Are We in a Pseudopandemic?

A new book explores the "hard conspiracy" thesis

First Open Discussion

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Massive protests across Europe against vaccine passports and mandated vaccines, like this one in Trieste, go almost completely unreported in the mainstream media.

Iain Davis’s Pseudopandemic: The New Normal Technocracy (free download available) proposes that COVID-19 was not an actual emergency but an orchestrated “pseudopandemic" designed to establish a new form of technocratic, anti-democratic global government.

Considering the level of threat it actually posed, Covid-19 did not merit the overwhelming global response it has received, Davis argues. As we know, this response has included forced lockdowns, massive social and economic dislocation (leading to mental health epidemics), undemocratic emergency decrees, new invasive forms of censorship, and restrictions of previously guaranteed freedoms, as well as essentially mandated vaccinations — plus, if we continue along this path, enforced booster shots (as Israel has already introduced) and biometric IDs or vaccine passports (as hundreds of thousands in Italy are now protesting against).

Davis writes the book as if he were a lawyer building a criminal case. His research is extensive and includes links to a vast number of science papers, think tank presentations, and supporting articles. He argues, for example, that Covid death rates were inflated to amplify fear and compliance. Unfortunately his rhetorical style is quite heavy-handed, and in many cases, he  pushes the logic of his argument too far. Even so, while reading it, a lot of puzzle pieces fell into place for me. While I still consider the idea that this was an intentionally engineered pseudopandemic to be a hypothesis, I find it a compelling and viable one. In what follows, I first want to review the book sympathetically and then explore where I disagree or find myself unsure.

A Psychological Operation

Davis argues: “The pseudopandemic was a psychological operation used to control billions through fear. By looking at this evidence we can identify those who had the means, opportunity and motive to commit the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on humanity.” Davis believes that the virus was pounced on as an opportunity by a conspiracy of super-wealthy, politically powerful interests focused on a particular agenda. They continue to use this fake, or highly exaggerated, emergency to drive global civilization toward the outcome they desire: A dystopian future based on complete corporate control and transhumanist technologies such as genetic modification and microchip brain implants.

Davis explores how such a conspiracy could be orchestrated with only a tiny number of “core conspirators” knowingly aware of the plot as a whole. Such a project requires a system of “compartmentalized authority,” with networks of “informed influencers” and “deceived influencers.” Many of that latter group — the “Covidiots,” in Peter Limborg’s term — are people who tend to believe in official structures of authority and try to do the right thing.

Due to the continuous bombardment of propaganda, a kind of “group-think,” a reduction in the capacity for critical thought, became a widespread phenomenon. This is due to the psychological mechanism of “mass formation,” a precursor to totalitarian movements, as Mattias Desmet, a Professor of Clinial Psychology in Belgium explores in this excellent interview. This tendency toward “mass formation” may infect political leaders as much as ordinary people, leading to blind, unthinking conformity.

I believe we must allow ourselves to explore the possibility that Covid-19 is, indeed, an engineered “pseudopandemic,” devised as a mechanism for establishing a new system of undemocratic control. This needs to be brought fully into consciousness, named, and publicly discussed among many sectors of society, without people being dismissed, marginalized, censored, or mocked for thinking about it (and perhaps organizing against it). This doesn’t mean, of course, that there isn’t an actual virus that has hurt and killed many people. It means that the appearance of this particular virus was seized upon to provide the means to transition society to a new regime of global control: A “biosecurity” complex (what the WHO calls Global Health Governance or GNG), a kind of transnational super-state, based on the framework of Global Public Private Partnerships (GPPP — something I didn’t know about before reading Davis’ book), outlined by the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset”, operating beyond existing legal frameworks.

The anarcho-primitivist Darren Allen makes a distinction between two approaches to Covid conspiracy: “soft strategy” and “hard conspiracy.” According to the soft strategy approach, “bungling governments, motivated by their usual venality, put together biofascism more or less by accident.” Those who follow the “hard conspiracy” thesis, like Davis, believe “that the entire thing was meticulously planned from the start” by a cabal of intelligence operatives and billionaires. “It should be obvious, to anyone with an understanding of how the world actually works, that neither of these things are wholly true, and, crucially, even if they are, it doesn’t matter,” Allen writes. “Everything that has happened is entirely and completely consonant a) with ordinary self-interest and b) with the goals and motives of a civilised, technocratic system, ten millennia in the making, which was built from a).” Allen’s point is that “the system” follows its own inexorable logic, and it therefore doesn't make sense to assign agency to particular factions or individuals. He may be correct, but I still appreciate Davis’ righteous fury, and feel it is crucial that we understand the underlying forces and dynamics behind this.

Mass, enforced vaccinations were one of the main goals of the conspiracy, according to Davis:

Among the motives for the pseudopandemic was behavior change to accustom the public to "very, very draconian" public health orders. The broad acceptance of a requirement to produce your biometric ID upon demand, which had hitherto been fiercely opposed, was accepted by the majority. In addition the public's acclimatization to reliance upon state subsidies, initially through furlough and eventually to be rolled out as UBI, was planned and achieved.

The pseudopandemic has been largely successful so far. With the population wide acceptance of vaccines, unnecessary for the vast majority, the nascent biosecurity state has been established. The core conspirators and their informed influencers have constructed the systems they need for totalitarian technocratic control. Just as they had extensively planned and prepared to do.

It is proving very difficult to assess the efficacy of the “vaccines” over the long term. Some nations that have vaccinated the vast majority of their population and imposed stringent lockdowns are experiencing a resurgence of COVID-19, while other countries with a far lesser percentage of vaccinated people and no lock downs are not experiencing surges at all (Latvia versus Sweden, for example).

The initial assertions that the vaccines would be 99 or 97% effective at preventing infection or transmission have proved utterly false. Such statements made by public health officials were, most probably, intentional deceptions. We now know that vaccine protection wanes quickly, going down to less that 50% after a number of months. The vaccines also have significant health risks, such as causing myocarditis and blood clots in younger people. The injuries and deaths caused by vaccines have been systemically under-reported by the MSM, which seems to have intentionally over-reported COVID-19 deaths and injuries. The MSM is underwritten by pharmaceutical companies to a great degree. The extraordinarily powerful Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides a great deal of funding to media companies, which influence their coverage, along with stewarding development of vaccines, and shaping global health policy via lavish donations to the World Health Organization (WHO).

There is some evidence which suggests that vaccinated people, after the waning of protection, may be at higher risk of severe reinfection. A number of virologists and experts in respiratory disease have been warning the public about these long-term dangers. If the vaccines turn out to cause long-term health conditions in some percentage of people, this will benefit the pharmaceutical companies, who will be making the new drugs to treat these conditions.

In considering the thesis that COVID-19 was an artificially engineered emergency or pseudopandemic, we also must be willing to explore questions about the origins of the virus. It is conceivable that the virus was deliberately made and released into the human population intentionally. Or it could be the case that conditions were created that allowed this to happen passively, without a deliberately inciting action.

If this seems farfetched to you, you probably haven’t been following The Intercept’s ongoing coverage of the mindbogglingly bizarre “gain of function” research on bat Coronaviruses performed by EcoHealth, collaborating with the Chinese Government, with funding from the US Government, approved by Anthony Fauci. This research included, apparently, a plan to infect bats with an engineered Coronavirus that is more transmissible to humans, and then putting the diseased bats back into the wild. We just learned that EcoHealth was also experimenting with MERS, a virus with a 35% fatality rate, seeking to make it more communicable to humans:

EcoHealth hard at work doing something strange to bats and dangerous to humans.

Yesterday, the NIH provided that missing report for the period ending May 2019, which was inexplicably dated August 2021. That summary of the group’s work includes a description of an experiment the EcoHealth Alliance conducted involving infectious clones of MERS-CoV, the virus that caused a deadly outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012. MERS has a case-fatality rate as high as 35 percent, much higher than Covid-19’s. The scientists swapped out the virus’s receptor-binding domain, or RBD, a part of the spike protein that enables it to enter a host’s cells, according to the report. “We constructed the full-length infectious clone of MERS-CoV, and replaced the RBD of MERS-CoV with the RBDs of various strains of HKU4-related coronaviruses previously identified in bats from different provinces in southern China,” the scientists wrote.

“Changing the receptor binding site on MERS is sort of crazy,” wrote Jack Nunberg, a virologist and director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana, in an email to The Intercept after reviewing the documents. “Although these new chimeric viruses may retain properties of the MERS-CoV genetic backbone, engineering of a known human pathogen raises new and unpredictable risks beyond those posed by their previously reported studies using a non-pathogenic bat virus backbone.” The researchers’ intent, which some scientists consider integral to defining gain-of-function, remains unclear.

EcoHealth diligently tried to hide this information. Peter Daszak, Director of EcoHealth, has been one of the main proponents of the theory that COVID-19 was a naturally occurring virus, despite his obvious conflict of interest.

Davis thinks that an aim of the core conspirators — which would include not only those with political power and control of money-creation, but unknown agents of military intelligence working together in China and the West — is, eventually, depopulation. This idea will seem, to some, to be utter paranoia drawn from dystopian science fiction (Soylent Green comes to mind). Personally, I do not find it entirely farfetched.

Over and over again, we have seen the ease with which governments and corporations disregard human life on a vast scale. We are entering a time when automation can easily replace most forms of labor, meaning that the large populations required for the previous phase of industrialization are no longer needed to perpetuate the system. At the same time, the world’s governmental and financial elites know that we have unleashed an ecological holocaust on the planet which will cause massive droughts, famines, and flooding in the next decades. Is it impossible to imagine there may be a “compartmentalized” enterprise to engineer viruses that might be used to reduce the human population significantly?

I recently wrote about Peter Frase’s Four Futures, which models four scenarios: Communism (equality and abundance); Socialism (equality and scarcity); Rentism (inequality and abundance); and lastly, Exterminism (hierarchy and scarcity). From where we are now, “hierarchy plus scarcity" seems a likely outcome. “The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources, is that it makes the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite,” Frase writes. “So what happens if the masses are dangerous but are no longer a working class, and hence of no value to the rulers? Someone will eventually get the idea that it would be better to get rid of them.”

In future editions of this newsletter, I will look at paths we can take to preferable outcomes that do not require depopulation. I also propose such an alternative in my 2016 book, How Soon Is Now.

Many progressive intellectuals in the alternative media circles — such as David Fuller and the Rebel Wisdom crowd — will talk around conspiracy theories from an anthropological or social psychology perspective, while refusing to engage with what Fuller calls the “truth content” of conspiratorial claims. I find this to be a dodge that, ultimately, supports the hegemonic discourse of the MSM, which is anti-conspiratorial. Alternative / progressive thinkers build an intellectual defense structure in which the idea of “conspiracy" can be introduced or problematized rhetorically, while they remain above the fray, neither defending nor rejecting its likelihood.

The term “conspiracy” is, in itself, a bit reductive. We will probably never have access to those inner circles where certain agreements may have been made and plots may have been hatched. We can’t know the nuances of how communication occurs in such settings, where things like “plausible deniability” and “on a need to know basis” must be core principles. Terms such as “collusion” and “complicity” may be more accurate, if more vague. When used dismissively, the term “conspiracy theory” allows writers and podcasters to nod toward subcultural currents while keeping their distance from claims that could be dismissed as ungrounded or paranoiac, hence they can maintain a detached stance of superiority. Meanwhile, massive protests are happening in Europe, across Italy and in Switzerland, as well as in the US, rejecting vaccine passports, lock downs, and further mechanisms of control.

At times, those who dismiss certain ideas as “conspiracy theory” ignore things that have been stated quite openly. For example, as Harris explores in his book, Karl Schwab, director of the influential World Economic Forum, has clearly described the plan devised by a subset of the global elite to use the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to bring about a profound level of irreversible social transformation.

In The Great Reset, co-written with Thierry Malleret, Schwab describes COVID-19 as “one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experienced over the last 2000 years…. It does not constitute an existential threat, or a shock that will leave its imprint on the world’s population for decades.” At the same time, this “mild” outbreak provides the catalyst to reshape society forever.

“Nothing will ever return to the “broken” sense of normalcy that prevailed prior to the crisis because the coronavirus pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory.” Rapid changes will shape a ““new normal” radically different from the one we will be leaving behind.” In fact, the blueprint for our “new normal” has been prepared for quite some time.

The Construction of the Bio-Security State

There are many parallels between 9/11 and the Coronavirus pandemic. In both cases, a nonstop media barrage created a sense of collective existential terror, providing the opportunity for anti-democratic maneuvers that were prepared and planned long in advance. 9/11 was used as the pretext to remove citizen’s rights with the Patriot Act; to launch the useless, yet, for military contractors, incredibly lucrative War on Terror; and start the catastrophic Iraq War which left one million Iraqi civilians dead along with 70,000 US soldiers. The pseudo-pandemic has, similarly, allowed governments, in collaboration with international bodies, to establish new legal frameworks and precedents for monitoring and controlling their populations, such as the UK Coronavirus Act 2020.

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In order to construct a globally coordinated biosecurity state, the “core conspirators” required an ongoing existential threat that can be dialed up and down as needed (such as a respiratory virus that produces an endless series of “variants”). This turns out to be a far more effective tool for totalitarian control than the incessant pursuit of terrorist evil-doers, as the danger is no longer outside, but within each of us: “We are all bio-hazards in the new biosecurity State,” Davis writes. “We are the threat, each of us a danger to each other. As the biosecurity State claims the authority to keep us safe, all bio-hazards must be controlled. Therefore we must be controlled.” It has been fascinating to see Liberals and Progressives, in particular, embrace the mass media and state propaganda, as well as all of the restrictions of this new biosecurity paradigm, as if it answered some unaddressed psychological need.

Davis wrote a very long and exhaustive tome, covering many subjects, including the history of the banking system, the Trilateral Commission, and so on. I can’t go through the detailed evidence he provides in this review; I recommend people explore the book, while I understand his tendency to push his argument too far may push many people away. One primary motive for the pseudopandemic, according to Davis and other chroniclers, is to address the systemic collapse of the global financial system, which entered a terminal phase with the 2008 failure of the subprime mortgage market. With the pandemic, all fiscal restraints were removed as governments created trillions of dollars of debt-based “free money,” giving it out to subsidize their out-of-work populations and closed businesses.

Davis asks if this is being done now because the controlling political and financial elite know that the current economic system is irretrievably broken. Rather than maintain the pretense, they have decided to hasten its demise in order to force the transition to a new financial system that will maintain and even strengthen their hegemonic control of global resources. This new financial system will utilize blockchain-based Centralized Digital Currencies that function more like “credits on the company store” than money as we know it now.

Because such a transition requires an absolutely massive level of deception, it can only be implemented when the global populace is thoroughly demoralized, terrorized, and deprived of basic rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Hence the need for a pseudopandemic, which has accomplished those objectives.

Areas of Disagreement

I intensely disagree with Davis about climate change and the ecological mega-crisis. I first encountered Davis on James Corbett’s podcast. Corbett is another extreme conspiracy theorist who I find compelling, yet goes too far at times. Corbett and Davis both seem convinced that anthropogenic climate change is a fraud or myth concocted by the global elite in order to justify the establishment of an ecological dictatorship based on a new ethos of “sustainability.”

For me, this creates a level of cognitive dissonance that I find troubling, as it forces me to doubt the integrity of Davis’ and Corbett’s work as a whole. For How Soon Is Now and after, I did enough research into the ecological emergency to accept it is a reality. I believe it has catastrophic implications for the near future. We are already seeing destructive impacts around the world, ranging from extreme temperatures to mega-droughts to gigantic forest fires.

Davis and Corbett seem to be Libertarians. This ideology involves a hatred of government and blanket rejection of authoritarian structures. This philosophical bias can lead to the presumption that virtually anything being promoted via governments and the financial elites at places like Davos must be entirely wrong, aimed only at extending social controls. This is very dichotomous, black-and-white thinking, which rejects ambiguity and complexity. Such dichotomous thinking can help to clarify and identify certain tendencies in a very complex, constantly changing situation. Beyond that, it has its drawbacks.

It seems reasonable to state that, whether COVID-19 was accidentally or intentionally unleashed, once it started to spread, it was utilized as a pretext to push global society in a direction that had already been determined and agreed upon by certain groups within the corporate, financial and political elites (who, we know, assemble each year at Davos for the World Economic Forum, where this future trajectory is discussed and shaped). Whether one considers this a “hard” or “soft” conspiracy, the results are the same.

We can identify a number of reasons why the global elite seek a profoundly anti-democratic restructuring of civilization at this time. It has nothing to do with public health. One of these motives is the rapid convergence of technologies which allows for a level of absolutely unprecedented social control on a planetary scale. Another of these motives is the increasingly fictional nature of the hyper-leveraged global financial system, which at this point is based on mountains of debt that can never be repaid. A third motive is the reality of a global ecological emergency brought on by a century of industrialization with its ever-increasing fossil fuel emissions and ecosystemic destruction.

Considering such factors, it only makes sense that those who have gained control of the lion’s share of the world’s financial capital and the Earth’s finite resources would work together — even a bit frantically — to devise a new system that maintains and, if possible, extends their power. This might not be such an easy thing to accomplish. It may even be impossible.

This helps to explain the WEF’s hideously tone-deaf marketing campaign for The Great Reset, which includes their infamous “You will own nothing and you will be happy” promotional video. The video debuted at their January 2021 conference in which Chinese Premier Xi Jinping gave the frightening opening address. Saying, “You will own nothing and you will be happy” is not quite the same as saying, “We will own nothing and we will all be happy.” The message is clear: A small group will own everything, and everyone else will own nothing.

The Great Reset advocates for what Frase in Four Futures calls “Rentism” (hierarchy plus abundance), where a tiny group controls the entirety of global resources, renting it out to the rest of us who are their serfs. It seems likely that other, darker outcomes are under consideration. The video also predicts a billion climate refugees by 2030.

As I intend to explore more in future essays, our ruling financial and political elites have caught themselves in a trap of their own making. Capitalism promoted the collective belief in endless progress toward a paradise of limitless material abundance. This is its only rationale for making everyone’s lives so miserable in the short term. If the ecological crisis exposes the entire enterprise of material progress as a fraud that must be abandoned, then the neoliberal and technocratic establishment will confront a severe crisis of legitimacy. If the people continue to awaken and reject the current direction in increasingly large numbers, then the future will be up for grabs.