Brownstone Institute
Chinese Rise Up Against Lockdowns that Elites Advocated in the US
From the Brownstone Institute
Mainstream headlines are alight with stories about protests of unprecedented proportion that have erupted across China in response to Xi Jinping’s draconian Zero Covid lockdown policies. I post these with the caveat that, owing to both the unique restrictions on information from China and our media’s false pretense of hawkishness in order to retain the public’s trust, stories about protests and instability in China are perennially exaggerated.
That there have been protests against the Chinese Communist Party’s lockdowns is not surprising, however, given how horrendous those policies have been. Exaggeration aside, during China’s lockdowns, most residents haven’t been allowed outside their homes even to get food. Meal deliveries are frequently inadequate and rotten and medical care is often inaccessible. Covid health status apps are strictly enforced. Those who test positive for Covid are taken to sparse, overcrowded quarantine camps resembling prisons. Infants are separated from their parents. Pets are killed.
I post these, too, with the caveat that stories of the CCP’s Zero Covid policies are often exaggerated as well, owing to both the establishment’s pretense of hawkishness and the consistent media narrative that during the response to Covid, at least we didn’t have it as bad as those poor Chinese who had to experience a “real lockdown.”
Wow, that’s some bad stuff. It’s an open question why the CCP remains so obsessively dedicated to this policy of Zero Covid; theories range from bureaucratic inertia to “saving face,” to a test of loyalty for Party members, to keeping “the science” alive, to simply putting on a show to reassure international onlookers that the CCP really does believe in what it sold them and at least they don’t have it as bad as in China. It remains to be seen whether these protests will result in any real change in the country’s direction.
But in the meantime, it’s worth remembering who it was exactly who advocated these insane Zero Covid lockdown policies and urged us to emulate them: Our own media elites and health officials.
Here’s the New York Times touting the Chinese “version of freedom.”
Here’s the Washington Post wishing the US was more like China.
Here’s the New Yorker on the secrets to China’s “success.”
Here’s Salon whining about America’s failure to “learn” from China’s success.
Here’s CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on the incredible results China was able to “achieve” with their “really strict lockdowns.”
Here’s former CDC Director Robert Redfield on China’s “control of their outbreak.”
Here’s former CDC Director Tom Frieden on how China used lockdowns to “crush the curve.”
Here’s Anthony Fauci advising India to “learn from China” as late as 2021.
Here’s Bill Gates praising China’s “authoritarian response” and blaming America’s failure on “freedom.”
Here’s WHO Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward rubber-stamping the CCP’s lockdowns into global policy.
Here’s former Surgeon General Jerome Adams toeing the line.
Here’s Neil Ferguson on how China led the way.
Here’s Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of the once-esteemed medical journal the Lancet, touting China’s response.
Here’s Devi Sridhar urging the UK to copy China’s “early and hard lockdown.”
Here’s professors Gavin Yamey, Gregg Gonsalves, and Angela Rasmussen defending China’s data.
Here’s the Financial Times attributing China’s “success” to Xi’s “strict lockdowns.”
Here’s Canada’s former Health Minister Patty Hajdu defending China’s data.
Here’s Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam on the “key lesson” to be learned from China.
Of course it’s no accident that Matt Pottinger and Deborah Birx, arguably the two most important officials behind lockdowns in the United States, got their idea of virus containment from China as well. As did Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza, who signed the first lockdown orders in the western world.
In 2020 and 2021, these calls for Western nations to emulate China’s lockdowns reached a fever pitch. But you don’t even need to look that far back. In fact, just yesterday, Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz defended the CCP’s Zero Covid policy amid the widespread protests that had erupted among the Chinese public.
Even some Covid “moderates” like professor Francois Balloux continue to toe the line that China’s lockdowns were effective.
And two days prior, Anthony Fauci gave a sworn deposition describing how China had inspired the advice on Covid containment that he issued to the United States.
As protests continue to erupt across China and Zero Covid is lain bare as the moral and intellectual catastrophe that is always was, it’s worth remembering that if we’d taken these officials and media elites seriously, the entire free world would look very much like China does today. Moreover, not a single one of these officials or media elites has been held to account or even lost their position. On the contrary, several of the most important pro-lockdown officials have had their exploits glorified in hagiographic memoirs, and some, such as UK SAGE advisor and 40-year British Communist Party member Susan Michie, have been given big promotions.
This in sharp contrast to the countless professionals who lost their positions due to noncompliance with Covid mandates, or those—as I found out the hard way—who’ve been censored for the mere suggestion that we may need an inquiry into why all these elites suddenly felt it appropriate to advise their countries to adopt one of the CCP’s most ruthlessly totalitarian policies.
It’s possible that when we get to the bottom of this story, we’ll find that these elites had perfectly good reasons for treating China’s data as real and treating Xi Jinping’s lockdowns as a legitimate public health policy, and a perfectly good explanation for why they couldn’t share those reasons with the public. But somehow, that doesn’t seem likely.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has resigned after months of rumors. Ardern, whose popularity has plummeted during the last six months, told us “she had nothing left in the tank.” In her resignation speech, she called on Labour Party ministers to consider which reform areas should be priorities and which should be scrapped as Labour moves to try to wipe some controversial policies off its plate.
The backstory to this resignation is a tale of woe. Ardern said today she wants to be remembered as someone who tried to be kind. The subtext is: the country is in an unprecedented mess but don’t blame me. School attendance is running at just 67 percent on any given day. Machete-wielding teenagers are ram-raiding liquor stores daily in an unparalleled crime wave. The health system is overwhelmed. Ardern’s government promised to build 100,000 new homes over three years. It has delivered just 1,500.
Our tourist, farming, and hospitality industries have never recovered from lockdowns and border closures. It now takes months to get a visa to visit NZ and the government says it only wants rich people to come. No wonder, we are all poor now. Ardern famously insisted on universal Covid vaccination mandates. There is a suspicion that our 90 percent vaccination rate has left everyone in a lethargic fog. Excess all-cause deaths are still running 15 percent above the long-term trends, and it is not because of Covid.
History will judge Ardern harshly, but don’t blame her alone. This was a Parliament who woke up on all sides of the house to the weakness of our constitutional arrangements (there are none). The Bill of Rights was tossed aside and no one in Parliament cared.
The leader of the National opposition, Chris Luxon, famously said pre-pandemic if he was in power, he would withdraw benefits from unvaccinated single mothers. David Seymour, leader of the ACT party, said those losing their jobs through vaccine mandates only had themselves to blame. Labour’s coalition partner, the Greens led by example, encouraging mothers in labour to ride to hospital on a bicycle (yes they did).
Revelations this week, hat Ardern personally overruled her scientific advisors who were expressing doubts about the safety of Covid vaccines for young people and the wisdom of mandates, have circulated very widely and no doubt this further undermined confidence in the government.
Political insider and right-wing commentator Cameron Slater published an article 10 days ago saying that out of all the politicians he has known (and he has known most since Muldoon in the 1970s) Ardern is the only one he rates as truly evil.
Ardern introduced rule by regulation. Adopting the enabling model favoured by fascists in the 1930s, her government has empowered authorities to tell us all what to do, when to stay at home, and where not to go. The courts, the Human Rights Commission, and the broadcast regulators have all followed the government line meticulously, which had a devastating effect on business, families, communities, and professions. To cement her policies, Ardern introduced massive government funding of our media and broadcasters.
Ardern was a protege of Tony Blair and Klaus Schwab of the WEF. They must bear some blame too. What fantasies of global power did they offer to a young person who was given to idealistic dreaming that segued into fanaticism?
Ardern’s government, in an absurd overreach, also funded a nationwide effort to discredit critics of policy, labeling them terrorists. This has divided a formerly egalitarian society, instituting a Stasi-like snitch culture that encourages us to dob in a neighbour. Government Disinformation Project employees appeared on funded films aired on television labeling knitting, blond hair, braids, vaccine hesitancy, love of natural foods, Yoga, and yes, motherhood as signs of terrorism that should be reported to the intelligence services.
Why did Ardern suddenly change overnight in August 2021 from being a kindly figure saying she would never mandate vaccines, to being one of the world’s most draconian proponents? We can only speculate. NZ is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence network. Given the Pentagon’s recently revealed massive involvement in US Covid policy and gain of function research funding, was she fed information that a bioweapon was in play? We will likely never know.
For a couple of weeks now government announcements and advertisements encouraging vaccination and boosters have been conspicuously absent. Has the penny finally dropped? We doubt it. It will take an honest, intelligent politician (are there any?) to roll back Ardern’s dictatorial powers and kickstart New Zealand. Why would any aspiring newbie give up that much power? The prospect will be too intoxicating.
Our final verdict: It is not Ardern but the whole NZ Parliament elected in 2020 that will be judged as the worst in our short history as an independent island nation, formerly famous for championing the underdog and offering opportunity to all. Ardern’s resignation is a bonfire of modern democracy.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
According to its website, the World Health Organization (WHO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, “works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable.” In recent times, however, the organization has become a vehicle for corruption, deceit, and Chinese propaganda.
The WHO is an incredibly powerful organization with 194 member states. When the WHO speaks, the world listens. When the WHO decides on a plan of action, the world changes.
As the piece demonstrates, the WHO has aspirations of becoming even more powerful than it already is. If successful, the consequences could prove to be severe.
Last year, Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, wrote a stinging piece that took direct aim at the WHO’s “bungled response to the coronavirus.” Miller, like so many others around the world, was particularly disillusioned about the “misplaced trust” placed in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As many readers no doubt recall, the CCP did its very best to conceal the COVID-19 outbreak that originated in Wuhan.
Because of the WHO’s numerous failures, Miller argued persuasively that the United States, whose “funding of UN activities exceeds that of every other country,” should refrain from financing the organization unless an “effective oversight and auditing entity” can be created to oversee operations.
In 2020, shortly after suspending financial support, the Trump administration began initiating a process to withdraw the United States from membership in the WHO. However, upon taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden quickly reversed that decision and restored funding practices.
A few weeks after Miller’s well-argued piece, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) introduced a bill designed to prevent the WHO from unilaterally imposing public health restrictions on the United States and violating the country’s national sovereignty. The legislation came after the decision-making body of the WHO, the World Health Assembly, met to discuss a “pandemic treaty.” If introduced, such a treaty would give the WHO far greater control over public health decisions in the United States.
Scott said: “The WHO’s radical ‘pandemic treaty’ is a dangerous globalist overreach. The United States of America must never give more power to the WHO.” He added that the bill would “ensure that public health matters in the country remain in the hands of Americans,” and it needed to be passed immediately. It wasn’t. It should have been.
From Jan. 9–13, clandestine meetings took place in Geneva, Switzerland. Those in attendance discussed the possibility of amending the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR). For the uninitiated, the regulations are considered an instrument of international law, a legally binding agreement of basically every country in the world (except Liechtenstein) that calls on members to detect, evaluate, report, and respond to public health emergencies in a coordinated manner.
Michael Nevradakis, a senior reporter for The Defender, warned that if the proposed IHR amendments are made, then WHO members would essentially be stripped of their sovereignty. As Nevradakis previously reported, the IHR framework already allows Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, “to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government.” The proposed amendments would give even more power to the director-general.
Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told Nevradakis that the proposed changes could violate international law.
Boyle, a legitimate expert who played a pivotal role in drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, believes we are heading toward “a worldwide totalitarian medical and scientific police state,” which the WHO directly controls. That’s because the IHR regulations “are specifically designed to circumvent national, state and local government authorities when it comes to pandemics, the treatment for pandemics and also including in there, vaccines.”
It’s clear to Boyle that the WHO is preparing to adopt the regulations in May of 2023, just a few months from now.
The brilliant researcher James Roguski also shares Boyle’s concerns. He claims that the WHO is attempting a global power grab by morphing from an advisory organization into what can only be described as a global law-enforcement agency. If introduced, the IHR changes, he suggested, “would institute global digital health certificates, dramatically increase the billions of dollars available to the WHO and enable nations to implement the regulations WITHOUT respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people.”
Although COVID-19 is now a distant memory for many, another pandemic, we’re told, is just around the corner. When it comes, the WHO may very well be in a position to order you, dear reader, to do exactly what it wants, when it wants. If these amendments are made in May, resistance may prove to be utterly futile.
Reposted from Epoch Times
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