By David Solway
We are constantly told by our political leaders and the compliant media that a pandemic lockdown is absolutely necessary if we are ever to defeat the COVID virus. Mask mandates, quarantine camps, self-isolating, limited sociability, the stoking of public fear and panic, the shuttering of businesses and the attendant cratering of the economy have become, once again, the false solution to a politically ginned-up crisis — déjà vu all over again. The trouble is: none of this works, none of this is necessary. Texas Tech professor Gilbert Berdine sums up: “After taking the unprecedented economic depression into account, history will likely judge these lockdowns to be the greatest policy error of this generation.”
Psychiatrist Mark McDonald writes: “Not only have Americans become afraid, they have become infected by … a pandemic of hysteria … a delusional psychosis. A delusion is a fixed false belief contrary to reality. Americans today believe that we must keep our businesses closed, that we must keep our children at home, that we must wear masks over our faces and isolate ourselves from human beings in order to keep us alive. That is false. That is a lie. And it is killing us. It is killing us physically, mentally, socially, psychologically, it is killing our country, and it must stop.”
There is no doubt that the lockdown is “killing” every country and destroying the urban hub of cultural life and economic activity wherever it has been imposed. Consider London, for example, a great and historic metropolis which has become a virtual ghost town, communally dead, everywhere shops and businesses closed that will never re-open again, a harbinger of massive financial collapse. London has fallen. And many cities and nations in the West will follow suit. Take a look at New York, Chicago and L.A.
Powerful confirmation of the absurdity and harmfulness of the lockdowns comes from the recently circulated Great Barrington Declaration, prepared and signed by eminent physicians and epidemiologists, which arrives at the following conclusion:
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
Adding to the growing dissent from official policy, 25 scientists from seven countries, who participated in the Truth Over Fear Summit in October 2020, “agreed that the lockdowns are causing far more harm than COVID-19 itself, and many believe the pandemic is tied to the plans of global elites to implement a worldwide socialist surveillance state through the “Great Reset.”
Irish biomedicine scientist Dr. Dolores Cahill argues: “There was no known moral, ethical, legal, scientific or medical basis” for the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic on March 11, 2020, at which point the number of COVID-19 deaths was one percent of the annual influenza deaths. No matter. Editorial director of the Heartland Institute Justin Haskins writes,
“For those of us who support free markets, the Great Reset is nothing short of terrifying…Making matters worse, the left has already proven throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that it can radically transform political realities in the midst of a crisis, so it’s not hard to see how …[t]he present pandemic is a ‘golden opportunity’ for radical change…dramatically pushing humanity toward greater government control. [R]adical – and catastrophic – change is exactly what we’re going to get.”
Similarly, as John Zmirak presciently writes in The Stream, we are being schooled to acquire a condition of learned helplessness, “characterized by three main features: a passive response to trauma, not believing that trauma can be controlled, and stress. Our political masters on the left are using “the virus as the pretext for a Great Reset, stripping citizens throughout the West of their traditional liberties, especially private property rights. Why else impose on us useless lockdowns, despite the plummeting number of virus deaths?”
Haskins’ and Zmirak’s suspicions are corroborated by the founder of the World Economic Forum and chief proponent of the Great Reset himself, Klaus Schwab. In his new book COVID-19: The Great Reset, Schwab actually downplays the significance of the virus while regarding it as a providential pretext to remake the world and unleash a “fourth industrial revolution” that will eliminate private property, restrict travel and establish a surveillance state in which everyone is chipped and monitored. The lockdowns are a way of softening up the population to accept a technocratic revolution presided over by a club of billionaires, their political adjutants and chosen “experts.” Schwab’s books make this clear.