Economic Coercion in Pandemic Policymaking
From the GBD to the Biden Administration
I have found myself in rare disagreement with my friend and fellow COVID Commentator Dr. Jonathan Howard of Science Based Medicine. He suggests in a recent article that the Great Barrington Declaration’s fantasy of which the American public got their marching orders and hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans embraced the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a patriotic smile was impossible, because people would have still chosen to avoid the virus. This is similar to an argument that I myself have made in a previous article and am rebuking upon further study. Jonathan writes in the excellent “The COVID Amnesia Project: Erasing Your Free Will to Preserve the Fantasy of the Optional Pandemic”:
“In the fantasy of an alternate pandemic, the sage authors of the GBD were in charge, and millions of Americans, who had devoted most of 2020 to avoiding COVID, would have suddenly been willing to contract it enmasse once they recieved their marching orders in October. Parents would have sent their kids to school, and customers would have flocked to packed restaurants. Teachers would have seen the video below [titled Day Jay Bhattacharya says only 1 in 500 teachers will die, October 2020], and hearing they faced a ‘very modest risk,’ would have been convinced to return to crowded classrooms. That’s how persusasive the authors of the GBD would have been. School bus drivers, chefs, waitresses and everyone else required to keep schools and restaurants functioning would have similarly abandoned their efforts to avoid COVID. Since they were ‘low risk,’ life would have been blissfully normal.”
Unfortunately, I now have to disagree. The premise of the Great Barrington Declaration relied upon stripping people of any choice to try and avoid a SARS infection. In the laisses-faire dystopia of the United States, most Americans are required to work a job in order to earn a wage so they may afford the basic necessities of survival. In the GBD’s proposed fantasy of a 2020 where they were in charge, there would be no pandemic relief: No stimulus, no unemployment, no remote schooling, no eviction moratorium. Just “three to six months” of the virus.
The general public would not be allowed to say no to COVID-19, under threat of utility shutoffs, starvation, eviction, and homelessness.
A Human Sacrifice to the Economic Gods
You have to remember that the prelude to the Great Barrington Declaration was in early 2020 when a British crackpot, Toby “The Era of Vaccines is Over” Rogers, demanded that hundreds of thousands of Brits die of COVID-19 as quickly as possible in order to rapidly end the pandemic. In April 2020, Martin Kulldorff was squealing in Spiked Online that “anti-herders,” those protecting themselves from infection, were just as selfish and dangerous as anti-vaxxers. Working with the Koch-funded think-tank AIER to fine-tune their messaging, the Great Barrington Declaration served as capital’s demand that government use their authority, backed by a monopoly on violence, to force the virus upon the public.
Prior to a vaccine ever being available, an infection with the new SARS-CoV-2 virus that was overwhelming hospitals and killing so many Americans in rapid fashion in early 2020 would become an innate requirement of earning a wage or getting an education. Employers and school administrators would be empowered and encouraged to bar workers, teachers, and students from masking, and even demand them to show up to work sick. Everyday Americans would be forced bring the virus home to their family, or their child would bring the virus home from school. If one became disabled by Long COVID and was now too sick to work, they would be fired and immediately replaced. With no way to earn a wage, and no welfare benefits, you would soon fall into poverty, homelessness, and deaths of despair.
As a part of “normal life” during these times, people who needed hospital care because of car accidents, heart attacks, etc. would die, as a result of hospitals being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Mass graves dug by prisoners, and overwhelmed morgues would become an everyday fixture of American life. While all of this chaos unfolded, officials would - just like Hamburg’s Chief Medical Officer during a deadly 1893 outbreak of cholera which killed thousands - insist there is simply nothing that can be done to prevent COVID-19 deaths, or worse yet, suggest that it’s the dead’s own fault for not being “metabolically healthy.” Government officials would fabricate statistics, and mercenary academics would misrepresent them to mislead the public that everything was actually going just fine.
The Dictatorship of the Workplace
The reason much of this would happen if the GBD authors got their way in 2020, is because it did happen, except it was under the Biden Administration. When teachers and students in Chicago walked out in protest over the dire state of COVID-19 in schools, Ashish Jha branded them as “irrational” on a podcast with Emily Oster before joining the Biden Administration. One single Black mother in Chicago, who tried to isolate her and her son from the virus until the authorities got involved, died soon after because her son brought SARS-CoV-2 home from school. Hundreds of thousands of children have played a role in the death of a primary caregiver after bringing COVID-19 home from class.
Rochelle Walensky’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reduced the COVID-19 isolation guidelines from 10 days to 5 in response to a letter from the CEO of Delta Airlines in December 2021, further empowering employers to force infectious workers back to the workplace to spread SARS-CoV-2 around their community, before later reducing it to zero days. In March 2022, when the CDC rolled out its new “Community Levels” guidance system that artificially raised the threshold for the CDC to even recommend masking, based upon hospital bed capacity, employers were further empowered to bar their workers from masking. As one anecdotal example from earlier in the pandemic, a grocery worker was forced by his boss to downgrade from an N95 respirator to an inadequate patterned cloth mask, out of some misguided fear that the mere sight of an N95 would somehow scare customers off. I have heard from multiple people with qualified, excellent resumes being turned down for jobs because they still wear a respirator: that taking COVID-19 precautions essentially renders you unemployable.
Workers who became too disabled by Long COVID to work were quickly fired from their jobs, and there is no welfare or benefits to support them - with still no treatment or cure, contrary to a Boston Globe article that Final COVID Czar Ashish Jha wrote soon after leaving the White House, telling Americans to “forget” COVID-19 and “live with the virus.” There are multiple tragedies of people disabled by SARS-CoV-2 having taken their own lives which are too quickly forgotten as part of the COVID-19 Amnesia Project. They often had no choice after our society forced the virus upon them and then stripped them of access to the basic essentials for survival.
To top it all off, in 2023 the California Supreme Court at the behest of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ruled in the case of Kuciemba vs. Victory Woodworks, when a woman was hospitalized and nearly died on a ventilator in 2020 because her husband’s employer violated California’s public health orders at the time. The court ruled that even though the plaintiff’s claim was correct and tangible harm was done, they decided to take this opportunity to legislate from the bench and throw their case out, fearing some hypothetical doomsday scenario in which a flood of lawsuits destroyed the American economy. The precedent had been established that your employer has no liability should you or a loved one be killed or disabled by a viral outbreak caused in an unsafe workplace.
The Biden Administration, having specifically promised OSHA workplace safety guidelines for COVID in their 2020 campaign that never materialized, said nothing. Workers were brutally crushed, time and time again, while Biden paraded as some sort of hero. He himself claimed that he “ended the pandemic,” even bragging about forcing American workers through “wave after wave of COVID” that killed and disabled many.
Just What Did This Achieve?
The Great Barrington Declaration authors cheered when tens of millions of American children, many of them unvaccinated, became very sick, hospitalized, disabled, and even died of COVID-19. The American Institute for Economic Research and their billionaire masters got what they wanted from the Biden Administration, and what did the Democrat Party get in return?
They did everything in their power to make it 2019 again: Nobody’s wearing masks anymore, and Donald Trump’s the President again. Mission Accomplished!
Having done their job, the Democrats were quickly cast aside into a shallow ditch and rendered irrelevant, making pathetic displays of impotency and cowardice. Not a single Democrat pointed out Jay Bhattacharya’s many errors regarding COVID-19 during his confirmation hearing for NIH Director, to the celebration of rabid anti-vaccine cranks on Twitter, squealing “we’re winning!” Now many have vocally subscribed to the COVID Amnesia Project, with leading Democrats and liberal influencers such as Rep. Auchincloss, Pete Buttigieg, Ashish Jha, and Scott Galloway saying that schools should have been fully in-person in 2020.
This is the bi-partisan consensus that will be guiding us through the next pandemic, made more frequent as a side-effect of climate collapse. Get ready for a bloodbath.
