On Thursday, friend-of-the-blog Michael P. Senger posted an important essay to Substack, in which he asks whether the “Response to COVID” was “effectively a coup by the Western intelligence community.” Everyone should read it, as it summarises in one place a range of evidence that Senger and others have collected pointing to the role of the defence and intelligence actors in promoting lockdowns, especially in America.
Many readers have asked me in sometimes polite and sometimes highly hostile and dismissive ways to comment on these ideas for a long time now. I find this surprising, as I don’t disagree with any of Senger’s specific observations, and I don’t think they’re necessarily in conflict with my own theses of What Happened in 2020. I’ve long held that the bureaucracy succumbed to very radical ideas about how to suppress SARS-2 between February and March 2020, and as the defence and intelligence sectors are part of the institutional apparatus of the government, it’s only logical to think that they should’ve fallen prey to these ideas too. Perhaps it is true, though, that my overall interpretation of events departs somewhat from the Intelligence Coup Thesis. In what follows, I’ll try to explain why.
Senger and others have surely shown that key members of the American defence establishment were very worried about SARS-2 and willing to follow the lead of China in pandemic policy from the beginning. Their advocacy, however, seems to be of two types. Either it occurs very early but doesn’t seem to be about mass containment specifically, or it occurs rather later and indicates an endorsement of lockdowns around the same time everyone else was endorsing them.
To forestall objections, I will risk trying the patience of my valued readers by explaining once again, in excruciating detail and with many citations, what I mean by “mass containment” and why I think a rigid, autistic, unrelenting focus on this particular concept is necessary to understand the events of 2020.
Almost all reporting and government statements on pandemic policy since March 2020 have worked to cover up the fact that lockdowns were not supposed to happen. The Western public health establishment never planned for them; everybody was supposed to do what Sweden did. To obfuscate the significance of the cataclysmic policy reversal that occurred in March 2020, pandemicists now pretend that lockdowns were merely the “social distancing” and school closures and work-at-home advisories that they had always fantasised about.
These blurred distinctions have necessarily coloured alt-Covid discourse too, but if we want to understand the events of early 2020 in particular, we must maintain firm distinctions among three different hygiene regimes.
These are 1) outbreak containment, 2) pandemic mitigation and 3) mass containment.
Plans for 1) outbreak containment had been current since SARS at least. The idea is that limited, confined outbreaks can be contained by harsh quarantines like those which Japanese authorities imposed on the Diamond Princess in February 2020. Should outbreak containment fail, then in the pre-2020 programme only 2) pandemic mitigation remained an option. Mitigation is a fuzzy set of measures that can be everything or nothing. Work-at-home advisories, school closures and “social distancing” had all occurred in mitigationist plans at one time or another. “Social distancing,” which has become a synonym for “lockdowns” in the Anglosphere especially, is an old concept that achieved particular currency with the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic. Before 2020 “social distancing” was never about locking down. In 2009, the WHO recommended “social distancing” as a “mitigation” measure for “low resource communities.” They described it as “keeping at least an arm’s length distance from others” and “minimizing gatherings.”
What never clearly existed and nobody in the Western public health establishment had ever explicitly planned before 2020 was 3) mass containment, which is the attempt to make 1) outbreak containment operate on the scale of entire populations, where it was previously thought only mitigation would work.
Contrary to what some of my critics maintain, the Wuhan lockdown was not pandemic mitigation, and it was not outbreak containment either. It was a new, third thing. Thus WHO Director Tedros at first remained noncommittal about Chinese lockdowns, telling the press on 24 January that “China has taken measures which it believes will be effective. But we hope from our side that they’re both effective and short in duration.” WHO team leader Gaudean Galea was even more explicit:
[T]rying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science. It has not been tried before as a public health measure, so we cannot at this stage say it will or will not work. … We will note carefully to what extent it is maintained and how long it can take. There are pros and cons … Such a decision obviously has social and economic impacts that are considerable.
Mitigationist planning is very sensitive to “social and economic impacts,” which is why a lot of early pandemicist discussion of the Chinese lockdowns expressed anxiety about these drawbacks. Mass containment, on the other hand, does not care about anything but virus suppression. Mass containment came to the West via the 24 February report of the joint WHO-China mission, which endorsed the Wuhan lockdowns and recommended this strategy to all nations.
Since the first-wave lockdowns, nobody will acknowledge the distinction between containment and mitigation, but this talk was all over the place in the earliest days of the Corona era.
The American progressive pundit Matthew Yglesias, writing in the odious webzine Vox on 27 February 2020, explained the distinction as follows to his readers:
The ideal thing to do when faced with an infectious disease outbreak is to contain it — isolate one or more areas where the outbreak is occurring, treat patients there, and hope the vast majority of the world will be spared. …
What we are realistically looking at now is not containment of a virus that is already on multiple continents, but efforts to mitigate the harm that it does by slowing its spread. …
In a pandemic of a severe disease without mitigation, a huge share of the population gets sick all at once — overwhelming the health care infrastructure, undermining the reliability of emergency services, and overall causing a degree of devastation beyond the specific medical impact of the virus. …
Even with effective mitigation a lot of people get sick, but the caseload is spread out and society can continue to function.
Note that Yglesias, writing just three days after the crucial 24 February lockdown endorsement, has no conception of mass containment. If containment fails, mitigation is for him the only other option.
