‘War' against virus used to justify censorship, loss of sovereignty and individual rights
David Hunter, Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at the University of Oxford aptly observed, “The fight against COVID-19 has launched a thousand military metaphors in the British press. The ‘greatest challenge since the Second World War’, ‘the frontline’, the virus is an ‘invisible enemy’, and so forth. US citizens feel besieged and under threat as we retreat to our foxholes.”
Global War
The British were by no means alone in attempting to wage a war against a 2019 version of a coronavirus. The head of the United Nations (UN), Secretary-General António Guterres, called for a COVID-19 Task Force to be “co-convened at the highest levels by the major powers” and tweeted a call for the “war” effort to be ratcheted up.
"Let’s be clear, we are at war with the virus. And if you are at war with the virus, we need to deal with our weapons with rules of a war economy, and we are not yet there,"
Ignoring history
“American political leaders … have been comfortable framing parts of the domestic policy agenda as wars for decades,” according to Randall G. Holcombe, Professor of Economics at Florida State University. This, despite their perpetual failure.
War on Poverty
In The War on Poverty: 50 years of failure, Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, describes how the war on poverty has gone.
“… in 2013, 14.5 percent of Americans were poor. Remarkably, that's almost the same poverty rate as in 1967, three years after the War on Poverty started…
“When President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, he wanted to give the poor a "hand up, not a hand out." He stated that his war would shrink welfare rolls and turn the poor from ‘taxeaters’ into ‘taxpayers’.
“Johnson's aim was to make poor families self-sufficient - able to rise above poverty through their own earnings without dependence on welfare. The exact opposite happened. For a decade and a half before the War on Poverty began, self-sufficiency in America improved dramatically. But for the last 45 years, there has been no improvement at all.“
War on Drugs
In A History of the Drug War, we learn that, after the Bush administration began pouring money into the war on drugs in 2001, “drug overdose fatalities rose quickly. After 30 years, the war on drugs was an abject failure… rates of incarceration skyrocketed…
“You can’t even make the argument that the war on drugs started with the best intentions. A top Nixon aide admitted that the real reason for starting the war on drugs was to take on anti-war hippies and African-Americans, associate them with drugs and demonize them on the news.”
War on Crime
A piece from The Guardian on the war on crime requires no commentary.
“From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime review – disturbing history. In her new book, Harvard historian Elizabeth Hinton tracks the way liberal American politicians, not the conservative Republicans, brought us the mass incarceration black Americans suffer today.”
New war
With recent American history looking like it may more accurately be described as comprising wars on the poor and other vulnerable citizens, one might suspect that public health officials would be wary of the potential negative consequences of declaring a new domestic war. He would be wrong.
The Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME) published a paper asking, “Must there be a "war" against coronavirus?” They concluded, “Calling it a “war” has made our pandemic response short-sighted. It has further dented the social cohesion within the general society, stigmatising many, creating a rift between different participants and sectors of the healthcare system, with a risk of further deterioration of physician-patient relationship.
“Importantly, the future of medicine as a profession has also been put at risk.”
Their research revealed that, “An overlooked consequence of war-driven narratives is the over mobilisation of resources in one direction, to the detriment of other areas of concern. The laser-focused approach to ‘defeat’ the coronavirus paved the way for continued massive diversion of hospital resources and staff towards COVID care. It has negatively impacted healthcare delivery for other health conditions …
“Non COVID-19 patients, with conditions like heart disease, diabetes, stroke, tuberculosis, kidney disease … have become the unwitting ‘collateral damage’ in healthcare’s war against the coronavirus.
The damage, they noted, deeply affects citizens in need of health care.
“Patients have been reported as intentionally withholding their COVID-status or travel history from HCPs [healthcare professionals]. Such behaviour is indicative of the stigma around the disease, the distrust of quarantine facilities, should one have to go there after testing positive, and also, suspicion that they may not receive care if they told the complete truth …
Censorship
The negative consequences of the government’s war declaration are not limited to patients seeking treatment for non-COVID illnesses. The IJME paper found that, “The assertion that the public health crisis presented by the pandemic is a ‘war’ tends to equate India’s physicians, nurses, and other allied staff with members of the armed forces. The expectation of silence, adherence to orders, and stoicism that is maintained in the defence forces, is thus transposed onto HCPs too.”
Thus, doctors on the frontlines, those in emergency rooms and primary care physicians, who are the first to see adverse events resulting from widespread usage of a new medicine or vaccine, are silenced by politicians and hi-tech company leaders with no medical training.
In the absence of a war footing, it would be inconceivable that doctors in the very best position to weigh the costs and benefits of a new vaccine would be coerced, with their livelihoods and reputations directly threatened, because non-doctors determined that the cost-benefit analysis of an intervention was already complete. In this case, the analysis was considered complete even before the first vaccine was administered. High vaccination rates had to be achieved, in their opinion, and any information that may lead to vaccine hesitancy or refusal must be quashed.
In this light, it is no surprise that content posted by America's Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) is being suppressed by the non-doctors at Google LLC, a mega corporation whose profits are swelling as a result of strict public health restrictions.
Bye, bye sovereignty
The official website of the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) has, since March 2021, openly advised that, “Global leaders unite in urgent call for international pandemic treaty.”
As with censorship, without an ongoing “war on a virus” it would be difficult to imagine independent nations signing a treaty according to which they would give up the right to choose for themselves when to quarantine healthy people, when to lockdown their citizenry, when to mandate a medical intervention, when to ventilate patients or separate them from their family members, which medications they must or may receive, or a host of other rights without which a nation is not truly sovereign.
The WHO notes that its treaty would be “rooted in the constitution of the World Health Organization … Existing global health instruments, especially the International Health Regulations, would underpin such a treaty.”
The UN’s International Health Regulations (IHR) “are a legally binding instrument of international law that aims … ‘to prevent, protect against, control, and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease’ … empowering the [WHO] to act as the main global [disease] surveillance system.”
How did we get here?
With 2024 set as the target year for implementation of the international pandemic treaty, one is left to wonder whether the day is coming where a hospital administrator will say, “Sorry, according to WHO protocol your grandmother had no right to refuse the medication we used and, once her oxygen level decreased she had no right to refuse ventilation despite breathing independently without duress. You cannot enter her room until 10 days after she tests negative on a PCR test.”
But the seeds for declaring health wars and for governmental actions stripping personal and national medical freedoms were not planted with the initial broadcasting of videos accompanied by now debunked claims that they showed people collapsing in the streets of China after exposure to a novel coronavirus.
Surgeon and general?
Dr. Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and virologist Bryan Ellison, provide a thorough history of the convergence of medicine and war in their 1996 book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, pp. 133-137, the foreward to which was written by Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis.
Duesberg, who won international acclaim in the 1970s for his groundbreaking cancer research, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and served as a scholar-in-residence at the NIH laboratories, explains why a leading public health official wears military attire.
“Public health seeks to prevent disease rather than treat it and is based on the notion that a healthy lifestyle is not just a matter of personal responsibility, but also a government management imperative.
“Unlike the academic style of research scientists, public health professionals take a more activist approach to disease - quarantining individuals or populations, seizing control of food and water supplies, conducting mass immunizations, pushing slogans in health campaigns, running aggressive family planning programs, regulating or restricting access to items … they believe [are] a risk factor for disease.
“Public health experts are inclined to view almost any infectious disease as an emergency. The federal government officially adopted such a system in 1912 with the reorganization of the Public Health Service (PHS), headed by the Surgeon General.
“Based largely on the German model, PHS members formed a corps of commissioned officers, complete with uniforms, that dispatched teams to impose quarantines and other crisis-control measures on cities with contagious epidemics."
Monitoring the nation
“The PHS reorganized the Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA) in 1946, creating the permanent Communicable Disease Center (CDC) … now called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention …
“Alexander Langmuir, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health [who became Director of the CDC's Epidemiology Branch] proposed that the CDC develop a comprehensive disease surveillance system to detect the earliest signs of a biological warfare attack. Such an infrastructure could also serve to control hypothetical epidemics-using such techniques as quarantine measures and mass immunizations…”
Medical CIA
In 1951, Langmuir, created the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), composed of young medical or public health graduates.
“After … intensive epidemiological training, these EIS officers were assigned for two years to hospitals or state and local health departments around the country. Upon completing their field experience, EIS alumni were free to pursue any career they desired, on the assumption that their loyalties would remain with the CDC and that they would permanently act as its eyes and ears. The focus of this elite unit was on activism rather than research and was expressed in its symbol - a shoe sole worn through with a hole. According to British epidemiologist Gordon Stewart, a former CDC consultant, the EIS was nicknamed the "medical CIA.”
Secretive
“Although a complete list of EIS officers and alumni was available until the spring of 1993, its members rarely advertise their affiliation; now the membership directory has been withdrawn from public circulation. Over the past four decades two thousand EIS trainees reached key positions throughout this country and the world. Many work in the CDC itself, others in various agencies of the federal government; one of the original 1951 graduates, William Stewart, went on to become the Surgeon General of the United States during the late 1960s."
Strategically placed
“Some have staffed the World Health Organization (WHO), including Jonathan Mann and Michael Merson, the two directors of WHO's Global Program on AIDS, while their fellow agents can be found in the health departments of foreign nations. Several dozen have entered university public health programs as teachers and researchers. Roughly 150 have taken jobs in state or local health departments, closely watching every outbreak of disease. Hundreds have become private practice doctors, dentists, or even veterinarians, while others work in hospitals. Some have joined biotechnology or pharmaceutical companies or have risen in the ranks of major insurance corporations. Some reside within tax-exempt foundations, helping direct the spending of trust funds on medical projects.”
Media positions
“A few have obtained prominent positions in the media. Lawrence Altman became a medical journalist for the New York Times in 1969 and is now its head medical writer. Bruce Dan joined ABC News as its Chicago medical editor for six years beginning in 1984, the same year he became a senior editor of the influential Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), a position he held for nine years. JAMA regularly publishes a section written by the CDC. Marvin Turck has held the title of editor at the University of Washington's Journal of Infectious Diseases since 1988. These three men were recruited into the EIS in 1963, 1979, and 1960, respectively - each one years before he entered the media."
Appearing independent
"Regardless of which career paths EIS alumni take, the vast majority of them retain their contacts with the CDC. Not only do they constitute an informal surveillance network, but they can act as unrecognized advocates for the CDC viewpoint, whether as media journalists or as prominent physicians. And they serve as a reservoir of trained personnel for any CDC-defined emergency.”
In search of an epidemic
"The EIS network has functioned very much as Langmuir first envisioned, except that it has grown up in the post-contagion industrial world, where infectious diseases have largely become subject matter for historians. The awaited biological attack never arrived. The CDC has nevertheless continued to exploit public trust by transforming seasonal flus and other minor epidemics into monstrous crises and by manufacturing contagious plagues out of noninfectious medical conditions.” [Emphases added].
War
As Professor Duesberg has laid out, today’s war on a 2019 version of a coronavirus, replete with big tech censorship, loss of medical freedoms, quarantines of healthy citizens and treaty negotiations to oblige nation states to follow WHO protocol, is over 100 years in the making.
