The COVID Caper Gradually Unravels

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Think back to those grim days of mid-March 2020. Many things didn’t make sense. There were screams about a new virus but no tests available for anyone to find out if we had the dreaded disease or not. The main question in everyone’s mind was, “How can I find out if I have this strange new bug?”

Hold on just a moment there. If there were no tests, how do we know that there was a reason to panic? If there were only a handful of positive tests, how do we know for sure that the virus wasn’t here and spreading months earlier? Maybe what they were calling COVID-19 was here for a year or more.

Was there really any way to know? Sure, we could have done seroprevalence tests on the population, but there were none underway. The one that came out earliest, in May 2020, showed that exposure had already happened by March, a fact which completely undermines the entire cockamamie policy response. The study was brutally attacked.

Why precisely was it mid-March 2020 when all official institutions, including media, not just in the United States but all over the world, decided suddenly to freak out? Why not in January 2020? Why at all?

Indeed, it wasn’t even clear what the point of the lockdowns was. Were we trying to make the virus go away through brute force? Early on, then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci even told The Washington Post that the virus would be defeated by social distancing alone.

What precisely would be the point of delaying infection and spread by two weeks, then another two weeks, and so on? There are endless questions. How did we know how many ventilators were going to be needed and where? And ventilation itself is a strange approach in any case, since it’s so deeply damaging and even deadly.

There was zero evidence in mid-March that this virus was potentially fatal for working-age people, and even among healthy elderly people, the survival rate was extremely high.

Another strange fact of those days was that they kept screaming that there was no treatment. Well, are we sure of that? No one in official channels was looking for treatments. How do we find treatments? By talking to experienced doctors who treat patients. But every time one of them spoke out, they were quickly and brutally shouted down and denounced.

As it turns out, many clinical physicians did, in fact, discover very effective treatments, from Vitamin D to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Huge and well-connected private sources of wealth funded deeply flawed studies that were trying to debunk them.

There was a ton of prattle about a vaccine, but this never made sense of any history of such products. A coronavirus is fast-mutating. Never before had there been a vaccine for the same virus that fuels half the common colds. There was no reason to expect that such a product would ever arrive. Even if it did, it would take five to 10 years to pass safety and efficacy tests. Plus, there’s always a grave danger of vaccinating your way out of a pandemic: It can drive mutations and wreck immune systems.

Again, all of this was known, not even controversial a year earlier. Still, in the chaos of those lockdown days, vaccine producers were given billions in tax dollars for development, all the privileges that come with “emergency use,” and wide indemnification against injury. Why is this not, and very obviously, an extremely bad idea?

Knowing that all of this was happening, alongside the locking down of the country, was enough reason for any discerning individual to cry foul. But there was another problem: We were by and large forbidden from gathering in groups. There could be no meetings. The few that took place were denounced by the media. Most were simply illegal.

The world was in chaos, and the professional class that could have put the pieces together was forced into a kind of digital isolation and paid the big bucks to sit around at home. Everyone was told that doing so was saving lives, even though there wasn’t a shred of evidence that this was true. But the media was howling in absolute union as if any of this made sense.

As the months went on, there were other crazy things happening, such as the gradual discovery that the PCR tests were good only for discovering the presence of the virus but nearly useless for delineating sick from not sick. Everything positive was declared a case, even though in the past the word “case” was reserved for people who were actually sick and in need of some treatment.

We were told to test, test, test, but there was never an action item of what to do with a positive case. Isolate, fine. That was for somehow “controlling the spread,” but for how long were we going to attempt to do that? If everyone was going to get this thing and develop immunity, what precisely could have been the point in all of the disruption and destruction?

Coincident with all this insanity, Congress was authorizing trillions and trillions of dollars in spending bills, generating debt that the Federal Reserve would buy with new money that was sure to generate inflation at a later date. Had all fiscal sanity just been thrown out the window?

Also in the midst of all of this, we had an extreme relaxation of ballot rules over voting. This happened right away and prepared a path for an explosion of the mail-in ballots that would decide the election against President Donald Trump.

Then you had the emergence of intense censorship from all main social media accounts. Before Joe Biden was inaugurated, President Trump was removed by Twitter entirely. Over the following week, the social media site Parler was shut down by Amazon, which was hosting its website, just before the app was removed from Apple.

At this point, it should have been obvious what was happening here: Media was being nationalized, bit by bit; all important sectors of it, in any case—that which reaches the 99 percent.

Now, at this point in the narrative, we were invited to believe that all of these weird things were discreet incidents, perhaps various interest groups piling on to take advantage of the chaos.

Some people, at the time, said there was no way that this was all the unfolding of a giant conspiracy. Governments aren’t that smart. Consider all that had to come together: media-generated panic with no serious outliers, bad PCR testing, neglect of therapeutics, mass intubation, indemnification of vaccine makers, global lockdowns, media censorship, social media takedowns, cancellation of dissent, relaxation of voting rules, worst inflation and spending in 40 years, and I’m probably missing a few things.

Surely all of this couldn’t have been planned from the top.

Maybe. And yet this week, we’ve been presented with incredible evidence of how the government worked very closely with social media companies through third-party institutions that were themselves funded by the government. They flagged accounts for takedowns. This so-called switchboarding was deployed to hide censorship.

I knew all of this, but the evidence is now all before us. It’s an avalanche of confirmation of our worst suppositions.

Here’s what stands out to me. We now have emails from April 2020 showing that Twitter officials knew for sure that the Election Integrity Partnership of the Stanford Internet Observatory was being established by the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security precisely to monitor and control social media.

One can presume that these efforts began a few weeks earlier, roughly fitting the timeline of the censorship efforts together with lockdowns.

In other words, it all happened at once. From what we can see, the turning point was March 13, 2020. That was the date of the coup. It was never announced. It just happened. The lockdowns and public panic were the dry ice deployed by magicians to hide their tricks.

President Trump was mostly not in charge of anything after that date, which is why he was so anxious to change the subject as the summer months of 2020 approached. At that point, he couldn’t restrain the immense bureaucracy that had taken charge of the country.

How the rest of the disaster fits in, we still need to know. There’s so much more to discover. But this one bit of information—that censorship and lockdowns went together—is highly suggestive of an integrated plan.

After all, if you were plotting a coup, with some of the world’s smartest and most powerful people, would you not plan it out in great detail? Indeed you would.

There’s so much more to learn about this disaster, or scandal, for the ages.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.