musings on the militarization of covid

when (and why) did respiratory viruses become national security?

a lot of very strange things seem to have happened in the west around covid and covid response.

not only did we take every piece of evidence-based epidemic guideline that had stood in place for 100 years and toss it out the window, but we then immediately adopted its diametric opposite as “proven policy” and recklessly imposed it in draconian fashion as though his was somehow “the science™.”

public panic was pursued as pandemic policy and response rammed down throats as trumped up moral imperative backed by increasingly overt threats and mandates.

dissidents were vilified and silenced. disagreement was disparaged and drowned under demagoguery.

the party line was as relentless and uncriticizable as it was lacking in foundation.

it felt like we were under attack.

it was not so much public health as war and as the fog clears we can increasingly see why: because this was done by soldiers.

this trend was astonishingly endemic. a few examples:

the UK

canada

the netherlands

(translated from dutch via google)

don’t even get me started on china or the australian reversion to prison colony.

i suspect you’d be hard pressed to find a country in the west where this was not so and where not only were militaries and military grade infowar and propaganda techniques used against an unsuspecting citizenry, but where they are not, as is so clearly the case in the US, seeking to keep doing it.

this does not instill confidence.

but how did all this happen?

the US response was largely dictated early on by deborah birx, a woman who came from a military and walter reed background and had almost no direct experience in this sort of pandemic.

she did not come to the white house through a health agency but rather under the auspices of matt pottinger, the national security advisor. it seems she was feeding his wife yen non-public info from china and he then put her forward to run white house response.

this is, on it’s face, a really weird choice and situation.

• why would the security/military apparatus step forward at such a time?

• and why, the minute that they did, did folks like fauci and redfield turn on a dime and start advocating the exact opposite of that which they had been (which had previously been in accord with longstanding practice)?

• why suddenly adopt 27 kinds of deeply restrictive pseudoscience from a fountain of fake data like birx?

• and why, all over the world, was this a military/security state issue and not a health agency one?

it sure is an interesting question.

i don’t think there has ever been a disease response like it in the developed world.

a divergence of this sort and magnitude would seem to require a potent causative agent to induce it.

so let’s put on our prognosticating hats and give it a bit of a think.

obviously, what’s about to follow is speculative. i claim no special knowledge here, just a tendency to see the shapes that underlie pixelated mosaics.

but it sure seems to like like the most parsimonious explanation here is a simple one:

governments knew this was a gain of function lab escape and not a naturally evolved virus and feared what that might mean.

this put the controls and roadmap for handling it in the hands of the military and security agencies, not the health agencies who were grabbed and dragooned into compliance to assure their loyalty (and perhaps to hide their culpability as matters of “security.”

they did not know how the pandemic would play out but even more so feared the idea that the public would panic even more if it knew this was man made and feared a “bioweapon” (something i do not believe SARS-COV-2 is or was ever intended to be) because that story rather than “vaccine program” would be the first jump from “lab escape” in the public consciousness.

“national security” was invoked, blast shutters dropped, patriot act (or similar) powers evoked, and the kinds of people who plan invasions were put in charge of public safety for fear this might wind up seeming like some sort of war.

and so it became one in all but name.

allowing daszak et all to get blamed for building this with NIH and US military grants was deemed “harmful to national security” and they fired up the propaganda machine.

of all the covidian claims, that’s the one that actually worked on me for a minute because it seemed absurd to me that if someone were building a bioweapon, they’d use a coronavirus as the base. (it was not until later when i figured out the vaccines and DARPA angles daszak, baric, hotez, and their merry band of serial passagers had been playing that i revised this view and changed my mind.)

peter daszak: supervillain origin story

and interestingly enough, i think the two sides of the story lend credibility to one another.

what we know daszak et al to have been doing makes a military takeover of response look more likely.

the fact that there was a military takeover of response seems to make it more likely that there was some extraordinary issue like what petey d was cooking up.

and everybody involved gets a nice bucket of new money, a shiny new gig, and a rousing attaboy.

an awful lot of oddly available resources were suddenly brought to bear.

every safety measure was disabled and process circumvented.

no questions are asked.

when you see government actually evidence some competence at lockstep omerta, it’s usually security services at work.

and folks like redfield seem to validate it. (perhaps this is why he’s no longer at CDC?)

the speed with which all the doubters fell silent and the “what happened in the henhouse commission” was suddenly 100% foxes venting vulpine viciousness at any who said them nay was as striking as the thoroughness of the shift.

that generally takes real, no screwing around threats. like, “guantanamo is lovely this time of year” kind of threats…

so, look, it’s just a theory, but if i were, say, congress, i’d sure have a pretty keen interest in getting to bedrock facts here.

what happened in the US and around the world was unprecedented, and wanting to know why seems like a needed avenue of inquiry.

and were i on the new house committee on the weaponization of government, “who knew what and when?” as well as “who made these choices and why?” would be top of my list.

if the government is hiding facts to protect itself from we the people, that’s a dire threat utterly incompatible with “consent of the governed.”

something awfully odd went down here and an awful lot of people all over the world sure seemed to be in on it all at once and acting in remarkable unison to repudiate every shred of standard practice we had.

seems a stretch to presume “it just happened” that everyone suddenly decided “hey, let’s use the military for public health” at once…