From the Brownstone Institute

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER

There is an old expression: “Success has a thousand fathers but failure is always an orphan.”

It’s a spin on Tacitus: “This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”

We can judge the results of the pandemic response, then, by the number of people who claim it as their own. So far the answer seems to be: none.

These days, if you listen to the rhetoric, you would think that absolutely no one forced anyone to do anything, not even take the jab. There were no mask mandates. No one was ever locked down. There were some mistakes, sure, but those came only from doing the best we could with the knowledge we had.

Other than make well-considered recommendations, they didn’t force anyone to do anything.

Even from 2021, the media routinely referred to the “pandemic” and not the pandemic policies as responsible for learning losses, depression, business failures, and poor economic conditions. This has been deliberate. It’s designed to normalize lockdowns as if they are just something one does to deal with infectious disease, even though lockdowns have no precedent on that scale in the West.

More recently, this denialism has taken a strange turn. Now the people who actually did pull the trigger on the loss of liberty are routinely refusing to admit that they forced anything.

We’ve heard Donald Trump make this claim for a good part of this year. Mr. “I left it to the states” has yet to be publicly confronted with his decisions from March 10, 2020 and throughout the rest of his presidency. Interviewers don’t press him on the subject for fear of having access cut off later. And yet the record is very clear.

Then Anthony Fauci joined in, claiming that he never recommended the lockdowns at all.

But the pandemic of lockdown dentialism has gotten worse, to the point that the head of Health and Human Services plus the head of Occupational Safety and Health Commision are doing the same, even though the Supreme Court actually ruled against their edicts.

Ah, what a difference time and events make.

It gets worse. One of the most imperial and invasive of the governors was Andrew Cuomo of New York. He issued a massive number of edicts that he enforced with police power, including even dictating that bars couldn’t sell drinks alone but also mandating the selling of  food, even to the point of spelling out the quantity of food. This resulted in the infamous Cuomo Fries served around the state.

But to hear him talk now, he didn’t do a thing and no one had to comply with anything.

“Government had no capacity to enforce any of this,” he says now. “You must wear a mask and people wore masks in New York. But if they said I’m not wearing a mask there was nothing I could do about it. You must close your private business. I won’t. Well there was nothing I could really do about it. It was really all voluntary. It was extraordinary when you think about it. Society acted with that uniformity voluntarily because I had no enforcement capacity.”

And that’s why hundreds of thousands of people fled the city and state? It was all voluntary?

As Thomas McArdle explains:

 In fact, the “New York State on PAUSE” executive order Mr. Cuomo signed on Friday, March 20, 2020, included a directive that all businesses in the state deemed non-essential by the government must cease employee activities within their offices before the following Monday. That December, an army of police sheriffs shut down a popular bar and restaurant on Staten Island that responded “I won’t” and arrested its general manager for defying coronavirus restrictions by remaining open for indoor business, in just one example of enforcement of lockdowns in the state.

Cuomo’s dissembling rhetoric is simply incredible. And it speaks to why we’ve seen no justice for what they have done. It’s simply because not one pandemic leader has admitted to having done anything at all. The entire pandemic response was so brutal, so outlandish, and so utterly wrong even according to their own goals, whatever they were, that no one wants to take credit for any of it.

All of which reminds me of Dr. Carter Mecher, who Michael Lewis in The Premonition celebrates as the key architect of lockdowns. In the Red Dawn emails of 2020, he pauses from his frenzied push for lockdowns with a winsome comment. He says that if everything goes well with the lockdowns, they will have saved society from a deadly disease. The irony, he says, is that if their strategy works, everyone will be saying: look it wasn’t bad after all, so why did we lock down?

So either way, he predicted, they are doomed.

This was the real premonition. Today, no one likes these people. The public is furious beyond measure. The leaders of the response all over the world are being toppled and fleeing offices with as much dignity as they can muster, which usually means landing in the Ivy League (Jacinda Ardern, Lori Lightfoot, Yoel Roth. and Cuomo).

The one thing they will not do is admit that they were completely wrong and only caused massive wreckage from which we are still suffering, plus completely discredited public health and government for a generation or two.

Early on, I and many others were accused of Covid denialism for citing the data on the age disparities of risk. The alarmists and lockdowners were said to be the realistic ones. Three years later, this has completely flipped. Reality bit back. Now the denialists are those who actively promoted and enforced lockdowns, and now implausibly deny that anything happened at all.

All of this gives new meaning to the word gaslighting. Indeed, it is enough to drive one crazy. We encounter it everywhere, even in the second Republican debate where not even one question was about the lockdowns, much less the surveillance, censorship, vaccine mandates, or the failures of the shot. Here we have the greatest failure of government in my lifetime or any living lifetime and we don’t have official institutions out there even willing to talk about it.

The major media is tacitly conspiring with the political establishment, the corporate sector, and the administrative state to pretend like that fiasco was completely normal and also entirely forgettable, not even worth naming. We did the best we could with the information we had so just stop complaining about it!

This is not going to work. It is too close to living memory for this level of gaslighting to be effective. The more these official institutions engage in this crazy form of denialism, the more they discredit themselves.

Author

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  Jeffrey A. Tucker

  Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

From the Brownstone Institute

BY MARYANNE DEMASI

Major international governments have signed multibillion-dollar legal contracts with drug companies in order to secure access to covid-19 vaccines.

But the drug companies and governments have refused to divulge details, saying the information is “commercial in confidence.”

In 2021, we got our first peek at contracts between Pfizer and various international countries after they were leaked to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and US consumer group Public Citizen.

“The contracts offer a rare glimpse into the power one pharmaceutical corporation has gained to silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximise profits in the worst public health crisis in a century,” said Zain Rizvi, author of the Public Citizen report.

Pfizer was accused of “bullying” governments during contract negotiations, asking some Latin American countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases.

High court decision

Last month, a South African NGO called Health Justice Initiative won a high court challenge to gain access to all of South Africa’s covid-19 vaccine contracts.

Tony Nikolic, an Australian solicitor from law firm Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates, reviewed the Pfizer contract and says it reads like South Africa was “held to ransom” over the deal.

“It’s a one-sided contract. Pfizer gets all of the profits and none of the risks,” says Nikolic. “It’s akin to extortion, there’s absolutely no liability for the vaccine manufacturer in terms of injuries that may arise from their product.”

The South African government agreed to “indemnify, defend and hold harmless” Pfizer and all its affiliates from “any and all suits, claims, actions, demands, losses, damages, liabilities settlements, penalties, fines, costs and expenses” arising from the vaccine.

It also says the government will “create, dedicate, and maintain a no-fault compensation fund sufficient to undertake and completely fulfil the indemnification obligations….. for damage, injury, or harm arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the development, administration, or use of the vaccine.”

Nikolic says, “It’s like the manufacturers could ask for anything they wanted. There was such panic at the time and images in the media of people dying in the streets created a real sense of fear and insecurity around the world.”

The protection against liability is not only in place for the initial vaccine formulation, but for “any or all related strains, mutations, modifications or derivatives of the foregoing that are procured by Purchaser.”

“What this means,” explains Nikolic, “is that Pfizer can modify its vaccine to match whatever variants emerge, and still have all the same protections against liability. This is nothing more than a cash cow for Pfizer, they are privatising the profits, whilst socialising the costs.”

Pfizer charged the South African government $10 per dose, which is nearly 33 percent more than the $6.75 “cost price” it reportedly charged the African Union.

“In my view, this is why Pfizer wants the details kept secret, so that it can protect the various price differences between countries. It’s classic price gouging with a predatory twist, that is why procurement transparency is essential,” says Nikolic.

Long-term safety?

The contract states “the long-term effects and efficacy of the vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known.”

Nikolic says this is in stark contrast to the public health messages at the time.

“We had politicians and key opinion leaders telling people that the vaccines were ‘safe and effective’ when the procurement contracts themselves did not make such claims,” says Nikolic.

“The contract clearly indicates that adverse effects were unknown at the time of signing. The burden of proof should never have been on the people to prove the vaccine was unsafe, it should have been on the manufacturer to prove the vaccine was safe,” he adds.

Nikolic has spent the last two years trying to access the procurement contracts signed by the Australian Government.

“Australians are still in the dark about what is contained within these contracts. We know it gave liability protection to the vaccine manufacturers like other countries, but that’s the extent of it,” says Nikolic.

“We need to know what our politicians knew at the time of signing the deal. And we need to know how much money we, the taxpayer, spent for a vaccine that turned out to be far less safe or effective than promised,’ he adds.

In a recent Australian Senate committee hearing, Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts grilled Pfizer executives under oath about the indemnity clauses in its contract with the Australian government, but Pfizer refused to give details.

“The contents of Pfizer’s contract with the Australian Government remains confidential,” said Pfizer Australia’s medical director Krishan Thiru.

In 2021, Nikolic mounted a legal challenge against covid-19 vaccine mandates in the NSW Supreme Court where he tried to subpoena the Pfizer contract, but his request was blocked.

Undeterred, Nikolic submitted an FOI request to the Australian Department of Health.

The FOI request, however, was denied because the contracts “contain information that is confidential in nature” such as “trade secrets and commercially valuable information.” It stated:

“The documents contain commercial information regarding the procurement of vaccines to Australia. The documents contain information specifically relevant to the unique commercial arrangements between the department and third parties, including indicative prices, payment terms, professional indemnity, ongoing funding measures, manufacturing details and production measures.”

Nikolic says, “It’s unethical, potentially unlawful and immoral for them to argue that the right to preserve commercial confidence overrides the right for public safety, it just doesn’t make sense.”

He adds, “It just boggles the mind how governments just rolled over and entered into agreements with companies like Pfizer that have a long track record of breaching the False Claims Act resulting in billion-dollar criminal and civil liability.”

Reposted from the author’s Substack