The Lockdown Lunacy: Additional Aspects

Published: April 2023

What role did China and Western “covid influencers” really play?

Introduction

A previous analysis looked into the genesis of failed covid lockdowns and discussed the roles played by the biosecurity ideology, the Ebola lockdowns, the Wuhan lockdown, the WHO-China report, the Italian lockdown, fake science and modeling studies, the International Monetary Fund, partisan politics, demographics, psychology and remote work technology, propaganda campaigns and psychological operations, as well as bogeymen Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates.

But what role did China and Western “covid influencers” really play?

Was it China?

Some lockdown skeptics have proposed that the Chinese Communist government in some way manipulated Western governments into self-destructive lockdowns. One of the most intriguing cases seemingly supporting this hypothesis is the initial German lockdown of March 2020.

In the German case, the “China hypothesis” is based on a government strategy paper that was leaked in late March 2020. This paper, titled “How we get Covid-19 under control”, recommended a fear campaign to manipulate the German population into accepting or even demanding lockdowns – a sinister strategy that was observed in many other countries at the time.

The German strategy paper was written, between March 19 and 22, by a group consisting mostly of economists and sociologists plus one PhD student in linguistics. This linguist had a keen interest in China and previously wrote a paper titled “Learning from Wuhan – there is no alternative to the containment of Covid-19”. According to the “China did it” hypothesis, this linguist may have been a Chinese operative who managed to maneuver Germany into a lockdown.

Yet this story appears to put the cart before the horse. In reality, the German lockdown decision was initiated already three weeks earlier, on February 24. On that day, the German Director of “Health Security” told the German Minister of the Interior that containment of the virus had failed and Germany had to prepare “curfews of indefinite duration” and a “shutdown of the German economy”.

The German Ministry of the Interior then began to assemble the group mentioned above in order to devise a lockdown implementation and communication strategy, which is why the group consisted of economists, sociologists, and a linguist who had studied the Chinese response. Leaked emails show that the group was tasked by the Ministry not with discussing pros and cons of a lockdown, but with justifying its implementation.

German researchers later found that the German Director of Health Security was embedded in international biosecurity expert groups and had participated in multiple biosecurity simulations in the months and years before the outbreak of the covid pandemic. One of these tabletop exercises, held in 2019 at the Munich Security Conference, was organized by the Pentagon-linked Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), which focuses on nuclear, chemical and biological threats.

Two years later, in March 2021, the NTI organized another such tabletop exercise that simulated a global monkeypox outbreak beginning in May 2022 – which then occurred in this exact month.

The intervention by the German Health Security director on February 24 was triggered, most likely, by the WHO-China report published on that day. The WHO-China mission was led by WHO expert Dr. Bruce Aylward, who previously managed the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak. This Ebola outbreak was either a US lab leak or a US biosecurity exercise, which was sold to the public as a “natural outbreak” by the very same people who later tried to depict SARS-CoV-2 as a natural virus.

Intriguingly, the only two Western members of the WHO-China mission (other than WHO experts) were a German representative previously involved in the management of the 2014 Ebola outbreak and specialized in “digital epidemiology and global health security”, and an American representative: Clifford Lane, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID deputy director and liaison with the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Homeland Security.

Clifford Lane later wrote in an email: “China has demonstrated this infection can be controlled, albeit at great cost. This is the bottom line of the report from my perspective.”

How did the initial Wuhan lockdown on January 23 come about, though?

It looks like Chinese officials initially assumed there was a SARS-like outbreak at the notorious Wuhan animal market. In mid January, a six-person expert group consisting of the most senior Chinese SARS and respiratory disease experts was sent to Wuhan. It was this expert group who first recognized or acknowledged that human-to-human community transmission was far more common than during the initial SARS outbreak in 2002. The expert group then recommended to upgrade the outbreak from category B (SARS) to category A (plague, cholera) and to impose a mass quarantine, prior to the Chinese New Year on January 25, to prevent transmission to other Chinese cities.

One of these Chinese experts was later named one of the 100 most influential people of 2020 by the American TIME magazine, while another Chinese expert and “lockdown architect” was named one of the 10 most important scientific figures of 2020 by the British journal Nature.

Thus, the Chinese lockdown in Wuhan obviously set a very important precedent, as did the early Chinese covid hospital and ventilator protocols, which were also based on the original 2002 SARS outbreak. Other countries later wanted to emulate this response, but mostly failed.

Nevertheless, the idea that China actively “manipulated” other countries into a lockdown is somewhat reminiscent to the infamous RussiaGate conspiracy theory, an elaborate British-American intelligence psyop that falsely claimed Russia had interfered in the 2016 US Presidential election and tried to install Donald Trump as US President. As will be discussed in detail in a later analysis, the one country that really did help install Trump as US President wasn’t Russia, but Israel.

Was it Zeynep Tufekci and Thomas Pueyo?

Another hypothesis proposes that American sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci or US social media strategist Thomas Pueyo were the true architects of Western lockdowns. Tufekci was one of the first authors to promote, in late February 2020, the idea of “flattening the curve”, while Thomas Pueyo wrote two highly viral pro-lockdown articles, in early and mid March, on “Why you must act now” and “The hammer and the dance”.

But this hypothesis, too, seems to put the cart before the horse. As with “stay-at-home orders”, “social distancing”, mass closures and movement restrictions, the idea of “flattening the curve” goes back to the pandemic response strategies developed by the US DHS and US CDC back in 2005 to 2007, when such policy papers were published in journals like “Biosecurity and Bioterrorism”. Indeed, the concept and the term of “flattening the curve”, and even the notorious chart of the “two curves”, first appeared in a 2005 policy paper written by the CDC, the DHS, and other US agencies.

In late February 2020, the idea of “flattening the curve”, via social distancing and lockdowns, was simultaneously reactivated by an influential article in the British Economist and by a second article, written by Tufekci, in the Scientific American. Other authors, including Thomas Pueyo, further popularized the concept in the following days and weeks. These articles did have an impact: the above-mentioned German lockdown paper, for instance, referred to Pueyo’s article.

Tufekci had been interested in epidemics and pandemics for many years, including in the (man-made) 2014 West African Ebola outbreak (see her 2014 Medium piece, “Ebola: The Real Reason Everyone Should Panic”). Just as with WHO expert Dr. Bruce Aylward and the Italian pro-lockdown Kessler Foundation, everyone who viewed the flu-like coronavirus outbreak as another Ebola-like outbreak dramatically overestimated both mortality in the general population and the ability to control an outbreak through political measures such as lockdowns.

Thus, Tufekci and Pueyo are probably best seen as two of many activists and influencers who contributed to lockdown decisions and, later, mass vaccination campaigns. Some of these people no doubt were genuine and well-meaning activists. Others were paid influencers or even pseudonymous Twitter personae or Twitter bots run by PR agencies, a phenomenon observed during both lockdowns and mass vaccination campaigns. Who could forget, for instance, “thermonuclear” Eric Feigl-Ding, a WEF Global Shaper and Soros Fellow?

The Twitter Files later showed that such influencers were actively promoted by Twitter (and likely other social media and video platforms), while lockdown skeptics were suppressed and censored. These decisions were coordinated with the US CDC, the DHS, and other agencies.

Yet other influencers likely were actual government operatives. US physician, CNN pundit, zero-covid proponent and vaccine passport advocate, Leana Wen, for instance, participated in the notorious 2013 “Boston Marathon bombing” – a fully staged terrorism and mass casualty exercise run by the US Department of Homeland Security and other US agencies. This and many similar events will also be discussed in detail in a future analysis.

What about Occam’s Razor and Hanlon’s Razor?

Some lockdown skeptics have argued that the pandemic response was just a “cock-up” (i.e. a botched job), referring to the principles of Occam’s Razor and Hanlon’s Razor. As philosophical and heuristic principles, Occam’s Razor recommends avoiding unnecessary assumptions, while Hanlon’s Razor recommends trying to explain events first by stupidity, not malice.

Whatever one’s hypothesis concerning the genesis of the covid pandemic, lockdowns and “vaccine passports”, the hypothesis has to take into account that the 2001 Anthrax letters, the 2009 swine flu “pandemic”, the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the 2019 coronavirus pandemic, and possibly even the 2015 Zika outbreak and the 2022 monkeypox outbreak, were all man-made and biosecurity-linked events: either false-flag bioterrorist operations (such as the Anthrax letters), or biosecurity live exercises, or serial lab leaks followed by a global media-fueled mass panic.

You have been reading: The Lockdown Lunacy: Additional Aspects.
An analysis by Swiss Policy Research.

See also

• The Lockdown Lunacy in Retrospect
• The Propaganda Pandemic
• Pandemics and Propaganda