Pandemic Preparedness and Its Discontents
Technocracy and technocrats gave us “pandemic preparedness”. And pandemic preparedness gave us the Covid State. And all of its evil deeds.
Will Jones at the Brownstone Institute notes that Covid has thrown up two core questions – where did the virus come from, and where did the response of governments to the virus come from? I have detailed how the seemingly benign but ultimately lethal Biosecurity Act of 2015 established the architecture of Covid fascism in Australia.
But the legislative foundation isn’t the whole story. This is only one leg of the strategy of the technocrats in the world’s capital cities. They had other aces up their sleeves. Here is Will Jones again:
The lockdown and NPI agenda began in the Bush White House in 2005 – though China had previously used lockdowns/NPIs in response to SARS in 2003 and claimed success (despite SARS disappearing everywhere and not just where NPIs were used). U.S. President George W. Bush was worried about biological attacks after 9/11 and the Iraq invasion and asked his team to come up with a whole of society response.
The 2005 bird flu scare added impetus to the emerging agenda of ‘pandemic preparedness’ (despite the fact that the scare came to nothing). The plan the team came up with was based on the use of NPIs for social distancing – very similar to what China had used, though the team members themselves did not credit China for their idea but, bizarrely, the high school science project of one member’s 14-year-old daughter.
This draconian biosecurity strategy grew from there. It came to include a stress on the fast development of vaccines and deployment of digital vaccine passes as the exit strategy from restrictions, particularly mRNA vaccines which were seen as a printable vaccine amenable to quick tailoring to emergent pathogens.
… The new biosecurity-oriented, NPI-based pandemic preparedness ideas gradually became embedded in international policy and practice, including through national pandemic plans, WHO guidance, and pandemic simulation exercises such as Event 201, organised by Johns Hopkins University.
https://brownstone.org/articles/lockdowns-and-fast-track-vaccines-the-origin-story/
The biosecurity movement, as Jones terms it, has been a powerful instrument for nudging democratically elected politicians towards Covid policy madness. It is managerialism on steroids.
Three truths are in play here.
The first truth is that clueless, fearful, reputation-obsessed politicians have come to rely totally on the advice of bureaucrats and so-called “experts”.
The second truth is the political scientist Charles Lindblom’s thesis about the development of public policy which he called “incrementalism”. As per Britannica:
Incrementalism was first developed in the 1950s by the American political scientist Charles E. Lindblom in response to the then-prevalent conception of policy making as a process of rational analysis culminating in a value-maximizing decision.
Lindblom summarily dismissed the “rational actor model” of policymaking, and suggested instead that policy develops incrementally over time, building on what already exists and susceptible to the influence of interest groups. He argued that it is interest groups that determine election outcomes and policies. Ideas, ideologies and methodologies (like the reliance on modelling) get baked into public service thinking and behaviour over time.
The third, linked, truth is the old Christian adage – “the devil makes work for idle hands to do”. Public servants with too much time on their hands think up things like “pandemic preparedness” and make it look virtuous. Politicians always have an urge to be seen to be doing something, to be problem-solving. Bureaucrats oblige by giving them ideas about “doing things”, about solving “problems” whether or not the problem actually exists (see under climate emergency). Politicians also hate being thought of as reactive and flat-footed. They like to be “strategic”. Vested interests like Big Pharma and the Microsoft founder with the Messiah complex found ways to get inside the heads of policymakers (and academics and the legacy media), to embed a fear of pandemics and suggest the policy tools for combatting anything that came along that someone in a white coat defined as a “pandemic”.
Pandemic preparedness is now well and truly embedded in the political class’s mindset. It is especially an obsession of those charged with overseeing public health. A benign interpretation of this process might see it all as merely an example of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Plan for something and it is bound to happen. Wikipedia’s definition is as follows:
A self-fulfilling prophecy is the psychological phenomenon of someone "predicting" or expecting something, and this "prediction" or expectation coming true simply because the person believes or anticipates it will and the person's resulting behaviors align to fulfill the belief. This suggests that people's beliefs influence their actions. The principle behind this phenomenon is that people create consequences regarding people or events, based on previous knowledge of the subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy
A less benign interpretation might see hidden, malign forces at work.
The susceptibility of politicians to apparently “rational” advice from bureaucrats is something to behold. Rocco Loiacono notes:
Late last year I berated a former senior Liberal politician in this state [Western Australia], reminding him that, shamefully, it was a Liberal government that passed the Public Health Act and all its draconian provisions. I asked him: ‘What were you doing when the Bill was before the Parliament?’ His response was words to the effect of: ‘Well, they told us not to worry because these provisions will never be used!’
https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/ben-falconers-loss-highlights-was-terrible-laws/
“They told us”. Indeed, they did. Here is a politician, a useful idiot, admitting that “they told us”.
What are the characteristics of those providing the advice, those who “told us”? The Covid bureaucrat class is elitist, woke, leftist, echo-chambered, and utilitarian. It is the ruling class. It takes its orders from the globalist set which has vested interests in policy outcomes and the tools with which to bribe bureaucrats, journalists and academics – funding, flattery, secondments and opportunities for “public-private partnerships”, the preferred model of team Davos and of the modern politician.
Here is where the other great contribution to democratic theory of the last century kicks in. This is public choice theory, most notably proffered by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Public choice theory outlines how bureaucrats are inevitably captured by private interests.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicChoiceTheory.html
Public health bureaucrats are now a wholly owned subsidiary of those who are commercially and ideologically wedded to those with an interest in pandemics, real or (especially) imagined. They are connected by funding and by career advancement.
The pandemic preparedness movement and the vaccination movement have developed in lockstep, sharing personnel and ideology. Everyone knows about Bill Gates’ tricks, of course. (Well, readers here do, at any rate). And, as Will Jones notes, the pandemic preparedness movement reached its apotheosis in 2019 with Event 201.
The movement was helped along enormously by international organisations, many of which were (inevitably) commissioned, championed and financially underwritten by Gates. Key organisations included the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and Gavi, the Global Fund and the Vaccine Alliance, whose interconnections forged the conjoining of the preparedness for a pandemic and vaccines as the single-bullet solution. The pandemic champions all over the globe formed what the political scientists call a “policy community” with key government organisations.
Regular attendance by politicians at events like the World Economic Forum’s Davos strengthened the networks and the thinking. (Greg Hunt, of course, is a former employee of the WEF). It is the same with events for politicians like those of the United Nations, the G7 and G20, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) and APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation). Then there is the World Bank. Of course, the World Health Organisation is the daddy of them all. Naturally funded by Bill Gates, as well as by the Chinese Communist Party. (The WHO notably bucked Lindblom’s theory of incrementalism when it abruptly and boldly overturned half a century of settled policy by advocating lockdowns and the rest in early 2020).
Who has heard of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board? Me neither.
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) is an independent monitoring and accountability body to ensure preparedness for global health crises. Co-convened by the Director-General of the World Health Organization and the President of the World Bank, the GPMB is comprised of political leaders, agency principals and world-class experts. It is tasked with providing an independent and comprehensive appraisal for policy makers and the world about progress towards increased preparedness and response capacity for disease outbreaks and other emergencies with health consequences. In short, the work of the GPMB is to chart a roadmap for a safer world.
https://www.gpmb.org/
A safer world? Does anyone now seriously think our world is “safer” as a result of all the pandemic preparedness that helped to deliver Covid totalitarianism? Nor should we forget the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Co-chaired by one Helen Clark. These organisations are popping up all over the place. This one was created by the WHO.
Tony Abbott, as Health Minister in the Howard Government, was caught up in the whole pandemic preparedness movement, no doubt egged along by his then Departmental Secretary, and now Gates collaborator, Jane Halton. Halton was described by The Daily Telegraph in 2014 as both “fascinating” and “all powerful”. Tony’s “iron lady”, in fact. She has been dubbed “Mrs Everywhere”. More importantly, she has also been termed “the global expert in pandemic preparedness”. (Her university degree was in psychology, which has perhaps come in handy for her in our current era of fear, nudging and “mass formation”, as Mattias Desmet terms the driver of Covid totalitarianism).
One headline noted in 2020:
Coronavirus Australia: Did Tony Abbott predict the global COVID-19 pandemic?
In 2007, Tony Abbott made predictions of a global flu pandemic killing thousands of Australians and seriously affecting the economy.
Chillingly, the story continued:
In 2007 Tony Abbott swung Australia into readiness of a global flu virus pandemic, spending $600m on “pandemic preparedness” economically and even predicting “extreme fear” in the community.
He also suggested at the time the Federal Government might consider new powers to quarantine people in their own homes in the event of a flu pandemic.
Abbott was clearly an early victim of Pandemic Preparedness Syndrome. It is almost impossible not to see Halton’s fingerprints on this. As Abbott himself has mused:
How to deal with a potential pandemic was often on my mind during four years as health minister in the Australian government of John Howard. In those days, hundreds of people – nearly all in East Asia and living in close contact with poultry – contracted bird flu; and about a half died. The fear back then was that a pandemic variant could become an even more deadly form of the Spanish flu, that killed up to 50 million people, mostly between 20 and 40, in the wake of the Great War (including over half a million from a then-US population of just on a hundred million); or a supercharged version of the Asian flu that killed upwards of a million people world-wide in the late 1950s; or the Hong Kong flu that killed another million or more in the late 1960s.
… Still, as the minister who would have been blamed for any deficiency in Australia’s pandemic preparedness, I beefed up the National Medicine Stockpile (including one of the world’s largest holdings of anti-viral drugs), established the Australian Health Protection Committee, and made formal speeches laying out the initial plan to deal with any crisis (emphasis added).
https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Australia-and-the-Coronavirus-Crisis.pdf
The politician’s greatest fear. To be caught short in a “pandemic”. The fear of blame. This core concern of politicians, the useful idiots, kicked in, big time, in March 2020. They played into the hands of the ideologues and totalitarians in the early days of panic. The bureaucrats who had prepared the ground for the panic.
Abbott continued:
No decent government could allow its hospitals to be overwhelmed, or contemplate with equanimity a new disease predicted to kill over two million people in the United States, up to half a million in Britain, and 150,000 in Australia.
Here is the core reason for “flattening the curve”. In other words, the politicians simply believed the catastrophist modellers. They were scared to begin with. They had absorbed the pandemic preparedness ideology. They believed the likes of Neil Ferguson, a modeller with an appalling record who somehow still managed (and manages) to collect a public pay packet. (Private sector employees who make such blunders are normally shown the door, pronto).
But there is more:
Faced with the prospect of death on such a scale, of course governments were going to ban travel, to close places of gathering, and to order people to stay at home as far as possible. And with the economy in an induced coma, governments really had no choice but to subsidise wages, freeze foreclosures and scrap rules about seeking work (emphasis added).
Of course? This attitude beggars belief. It basically says, we simply accept the rule by experts. Perhaps he was still wedded to the advice of the aforementioned Jane Halton, now used by Bill Gates to advance the pandemic narrative globally.
Finally, from Tony Abbott, still thinking as a Health Minister:
And it’s sensible to err on the side of caution.
Err, no it wasn’t. Perhaps “caution” might have suggested a sober approach to crushing the freedoms and rights of citizens, a sceptical approach to trusting the modelling of failed academics, and a recognition of fifty years of public health science which suggested that lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions were not the preferred path. Let alone vaccine mandates. This is not even a close simulacrum of “caution”.
Pandemic preparedness has a certain appeal to trusting politicians, even those as normally sensible as Tony Abbott. Abbott’s typically measured consideration of the dilemmas of governments when confronted with bureaucratic advice that politicians assume to be “rational”, but which in practice we now know to have been compromised and ideological, sums up the democratic dilemma we face.
Of course, it was Abbott’s Government that, in 2015, passed the egregious Biosecurity Act that delivered Australia’s Covid totalitarianism. Legislation that was prepared for government by those who were already committed to “pandemic preparedness”. And it didn’t remotely see the dangers of the powers written into the legislation.
When the policymaker is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Abbott also once said:
Almost certainly, preparing thoroughly for disasters which don’t eventuate will help prepare for those which do.
So long as we retain in the political class the capacity to discern what is, and what is not, an emergency. In 2020, conditioned by a decade or more of pandemic obsession among the bureaucracy, the politicians failed dismally. An epic fail, at best. Politicians need to remember their Buchanan and Tullock.
Nor should anyone think that the Covid hysteria has taught the world what a dangerous croc the pandemic preparedness movement is. No, it turns out that they are just warming up:
International policymakers, scientists, and representatives of industry, philanthropy and civil society were united at the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit—co-hosted in London by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the UK Government on March 7-8, 2022—in endorsing the ambition to have safe, effective, and globally accessible vaccines against the next pandemic threat ready in just 100 days.
https://cepi.net/news_cepi/the-global-pandemic-preparedness-summit-on-the-road-to-100-day-vaccines/
Talk about doubling down. One hundred days! It makes the ill-considered Operation Warp Speed look like slow coaches. And one Jane Halton, Mrs Everywhere, was, inevitably, right in the middle of the participants group photographed to mark the occasion of the summit.
As CEPI notes, still stoking the fear:
Worryingly, future disease outbreaks could be even worse.
Pandemic preparedness ideology conditions bureaucrats to will on a pandemic, just like preparing armies for war tends to see happy soldiers when the fighting starts. It also conditions the political class to ignore, or worse still justify, what would by many be seen as catastrophic bungling. We have all paid the price.
Paul Collits
30 August 2022
Great analysis! It brings to view the greatest errors of bureaucratic mindsets attempting to fashion master schemes to impose on populations.
Sparty just publlished a word on pandemic preparedness.
https://iamspartacus.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-barnacle?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email