Although the pandemic response is much too late to fix the medieval plagues used to justify it, it remains of great relevance to Pharma investors who see unbeatable advantage in converting taxation dollars into rising share valuations. Governments supporting the CEPI 100-day vaccine initiative are giving public money to support the research and maintain manufacturing readiness of private companies who will then sell their products back to the very same taxpayers, ideally mandated by those governments. This will occur in response to disease surveillance that the same hapless taxpayers are funding. A whole army of global health bureaucrats is positioning to run this – these officials only need a theoretical risk to recommend lockdowns. The 100-day mRNA vaccines will return freedom. The business case here is simply irresistible.
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Samizdata quote of the day – Turning fear into return on investmentThomas Fairfax (Yorkshire) · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Economics, Business & Globalization · Health & medical · Slogans & Quotations January 24th, 2026 |
 15 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Turning fear into return on investmentLeave a Reply |
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There were many vicious actions involved in Covid.
At first denying that it was dangerous to Western nations (both the “World Health Organisation” and Dr Fauci and various American government agencies were guilty of saying it was not a threat to Western nations), even as the Dictatorship in China closed off travel from Wuhan whilst keeping the international airport OPEN (indeed actively encouraging the spread of the disease around the world – a policy that may, perhaps, have started as early as the international sporting event held in Wuhan in late 2019).
Then there were the denials (the official “narrative”) that the virus came from the lab in Wuhan (research backed by such people as Tony Fauci and Peter Daszak of the criminal “Word Health Organisation” and the “Eco Health Alliance” – yes a real organisation).
Instead absurd lies were told about the “natural origin” of Covid in some “meat market” – and anyone who told the truth (that it came from the lab) was ridiculed and persecuted – by the entire Western establishment.
Then Early Treatments of the disease, which could have saved most of the people who died, were viciously mocked – and doctors and medical scientists who advocated them, were (again) ridiculed and persecuted – often driven from their jobs.
Then there were the medically useless “lockdowns” – which did NOT “save lives” – but were very effective at destroying small independent business enterprises, and handing over power to governments and vast corporations, and very effective at piling up vast debts crippling nations – leading to poverty – which will get worse-and-worse over time.
Lastly there were the Covid “vaccines” which were not vaccines by any traditional definition of that word – they did not prevent people getting the sickness, or passing it on, or dying of it. But they were good at spreading medical problems of their own in some (some – not all) people – such as blood clots (the specialty of the AstraZeneca injections), and, again in some people (not all people) heart damage and (possibly) cancers.
The difficulty is that all of the above can not be admitted – not even by President Trump who, at the time, endorsed the “vaccines” (which were not vaccines) as all Western leaders did.
There is also the vast power of the Corporations who made these toxic injections – the media will not challenge them, the media financially depend upon them, as do many people in government (both elected and unelected) in various Western nations.
Even today the official line in Britain is that the “lockdowns” were a great success and, indeed, should have been even more extreme – the farcical “Inquiry” said this.
And that there were no effective Early Treatments for Covid (even though there were).
And that the Covid “vaccines” (which were not vaccines), were a “triumph” – and that anyone who tells the truth about them is a “paranoid conspiracy theorist”.
It is difficult not to despair – as the reaction to Covid (not Covid itself – the reaction to it) shows that the Western system (both political and commercial – including the media) is totally dysfunctional, and utterly corrupt.
To me the most depressing part was the herd mentality that really came to the fore during the crisis. People were willing to believe any government lie no matter how preposterous and to loudly vilify anyone who dissented.
Including a depressing number of libertarians, classical liberals & other pro-liberty folk you’d think would have been highly resistant to that.
@Ragnar
Including a depressing number of libertarians, classical liberals & other pro-liberty folk you’d think would have been highly resistant to that.
Which is why is is really important to assess the pandemic response after the fact. Anthony Fauci and similar people should be testifying before congress. Since Biden gave them a pre-emptive pardon they cannot invoke the 5th and must testify honestly or risk a perjury charge. Congress is pissing around with a lot of other stuff, but to me, given that they can’t legislate, that is certainly the most important thing they should be doing right now. If only congress and the press gave as much attention to a two year long large scale abuse of our civil rights as they did to a one day mob that got out of hand at the capitol, we surely would be much better informed.
The great shame of it all is that mRNA vaccines are surely a really powerful tool, but they need to be treated like any other drug and be subjected to careful clinical testing and adverse effect recording, a process that in all the gleeful panic seems to have been entirely skipped.
BTW on the subject of drugs I heard a new term. Drug testing has traditionally be performed either in-vitro or in-vivo (either in a test tube or in living tissue), apparently a new term has been introduced: in-silico meaning it has been tested in a computer model by AI. I think the story of AI and drugs is a beacon of hope, especially for people like me who are getting a bit long in the tooth. It has hardly been used for two years and yet has already discovered two new antibiotics that treat highly drug resistant infections like gonorrhea and MRSA, and the mechanism of action of these antibiotics is that they are far harder for bacteria to evolve past them. And at least 19 other drugs that treat critical life threatening diseases.
Fraser Orr, great post.
A quibble with AI becoming a drug developer as a good thing: drug developers rely mostly on combinatoric methods using large scale, high throughput screening/assessment methods (I base this on outdated, sideline expertise). They know squat about the mechanism by which apparently, or allegedly, effective drugs work. So, years later when we learn that a given drug did good things but also attacked some other compartment of the body, or killed babies, or whatever, they are all “Shocked! Shocked, I tell you!”
I agree that modern chemistry and bio methods have done good things and will do more, but let’s hope RFK Jr and company bring strong daylight into how drugs move from “nice AI result” to being injected into us! Double blind studies with placebos! Double blind peer review!
And that strong daylight can happen at the same time as the USG Fed bureaucracy that slows everything to a crawl gets nuked. That said, new drug rollout will be slow because it takes time to see what long term effects are (for those in Portland, the reason it takes a long time is a long time is needed).
@GregWA, sure, but if I am dying of MRSA that I acquired at a hospital, dying of a bacterial infection like I live in the 19th century, I think the short term benefits of the new drug Halicin will probably be more interesting than the long term effects. And I would no doubt be happy to have them watch me for longer term effects as I go on breathing.
It is also worth considering that the massive amount of data we have on previous drugs can be (is being) fed into those networks so that they will be far more able to predict side effects than has ever been done with the whack a piñata approach to drug discovery done so far. As that in-silico model of human metabolism gets better we will be able to reduce the risk of being the first one to try quite quickly. One of the reasons that AE are such a problem with new drugs is that we don’t really have that holistic model available to us. But now we do.
And the plain fact is that the way these drugs are discovered by AI is not the current way — which is try one million compounds in a big factory to see which ones have effect. Rather they are build around the idea of the function of the protein defects causing the disease (something that AI can model at incredible speeds and accuracies today) and designing novel small molecules that will “fit” into and reshape the protein. So AI is not just a whack a piñata approach but rather an actual “intelligent” design for drugs.
The countries that had the least mad lockdown policies were lower tier ‘rogue states’ like Belarus and Nicaragua.
Given that’s the case I don’t think there’ll ever be any real reckoning about what happened. Most people have mentally moved on. Many of the critics of lockdown, vaccine mandates etc have long alienated each other due to other polarising issues like Ukraine/Russia, Gaza/Israel etc etc
Thanks, Fraser. I clearly need to do some homework!
And I’m not expecting a serious reckoning about the Wuhan lab.
@GregWA
Thanks, Fraser. I clearly need to do some homework!
If you are interested in a bigger read on this I’d recommend Dario Amodei’s essay “Machines of Loving Grace”. If you don’t know him he is the CEO of Anthropic, a major AI company. It’s an odd title and by no means do I agree with everything he says, but he has a vision of healthcare in an AI world which I think is quite compelling and seems grounded in practical reality rather than Pollyanna optimism. He has a background not just in AI, but also as a biology researcher, so he knows a lot more about it than me.
@Martin
Given that’s the case I don’t think there’ll ever be any real reckoning about what happened. Most people have mentally moved on.
You may be right, but I do wonder if the government attempts another such lockdown due to some other health crisis, whether people will be rather more analytical of the last time and perhaps more skeptical before swallowing it whole. But perhaps I am being to overly optimistic.
I think it would be more the sheer economic unreality of another lockdown that would be a better deterrent than relying on the masses to stop anything.
Martin – Belarus and Nicaragua had no lockdown at all, neither did several other countries, and a few American States.
As for people who say “we can not believe the low death rates in Nicaragua and Belarus” (and Sweden?), a good contrast is between and Argentina and Uruguay.
These are similar countries culturally (language, ethnic group, and so on), and Argentina went all in on the Progressive International Community lockdown policy – and Uruguay did not.
It was Argentina that had the much higher Covid death rate.
The British “Inquiry” ignored all of the above, just as it ignored the fact that effective Early Treatments existed for Covid (which could have saved most of the people who died) and ignored the fact that the Covid “vaccines” were NOT vaccines by any traditional definition of this word.
The international system (the international Progressive Corporate State – of “Big Pharma” and so on, including the education system and the media) has been shown to be totally dysfunctional and utterly corrupt.
@Paul Marks.
It was Argentina that had the much higher Covid death rate.
FWIW, in July 2020 I pulled the government data for the death rates per state put them in a spreadsheet along with population density and compared locked down states to non lockdown states. This is pretty simple, anyone could do it, even someone as dumb as a government employee or a member of the press. It was crystal clear that at the height of the infectious phase states that did not lock down had the same or slightly lower death rates than those that did not. That is just a plain, empirical fact. As a for example, the death rate in Florida, which was only lightly locked down, was about the same as the death rate in California which was lock down city (remember the surfer on the beach who was fined for not wearing a mask when there was literally nobody about.) I think Florida was slightly lower, and that despite the fact that there are vastly more older people in Florida per capita than California. Again, the data was not unclear, and anyone who can use a web browser and Microsoft Excel could have determined that in ten minutes.
ignored the fact that the Covid “vaccines” were NOT vaccines by any traditional definition of this word.
The mRNA vaccine is a VERY powerful tool, and I think it is quite tragic that it has been painted with the brush of the covid deception. The Covid vaccine certainly had side effects that were dangerous and was of questionable efficacy. But the problem is not the mRNA vaccine, which I think will go on to save a lot of lives in the future, it was the fact that all the normal “safe and effective” rules were suspended for it. And that might have been the right thing to do given the nature of the emergency, I’m no fan of the creaking, sclerotic FDA bureaucracy which is undoubtedly responsible for at least a million unnecessary deaths due to is very poor risk/reward calculation and incentive. The problem was that it was rolled out very poorly and monitored even more poorly. There was no reason to risk the health of kids with it, for example, and the AE were mostly covered up to hide people from embarrassment, and to line the pockets of big political donors. And I also think there was a large amount of “we need to do something to calm people down since we have ginned them all up into a crazy level of fear.”
But make no mistake, mRNA wrapped in a lipid bubble is a mechanism of drug delivery that has the potential to save many, many lives from horrible diseases. Some newer work on this coats the bubble with proteins that allow delivery of mRNA to specific types of cells, allowing the targeted delivery of therapeutics to individual cell types, and since it is RNA that we can quite simple manufacture to order, it has unbelievable potential.
It just needs to be managed to a reasonable level of safety and efficacy.
Fraser Orr.
Yes – the “lockdowns” did not save lives, and were not intended to save lives. Politicians such as Alexander Boris Johnson were browbeaten by officials and “experts” who had a political agenda, an international agenda.
On the mRNA technology – it is indeed useful, but NOT for what it has been used for in relation to Covid. As the person who created this technology has made clear.
The Covid “vaccines” are a con – and a very dangerous one.