I Remember a Pandemic

An account of the lockdown years and their aftermath. If you supported lockdowns, walked around with a mask on, got yourself ‘vaccinated’, and criticised those who objected to living in a bio-security state, what follows will make difficult reading. I suggest you deal with this difficulty by getting agitated and then, to get rid of the agitation, either finding a reason to throw your hands into the air and walk away in the first two paragraphs, or looking for one or two doubtful claims, countering them with facts of your own, and declaring the whole thing an outrage. Do not, under any circumstances, take in the whole argument.

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

Marshall McLuhan.

I remember a worldwide ‘pandemic’, which occurred between 2020 and 2022. During these three years the world population grew,1 all-cause mortality rates were not wildly abnormal,2 hospitals often stood empty (sometimes so empty staff could spend their time making amusing dance videos3) and the good old-fashioned flu mysteriously vanished from medical records as a cause of death. The IFR (Infection Fatality Rate; the percentage of people infected with a disease that are expected to die) of this ‘pandemic’ was similar to a bad year of the flu, perhaps a very bad year (such as the 1957 flu epidemic).4 It overwhelmingly struck people in their seventies and eighties (i.e. at the age they die anyway), it did not kill children, those most susceptible to deadly illnesses of this sort, it did not kill celebrities under the age of 50, and, miraculously, it left the whole continent of Africa unscathed.5 I also remember that the data that revealed all this was openly available at the time, just as it is now.

There clearly was a rise in all-cause mortality during the ‘pandemic’ years, there clearly was a virus killing people. The reason I am making it possible to instantly dismiss my position, by putting ‘pandemic’ in scare quotes, is because, firstly, I draw the line where the WHO used to in its pre-Covid definition of pandemic, as an enormous number of deaths and illness,6 which is to say an event which, by virtue of its enormity, is visible, which can be verified by the senses (and I am not interested in arguing with people who don’t access reality through their senses7). And secondly, putting aside the various co-morbidities which were roped under the rubric of Covid deaths, and putting aside the fact it was laying waste to eighty-year olds, in many cases it wasn’t Covid that was killing people at all; it was the authorities, who were depriving them of their livelihoods, depriving them of a healthy life and depriving them of treatment.

I remember a ‘pandemic’ which the UK government spent half a trillion pounds tackling. Not by making available cheap drugs and treatments well known to address such a disease — such as ivermectin, vitamin D and anticoagulants8 — but by pumping oceans of cash into a locked down economy.9 Amazingly, and purely coincidentally, this act was instrumental in cooling down an overheating financial system on the brink of collapse (while insulating the real economy from inflation), but to suggest that all the money was spent for anything other than a purely altruistic desire to improve public health, a famous concern of governments everywhere, or to suggest that mask-mandates, forced vaccinations, digital IDs and similar bio-security measures might not be in the interests of ordinary people, was instantly dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory.’

I remember the videos of the ‘pandemic’ which came out of China in the early days, of people falling down dead in streets that had to be cleaned by men in Hazmat suits. For some reason these vanished. I remember images of overfilled morgues in Italy, which, as Reuters eventually admitted, were from 2013, when a large number of refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. I remember having to keep two metres distance from my fellow humans and stand in front of thin pieces of plexiglass that viruses were unable to get round. And of course I remember the lockdowns which, apparently, were necessary to tackle the ‘pandemic’, despite the large number of studies10 which showed they did not work, and could not work, and despite the very government which told us lockdowns had to be imposed because this virus was so deadly, ignoring them.

I remember a ‘pandemic’ which was made up not of deaths from Covid, but by deaths with it, a veritable obsession with cases. These statistical objects were detected with PCR tests, developed at light-speed by a man, Christian Drosten, who said ‘we wouldn’t even know the virus existed if we didn’t test for it’, a fact backed up by the many criticisms of his foundational Corman-Drosten paper,11 as well as by Antony ‘The Science’ Fauci, who said that PCR tests were useless and misleading and eventually even by the WHO which ended up presenting it as an aid for diagnosis, and not a test for it.

I remember a ‘pandemic’ in which you could wake up feeling asymptomatic, pop down to the local deserted test centre, have a swab rammed up your nostril, be told that, although you feel completely fine, you were a ‘case’ now carrying a civilisation-destroying disease, rush home to self-isolate, get hit by a bus in your scramble to safety, die of internal bleeding… and be counted as a coronavirus death. Even if you died a month later you’d be put down as death by Covid; not unlike having a swim, dying 30 days later from cancer and having cause of death recorded as ‘drowning’.

I remember a ‘pandemic’ which spread, unlike any other epidemic in history, by asymptomatic transmission. Before the ‘pandemic’ it was an established fact that although people without symptoms can pass on illness, asymptomatic people are not vectors for contagious diseases, for the simple and transparently obvious reason that they are healthy. That’s what (amongst other things) ‘healthy’ means, or did mean before 2020; not having symptoms of ill health. For the first time in history this fundamental fact was turned inside out, presented to human beings as the truth and then widely accepted.

I remember millions of deaths around the world from shut-down health-services, destroyed livelihoods, disrupted logistics and wiped out working-class income (often ascribed to the ‘pandemic’); but none of that was as important as ‘caring for the vulnerable,’ because protecting 80 year olds in care homes is what society is all about. I remember the minds of the young being ruined by two years of solitary confinement. I remember an unprecedented expansion of state control, groundless suspension of civil liberties, the abolition of informed medical consent, and, despite the most conspicuously totalitarian initiatives of the ‘pandemic’ years being laid aside, a decisive lurch towards the dystopian technocratic future we’re still facing. And I remember widespread fear, distrust, paranoia, hysterical panic and suppression of all forms of dissent, or even doubt.

I remember that many doctors and scientists who pointed out that deaths were exaggerated, lockdowns were useless and the ‘vaccines’ potentially dangerous were ignored during the ‘pandemic’; and not just ludicrous fringe figures (such as David Icke and Piers Corbyn, who fulfilled their function of being targets for conspicuous ridicule), but epidemiology experts and professors of medicine at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, as well as a chief medical officer, an ex vice president at Pfizer and even a Nobel prize winner.12 I remember that they were not just ignored for expressing scepticism — sometimes extremely mild and cautious doubt — but censored, harassed and vilified. Even arrested. And that’s without counting the doctors and medical scientists who, threatened with losing their jobs, were too scared to speak up.

Talking of cowardice, I remember professional-class radicals, including just about the entire left-wing13, remaining silent or actively pushing for harsher lockdowns or more vaccinations; including Noam Chomsky,14 John Zerzan,15 Slavoj Žižek,16 Judith Butler, Chris Hedges, Paul Street,17 Jürgan Habermas, Bruno Latour, John Pilger, Media Lens, David Graeber,18 Irvine Welsh, George Monbiot, George Galloway, Jonathan Cook, Daniel Pinchbeck, Paul Kingsnorth, Dougald Hine, Rachael Swindon, Glenn Greenwald, South Park, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Loach, Bernie Sanders, Peter Limburg, Russell Brand, Naomi Klein, Glenn Greenwald, Moon of Alabama, Caitlin Johnstone,19 Ran Prieur, The Stranglers, Sonic Youth, The Dead Kennedys and, ironically enough, Rage Against the Machine. They, like the crowds of silent slebs, didn’t mind that lockdowns destroyed the livelihoods,20 and the lives, of the poor people they [sometimes] pretend to care about, while allowing for a colossal transfer of wealth and power to their putative enemies—transnational corporations and their shareholders.21 A few ‘spoke out’ later, when it was safe to do so (Kingsnorth, for example, and Brand), but were either actively complicit or silent in 2020 and 2021, when it actually mattered.

I remember the left fetishising abstract conceptions of nature, life and society to an hitherto unprecedented degree. The danger was not something which we human beings had it in our power to assess for ourselves; just as we had to be reminded that Covid existed with terrifying videos and posters, so we had to go via charts, graphs and similar such expert-interpreted spectacle in order to grasp the severity of the situation. Likewise, we couldn’t handle Virus ourselves, deal with it intelligently and collectively; for it was an autonomous, sovereign, all-powerful master which we had to prostrate ourselves to, just as we do to the perils of climate change or of official enemies. It was not leaders, politicians or officials who decreed we had to imprison ourselves in our rooms and treat our fellows, even our children, like enemies. No, no; it was Virus. See—here are the graphs! The reason for all the outrageously invasive forms of social control was not to preserve the system or enrich those with most power in it. No, no, no, it was all done for life, for society! We had to save lives at all costs. Freedom, autonomy, individuality, dignity, even family, even, oddly enough life; all were expendable before abstract ideas of ‘nature’, ‘life’ and ‘society’.

I remember that many people at the time were surprised by the left’s hypocritical support for a war on the poor (not to mention on the ‘people of colour’ they fetishise) and for its enthusiastic acceptance of a massive expansion of the technocratic system. Very few people understood then, or now (for the people above are still taken seriously), the self-interest of the left (its instinctive bias towards professionalism and civilised institutionalism), its managerialism (viewing people as manipulable objects or medical cases), its repressed hatred of the poor (disguised by moralising pity and justified by fomentation of moral panics), its irresponsibility (personal duty is handed over to the professionally managed, democratic mass), its self-contempt and low self-esteem (and consequent hysterical hyper-sensitivity to both criticism and intimacy), its morbid fear of physicality (dirt, disorder, death, belching, farting), and its pathological oversocialisation (and compulsive need to suppress individuality under the fig-leaf of ‘pacifism’); very few people understood all this and so very few people understood why the left didn’t just support professionally-managed, poor-destroying, tech-enhancing lockdowns against a flu-like illness but enthusiastically campaigned for harsher, more repressive measures.22

Given the nature of the leftist professional-class,23 you’d expect it, a class of people whose power and identity depends on managing people within institutions, who have both the need and the power to substitute society for submission to institutions and who never have to face their fellows outside of institutions, as individuals; you would expect these institutionalised aphids to be cowards, wouldn’t you? Similarly, you’d expect people who own nice, spacious properties to be sanguine about locking down poor people into the cupboards they rent from the professional-class. You’d expect all that; but I remember that many ordinary people went along with it all too. Personally, I found this most depressing. Even those who knew that it was all bullshit were afraid not just of fines the government imposed for not wearing a face mask, not just of the police slapping their wrists for visiting friends, but of shop assistants! Of course grown men couldn’t tell themselves they were afraid of supermarket security guards, much less of clasping a stranger’s hand or getting a bit dirty, so they invented some other reason why they were putting on masks.

I remember lots and lots of people wearing masks. Sometimes when cycling, sometimes even when alone in their cars! Why? Fear, for the most part, and ignorance. That’s easy to explain. More perplexing is why were masks were mandated at all, when they cannot stop the transmission of viruses (surgeons don’t wear them for that reason) and were demonstrated, in study after study,24 to be useless (even if they are clean, properly handled and only used once — which ‘pandemic’ masks certainly weren’t). Masks did however, like all the hand disinfectant everywhere and the one-way arrows on the pavements, have a symbolic function; they reminded people of the mortal danger that their fellow men and women represented and they reminded them of the hygienic virtue of following rules that were designed, from pure love, to protect ‘society’.

And, talking of protection, I remember the ‘vaccines’. Do you remember those? They weren’t really vaccines, which are fragments of dead or weakened pathogens which the body develops an immune response to, but something entirely new; synthetic molecules that programmed cells to synthesize pathogens in the form of a ‘spike protein’ that the immune system then had to fight off, perhaps forever. I remember, even though we knew at the time that the absolute risk reduction from ‘vaccines’ was between minuscule and non-existent, and that not one independent study confirmed their safety and efficacy,25 that millions of people chose to be injected with them. That’s right, they chose to be injected with a rapidly deployed, poorly tested synthetic substance26 which caused their immune system to attack their own bodies, quite possibly for the rest of their life, because… their government told them to.

Can you believe it? Millions and millions of people put experimental gene-hacking chemicals — produced by massive drug companies that first secured complete indemnity from risk — into their bodies, and into the bodies of their children,27 without doing any serious research (beyond mainstream bromides), not just once, not twice, but sometimes three times, four… some people are still doing it… for no other reason than that they were told to, either by their boss or by the government. Of course only an expert could say whether all the blood clots, heart problems, myocarditis, cancers28 and sudden deaths since the pandemic29 — are due to these ‘vaccines’. I’m not an expert, so I don’t know. I wouldn’t rule it out though, would you? If so, perhaps you’d like to seriously address the leaked data from New Zealand30 on ‘vaccine’-related mortality?

My final memory of the ‘pandemic’ was the arrival of the war in the Ukraine, which started practically to the hour that the coronavirus emergency was declared over. It could of course be a remarkable coincidence, but perpetual emergency, specifically perpetual war — on drugs, on AIDS, on terrorism, on paedophiles, on climate change, on the evil Rus — plays a central role in keeping the capitalist bubble pumped up, distracting the population from social collapse and securing its support for moral crusades that justify both the printing of money on an unimaginable scale as well as well as more and more oppressive social control. So it’s to be expected that some existential threat would appear when Virus had run its course. Not, I hasten to add, because a Secret Them controls the world. The technological system has its own totalising technical-financial logic which its owners and managers must conform to—which is why all conspiracy theories (both the nutty ones and the reasonable ones) are beside the point. Right now the system demands a controlled demolition of the world economy and so that is what those who own and manage the system are attempting.

Talking of ‘conspiracy theories’, one last memory of the ‘pandemic’. I remember that any kind of doubt or dissension about the severity of the terrible scourge of Covid — any kind, mind you — would be associated with the most preposterous ideological posturing, such as the terror of the professional-class, ‘racism’. The reason for this was partly to damn unacceptable criticism by association, but principally to conceal class war. As I say, the middle class fear, and therefore hate, the working class, but because they cannot openly express their hatred—it’s just not nice—they cover their anxieties and ambitions with moralising pity and ‘solidarity’, with indirect attacks on the taste of the lower class—their taste in politics, in rituals and beliefs, in art, in dress and even in names— and with endless chatter about the dangers of capitalism, intolerance, fascism and so on which the working class are tragically susceptible to. Fortunately, the ‘pandemic’ enabled the professional-managerial left to make enormous strides in dealing with ‘capitalists’, ‘fascists’, ‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘gammon’, ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘white supremacists’ who, coincidentally enough, also happened to be their longstanding [white31] working class enemies.

To summarise, I remember a ‘pandemic’ which was almost entirely a media-generated spectacle, which never really existed. There was a virus, it did kill many people, but there was an not a 1918-type bio-medical catastrophe. I remember a ‘pandemic’ in which everything done to combat it made us sicker, more anxious, more afraid, more lonely, poorer and more dependent on an inhuman, unnatural, technocratic system owned by a morally crippled class of capitalists and managed by a bloodless class of professionals. I remember a ‘pandemic’ which revealed all but a handful of people to be either fools, who believed in the lies of the system, or, worse, cowards,32 who didn’t believe in them, but who went along with it all anyway, ‘for an easy life’.

Do you remember that ‘pandemic’? If you are neither a fool nor a coward then probably you did. Probably your memory of it is as sharp as mine. If not, I would imagine it’s all getting a bit hazy in your mind, as shameful events, those that you participated in, tend to.33 But don’t worry, because I remember, and I’m not alone. You can find others who remember. It wasn’t that long ago, after all. That said, if there is another ‘pandemic’ soon, or perhaps a ‘climate emergency’ which necessitates similar measures to those proposed during the Covid ‘pandemic’ (lockdowns, digital IDs, CBDCs, resource-rationing, social restrictions, etc, etc.), I might not write about it as I did [throughout] the last one, I’m not sure it will be quite as necessary; but I won’t forget it, and hopefully neither will you.

Hopefully next time you’ll stand up for what you know to be the truth.

Notes