Bill Gates has called the global response to Covid-19 a “world war.” His militaristic language has been echoed by Anthony Fauci and other architects of Covid-19 policy over the past two and a half years.
To fight their “world war,” Gates and Fauci and their allies have deployed an arsenal of high-tech “weapons” and tech-enabled social control tools—contact tracing apps, PCR tests, QR codes, digital passports, lockdowns, mandate masks, mRNA vaccines. , social media censorship, mass surveillance, and so on—with disastrous consequences for civil society, human health, and even the environment.
As an advocate for wildlife conservation, I am surprised that almost all environmentalists, and most others on the Left, have supported this disastrous high-tech “war” against Covid-19. I believe that an ecological perspective reveals many of the flaws inherent in aggressive high-tech attacks on pathogens, even though most environmentalists are too blinded by the progressive political ideology and hysteria around Covid-19 to see the truth.
Despite the criticism leveled at pandemic policies by civic libertarians and public health experts such as the author of the Great Barrington Declaration—criticism I appreciate—I tend to view pandemics in terms of the insights I have gained while trying to protect the planet. biodiversity, a point of view that many critics may not think of, and even tend to ignore.
To me, the “war” against Covid-19 has been characterized by a series of destructive attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that appear to be deeply entrenched in our political and economic institutions, and which form a pattern that conservationists and ecologists must recognize.
Every aspect of the “war” against Covid-19 can be understood in these terms. To explain this, I will first outline how I view the global response to Covid-19 through an ecological lens.
Ecology and Aggressive Technological “Wars” Against Complex Living Systems
“The first rule of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else,” wrote ecologist Barry Commoner in the 1970s. Read also : ZKW equips the new all-electric Volvo C40 with high-tech lights. Or as the legendary naturalist John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club (recently canceled by his own organization), a hundred years earlier, “When we try to choose something by itself, we find that it is linked to everything else in the world. universe.”
Ecological damage often occurs when people aggressively try to control complex natural processes to achieve short-term goals without really understanding how living systems work, or what the consequences are, usually with new technologies that promise “progress” but have negative impacts. consequences that cannot be managed in the long term. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons why our global industrial economy, which disrupts natural processes on a large scale across the planet, has brought about a multi-faceted ecological crisis that has witnessed a dramatic collapse in the planet’s biodiversity, including the average decline 70% of the wildlife population on Earth since 1970, among other symptoms of environmental degradation (I won’t even mention the “C” word).
An example of an ecologically destructive practice that fits this pattern is the worldwide Big Ag/Big Pharma industrial chemical “war” against plant and animal pathogens using herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics and other drugs. The world’s most popular herbicide, glyphosate, has damaged global biodiversity over the past five decades and has the potential to cause many human health problems, including cancer. (Acknowledging this danger is not in support of the anti-farmer measures recently enacted in the Netherlands, Canada and elsewhere).
The “war” on insects waged through the widespread application of the chemical insecticide DDT in the mid-twentieth century also caused widespread ecological damage in many of the species that Rachel Carson describes in her book, Silent Spring, giving rise to the modern environmental movement. Studies still link DDT to an increased risk of cancer in children and grandchildren exposed to the chemical decades ago.
A similar ecologically destructive practice is the “war” that has been waged for decades on apex predators such as wolves, bears, and big cats at the behest of industrial agriculture interests, often through large-scale dispersal of chemical toxins across the landscape, triggering negative “trophic cascades”. across the US and global ecosystems.
I can’t help but notice that the high-tech “war” against Covid-19 resembles this industry’s “war” against nature in many ways. The whole concept of “war” is based on a militaristic, mechanistic way of thinking that is obsessed with using technological control over natural processes to achieve short-term goals—often eradication of “threats” such as pathogens or predators—but cannot recognize the long-term consequences of intervening in the chain. the complex biological relationships that support natural ecosystems, and which ultimately provide the basis for human health and well-being.
Gates exemplifies this mindset, with his techno-utopian belief that human pathogens are like computer viruses, that human biology can be manipulated like computer code, and that vaccines can be regularly “uploaded” into the human body like software updates. He had a misguided, warlike notion, as economist Jeffrey A. Tucker observed, that “with enough money, intelligence, and power, along with technological know-how at the helm, [the virus] can be stopped in its tracks.” Covid-19’s militaristic strategy of retreat (lockdown and mask) and attack (mass mRNA vaccination) has never been based on a thorough understanding of how human populations interact with pathogens and coexist with them over time, how every citizen stays healthy, or how human society develops.
“Pandemic is not war,” says Indian activist Dr. Vandana Shiva, one of Gates’ most staunch critics, and the only prominent ecologist to criticize his Covid-19 policies. “In fact,” he says, “we are part of a biome. And we are part of the virome [a collection of all viruses in the human body]. Biomes and viromes are us.” In other words, coexistence with pathogens is the rule in ecology, eradication of pathogens from nature is a rare exception, and declaring “war” on any part of a complex living system can have significant unintended consequences.
But for Gates and Fauci and others in power, waging a high-tech “war” against the virus is far more in their interests than a simple approach based on subtle ecological principles (or traditional public health precepts before March 2020). Using new technologies to control natural processes for short-term gain, ignoring the long-term ecological consequences, is a business model. In fact, the more ecological damage is inflicted, the more technological intervention can be justified, raising the question of whether the “unintended” consequences in some cases were intentional.
As explained further below, the failure of every aspect of the “war” against Covid-19 can be described and understood ecologically, including lockdowns, masks, mass vaccination of mRNA, and even the origin of the virus itself.
Origins of the Virus: Who Is the Real Bio-Terrorist, Mother Nature or Anthony Fauci?
One of the great ironies of the global response to Covid-19 is that one of its main architects, Fauci, may be partly responsible for the pandemic. Fauci and other powerful figures in international biosecurity agencies have long ignored the ecological risks of destroying natural viruses using biological weapons technology. On the same subject : The state of antimicrobial resistance in the United States immediately following the 2020 peaks of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is an important factor that may have caused the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan, China.
Soon after the pandemic began, Fauci immediately and vigorously began promoting the unproven theory that SARS-CoV-2 jumped naturally from wild animals to humans, and he even organized a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit alternative theories. But evidence is mounting that the new coronavirus very likely comes from “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was funded in part by a US government grant approved by Fauci himself. Jeffrey Sachs, a distinguished Democrat and professor of sustainability at Columbia University, led a commission for The Lancet that investigated the origins of SARS-CoV-2 for two years.
He said, “I’m pretty sure it [the virus] came out of US biotechnology, not nature. . . So this is a biotech fault, not a natural spillover.” Sachs has gathered evidence to support the laboratory leak theory, particularly regarding the presence of an unusual feature in the virus called the “Furin Cleavage Site”, which may have been artificially incorporated into SARS-CoV-2.
I find Sach’s reasoning and the evidence he provides convincing, although as a wildlife conservationist I remain concerned about the potential natural “flow” of the virus from wild animals to humans. Environmentalists, journalists, scientists and others who focus their attention exclusively on computer models of zoonotic transmission and statistical studies that support the theory of natural transmission, while turning a blind eye to the strong evidence supporting the laboratory leak theory advanced by Sachs and others, including Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, author of Viral: The Search for the Origins of Covid-19, is missing an important story. (Even Fauci now says he has an “open mind” about a possible lab leak.)
Most fail to realize that Fauci and other proponents of “gain function” have long displayed a reckless disregard for the risk of damaging natural viruses, expressing a paranoid attitude towards nature that is the opposite of respect for ecology. Fauci and others claim that “Mother Earth Is the Ultimate Bioterrorist” to justify their Frankenstein-like attempts to hunt down the most dangerous viruses that exist in the wild, take them to laboratories like the one in Wuhan, and toy with them to make them more dangerous. dangerous and deadly.
Their twisted logic seems to be that if they intentionally create a supervirus, they can somehow anticipate and prepare for a natural pandemic. However, most objective observers say that the “gain of functionality” is a military-industrial advantage that has no practical benefit whatsoever and dramatically increases the risk of a pandemic (which, when it does occur, substantially increases the wealth and power of funding and conducting experiments). “Revenue research functions of concern involve the creation of new health threats,” Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University recently testified before the US Senate, “a health threat that did not exist before and may not exist in nature for decades. , hundreds, or thousands of years.”
If environmentalists and other Leftists were true to their principles, they would denounce the funding of Fauci’s biological weapons experiments and call for a worldwide ban on “benefit function” research in the same way that previous generations of activists did to limit it. nuclear weapons proliferation. The “profit function” is already illegal under US law that Fauci appears to have discovered.
It’s still inconclusive whether “gain of function” research actually led to the Covid-19 pandemic, but its potential to do so is a vivid example of how powerful actors like Fauci are using technological tools to disrupt natural processes, at the expense of if not outright insults. for long-term ecological consequences, thus creating opportunities to use more power.
Lockdowns: A Failed Bio-Warfare Strategy
Since 9/11, it has been part of US bio-warfare planning to “lock down” populations in response to intentional biological attacks or accidental releases of engineered pathogens, which Sachs says is exactly how SARS-CoV-2 escaped. biotechnology laboratory in Wuhan, China. On the same subject : health-department-celebrates-2022-pride. (See Chapter 12 of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, for a comprehensive summary of bio-warfare planning over the past twenty years).
In the spring of 2020, the tactic of biowarfare—lockdown!—was waged on hundreds of millions of healthy Americans and billions of others around the world with no understanding of the true long-term effects on human health and well-being, the vitality of our complex civil society, or biological relationship between population and virus.
Authorities justify lockdowns and related policies with oversimplified computer models that do not reflect biological reality, and which are based on the completely false premise that limiting social contact through the power of modern technology (contact tracing apps, QR codes, digital passports, mass testing, schools online, social media messages, etc.) will somehow “flatten the curve” of infection in a meaningful and non-temporary way.
The Great Barrington Declaration, written by epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta, of Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford Universities, correctly predicted that lockdowns would not contain or control the spread of the virus, which is now ubiquitous in every country. corner. world despite many countries imposing lockdowns throughout 2020 and 2021.
Complex human societies—a vast web of material and energy relationships and flows—are in many ways like complex ecosystems that cannot simply be turned on and off like machines. Indeed, shutting down social activities violates the first rule of public health articulated by Dr. D.A. Henderson, patiently doing slow and methodical work on smallpox, the only human disease ever eradicated (after a century and a half of efforts and vaccines that prevented infection and transmission). He said, “Experience has shown that communities facing epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disturbed.”
By disrupting the normal functioning of society to its fullest, lockdowns are causing enormous collateral damage to the most vulnerable and marginalized people on Earth, including the global poor (100 million pushed into dire poverty by lockdowns in 2020, and another 263 million could hit extreme poverty this year), the working class ($3.7 trillion in lost income in 2020 alone and now crippling inflation), and children (a massive education deficit and an unprecedented mental health crisis).
Lockdowns lead to desperate deaths from suicide and drug and alcohol addiction, depression, missed medical care, and other direct dangers to human health, including the decline of millions of immune systems due to lack of exposure to pathogens, leading to a spike in infections. adenovirus, rhinovirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), human metapneumovirus, influenza, and parainfluenza, other than Covid-19.
Meanwhile, billionaires with lock-in technology arsenals added a total of $5 trillion to their wealth from March 2020 to November 2021, and the world’s ten richest people, including Gates, doubled their fortunes due to the increased value of their holdings in Big Tech and Big Pharma caused by ” super-pandemic advantage.” According to OxFam International, “for every new billionaire created during the pandemic—one every 30 hours—nearly one million people could be pushed into extreme poverty by 2022.”
Lockdown also empowers government bureaucrats (under the influence of Big Pharma, Big Tech, and other multinational corporation interests) to govern by emergency decree, circumventing the democratic process and causing massive worldwide setbacks on basic civil liberties and human rights, which fall to various forms. technology-enabled controls: freedom of speech gives way to social media censorship, freedom of movement to digital passports, and freedom to earn a living or get an education to ban “non-essential” activities that force online commerce and schooling.
The true story here is how elites are using lockdowns to exert an unprecedented level of control over society and each of us. At the height of the global lockdown mania in 2020, Vandana Shiva described their destabilizing and dehumanizing effects from her perspective as an activist who has long sought to protect India from policies that Gates and other global elites have imposed on her country, especially industrial agriculture policies. who take land from traditional farmers and give it to giant multinational corporations. He uses the term ecology to describe how the technocratic elite seeks to control us in the same way they control the land:
“The coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns have revealed more clearly how we are reduced to objects to control, with our bodies and minds new colonies to attack. This extractive linear logic [lockdown and similar policies] is incapable of seeing the intimate relationships that sustain life in nature. It is blind to diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organization and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and the violence it releases.”
Just as petty ecological interventions in complex ecosystems of life can destabilize them, lockdowns severely destabilize our complex civil society, exposing them and each of us to exploitation. For years, we will live with the disastrous consequences of this unwieldy and poorly understood bio-warfare tactic.
Toxic Masquerade: The Effects of Petrochemical Masks on Health and the Environment
Masks are a “weapon” in the “war” against Covid-19 produced by the petrochemical industry that has caused enormous collateral damage to human health, civil society, and even the environment.
Yes, surgical masks and N95 styles are made of synthetic petrochemical fibers, namely plastic. As I wrote earlier, billions of plastic masks have ended up in the world’s oceans, where they directly harm marine life such as turtles, whales, and especially seabirds—masks destroying bird populations worldwide. The masks also contaminate the water with countless tiny particles called “microplastics” that infiltrate the marine food chain. Billions more plastic masks have been buried and burned in landfills and incinerators, where they release petrochemicals into the soil, water and air. At the height of the pandemic, the world was throwing away about 3 million masks per minute.
The petrochemicals in masks are toxic. Many surgical and N95 masks contain PFAS, known as “Forever Chemicals. One study found that “wearing a mask treated with high levels of PFAS for extended periods of time can be an important source of exposure and a potential health risk.” The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently warned that certain PFAS compounds are more harmful to human health than previously thought and pose a risk to human health even in very small amounts.
The latest study also found microplastics in human blood and deep lung tissue for the first time. The studies weren’t about masks, but they did raise clear questions about the effects of breathing through plastic materials worn over the nose and mouth. A team of researchers from Hull York Medical School in the UK found polypropylene and PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which are fibers from synthetic fabrics such as surgical masks and N95, in lung tissue. “The surprise for us was how deep it went into the lungs and the size of the particles,” said their team leader.
Obviously, public health agencies never stop their mask campaigns long enough to consider the real risks petrochemicals pose to human health and the environment. And despite these risks, Big Plastics manufacturing giants like 3M, which is selling $1.5 billion worth of surgical and N95 masks by 2021, have every incentive to keep plastic masks off the assembly line. 3M and other major companies in the billion-dollar petrochemical industry routinely lobby officials in Washington D.C. about the expected benefits of wearing masks, and has been rewarded with a large public contract to provide masks to the government. The petrochemical industry is also engaged in massive lobbying to defeat efforts to regulate the toxic chemical, PFAS, which is found in masks and other plastic products.
In addition to the direct harmful effects of toxic petrochemicals and microplastics in masks, a great deal of detrimental social, emotional, educational and health harm has been suffered by the public due to the simple act of covering people’s faces, especially children. Forcibly covering people’s faces with useless plastic, or cloth, is by no means “low impact”, as public health officials falsely claim.
Despite all this additional damage, masks made little to no difference in the spread of the virus across the US and the world. As with lockdowns, public health officials rationalize mask mandates with oversimplified computer models, and with ridiculous studies of mannequins, as well as small, inconclusive observational studies, instead of solid scientific understanding of disease transmission in complex human societies.
Randomized controlled trials conducted before and during the pandemic showed that mask policies did not significantly reduce community transmission of respiratory viruses including Covid-19. Even if masks prove to have some modest effect, officials who mandate masks in most societies are relying on the faulty short-term logic that characterizes the lockdown: the simple idea that temporarily “reducing” respiratory virus transmission is a legitimate and meaningful goal, regardless of collateral damage. .
Petrochemical masks are yet another failed, but profitable, industrial technology generated by the “war” economy that has sprung up around Covid-19.
mRNA Mass Vaccination: What Can We Learn from Big Pharma’s “War” on Plant and Animal Pathogens?
The greatest “weapons” deployed in the “war” against Covid-19, the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, are new technologies unlike any other vaccine in history. Despite the novelty of their technology, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) determined at unprecedented “warp speed” that the mRNA injection was “safe and effective,” and initially approved it for emergency use after a surprisingly short test.
“Operation Warp Speed” is actually a giant military industrial project involving four generals and dozens of other military officers. Bio-warfare planners have focused on mRNA products because they can be rapidly formulated and produced in response to biological attacks or accidental laboratory leaks. However, clinical trials take years to complete and cannot be accelerated, only limited. Long delays in testing are unacceptable in “war.” Placing a “shot in hand” as quickly as possible is the measure of success.
But what are the long-term consequences for human health, as well as the ecological balance of the viral host in populations, from hastily injecting nearly the entire human species with the new, lightly tested mRNA technology developed by Big Pharma at “curve speed”?
We may have no way of knowing for sure, and even trying to answer the question exposes one to a derogatory “anti-vaxxer”. There are many rational criticisms of mRNA vaccines that deserve credit for opposing name-calling and censorship, and there are also some irrational criticisms. I won’t go into all of those arguments here.
On the other hand, as a conservationist, I tend to seek answers in the worldwide industrial “war” being waged by Big Pharma (along with its corporate cousin, Big Ag) against plant and animal pathogens. I think that chemical and pharmaceutical warfare is an important global precedent that has some disturbing similarities to the current mRNA attack against Covid-19, and can be an important lesson about what we can expect.
For example, more than three hundred million pounds of the chemical herbicide, glyphosate, are now dumped into US soil each year. Glyphosate is produced by Bayer, which recently acquired the original manufacturer, Monsanto, in a $66 billion merger between Big Ag and Big Pharma (a meeting of corporate interests in which Bill Gates is an interested party, through his program to “revolutionize” global food production that called Gates Ag One).
The EPA, under the industry-friendly leadership of the Trump administration, determined that glyphosate was “safe” and “effective.” However, in June this year, the United States Court of Appeals ordered the EPA to waive that order and reassess the risks glyphosate poses to human health and the environment due to the accumulation of evidence of harm, including loss of biodiversity in mixed soil and water. with glyphosate. The United States Supreme Court recently rejected Bayer’s appeal against a multimillion-dollar decision based on the company’s failure to warn about the cancer risks of glyphosate.
However, the use of glyphosate remains at very high levels, especially in plants that have been genetically modified to withstand chemical exposure. As weeds growing on approximately 150 million acres of U.S. soil have become resistant to glyphosate—you might call it a weed variant—an increasing number of glyphosate and other powerful herbicides are being used to kill “super weeds” in the escalating chemical warfare against natural plant pathogens.
A similar practice is carried out by the Big Ag/Big Pharma industry in the livestock sector. The widespread use of antibiotics and “leaky” vaccines that fail to prevent infection or transmission have created “superbugs” and “superviruses” in farm animals. A “leaked” vaccine for Marek’s Disease in chickens may have stimulated the evolution of viral variants that made the disease much more lethal, as explained in a 2015 article in Science magazine (with a title that will never be printed today), “Do Some Vaccines Make Viruses.” More Deadly?”
“Vaccines save millions of lives every year by teaching our immune systems how to fight certain viruses or bacteria. But a new study suggests that, paradoxically, they can sometimes teach pathogens to be more dangerous, too. . . Some vaccines do not prevent infection, but reduce how sick the patient is . . . such ‘imperfect’ or ‘leak’ vaccines could give an edge to more lethal pathogens, allowing them to spread when they would normally be quickly depleted.”
Yet industry continues to engage in these ecologically risky (but profitable) agricultural practices on a global scale.
The similarities between Big Ag/Big Pharma’s chemical and pharmaceutical “war” on plant and animal pathogens and Big Pharma’s current mRNA “war” against human pathogens include these striking similarities:
Conclusion
If we carefully analyze every aspect of the “world war” against Covid-19, we can see how every high-tech tactic and “weapon” has harmed human health, destabilized civil society, and perhaps upset the ecological balance between human population and the environment. viruses, while enriching vested interests and empowering financially arrested government regulators.
“War” has been characterized by a different pattern that I described earlier in this essay:
This destructive pattern seems to be ingrained in our institutions and in the views of our leaders. It largely defines our society’s dysfunctional relationship with nature. An ecological perspective that keeps this pattern in mind, and takes into account all the consequences of launching a high-tech “war” against pathogens or other parts of our environment can help us avoid similar disasters in the future, or at least recognize them.
W. Aaron Vandiver is a writer, former litigator, and wildlife conservationist. He is the author of the novel, Under a Poacher’s Moon.
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