Three Years In, How Did the Lockdowns Go?

Three years ago this month, a very small group of highly guarded ruling-class people from the U.K., U.S. and Europe were gathering to figure out how to lock down the country and the world. They held Zoom meetings and went to burner phones and plotted how to convince Trump to betray his own instincts.

And this week three years ago, the World Health Organisation sponsored a trip to Wuhan, China, and other cities to discover how they did it: how they utterly crushed a pathogen by smashing the liberties of the people. The WHO’s report was glowing: it worked and should be repeated the world over.

None of the rest of us knew this was happening. They knew what was coming but we did not.

The great experiment that had never been tried before. They would shut down the world economy in anticipation of a vaccine that was supposed to end the pandemic. And then, some of them figured, the whole world would be in debt to Big Pharma forever and we would be permanently acculturated to depend on them for everything. Then we go for vaccine passports and central-bank digital currencies and Big Tech too would ride high forever.

What a plan!

There were some missteps. It turned out that the vaccine didn’t work like it was supposed to. Whoops. And there was another big failure. The lockdowns didn’t actually stop the virus. Not only that, they utterly crushed everything we call society, leaving not only economic destruction in their wake but also cultural collapse and awful public health.

The U.S. was an interesting case because we have a federal system, meaning that even now, individual states can go their own way. Despite everything, the CDC did not have the power to enforce its edict. The Trump administration declared that “all indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate should be closed,” but there was no means to make that stick, much less script the pace of reopening.

South Dakota, for example, simply defied the federal Government. Georgia opened up after a few weeks even against the objections from Trump personally. Florida came next and then Texas. The rest of the ‘red states’ fell like dominos, each going back to normal over the course of the year, while ‘blue states’ stayed closed as a matter of principle: they would follow the edicts of Anthony Fauci and then the Biden administration no matter what.