by Thierry Meyssan
We reproduce a discussion between Thierry Meyssan and a group of students. He explains that the political responses to Covid-19 have no medical purpose. A partially identifiable transnational group seized the opportunity provided by the epidemic to try to impose a profound transformation of European societies, just as it had used the attacks of 11 September 2001 to transform the United States. There is still time to oppose the hierarchisation of the world to come.
Question: Who do you think manufactured Covid-19?
Thierry Meyssan : My analysis is exclusively political. I don’t give an opinion on medical questions, but only on political decisions.
An epidemic is generally a natural phenomenon, but can also be an act of war. The Chinese government has publicly asked the United States to shed full light on the incident that occurred in their military laboratory in Fort Detrick, while the American government has asked for the same transparency for the laboratory in Wuhan. Of course neither state has agreed to open its laboratories. This is not ill will, but a military necessity. So we should stop there.
Incidentally, it is irrelevant because, over time, these two hypotheses seem to be wrong: neither of these two powers controls this virus. From a military point of view, it is not a weapon, but a scourge.
So you do not rule out the possibility that this virus could have escaped from one of these laboratories by mistake?
It’s still a possibility, but it’s not getting us anywhere. We have to rule out sabotage because it wouldn’t benefit anyone. The other possibility is that it was an accident. In that case, it is individuals who are guilty of it. It does not make sense to blame states.
How do you assess the political response to the epidemic?
The role of political leaders is to protect their people. To do so, they must prepare their countries in normal times to be able to respond to future crises. But the West has evolved in such a way that this mission has been lost sight of. Voters now demand that states should cost as little as possible and that political staff should run them like big business. As a result, there are no Western political leaders today who see beyond the tip of their noses. Men like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping are called “dictators” only because they have a strategic vision of their function, representing a school of thought that Westerners consider outdated.
In the face of a crisis, political leaders must act. In the case of Westerners, this is an unexpected moment for them. They have never been prepared for it. They were chosen for their ability to make people dream of a brighter tomorrow, not for their composure, adaptability and authority. Many of them are humanly representative of their constituents and therefore have none of these qualities. So they take the most radical measures so that they cannot be accused of not having done enough.
In this case, however, they found an expert, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, who persuaded them that the Great Grim Reaper was coming: half a million deaths to come in France, even more in the United Kingdom, more than double that in the United States. His prophecies were 2,500 times the death rate in China. Yet this statistician has a habit of prophesying calamities without fear of exaggeration. For example, he predicted that bird flu would kill 65,000 Britons, but in total it caused only 457 deaths [1]. 1] Fortunately, he has just been fired by Boris Johnson of the SAGE, but the damage is done [2].
In panic, Western political staff rushed to the advice of an international health authority. The WHO rightly considered that this epidemic was not its priority in comparison to other much more deadly diseases, so they turned to CEPI, whose director, Dr. Richard Hatchett, they all know. They met him at the Davos Economic Forum or at the Munich Security Conference. They have all been approached by him at one time or another to fund the vaccine industry.
It so happens that this gentleman, when he worked at the White House, was one of the two authors of the health component of Donald Rumsfeld’s political project for the world [3] In 2001, Rumsfeld was planning a geographic division of the world economy. Raw materials would be exploited in unstable areas, processed products in stable states (including Russia and China), and weapons only in the USA. It was therefore necessary to militarise US society and to transfer the majority of workers to arms companies. In 2005, Rumsfeld commissioned Dr. Hatchett to design a plan for the compulsory home confinement of the entire US population. It would have been activated during a bioterrorist attack comparable to the one perpetrated in Congress and against major media outlets with anthrax in 2001.
It was this plan that Dr Richard Hatchett took out of his drawers and presented to Western leaders who asked his advice. It must be understood that widespread mandatory containment has never existed. It has nothing to do with the isolation of patients. It is not a medical measure at all. It is a means of transforming societies. It was never used in China, neither during the H1N1 [4] epidemic nor during the SARS epidemic [5] or the Covid-19 epidemic [6]. The confinement of the city of Wuhan in early 2020 was a political measure by the central government to take back control of this mismanaged province, not a medical measure.
No epidemiological work in the world has ever discussed mandatory generalized containment, much less advised it.
Perhaps, but in France we are not confined to fight the disease, but to spread it out over time so as not to overburden hospitals, to prevent us from having to choose between the patients we could treat and those we should let die.
Not at all. This argument did not come before, but after the decision was made. It is just an excuse for politicians to mismanage. It is true that, in France, the intensive care units in public hospitals were quickly saturated in two regions. Patients undergoing intensive care were therefore transferred to other regions or even to Germany. But there were plenty of beds available in private clinics.
This is what I said at the beginning of this conversation: our political leaders are incapable of managing crises. Their conception of the state prevents them from acting. They are incapable of thinking about coordination between the public and private sectors, with the exception of some regional presidents. But this is not the traditional opposition between the central State and the regions. For example, at the beginning of the epidemic, liberal laboratories did not have the means to carry out large-scale testing. The government was not able to requisition the laboratories of the ministries of research and especially of agriculture in response to the public health emergency. Yet researchers and veterinarians kept offering their services.
Okay for the hospitals and the tests, but you also challenged the masks.
Yes, for a century now, health workers have attested to the usefulness of surgical masks in operating theatres and during post-operative care. But these situations have nothing to do with the situation of the average person today.
At present, a large number of unions and academies recommend that masks should be compulsory for everyone in public places. This is reassuring, but it is useless in the face of Covid-19. Moreover, for lack of surgical masks, we end up wearing any piece of fabric covering the nose and mouth but without the filtering qualities of surgical masks. Contrary to popular belief, contamination does not occur through the sputum itself, but through the viruses it spreads in the air up to 8 metres away from a person who screams or sneezes. However, one has to be receptive to this virus to be contaminated, which is not the case for everyone. And you have to have a weakened immune system to develop this disease.
Because they don’t know what to do, our rulers resort to generalized confinement and masks for everyone. No one has proven that these measures have an impact on the epidemic, but everyone believes in them. This is the collapse of Western culture: in the past we used to think calmly, today we wear greyish-grey, masks, we are sinking into magic.
There is a child who died from Covid-19 in France.
What is true in individual terms is absolutely false in collective terms. The median age of those who died in France is 84! That means that half of them were over 84.
But then if confinement is absurd and masks are useless, what should be done?
I didn’t say containment was absurd in itself. I said it was mandatory and indiscriminate. In all epidemics, people who are sick should be confined, but only they. And I do not recognise any legitimacy for a power that fines, sends to prison or even shoots citizens who refuse to be placed under house arrest for an indefinite period of time.
Public Health does not insure itself with constraints, but with trust. And no one should be protected against himself. It seems unworthy to me to prevent elderly people from receiving their families if they wish to do so. Perhaps they will be contaminated, perhaps they will get sick and perhaps they will die, but that will be their choice. The only thing we know for sure when we are born is that we will die. Life is a long road to prepare for it and old people have the right to prefer to live with their loved ones rather than a few more years.
Epidemics are always treated in the same way: hygiene measures – washing and airing – and isolating the sick at home or in the hospital in order to treat them. Everything else is just cinema. We have to go back to the basics and not imagine constraints.
How is it possible that our leaders have imposed a US fascist project on us?
I understand what you mean by fascist, but it’s not very appropriate. Fascism is an ideology responding to the crisis of capitalism in 1929, Rumsfeld certainly has many characteristics of it, but he thinks from another world.
Dr. Hatchett never had to answer for his totalitarian project in the US. But neither did Donald Rumsfeld. And ultimately no one has ever had to answer for what happened after the attacks of September 11, 2001, because we collectively decided not to shed light on the attacks themselves. So this original crime has not ceased to have consequences. The Obama administration continued to faithfully implement Project Rumsfeld in Libya, Syria and Yemen (the Cebrowski doctrine). And since the Trump administration has strongly opposed it, we see Rumsfeld’s former collaborators continuing his work through structures other than the US federal state. Whether we like it or not, this will continue until this matter is reopened.
Excuse me for going back, but if compulsory, generalised containment was only an authoritarian measure with no medical purpose, why is it so difficult to end the lockdown?
No, it’s not difficult. It’s just a matter of becoming free again. The problem is that we don’t know much more about this virus than we did two months ago and we are now entangled in imaginary knowledge.
The curves of the epidemic are more or less the same in all affected countries, whatever measures are put in place. Only two types of countries stand out: on the one hand, those that for some unknown reason have not been affected, such as those in the Indochinese peninsula (Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia-Thailand); on the other, those that have reacted much more quickly than others by immediately isolating the sick and treating them, such as Taiwan. So no matter how we end lockdown, there will certainly be a greater or lesser number of infected people, but that should not have an impact.
Will governments continue mandatory containment until a vaccine is found?
I do not know if a vaccine will ever be found. We have been looking for a vaccine against AIDS for 35 years. Besides, it is no more likely that the Covid-19 epidemic will last longer than other coronaviruses, SARS or MERS.
Both the vaccine and the new drugs have considerable economic stakes. Some pharmaceutical companies will do anything to prevent doctors from treating people with cheap drugs. Remember how Donald Rumsfeld, when he was head of Gilead Science, shut down the Al-Shifa factory that made AIDS drugs without paying royalties: he had it bombed by Democrat Bill Clinton claiming it was owned by Al Qaeda, which was absolutely false. In fact, Dr. Hatchett now heads the largest vaccine association, CEPI.
What will happen now?
We are seeing a huge rupture in some Western societies within weeks. In France, fundamental freedoms have been suspended, including the right to hold meetings and demonstrations. 13 million workers have been placed on part-time unemployment. They have temporarily become welfare recipients. School will resume, but will no longer be compulsory; parents will choose whether to send their children to school or not. Etc. This is not the consequence of the epidemic but, as I have just explained, the consequence of inept political reactions to the epidemic.
Mandatory generalized confinement had been conceived by Donald Rumsfeld’s team to transform US society. This project was not applied in the USA, but fifteen years later in Europe. The transfer from one continent to another illustrates the transnational character of financial capitalism of which Rumsfeld is the pure product. There is no reason why those who financed the Rumsfeld team should not pursue their political project now in Europe.
In that case, in the years to come, a very large proportion of European workers will be transferred to the arms industry. NATO, which President Macron believed to be brain-dead, and its civilian component, the European Union, whose members have been tearing each other apart in recent weeks to steal loads of masks, will be reorganised. These two organisations will continue the systematic destruction of all state structures in the Broader Middle East, which began in 2001, and then in the Caribbean Basin.
However, Rumsfeld’s men made a mistake. By hiding their 2006 project, they gave the impression that they were following the example of China when they imposed mandatory generalized containment. China, rather than the United States, has become the de facto intellectual referent for Europeans. It is therefore going to become obsessive about preventing it from continuing to build the Silk Roads. It will have to be contained.
Epidemics do not cause revolutions, but wars and economic disasters do. Today, through the fault of our rulers, the EU economies are ruined and we are preparing for war. We are going to go through a pivotal time from which the best and the worst can emerge.
This change in the world will be the response to the disappearance of the middle classes implied by financial globalisation and denounced by the Yellow Vests, just as the Second World War was a response to the exhaustion of colonial empires and the crisis of cartel capitalism in 1929.
France has already experienced such a drama. It was in 1880-81, when the industrial capitalism of the time was no longer able to exploit the workers in the face of the beginnings of the trade unions. Jules Ferry expelled some religious congregations and created the compulsory secular school in order to wrest children from the influence of the Catholic Church. He had them educated by supporters of militarism, the “black hussars”. He made them the soldiers of his colonial project. For 35 years, France enslaved many foreign peoples, then began a rivalry with the emerging power of the time, Germany, and found itself precipitated into the First World War.
In Europe, we are going to experience the same debates that the United States experienced twenty years earlier. We must absolutely refuse to be embroiled in such crimes. That will be the fight of the years to come. It will be yours.
Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
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