Much has been written about this being the fifth year since the COVID Pandemic—really since the start of the COVID Pandemic Panic. It has been five years since mass hysteria swept the globe, a phenomenon unlike any I have seen in my lifetime.
Unsurprisingly, a number of writers here on Substack are recalling their work from that time, and with good reason. However one views COVID, that period was undeniably the most impactful certainly in modern times, and we should look back at what was being both said and done in that period. Part of understanding where we are now involves recalling where we were then.
When I recall my own writings from that period, I find that understanding where we are now is not at all easy.
What does one say five years after such global madness? How does one even begin to put any of it into any sort of perspective?
I have no idea.
I know how the story evolved—I wrote about it. I know how the narratives shifted.
Yet if anything I understand less about the Pandemic Panic now than I did then, even though I know more.
What I do understand is this: the facts, the evidence, and the data which charted the true impacts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were always out there. They were always available.
They were ignored—deliberately, willfully, even spitefully.
Some will say it was all planned. Perhaps it was. Or perhaps that is fear and suspicion overcoming reason and evidence. I am not certain the evidence points conclusively in either direction.
Bad Journalism Was Immediately Obvious
When reports of a new infectious respiratory pathogen began to emerge publicly at the end of 2019, it became immediately apparent that corporate media was completely MIA when it came to giving the story adequate coverage.
That realization was the focus of one of my first commentaries on what would become the COVID Pandemic.
We do well to remember that, early on, the most detailed reporting was occuring in alternative media outlets such as ZeroHedge, and from independent journalists such as Paul Joseph Watson.
We do well to remember also the reporting ZeroHedge did at the time was far more focused on the virus, its resemblance to SARS from years earlier, and its seeming greater virulence than SARS. COVID as an expression of malevolent global conspiracy came later.
Only reluctantly did corporate media outlets such as the Associated Press pick up the story, and only after outlets such as the South China Morning Post along with Zero Hedge had started to provide more in-depth coverage.
Only after the second SCMP story did the Associated Press pick up the story. Even then, it was not the legacy media but alternative media news aggregator ZeroHedge that gave the story wider distribution, pulling together the narrative threads from the SCMP and AP articles, and highlighting the health risks posed by coronavirus infections.
Thanks to the alternative media outlets, there was reporting being done even very early on, when corporate media had not yet picked up the story.
It was ZeroHedge that provided some of the earliest details on the initial lockdown in Wuhan.
It was from these sources that I soon realized just how completely absurd the notional “experts” were, how utterly clueless and even uninformed they were.
What those early days of the COVID Pandemic Panic—what at the time I was still calling a pandemic—made plain was that the “experts” to whom people were turning were not delivering the honest, reasoned, evidence-driven leadership people expected.
The COVID-19 pandemic is merely the latest example of a reality few want to contemplate: there are no true "experts" in anything. A quick survey of the significant events and crises in recent decades, from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to the SARS outbreak in 2003 to the subprime mortage crises and subsequent global financial crisis of 2008, to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, time and again one can point to the actions of "experts" as being a catalyzing force if not a primary cause. Time and again, the "experts" have led us down the rabbit hole.
Remarkably, even then there was reason—and evidence—to wonder if the virus had somehow been weaponized, and either accidentally escaped a laboratory environment or was intentionally released.
The notion that COVID-19 is a bioweapon is not a conspiracy theory. It is a valid and disturbingly reasonable hypothesis. It is only a hypothesis, however, one that is not as yet proven to be categorically true.
That is the frustrating fact of the bioweapon hypothesis.
At that time, the evidence that had emerged was well short of what we have now—and even so was enough to support speculation about the pathogen’s possible weaponization.
Not all the facts were out there….yet. But they eventually would be.
It was as COVID cases began to be reported outside of China that another uncomfortable reality emerged: The data was not reconciling to the corporate media narrative at all.
However, we already begin to run into a problem with the data. When we look at the total number of COVID-19 cases reported by China (which we must take with a grain of salt, as China has been almost blatantly manipulating the data they report publicly), we have the following totals:
78,824 total confirmed cases
2,788 deaths
7,952 severe cases
36,117 recovered7,952 is only slightly more than 10% of 78,824. 19 percent of the total case number would be 14,976--almost double what we are told.
Even within China, but especially without, the COVID cases that were being reported simply did not rise to the estimated severity levels that had been popularized by corporate media. There were not enough cases, there were not enough severe cases, there were not enough deaths.
This was known. The data was available in the public record—in most cases it was provided by the world’s public health agencies—and yet corporate media either disregarded the data or simply lied about it.
All of this was what was known and knowable in February of 2020.
Long before lockdowns came to Europe or the United States, long before face mask mandates were a thing, long before the pharmaceutical authoritarianism of the mRNA inoculations was public policy, it was demonstrably obvious that the COVID Pandemic was something quite different from what was being reported. It was demonstrably obvious that people the world over were being gaslit and deceived by the media reporting.
The data was out there—and people were deceived anyway.
From Media Lies Came Actual Death
Just a couple months later, in April of 2020, the United States had fully embraced the madness of the COVID Pandemic Panic. The narrative was in full swing, and the corporate media propaganda machine was relentlessly pushing that narrative at every turn. That was made obvious by the lunacy of the lockdown policies, which from the beginning very deliberately avoided considerations of the costs of the lockdowns.
Even if the COVID disesase was as horrible as it had been portrayed by the media, that still did not excuse the intentional disregard of the very real human and economic costs of lockdown strategies.
Lives were not merely lost due to the lockdowns. They were sacrificed. They were knowingly, willfully, intentionally discarded.
Contrary to the sentiments expressed by many progressive media and legacy media outlets, addressing economic concerns is not about trading profits for lives, but about saving lives, as the lockdown strategies are certain to produce several times more deaths than the disease possibly could.
Who is counting these deaths? Who is even contemplating these deaths?
For all the moralizing that occurred within the corporate media at the time, there is no denying that this was the reality.
Perversely, these lives that were tossed away like so much dross were never matched on the disease side of the ledger with disesase-related fatalities. The lack of severity the media failed to report in February very clearly became a lack of death which the media also failed to report.
Again, this information was always available. It was available in public news outlets, and it was available from public health agencies, up to and including the CDC.
The data to prove that the media was lying about all of it was always a mouse-click away.
Yet the media lies went largely unchallenged. Lives were sacrificed—all supposedly to prevent deaths which never actually happened.
Of course, in those early days of the Pandemic Panic, no lie was more damning, or told with more impertinence and impunity, than Anthony “The Science™” Fauci’s damning about face on face masks.
What still beggars belief was the rapidity and requisite mendacity of that about-face. It was quite literally an overnight change in position, because at the end of March the WHO was still against mask mandates.
Even as late as March 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) advised against wearing masks.
"There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," WHO executive director of health emergencies Mike Ryan said Monday.
What also confounds reason and logic was that the scientific literature had for well over a decade established a solid clinical basis for refuting the mask mandates.
Everyone in corporate media, in government, and in healthcare knew, or should have known, that there was never any scientific basis for mask mandates—and yet the lies about the mask mandates were still told.
Governments Were Not Merely The Problem, They Were The Enemy
The narrative itself merely went downhill from there.
By May of 2020 there was a damning amount of evidence to support that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had emerged from a laboratory, that all the energies spent in defense of a zoonotic origin of the virus were nothing but pure hogwash and horsehocky. Even if the virus itself was not explicitly intended as a weapon, Beijing’s response to the COVID outbreak was an absolute weaponization of the disease.
It was the pursuit of the bioweapon angle, and of COVID’s likely laboratory origins, that put ZeroHedge in corporate media’s crosshairs, resulting in them being booted for a time from the pre-Elon Musk Twitter.
This interest in the truth about the CCPVirus' origins would get ZeroHedge falsely accused by BuzzFeed and then subsequently banned from Twitter, but their journalism has withstood the test of time--researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had not only studied bat coronaviruses for some time, but were actively seeking graduate students to participate in that research as late as December, 2019.
They were not the only ones. Later on, I would be booted from LinkedIn for a time.
Nor was I alone. Indeed, I was perhaps the smallest of the fish cancelled by corporate media for challenging the “official narrative.”
I am the smallest of fish in the independent media pond. I have nowhere near the readership or following of Alex Berenson or Steve Kirsch. Yet what has happened to me on LinkedIn has also happened to them—Alex Berenson had his Twitter account suspended, and Steve Kirsch has been booted from LinkedIn. Both writers have stated their cases within their own newsletters, and anyone interested in how Big Tech came gunning for them should read their own words on the matter.
The official narratives put forward by governments around the world were simply not to be challenged—ever.
Nor was it hard to understand why government was so intent on cancelling dissident voices: the incompetence and idiocy of government policies on COVID were several orders of magnitude beyond absurd, as the foolishness of mass PCR testing would quickly prove.
The tests were flawed, the protocols were ineffective, and the logic nonexistent. Ultimately, mass testing simply did not do a damn thing to prevent COVID’s spread. That much was proven in every country where it was presumably tried.
South Korea's low positive test rates have been largely replicated here in the US. In mid-March, Washington State had a marginally higher positive test rate at 7%, a percentage that has remained fairly stable. Only New York has had a sizable fraction of tests come back positive; the current positive result rate is 35.7%.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is that testing, while an invaluable diagnostic tool, is simply unsuitable for any sort of epidemiological tracking. This is also the somewhat belated conclusion of the "experts", who have at last concluded that, for tracking purposes, confirmed case numbers are "meaningless". It was similar logic that led Los Angeles in March to alter its testing protocol to focus it on diagnosing patients for whom the positive diagnosis would impact the course of treatment.
Yet the insistence on testing persisted, and would be used to shut people out of public spaces, even deny them the ability to travel.
This, despite the volume of data that existed arguing against a reliance on mass testing.
The data was there. The facts were known. Governments simply did not give a damn—or rather they gave a damn that people not know the facts and not look at the data.
No expression of government malevolence in 2020 could possibly exceed that of the lockdowns themselves. They were, in every instance, an economic and humanitarian disaster.
Even before China tried the Dante-esque extremity of “Zero COVID”, it was clear that lockdowns did only harm and no good.
In China, and in Italy, the data was unequivocal: lockdowns did nothing.
87.5% of Italy's March 23 case total occurred after the lockdown, as did 93.3% of Italy's March 23 death tally.
Moreover, 66.9% of Italy's April 20 case count occurred after March 23, as did 76.9% of Italy's April 20 death toll from the virus.
Again, if the lockdown strategy were to have worked as advertised, the majority of cases as well as deaths should have occurred relatively soon after the lockdown was initiated. The data is as emphatic in Italy as in Wuhan: that did not happen.
To make matters even more surreal, the clinical research at the time showed that lockdowns did not help.
These findings are independently confirmed by a study published on MedRX as of April 24, 2020, which showed the lockdown in Italy, as well as other European countries, did not save any lives. This study compared expected decay trends pre- and post-lockdown as the infection peaked, and found that the post-lockdown decay trends actually slowed.
In 2022, long after the lockdowns had largely faded away, more clinical research confirmed what I and others had said at the time.
The data, however, always told the same story: lockdowns did not work. That was known—and knowable—in 2020. There was never any need for post-mortem research into the lockdowns to establish that they were useless. The information that proved that was always publicly available.
Trust Nothing. Verify Everything
Even now, as I am writing this, and rereading what I wrote in 2020, comprehending how many lies were told, and how much damage was done, seems impossible. I like to think I am fairly well read in human history, and I cannot recall a single event where so much deception was deployed on literally a global scale, to alter the trajectory of societies worldwide.
I can think of no parallel from the past that matches the COVID Pandemic Panic. It stands alone, an apotheosis of government and media malevolence and mendacity. I like to think that it could not be repeated—but I fear that, with the right timing and the right circumstances, something very much like this will happen again.
But this much I do know: every single piece of information that one would need to understand the error of the government diktats, and to grasp that corporate media was in fact lying about COVID, was always out there. Every data point I used in 2020 was freely accessible, available to everyone.
If there is one lesson people will take from the COVID Pandemic Panic, five years on, I surely hope it will be this: trust nothing, and verify everything.
Governments and the media and Big Pharma all lied about the virus. They lied about how to treat the disease brought on by the virus. They lied about how dangerous the virus and the disease were.
Yet they lied because people let them lie. They lied because people were willing to accept what they were told at face value. They lied because people were unwilling to question. Rather than reach their own conclusions, people chose to accept the “conclusions” proffered by others.
People chose to trust the “experts”, and the experts betrayed them. Worse, the experts were counting on that trust, and intentionally weaponized that trust. When I look back over everything that I wrote in 2020, and every cited data point, that much is clear.
If my writing now persuades people of anything I hope that it is to not accept anything uncritically. If my work accomplishes anything I hope it is to spread a little more skepticism, to sow a good deal more doubt, that people will be inspired to check the facts for themselves.
We can prevent a repeat of the COVID Pandemic Panic. We can make sure that something that evil never happens again. If we are willing to think for ourselves, to form our own conclusions, and to cultivate at every turn the courage of our convictions, neither media nor government can ever mislead the way they did with the COVID Pandemic Panic.
The facts are out there.
The evidence does exist.
The data does matter.
Get the facts. Get the evidence. Get the data. Think for yourself. Never let anyone do your thinking for you.
Trust nothing. Verify everything.
I now cannot find the article I saved, it stated that out of 60,000 Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis patients in Northern Italy only about 20 tested positive for the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and only 14 even went to the hospital with no admissions and ZERO deaths. This was one of the first articles that mentions the use of therapeutics having anti-viral effects, the drug in question was hydroxychloroquine.
Is it possible that this article was corrupted on my computer, or simply deleted.
Keep up the good work, Peter!
“Yet they lied because people let them lie. They lied because people were willing to accept what they were told at face value. They lied because people were unwilling to question. Rather than reach their own conclusions, people chose to accept the “conclusions” proffered by others.”
This is now the big cultural change. We no longer trust anything ‘they’ say, whether it’s government, corporate media, academic scientists, Big Pharma, or anyone else in the mainstream establishment. Half the country no longer accepts anything at face value, thanks to writers like you, Peter. It’s a huge paradigm shift (and for once this is an appropriate use of that phrase). I am indebted to all of you brave souls on Substack who wrote the truth, usually at great cost to yourselves. THANK YOU.