What Really Happened: Lockdown Until Vaccination

"...in April of 2020, I got a call from Rajeev Venkayya...he told me on the phone to stop writing about lockdowns..."

By Jeffrey A. Tucker, Brownstone Institute

Four years later, many people are investigating how our lives were completely upended by a pandemic response. Over my time on the case, I’ve heard countless theories. It was Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, the Green New Deal, the CCP, Depopulation, Get Trump, Mail-In Ballots, and so on. 

There is evidence to back them all. 

The problem with having so many pieces of evidence and so many theories is that people can too easily get thrown off track, going on wild goose chases. It’s too much to follow through consistently, and this allows the perpetrators to hide their deeds. 

For such situations, we can take recourse to Occam’s razor: the best explanation is the simplest one that explains the maximum number of facts. This is what I offer here. 

Those in the know will be shocked by nothing herein. Those not in the know will be amazed at the audaciousness of the entire scheme. If it is true, there are surely documents and people who can confirm this. At least this model of thinking will assist in guiding thinking and research. 

There are three parts to understanding what took place. 

First, in late 2019 and perhaps as early as October, higher-ups in the biodefense industry and perhaps people like Anthony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar of the UK became aware of a lab leak at a US-funded bioweapons lab in Wuhan. This is a place that does gain-of-function research to produce both the pathogen and the antidote, just like in the movies. It’s gone on for decades in possibly hundreds of labs but this leak looked pretty bad, one with a fast-transmitting virus believed to be of high lethality. 

The civilians were not likely the first to know. Military and security higher-ups, the people actually working with clearances in the bioweapons industry, were the first to get the word. They gradually leaked it out to civilian sources. 

By January 2020, the situation had become dire within the bureaucracies. If the background of the lab leak got out, and millions died and the blame fell on the US and its labs around the world, there could be massive repercussions on politics and so much more. This is why, as Farrar admits, they went to burner phones and secure video hangouts, while experiencing weeks of sleepless nights. There was fear in the air among those who knew what had happened. 

That’s when the effort began to shift blame over to the wet markets in Wuhan and scientifically back the idea of natural origins. They had to work very fast, but the result was the famed “proximal origins” article, published in early February, which was backed up by a stream of NIH-funded scientists labeling the claim of lab origin as conspiracy theory. The media backed the claim with censorship of anyone saying otherwise. 

So far so good, but there was still the problem of the virus itself. That’s where the antidote labeled a vaccine came into play. This effort began in January too: the opportunity to deploy mRNA technology. It had been stuck in research for some 20 years but had never gained regulatory approval through conventional means. But with a pandemic declared, and the fix relabelled as a military countermeasure, the entire regulatory apparatus could be bypassed, along with all indemnifications pushed through and even taxpayer funding. 

The people behind the lab disaster would become heroes instead of villains.

Speed was always an issue. How can a vaccine be produced, distributed, and injected into the world’s population before the pandemic has already passed through the population, ending the same way as every other such episode in history, namely through exposure and resulting immunological upgrades? 

If that happened, the vaccine would be superfluous and the pharma would miss their chance to demonstrate the wonders of a technological promise that had consumed them for twenty-plus years. 

That’s where the lockdowns come in. Here is where the plan gets truly insidious. The idea was to come up with some way in which the antidote would gain the credit for having solved the pandemic that supposedly emerged from a wet market. The new technology would get the credit and then obtain generalized approval for a new form of health care that could be applied to myriad maladies in the future. Everyone would get rich. And Big Pharma and Fauci would be the heroes. 

Apart from convincing Donald Trump to authorize the wrecking of his prized economy (which is a story unto itself), the vexing problem with the plan was timing. There was likely no way to get this released to the population for at least 9 months or perhaps more. It could be sooner in the future, perhaps 100 days, but the first time out would require more time. 

It’s not that the planners were in denial of natural immunity. They were simply against depending on it or even tolerating it when they could test out a new product on the population. 

The objective in this little game must be to preserve population-wide immunological naivete for the entire period. Exposure needed to be minimized to keep seroprevalence levels at their lowest possible point, perhaps no more than 10 or 20 percent and certainly below 50 percent. The only possible path here was to insist on as little human-to-human contact as possible. 

Hence: lockdown. Forced human separation. Not just for two weeks. The protocol needed to be maintained for 9-11 months. Nothing like this had ever been attempted in human history, especially not on a global level. But maybe it would work, thanks to online commerce, work-from-home tools, and a properly panicked population that had not been through anything like this in many generations. 

Thus did the plan commence. There were slogans: “flatten the curve,” “slow the spread,” and so on. They all amounted to the same thing: prolong the pain as long as possible to get ready for mass injections.

This is why people were told to stay inside. AA meetings had to be canceled. The gyms were closed. There could be no church services, concerts, weddings, or funerals. There had to be Plexiglas at all merchant locations. Restaurants had to close or be only at half capacity. This was the reason for the masking, a lame ritual but a good symbol of disease avoidance. The travel restrictions were the same. Media messaging would be to demonize all infections and raise constant panic about any exposure. 

It is rather obvious, even to the obtuse fools running the pandemic response, that all of this was bad for public health. You cannot make the population less sick by driving everyone into depression, unemployment, and substance abuse. That is so apparent that we are wasting breath even pointing that out. 

But improving health was not the point. 

The goal of all of it was to keep natural immunity from ruining the chance for the mRNA shots to save the day. That is also why we could not have off-the-shelf therapeutics. There could be no Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine, not because they didn’t work but precisely because they did. The last thing the pandemic planners wanted was a cure that was not mRNA. 

This is also why the J&J shot was taken off the market very quickly on the grounds that it was generating blood clots. It was not a mRNA shot. And it was in competition with the preferred technology so it had to be knocked out. So too with AstraZeneca, which was also not part of the mRNA platform. 

Keep in mind the perversity here: the goal was not health but sickness as long as possible, to be cured by a new technology. That was always the game plan. 

Once you realize this, everything else falls into place. This is why officials early on stopped talking about the huge risk gradient between young and old. There was a 1,000-fold difference. Young students were at near-zero risk. Why did they have their schools canceled as if getting Covid would be the worst possible disaster? The reason was to keep to the bare minimum all population immunity to prepare the ground for the shots. 

This theory explains the absolute hysterical reaction to Jay Bhattacharya’s seroprevalence study from May 2020 showing that 4 percent of the population already had some immunity. That was very early on. Fauci and the biodefense industry could not stand the idea that the population would already be exposed and recovered by the time the shots arrived. 

It’s also why there was such a hysterical reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration. The problem was not its opposition to lockdowns as such. The problem was this sentence: “all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine.” Further, with full and immediate opening, “society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”

It was not obvious at the time but this plan directly contradicted the scheme hatched from the top to delay herd immunity until the vaccine could be developed. In fact, the World Health Organization was so furious at this claim that it changed its own definition from that which is conferred by exposure to that which is imposed upon the body by a shot. 

Looking back at early statements from the likes of Deborah Birx, the scenario takes on great clarity. It makes sense of her war on cases, as if every verified exposure represented a policy failure. At the time, hardly anyone asked why this should be. After all, exposure represents rising immunity in the population, correct? Isn’t this a good thing and not a bad thing? Well, not if your ambition is to keep seroprevalence levels as low as possible in anticipation of the great inoculation. 

Recall too that every digital platform changed even the definition of what it means to be a “case.” In traditional parlance, a case is meant to be actually sick, needing a doctor or bed rest or going to the hospital. It did not mean merely exposed or merely infected. But suddenly all that was gone and the difference between being exposed and being a case vanished. The FTX-funded outfit OurWorldinData branded every positive PCR test as a case. No one really complained. 

It also explains the wild and essentially futile attempts at tracking and tracing every infection. It got so crazy that the iPhone even released an app that would warn you if you were near someone who at some point tested positive for Covid. Even now, the airlines want to know your every stop when flying in or out of the country in the name of tracking and tracing Covid infections. This whole enterprise was crazy from the get-go: there is simply no way to do this for a fast-moving and fast-mutating respiratory infection. They did it anyway in a futile effort to preserve immunological naivete as long as possible. 

Let’s say you are convinced that I’m correct here, that the whole purpose of lockdowns was to prepare the population for an effective vaccine. There are a few remaining problems with the plan from the point of view of the plotters. 

One is that it was already well-established in the scientific literature that physical interventions to stop such viruses are completely ineffective. That is true. Why would they do them anyway? Maybe they were the best hope they had. Also, maybe they served the purpose of keeping the population panicked enough to create a pent-up demand for the shots. That seemed to work more or less. 

A second problem is that the infection fatality rate (and case fatality rate) was a tiny fraction of what it had been advertised to be at the outset. Plainly put, most everyone got and shook off Covid. As Trump said when he left the hospital, Covid is not to be feared. Such messaging was a disaster from the point of view of those who had embarked on the lockdowns for purpose of forcing the inoculation to be seen as the magic bullet. It goes without saying that this explains the shot mandates: so much had been sacrificed to prepare people for the inoculation that they could not give up until everyone got it. 

A third problem for the plotters is one likely not fully anticipated. The shot did not in fact confer durable immunity and did not stop the spread of the virus. In other words, it failed spectacularly. These days, you hear top industry apologists claim that “millions” of lives were saved but the studies showing that all fall apart on close examination. They are built by models with assumptions baked in to give the right answer or use data that is itself compromised (for example, by tagging people as unvaccinated weeks after getting the shot). 

In summary, if this theory is correct, what you have unfolding here is the biggest and most destructive flop in the history of public health. The entire scheme of lockdown-until-vaccination depended fundamentally on a shot that actually achieved its aim and certainly did not impose more harm than good. The trouble is that most everyone now knows what the pandemic masters tried to keep quiet for a very long time: natural immunity is real, the virus was mainly dangerous for the elderly and infirm, and the experimental shots were not worth the risk. 

Today the pandemic planners find themselves in an awkward spot. Their scheme failed. The truth about the lab leak has been revealed anyway. And now they face a population worldwide that has lost trust in all authority, from government to industry to technology. That’s a serious problem. 

None of this is to say that there weren’t other actors involved who benefitted. Big Tech and Big Media loved having people home to stream movies. Online commerce enjoyed the big bump. The censorship industry enjoyed having a new class of topics to ban. Government always loves power. And the Green New Dealers seized the moment to embark on their Great Reset. The CCP bragged about having shown the world how to lock down. 

All that is true: the entire episode became history’s biggest grift. 

Still, none of that should distract from the core plot: lock down until vaccination. It’s a model they hope to replay again and again in the future. 

It’s customary in academic literature to admit problems with a hypothesis. Here are some. 

First, the lockdowns were nearly universal at the same time, not just in the US and UK. How would the motivations described above apply to nearly every country in the world? 

Second, it was known very early in the vaccine trials that the shots did not confer immunity or stop the spread, so why would authorities depend on them to upgrade immune systems if they knew they could and would not? 

Third, if keeping seroprevalence levels as low as possible was really the goal, why did the same authorities who demanded lockdowns celebrate protests and mass gatherings in the summer of 2020 in the name of stopping racially motivated police brutality?

These are serious problems with the hypothesis, to be sure, but perhaps each has a believable answer. 

I’ll end on a personal note, in April of 2020, I got a call from Rajeev Venkayya. He credits himself with coming up with the whole idea of lockdowns back in 2006 while working for the biodefense desk as part of the George W. Bush administration. He then moved on to the Gates Foundation, then started a vaccine company. 

He told me on the phone to stop writing about lockdowns, which I found to be a ridiculous request. I asked him what the end game of these lockdowns was. He said plainly to me: there will be a vaccine. I was astounded that anyone could believe such a thing. No vaccine could be safely distributed to the population in time to keep society from falling apart. Moreover, there had never been an effective vaccine for a fast-mutating coronavirus. 

I assumed that he had no idea what he was talking about. I figured that this guy was long out of the game and was just engaged in some kind of fantasy talk. 

Looking back, I now see that he was telling me the actual gameplan. Which is to say, in the recesses of my mind, I’ve known this all along but it’s only now emerging as a clear picture in the midst of the massive fog of war.

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