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CHAPTER 4
Fear and Threat
Western governments have long used manufactured fear as a means of
keeping the population susceptible to propaganda. A “pandemic” is a
powerful fear concept, yet there is no credible evidence of a viral pandemic
in 2020. “Covid-19” does not meet any credible (pre-2009) definition of
a “pandemic,” and attempts to present “Covid-19” as a new “Spanish
flu” are bogus. The exaggerated threat of “Covid-19” was a function of
military-grade propaganda, emanating from governments and the media,
involving a barrage of terrifying images, messages, and “alert levels.” The
BBC played a particularly culpable role in spreading fear. Death statis-
tics were manipulated. Propaganda about hospitals being overwhelmed
by “Covid-19” admissions camouflaged a sinister attack on public health.
The primary purpose of face masks and PCR tests was to spread fear.
Waves of fear/terror were sent by “new variants,” “immunity escape,”
and the open letter by Geert Vanden Bossche. The spurious concept of
“long Covid” projects the danger out into the future.
Existential Threat and Social Control
Totalitarian regimes have historically ruled through terror in the form of
direct threat of physical violence, viz. the GPU, the Gestapo, and Orwell’s
(1984, p. 390) image of “a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
Under totalitarianism, Meerloo (1956, p. 28) writes, “The terrorized
victims finally find themselves compelled to express complete conformity
© The Author(s) 2024
D. A. Hughes, “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War
for Technocracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41850-1_4
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116 D. A. HUGHES
to the tyrant’s wishes.” Western governments, in contrast, have not ruled
through ter ror in the same way, because more effective means have been
found. As Huxley (1958, p. 5) writes, “government through terror works
on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manip-
ulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual
men, women and children.”
That “non-violent manipulation” (absence of direct physical threat) has
much in common with Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlov, Huxley (1958,
p. 30) comments, found that “the deliberate induction of fear, rage
or anxiety markedly heightens the dog’s suggestibility”; and if kept in
that state for long enough, “the brain goes ‘on strike,’” allowing new
behaviour patterns to be installed with ease. Similar is true of humans:
“threat, tension, and anxiety, in general, may accelerate the establish-
ment of conditioned responses, particularly when those responses tend
to diminish fear and panic,” and those responses “can develop even when
the victim is completely unaware that he is being influenced” (Meerloo,
1956, p. 50). Even as CIA mind control programmes in the 1950s
and 1960s explored these premises through experiments on individuals,
similar techniques were already being rolled out against the entirety of
U.S. society.
For example, Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s 1947 recommendation to
“scare hell out of the American people” (his nephew, Hoyt Vandenberg,
was CIA Director at the time) was officially justified by the alleged threat
posed by the USSR. Mechanisms for keeping the population and poli-
cymakers in fear, not least of imminent death, included the “Doomsday
clock” (1947), the apocalyptic rhetoric of NSC-68 (1950), the contagion
metaphor for communism, the “Second Red Scare” based on alleged fifth
column communism, the 1952 Duck and Cover film used to terrorise
school children, graphic accounts of the potential effects of a nuclear
attack on the United States in the Wall Street Journal and Reader’s
Digest, and Kissinger’s (1957, Chapter 3) description of the effects of a 10
megaton nuclear weapon detonated in New York. All of these threats were
hyperbole. As Talbott (1990, p. 36) retrospectively admits, “For more
than four decades, Western policy has been based on a grotesque exag-
geration of what the U.S.S.R. could do if it wanted.” Kennedy’s alleged
“missile gap,” for instance, was massively in favour of the United States
in the 1960s.
With the end of the “Cold War,” a new existential threat had to be
found. In 1991, the Club of Rome proposed a new “common enemy
4 FEAR AND THREAT 117
against whom we can unite,” i.e. “humanity itself” for its disastrous
inference in natural processes (King & Schneider, 1991, p. 115). But
when the green agenda failed to gain traction, multiple premonitions of a
“new Pearl Harbour” appeared between 1997 and 2001 (Hughes, 2020,
pp. 76–77). According to Cyrulik (1999,p.6), of CIApartner thinktank
CSIS, “A threat that causes Americans to live in fear, to trade liberty for
security, and to change our way of life would make for a powerful tool.”
“9/11” duly took place and the “War on Terror” made “transnational
terrorism” the new existential threat. “Entrapment terror” ensued, i.e.
“the mental effect of routine exposure to a 24/7 corporate news cycle
of psychological operations against the masses, weaponizing the language
of terror and trapping news consumers in a near-blinding state of fear”
(Broudy & Hoop, 2021, p. 371). Rational dialogue and critical ques-
tioning of the official 9/11 narrative were crippled as society became
divided into propagandised true believers and heretical “conspiracy theo-
rists,” to use a term weaponised by the CIA as long ago as the 1960s
(deHaven Smith, 2013, p. 25), yet still deployed uncritically by far too
many academics in their servile defence of authority.
The same principle of finding an “existential threat” with which
to terrorise the public was again operationalised during the “Covid-
19” operation, only this time, the “invisible enemy” was neither “fifth
column” communists, nor “terrorists,” nor “humanity itself,” but, rather,
a “deadly virus.”
Th e “Covid-19 Pandemic”
“Pandemic” as a Fear Concept
A “pandemic” is a very powerful term when it comes to creating fear,
because it suggests ubiquitous disease and death (pan demos —across
all people). Epidemics, according to England’s Chief Medical Officer,
Chris Whitty (2018), “cause substantial panic, and have substantial social
and economic impacts, very often way out of proportion to their actual
medical importance.” Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 14) know that “The
spread of infectious diseases has a unique ability to fuel fear, anxiety and
mass hysteria.” Much rides, therefore, on the responsible usage of terms
such as “epidemic” and “pandemic.” When the WHO formally declared
pandemic status for “Covid-19” on March 11, 2020, its Director-General
118 D. A. HUGHES
noted: “Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word
that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear […]” (WHO, 2020a).
When that same WHO Director-General claimed on February 25,
2020, that the world should do more to prepare for a possible coronavirus
pandemic (“Coronavirus: World must prepare for pandemic, says WHO,”
2020), the Dow Jones index went into a tailspin and lost 36% of its value
in a single month (to March 23, 2020). On March 12, 2020, the day after
the WHO “pandemic” declaration, U.S. stock markets experienced their
largest single-day percentage fall since Black Monday (1987). Yet, when
the “pandemic” declaration was made, there were only 4291 “Covid-
19” deaths worldwide, only 1440 of which were outside China, only 29
of which were in the United States (Chossudovsky, 2021, p. 22). For
perspective, the 4291 deaths represented 0.000055% of a global popula-
tion of 7.8 billion in 2020. There was no sound scientific reason to invoke
the fear-generating language of a “pandemic.”
No sooner was the “pandemic” declared than “Covid-19” cases and
deaths began to surge worldwide at an unnaturally fast rate that cannot
plausibly be accounted for by viral spread and the “extraordinary fore-
casting ability of the global health-monitoring system” (Rancourt, 2020a,
2020b, 2020c, p. 3). As Engler (2022) writes of Lombardy: “A virus
doesn’t spread across thousands of kilometres within days [generating]
peaks [of deaths] at the same time”; rather, like a 2003 heatwave in
France that was blamed on neglect, the cause was probably attributable
to the state. In Britain, the surge in care home deaths “everywhere all
at once” in early April 2020 was “more likely the result of synchronous
policy panic than a deadly virus” (Kenyon, 2022). The s urge in deaths in
the United States, Rancourt (2020a, p. 1) argues, owed not to a “novel
virus,” but was, rather, a “likely signature of mass homicide by govern-
ment response,” a contention fleshed out in a later paper (Rancourt et al.,
2021) and supported by Senger’s (2022b) argument that “over 30,000
Americans appear to have been killed by mechanical ventilators or other
forms of medical iatrogenesis throughout April 2020, primarily in the area
around New York.” If, as some critics claim, SARS-CoV-2 was already
circulating in 2019—in Brazil (Fongaro et al., 2021), France (Deslandes
et al., 2020), Spain (Allen & Landauro, 2020), the United States (Rice,
2022), and Italy (Apolone et al., 2021), specifically Lombardy (Amendola
et al., 2022)—and if “fatal infections were in decline before full UK l ock-
down” (Wood, 2021), then the sudden worldwide spike in deaths in the
spring of 2020 makes even less sense from an epidemiological perspective.
4 FEAR AND THREAT 119
What Counts as a “Pandemic”?
The WHO published a document on “pandemic preparedness” in 1999,
which was revised in 2005 and 2009. The 1999 version defines a
pandemic in terms of “unparalleled tolls of illness and death” (cited in
Cohen & Carter, 2010, p. 1275). The 2005 version requires “several,
simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and
illness” (WHO, 2005). The May 2009 version, in contrast, which was
released one month before the “swine flu pandemic” was declared, states
that “Pandemics can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they
cause, and the severity of a pandemic can change over the course of that
pandemic” (cited in Flynn, 2010). Thus, since May 2009, according to
the WHO, a “pandemic” has technically been possible without anyone
getting seriously ill or dying.
Under the 2009 criteria, a pandemic goes through six stages and is only
declarable once it reaches phase 6 (sustained community-level outbreaks
in two or more WHO regions). Germán Velásquez, Director of the WHO
Secretariat on Public Health, Innovation, and Intellectual Property until
2010, was asked in 2018, “Could they have declared the pandemic level 6
also with the old [pre-2009] definition?” Velásquez replied, “No, because
the severity, the number of deaths, would have been a factor. Since that
was no longer one of the criteria, it made it easier to declare a pandemic”
(cited in Day, 2020).
When WHO Director-General Margaret Chan declared a pandemic on
June 11, 2009, only 144 people worldwide had died from swine flu. Chan
described the disease as “unstoppable” but also as “moderate.” According
to the WHO in August 2010, well past the peak of the “pandemic,” swine
flu had claimed 18,449 lives in laboratory-confirmed cases (WHO, 2010).
The risk of swine flu causing serious illness was shown to be no higher
than that of the seasonal flu (DeNoon, 2010). In Germany, where around
10,000 people die each year from seasonal influenza, only 189 people died
of swine flu between 2009 and 2010 (Keil, 2010,p.2).
The WHO declaration of a swine flu “pandemic” triggered an esti-
mated £14 billion worth of pre-arranged contracts obligating govern-
ments to purchase swine flu vaccinations from pharmaceutical companies
in the event of a level 6 pandemic (Day, 2020). By thesamelogic,had the
WHO declared sneezing to be a pandemic, that, too, would have been
sufficient to trigger a vaccination campaign (Keil, 2010,p.2).
120 D. A. HUGHES
In the wake of this scandal, a British Medical Journal investigation
uncovered multiple conflicts of interest involving the WHO and big
pharma (Cohen & Carter, 2010, p. 1279). The Parliamentary Assembly
of the Council of Europe’s Subcommittee on Health, called on the
Council to investigate the WHO’s ties to pharmaceutical companies,
noting in a formal motion that “the definition of an alarming pandemic
must not be under the influence of drug-sellers” (Wodarg et al., 2009).
Calling “Covid-19” a “pandemic” served to inculcate fear in a public
not wise to the scam. Scientifically speaking, however, the WHO’s “pan-
demic” concept is close to worthless, because it tells us nothing about
serious illness and death. For reasons that follow, it is far more accurate
to use Davis’ (2021a) term and to call “Covid-19” a “pseudopandemic.”
The Bogus “Spanish Flu” Analogy
“Covid-19” was misleadingly compared to the “Spanish flu,” which
Wikipedia (as of June 2023) calls “one of the deadliest pandemics in
history.” For example, Ferguson et al. (2020, p. 3) claim: “The last
time the world responded to a global emerging disease epidemic of the
scale of the current COVID-19 pandemic with no access to vaccines
was the 1918–19 H1N1 influenza pandemic.” According to Mike Davis,
“COVID-19’s currently guesstimated 2% mortality rate is comparable to
the Spanish flu, and like that monster it probably has the ability to infect
a majority of the human race unless antiviral and vaccine development
quickly come to the rescue” (cited in Fuchs, 2021, p. 3). Schwab and
Malleret (2020, p. 13) ask, “Is the pandemic like the Spanish flu of 1918
(estimated to have killed more than 50 million people worldwide in three
successive waves)?” There was a massive surge of interest in “Spanish flu”
on Google Trends in spring 2020.
Black (2020) observes that the Wikipedia page on the “Spanish” flu
was heavily edited in the months preceding the WHO “pandemic” decla-
ration (from December 2019). Given that Wikipedia is a “micro-managed
propaganda organ” and that most edits served to downgrade the severity
of the “Spanish flu,” this is worthy of note. The case fatality rate for the
“Spanish flu” on Wikipedia was reduced from “an estimated 10–20%” to
“2–3%,” even though the latter figure, implying 12–18 million deaths,
cannot be reconciled with the generally accepted death toll of over 50
million (Johnson & Mueller, 2002). Wikipedia’s downgraded 2–3% CFR,
Black (2020) proposes, can be cited by the media and others as “evidence
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that COVID-19 is as dangerous as, or more dangerous than, the Spanish
Flu.”
In March 2020, the WHO provided a “meaningless” (because based
predominantly on bad outcomes) estimate of the CFR for “Covid-19” at
3.4% (Ioannidis, 2020). As more “cases” were identified, this figure fell to
just above 2%, where it stabilised in 2021. According to data collected by
Johns Hopkins University (n.d.), the mean CFR average across all coun-
tries (as of February 2021) was 2.15%. Based on data retrieved from the
WHO (n.d.-a) Coronavirus dashboard in February 2021, the CFR was
2.2%; by November 2021 it was 2.0%. Thus, the official CFR for “Covid-
19” fell precisely in the 2–3% range of Wikipedia’s downgraded CFR
for the “Spanish flu,” enabling a false comparison of “Covid-19” to the
“Spanish flu” in line with Black’s (2020) prediction. Once “Covid-19”
was replaced by the Russia-Ukraine conflict as the primary focus of the
24/7 news cycle in February 2022, Wikipedia put “Spanish flu” deaths
back up to “17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million,”
implying a CFR of 3–8% to 16%, though CFR was no longer mentioned.
According to the CDC (2018), the “Spanish flu” killed “at least 50
million” people out of a global population of ca. 1.5 billion. Today, the
world’s population stands at just over 8 billion, over five times higher.
This means that a “Spanish flu” equivalent today would kill well over 250
million people, although this number would need to be revised down-
wards to account for developments in modern medicine including the
advent of antibiotics to treat secondary infections, as well as differential
access to such medicine in different parts of the world. A 2006 study
factoring in such considerations estimates, based on the 2004 world popu-
lation of 6.46 billion that a “Spanish flu” equivalent would claim 51–81
million lives (Murray et al., 2006). Given that the global population has
increased by 22% since 2004, it seems reasonable to extrapolate that range
to 66–99 million lives today. A ballpark figure, therefore, would be 82
million lives. Yet, according to the WHO (n.d.-a) Coronavirus Dashboard
in March 2022 (24 months into the “pandemic,” a time frame compa-
rable to the “Spanish flu”), “Covid-19” had killed ca. 6 million people,
barely one-fourteenth of this figure. Furthermore, given that the average
age of death for “Spanish” flu victims was 28, compar ed to a median age
of death of 83 for “Covid-19” in England and Wales (ONS, 2021a), the
former was far more deadly in terms of life-years lost.
122 D. A. HUGHES
Exaggerating the Danger
The Role of the UK Government
Under the pretext that the public had to be terrified into compliance for
its own good, the UK Government unleashed a campaign of fear against
its own citizens. As former Q.C. Lord Sumption observes,
Fear was deliberately stoked up by the government: the language of
impending doom; the daily press conferences; the alarmist projections
of the mathematical modellers; the manipulative use of selected statis-
tics; the presentation of exceptional tragedies as if they were the normal
effects of Covid-19; above all the attempt to suggest that that Covid-19
was an indiscriminate killer, when the truth was that it killed identifiable
groups, notably those with serious underlying conditions and the old, who
could and arguably should have been sheltered without coercing the entire
population. These exaggerations followed naturally from the logic of the
measures themselves. They were necessary in order to justify the extreme
steps which the government had taken, and to promote compliance.
(Sumption, 2020, p. 10)
The methods used by the UK Government, as well as their terrible
impact on members of the public, are documented in Dodsworth’s book,
A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During
the Covid-19 Pandemic (2021). The term “weaponised” here indicates
psychological war fare against the public.
The Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours
(SPI-B), which is a behavioural science subgroup of SAGE, bears signif-
icant culpability for helping to wreck the mental health of the nation.
Yeadon (2020) blames SAGE for psychologically “torturing the popula-
tion.” On March 22, 2020, SPI-B advised the Government that “The
perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who
are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging” (2020, pp. 1–
2). Cue the sickening propaganda campaign described in Chapter 3 that
aimed to instil the fear of death in people and make them believe that they
could unwittingly kill others if they did not follow the “rules.” These
methods, in Scott’s (2022) view, made the population “psychologically
and physically unwell,” their aim being “to harm people.” SPI-B’s Gavin
Morgan admitted that “using fear as a means of control is not ethical.
Using fear smacks of totalitarianism” (cited in Rayner, 2021). Steve Baker
MP remarked on the issue: “If we’re being really honest, do I fear that
4 FEAR AND THREAT 123
Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes,
of course it is” (cited in Rayner, 2021).
Who sits on SPI-B and SAGE? Publicly available names can be found
on the UK Government website (Government Office for Science, n.d.),
and include an array of academics, members of the Behavioural Insights
Team, the Cabinet Office, etc. More interesting, however, is that, for
SPI-B, “4 participants have not given permission to be named.” SAGE
minutes from March 13 and 16, 2020, end: “Names of junior officials and
the secretariat are redacted. Participants who were Observers and Govern-
ment Officials were not consistently recorded therefore this may not be
the complete list” (SAGE, 2020a, 2020c). Who are the mystery atten-
dees? How many of them are there? What is their role? Why is the public
not allowed to know their identities? The SAGE minutes themselves
would not be publicly available were it not for a legal challenge by Simon
Dolan in 2020 to get them released. The secrecy and lack of transparency
are red flags; one suspects the influence of British intelligence.
In May 2020, Boris Johnson announced “five alert levels” for “Covid-
19” (Prime Minister’s Office, 2020b). Those alert levels were modelled
on the same colour-coded system that operated during the “War on
Terror,” allowing fear levels to be dialled up and down. Layered onto
this was the tier system of “lockdown” imposed in autumn 2020, with the
four tiers (as of December 2020) being classified, respectively, as “medium
alert,” “high alert,” “very high alert,” and “stay at home.” There was no
“low alert” or “zero alert.” In May 2021, the UK Government (n.d.-b)
announced an Emergency Alerts system that “will warn you if there’s a
danger to life nearby. In an emergency, your phone or tablet will receive
an alert with advice about how to stay safe.” The system continues to
be developed, but it essentially trains the population to be fearful upon
command. Given that the public gets its news from diffuse sources, an
Emergency Alert to everyone’s smartphone at a moment of acute tension
could cause mass panic and hysteria, which social engineers have decades
of experience in exploiting. The model is Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adap-
tation of H.G Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898), which caused panic in
the United States when people were unable to distinguish fiction from
reality, not least because the radio served as an accepted vehicle for impor-
tant announcements at a time when millions were worried about war in
Europe (Cantril, 2005, p. 68).
124 D. A. HUGHES
The Role of the Media
One means of “maximizing the psychological effects of a terror
campaign,” Digital Citizen (2003) notes, is “repetition of terrifying
images, the kind that would make a person recoil, and then compelling
that person to continue viewing them. Such terrifying images weaken
the ability of the mind to reason, making it more susceptible to sugges-
tion and manipulation.” Much like the endlessly replayed videos of the
planes striking the Twin Towers, or of the final moments of those build-
ings (including their occupants), the media in 2020/21 was awash with
imagery of mass death, disease, ICUs, patients on ventilators, people
wearing face masks, frightening-looking graphs and forecasts, and the
ubiquitous computer-generated image of the “SARS-CoV-2” virion.
In the “shock and awe” early stages of the “Covid-19” operation,
the threat from “SARS-CoV-2” was wildly exaggerated by the media. As
Yoram Lass, the former Director-General of the Israeli Health Ministry,
put it in March 2020, “SARS-CoV-2” is a “virus with public relations”
(cited in Magen, 2020). For example, ludicrous staged footage emerged
from China of people falling dead on the str eet (some putting their
arms out to break their fall) and being surrounded by figures in hazmat
suits (cf. Agence France-Press, 2020). Similar images of forensic experts
in hazmat suits removing bodies from the streets came out of Ecuador
(Ibbetsen, 2020). On April 10, 2020, the BBC published an article
titled, “New York ramps up mass burials amid outbreak,” again featuring
workers in hazmat suits. In fact, many news outlets ran with aerial footage
of the mass burial site in New York, as though to suggest that people were
dying too fast to be given ordinary burials. However, Hart Island has been
used for mass burials of unclaimed and unidentified bodies since 1869,
with some 69,000 people having been buried there since 1980 (Nolan
Brown, 2020). Footage of patients gasping for air in ICUs in Lombardy
was broadcast without providing the context that Lombardy is one of the
most air polluted regions in the world, and, as Lass points out, “Italy is
known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than
three times any other European country” (cited in Magen, 2020). Other
footage from an Italian hospital was presented by CBS as from a hospital
in New York and by 7 News as from a hospital in Melbourne. None of
this deception would have been necessary if “Covid-19” were as deadly
as claimed.
4 FEAR AND THREAT 125
“Mortality-salience increases ideological conformity,” Kyrie & Broudy
(2022) write: it therefore pays for the authorities to “issue frequent
mortality-reminders to keep thoughts of har m and death salient (e.g.
frequent TV terror alerts or daily COVID cases and death counts).” In
2020/21, it was impossible to escape such messaging in state and corpo-
rate media. In 2022/23, in contrast, with excess mortality (consisting
mostly of “deaths not involving Covid-19”) consistently running well
above the five-year average in England and Wales in the wake of the
“lockdowns” and the “vaccine” rollout (ONS, 2023, Fig. 1), the frequent
mortality-reminders were quietly dropped.
To see the despicable lengths to which the media would go in order
to amplify fear of “Covid-19,” consider the following Mail headline from
March 2021: “Grandmother, 66, who was terrified of infecting her family
with Covid killed herself by stepping in front of a train when she felt ‘a
little under the weather’ with a cold, inquest hears” (Saunt, 2021). The
article goes on to reveal that the woman had reported anxiety issues to
her GP since 2007 and that she had admitted visiting a train track with
suicidal thoughts in 2013. Her suicide probably had little, if anything, to
do with “Covid-19,” yet the depraved Mail headline spun it that way to
spread fear.
The Role of the BBC
An Office of Communications report from 2018 finds that 27% of UK
adults “nominate BBC One as their single most important news source”;
62% watch it (Ofcom, 2018). Across social media platforms, the BBC is
the “most commonly followed news platform” (37% of UK adults). Of
those who get their news not through social media, 63% use the BBC
website/app. The BBC News website reaches 74% of the total digital
audience of UK adults one way or another. These are astonishing statis-
tics. They suggest that somewhere in the region of two-thirds of UK
adults get their news from the BBC, with over a quarter rating the BBC as
their most trusted source. In terms of the top current affairs programmes
across all channels, 72–78% believe that the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky,
Channel 5, BBC Radio, and LDC are “impartial.” This shows how easy it
is for a handful of broadcast corporations to manipulate a gullible public.
The BBC was a lead culprit when it came to instilling fear of “Covid-
19.” For example, consider how often the phrase “record number”
(or equivalent) featured in BBC headlines: “NI [Northern Ireland] hits
126 D. A. HUGHES
another record number of cases” (16/10/20), “Record numbers in
hospital in Wales” (12/11/20), “UK announces daily record number of
Covid cases” (29/12/20), “The UK has recorded its highest number
of Coronavirus deaths in a single day” (8/1/21), “Uruguay registers
record number of new Covid cases” (11/1/21), “Record number of daily
deaths reported in UK” (13/1/21), “UK recor ds daily high of 1820
deaths” (20/1/21), “UK counts record number of COVID deaths”
(21/1/21), “‘Record number’ of Covid intensive care patients trans-
ferred” (22/1/21), etc. Throughout the state and corporate media,
in fact, “record numbers” and “new highs” were stressed wherever
possible; “cases,” hospitalisations and death rates seemed constantly to be
“surging,” “sharply up,” “rising alarmingly,” etc., without any necessary
context or sense of perspective being provided.
A search on the BBC News website for “how worried should” reveals
that the BBC likes to use that phrase to scaremonger wherever possible,
e.g. “How worried should we be about melting ice caps?,” “Nuclear
N. Korea: How worried should we be?,” “North Korea-U.S. tensions:
How worried should you be?,” “How worried should NATO be about
Russia’s military ZAPAD exercises?,” “How worried should we be for
our health service?,” “The falling FTSE: How worried should we be?,”
“Global debt: How worried should we be?,” “China’s economic slow-
down: How worried should we be?,” “How worried should the West be
about China?,” “Obesity: How worried should we be?” “How worried
should be you be about knife crime?,” “How worried should we be about
deadly cyber attacks?,” “How worried should we be about ‘Big Brother’
technology?,” “How worried should we be about deepfakes?,” “Swine
flu: How worried should we be?,” “Covid: How worried should we be?,”
and “New Covid strain: How worried should we be?.” It is clear that a
primary function of the BBC is to keep the population in a perpetual state
of anxiety.
Exaggerated Death Statistics
It has been known since 2005 that official death figures are “more
PR than science” when it comes to selling vaccines (Doshi, 2005;cf.
Hammond, 2018). But in order to sustain the illusion of a “pandemic,”
the manipulation of official mor tality data since 2020 was unprecedented
(Davis, 2021a, Chap. 12). For example, until August 2020, anyone in
England who died following a positive test result for “Covid-19” was
4 FEAR AND THREAT 127
labelled a “Covid-19” death on the death certificate, even if they died
of other causes (Davis, 2021c). When Loke and Heneghan (2020)drew
attention to this problem, Public Health England ruled that “Covid-19”
could still appear as the underlying cause of death provided there had
been a positive “Covid-19” test within 28 days of death or the death
occurred within 60 days of a first positive test (Newton, 2020). This is as
arbitrary as claiming that someone died within 28 or 60 days of getting a
haircut: there is no proof of causation.
Any medical doctor could certify the cause of death, even having
only met the patient “via video/visual consultation,” or indeed having
never “seen the deceased before death,” based purely on the “best
of their knowledge and belief” (ONS & HM Passport Office, 2020,
p. 2). Section 19 of the Coronavirus Act withdrew Form 5 of the
cremation medical certificate (requiring the opinion of a second medical
practitioner), meaning that there was no way for relatives to chal-
lenge “Covid-19” on the death certificate, the evidence quickly being
incinerated (Beeley, 2020).
Despite all these artifices to inflate the number of official “Covid-19”
deaths, the all-cause age-standardised mortality rate in England and Wales
in 2020 was lower than during any year between 1970 and 2008, and
only the tenth highest year of the twenty-first century (ONS, 2021b)—
inconsistent with an extraordinary “pandemic” year. According to the
ONS on January 11, 2021, the median age of death “due to COVID-
19” in England and Wales was 83; the mean was 80, vs. an average
life expectancy in 2018–2020 of 79 for men and 83 for women (ONS,
2021c). Thus, “Covid-19” did not affect life expectancy, other than to
help men who contracted it live longer. Yet, as late as August 2021,
the Department of Health and Social Care (2021) still maintained that
“COVID-19 is the biggest threat this country has faced in peacetime
history.”
Once the “vaccines” were rolled out, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza
Group on Modelling, Operational subgroup (SPI-M–O, 2021)worried
that, with a “large proportion of the adult population […] vaccinated,
the current definition of death (i.e. death within 28 days of a posi-
tive COVID-19 test) will become increasingly inaccurate […] It will
also potentially distort estimates of vaccine efficacy.” An unnamed senior
SAGE source reportedly claimed: “If the definition remains the same,
these people would be counted as ‘vaccine failures,’ wher eas the vaccine
prevented death from Covid, but they really died from something else”
128 D. A. HUGHES
(Merrick, 2021). Thus, whereas “died within 28 days of a positive test
result” was enough to classify a “Covid-19” death, regardless of the true
cause of death, the same criterion was not allowed to apply after “vac-
cination.” On the contrary, being “unvaccinated” was classed as either
“having no record of receiving any vaccination or having had a first dose
administered within 14 days of receiving a positive covid test” (Christie,
2022). In other words, a person could test positive for “Covid-19” up
to two weeks after their first “Covid-19 vaccine” and still be classed as
“unvaccinated”—conveniently enough, given that most reported serious
adverse reactions to the “vaccine” occur within the first few days of
it being administered (OpenVAERS, n.d.). The statistics wer e clearly
massaged to exaggerate deaths from the “virus” and to minimise deaths
from the “vaccine.”
Hospital Propaganda
An important device for elevating fear levels in the United Kingdom
was propaganda that hospitals were on the brink of being overwhelmed
by “Covid-19” admissions. On March 23, 2020, the Prime Minister
announced that Covid-19 restrictions were necessary to “protect our
NHS and to save many many thousands of lives” (Prime Minister’s Office,
2020a). The slogan, drilled into the public at every available opportunity,
was “STAY HOME. PROTECT THE NHS. SAVE LIVES.”
Yet, by April 13, 2020, around 40% of NHS beds lay unoccupied,
“about four times the normal number” (West, 2020). An additional
8000 private hospital beds and 20,000 staff, including 700 doctors, were
commissioned by the NHS, yet those beds remained empty and staff were
left “bored” and “twiddling their thumbs” (Adams, 2020). According to
leaked documents, “Two-thirds of the private sector capacity that was
block-purchased by the NHS—costing hundreds of millions of pounds—
went unused by the service over the summer [of 2020], despite rocketing
long waits for operations” (Thomas, 2020). Videos emerged online
of alleged hospital workers performing complex choreographed dance
routines (which must presumably have taken time to learn and rehearse)
without a patient in sight. John Wright of Bradford Royal Infirmary wrote
in March 2021 that “the Covid pandemic has transformed our hospitals.
Car parks are empty, once-bustling corridors are quiet…” (“Coronavirus
doctor’s diary: Has Covid changed hospitals for the better?,” 2021).
4 FEAR AND THREAT 129
SAGE’s “reasonable worst-case planning assumptions” in spring 2020
projected “up to 90,000 beds with ventilators to care for COVID-19
patients” (National Audit Office [NAO], 2020, p. 6). Anticipated venti-
lator shortages did not occur, however, with only 2150 new ventilators
of the 30,000 ordered being dispatched to the NHS based on demand;
and even at the peak of the “first wave,” 43% of ventilator beds remained
unoccupied (NAO, 2020,p.23).
Seven Nightingale hospitals were erected by the military as a supposed
emergency overflow to deal with the imminent inundation of regular
hospitals with “Covid-19” patients. Yet, by October 2020, most had
“never had a patient” (Quinn, 2020). By the end of 2020, only 28
patients were being treated across all Nightingale hospitals (an average
of four patients per hospital), only 249 patients had been admitted all
year, and the London Nightingale had reportedly been “stripped of most
of its 4000 beds, ventilators and even signs” (Andrews, 2020). Why, given
the greatly increased waiting times for treatment for diseases other than
“Covid-19” (Triggle & Jeavans, 2021), were the Nightingales not made
dedicated “Covid-19” treatment centres, to alleviate the burden on the
rest of the NHS? Instead, in March 2021, it was announced that four of
the Nightingale hospitals would close permanently (Blanchard, 2021).
It is the NHS’s responsibility to protect the taxpayers who fund it.
Yet, the government’s “Pr otect the NHS” message led to a precipi-
tous drop in hospital admissions, (Matthews, 2020). In September 2020,
the number of hospital operations carried out was “25% lower than in
previous years” (Butcher, 2021). According to the ONS (2021d, Fig. 6),
excess deaths in hospitals in England and Wales remained below the
five-year-average between mid-May and mid-October 2020. Ambulance
callouts in England in 2020 remained at or below normal levels (Public
Health England, 2021c, Fig. 1). According to NHS England (2020),
“Hospital treatment and intensive care has been available to any indi-
vidual who clinicians determined would benefit from it throughout the
pandemic as it normally would be.” Public Health England data (2021a,
Fig. 1) show that emergency department admissions in 2020 at no point
rose above pre- “pandemic” levels and fell from mid-September 2020 into
2021 as “Covid-19 cases” officially rose. None of this is consistent with a
healthcare system on the brink of being overwhelmed by a “pandemic.”
Those with WEF webpages acted as primary propagandists. NHS
England Chief Executive Simon Stevens (https://www.weforum.org/
people/simon-stevens) claimed in November 2020 that “the equivalent
130 D. A. HUGHES
of 22 of our hospitals” were “full of [11,000] coronavirus patients” (cited
in Iacobucci, 2020b). Spread across 875 hospitals in England (Interweave
Healthcare, 2021), this averages out at only 13 per hospital—hardly over-
whelming. According to Daniel Sokol (https://www.weforum.org/age
nda/authors/daniel-sokol), “The government is petrified at the prospect
of the NHS being overwhelmed. Yet, it already is. Elective opera-
tions have all but stopped in many hospitals and resources reallocated
towards the covid-19 effort” (Sokol, 2021). Elective operations did not
stop because of “Covid-19,” however; they stopped because the NHS
cancelled “non-urgent” procedures based on a grotesque exaggeration of
the “Covid-19” threat. Trish Greenhalgh (https://www.weforum.org/
agenda/authors/trish-greenhalgh) claimed on January 18, 2021, that
“the NHS is truly overwhelmed for the first time in its 70-year history
because of the rise in COVID hospital admissions” (Greenhalgh, 2021).
Greenhalgh’s claims regarding “Covid-19” need to be treated with
caution. The Oxford professor was, after all, an early promoter of face
masks (Greenhalgh et al., 2020), an advocate of joggers and cyclists
wearing masks (Greenhalgh, 2021), a perpetual source of unreliable infor-
mation about masks (Citizen Journalists, 2023), and a champion of
“lockdowns” until high “vaccine” uptake is achieved among adolescents
(Gurdasani et al., 2021). Face masks (Jefferson et al., 2023; Kisielinski
et al., 2021; Children’s Health Defence, n.d.), “lockdowns” (Bhat-
tacharya & Packalen, 2020; Stringham, 2020; Rancourt et al., 2021;
Dettmann et al., 2022; Bardosh, 2023; Harrison, 2023), and “vaccinat-
ing” young people (Dowd, 2022; Hughes, 2022a) were all unnecessary
and dangerous.
Greenhalgh’s claim about the NHS being overwhelmed by “Covid-
19” hospital admissions is easily dispr oved. For example, Craig et al.
(2021) show that the number of Accident and Emergency patients
presenting with an acute respiratory infection in early January 2021 was
“well below normal levels,” and the total number of hospital patients
“remains the same or even lower than in previous years.” Even the
BBC admits that “hospitals were at about 87% occupancy in December
[2020] and early January [2021],” i.e. “noticeably lower than a usual year
[of] between 93 and 95%” (Butcher, 2021). By February 2021, NHS
hospital bed use in England still had not surpassed 2019 levels (NHS
England, 2021). Greenhalgh’s false claim is, then, not dissimilar from
contemporaneous propaganda about temporary morgues being set up in
parts of Britain because hospitals were running out of space (Reuters,
4 FEAR AND THREAT 131
2021). A year later, the playbook was the same, viz. headlines such as
“NHS England makes plans for field hospitals in preparation for wave of
Omicron Covid cases” (Parsley, 2021).
Pressures on the NHS in late 2020 and early 2021, such as they
were, owed not to an unmanageable flood of “Covid-19” patients,
but, rather, to the “enhanced Infection Prevention Control measures”
(NHS England, n.d.-b) put in place to deal with such patients. There
were around 10,000 fewer NHS beds in 2020 than in 2019 owing
to the alleged need to maintain distance between patients (Johnston,
2021). NHS staff were expected to change PPE between treating patients
(Craig et al., 2021). Staff testing positive for “Covid-19” were told to
“self-isolate,” leading to a reduction in workforce capacity.
It is unclear how many “Covid-19” hospital admissions should have
been labelled as such in the first place. Dee (2021), for instance, analyses a
large data set of electronic admissions records for an unnamed NHS Trust
between January 1 and June 13, 2021, and finds that “Only 9.7% (204 of
2102) of declared COVID cases actually exhibited the fundamental basis
for symptomatic disease.” The r est, presumably, were misdiagnosed using
the PCR test. At any rate, the figures are unreliable.
Ostensibly to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed by a tsunami
of “Covid-19” cases that never came, NHS clinical services and sched-
uled operations designated “non-urgent” were postponed or cancelled
(Stevens & Pritchard, 2020). This meant that large numbers of people
could not get screened for illness, or get an operation, creating a “ticking
time bomb of health problems” (Shayler, 2022, p. 23). Britons could not
see their GP in person or obtain necessary dental care because of govern-
ment orders that had no statutory basis, yet which left many people in
pain or discomfort (Sumption, 2020, pp. 6–7). Five million patients were
waiting for surgery in England in March 2021, the highest figure since
records began (Pym, 2021). By May 2021, 10% of NHS patients had to
wait over a year for treatment, while disruption to cancer services had
produced 45,000 “missing cancer patients” following drops in GP refer-
rals and screening services (Triggle & Jeavans, 2021). Heart attacks in
England, up 9% on the previous year, reached record levels in 2021/
22, owing to difficulties in getting GP appointments and prescriptions
for vital medication (Donnelly, 2023). Four in ten patients surveyed in
England in November 2022 claimed that their health had worsened while
waiting to be admitted to hospital (Care Quality Commission, 2023).
Meanwhile, the number of deaths registered in private homes in England
132 D. A. HUGHES
has (as of December 30, 2023) remained above the five-year average
every single week since March 2020 (Office for Health Improvement and
Disparities, n.d. [search by place of death]). This all fits the model of clan-
destine Omniwar, with deprivation of necessary healthcare being used to
weaponise public health, causing widespread illness and death by stealth.
The Spectator (n.d.) shows some disturbing graphs highlighting the
devastating impact of Government/NHS “Covid-19” policies on public
health in England. Takeaway points include:
• Hospital waiting lists increased from just over 4 million pre-Covid
to 7.75 million in September 2023—nearly double.
• The number of patients spending 12 hours or more from decision
to admit to admission each month in A&E departments rose from
a previous high of 2800 in 2020 to 54,500 in December 2022
(42,850 as November 2023).
• The average wait time for an ambulance increased from 20 to 30
minutes pre-Covid to around 50–60 minutes in 2022 (90 minutes
in December 2022), falling back to below 40 minutes in 2023.
• Patients waiting more than 18 weeks on a hospital waiting list
increased from 745,000 in February 2020 to 3 million in April
2023. Patients waiting longer than 52 weeks increased from 1600
in February 2020 to 436,000 in Mar ch 2021 and have held steady
at around 350,000 to 400,000 per month.
• The number of hip and knee replacements halved between 2019 and
2020, comparing unfavourably to other countries.
• GP appointments have gone from being 80% face-to-face and 14%
by phone to 64% face-to-face and 32% by phone.
• There have been 8 million fewer monthly referrals for non-
emergency, consultant-led treatment than before the “pandemic.”
Taken together, we are looking here at the perfect cocktail for a sicker
population. This damage to the NHS, inflicted not by a virus but by
government policy, looks very much like an attack on the health of the
population, duplicitously delivered under the guise of “public health.”
The government’s attack on the NHS ramped up in autumn 2021,
when Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, announced that “Covid-19 vacci-
nation” would be made mandatory for NHS workers (Baker, 2021),
despite risking an exodus of healthcare workers from the profession. In
4 FEAR AND THREAT 133
the United States, for instance, vaccine mandates for hospital workers
meant that thousands of hospital workers resigned or were fired, resulting
in critical staff shortages and “dangerous reductions” in ICU beds (Blay-
lock, 2022). There was already a shortage of 35,000 nurses in England
in June 2021, with NHS Trusts resorting to hiring people unqualified for
nursing roles, potentially jeopardising patient safety (Campbell, 2021).
The abortive attempt to mandate “Covid-19 vaccination” for NHS
workers revealed a flagrant disregard for public health, not only because
of concerns surrounding the safety of the “vaccines” (Seneff & Nigh,
2021), but also because of the detrimental impact on the NHS.
The dismantling of the NHS took another leap forwards with the
passage of the Health and Care Act in April 2022, which removes the
statutory requirement for the NHS to offer treatment to all citizens
and for emergency services to be provided for everybody in a given
area (Pollock & Roderick, 2021). Instead, the principle of universal free
healthcare is replaced with “the limited concept of ‘core responsibil-
ity’ for specified groups of people and the conferring of ‘discretions’
on providers, enabl[ing] further reductions in and closures of services,
pushing those who can afford to do so into paying or their health
care” (Pollock & Roderick, 2021). In other words, it is a major move
towards privatising the NHS. The birth of the NHS in 1948, like the
first welfare state under Bismarck, did not happen by accident. Both were
major concessions by the ruling class at a time of social instability and
revolutionary potential. The attempt to privatise the NHS reflects an
attack on the lower classes who will struggle to afford healthcare and
will consequently be made sicker.
The attack on the NHS long predates “Covid-19.” For example,
between 2000 and 2021 the number of NHS hospital beds fell from
240,000 to 158,000, a cut of just over a third (Statista, 2020). Mean-
while, the UK population rose from 58.9 million in 2000 to 67 million
in 2021, a 13.8% increase (ONS, n.d.). This means that the number of
NHS hospital beds per 1000 people fell from 4.1 in 2000 to 2.4 in 2020,
a significant 41% reduction. The United Kingdom now has one of the
lowest rates of hospital beds per capita of any OECD country (Organ-
isation for Economic Co-operation and Development, n.d.). The Royal
College of Surgeons and the British Medical Association both complained
of chronic bed shortages in 2016, and the Faculty of Intensive Care
Medicine in 2018 reported that 80% of ICUs were sending patients to
134 D. A. HUGHES
other hospitals because of bed and staff shortages (Kayser, 2020). Pres-
sures on the NHS have arisen, not from disease within the population,
but, rather, from a longstanding agenda to undermine the NHS in the
interests of the ruling class.
“Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions”
as Instruments of Fear
Face Masks as Instruments of Fear
Reflecting on her experience of living in East Asia during the SARS
epidemic, Laurie Garret of the Council on Foreign Relations told an
audience at the National Academy of Medicine in 2018:
The major efficacy of a m ask is that it causes alarm in the other person,
and so you stay away from each other [...] It is alarming. When you walk
down the street and everyone coming towards you has a mask on, you
definitely do social distancing. It is just a gut thing. But did the mask help
them? Did the mask keep the virus out? Almost certainly not. (cited in
Senger, 2022a)
The lessons of East Asians’ willingness to wear masks and “social
distance,” believing they were doing the right thing in the absence of any
hard scientific evidence, were weaponised against Western populations in
2020, when Garrett suddenly became adamantly pro-mask.
As official “cases,” hospitalisations, and deaths involving “Covid-19”
tailed off in England in summer 2020 (daily deaths approached zero in
August [UK Government, n.d.-a]), face masks were mandated to main-
tain fear levels and the performance of the “pandemic.” Psychologically,
face masks act as a “crude, highly visible indicator that danger is all
around,” even when it is not (Sidley, 2020). Without the masks (and
the signage and the plexiglass and the performance of danger through
“social distancing”), there would have been no visible indication of a
“pandemic.”
The mask mandates were never about public health. In the spring of
2020, senior public officials around the world explicitly recommended
against such mandates. On March 4, 2020, England’s chief medical
officer, Chris Whitty, stated: “our advice is clear, that wearing a mask if
you don’t have an infection really reduces the risk almost not at all” (cited
in Davis, 2020a). On March 12, 2020, England’s deputy chief medical
4 FEAR AND THREAT 135
officer, Jenny Harries, claimed that masks can “actually trap the virus” and
that, “for the average member of the public walking down a street, it is
not a good idea” to wear one (cited in Baynes, 2020). On April 23, 2020,
the government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, claimed: “The
evidence on face masks has always been quite variable, quite weak. It’s
quite difficult to know exactly, there’s no real trials on it” (cited in Davis,
2020a). According to Health Secretary Matt Hancock on April 24, 2020,
“The evidence around the use of masks by the general public, especially
outdoors, is extremely weak” (cited in Davis, 2020a). On April 28, 2020,
England’s deputy chief scientific adviser, Angela McLean (previously chief
scientific adviser to the MoD) asserted that “there is weak evidence of a
small effect in which a face mask can prevent a source of infection going
from somebody who is infected to the people around them” (Reuters,
2020). Yet, despite this high-level medical establishment consensus by
late April 2020, mask mandates on UK public transport were announced
on June 4, 2020 (to begin on June 15); for shops it was July 24.
The WHO (2020c, p. 1) followed a similar pattern. On January 29,
2020, it advised: “a medical mask is not required [in the community
setting], as no evidence is available on its usefulness to protect non-sick
persons.” On February 7, 2020, the WHO’s Christine Francis explained,
“If you do not have these symptoms [cough, fever, difficulty breathing],
you do not have to wear masks because there is no evidence that they
protect people who are not sick” (cited in Langton, 2020). On March
30, 2020, Mike Ryan, the executive director of the WHO health emer-
gencies programme, claimed, “there is no specific evidence to suggest that
the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.
In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite […]” (cited in
Howard, 2020). On April 6, 2020, the WHO (2020e, p. 1) reiterated
its position that “there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask
(whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider commu-
nity setting, including universal community masking, can prevent them
from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.” Yet, on
June 5, 2020, the WHO’s Maria Van Kerkhove unexpectedly claimed:
“We have new research findings. We have evidence now that if [masking]
is done properly it can provide a barrier [against] potentially infectious
droplets” (Kelland, 2020).
As with the UK “lockdown” decision of March 23, 2020 (see
Chapter 2), it is worth asking who exactly was responsible for the mask
mandates, given that senior public health officials, both in the United
136 D. A. HUGHES
Kingdom and at the WHO, saw no reason for them in April 2020. Clearly,
we are not actually dealing here with public health. Rather, we are looking
at a transnational deep state (Hughes, 2022b) capable of intervening at
the highest levels of governments and international organisations at a
moment’s notice, exercising veto power over decisions previously taken
and issuing new policies on a whim. Face masks were never about public
health; rather, they are an extremely potent instrument of psychological
warfare.
According to WHO interim guidance of June 5, 2020, “At present,
there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID-19 and in healthy
people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of
healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory
viruses, including COVID-19” (WHO, 2020f, p. 6). Nine studies plus
one meta-analysis are cited that “could be considered to be indirect
evidence for the use of masks (medical or other) by healthy individuals
in the wider community” (my emphasis). The meta-analysis was commis-
sioned by the WHO itself and is seriously flawed (Swiss Policy Research,
2020). On this pathetic evidence base, the WHO (2020f,p.6)recom-
mends that “governments should encourage the general public to wear
masks in specific situations and settings.” To be clear, the worldwide mask
mandates, based on WHO guidance, were instituted based on no direct
evidence of their efficacy.
To make matters worse, the WHO’s recommendation that the public
be masked was accompanied by a list of potential harms caused by face
masks. These include: self-contamination either through hand practice
or reusing masks that are wet, soiled, or damaged; facial skin lesions,
irritant dermatitis, or worsening acne through prolonged usage; droplet
transmission to the eyes; and discomfort (WHO, 2020f,p.4). To these
harmful effects, the WHO interim guidance of December 1, 2020,
which again concedes the “limited evidence of protective efficacy of mask
wearing in community settings,” adds “headache and/or breathing diffi-
culties,” “facial temperature changes,” “difficulty with communicating
clearly, especially for persons who are deaf or have poor hearing or use lip
reading,” and “improper mask disposal leading to increased litter in public
places and environmental hazards” (WHO, 2020g, pp. 6, 10). Thus, not
only was there no direct evidence of the efficacy of mask mandates, but
there was also no evidence of their safety.
4 FEAR AND THREAT 137
A mere six days after the WHO’s anti-scientific recommendation that
governments encourage the practice of public mask wearing, Rancourt
(2020b) found that “No RCT [randomised controlled trial] study with
verified outcome shows a benefit for HCW [healthcare workers] or
community members in households to wearing a mask or respirator.
There is no such s tudy. There are no exceptions”; moreover, “no study
exists that shows a benefit from a broad policy to wear masks in public.”
A literature review published in April 2020 had reached a similar conclu-
sion: “The evidence is not sufficiently strong to support widespread use
of facemasks as a protective measure against COVID-19” (Brainard et al.,
2020). Royo-Bordonada et al. (2020) note: “At present, there is no
evidence on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the
community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-
CoV-2.” According to Heneghan and Jefferson (2020), “there is no
available good quality evidence on whether, for example, masks prevent
transmission of Covid-19 in the community and (if so) which types.”
Although post hoc studies emerged seeking to justify mask mandates,
so did studies finding against face mask usage (Children’s Health Defence,
n.d.; LifeSite News, 2021). The key point is that ther e was no scientific
basis for mask mandates when they were introduced. The belated pro-mask
studies amount to little more than a rationalisation of arbitrary power.
The fact that “case” rates surged in country after country after masks
were mandated confirms that masks were never effective in “stopping the
spread.”
The WHO, Rancourt (2020c, p. 4) observes, violated the Golden
Rule of medical ethics: “You don’t recommend an intervention without
policy-grade evidence for both harms and benefits.” In Britain, no risk
assessment was carried out by the government before mask mandates were
introduced, and my MP was unable to provide one when I asked for it in
July 2020. Rancourt (2020c, p. 5) is correct that mask mandates repre-
sent “the worst decisional model that can be applied in a rational and
democratic society,” i.e. “forced preventative measures without a scien-
tific basis, while recklessly ignoring consequences.” Indeed, the failure of
public policy to heed the potential harms of face mask wearing was stark.
As Cayley (2020) observes, “most of the studies touting good effects
like reduced viral load have paid no attention to potential ill effects.”
According to Kisielinski et al. (2021), “Up until now, there has been no
comprehensive investigation as to the adverse health effects masks can
cause.”
138 D. A. HUGHES
James Meehan, MD, writes: “In February and March [2020] we were
told not to wear masks. What changed? The science didn’t change. The
politics did. This is about compliance. It’s not about science” (cited in
Manley, 2020). Compelling behaviour change was fundamental. Indepen-
dent SAGE’s Gabriel Scally claimed in August 2020 that the face mask
“acts as a reminder that these aren’t normal times and that we’ve all
got to change our behaviour” (“‘Re-think Face Masks in Shops,’ Says
Scientist,” 2020). A government “Covid-19” taskforce advisor was even
more explicit: “Masks are a behavioural psychology policy. We need to
stop pretending that it’s about public health. Nudge is a big thing in
government” (cited in Dodsworth, 2021b). However, face masks were
not mere “nudges” to encourage the public to adopt supposedly benefi-
cial behaviours for the good of society. Rather, face masks are instruments
of menticidal attack, designed to break the public down psychologically.
One obvious function (among many) is to trigger visceral fear of disease
and a sense that the environment has become strange and threatening.
The increased stress and anxiety make the public more susceptible to
propaganda and psychological manipulation.
There are physiological, as well as psychological, reasons why mask
wearing increases fear levels. Covering the mouth and nose with a mask
can lead to hypercapnia, i.e. abnormally high CO2 levels in the blood
(Kisielinski et al., 2021). In mice, “rising CO2 concentrations elicit
intense fear” and it has been shown that “the amygdala [acts] as an impor-
tant chemosensor that detects hypercarbia [hypercapnia] and acidosis and
initiates behavioral responses” (Ziemann et al., 2009). In humans, “the
amygdala has a central role in anxiety responses to stressful and arousing
situations” and can activate the “fight-or-flight” response (Linsambarth
et al., 2017; Moyer, 2019). Therefore, by increasing CO2 levels, face
masks can physiologically trigger fear and anxiety in the wearer.
PCR Tests as Instruments of Fear
Another instrument for spreading fear was the PCR test, which was
wrongly used to diagnose “cases” of “Covid-19” (hence the misleading
phrase “tested positive for Covid-19”). The inventor of the PCR test,
Kary Mullis (1993) never intended it to be used for diagnostic purposes,
calling it “a process used to make a whole lot of something out of some-
thing. […] It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick.” In Mullis’ words, “PCR
detects a very small segment of the nucleic acid which is part of a virus
4 FEAR AND THREAT 139
itself” and doubles the amount of it in successive cycles of the RT-PCR
process (cited in Farber, 2020a). Thus, David Crowe explains, “PCR is
really a manufacturing technique […] If you double 30 times, you get
approximately a billion times more material than you started with” (cited
in Farber, 2020a). This can be useful for experimental purposes, but it
cannot distinguish whether the genetic material detected implies active
infection or mere “dead particles” following recovery from infection
(Heneghan & Jefferson, 2020). Canadian microbiologist Jar ed Bullard
testified under oath that PCR tests can detect non-viable viral fragments
for up to 100 days, even though a person with “Covid-19” is infectious
only for one to two weeks (Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms
[JCCF], 2021).
The “Covid-19” PCR test manufacturers themselves clearly indicate
that their product cannot diagnose disease:
The instruction manual of “RealStar” by Altona Diagnostics: “For resear ch
use only! Not for use in diagnostic procedures.” “Multiplex RT-qPCR Kit”
of Creative Diagnostics: “This product is for research use only and is not
intended for diagnostic use.” The product announcement of the “LightMix
Modular Assays” by Roche: “These assays are not intended for use as an
aid in the diagnosis of coronavirus infection. For research use only. Not
for use in diagnostic procedures.” (Steinhagen, 2020)
It is, therefore, curious that Public Health England (2021b) claims
that “COVID-19 cases are identified [diagnosed] by taking specimens
from people and testing them for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
If the test is positive, this is referred to as a case. If a person has had more
than one positive test they are only counted as one case.”
The idea that a positive test for the “SARS-CoV-2” virus—whether
using PCR, lateral flow, or any other form of test—implies the presence
of the disease known as “Covid-19” is ludicrous, because it ignores the
role of the human immune system. It is commonplace for viruses to be
carried asymptomatically, with the virus remaining present in harmlessly
low levels, because the immune system prevents it from replicating. Harrit
(2021) makes this point succinctly:
To be sick is to have symptoms. If you are not sick, you are not contagious.
It used to be common sense that you are healthy unless you are not. Sense
is not common anymore during the alleged Covid-19 pandemic. Now you
are sick until proven healthy – and contagious by default. The vehicle for
this scam is the RT-PCR test run at >35 cycles and beyond.
140 D. A. HUGHES
According to biochemist David Rasnick, “You don’t start with testing;
you start with listening to the lungs,” i.e. clinical symptoms first (cited
in Farber, 2020a). Yet, against such elementary principles, the ONS and
Oxford University partnered on a well-remunerated study in 2020 to
“find out how many people have Covid-19, either with or without symp-
toms across the UK” (Slater, 2020). The aim seems to have been to
normalise the concept of symptomless disease.
The number of cycles the RT-PCR test involves is known as the cycle
threshold, with each cycle doubling the amount of genetic material under
examination. The more cycles that are run, the higher the chance of
a positive test result, because there is more material to detect. At a
certain cycle threshold, the test becomes too sensitive and may yield
false positive results, detecting material that was not originally present
in sufficient quantity to be infectious. There is no absolute value to that
cycle threshold, and different laboratories use different cycle thresholds
(itself problematic in terms of consistency of standards). Nevertheless,
according to the authoritative MIQE (Minimum Information for Publi-
cation of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments) guidelines of 2009,
“Cq values > 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and
generally should not be reported […]” (Bustin et al., 2009, p. 618). One
of the authors of those guidelines, Stephen Bustin, claims in an April 2020
interview, “I would be very unhappy about a 40-cycle PCR […] Above
a cycle of about 35, then you start to worry about the reliability of your
results […] Try to be sure that the results you get are in the twenties to
thirties” (The Infectious Myth, 2020, 30:00).
Yet, NHS England worked to a cycle threshold of 45 when testing
for “SARS-CoV-2” (Science & Technology Committee, 2020). A WHO
summary table of protocols being used around the world shows France
using 50 cycles, Germany, Thailand, and the United States using 45
cycles, and Hong Kong, and Japan using 40 cycles (WHO, 2020b). The
Canadian province of Manitoba used between 40 and 45 cycles (JCCF,
2021). Kim et al. (2020), in the early “isolation” of “SARS-CoV-2,”
perform PCR amplification with 40 cycles. This implies the likelihood
of high false positive rates in PCR testing across the world.
Did the PCR tests test exclusively for “SARS-CoV-2,” as any reliable
test must? For the “Covid-19” PCR test to be valid, Bustin claims, “the
SARS-CoV-2-specific primers and probes […] must be 100% specific for
the virus and so amplify only viral sequences” (Bustin & Nolan, 2020).
4 FEAR AND THREAT 141
However, research published by the Spanish medical journal D-Salud-
Discovery (Blanca, 2020), whose findings are independently verified by
Davis (2020b), casts doubt on whether this is the case. It finds, for
instance, that the PCR test protocol of the Pasteur Institute tests for
genetic sequences present in “dozens of sequences of the human genome
itself and in those of about a hundred microbes.” The Japanese PCR
protocol yields similar results: 93 human genome sequences and 100
microbe sequences with 94–100% similarity (Blanca, 2020). These find-
ings are achieved by entering key genetic sequences from WHO-approved
PCR protocols into the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST),
which enables a given sequence to be compared to all sequences stored
in the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Although the PCR test was unfit for purpose, the authorities were
eager to use it everywhere. On Mar ch 16, 2020, the WHO Director-
General pleaded, “We have a simple message for all countries: test,
test, test” (WHO, 2020d). The UK Department of Health and Social
Care (2020a) published a document on April 4, 2020 titled, Coron-
avirus (COVID-19) Scaling Up Our Testing Programmes ,and NHSTest
and Trace was established on May 28. Operation Moonshot aimed to
administer 10 million tests a day by 2021 at the astronomical cost to
the taxpayer of £100 billion, but the scheme was abandoned after the
Good Law Project threatened legal action over misuse of public funds
(Iacobucci, 2020a). In July 2020, the Rockefeller Foundation (2020)
called on everyone to get tested at least twice a month—a new mass
industry involving “perhaps as many as 300,000” people (ca. 0.1% of
the population) to administer 30 million tests per week and run contact
tracing in the United States.
Why the urgency to “test, test, test” using an obviously flawed testing
protocol? One reason is that tests create “cases” and “cases” create fear.
The more tests that are carried out using a test liable to produce false posi-
tive results, the more “cases” there will be (the so-called “casedemic”).
“Cases” here, however, are not the same as active infections that cause
illness. They are, rather, an artifice to inflate fear levels, e.g., via media
reports of “surging case numbers” and “deaths within 28 days of a posi-
tive test for coronavirus.” When the United Kingdom ended free testing
in April 2022, the “Covid-19 case rate” plummeted by 38% in a single
week (Matthews, 2022).
142 D. A. HUGHES
There is nothing new in this scam. Reflecting on HIV testing between
1984 and 1996, Mullis remarks: “The number of cases went up epidem-
ically, you know, exponentially, because the number of tests that was
done went up exponentially” (“PCR inventor Kary Mullis talks about
Anthony Fauci,” 2020). Yet, the number of active HIV infections in
North America, Mullis adds, remained steady during the same period,
at around a million. The reported “cases” nevertheless generated huge
public fear around the virus, driving demand for pharmaceutical products
and, thus, profit for Big Pharma.
In 2007, nearly 1000 healthcare workers at a medical centre in New
Hampshire were furloughed following an apparent whooping cough
outbreak. However, it proved to be a false alarm: “Not a single case
of whooping cough was confirmed with the definitive test, growing the
bacterium, Bordetella pertussis, in the laboratory. Instead, it appears the
health care workers probably were afflicted with ordinary respiratory
diseases like the common cold” (Kolata, 2007). The reason for the false
alarm was PCR testing and the fact that epidemiologists and infectious
disease specialists “placed too much faith in a quick and highly sensi-
tive molecular test that led them astray.” The sensitivity of the PCR test
“makes false positives likely, and when hundreds or thousands of people
are tested […] false positives can make it seem like there is an epidemic.”
The strategy for dealing with the 2009 “swine flu pandemic” (neither
endemic in pigs nor a pandemic in any pre-2009 sense of the term) can
be summarised as: “Publicise all cases where the virus has been detected.
That is, set up surveillance stations everywhere and notify the community
of every case of the virus found in the population—even if the infec-
tion does not cause any disease […]” (Wilyman, 2020). This chimes
with Marc van Ranst’s cynical media strategy for spreading fear of H1N1
(EvidenceNotFear, 2020).
During “Covid-19,” the mass testing regime became self-sustaining,
as those found to have been in contact with a positive “case” were them-
selves asked to take a test, even if neither party was symptomatic. On and
on it went: healthy people producing false positive test results, drawing in
even more people for testing. To encourage more and more people to get
tested, some 700 test centres were set up under NHS Test and Trace, the
average distance to one being just 2.4 miles (Department of Health and
Social Care, 2020b). However, if amateur video footage of empty testing
centres is anything to go by, this was largely just propaganda.
4 FEAR AND THREAT 143
Viral Terror
Waves of Fear
Totalitarian menticide involves creating successive waves of fear and terror.
As Meerloo (1956, p. 147) notes, “Each wave of terrorizing […] creates
its effects more easily—after a breathing spell—than the one that preceded
it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience.” Linked
to these “waves of terrorizing” is the totalitarian “strategy of fraction-
alized fear,” whereby victims’ minds are more easily conditioned “in a
quiet period between acute tensions,” when their guard may be down
(Meerloo, 1956, p. 168).
The threat of new “waves” of “SARS-Cov-2” served a similar function,
i.e. to terrify and demoralise the public and wear it down psychologically.
The alleged virus need not be especially virulent for the mere threat of
its resurgence (with attendant implications associated with “lockdown”)
to be used to keep the population fearful and apprehensive. Schwab and
Malleret (2020, p. 91) appear to explain the desired effect: “On a plane-
tary scale, our collective sense of mental wellbeing has taken a very severe
knock. Having dealt with the first wave, we are now anticipating another
that may or may not come, and this toxic emotional mix risks producing
a collective state of anguish.” That “very severe knock,” however, was
caused by government policies, not by a virus which, by the authors’
admission, had killed only “0.006%” of the global population at that point
(2020, p. 99). It is the anticipation (created by propaganda) that causes
the anguish, not anything in nature.
Invoking “waves” of the virus means that the threat of some future
dread can be used to keep the population anxious and uncertain. The
idea of a “second epidemic peak” was seeded by SAGE ( 2020b,p.4)
as early as Mar ch 13, 2020: “it is a near certainty that countries such
as China, where heavy suppression is underway, will experience a second
peak once measures are relaxed.” This chimes with “Report 9” three days
later: “Once interventions are relaxed (in the example in Fig. 3, from
September onwards), infections begin to rise, resulting in a predicted peak
epidemic later in the year” (Ferguson et al., 2020, p. 10). During the
summer of 2020, when “Covid-19” case, hospitalisation, and mortality
rates all plummeted in England (UK Government, n.d.-a), the propa-
ganda was that “Hospitals will need as much capacity as they can get if
there is a second wave” (Chalmers, 2020a). In one possible scenario envis-
aged by Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 21), “the first wave is followed
144 D. A. HUGHES
by a larger wave that takes place in the third or fourth quarter of 2020,
and one or several smaller subsequent waves in 2021 (like during the
1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic).” This is essentially what happened
in England (only with the “second wave” peak coming in mid-January
2021, rather than Q4 of 2020), forming a supposed three-peak distribu-
tion over a two-year period much like the “Spanish flu” a century earlier
(UK Government, n.d.-a; Taubenberger & Morens, 2006, Fig. 1).
The three “waves” of “Covid-19,” like those of the “Spanish flu,”
are a form of pseudoscience: “Viruses do not do waves. That’s just a
myth based on poor understanding of influenza at the end of WW1, a
century ago” (Yeadon, 2020). It makes no sense, other than to spread
fear, to treat “Covid-19” as a single ongoing event with multiple “waves.”
“Modern human mortality in mid-latitude temperate-climate regions,”
Rancourt (2020a, p. 4) notes, “is robustly seasonal,” and this is why,
for instance, we speak of the “flu season” rather than amalgamating the
last several flu seasons’ data (as the WHO [n.d.-a] Covid-19 Dashboard
does for “Covid-19”). In the Czech Republic, “the three individual waves
(autumn 2020 to spring 2021) […] lacked direct genomic relationship
between each other,” and the Omicron variant “did not reveal direct
evolutionary connection to any of the previous SARS-CoV-2 variants”
(Kämmerer et al., 2023; cf. Tanaka & Miyazawa, 2023), rendering it
doubtful that “new variants” were responsible for new “waves” of the
virus.
Once “Covid-19'' had apparently formed the classic Gompertz curve
in the spring of 2020, there was no reason, based on the principle of
viral entropy, to expect a “second wave” larger than the first in the
winter. Prior and naturally acquired immunity meant that “endemic equi-
librium” should have been imminent” by the autumn of 2020 (Yeadon,
2020). According to Oxford-AstraZeneca’s Sarah Gilbert, “viruses tend
to become less virulent over time as they spread through a popula-
tion becoming more immune” (cited in Knapton, 2021). An open letter
to the Prime Minister, dated November 8, 2020, and signed by 469
medics, states: “It is notable that [the] UK death rate is currently sitting
around average for this time of year. The use of the term ‘second
wave’ is therefore misleading” and the government response to the
virus is “disproportionate” (Davies, 2020). The so-called “second wave”
that purportedly followed in winter 2020 is, therefore, not scientifically
credible.
4 FEAR AND THREAT 145
In 2021, fear of a future virological threat was linked to the poten-
tial return of influenza, which, in a historically unprecedented turn of
events, had supposedly vanished in 2020 (see Chapter 6). In February
2021, SAGE’s John Edmunds predicted “an out-of-season [influenza]
epidemic perhaps in the autumn, rather than winter” (Patel, 2021). Susan
Hopkins, in charge of Public Health England’s “Covid-19” strategy,
claimed in March 2021 that the United Kingdom must prepare for a
“hard winter” of “flu and other similar illnesses” (cited in Topping,
2021). Boris Johnson claimed in June 2021: “You can never exclude
the possibility that there will be some new disease, some new horror we
haven’t budgeted for or accounted for […] Things like flu may come back
this winter, we may have a rough winter for all sorts of reasons” (Jones,
2021). A July 2021 report by the Academy of Medical Sciences (2021),
commissioned by Patrick Vallance, predicts the perfect storm: a “third
peak of COVID-19 infections over the summer of 2021,” followed by
a possible “new variant,” while “outbreaks of RSV in the autumn and
influenza in the winter could be around twice the magnitude of a ‘nor-
mal’ year, and might overlap (at least partially) with a peak in COVID-19
infections.” Mike Tildesley, a modeller from the University of Warwick,
claimed in August 2021: “If [flu and other respiratory infections] retur n
on the scale we expect we could see really major pressures build on the
NHS that could raise some very difficult questions” (Triggle, 2021b).
Actual influenza rates for the winter of 2021/22 were lower than for any
of the six winters preceding “Covid-19” (WHO, n.d.-b), thus confirming
the well-established pattern of using public health forecasts to spread fear
during the “Covid-19 pandemic.”
Since the “Covid-19” operation was wound down in early 2022,
artificially manufactured waves of fear have continued to roll across
Western societies, viz. the Marburg and monkeypox scares, the “cli-
mate emergency” (Plimer, 2021), the threat of food and fuel short-
ages, fear-mongering rhetoric of nuclear war attached to the Ukraine
conflict, runaway inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, “disinformation”
(the pretext for online censorship), concerns about immigration (see
Chapter 8), threats of cyber-attacks/outages (Cyber Polygon, n.d.), etc.
This goes beyond Mencken’s (2009, p. 24) contention that “The whole
aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence
clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Rather, we are looking here at
psychological warfare: “These fear-waves and threats (negative stimuli;
146 D. A. HUGHES
conditioning à la Pavlov) are designed deliberately to grind people down,
to make them submit, to induce breakdown, to coerce them to give up
[…]” (Scott, 2022).
“New Variants” and “Immunity Escape”
In order to maintain fear levels among the population, the concept of
“new variants” was introduced in Britain in December 2020, based on
Public Health England data (2020a, pp. 5, 48) regarding unusually high
“case” rates in Kent. Matt Hancock wrote in a WhatsApp conversation
on December 13, 2020: “When do we deploy [a military term] the new
variant” in order to “frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain”?
To which his special adviser, Damon Poole, replied: “Yep that’s [sic.] will
get proper behaviour change” (Haigh, 2023). Hancock announced the
new variant and Tier 3 restrictions the next day.
The term “new variant” is interesting in and of itself, since influenza
routinely develops new strains, yet there is no comparable level of fear-
mongering attached. The underlying idea, propagated by the media, is
that “SARS-CoV-2 consistently evolves into an ever more dangerous iter-
ation of itself” (Davis, 2021b)—the opposite of viral entropy. The idea
was thus seeded that the virus mutates in such a way as to evade all forms
of acquired immunity, be they cross-reactive T-cell immunity, naturally
acquired immunity to the virus, or vaccine-derived immunity.
The first “Variants of Concern” originated in the United Kingdom,
Brazil, and South Africa (Golemi-Kotra, 2021), the same three countries
used in AstraZeneca’s phase 3 trials (Voysey et al., 2021). The odds of
this precise combination of countries appearing randomly together are 7
million to one against (1/193 * 1/192 * 1/191), suggesting either that
the AstraZeneca “vaccines” cause immune escape or that this incredible
coincidence was scripted in order to promote the idea of immune escape.
Official sources did not portray the “Kent variant” as especially
virulent. Public Health England (2020b) on December 20, 2020, for
instance, offered “no evidence that this variant causes more severe disease
or higher mortality.” Gates (2020) claimed on December 22, 2020, that
the new variant “seems to spread faster but not to be more deadly.”
Johns Hopkins Medical Centre saw “[no] indication that the new strain is
more virulent or dangerous in terms of causing more severe COVID–19
disease” (Bollinger & Ray, 2020). Analysis of relevant UK data by Davis
(2021b) reveals that up to early December 2020, “the new variants had
4 FEAR AND THREAT 147
accounted for an increased rate of transmission—but significantly lower
rates of hospitalisation and mortality.”
Yet, SAGE (2020d) tr eated the “new variant” as a pretext for authori-
tarianism: “Given the increase in risk associated with the new variant,” it
claimed, “a commensurate strengthening in the measures taken […] may
be needed.” This was despite inherent scientific uncertainty, reflected in
SAGE’s use of hedging phrases such as “not yet known whether […],”
“not yet any evidence which suggests […],” “not yet clear whether […],”
and “currently no evidence of […].” Neil Ferguson likewise claimed: “the
new variant without doubt will make the relaxation of restrictions more
difficult” (cited in Glaze, 2021). “New variant” thus became synonymous
with scientifically baseless restrictions on liberty, providing a “psycholog-
ical justification for actions the government may wish to take anyway”
(Dodsworth, 2021a, p. 116).
Notwithstanding the dubiousness of the “new variant” concept, the
idea was propagated that “new variants” might s omehow evade all forms
of acquired immunity. The “specter of vaccine escape mutants” was
mooted as early as June 2020 (Branch, 2020). Once the “vaccines” were
rolled out in December 2020, an early concern was that too long a gap
between “vaccine” doses could create “more potential for viral evolu-
tion” (Saad-Roy et al., 2021). In early January 2021, the New and
Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats A dvisory Group (2021) warned that
“SARS-CoV-2 variants may arise which evade monoclonal antibody ther-
apies, convalescent plasma therapy, vaccine derived immunity, or naturally
acquired immunity.” The BBC warned in February 2021: “Growing levels
of immunity from further rollout of the vaccine will favour variants that
can sneak past the vaccine” (Triggle, 2021a). Whitty expressed confi-
dence that a vaccine-resistant variant would emerge (cited in Boyd, 2021).
Ferguson warned of “the worst case scenario [that] we have a new variant
pop up which does manage to evade the vaccines […]” (cited in Walsh,
2021). An Express headline pointed to a “vaccine-resistant variant” about
to “smash” the United Kingdom (Falvey, 2021). This is all scripted and
intended to maintain fear of the “virus” even as the “vaccines” intended
to deal with that virus were being rolled out.
The WHO’s Maria Van Kerkhove warned in August 2021 that “new
variants could emerge which evade vaccines,” claiming that so many
new variants had emerged that the Greek letter scheme introduced to
label them a few months earlier would soon be exhausted and that the
WHO might have to name them after star constellations (“COVID-19
148 D. A. HUGHES
Variants could be named after constellations,” 2021). The Sun warned
with respect to the Lambda variant that “‘unusual’ mutations can ‘dodge
vaccines’” (Zorzut, 2021). According to the New York Post , the Epsilon
variant, despite being removed from the WHO’s “variants of interest” in
July 2021, “could evade vaccines” (O’Neill, 2021). In September, the
WHO claimed it was monitoring the new “Mu” variant, which has “the
potential to evade immunity provided by a previous Covid-19 infection
or vaccination” (Lovelace Jr., 2021). The propaganda strategy is clear, i.e.
to maintain constant fear of immune escape via a proliferation of “new
variants.”
Geert Vanden Bossche
The issue of immune escape received special attention following publica-
tion of an open letter by Geert Vanden Bossche (2021). Vanden Bossche,
a virologist with experience of working for Big Pharma, GAVI, and the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, claims that mass vaccination with leaky
vaccines could lead to mor e virulent s trains of “Covid-19” developing in
vaccinated people, which in turn could kill the unvaccinated, leading to
a never-ending need to vaccinate against ever more dangerous strains. It
was first theorised in 2001 that vaccines could in principle select for the
evolution of increased virulence (Gandon et al., 2001). Empirical confir-
mation was provided in 2015: immunisation of chickens against Marek’s
disease “enhances the fitness of more virulent strains, making it possible
for hyperpathogenic strains to transmit”; this is because leaky vaccination
“prolongs host survival but does not prevent infection, viral replication or
transmission” (Read et al., 2015). If similar were to occur in humans, then
“the normal ‘life cycle’ of a virus, from highly virulent and dangerous, to
more infectious but less dangerous (‘virus entropy’) may be fundamentally
affected or even reversed” (van der Pijl, 2022, p. 247). This contravention
of Virology 101 seems prima facie unlikely, however.
The Vanden Bossche open letter reads more as fear propaganda than
as science. For example, it refers to “killer vaccines” and claims that mass
vaccination threatens to “wipe out large parts of our human popula-
tion” by “turning a relatively harmless virus into a bioweapon of mass
destruction.” If so, how might those behind the “bioweapon” expect to
survive? Do they have the antidote? Vanden Bossche (2021) dramatically
appeals to professional reputation rather than carefully supported scien-
tific argumentation: “In this agonizing letter, I put all of my reputation
4 FEAR AND THREAT 149
and credibility at stake.” Yet, an unreferenced, five-page letter is not the
place to do this; rather, a peer-reviewed journal article, or at the very
least a preprint would have been more appropriate, notwithstanding the
urgency of the subject matter.
Like a tabloid newspaper, Vanden Bossche’s open letter places multiple,
sometimes sensationalist, phrases in capital letters to grab attention,
e.g. “THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT PUBLIC HEALTH EMER-
GENCY OF INTERNATIONAL CONCERN.” Phrases such as “racing
against the clock” and “ther e is not one second left for gears to be
switched” add to the drama but detract from scientific credibility. The
virus itself is anthropomorphised as a kind of master criminal that will
“take on another coat” as part of its “strategy” to replicate and increase
its “return on selection investment.” The open letter also makes emotive
reference to the vulnerability of children to “Covid-19,” even though
there is little to no credible scientific evidence to support this assertion
(Hughes, 2022a).
Vanden Bossche’s scientific claims are spurious. For example, he
presents a jaundiced view of the human immune system (Frei, 2021),
focusing on initial “passive immunity” but not subsequent “adaptive
immunity” in which T-cells are produced. He tries to downplay cross-
reactive T-cell immunity as “short-lived,” only mentioning T-cells twice,
even though it is known that “CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells, and
neutralizing antibodies all contribute to control of SARS-CoV-2 in both
non-hospitalized and hospitalized cases of COVID-19” (Sette & Crotty,
2021). Because “SARS-CoV-2” is a coronavirus, there is already a certain
degree of cross-reactive T-cell memory (found in ca. 28–50% of people)
and therefor e “some degree of pre-existing immunity in the popula-
tion” (Sette & Crotty, 2021). The “Variants of Concern” do not change
this, for they “do not significantly disrupt the total SARS-CoV-2 T cell
reactivity” (Tarke et al., 2021).
Despite criticising leaky “Covid-19” vaccines for endangering all
human life, Vanden Bossche (2021) reaches a surprising conclusion:
“Paradoxically, the only intervention that could offer a perspective to end
this pandemic (other than to let it run its disastrous course) is …VAC-
CINATION.” Thus, he does nothing to challenge the “Covid-19” vacci-
nation agenda. Instead, he proposes “large vaccination campaigns” that
will prime NK (natural killer) cells so that they “acquire immunological
memory” and thereby become able to “recognize and kill Coronaviruses
150 D. A. HUGHES
at large (include all their variants) at an early stage of infection”—even
though there is still no cure for the common cold.
If Vanden Bossche were right, deaths among the “unvaccinated” would
have spiralled out of control. Instead, not only did Omicron fit the viral
entropy model of more transmissible but less deadly (it was likened to
the common cold), but health outcomes among “unvaccinated” people
proved better than for the “vaccinated” (see Chapter 7). It is therefore
hard to escape the conclusion that Vanden Bossche is yet another medical
establishment figure responsible for propagating a pseudoscientific fear
narrative. Almost no one had heard of him before he entered the scene,
and he disappeared just as quickly, having played his part.
“Long Covid”
The threat severity of “Covid-19” was hyped via the new concept of
“long Covid,” which NHS England (n.d.-a) vaguely defines in terms of
“symptoms that develop during or following an infection consistent with
COVID-19 which continue for more than 12 weeks and are not explained
by an alternative diagnosis.” Those symptoms are said by NHS England
to be “wide-ranging and fluctuating, and can include breathlessness,
chronic fatigue, ‘brain fog,’ anxiety and stress,” as well as “generalised
pain, fatigue, persisting high temperature and psychiatric problems.”
All of those symptoms, however, can be explained by alternative diag-
noses. According to one GP, “most [of those] symptoms are so common
that we see them in general practice all the time” (cited in Cox, 2021).
Without a control group, it is impossible, in the words of NIAID’s
Michael Sneller, to “attribute any abnormality to the viral infection”; for
example, “about 12% of our COVID group complains of tinnitus, and
about 14% of the control group has tinnitus” (cited in Couzin-Frankel,
2021). Blankenburg et al. (2022) find “no statistically significant differ-
ence (Fisher’s exact test) in the occurrence of any neurocognitive or pain
symptoms” among 1560 school children with “long Covid” symptoms,
regardless of whether they tested seropositive or seronegative.
The term “long Covid” was coined by a patient advocacy organisa-
tion called Body Politic in a May 2020 report based on online surveys of
people self-reporting persistent symptoms. However, of those surveyed,
“nearly half (47.8%) never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for
Covid-19,” meaning that less than a quarter had tested positive (Devine,
2021). In a December 2020 report by the same organisation, only 15.9%
4 FEAR AND THREAT 151
of respondents “had tested positive for the virus at any time” (Devine,
2021). To be clear, only 16–25% of those self-reporting “long Covid”
in these early surveys had tested positive for “SARS-CoV-2.” Proponents
of “long Covid” sometimes attribute such low rates to the initial scarcity
of testing kits, as though more testing would undoubtedly have revealed
many more “cases” (Re’em, 2021). Yet, in the May 2020 report above,
more people tested negative than positive, suggesting that less than half
of tests overall would have come back positive.
A later scientific study corroborates this hypothesis: in 467 12–25-
year-olds, “long Covid” symptoms after six months (based on the WHO
definition of “Post-COVID-19 Condition”) were found in 49% of those
who had previously tested positive for “ SARS-CoV-2,” but also 47%
of those had tested negative (Selvakumar et al., 2023)—offering no
convincing evidence that “long Covid,” if it exists, has anything to do
with “Covid-19.” Rather, Selvakumar et al. (2023) conclude, “initial
symptom severity and psychosocial factors” are the key predictors of “long
Covid,” there being no hard evidence what caused those symptoms, while
the “psychosocial factors” mean that it could all be in the mind. An even
larger study of 5086 11–17-year-olds delivers a similar verdict: “these
symptoms may be causally related to multiple factors and not just the
original SARS-COV-2 infection” (Pereira et al., 2023).
The existence of “long Covid,” which has no equivalent in, say, “long
rhinovirus” or “long influenza,” was not established through scientific
investigation; rather, it was promoted by patient advocacy groups like
Body Politic bringing together people convinced they have the illness. To
a sceptic, this looks “a lot like amalgam poisoning, electricity allergy, and
chronic Lyme disease—i.e. conditions that some people diagnose them-
selves with (doctors rarely diagnose them), but for which there are no
diagnostic tests, and for which there is no scientific evidence” (Rush-
worth, 2020). Devine (2021), too, compares “long Covid” to chr onic
Lyme disease, “a term whose usage is discouraged because it describes a
range of symptoms without requiring evidence of prior infection with the
bacterium that causes Lyme disease; some see it as quackery […].” One
“long Covid” advocacy group, Patient-led Research, ran a study in which
“the majority [73%] of participants did not report receiving a positive
SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic or antibody test result,” nevertheless claiming
that this “should not be used as an indicator to rule out Long COVID in
patients who otherwise have suggestive symptoms” (Davis et al., 2021,my
emphasis). There is no plausible connection here between the virus and
152 D. A. HUGHES
the alleged long-term symptoms. Rather, “long Covid” turns out to be
“basically whatever the person who thinks they have it says it is. Anything
and everything can be attributed to long covid” (Rushworth, 2020).
Despite the lack of science, “long Covid” patient advocacy organisa-
tions rapidly gained disproportionate influence. For example, take Lisa
McCorkell of Body Politic and Patient-Led Research, whose highest
academic qualification is a Master of Public Policy in 2020. In April 2021,
McCorkell gave evidence to Congress as one of seven “expert witnesses”
alongside the heads of the NIH and CDC, as well as two professors
from Stanford and Yale. In her testimony, McCorkell (2021) notes that
Body Politic formed part of the WHO’s “long Covid” working group and
held “ongoing meetings” with the CDC’s Post-COVID Conditions Unit,
producing research that has been cited in “over 70 scientific publications,
guidance for clinicians, and policy documents.” Thus, a patient advocacy
group run by five young people without prior academic publications,
whose work on “long Covid” contains obvious methodological flaws,
supposedly informed scientific debate and policymaking at the highest
levels of public health, including the WHO, CDC, and NIH. This is not
credible. A more plausible explanation is that there is a high-level agenda
to promote “long Covid,” and patient advocacy groups are either being
exploited or were astroturfed to push the agenda.
To see why many people believe they have a condition called “long
Covid,” consider why so many people believe they may have had “Covid-
19” in the first place. Not only is it “hard to tell the difference” between
“Covid-19” and influenza “based on symptoms alone” (CDC, 2021;
see Chapter 6), but the media also encouraged the public to identify
any and every symptom with “Covid-19,” including hives (Haglage,
2020), chilblains (Young, 2020), parosmia (Brewer, 2021), insomnia
(McCann, 2022), hiccups, tinnitus, and stammering (Hagan, 2021),
mouth disease, hearing loss, blood clots, conjunctivitis, and diarrhoea
(Mullin & Chalmers, 2021), erectile dysfunction (Ruiz, 2020), “green
poop” (Sweeney, 2022), eye swelling (Hockaday, 2022), and brain fog
(Parsons, 2022). Some of these symptoms were crudely renamed “Covid
toes,” “Covid eye,” “Covid brain,” etc.
The media was relentless in promoting the existence of “long Covid.”
According to the Manchester Evening News, there are “more than 200
symptoms associated with long Covid” (Cox, 2021). The Guardian
published a series of articles on “long Covid,” relating “harrowing tales
4 FEAR AND THREAT 153
of people who never fully recovered from a Covid infection, experi-
encing pain, ‘brain fog,’ irritable bowel syndrome, and a huge range
of other disorders with no end in sight” (see Ritchie, 2021). The
Mail insists “‘Long Covid’ IS real” and that three quarters of patients
admitted to hospital with “Covid-19” symptoms were still showing symp-
toms three months later (Chalmers, 2020b). According to National
Geographic, “people who only suffered mild infections can be plagued
with life-altering and sometimes debilitating cognitive deficits” (Mullin,
2021).
A population saturated in propaganda of this kind (in particular, the
majority that has no idea it is being propagandised) will naturally include
many people who believe they have had “Covid-19” and “long Covid,”
regardless of whether or not they tested positive using an unreliable test.
It is significant that some of the alleged symptoms of “long Covid,” such
as brain fog, fatigue, and body aches, are also found in chronic fatigue
syndrome, a condition which for years was not taken seriously. Similarly,
a common complaint among the “long Covid” community is that the
condition was at first not taken seriously by medical professionals owing
to lack of a positive test result (Guenot, 2021). To what extent, then,
is “long Covid” embraced and promoted by communities legitimately
seeking due recognition of their suffering from other causes?
It must also be acknowledged that “Covid-19” and “long Covid” are
likely to be embraced by hypochondriacs and those with Munchhausen
syndrome, i.e. people morbidly anxious about their own health or who
feign disease in order to gain attention. This consideration is particularly
important in view of Pentagon neuroscience adviser James Giordano’s
(2017) plans for psychological warfare:
What I put over the internet is: this is a vir us, bacteria, an agent that
I have infiltrated into your fill-in-the-blank. I say it’s a weapon of mass
destruction, and what I tell you it’s going to do is, it’s going to produce
paranoia, anxiety, and sleeplessness. What I’ve just done is I’ve recruited
every paranoid hypochondriac to think that they have whatever that is [...]
I create a legion of essentially what’s known as the worried well.
Sneller et al. (2022) find that patients with a history of anxiety disorder
(as well as women) are more likely to report PASC (“long Covid”)
and that there is “no evidence of persistent viral infection, autoim-
munity, or abnormal immune activation in participants with PASC,”
154 D. A. HUGHES
casting doubt on any connection to the virus. In the absence of hard
scientific evidence, “long Covid” could be psychogenic and based on
“pseudoscience” that will “perpetuate patient denial of mental illness and
psychosomatic symptoms” (Devine, 2021).
There is, in any case, something suspect about the vast array of symp-
toms attributed to “Covid-19” and “long Covid.” On the one hand,
Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 21) seek to convince us that
COVID-19 is a master of disguise that manifests itself with protean symp-
toms that are confounding the medical community. It is first and foremost
a respiratory disease but, for a small but sizeable number of patients,
symptoms range from cardiac inflammation and digestive problems to
kidney infection, blood clots and meningitis. In addition, many people
who recover are left with chronic kidney and heart problems, as well as
lasting neurological effects.
According to the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (2021,
p. 7), “COVID-19 also causes pneumonia, cardiac injury, secondary
infection, kidney damage, pancreatitis, arrhythmia, sepsis, stroke, respi-
ratory complications, and shock.”
Yet, how can a respiratory disease produce such far-reaching effects
across multiple failing organs? As Rushworth (2020) writes, “covid is not
some magical entity, it’s a coronavirus, and it behaves like other coron-
aviruses, and other respiratory viruses more generally. It would be strange
for covid to cause symptoms that other respiratory viruses don’t.” Since
when have coronaviruses caused coagulopathies, blood clots, and crossed
the blood brain barrier to produce neurological disease? The danger of
the virus in terms of clinical symptoms appears to have been greatly
exaggerated.
A Scientific American headline from July 2021 reads: “A tsunami of
disability is coming as a result of ‘long Covid.’ We need to plan for a
future where millions of survivors are chronically ill” (Pomeroy, 2021).
The idea of “long Covid” as “mass disabling event” (Lin II & Money,
2022) was, thus, propagated at a stage in the “vaccine” rollout where
most U.S. adults had taken at least one shot—as opposed to, say, in
December 2020, when “long Covid” had supposedly been around for
at least seven months without “vaccines.” Some of the most distressing
videos of “vaccine”-injured people show them convulsing uncontrollably,
4 FEAR AND THREAT 155
indicating a neurological disorder unlikely to have been caused by a coro-
navirus. According to Scientific American, “Long Covid now looks like a
neurological disease” (Sutherland, 2023). Readers must draw their own
conclusions.
If “long Covid” were as serious as is made out, one might have
expected that, after three years, the more than $1 billion poured into
“long Covid” research by the NIH would have yielded some tangible
results. Instead, Cohrs and Ladyzhets (2023) observe, “There’s basically
nothing to show for it […] The National Institutes of Health hasn’t
signed up a single patient to test any potential treatments.” This bears
the hallmarks of a scam.
Societies in Distress
The “Covid-19” operation represents “a well-organized, very sophisti-
cated propaganda campaign that has drawn on the human fear of death
and disease” (Curtin, 2021). Building on fear tactics deployed during
the “Cold War” and the “War on Terror,” the pseudopandemic (Davis,
2021a) sought, in the most literal way, to put the fear of death into
everyone, and would not have been possible without the media to
amplify fear levels. Manipulated death statistics, propaganda about “over-
whelmed” hospitals, face masks, PCR tests, viral “waves,” “new variants,”
“immune escape,” “long Covid”—all of it was about keeping populations
in a state of heightened fear and anxiety so that they might be psycholog-
ically weakened and manipulated in various ways and ultimately rendered
powerless to resist the transition to technocracy.
The real-life ef fects of this fear-mongering were evident in, for instance,
“people body swerving in a supermarket to maintain distance from one
another; hugging each other through plastic; washing one’s shopping and
leaving for three days before touching again; [and] shop owners washing
physical cash in a fish tank” (Scott, 2021). Demand for underground
bunkers and “prepping” products exploded (“The plague of fear breeds
paranoia,” 2020). People wore face masks when out walking without
another human being in sight and while driving in their car alone (Sardi,
2021).
The Health Advisory & Recovery Team (HART, 2021) makes the
indisputable point that “it is unacceptable for a civilised society to strate-
gically inflict heightened emotional distress on its citizens as a means
of inducing the behaviours that the government has, paternalistically,
156 D. A. HUGHES
decided are the ‘right’ ones.” The point is, however, that we no longer
live in civilised societies. We live in wartime conditions, with the rule of
law breaking down, in societies that can increasingly only be ruled by
force, until a new settlement is reached (cf. Hughes et al., 2022).
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180 D. A. HUGHES
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