issued under Emergency Use Authorization Section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. This happened on Dec. 11, 2020. That’s what allowed the approval of vaccines outside the FDA’s usual processes and provided liability protection for vaccine manufacturers. Thus were born what’s now popularly known as the “clot shots,” which many insiders have told me are easily the most dangerous shots ever given approval as vaccines in this country’s history.

The first two emergency declarations will be allowed to expire. The third, no. That should serve as a clue about who and what has the most power within government today: Pfizer and Moderna. These two companies have somehow bought most governments in the world, and their policies revolve around their interests, despite global incredulity about the merit of their mandated shots.

One suspects, then, that the profits and power of the vaccine manufacturers have played an outsized role in crafting the pandemic response from the very beginning. Indeed, this might have been the whole point. I say this because, at the end of the day, it’s their industrial survival that continues to enjoy government protection.

Jennifer Kates, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was quoted by The New York Times as saying that the end of the declaration could send a bad message. What kind? That we might “let our guard down” about the virus.

Can we please stop with this complete nonsense? Absolutely no one knows how to keep one’s guard up about a virus and also go about regular life tasks. There’s no method anyone has that enables anyone to “be careful” about the virus.

No amount of hand sanitizer is going to keep the virus away. You can hide forever, but at some point, the virus will find you. To believe otherwise is to engage in complete fantasy. The virus is invisible to the naked eye. It’s impossible to observe some space and know that the virus is there and, therefore, adapt one’s personal behavior to avoid it.

And despite all the preposterous antics surrounding “track and trace,” that isn’t possible either. Even now, the government pretends otherwise. Returning from a trip to Mexico last week, I wasn’t even allowed to board the flight without making a sworn statement about my precise destination. This is presumably because if I get COVID-19, health authorities want to be able to warn all contacts all the way from Mexico.

This is just one sign of the amazing fantasy and lies we’ve endured for three years now, during which time constitutional government has been effectively supplanted by emergency law. It all began in January 2020, when the bureaucracies took over with the claim that they can do whatever they want regardless of the law. Forget the Bill of Rights. That was shredded.

Government by emergency isn’t government by the Constitution. Nor is it freedom. In a free society, the rule of law cannot be subject to approval by the elites. It isn’t just an option for good times. If a regime is permitted to suspend all normal processes and replace them with bureaucratic diktat, this isn’t a free country. But indeed that’s precisely what happened, starting in 2020.

I’ve been researching and watching carefully since those days, following every legal and epidemiological iteration. I’ve been reluctant to come to any final conclusions about precisely what this fiasco was all about. Initially, I believed it was just fear and concern over a new virus. But there are too many anomalies to believe that anymore.

In the end, I’ve reluctantly concluded that we experienced a quiet coup d’etat: The national security state quietly overthrew elected leadership and constitutional government under the cover of a health emergency. In this, there were many people who benefited: media, tech, and pharma, for starters. But the driving impetus for the whole operation is staring us in the face. They wanted to get rid of Trump and disenfranchise those who supported him.

There are surely other factors going on, including the ambitions of the nefarious elites who gathered in Davos for the World Economic Forum, and many others. But the thing that triggered the response was the motivation to displace constitutional government.

What to do in response to the evidence before our eyes? The power to declare these emergencies needs to be completely repealed, including and probably especially the whole of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 and every subsequent amendment. This is a huge priority in the United States, or else we are going to face another emergency, and then another, forever, and freedom itself will always be contingent, granted only when our overlords approve.

Sadly, the powerful elite aren’t done with us just yet. Not even after May 11.

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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