The recent revelations surrounding the covid-19 pandemic in the West are so shocking that it is necessary to first summarize them to keep on track. Secondly, it is important to try to understand why these political and health scandals are unlikely to have the political consequences hoped for by those who wish to see truth and justice triumph.
Covid-19 Political Scandals
It is necessary to mention the ambiguous roles played in the origin of the covid pandemic and its subsequent policies by the World Economic Forum of Klaus Schwab, the World Health Organization, the foundation of Bill Gates, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of Anthony Fauci, among others. Recent books, for example by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Peter Breggin, strongly suggest a nefarious and self-interested globalist influence in this regard.
In Europe, the allocation of the huge $35 billion contract between the European Union and Pfizer for its covid vaccine is a simmering political scandal involving the personal relationships between the EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and her husband, and Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer. The conflicts of interest seem so obvious that a group of members of the European Parliament have publicly exposed them but so far with little impact. The lack of transparency surrounding these contracts is stunning.
Further, Pfizer has admitted to the EU Commission that no test was done to check whether the vaccine prevents, or at least reduces, contamination. However, the coercive vaccination policies were largely based precisely on the argument of “vaccinating oneself to protect others.”
The lockdown policies enacted across the world are just as scandalous since a recent study by the Johns Hopkins Institute concludes that these policies “have had little or no effect on mortality from COVID-19. . . . They have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they were adopted.” In addition, many studies and testimonies prove the severe impact of these restrictions of freedom on the physical and psychological health of the population.
Covid-19 Health Scandals
Perhaps the most shocking health scandal of this pandemic is the way in which covid-19 prevention methods have been concealed or undermined, starting with vitamin D and zinc. Dr. Pierre Kory and Dr. Tess Lawrie have exposed this and shown the preventive effects of ivermectin. In a study of a strictly controlled population of 88,012 Brazilian subjects, regular use of ivermectin as a preventive measure against covid-19 reduced the covid-19 mortality rate by 92 percent.
Further, Dr. McCullough in the US and Professor Raoult in France have shown the preventive effect that hydroxychloroquine has against covid-19, which even the prestigious Lancet journal scandalously tried to discredit.
The health scandal continues with the current excess mortality that mainstream media is hardly reporting. The British Heart Foundation indicated an excess mortality currently of 15 percent compared to the average in the British population (thus there were twenty-five thousand more deaths in the United Kingdom in 2022 than normal). Similar levels of excess mortality compared to the period 2016–19 are also noted in Europe (according to Eurostat). This excess mortality is mainly due to cardiovascular causes and is superior to the excess mortality produced by covid-19 itself. Also, there’s a strong correlation between the population vaccination rate and this excess mortality, which for the time being is unexplained.
In addition, a significant increase in myocarditis rates among vaccinated young men was measured globally, to the extent that the Florida Department of Health asked to stop the vaccination of men under forty years of age. The covid-19 vaccine seems to be the cause of this increase in myocarditis because a study of nearly two hundred thousand adults showed “post COVID-19 infection was not associated with either myocarditis . . . or pericarditis.”
A Policy of Emergency and Technocratic Progress
Why do these revelations not become scandals with significant political consequences? Why do they not inspire widespread public condemnation among the majorities that directly suffer the consequences of these policies?
One reason is the lack of information about them, a lack for which the mainstream media is largely responsible. Indeed, control and manipulation of information are fundamental to the ruling elites, especially in a so-called democratic political system where the governed majorities have the illusion of making important decisions through its elected representatives. Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda, even suggested that this control is necessary: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”
However, it seems difficult to believe that this media control is sufficient to explain, especially in the internet age, why the vast majority of Western populations unflinchingly accept policies so clearly harmful and contrary to their interests. In a notable recent essay, political science professor Matthew Crawford convincingly described the current societal and cultural conditions that allowed this surprising subjugation of the majorities during the pandemic.
Through what Crawford calls a new “politics of emergency,” the “state of exception” has become almost the rule in Western “liberal democracies.” Thus, martial language is often invoked to pursue ordinary domestic politics, also in the case of the covid pandemic. Indeed, after the “wars” against poverty, drugs, and terrorism, it is hard to disagree with Crawford.
The author denounces the modern belief in “technocratic progressivism” in the West, which manages to justify to the citizens a “transfer of sovereignty from representative bodies to unelected agencies located in the executive branch of government.” The extraordinary power of the CDC in the US, and other unelected institutions around the world, are typical of this transfer of power.
This new authoritarianism has made it possible to, again in Crawford’s words, “remove agency from skilled practitioners on the grounds of incompetence, and devolve power upward toward a separate layer of information managers that grows ever thicker. It also removes responsibility from identifiable human beings who can be held to account for their decisions.”
The principle of equality before the law is now seriously violated by this “system of privileges for protected classes,” as well as by the introduction of mandatory health passes and vaccination obligations.
Western populations are thus witnessing the “slow-motion desertion of liberal principles of government” of John Locke. These principles are being replaced by a Hobbesian security ideology using a “priestly form of authority.” This authority requires “a credulous, fearful person,” who, when they “believe in science,” are then considered by the authorities to have a good “perception of the risks of covid.”
This is reminiscent of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century for which the goal was making a homo novus with morally improved behavior—in this current case, it is one who adopts barrier gestures, wears masks, cares for the carbon footprint, and is “woke.” Such fake responsibilities are likely to produce an artificial sense of guilt in the population, which “might explain why our embrace of illiberal politics has met with so little resistance.”
In sum, Western societies are undergoing “an ever-deeper penetration of society by bureaucratic authority in both the public and private sectors.” Crawford then concludes that “the self-image of the liberal West—as based on the rule of law and representative government—is in need of revision.”
A Necessary and Inevitable Libertarian Reaction
Libertarians, ever distrustful of statism in any political system, were less surprised than Crawford seemed to be by this development. They know that the image of the West as an unshakable bastion of freedom and democracy has always been exaggerated at best, untrue at worst. Yet, this does not prevent libertarians from being the first to be concerned about the frightening but very real decline in freedom described by Crawford.
There is a glimmer of hope, however, when a nonlibertarian intellectual like Crawford makes quite a libertarian analysis of this situation. This is not surprising in a sense, since the intellectual framework of libertarianism is ideal to scrutinize and criticize governments. Crawford even comes close to the libertarian conclusion that it is the growth of the national and supranational states that gives rise to the political abuses and health crimes described above.
This new technocratic authoritarianism in the West could thus paradoxically help to spread libertarian ideas so they once again become a source of inspiration for Western societies drained of freedom and searching for an explanation to their current political and cultural predicaments. It is therefore important that these political and health scandals erupt into the public light.
By Finn Andreen