China Has Outsmarted the West, the World Is Dancing to Xi Jinping´s Tune
President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization
Lockdowns for disease mitigation have never been used in the modern Western World. And yet, here we are. How is it possible that a strategy, which the WHO has systematically ruled out, is now used in almost all countries?
WHO
Xi Jinping played the WHO very well. At the pandemic’s start, China was praised for how well it managed the pandemic and how `transparent´ they were. In hindsight, a very naïve view about China. Within weeks after the start of the pandemic, the WHO promulgated lockdowns into global policy through a series of press conferences that showed a complete absence of analysis or logic.
The virus came from China, and now we also started to use public health policies from China. So why have governments worldwide copied and continue to copy China’s anti-democratic, totalitarian measures in response to COVID-19?
I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March … It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realized we could … If China had not done it, the year would have been very different.
Neil Ferguson
Europe
The government in Germany commissioned a confidential strategy paper. One of the expert teams was a team from the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. This paper was obtained upon a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request. Unfortunately, of the 210 pages of FOIAed emails that led to the publication of the German strategy paper, 118 pages were blacked out entirely. The paper addressed how to implement lockdowns, mass testing, and quarantine facilities. The emails contain frequent discussions of China, but nearly all of these references were redacted. The stated reason: `May have adverse effects on international relations.´
In the Netherlands, the government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis. The study showed a gain of 100.000 QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) if lockdowns would be used, but… this would be at the cost of 620.000 (!) QALYs. Everybody could figure out that this means that lockdowns are very harmful to society, but the Dutch government decided differently. Lockdowns were used, and with that, 520.000 QALYs were sacrificed. The government’s motivation was that society would not accept the `optics´ of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed.
Registration Fraud
There is a difference between dying with COVID-19 or dying from Covid-19. When someone dies in the hospital, an ICD-10 code is given as the cause of death. If someone has severe lung emphysema and gets the flu and therefore dies, the cause of death is lung emphysema. This all changed with COVID-19. Now, if a patient who died in the hospital either tested positive or had been in contact with anyone who had COVID-19 within several weeks prior to their death, then the death should be classified as a COVID-19 death. This could lead to the absurdity that someone who died because of a traffic accident and tested positive for COVID-19 was still counted as COVID-19 death. The result was an alarming number of supposed `COVID-19 deaths.´ This absurd number has been used to rationalize all the devastating measures taken by governments.
China And Main Stream Media
In almost every top media outlet and friends in corporations, universities, and governments, the Chinese government has financial stakes. Preexisting financial relationships with China led institutions to trust information from China, endorse the CCP’s narrative, and ultimately advocate for the CCP’s policies’ global adoption. Owing to this combination of naivete, groupthink, and outright corruption, scientists and journalists have been incorporating information from China into their work as true, when in fact, nearly every bit of information that has come from China concerning the virus has been a lie.
There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
Articles from March 10, 2020, illustrate how media outlets adopted China’s narrative in unison. `How China Slowed Coronavirus: Lockdowns, Surveillance, Enforcers,´ reported The Wall Street Journal. `Those containment efforts do appear to have been successful, with the number of new cases slowing to a trickle in recent weeks,´ CNN admired. `Xi asserts victory on first trip to Wuhan since outbreak … China’s epidemic statistics suggest that its efforts have been effective,´ trumpeted The Washington Post. “The World Health Organization has praised Beijing’s response … ‘This epidemic can be pushed back,’ Dr. Tedros said, ‘but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government,’” The New York Times repeated.
For journalists, indulging the fiction that China controlled the virus appears to have begun as a little white lie, a little something in exchange for all those goodwill seminars and ad placements. It was silly, of course, but what harm could that do?
The snowball effect of this little white lie that China had controlled the virus was soon apparent in journalists’ writing. One after another, they fell victim to their collective propaganda. Finally, global media outlets legitimized a ludicrous narrative in which the CCP’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan had eliminated domestic cases from all of China, but not before the virus had spread everywhere outside China, where governments now had no choice but to adopt the CCP’s lockdown policies.
`The U.S. has absolutely no control over the coronavirus. China is on top of the tiniest risks,´ The Washington Post gushed. `The verdict is in,´ Politico ruled, `China has outperformed, while the once-respected American system has disastrously faltered.´ `U.S. Says Virus Can’t Be Controlled. China Aims to Prove It Wrong,´ The New York Times admired. `China beat the coronavirus with science and strong public health measures, not just with authoritarianism,´ the Conversation lectured. `In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom,´ The New York Times suggested. `China eradicated COVID-19 within months. Why won’t America learn from them?´ Salon whined.
Sleepwalking Ourselves Into Totalitarianism
And now we are at the point that preventing embarrassment and denial has become the primary motivations of world leaders. We sleepwalked ourselves into totalitarianism. From the courts to intelligence agencies to the media and politicians, it all amounts to a collective shirking of responsibility for determining whether lockdown policies have been implemented on fraudulent pretenses and whether those policies actually work.
It started with `2 weeks lockdown` to bend the curve, and now we have fear-mongering, mask mandates, distancing, curfews, school closures, and mandatory vaccines which are still in Phase III trials.
All this was a cover-up of the catastrophe that was the original lockdowns and denial of the insanity of trusting scientists and billionaires who treat information from China as real. For science and the professional class long-term, letting this fraud continue will be devastating, and the best thing to do would be to speak up. Unfortunately, censoring, canceling, and firing those who disagree are now allowed, so the people who try to speak up are silenced down. Almost none of the politicians feel they have the power to speak up against lockdown measures without inconveniencing their careers. The origin of lockdown `science´ cannot be factually discussed without the Chinese government looking very bad; something media investors are reluctant to allow. Instead, overcompensating for Beijing, media outlets portrayed China as not only a responsible international stakeholder but an admirable one whose example should be followed.
Chinese social media platforms began censoring references to coronavirus and keywords critical of the government’s handling of the infection as early as December [2019].
Bill Gates about a list of things China did right
People were led to believe that lockdowns were grounded in rigorous `science,´ and that by following them, they were `following science,´ when in fact, the only analysis had been `China claimed they eliminated the virus this way, so we can too.´ The numbers used by mainstream media have shifted constantly, from mortality to hospitalizations to `cases,´ to rationalize public anxiety. With few exceptions, this failure to `crush´ the virus has been absurdly attributed to lockdowns’ leniency rather than their evidently fraudulent scientific origins.
Journalists constructed a reality that pleases the CCP and their investors while being at least remotely plausible to their middle-class readers. To date, this is the best they’ve come up with: a super virus emerged that was so deadly only Chinese totalitarianism could stop it; it caused spontaneous death in Wuhan (but nowhere else) until Xi’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan eliminated it from all of China (but nowhere else), while a steady stream of `variants´ now demands indefinite lockdown measures.
Science???
In another article, I already wrote about the scientific method and how science works. `The science´ about COVID-19 changes constantly, sometimes overnight. First, in March 2021, vaccinated persons were supposed to wear two masks, then in May, they didn´t need masks, then in July, they suddenly needed masks again. In early 2021, as vaccines became widely available, scientists and the media introduced the concept of `variants,´ (the variants are real, but just like the influenza virus, mutations, in general, become more infectious but less virulent), justifying ever more restrictions. The resultant reporting has been not only harmful and misleading but inherently contradictory and just plain bad.
For instance, throughout the summer of 2020, media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and Vanity Fair all claimed that the secret to Japan’s success was widespread masking. Mask use and social distancing only increased, yet the number of COVID-19 cases in Japan multiplied dramatically. By summer 2021, Japan was in a state of emergency and had to cancel spectators for the summer Olympics.
Iceland was declared by media outlets to have `beaten´ COVID-19 several times, but despite a 70% vaccination rate, COVID-19 cases in Iceland are currently at an all-time high. Cases are likewise at or near all-time highs in Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and several other Southeast Asian countries that the media has declared a `success´ on numerous occasions in order to buttress its failing narrative.
Fear Mongering
The widespread government and media fear-mongering give a picture that is wildly out of proportion to the relatively moderate health risks it poses. For example, according to the most widely cited study on COVID-19’s IFR by age, the average IFR for those under 40 years old is around 0.01%. But in surveys conducted regularly by the University of Southern California, on average, Americans under 40 have consistently estimated their chance of dying if they contract the virus to be around 10%, a 1,000-fold overestimation.
Likewise, in October 2020, the WHO’s peer-reviewed bulletin showed COVID-19’s overall IFR across all age groups to be about 0.23%. In a poll conducted by the Menzies Research Centre, by June 2021, Australians on average estimated their chance of dying if they contracted the virus to be 38%, an overestimation of more than 160-fold.
This ignorance about their actual risk from COVID-19 renders democratic accountability for lockdown measures impossible. Even more so because, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judge the threat of COVID-19 is their own government’s decision to employ drastic lockdown measures. ”We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown; in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if the government’s are taking such drastic measures.’ We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.” The policies thus create a feedback loop in which the measures themselves sow the fear that makes citizens believe their risk of dying from COVID-19 is hundreds of times greater than it really is, which in turn causes them to support more lockdown measures.
Conclusion
Having absorbed disinformation into policy, the Western institutions have, perversely, helped promulgate a totalitarian hygiene regime around the world and turned against those standing up for western values that politicians appear too spineless to defend. Whether COVID cases go up, down, or sideways, the solution offered by lockdown scientists and public health officials, the WHO being only the worst offender, is always the same: Be more like China. Every policy they’ve imported has been as deeply illiberal as it is ineffective, and many are disturbingly willing to suggest permanent changes to our civilization rather than admit error. For Xi Jinping, lockdown was never about a virus. It was about sending a message: that stripped of all disguise, the illusion of virtue, competence, and commitment to human rights among the Western political class is nothing more than conformity with easily exchangeable norms.
Interesting Links:
COVID-19, It Is Not the Virus That Is Killing Us
COVID-19 and the Spike Protein, Man-Made After All?
Vaccine Fanatics Have Achieved More Than The Anti-vaxxers Have Ever Been Able To Do
Can There Come Anything Good From Lying?
Why Mandatory Vaccination Is a Very Bad Idea
Your Idea About Science May Be Completely Wrong
Based on an article by Michael P. Senger: `The Masked Ball of Cowardice´
Post Scriptum
How ironic… After publishing this article on Medium, guess what happened? Within a day I was cancelled and even my membership of Medium was annulled. This has lead to the development of the webpage you are now looking at.
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