Americans were recently introduced to a funny little man named Dr. David Morens. I’ve been curious about him for years.
He was Dr. Anthony Fauci’s No. 2 at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He was not quite, in Godfather parlance, the consigliere. He was more of a plain-old gatekeeper. He controlled the access and worked to stop people from getting to Dr. Fauci while protecting his boss against knowing things that Dr. Fauci did not want to know.
Right now, Dr. Morens’s LinkedIn profile states that he is looking for work. That’s quite a fall. He went from among the most powerful figures in the world to depending on social media for his next gig.
In his testimony to the House Subcommittee on the topic of the virus response, Dr. Morens attempted to account for an astonishing string of emails that were confessing every crazy and futile attempt to hide communications between him, Dr. Fauci, and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, the supposed nonprofit chosen to launder money from NIH to the Wuhan Institute from which the virus leaked.
The emails are so crude and conspiratorial that I almost cannot believe we are seeing them. Someone must want his head on a platter, which is to say that he is dispensable. He surely knows this. Most likely the events confirm an intuition that he has long had: namely that he is just being used. Indeed that is true. He has served his purpose and now he is toast.
Keep in mind that this was in the midst of national calamity. Major cities had neighborhoods in cinders from Black Lives Matter riots, and most main streets in the United States had stores that were boarded up. Kids were not going back to physical school but rather being tutored in Zoom school.
Malls were closed up, as were theaters. Arts festivals were canceled, and sports were being played with cardboard fans, as astonishing as that seems now. We were all being told never to shake hands, stand six feet apart from every other person, never sing with others and don’t hold house parties, and don’t travel. It was pretty clear that most holidays would be canceled. People who dared walk the streets were in masks.
Church was obviously a no-go, although liquor and pot stores were fully functional.
So, yes, it was the apocalypse. Except that it was entirely imposed. The virus of which everyone seemed afraid had not changed since February 2020 when we first realized that it was a danger to the aged and infirm just as every other virus in existence. In other words, the entire bit could have been handled the way we always handle waves of flu: with doctors using their know-how and otherwise going about our business.
But no! Dr. Fauci and his backers (it’s still not entirely clear) had other ideas. Nope, we had to overthrow civilization itself.
Back to this weird article in Cell.
“The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has upended our entire planet,” they wrote, “quickly challenging past assumptions and future certainties. It possesses simultaneously three characteristics that have allowed it to render an historic assault on the human species, triggering a virtual global ‘lockdown’ as the only weapon against uncontrolled spread.”
Oh really? The ONLY weapon? This is utterly preposterous. Such policies had never been followed in the West, ever. We have a Bill of Rights for a reason. We have laws for a reason. We don’t just throw them all out because some bureaucrats think a stray member of the microbial kingdom is lurking here and there.
But that’s just the beginning of the absurdities. The article then plunges into history, not just decades ago or centuries ago but—get this—12,000 years ago! Yep: “Newly emerging (and re-emerging) infectious diseases have been threatening humans since the neolithic revolution, 12,000 years ago, when human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops.”
Hold on, just a moment. Marx only had a beef with the Industrial Revolution. Others gripe about the Reformation or the Fall of Rome. But Drs. Fauci and Morens beat them all: Their argument is with every step away from hunting and gathering! To their minds, that’s when everything got off track.
I know, it’s hard to believe, but the No. 1 and No. 2 among the most powerful people in public health actually wrote this in the midst of the biggest crisis of our lives. Did they want to undo all this history? No, don’t be silly. After all, they are realists.
“We cannot return to ancient times,” they admitted. But then they asked, “Can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction?”
Bend? Who is doing the bending and what is being bent? The answer is: you and I. Society. Everything. We can no longer live in harmony with nature. We must be crushed. Or as Drs. Morens and Fauci put it: we must commence “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
And why? If you read the text, you find out about something called “host switching,” which means that “human behaviors that perturb the human-microbial status quo have reached a tipping point that forecasts the inevitability of an acceleration of disease emergences.” And the only way to deal with that, of course, is to put this small group of mad scientists in charge of our lives, such that we have to do everything they say.
These days, I’m often astonished at the words I’m writing here, having to remind myself that I’m not writing fiction but the actual history of our time.
What is the underlying philosophy at work here? It is that every human being is a microbial threat to every other person. We all need to stay far apart from each other, not own pets, not procreate, not travel any distance at all, live entirely off whatever the land and trees deign to give us at the moment, and otherwise treat other human beings as pathogenic threats.
“You do not have personal liberties for yourself,” he said in one interview. “As a member of society reaping all the benefits of being a member of society, you have a responsibility to society. ... There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right. Of making your own decision for the greater good of society.”
And who decides what is good for society? You guessed it. It’s these very guys. They are our overlords. They and they alone. Please understand: It’s not just about the vaccine they want to market with hundreds of millions of royalties going to the NIH. They really do have an overarching and quite scary political vision too, one that reaches far beyond what any modern fanatic has ever suggested.
In other words, it’s not quite correct to say that social distancing, masking, and so forth were entirely made up. They were imposed for a reason, but it was not to mitigate COVID-19. It was to introduce a wholly new system of social and political organization. It was an experiment in total revolution, under the cover of virus control.
A world in which people do not have rights but rather are regarded as biohazards is not civilization as we know it. It’s not feudalism either. It’s something else. Something far more terrifying, a technocracy without precedent. That it comes from these little bureaucrats no one elected and no one controls is even stranger.
