First published June 3, 2020
Governments have used psychological warfare throughout history to manipulate public opinion, gain political advantage, and generate profits. Western governments have engaged in such tactics in the war on terrorism as well as in its predecessor, the war on communism. In both cases, state-sponsored terrorism and propaganda were used to distort the public’s perception of the threats, leading to increased governmental control of society and huge financial benefits for corporations. It appears that the same kinds of effects are being seen as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many of the features and outcomes seen in the war on terrorism and the war on communism are evident in this new “war on death.” Therefore, it’s reasonable to wonder if the extreme response to COVID-19, and its associated virus SARS-COV-2, could be another psychological operation against the public. Considering facts about the disease and the disproportionate response emphasizes the possibility.
If COVID-19 has been co-opted for manipulation of the public, through hyping the threat and pushing exploitive solutions, who is behind it and who benefits?
Let’s first review what features and outcomes the “coronavirus scare’ shares in common with the “red scare” that drove the perceived threat of communism and the “Muslim scare” behind the perceived threat of terrorism. Here are a dozen characteristics that these perceived threats share.
- Fear-based and globally directed
- Media saturation with bias toward fear
- Data manipulation and propaganda
- Censorship of opposing views
- Intelligence agency control of information
- Preceded by exercises mimicking the threat
- Series of claims made that are later proven false
- Response threatens democracy
- Large increase in wealth and power for a few; increase in social inequality
- Increased government control of the public and reduced individual freedoms
- Response kills far more than the original threat
- Evidence for manufactured events (see below)
There are also differences between the COVID-19 pandemic response and the “wars” on communism and terrorism. One difference is that, for the virus, agencies dedicated to public health have taken the lead. Although the central characters that hyped the communism threat and the terrorism threat were sometimes the same people, they tended to represent military, diplomatic, or intelligence agencies.
The primary actors driving the coronavirus lockdowns and associated control mechanisms are political leaders. However, the directives being acted upon come from the World Health Organization (WHO), an agency of the United Nations ostensibly responsible for international public health. Others controlling the coronavirus scare are national health agencies, most notably the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS).
Are these agencies acting solely in the interest of public health?
The WHO
The common impression is that the entire matter began in reaction to events in China but even that is not clear. For example, the virus is said to have originated in the city of Wuhan and the first, limited, lockdown occurred in that area from January to March. China has since said that it warned the WHO about the virus during the first week of January. However, it is known that U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of the potential outbreak even before that, in November 2019. A Chinese spokesman later suggested that the U.S. military might have brought the virus to Wuhan during the military games held there in October.
The first instance of an entire country being locked down for the coronavirus was in Italy. This occurred on March 9th based on advice from the Italian government’s coronavirus adviser Walter Ricciardi, who said,
“The situation risks going out of control and these measures are necessary to keep the spread at bay.”
Ricciardi, a WHO committee member, later admitted that Italy had inflated the death counts from the virus, stating,
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.”
Many have noted the inordinate influence of billionaire Bill Gates on the activities and direction of the WHO. As of 2017, this influence was seen as troubling, with health advocates fearing that, “because the Gates Foundation’s money comes from investments in big business, it could serve as a Trojan horse for corporate interests to undermine WHO’s role in setting standards and shaping health policies.”
Gates has been called a ruthless schemer by his Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Allen is not alone in that assessment.
Despite engaging in a costly “public charm offensive,” Gates is seen by many as a predatory and monopolistic opportunist hiding behind a false front of philanthropy. With regard to the coronavirus scare and Gates’ stated goal of vaccinating the entire world population, however, people should be most concerned that he has worked diligently on mechanisms of population control.
Of course, no one person controls the world yet so who is supposed to be running WHO, apart from Bill Gates? The face of the WHO is Dr. Tedros Adhanom, the director-general of the organization. Tedros has a poor history of ethics in leadership, with many accusations having been made against him including that he covered-up epidemics in the past.
Alarms about Tedros began to go off immediately after his appointment in 2017, when he named Robert Mugabe, the former dictator of Zimbabwe, as a goodwill ambassador to the WHO. Mugabe’s rule over Zimbabwe was dominated by “murder, bloodshed, torture, persecution of political opponents, intimidation and vote-rigging on a grand scale.” This appointment indicated that Tedros’ judgment of goodwill was dubious at best.
A letter from a group of American doctors that same year described why Tedros has become known as “Dr. Cover Up.” They wrote,
“Your silence about what is clearly a massive cholera epidemic in Sudan daily becomes more reprehensible. The inevitable history that will be written of this cholera epidemic will surely cast you in an unforgiving light.” They added that Tedros was “fully complicit in the terrible suffering and dying that continues to spread in East Africa.”
Problems at WHO didn’t start with Tedros, however. After the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, evidence came to light that the WHO had exaggerated the danger and had spread fear and confusion rather than helpful information. It was later learned that “Italy, Germany, France and the U.K. made secret agreements with pharmaceutical companies” that “obliged the countries to buy vaccinations only if the WHO raised the pandemic to a level 6.” The WHO then proceeded to change its guidelines for defining a pandemic in order to accommodate those contracts, thereby increasing the public’s fear despite the fact that the pandemic never became a serious threat.
Although WHO has been praised for its work to reduce some illnesses like polio, it has also been found that drugs and vaccines recommended by WHO have been “found to be harmful and without significant clinical effect.”
A comprehensive view suggests that the WHO is more of a corporate interest agency than an organization committed to preserving public health. That’s not surprising due to the fact that 80% of WHO’s funding comes from “voluntary contributions” provided by private donors including pharmaceutical companies and industry groups like Bill Gates’ Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). And since the worldwide response to COVID-19 has been directed and coordinated by an organization that works on behalf of multi-national corporations that stand to benefit, the idea that the coronavirus scare could be a psychological operation seems plausible.
The CDC
In the U.S, the CDC is also heavily influenced by corporate and political interests. This became clear when, in 2016, a group of senior scientists within the CDC filed an ethics complaint against the agency making that exact claim. They wrote, “It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests.” The scientists noted that, in order to pursue political objectives, “definitions were changed and data cooked” at CDC, even to the point of misrepresenting data to Congress.
Like the WHO, the CDC has a history of pushing harmful vaccines. An example was covered in a 60 Minutes episode exposing the harm done by the Swine Flu vaccine in 1976 and CDC’s urging that all Americans be injected with that harmful vaccine. The report revealed that the illness was hyped based on very questionable data and the vaccine caused neurological damage.
The current Director of CDC is retired U.S. Army doctor Robert Redfield, who is known for having led the Pentagon’s disastrous response to HIV-AIDS in the 1980s. “A devout catholic, Redfield saw AIDS as the product of an immoral society. For many years, he championed a much-hyped remedy that was discredited in tests. That debacle led to his removal from the job in 1994.” Public health reporter Laurie Garrett remarked, “Redfield is about the worst person you could think of to be heading the CDC at this time. He lets his prejudices interfere with the science, which you cannot afford during a pandemic.”
The CDC is an agency within the department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Alex Azar, a lawyer and former pharmaceutical company executive, was appointed as Secretary of HHS in 2017. Azar has deep connections to the pharmaceutical industry and is known for having engaged in price gouging with his former employer.
Azar is also known for leading the HHS response to the anthrax scare of 2001, the first known bioterrorism attack on the United States. The anthrax attacks were targeted against members of Congress and the media that were dissenting voices in the national discussion about the Patriot Act, the oppressive legislation introduced immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Although Muslims were first blamed through highly questionable evidence, it was ultimately found that the weaponized anthrax came from U.S. military laboratories.
Azar was instrumental in defining the National Biodefense Strategy in 2018, working closely with John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Advisor. Bolton, a neocon and member of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), has a long history of pushing authoritarian policies and war.
In the U.S. the person most visibly in charge of the COVID-19 response is Anthony Fauci, who is the long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Like Redfield, Dr. Fauci is a Catholic and has said that values he learned in his Jesuit education continue to guide him.
After weeks of Fauci having led the coronavirus response in the U.S., it was learned that his NIAID had funded “gain of function” research at the Wuhan laboratory where the SARS-COV-2 virus is suspected of having originated. Fauci’s response to questions about that inexplicable coincidence was simply to denounce “conspiracy theories” rather than addressing the questions directly, much as others did when questioned about 9/11 foreknowledge.
Whether SARS-COV-2 was genetically engineered in a laboratory, like the NIAID-funded Wuhan lab, is a subject that has become of interest to many scientists. The Wuhan laboratory is not the only place the U.S. supports work like this, however, as the Pentagon funds such labs in 25 countries across the world. Located in places such as Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa, these labs isolate and manipulate viruses like the bat coronaviruses from which SARS-COV-2 originated. This bat-research program is further coordinated by a group called EcoHealth Alliance.
The manipulation of viruses for gain of function at U.S. funded labs is, like the origin of the weaponized anthrax at U.S. labs, evidence that bioterrorism and pandemics can be manufactured events. This is another way in which the coronavirus scare could reflect the war on terrorism and war on communism, both of which were driven by manufactured terrorist events.
It is remarkable that Fauci funded work to manipulate coronaviruses then became the voice of the coronavirus pandemic response while also working closely with Bill Gates’ GAVI initiative. Fauci has boasted that NIAID and GAVI work together to push vaccines with “outright collaboration between us in setting the standard of what is needed.” This makes it easier to see that a new pattern of hyped pandemics resulting in increased population control and global vaccinations is not only possible but would be a very lucrative business model.
The NHS and Corporate Nations
By now it’s well known that the initial projections for deaths due to COVID-19 were massively overestimated and one academic paper was responsible for the panic. The lead author of that paper, Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, has since resigned in disgrace from his government advisory position. Much like the U.S. government’s explanation for destruction of the World Trade Center buildings, his estimates were based on computer models that cannot be shared with the public.
As in the U.S., U.K. intelligence agencies have taken a leading role in managing the coronavirus scare. The terrorism expert who is expected to be the next chief of MI6 was selected to lead a new “biosecurity centre” to evaluate the coronavirus threat and “enable rapid intervention.” Additionally, the U.K. intelligence agency known as Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) was granted powers over the NHS’s computer systems. GCHQ is known for engaging in illegal activities related to population control mechanisms such as mass surveillance.
Totalitarian outcomes are further enabled with billionaire Peter Thiel’s CIA-initiated company Palantir managing the databases used by both the CDC and UK’s NHS that drive COVID-19 decision making. For perspective, in 2009, Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” providing another clue that public health and awareness are not the main priorities behind the coronavirus scare.
The data behind the COVID-19 pandemic was never reliable, with test kits being inaccurate, government policies inflating the death counts, and the media focusing solely on fear-based predictions that are repeatedly proven false. Recently, scientists and government leaders from other countries, including Russia, Germany and Denmark, have begun speaking out about how the coronavirus threat has been exaggerated.
The outcomes of the coronavirus scare have included huge windfalls for billionaires, financial institutions, and corporations. Legislation being passed in response to COVID-19 is largely beneficial to corporate interests. The outcomes for everyone else have been fear, unemployment, poverty, loss of freedoms, grave risks to democracy, and death.
How this is possible is related to the fact that governments, and the nations they represent, are no longer what they were. In many ways, corporations have replaced governments as the drivers of public policy and, as with Peter Thiel’s Palantir, the public’s interest is not their concern. Meanwhile, over two dozen companies have become larger and more powerful than many national governments. As a result, governments are now false fronts for corporations and the decisions they make, for example to lockdown citizens and remake their economies, are driven by profit-based strategies indifferent to public interests.
In summary, the features and outcomes of the coronavirus scare reflect those of previous psychological operations including the war on terrorism and its predecessor, the war on communism. The people and agencies driving the coronavirus scare have a history of unethical behaviors, including hyping pandemics to push vaccines, and appear to seek long-term profits through implementation of a highly controlled society. Therefore, the response to COVID-19, if not the virus itself, can be seen as a psychological operation used to drive those outcomes.
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Kevin Ryan writes on Dig Within where this article was originally published.
Featured image is from The Unz Review
