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Biden: “I Would Shut Country Down Again If Recommended By Scientists” | Zero Hedge

Posted by M. C. on August 22, 2020

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/biden-i-would-shut-country-down-again-if-recommended-scientists

by Tyler Durden

Throughout the Democratic National Convention there was a common, if contradictory, theme: on one hand, the Democrats bashed Trump for his response to the covid pandemic while at the same time they lamented the dismal state of the economy, where millions have lost their jobs and countless corporations have gone bankrupt. Well, which one is it, because you can’t have both: if Trump had enacted a more forceful response to the pandemic, the US economy would have been shut down for longer (as Neel Kashkari now urges, seeking another 6 weeks of shutdowns and setting the stage for the next crisis); alternatively the economy would be firing on all cylinders but the fallout from covid would be much more widespread.

On Friday afternoon, in an exclusive interview with ABC “World News Tonight”, Biden revealed on which side of the fence he is saying that as president, he would shut the country down to stop the spread of COVID-19 if the move was recommended to him by scientists.

“I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,” Biden told Muir Friday, alongside his running mate, Kamala Harris, during their first joint interview since officially becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees.

Biden also criticized what he argued is the “fundamental flaw” of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, that the nation cannot begin to recover economically until the virus and public health emergency is under control, which is strange considering that in isolated cases such as Sweden which did not succumb to the media panic and did not enforce a uniform shutdown – while at the same time not forcing the population to take draconian measures to limit the spread of covid – the economy hit was far less than most of its European counterparts, while the Covid breakout has almost completely faded.

“I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving, until we control the virus,” Biden added. “That is the fundamental flaw of this administration’s thinking to begin with. In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”

Biden’s statement brings up one immediate question: which scientists would he listen to? The WHO which, under heavy influence from China, pretended for well over a month that covid was innocuous as the following Feb 23 soundbite from WHO Director Tedros Ghebreyesus confirms:

I have spoken consistently about the need for facts, not fear. Using the word pandemic now does not fit the facts, but it may certainly cause fear. This is not the time to focus on what word we use. That will not prevent a single infection today or save a single life today.

… and only on March 11 – just days before the US announced economic shutdowns – declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic (apparently succumbing to “causing fear”). Or perhaps Biden should have listened to scientists like the US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who on February 29 tweeted “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.”

Or perhaps he meant listening to scientists like Anthony Fauci who on June 12 said “we know that you don’t need an N95 [mask] if you’re an ordinary person in the street” adding that “masks are not 100% protective.” When confronted with this contradiction in the government’s public-health advice, Fauci said “actually the circumstances have changed,” he said. “That’s the reason why.”

So will Biden shutdown the entire economy, leading to tens of millions more in job losses, just because it is the prevailing opinion circumstance at the time that he should do so?

Or perhaps what Biden meant to say is that as a leader it is his job to weigh costs and benefits of all policy options, as the catastrophic consequences of another economic shutdown could and likely would outweigh the benefits from a draconian response to a disease which as we showed recently has led to virtually no outsized under-40 fatalities, and yet as Jim Reid said in July, it is the “younger people will be suffering most from the economic impact of Covid-19 for many years to come, we wonder how history will judge the global response.”

We wonder too, especially now that we know that if there is another wave of covid in the US – whether domestic, or imported from China again or some other country – the US will have another full-blown economic shutdown, just as Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari has been urging (we also know who Fed chair would be in a Biden administration).

One final point about science, best laid out on twitter, is that “Science is NOT a magic wand. Especially “science” as it’s practiced today. Bureaucratic science is ALL about consensus. What gets funded is political. What gets published is political.”

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Zuckerberg, Facebook & Three “Fact-Checkers” Sued For Government Sponsored Censorship – Collective Evolution

Posted by M. C. on August 20, 2020

world events are manufactured by powerful interests and not facts. While people utilize news platforms and social media to get their news, they often don’t have the time nor take the action of verifying the claims from any news source. Mainstream media is often blindly trusted, and anything on Facebook labeled as ‘false’ is filed away in the mental category of “never trust this website or other stories of this same topic.” These perceptions then inform the decisions people make in their lives. Everything from what politicians to support, what products are safe, whether to vaccinate their children, and so on.

Are we allowing powerful corporations, with direct interests in public acceptance and belief in certain ideas to regulate what information is true? Can we honestly say that our beliefs and perceptions around certain current events are grounded in facts? Have we been told all the facts? Or are some left out due to censorship?

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/08/18/zuckerberg-facebook-three-fact-checkers-sued-for-government-sponsored-censorship/

By

CE Staff Writer

In Brief

  • The Facts:Children’s Health Defense sues Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Inc and three different “fact-checkers” for censoring information CHD shares.
  • Reflect On:Is it time to question our perceptions given the fact may have been shaped by false information coming from the mainstream media and fact checkers?

How much of what you believe is going on within the world’s current events is actually true? Do you think you would make different decisions if your perception was missing important bits of information that change any given story? This is an important question right now, as much of what people think is happening comes from mainstream media or “fact-checkers,” and much of the time, it’s only a small piece to the story that doesn’t truly inform people.

Ongoing Facebook censorship is forcing the hand of independent organizations who have had enough of the platform’s allowance of independent “fact-checkers” to decide what is true and not true on Facebook, and also for unjustly destroying the trust these organizations work for years to build.

–> Help Support Collective Evolution: Become a member of CETV and get access to exclusive news and courses to help empower you to become an effective changemaker. Click here to join.

What Happened: Children’s Health Defense, led by Robert F Kennedy Jr., has sued Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook INC, and three “fact-checkers” (SCIENCE FEEDBACK, POYNTER INSTITUTE, and POLITIFACT) for censoring CHD’s content on Facebook. CHD cited 1) FIRST AND FIFTH AMENDMENTS (BIVENS); 2) LANHAM ACT (15 U.S.C. § 1125(a)); 3) RICO FRAUD (18 U.S.C. § 1962); 4) DECLARATORY RELIEF as their official complaints.

As posted on the CHD website:

Facebook acknowledges that it coordinates its censorship campaign with the WHO and the CDC. While earlier court decisions have upheld Facebook’s right to censor its pages, CHD argues that Facebook’s pervasive government collaborations make its censorship of CHD a First Amendment violation. The government’s role in Facebook’s censorship goes deeper than its close coordination with CDC and WHO. The Facebook censorship began at the suggestion of powerful Democratic Congressman and Intelligence Committee Chairman Representative Adam Schiff, who in March 2019 asked Facebook to suppress and purge internet content critical of government vaccine policies. Facebook and Schiff use the term “misinformation” as a euphemism for any statement, whether truthful or not, that contradicts official government pronouncements. The WHO issued a press release commending Facebook for coordinating its ongoing censorship campaign with public health officials. That same day, Facebook published a “warning label” on CHD’s page, which implies that CHD’s content is inaccurate, and directs CHD followers to turn to the CDC for “reliable, up to date information.” This is an important First Amendment case that tests the boundaries of government authority to openly censor unwanted critique of government.

Why It Matters: Many Facebook users are unaware that their perceptions about world events are manufactured by powerful interests and not facts. While people utilize news platforms and social media to get their news, they often don’t have the time nor take the action of verifying the claims from any news source. Mainstream media is often blindly trusted, and anything on Facebook labeled as ‘false’ is filed away in the mental category of “never trust this website or other stories of this same topic.” These perceptions then inform the decisions people make in their lives. Everything from what politicians to support, what products are safe, whether to vaccinate their children, and so on.

Are we allowing powerful corporations, with direct interests in public acceptance and belief in certain ideas to regulate what information is true? Can we honestly say that our beliefs and perceptions around certain current events are grounded in facts? Have we been told all the facts? Or are some left out due to censorship?

The Real World Results of Censorship

The fact that Science Feedback is on this list is somewhat a personal pleasure for me, as here at CE we have dealt a great deal with the ‘fact-checking’ company. They happen to be an organization that all too often uses the ‘strawman claim’ to debunk our material. They look at a piece of content they wish to censor, they then create a claim that isn’t said in the content but relates to the content’s subject, then they proceed to debunk the claim they created. The end result is a grey box on Facebook covering the news content and claiming it’s false. This immediately kills virality and casts a great deal of doubt over our work. Since the vast majority of people don’t read fact-checking ‘debunks’, they never get to see that fact-checkers don’t actually debunk all stories, they simply make it appear that they do.

Fact-checkers have cost our company over a million dollars a year in revenue since 2017, forcing us to have to lay off more than 70% of our staff. They’ve cut traffic to our website by over 90% as well. YouTube did the same on Jan 1st 2018 when they shut off traffic to our videos.

Google also virtually shut off our search engine traffic on May 1, 2020, as seen in the graph below. Prior to this period, they had already been declining our search traffic. This was the most drastic shut-off.

The results of a coordinated effort from major tech companies to censor our work has made it incredibly difficult to provide the trusted high-value service we worked for over a decade to build. Since all of this, we have created our own platform called CETV that is the primary means by which viewers/readers can support our work.

The Takeaway

We will continue to update you with what happens with this court case as it proceeds. The ‘war on consciousness’ and public perception has been ongoing for years, but seems to be culminating as shadow government powers are exposed over the course of time. This public awakening to what happens behind the scenes in our world is a powerful and primary process in the overall evolution of humanity’s consciousness. As we expose and do away with a world built on separation, conflict, and ego, we awaken to a consciousness that wishes to create a world of unity, connection, and thrivability.

Understanding what’s going on here is all part of the process.

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Robert F Kennedy Jr. Exposes Bill Gates’ Vaccine Dictatorship Plan – cites Gates’ twisted ‘Messiah Complex’

Posted by M. C. on August 1, 2020

In 2010, Gates committed $10 billion to the WHO promising to reduce population, in part, through new vaccines. A month later Gates told a Ted Talk that new vaccines “could reduce population”. In 2014, Kenya’s Catholic Doctors Association accused the WHO of chemically sterilizing millions of unwilling Kenyan women with a phony “tetanus” vaccine campaign.

Independent labs found the sterility formula in every vaccine tested.

After denying the charges, WHO finally admitted it had been developing the sterility vaccines for over a decade.

Similar accusations came from Tanzania, Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines.

https://fort-russ.com/2020/04/robert-f-kennedy-jr-exposes-bill-gates-vaccine-dictatorship-plan-cites-gates-twisted-messiah-complex/

Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is an American environmental attorney, author, and opponent of vaccination. Kennedy is a son of Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy. He is the president of the board of Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-profit environmental group that he helped found in 1999.

From #RobertFKennedyJr‘s Instagram post April 9th, 2020:

#Vaccines, for #BillGates, are a strategic philanthropy that feed his many vaccine-related businesses (including #Microsoft’s ambition to control a global vac ID enterprise) and give him dictatorial control over global health policy—the spear tip of corporate neo-imperialism.

Gates’ obsession with vaccines seems fueled by a messianic conviction that he is ordained to save the world with technology and a god-like willingness to experiment with the lives of lesser humans.

REVEALED: Massachusetts Contact Tracing NGO part of Clinton Pedophile Ring in Haiti

Promising to eradicate Polio with $1.2 billion, Gates took control of India ‘s National Advisory Board (NAB) and mandated 50 polio vaccines (up from 5) to every child before age 5. Indian doctors blame the Gates campaign for a devastating vaccine-strain polio epidemic that paralyzed 496,000 children between 2000 and 2017. In 2017, the Indian Government dialed back Gates’ vaccine regimen and evicted Gates and his cronies from the NAB. Polio paralysis rates dropped precipitously. In 2017, the World Health Organization reluctantly admitted that the global polio explosion is predominantly vaccine strain, meaning it is coming from Gates’ Vaccine Program. The most frightening epidemics in Congo, the Philippines, and Afghanistan are all linked to Gates’ vaccines. By 2018, ¾ of global polio cases were from Gates’ vaccines.

In 2014, the #GatesFoundation funded tests of experimental HPV vaccines, developed by GSK and Merck, on 23,000 young girls in remote Indian provinces. Approximately 1,200 suffered severe side effects, including autoimmune and fertility disorders. Seven died. Indian government investigations charged that Gates funded researchers committed pervasive ethical violations: pressuring vulnerable village girls into the trial, bullying parents, forging consent forms, and refusing medical care to the injured girls. The case is now in the country’s Supreme Court.

In 2010, the Gates Foundation funded a trial of a GSK’s experimental malaria vaccine, killing 151 African infants and causing serious adverse effects including paralysis, seizure, and febrile convulsions to 1,048 of the 5,049 children.

During Gates 2002 MenAfriVac Campaign in Sub-Saharan Africa, Gates operatives forcibly vaccinated thousands of African children against meningitis. Between 50-500 children developed paralysis. South African newspapers complained, “We are guinea pigs for drug makers”

FLORES: Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity

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Nelson Mandela’s former Senior Economist, Professor Patrick Bond, describes Gates’ philantropic practices as “ruthless” and “immoral”.

In 2010, Gates committed $10 billion to the WHO promising to reduce population, in part, through new vaccines. A month later Gates told a Ted Talk that new vaccines “could reduce population”. In 2014, Kenya’s Catholic Doctors Association accused the WHO of chemically sterilizing millions of unwilling Kenyan women with a phony “tetanus” vaccine campaign.

Independent labs found the sterility formula in every vaccine tested.

After denying the charges, WHO finally admitted it had been developing the sterility vaccines for over a decade.

Similar accusations came from Tanzania, Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines.

A 2017 study (Morgensen et.Al.2017) showed that WHO’s popular DTP is killing more African than the disease it pretends to prevent. Vaccinated girls suffered 10x the death rate of unvaccinated children.

Gates and the WHO refused to recall the lethal vaccine which WHO forces upon millions of African children annually.

Global public health advocates around the world accuse Gates of – hijacking WHO’s agenda away from the projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases; clean water, hygiene, nutrition and economic development.

They say he has diverted agency resources to serve his personal fetish – that good health only comes in a syringe.

In addition to using his philanthropy to control WHO, UNICEF, GAVI and PATH, Gates funds private pharmaceutical companies that manufacture vaccines, and a massive network of pharmaceutical industry front groups that broadcast deceptive propaganda, develop fraudulent studies, conduct surveillance and psychological operations against vaccine hesitancy and use Gates’ power and money to silence dissent and coerce compliance.
In this recent nonstop Pharmedia appearances, Gates appears gleeful that the Covid-19 crisis will give him the opportunity to force his third-world vaccine programs on American children.

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The Seven-Step Path from Pandemic to Totalitarianism – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on July 30, 2020

https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/23/the-seven-step-path-from-pandemic-to-totalitarianism/

There are just seven steps from pandemic declaration to permanent totalitarianism – and many jurisdictions are about to start Step 5

Rosemary Frei

As if it was planned in advance, billions of people around the globe are being forced step by rapid step into a radically different way of life, one that involves far less personal, physical and financial freedom and agency.

Here is the template for rolling this out.

Step 1

A new virus starts to spread around the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) declares a pandemic.

International agencies, public-health officials, politicians, media and other influential voices fan fear by focusing almost exclusively on the contagiousness of the virus and the rising numbers of cases, and by characterizing the virus as extremely dangerous.

Within a few days governments at national and local levels also declare states of emergency. At lightning speed they impose lock-down measures that confine most people to their homes – starting with closing schools – and shut down much of the global economy. World markets implode.

The stunned, fearful and credulous public – convinced over the previous few years that their bodies do not have the natural ability to react to pathogens by producing antibodies that confer long-lasting immunity – largely complies willingly.

The first weekly virtual class on local emergency and crisis responses to COVID19 is held for mayors and other city officials around the world. Coordinated by a handful of American organizations in the academic, medical, financial, political and transportation spheres, the classes feature guests ranging from Barack Obama to Bill Gates.

Step 2

National, state/provincial and municipal leaders, as well as public-health officials, start daily press briefings. They use them to pump out frightening statistics and modelling asserting the virus has the potential to kill many millions.

Most of this information is hard to decipher and sheds little real light on the natural course of the virus’s spread through each geographic area.

Officials and media downplay or distort inconveniently low death tolls from the virus and instead focus on alarming statistics produced by compliant academics, social-media influencers and high-profile organizations.

The main message is that this is a war and many lives are at stake unless virtually everybody stays at home. Mainstream media amplify the trope that the world is at the mercy of the virus.

Simultaneously, central banks and governments hand out massive amounts of cash largely to benefit the big banks. And they bring in giant private-sector financial firms to manage the process despite these global companies’ very poor track record in the 2008-2009 crash. Governments also rapidly start to create trillions of pounds’ worth of programs that include compensating businesses and workers for their shutdown-related losses.

Step 3

There is a concerted effort by all levels of government and public health to very rapidly ramp up testing for viral RNA, along with production of personal protective equipment.

They push aside the need for regulation, including quality standards and independent verification of tests’ rates of accuracy, by insisting that fast approval and roll-out are imperative for saving lives.

Models are released that predict snowballing of numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths even under best-case scenarios.

At about the same time, public-health officials significantly loosen the criteria for viral infections, outbreaks and deaths, particularly in the oldest members of society. That increases the numbers of cases and deaths ascribed to the new pathogen.

The media continue to clamour for more testing and for severe punishment of people who aren’t completely compliant with the lock-down measures.

As a result, there’s little backlash as police and military with sweeping new powers enforce these measures and give stiff penalties or even jail terms to those who disobey orders. States also monitor with impunity massive numbers of people’s movements via their cellphones.

Vast human resources are focused on tracking down people who have had contact with a virus-positive individual and confining them to their homes. Thus the portion of the public exposed to the virus remains relatively small.

It also contributes to social isolation. Among many effects, this enables those in control to even further erase individual and collective choices, voices and power.

Step 4

When the numbers of cases and deaths start to plateau, local officials claim it’s too early to tell whether the virus has finished passing through their population and therefore, restrictive measures must continue.

An alternative narrative is that if such measures aren’t kept in place there will be a resurgence of cases and deaths. Yet another is that the continuing climb in elderly persons’ deaths means all bets are off for the time being.

They admit that initial models incorrectly predicted there would be a tsunami of cases, ICU admissions and deaths. However, they assert more time is needed before it can be determined whether it’s safe to loosen some of the restrictions and let children return to school or adults go back to work.

Officials do not try to calculate the overall skyrocketing cost to their populations and economies of the shut-downs and other measures against, nor do they discuss what cost level may be too high.

They and powerful media organizations also push for the massive virus-testing over-capacity to be used to surveil the general population for viral RNA in their bodies. At the same time, the roll-out begins of widespread blood testing for antibodies to the virus.

Meanwhile, new data are published showing the virus has a high capacity to mutate. Scientists and officials interpret this as meaning a larger medical arsenal will be needed to combat it.

Step 5

About two or three weeks later, the dramatic increase in testing for viral RNA produces the desired goal of a significant upsurge in the number of people found positive for the virus.

Public-health officials add jet fuel to the surge by adding to their case and death tallies the large number of people who are only suspected – and not lab-test-confirmed – to have had an infection. Politicians and public-health officials tell the populace this means they cannot return to their jobs or other activities outside the home for the time being.

Governments work with public-health agencies, academics, industry, the WHO and other organizations to start to design and implement immunity-passport systems for using the results of the widespread antibody testing to determine who can be released from the lock-downs. This is one of many goals of the seven steps.

Meanwhile, government leaders continue to highlight the importance of vaccines for besting the virus.

Step 6

Large-scale human testing of many different types of antivirals and vaccines begins, thanks to a concerted push from the WHO, Bill Gates and his collaborators, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, governments and universities.

Large swaths of the population don’t have the antibodies to the virus because they’ve been kept from being exposed to it; they eagerly accept these medications even though they’ve been rushed to market with inadequate safety testing. They believe these medical products offer the only hope for escaping the virus’s clutches.

Step 7

Soon the new virus starts another cycle around the globe – just as influenza and other viruses have every year for millennia. Officials again fan the flames of fear by positing the potential for millions of deaths among people not yet protected from the virus.

They rapidly roll out virus and antibody testing again, while companies sell billions more doses of antivirals and booster vaccines.

Governments simultaneously cede control of all remaining public assets to global companies. This is because local and national governments’ tax bases were decimated during Step 1 and they’re virtually bankrupt from their unprecedented spending in the war against the virus in the other steps.

The overall result is complete medicalization of the response to the virus, which on a population level is no more harmful than influenza.

This is coupled with the creation of permanent totalitarianism controlled by global companies and a 24/7 invasive-surveillance police state supported by widespread blossoming of ‘smart’ technology.

The key players repeat the cycle of hysteria and massive administration of antivirals and booster shots every few months.

And they implement a variation of steps 1 to 7 when another new pathogen appears on the planet.

Sounds far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s not.

With the arrival of COVID19 many countries quickly completed Steps 1, 2 and 3.

Step 4 is well under way in a large number of jurisdictions.

Step 5 is on track to start in early May.

Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from a faculty of medicine and was a freelance medical writer and journalist for 22 years. She is now an independent investigative journalist in Toronto, Ontario. You can find her earlier article on the novel coronavirus for Off-Guardian here, watch and listen to an interview she gave on COVID19 and follow her on Twitter.

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Watch “When Will Covid Tyranny End? W.H.O. Director: ‘Never!’ Unless…” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on July 27, 2020

Ethiopian Communist party bigwig says No Old Normal, one world government will save us.

What now? Are the CVirus tests COVID 19 specific or do they pick up common cold coronavirus?

Good summary at end.

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PETER HITCHENS: Face masks turn us into voiceless submissives | Daily Mail Online

Posted by M. C. on July 20, 2020

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8537489/PETER-HITCHENS-Face-masks-turn-voiceless-submissives.html

By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday

In the name of Covid, the State has already thrust itself into every corner of our existence.

It has come between husbands and wives at the ends of their lives. It has forbidden the old to embrace their grandchildren.

It has denied us funerals and weddings, locked the churches, silenced the ancient monastic music of cathedral choirs and prevented the free worship of God for the first time in 800 years, and banned us (unless we are Left-wing) from holding or attending public meetings.

It has ordered us to stay at home, scolded or fined us for sunbathing, going on country rambles or even entering our front gardens.

The Government began its wild, disproportionate shutdown of the country by spreading fear of a devastating plague that would destroy the NHS and kill untold thousands. Now, as many people find that Covid-19 is, in fact, nothing of the kind, new ways have to be found to keep up the alarm levels. Commuters are pictured above on the London Underground

The Government began its wild, disproportionate shutdown of the country by spreading fear of a devastating plague that would destroy the NHS and kill untold thousands. Now, as many people find that Covid-19 is, in fact, nothing of the kind, new ways have to be found to keep up the alarm levels. Commuters are pictured above on the London Underground

It has forced millions of us to stop working, sabotaged the educations – at school and university – of untold numbers of young people and has become our boss and paymaster in the biggest state takeover of life and work ever attempted by non-Communists.

Soon we will discover that it has also wrecked an already wobbly economy and separated untold numbers of us from jobs and businesses we thought were safe. Soon, too, it will also separate us from our savings, through punishing tax and savage inflation, to pay for the disaster it has caused.

Now it presumes to tell us what to wear. And what it wants us to wear is a soggy cloth muzzle, a face-nappy that turns its wearer from a normal human into a mumbling, mouthless submissive.

And this, it seems, is popular. Is there nothing the modern British people will not put up with? Britain’s muzzle consumption is now so high that six months from now there will be reports of dolphins and whales floundering about in an ocean made sticky by millions of gallons of hand-sanitiser, as they choke on congealed clumps of used muzzles. These items are set to become the new plastic bags.

Why is this frenzy taking place?

Here is a clue. On July 12, Deborah Cohen, the medical correspondent of BBC2’s Newsnight, revealed an astonishing thing. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had reversed its advice on face masks, from ‘don’t wear them’ to ‘do wear them’.

But the key fact was that it had not done so because of scientific information – the evidence had not backed the wearing of face coverings – but because of political lobbying.

She revealed on Twitter that: ‘We had been told by various sources [that the] WHO committee reviewing the evidence had not backed masks but they recommended them due to political lobbying.’ She said the BBC had then put this to the WHO, which did not deny it.

In March, the WHO had said: ‘There is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can protect them from infection with respiratory viruses, including Covid-19.’

The American TV news channel CNN reported on March 31 that Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme, had said at a briefing in Geneva: ‘There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.

‘In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly.’

A few weeks ago, the WHO changed its advice to say it ‘advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult, such as on public transport, in shops or in other confined or crowded environments.’

Earlier that same month, England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, had said that wearing face masks would do little to combat the outbreak.

While noting that if someone was infected, they might reduce the danger of spreading the disease by covering their faces, Prof Whitty said wearing a face mask had almost no effect on reducing the risk of contracting the illness.

He stated: ‘In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.’

People are seen walking down London's Oxford Street. There is plenty of research showing that the case for muzzles is poor, especially a survey done for the dental profession four years ago, which quietly vanished from the internet after mask opponents began to cite it

 

People are seen walking down London’s Oxford Street. There is plenty of research showing that the case for muzzles is poor, especially a survey done for the dental profession four years ago, which quietly vanished from the internet after mask opponents began to cite it

Also in March, the Advertising Standards Authority banned two firms’ advertisements for masks, saying that the adverts were ‘misleading, irresponsible and likely to cause fear without justifiable reason’.

At about the same time, Dr Jenny Harries, a Deputy Chief Medical Officer, warned that people could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting Covid by wearing muzzles. She said masks could ‘actually trap the virus’, and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in. She explained: ‘For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea.’

On April 3, the other Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, said he did not believe healthy people wearing them would reduce the spread of the disease in the UK.

The British Government has also zig-zagged. Read the rest of this entry »

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Bill Gates and the Depopulation Agenda. Robert F. Kennedy Junior Calls for an Investigation – Global ResearchGlobal Research

Posted by M. C. on July 18, 2020

https://www.globalresearch.ca/bill-gates-and-the-depopulation-agenda-robert-f-kennedy-junior-calls-for-an-investigation/5710021

By Peter Koenig

First published by GR on April 18, 2020

**

For over twenty years Bill Gates and his Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) have been vaccinating foremost children by the millions in remote areas of poor countries, mostly Africa and Asia. Most of their vaccination program had disastrous results, causing the very illness (polio, for example in India) and sterilizing young women (Kenya, with modified tetanus vaccines). Many of the children died. Many of the programs were carried out with the backing of the WHO and – yes – the UN Agency responsible for the Protection of Children, UNICEF. 

Most of these vaccination campaigns were implemented without the informed-consent of the children, parents, guardians or teachers, nor with the informed-consent, or with forged consent, of the respective government authorities. In the aftermath, The Gates Foundation was sued by governments around the world, Kenya, India, the Philippines – and more.

Bill Gates has a strange image of himself. He sees himself as The Messiah who saves the world through vaccination – and through population reduction.

Around the time, when the 2010 Rockefeller Report was issued, with its even more infamous “Lock Step” Scenario, precisely the scenario of which we are living the beginning right now, Bill Gates talked on a TED show in California, “Innovating to Zero” about the use of energy.

He used this TED presentation to promote his vaccination programs, literally saying, “If we are doing a real good job vaccinating childen, we can reduce the world population by 10% to 15%”.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I) .

This sounds very much like eugenics.

The video, the first 6’45”, “The Truth about Bill Gates and his Disastrous Vaccination Program”, will tell you all about it.

Read also Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: a Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination by Robert F Kennedy Jr

Robert F Kennedy Jr, an avid Defender of Children’s Rights and anti-vaccination activist, has launched a petition sent to the White House, calling for “Investigations into the ‘Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’ for Medical Malpractice & Crimes Against Humanity“

Screenshot 

“At the forefront of this is Bill Gates, who has publicly stated his interest in “reducing population growth” by 10-15%, by means of vaccination. Gates, UNICEF & WHO have already been credibly accused of intentionally sterilizing Kenyan children through the use of a hidden HCG antigen in tetanus vaccines”. (Excerpt from text of Petition)

Link to the Petition.

If you wish to Sign the Petition click Here  

(At the time of writing, the petition had over 265,000. It requires 100,000 for an answer from the White House)

Video: Robert F. Kennedy Junior

See also brief video featuring Author Bill Still ( 6 min) entitled The Truth about Bill Gates and his disastrous Vaccination Programs around the World

Robert. F. Kennedy Exposes Bill Gates’ Vaccination Agenda

Now Mr. Gates and his allies, including Big-Pharma, WHO, UNICEF, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID / NIH, a close ally of Mr. Gates  – and of course, Agenda ID2020, are proposing to (force) vaccinate 7 billion people around the globe, with their concoction of a (so far) untested coronavirus vaccine. This is a multi-billion dollar bonanza for  Big Pharma and for all those who support the vaccine. Nobody will really know what the vaccine cocktail will contain. They intend to start with the Global South (Developing Countries) and then gradually move North (Developed Countries).

Mind you, there is no need for a vaccine to cure the corona virus. There are many cures:

French Professor Didier Raoult, who is one of the world’s top 5 scientists on communicable diseases, suggested the use of hydroxychloroquine (Chloroquine or Plaquenil), a well-known, simple, and inexpensive drug, also used to fight Malaria, and that has shown efficacy with previous coronaviruses such as SARS.  By mid-February 2020, clinical trials at his institute and in China already confirmed that the drug could reduce the viral load and bring spectacular improvement. Chinese scientists published their first trials on more than 100 patients and announced that the Chinese National Health Commission would recommend Chloroquine in their new guidelines to treat Covid-19. (Peter Koenig, April 1, 2020)

Be aware, awake, alert and warned.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Peter Koenig, Global Research, 2020

 

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The Covid Set-Up Is Now Fully in Play as CDC Outlines Plan for Death – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on July 16, 2020

“Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.”

Excerpt From: Étienne de la Boétie. “The Politics of Obedience.” iBooks.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/07/gary-d-barnett/the-covid-set-up-is-now-fully-in-play-as-cdc-outlines-plan-for-death/

By

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through. And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean… We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.”

“I am worried. I do think the fall and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are probably going to be one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health because of what you said — the co-occurrence of Covid and influenza, and this is where I’d like to continue to work with you to get the American public to embrace the influenza vaccine so we can try to minimize the impact of inluenza, because I think those two respiratory pathogens hitting us at the same time do have the potential to stress our health system.”

The CDC Director, Robert Redfield, made both these ‘predictive’ statements about the future of this orchestrated coronavirus pandemic. The first comment was a few months ago as reported in this article on April 21, and the second quote was from an interview held yesterday with the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association. In my opinion, these are not simply prognostications, but are warnings of things already planned and known. Part of the reason for these announcements is to set the stage for the final nail in the coffin of freedom, and to prepare the sheep for mass death purposely created to advance this sinister agenda of total population control. The CDC, and therefore the state, will recommend the flu vaccine followed by the Covid vaccine, and both will infect all recipients with multiple viruses and poisons at a time when the bulk of society is most vulnerable. This is by design.

The state’s scandalous pandemic response is the major part of this plan that can guarantee more sickness and death; sickness and death purposely sought by the perpetrators of this fraud in order to perpetuate great harm through the manipulated weakening of the immune systems of most all Americans. After several months of lockdowns, a carrot was dangled for a brief period, with promises of reopening. That reopening never actually happened in full, as the restrictions remained during the pause, and then the stopgap plan of arranged fake racial strife, rioting, looting, and property destruction was allowed to continue until the next part of this plot could be released on the public. The beginning strategy of this second phase was based on false case increases, enough to instill fear in an already beaten down populace that is once again being told to isolate, mask, distance, and lockdown. The final part of this second phase will come with the first sign of cold weather, and this has already been put into motion due to the near complete decimation of general health due to the government response to this hoax.

What the CDC head is indicating with his comments is that he knows that the flu season coming will be much more devastating than normal, and that all sickness and death will be blamed on a virus that has never been properly scientifically isolated, identified, or verified. That will matter not, as after 8 months of mandated isolation and lockdowns, deadly oxygen-stealing mask wearing, of vitamin deficiencies, lack of exercise, job loss, depression, and extreme stress, the entire population will be at great risk of becoming sick, and the evil controllers of this fraud that plotted this outcome from the beginning, will use the purposely created weakness of the masses to advance their agendas of control.

This coming flu season will not be like last year when total deaths were close to normal, even with the introduction of a fraudulent virus. This next flu season will see not only the old and infirmed getting sick and dying, but people of all ages will be highly affected due to deliberately introduced lockdown measures implemented by the elite controllers. These controllers include the big banking sector, the government at every level, the WHO, the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies, the medical and healthcare industry, the giant tax-free foundations, and others. These are the only entities that will benefit from this great reset and new world order. They will still benefit monetarily of course, as the wealth transfers will continue in earnest, but they will benefit most by gaining total power and control over all aspects of society and people worldwide.

This Covid set-up is going forward without pause, and the governing system’s anticipation of carnage is based on reality and the desired expectation of mass death and destruction. The children, young, and somewhat healthy were spared this past year because there was no real pandemic other than the one created out of thin air. That will not be the case this coming year, as the government response, mandated isolation, and restrictions have been effective in weakening the entire population, and that will lead to an immune system breakdown that will not be exclusive of age. The state fully understands the implications of what they have created, and are using it to continue to advance agendas meant to destroy all that is held dear by humanity. The fact that so many will die is not any concern of those perpetrating this fraud, as they know exactly what they are doing, and they know exactly what they seek.

This is the most dangerous time in the history of man. The seriousness of this plot cannot be underestimated. It is not due to any threat of conventional war, and it is not due to any threat of nuclear decimation, it is based on the fact that this is a psychological war waged by psychopaths against all mankind, and it is being advanced by a small group of monsters that have taken control of the minds of the masses through long-term indoctrination and policies meant to breed dependency. Fear is the new weapon of mass destruction, not because it is legitimate, but because the people have lost all will to be free, have lost all ability to think, and seek shelter and comfort as a collective herd only capable of existence in a society that is based on totalitarian rule.

“Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.”

Excerpt From: Étienne de la Boétie. “The Politics of Obedience.” iBooks.

The people of this country are teetering on the precipice of annihilation. Hundreds of millions of American citizens hide under their beds, cover their face until they cannot breathe, submit to forced financial ruin, succumb to obvious lies and deceit, allow their property to be plundered and burned without resistance, allow their children to be poked and prodded, and injected with poisons, and voluntarily imprison themselves, never again to live a free and normal life. All this is done on orders from a few, from a criminal and corrupt government that is evil beyond imagination, and that is vile and immoral at its very core.

The blame for this travesty falls not so much on those that have fooled the people, but on the people themselves. Voluntary serfdom is deserved, because people unwilling to defend themselves, their families, their neighbors, their livelihoods, and their very freedom, are not worthy of respect. Longing for freedom without the courage to claim it is a meaningless endeavor, as any real demand by the masses would leave the governing elite naked and afraid. All that is necessary to achieve liberty is to want it, and this alone can defeat tyranny.

Gary D. Barnett [send him mail] is a retired investment professional living and writing in Lewistown, Montana. Visit his website.

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Coronavirus and the Gates Foundation

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2020

http://www.williamengdahl.com/englishNEO18Mar2020.php

By F. William Engdahl

Arguably, no one has been more active in promoting and funding research on vaccines aimed at dealing with coronavirus than Bill Gates and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. From sponsoring a simulation of a coronavirus global pandemic, just weeks before the Wuhan outbreak was announced, to funding numerous corporate efforts to come up with a novel vaccine for the apparently novel virus, the Gates presence is there. What does it actually entail ?

We must admit that at the very least Bill Gates is prophetic. He has claimed for years that a global killer pandemic will come and that we are not prepared for it. On March 18, 2015 Gates gave a TED talk on epidemics in Vancouver. That day he wrote on his blog, “I just gave a brief talk on a subject that I’ve been learning a lot about lately—epidemics. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is a tragedy—as I write this, more than 10,000 people have died.” Gates then added, “As awful as this epidemic has been, the next one could be much worse. The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease—an especially virulent flu, for example—that infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic.”

That same year, 2015, Bill Gates wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine titled, “The Next Epidemic: Lessons from Ebola.” There he spoke of a special class of drugs that “involves giving patients a set of particular RNA-based constructs that enables them to produce specific proteins(including antibodies).Although this is a very new area, it is promising because it is possible that a safe therapy could be designed and put into large-scale manufacture fairly rapidly. More basic research as well as the progress of companies like Moderna and CureVac could eventually make this approach a key tool for stopping epidemics.” Moderna and CureVac both today receive funds from the Gates Foundation and are leading the race to develop an approved COVID-19 vaccine based on mRNA.

2017 and Founding of CEPI

A global flu-like pandemic in fact is something that Gates and his well-endowed foundation have spent years preparing for. In 2017 during the Davos World Economic Forum, Gates initiated something called CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, together with the governments of Norway, India, Japan, and Germany, along with the Wellcome Trust of the UK. Its stated purpose is to “accelerate the development of vaccines we’ll need to contain outbreaks” of future epidemics. He noted at the time that “One promising area of vaccine development research is using advances in genomics to map the DNA and RNA of pathogens and make vaccines.” We will return to that.

Event 201

By 2019 Bill Gates and the foundation were going full-tilt boogie with their pandemic scenarios. He made a Netflix video which made an eerie imaginary scenario. The video, part of the “Explained” series, imagined a wet market in China where live and dead animals are stacked and a highly deadly virus erupts that spreads globally. Gates appears as an expert in the video to warn, “If you think of anything that could come along that would kill millions of people, a pandemic is our greatest risk.” He said if nothing was done to better prepare for pandemics, the time would come when the world would look back and wish it had invested more into potential vaccines. That was weeks before the world heard about bats and a live wet market in Wuhan China.

In October, 2019 the Gates Foundation teamed up with the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to enact what they called a “fictional” scenario simulation involving some of the world’s leading figures in public health. It was titled Event 201.

As their website describes it, Event 201 simulated an “outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.”

In the Event 201 scenario the disease originates at a pig farm in Brazil, spreading through low-income regions and ultimately explodes into an epidemic. The disease is carried by air travel to Portugal, the USA and China and beyond to the point no country can control it. The scenario posits no possible vaccine being available in the first year. “Since the whole human population is susceptible, during the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week.”

The scenario then ends after 18 months when the fictional coronavirus has caused 65 million deaths. “The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed.”

Event 201 Players

As interesting as the prescient Gates-Johns Hopkins Event 201 fictional scenario of October, 2019 may be, the list of panelists who were invited to participate in the imaginary global response is equally interesting.

Among the selected “players” as they were called, was George Fu Gao. Notably, Prof. Gao is director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention since 2017. His specialization includes research on “influenza virus interspecies transmission (host jump)… He is also interested in virus ecology, especially the relationship between influenza virus and migratory birds or live poultry markets and the bat-derived virus ecology and molecular biology.” Bat-derived virus ecology…

Prof. Gao was joined among others at the panel by the former Deputy Director of the CIA during the Obama term, Avril Haines. She also served as Obama’s Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor. Another of the players at the Gates event was Rear Admiral Stephen C. Redd, Director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The same CDC is at the center of a huge scandal for not having adequate functioning tests available for testing cases of COVID-19 in the USA. Their preparedness was anything but laudable.

Rounding out the group was Adrian Thomas, the Vice President of scandal-ridden Johnson & Johnson, the giant medical and pharmaceutical company. Thomas is responsible for pandemic preparedness at J&J including developing vaccines for Ebola, Dengue Fever, HIV. And there was Martin Knuchel, Head of Crisis, Emergency & Business Continuity Management, for Lufthansa Group Airlines. Lufthansa has been one of the major airlines dramatically cutting flights during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

All this shows that Bill Gates has had a remarkable preoccupation with the possibility of a global pandemic outbreak he said could be even larger than the alleged deaths from the mysterious 1918 Spanish Flu, and has been warning for at least the past five years or more. What the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also has been involved in is funding development of new vaccines using bleeding-edge CRISPR gene-editing and other technologies.

The Coronavirus Vaccines

Gates Foundation money is backing vaccine development on every front. Inovio Pharmaceuticals of Pennsylvania received $9 million from the Gates-backed CEPI, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, to develop a vaccine, INO-4800, which is about to test on humans in April, a suspiciously rapid time frame. In addition Gates Foundation just gave the company an added $5 million to develop a proprietary smart device for intradermal delivery of the new vaccine.

In addition Gates Foundation monies via CEPI are financing development of a radical new vaccine method known as messengerRNA or mRNA.

They are co-funding the Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech company, Moderna Inc., to develop a vaccine against the Wuhan novel coronavirus, now called SARS-CoV-2. Moderna’s other partner is the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Head of NIAID is Dr Anthony Fauci, the person at the center of the Trump Administration virus emergency response. Notable about the Fauci-Gates Moderna coronavirus vaccine, mRNA-1273, is that it has been rolled out in a matter of weeks, not years, and on February 24 went directly to Fauci’s NIH for tests on human guinea pigs, not on mice as normal. Moderna’s chief medical adviser, Tal Zaks, argued, “I don’t think proving this in an animal model is on the critical path to getting this to a clinical trial.”

Another notable admission by Moderna on its website is the legal disclaimer, “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: …These risks, uncertainties, and other factors include, among others: … the fact that there has never been a commercial product utilizing mRNA technology approved for use.” In other words, completely unproven for human health and safety.

Another biotech company working with unproven mRNA technology to develop a vaccine for the COVID-19 is a German company, CureVac. Since 2015 CureVac has received money from the Gates Foundation to develop its own mRNA technology. In January the Gates-backed CEPI granted more than $8 million to develop a mRNA vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Add to this the fact that the Gates Foundation and related entities such as CEPI constitute the largest funders of the public-private entity known as WHO, and that its current director, Tedros Adhanom, the first WHO director in history not a medical doctor, worked for years on HIV with the Gates Foundation when Tedros was a government minister in Ethiopia, and we see that there is practically no area of the current coronavirus pandemic where the footprints of the omnipresent Gates are not to be found. If that is to the good of mankind or grounds to be worried, time will tell.

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New York: The Corona Crisis Shows the Benefits of Localism Yet Again | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 6, 2020

https://mises.org/wire/new-york-corona-crisis-shows-benefits-localism-yet-again?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=afebb2e785-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-afebb2e785-228343965

One unintended effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to highlight the state’s ineptitude in dealing with pandemics. Specifically, it shows the dramatic consequences that one-size-fits-all measures have for areas whose specific needs are not properly addressed by the approach or where the problems being addressed are not present. Federal government health officials have warned that states are “opening too early” from the lockdowns suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Yet states like Florida and Georgia have recently opened back up and removed their blanket lockdowns, but COVID-19 cases have (at least so far) not surged. Florida has instead opted to allow local communities to decide how to move forward, with denser, more affected areas like Miami continuing with safety precautions.

The willingness of states and local communities to open up, regardless of what federal government officials proclaim, shows us the benefits of localism. It has allowed for less hard-hit areas to adopt policies more similar to those of Sweden, which has been praised by the World Health Organization (WHO) for its long-term thinking, and which now serves as the de facto model for many jurisdictions. The localist strategy, though, is one that can be praised on other grounds. The adoption of a more localist mindset allows political jurisdictions that have a relatively low number of COVID-19 cases to avoid harsh lockdowns that have ended many small businesses and are threatening many more.

In the US, the contrast is not only between the federal and state governments, but also between the state and local governments. Several local governments have sued state governments over their blanket lockdowns. The urban-rural distinction has been made quite apparent by this dichotomy. Even in the most populous states, COVID-19 cases have often been concentrated in urban areas and their surroundings.

This problem is highlighted better than anywhere else in the state of New York. As of May 18, New York continues to be number one in cases, at 347,936 cases and 28,168 deaths. Downstate (the city and surrounding counties) represents 59 percent of coronavirus cases, while nearly all remaining cases are represented by Upstate New York’s few urban areas like Buffalo and Albany.

Despite this clear distinction in population density, cases, deaths, and the overall risk of opening, all of New York had been subject to the same policies as the city until recently. Governor Cuomo has set guidelines to allow New York counties to reopen. Meanwhile, New York has been splitting into regional councils to determine whether a certain area qualifies to reopen. Regions permitted to reopen have been central New York, the Finger Lakes, Mohawk Valley, North Country, Southern Tier, and Western New York, with Capital Region expected to reach the requirements to open up soon.

Compounding criticisms of Governor Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic and the more localist approach’s display of efficiency reminds us of a debate that had been occurring even before the pandemic, namely, splitting New York State between upstate and downstate. Although many proposals to do this have surfaced and failed in New York’s history, recent events may rekindle the conversation.

Talk of secession over COVID-19 will not be exclusive to New York State, however. Talk of secession was already floating around American discourse before the pandemic, not only at the state level, but on a local level relative to state governments as well. After battles over gun control in the Virginia legislature, some counties threatened to not enforce such measures and even split from the state. In highlighting this contrast between the federal, state, and local governments’ values and ways of administering their power, COVID-19 could become the crux of another nationwide conversation on the partitioning and even secession of states, especially since governments’ handling of the pandemic has further deepened the divide between urban and rural populations.

Although it is uncertain whether this will be a consequence of the current pandemic, what is certain is that localism has gained much legitimacy. Only time will tell whether the embrace of such attitudes will outlast the pandemic or fade away.

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