(Updated July 2023 based upon an article originally published by PANDA in March 2022)
It’s been three years since COVID-19 emerged as a dominant and, for some time, all-consuming issue. Now there are signs we are witnessing the unravelling of some of the key policy responses – blanket lockdowns and population-wide injections – that have been so aggressively promoted by many, although not all, governments around the world.
There is also reluctance by many to concede there have been problems with the COVID-19 responses to date. However, doubts about the efficacy of lockdowns are now widely aired and well substantiated and there is increasing evidence for, and awareness of, the dangers surrounding the mRNA genetic vaccine. And it is at least clear that large numbers of people, including scientists and academics, are expressing views at odds with authority or mainstream claims that lockdowns reduce mortality and that mass injections are a rational and efficacious solution.
As debate over ‘The Science’ increases, more and more people now question whether or not there is more to COVID-19 in terms of underlying agendas, in particular with respect to global-level actors such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and so-called ‘Big Pharma’. In the early days of COVID-19 any such talk was immediately dismissed as ‘conspiratorial’ nonsense and, broadly speaking, people raising non-mainstream doubts about any aspect of the COVID-19 issue were subjected to vilification by ‘authoritative’ voices and corporate media.
Such dynamics were very much in evidence with respect to debate over the origins of COVID-19. And yet, today, the so-called ‘lab leak theory’, whatever its veracity, has moved from a‘sphere of deviance’ to a ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’ with mainstream scientists through to legacy media and governments discussing it. At the same time, there is increased public awareness of various political agendas, for example the WEF’s ‘great reset’ visions. Indeed, a refrain from some quarters is that yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s fact. So, if all this is not about a virus, what might actually be going on?
COVID-19 and the ‘Structural Deep Event’ concept
No ruling class could survive if it wasn’t attentive to its own interests; consciously trying to anticipate, control or initiate events at home and abroad both overtly and secretly. It is hard to imagine a modern state if there would be no conspiracy, no plans, no machinations, deceptions or secrecy within the circles of power. In the United States there have been conspiracies aplenty … they are all now a matter of public record. (Parenti, 1993)
It is a fact, then, that powerful political and economic actors do not blindly and irrationally stumble through history but rather strategise, plan and take actions that are expected to achieve results. They may make mistakes and plans are not always successful, but that does not mean they do not try and sometimes succeed in their aims and objectives. For example the tobacco industry worked long and hard, and with some success, to shape scientific and political discourse regarding their product and delay public awareness of its dangers.
Second, it is also true that powerful actors can have clear perceptions of their interests and are guided by the desire to realise, protect and further them. Where those interests come from might be reducible to any number of material or ideological influences. But origins do not matter, powerful actors still have conceptions of their interests and what they want to do.
Third, in today’s world of weakening democracies, corporate conglomerates and extreme concentration of wealth, it is also true that many political and economic actors are extremely powerful, whether measured in relative or absolute terms. They have resources and skills at their disposal that others do not. One potent tool available is that of propaganda, which grants significant leverage and influence to those with the skills and resources to disseminate it. For those liberals who remain at peace with their world - believing that powerful actors simply relay their political, economic and social goals to knowledgeable publics who then consent, or refuse to consent, to those goals - the fact that propaganda is exercised extensively across liberal democratic states comes as a shock. Indeed, many mainstream scholars struggle to recognise the role of propaganda even in well documented examples such as that of the tobacco industry shaping the science on the harms of smoking or the bogus claims regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Recognising that propaganda is a major component of exercising power within so-called liberal democratic states logically removes any justification for the assumptions that a) powerful actors cannot or do not manipulate publics and b) citizenry are sufficiently autonomous and knowledgeable to always be able to grant or withhold consent.
And as Parenti observed, history is replete with examples of powerful actors successfully pursuing goals and manipulating populations in the process. In the days after 9/11, we now know that British and American officials were planning a wide-ranging series of actions – so called ‘regime-change’ wars – that went well outside the scope of the official narrative regarding combating alleged ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’. One British embassy cable stated, four days after 9/11, that ‘[t]he “regime-change hawks” in Washington are arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose [against international terrorism] could be used to clear up other problems in the region’. Within weeks British Prime Minister Tony Blair communicated with US president George W. Bush saying, amongst many other things, ‘If toppling Saddam is a prime objective, it is far easier to do it with Syria and Iran in favour or acquiescing rather than hitting all three at once’. As these two western leaders conspired at the geo-strategic level, a low-level ‘spin doctor’, Jo Moore, commented on the utility of 9/11 in terms of day-to-day ‘media management’, noting that it was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Jo Moore was forced to resign, Bush and Blair laid the tracks for 20-plus years of conflict in the international system, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the recently ended 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. And today, there is substantial evidence that the foundational official story regarding the 9/11 crimes is in fact false with the evidence clearly pointing toward the involvement of a number of state-level actors, including within the US.
Professor Peter Dale Scott (University of California, Berkley) developed the idea of the ‘structural deep event’ and this is useful in capturing the idea that powerful actors frequently work to instigate, exploit or exacerbate events in ways that enable substantive and long-lasting societal transformations. These frequently involve, according to Scott, a combination of legal and illegal activity implicating both legitimate and public-facing political structures as well as covert or hidden parts of government – the so-called deep state which is understood as the interface ‘between the public, the constitutionally established state, and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power, and violence outside the government’. So, for example, Scott argues that the JFK assassination became an event that enabled the maintenance of the Cold War whilst the 9/11 crimes likewise enabled the global ‘war on terror’, and that both involved a variety of actors not usually recognized in mainstream or official accounts of these events. It is important to note that Scott claims his approach does not necessarily imply a simplistic grand conspiracy, but is rather based on the idea of opaque networks of powerful and influential groups whose interests converge, at points, and who act to either instigate or exploit events in order to pursue their objectives.
Applied to COVID-19, a ‘structural deep event’ reading would point toward a constellation of actors, with overlapping interests, working to advance agendas, and being enabled to do so because of COVID-19. Such a reading does not necessarily include or exclude the possibility of COVID-19 being an instigated event and one that functioned, in the widest sense, as a propaganda event enabling powerful actors to realise their goals. What are the grounds for seriously considering a ‘structural deep event’ reading?
The damaging COVID-19 response
A large swathe of scientists and medical professionals are now clearly and repeatedly warning governments and populations that lockdowns are harmful and ineffective whilst mass injection of populations with an experimental genetic vaccine resulted in substantial harms. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that the use of the PCR test, which gave a skewed impression of infection and death rates leading to the locking down of entire(healthy) populations for extended periods of time in response to a respiratory virus, and then attempting to submit people to an experimental injection on a repeated basis, were notscientifically robust policies. As of mid 2023, although causes are disputed, there continues to be worrying excess mortality across many countries. It is also now clear to many that the scale and nature of COVID-19 was exaggerated in a way that suggested the existence of an entirely new and unusually deadly pathogen that demanded drastic responses when, in fact, this was not the case.
It is also now apparent that a remarkable and wide-ranging propaganda effort, involving extensive use of behavioral scientists, was used to mobilize support for lockdowns and, later on, injections as well as exaggerate any threat posed. An early paper published in April 2020, authored by over 40 academics, presented a blueprint for how ‘social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts’. Furthermore, many Western governments have behavioural psychology units attached to the highest levels of government, designed to shape thoughts and behaviour, and these were engaged early on during the COVID-19 event. According to Iain Davis, in February 2020 the WHO had established the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health (TAG); ‘The group is chaired by Prof. Cass Sunstein and its members include behavioural change experts from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Prof. Susan Michie, from the UK, is also a TAG participant’. In the UK, behavioural scientists from SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour) reconvened on 13 February 2020 and subsequently advised the UK government on how to secure compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Broadly, these propaganda techniques included maximising perceived threat in order to scare populations into complying with lockdown and accepting the experimental genetic vaccines as well as utilising non-consensual measures involving incentivization and coercion through, for example, various mandates.
We also now know that propaganda activities included smear campaigns against dissenting scientists and, in at least one major case, were initiated by high-level officials: in Autumn 2020, Anthony Fauci and National Institute of Health director Francis Collins discussed the need to swiftly shut down the Great Barrington Declaration, whose authors were advocating an alternative (and historically orthodox) COVID-19 response focused on protecting high-risk individuals and thus avoiding destructive lockdown measures. Collins wrote in an email that this ‘proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises’. Rather than a civilised and robust scientific debate, a smear campaign followed. Furthermore, censorship and suppression appears to have been experienced widely across swathes of academia whilst the White House is currentlybeing sued with respect to First Amendment violations against scientists including Professors Kuldorff and Bhattacharya from the Great Barrington Declaration.
The legacy corporate media, social media platforms and large swathes of academia appear to have played an important role in disseminating this propaganda and promoting the official narrative on COVID-19. The proximity of legacy corporate media to political and economic power has been well understood for many decades: concentration of ownership, reliance upon advertising revenue, deference to elite sources, vulnerability to smear campaigns and ideological positioning are all understood to sharply limit the autonomy of legacy media (these factors also arguably shape academia). With COVID-19 these dynamics are exacerbated by, for example, direct regulatory influence, such as Ofcom direction to UK broadcasters, and censorship by ‘Big Tech’ of views deviating from those of the authorities and the WHO. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) have coordinated major legacy media in order to counter what they claim to be ‘misinformation’, and this appears to have played a role in suppressing legitimate scientific criticism whilst elevating ‘official’ narratives. At the global ‘governance’ level, both the United Nations and the WHO promoted campaigns around combating alleged ‘disinformation’ and the so-called ‘misinfo-demic’. Currently moves are afoot to further strengthen elite control over media discoursevia legislation aimed at preventing so-called ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’ and ‘online harms’ and which is being rolled out over multiple legislatures.
Finally, confirmation of direct involvement of US authorities with censorship decisions by the social media company Twitter has been presented in the ‘Twitter Files’ and, in the UK, further corroboration regarding the role and significance of a Counter Disinformation Unit within the UK government. Matt Taibbi’s work on the ‘Twitter Files’, presents what is described as the Censorship Industrial Complex, or Counter-Disinformation Industry, which links universities, foundations, NGOs and federal agencies and which have actively censored content on twitter during the COVID-19 event. Critically, these censorship regimes dovetail with the aforementioned legislative developments relating to ‘disinformation’ and ‘online harms’.
Extreme and flawed policy responses – societal lockdown and mandated mass injection – combined with widespread propaganda activities aimed at securing the compliance of the population might be explicable in a number of ways. For example:
1) The cock-up thesis might be invoked to explain all of this as an irrational panic response by well-intentioned or ideologically driven actors who got things badly wrong and imitated each other while doing so.
2) It might be that these policy responses are the result of narrow vested interests and corruption.
3) Powerful actors might have sought to take advantage of COVID-19, even instigate the event, so as to advance substantial political and economic agendas and, as part of this, helped to promote advantageous narratives during the COVID-19 event.
Following two years of massive societal disruption aimed at containing a seasonal respiratory virus and the persistence of some aspects of the COVID-19 narrative despite substantive scientific challenges, it is clearly necessary to take seriously the very really possibility that vested interests and substantial political agendas underly the COVID-19 event. So, what is the key evidence for explanations two and three?
Manipulation and exploitation of Health Agencies: Regulatory Capture at the NIH and CDC plus the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Pandemic Preparedness Agenda
For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s detailed analysis of the US-led COVID-19 response in The Real Anthony Fauci, documents the corrupt relationship between so-called ‘Big Pharma’ and Anthony Fauci arguing that, to all intents and purposes, there has been regulatory capture whereby pharmaceutical companies and public officials enjoy mutually beneficial arrangements. This mutual infiltration is understood by Kennedy to underpin the COVID-19 response, especially the commitment to a ‘vaccine-only’ solution and suppression of preventative treatments such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). By way of example, Kennedy relays the case of Dr Tess Lawrie and WHO researcher Andrew Hill in which Hill appeared to confirm there was pressure to delay publication of results supporting the efficacy of Ivermectin. Regarding HCQ, Kennedy writes:
By 2020, we shall see, Bill Gates exercised firm control over WHO and deployed the agency in his effort to discredit HCQ’ …
On June 17, the WHO - for which Mr. Gates is the largest funder after the US, and over which Mr. Gates and Dr Fauci exercise tight control – called for the halt of HCQ trials in hundreds of hospitals across the world. WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ordered nations to stop using HCQ and CQ. Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium banned HCQ for COVID-19 treatment.
More broadly, the WHO has been important in terms of co-ordinating COVID-19 policy responses. Although notionally independent, the WHO has increasingly come under corporate influence via both the growth of corporate-influenced organisations such as Gavi (Global Vaccine Alliance), CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) and private financing via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The WHO is also currently negotiating the treaty on pandemic preparedness with the governments of member states to provide unprecedented powers to this organization to enable rapid responses, transcending national governments, when the WHO declares pandemics in the future, thus centralizing control and potentially overriding national sovereignty.
This line of analysis might lead to a conclusion that what we have experienced to date – harmful lockdowns and injection strategies underpinned by massive propaganda – is primarily the result of corruption, conflicts of interest and vested interests, rather than what could reasonably be described as good faith errors by politicians and bureaucrats.
The World Economic Forum and the ‘Great Reset’
When I mention our names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic forum. But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like prime minister Trudeau, president of Argentina and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for prime minister Trudeau and I will know that half of this cabinet or even more half of this cabinet are actually young global leaders of the World Economic Forum …. that’s true in Argentina, and it’s true in France now with the president a Young Global Leader
Corporate members of the WEF’s Forum of Young Global Leaders includes Mark Zuckerberg whilst ‘Global Leaders for Tomorrow’ included Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
