THE CATASTROPHIC COVID CONVERGENCE - revisited

A comprehensive story of how Covid happened. Part 1: The Lead-Up to Covid

Illustration by Anthony Freda

It’s been just over two years since my July 2022 article entitled “The Catastrophic Covid Convergence,” in which I attempted to explain the seemingly inexplicable cascade of events known as the Covid pandemic response (in this article shortened simply to “Covid”) that began in early 2020. 

I’ve spent the interim researching and writing extensively about this topic. The Covid story is so much more complicated than I initially understood. It is not about a single public health event run by a few misguided or ill-intentioned individuals. It is not confined to any one government, and it is not a consequence of any one country’s internal politics. It is, I now believe, a precautionary chapter in a much larger global saga.

The important questions to ask about Covid, given this understanding, are also very different from the ones I was asking two years ago, such as: Was the virus an engineered bioweapon? Was it intentionally released? What were the names and motives of the people who ran the response?

Although these continue to be the focus of much public outcry and heated debate, they are actually secondary to the Covid story I will tell in this two-part article.

In Part 1, I will explain the convergence of global developments that led to Covid being predictable, if not inevitable.

In Part 2, I will look at how the globally uniform response to Covid was achieved.

In contrast to all my previous articles, this time I will include as few quotes and references as possible, because I want to tell a story based on my current knowledge and understanding, without a lot of distractions. The bibliography at the end includes key books and articles that tell different parts of this story with hundreds of pages of references, for those who are interested.

Part 1: The Lead-Up to Covid 

In this telling, Covid is a predictable – if not inevitable – outcome of the evolution of the U.S. national security state and its convergence with global public-private partnerships, in the period since the end of the Cold War. 

Concomitant Rise of War on Bioterror and Unchecked Global Capitalism

When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, it was quickly replaced by the “war on terror” as the income-generating, self-perpetuating-and-expanding mechanism for the U.S. military-industrial complex.

The war on terror generated decent returns for the national security apparatus, when the 9/11 attacks were used as a pretex for Middle Eastern “regime changes,” and when the terror threat was parlayed into creation of DHS (Department of Homeland Security) – the US Government’s designated overseer of perpetual states of emergency and wrap-around internal surveillance.

The anthrax letters following 9/11 launched a less-noticed, but equally lucrative and long-term, budget-expanding war – this one on bioterror.

Biodefense experts mustered support for the war on bioterror with the terrifying claim that advances in biotechnology could enable random nut-jobs to create deadly bioweapons in their garages. Major cities were vulnerable to bioterror attacks through their subways, water systems, etc. Loss of life could reach millions. Potential economic loss: trillions. Preventing such calamities was worth almost any price.

This increasingly lucrative war on bioterror developed simultaneously with another snowballing trend after the fall of Communism: a global march toward unchecked capitalism.

When the Eastern Block fell, no military, geographic or ideological push-back remained against global capitalist market forces. Wealth increasingly accrued to individuals and companies operating not within specific nations, but in a supra-national sphere of deal-making and influence peddling. International banks and investment funds came to own more debt, and hold more wealth, than any national governments.

In this environment, enormous global conglomerates arose – referred to as global public-private partnerships, or GPPPs – loosely formed around various areas of activity and interest. One such GPPP was the biodefense/pandemic preparedness industrial complex - a globe-spanning, “too-big-to-fail” entity that ran the Covid pandemic response. 

Rise of the Biodefense/Pandemic Preparedness Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP)

To understand how the biodefense/pandemic preparedness GPPP coalesced, it is necessary to first look at the fields of biodefense and pandemic preparedness separately, and then at how they came to be yoked together into one rapidly metastasizing cartel – first as part of the U.S. security state, and then as an arm of the global governance structure dedicated to “global health security.”

When biodefense and pandemic preparedness were separate

Before the Anthrax attacks of 2001, the field of biodefense was mostly the purview of intelligence and military specialists. In secret labs, biowarfare scientists tried to concoct deadly bioweapons so they could then devise foolproof countermeasures against them. Intelligence agents tried to assess the biowarfare capabilities of enemy nations and rogue terrorists. They devised plans for how to quarantine a military base or a city in the case of an attack, and how to get countermeasures to soldiers/civilians as quickly as possible. 

Because a bioterror attack would likely be localized to an area containing at most a few million people, the biodefense response of quarantine-until-countermeasure was a geographically, and temporally, limited plan. And because there were no bioweapons attacks on the U.S. after 2001, these plans remained entirely theoretical. 

Similarly, before biodefense started attracting so much attention, pandemic preparedness was a quiet backwater of the public health realm. Epidemiologists and public health experts had come up with time-tested, non-dramatic plans to contain disease outbreaks: identify clusters of patients with serious/life-threatening symptoms, treat their symptoms with available medicines, isolate them from others if necessary, increase healthcare capacity on a local level as necessary, and let everyone else go on with their lives. 

This type of disease outbreak preparedness is almost never front-page news and does not garner large budgets or public visibility. Yet it worked remarkably well to limit the number of deaths from even very deadly pathogens, like Ebola, MERS, and H1N1 influenza, to an average of no more than about ten thousand a year worldwide between 2000 and 2020 [ref].

In summary, before the turn of the 21st century, both the biodefense and public health fields had relatively modest plans for dealing with deadly disease outbreaks – whether intentionally caused or naturally occurring. And neither type of outbreak ever happened on an unmanageable scale.

When biodefense and pandemic preparedness merged

The object of biodefense is to protect the military, and also civilian populations, from potential bioweapons attacks. But the pathogen/countermeasure research at the center of biodefense efforts can also be useful for pandemic preparedness, making it a “dual use” endeavor. 

Dual use refers to efforts that may serve both military and civilian objectives. In the case of biodefense/pandemic preparedness, it’s easy to see: pathogens can be bioweapons, but they can also spread naturally and may cause destructive waves of disease; and countermeasures, including vaccines, can theoretically be used against both bioterror attacks and natural disease outbreaks.

In the decade after 9/11, as biodefense enjoyed an increasing portion of national security attention and spending, the field attracted many more scientists, academic institutions and nonprofits into the study of pathogens and countermeasures. Naturally, many of these non-military entities came from fields including virology, immunology and epidemiology, whose work is used – among other purposes – for pandemic preparedness. The civilian side of the research was mostly funded by public health agencies and mega-nonprofits interested primarily in vaccine development. 

It was not long before the two fields merged into one “dual use” entity – conveniently defined as a crucial aspect of national security – called simply “biodefense” or “health security.” In 2006, a new sub-agency was even created to cement the merger: ASPR – a military/intelligence-run entity within HHS – the umbrella civilian public health body. This symbiotic military/civilian enterprise could then attract a great deal more funding, and exert influence over a much vaster array of research institutions, nonprofits and NGOs than either biodefense or pandemic preparedness could have done separately.

Another impetus for the merger of the two fields was their shared private partners: pharmaceutical companies, whose job it was to help design, research and ultimately produce whatever countermeasures were deemed necessary for protection, either from bioweapons or naturally occurring pathogens. Ideally, the countermeasures for one type of disease outbreak would also work for the other.

This is why, in the decades after 2001, the biodefense field became obsessed with finding a “platform technology” that could provide protection from any conceivable bioweapon, while the public health/pandemic preparedness field pushed for a “universal flu vaccine” that could provide protection from any naturally occurring, respiratory-disease-causing virus. And, by 2019, both arms of the biodefense complex had invested a huge amount of funding and hype into a specific technology called “mRNA vaccine platforms” – thought to be the sought-after miracle countermeasure to all engineered viral bioweapons and all flu-causing viruses.

Biodefense/pandemic preparedness on a global scale

As discussed above, while all this merging of military and civilian research on bugs and drugs was happening on a national level, capital and political power were shifting away from nation states and into global public-private partnerships, or GPPPs. 

All of these gargantuan global entities share the following characteristics:

• Their backbone is the global banking system, whose interests they represent.

• Their agendas are usually aligned with the imperialist agenda of the United States – the world’s only superpower – and its allies.

• Their power to impose their agendas on the world’s population comes largely from the U.S. military-industrial complex and its partners and alliances (NATO, EU, Five Eyes, among others).

• They seek to enforce their agendas through advanced surveillance technology and AI, with the ultimate goal of gathering identity, health, and behavioral information about the entire world’s population into centralized databases.

• They use international governance and networking bodies (UN, WHO, Atlantic Council, WEF, among others) to coordinate and disseminate their agendas to national governments.

• They use multi-national consulting and management firms to help national governments implement their agendas.

• They include multinational corporations run by multibillionaires, who attain astronomical profits through their GPPP activities. 

• They coalesce around various perceived existential crises, like climate change and “global health security” (another name for international biodefense/pandemic preparedness). These pursuits are marketed to the public not just as altruistic and life-saving, but as the only way to avoid complete global devastation.

• Their ability to convince the world’s population to support their agendas derives from the global censorship and propaganda industrial complex – run through international intelligence alliances, partnering with marketing firms, academic institutions and nonprofits – using “nudge” methods and the psychological warfare playbook (psychological operations, or psy-ops) originally designed for coups and counterinsurgencies. 

With these characteristics in mind, we can list some of the main components of the biodefense/pandemic preparedness public-private partnership, to see just how enormous a complex it is. We can also see how the national biodefense complex scales up and merges with the global entity:

The Biodefense GPPP Prepares for an Inevitable Catastrophe

Along with the backing of the international banks and the support of the censorship and propaganda industrial complex (shortened in this article to “psy-op complex”) and multinational consulting firms, all of the components of the biodefense GPPP represent hundreds of billions of dollars in funding and financing, thousands of national and international companies, agencies, academic institutions and NGOs in dozens of countries, and hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of jobs all over the world. Its sheer size and control over people and resources make this an entity that is “too big to fail.”

Yet without a viable threat of a bioweapons attack or a catastrophic pandemic, this behemoth cannot continue to sustain and grow itself.

For that reason, as it ballooned in the two decades before Covid, the biodefense GPPP had to keep the threat of a catastrophic bioterror attack or global pandemic front and center. And it had to prepare all of its components to respond to the threat when it predictably, if not inevitably, occurred.

Tabletop exercises

Preparations for the catastrophe included priming the world’s governments for the inevitability of such an event, accomplished through “tabletop exercises” – simulations of what would happen in the event of a deadly bioattack or pandemic. 

Between 2001 and 2019, regularly scheduled “tabletop exercises” carried out by representatives of the biodefense GPPP effectively promoted the story of catastrophic global threats posed by bioterror/pandemic events. The content of each exercise was less important than the overarching message: naturally emerging and engineered pathogens posed an existential threat to humanity, and nothing less than a global response would be necessary to avoid armageddon. 

Creating a new business model for countermeasures

The most important component of a global response to such a catastrophe, in terms of accruing power and resources for the biodefense GPPP, is the manufacture and distribution of countermeasures to the entire global population, an effort spear-headed by pharmaceutical companies and their hundreds of subcontractors and subsidiaries.

But the traditional business model for private pharmaceutical companies does not lend itself to such a project. No private company can survive, let alone thrive, by devoting significant resources to building and maintaining manufacturing capacity for countermeasures against a hypothetical threat that might never happen. Furthermore, the oversight and regulation of medical products will almost inevitably delay the availability of novel countermeasures until after an attack or outbreak is over. And, finally, even if the countermeasures can be manufactured and approved quickly enough, what if they cause unexpected outcomes (e.g., injury or death) for which the companies could be held liable?

All of these obstacles were overcome by the biodefense GPPP through under-the-radar legislative and legal maneuverings and regulatory capture in the decades leading up to Covid:

• Regulatory barriers lowered to zero or near-zero 

Over several decades, important loopholes in countermeasure regulation were introduced into the legal code, most notably Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Internationally, defense treaties and biodefense agreements can lower regulatory barriers such that emergency authorization in one country could be applied to others. The WHO Emergency Use Listing (EUL) accomplishes this globally. EUL was first used for the Covid vaccines.

• Liability removed from anyone working on, distributing, or administering countermeasures

The PREP Act was a necessary additional legal measure to ensure that anyone who did anything with EUA products would not be liable in case the unregulated countermeasures went awry. The liability shield is extended by governments and regulatory bodies internationally along with EUA.

The Novel Coronavirus Trigger

By 2019 all of these preparations for a catastrophic global pandemic were in place, but the civilization-ending pathogen/bioterror attack had not yet materialized.

Then, in late 2019 a propitious public health emergency in Wuhan, China ended the very long dry spell in biodefense disasters: Clusters of patients exhibited severe symptoms of a respiratory disease that could not be attributed to any known pathogen. Analysis of the body fluids of the patients was performed, and a novel coronavirus was identified.

There are many unanswered questions about exactly how and when the novel coronavirus, subsequently called SARS-CoV-2, entered the human population, and how it turned into “the Covid-19 pandemic”: Was the virus engineered? When did the virus begin to circulate? Was the virus intentionally or accidentally released? Was it just one mutating virus, or several different ones?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, the important point to remember is that if it had not been SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, it would have been a different triggering event somewhere else – and the global pandemic response would have been the same.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article: The Global Pandemic Response and Its Aftermath.