Covid’s most dangerous moment
Guest Post by Alex Berenson
It wasn’t vaccine mandates, bad as those were. In March 2020, the top doctor for the World Health Organization said countries should forcibly remove infected people from their families and homes.
Now that they may finally face a reckoning, the medical authoritarians want us to forget.
To forget how they panicked in 2020 – at least partly because they feared Sars-Cov-2 was a monster that leaked from a Wuhan lab they’d supported. To forget how far they, and their media handmaidens, went in that panic.
We cannot forget. Not now, not ever.
The comment came late in a World Health Organization press conference that not many people saw. It’s been forgotten since. Even most Unreported Truths readers may not know about it.
Yet it was probably the most dangerous moment in the entire pandemic.
On Mon., March 30, 2020, the WHO held a press conference at its headquarters in Geneva. The speakers included the group’s executive director for health emergencies, Dr. Michael Ryan, an Irish epidemiologist who led its Covid response.
If March 30 wasn’t the absolute peak for Covid panic, it was close. A Navy hospital ship docked in New York City that day. (It went basically unused before quietly leaving four weeks later.) The previous week, The New York Times had suggested the United States might need one million ventilators to handle the pandemic, an estimate that proved roughly 45 times too high.1
A handful of us were watching the numbers closely and had already realized the Covid panic was overstated. Elderly people were at risk, but the hospitals were not going to be overrun, not even in New York City.
It’s fair to say that was… not the consensus view. The few states that had not already locked down faced increasingly harsh pressure to do so. On Twitter the mood ranged from hysterical to flat-out apocalyptic:
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Against this backdrop, the WHO viewed China as a success story.
China’s harsh lockdown in January and February had kept Covid from spreading widely in Beijing, Shanghai, and the coastal mega-cities. Cases in Wuhan, the original epicenter (and, coincidentally enough, the home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology), had also plunged.
Meanwhile, cases were taking off across Europe and the United States, despite the fact that European countries and most American states had imposed their own lockdowns and stay-at-home orders.
So when a reporter for Bloomberg asked Ryan whether “central quarantine” — that is, the internment hospitals that China had set up in Wuhan — would “be needed in order to have the same success that China has had,” the WHO’s top doctor had his answer ready.
Quietly, tiredly, Ryan explained:
…[A]t the moment in most parts of the world due to lockdown most of the transmission that’s actually happening in many countries now is happening in the household at family level. In some senses transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units.
Now we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner so that’s what I was saying previously; the transition from movement restrictions and shut-downs and stay-at-home orders can only be made if we have in place the means to be able to detect suspect cases, isolate confirmed cases, track contacts and follow up on the contacts’ health at all times and then isolate any of those people who become sick themselves. [Emphases added]
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To be clear, Ryan blamed lockdowns for forcing infected people back into their houses, where they would in turn sicken their relatives.
To be clear, his answer to this problem was to force people to open their homes to health authorities so that authorities could move those infected people out of their homes and into government-run quarantine facilities.
To be clear, broad lockdowns could not end unless countries committed to rounding up infected people.
“In a safe and dignified manner,” of course.
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(Live from Geneva… It’s health fascism! For your own safety, of course.)
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This proposal went nowhere in the United States. (Hello Second Amendment.) But to discount it as “fringe” – to use a word that gets bandied around now and again – is to misunderstand when it was made, and who made it.
The panic in late March 2020 was very real. It shouldn’t have been. The fact that healthy non-elderly adults faced low risks from Covid was already clear. On March 20, none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci had said young people might have “minimal symptoms, or no symptoms at all” from Covid.
But, for reasons that still remain obscure, by late March public health authorities and the media had whipped the world into a frenzy that for many people did not abate for a year or more.
If Covid had been even marginally worse – just marginally closer to what so many people in power were pretending it was – the demands for internment camps and family separations would have gotten loud, quickly.
Ryan wasn’t speaking off the cuff on March 30, 2020. He knew exactly what he was doing. He and the World Health Organization were floating a trial balloon.
It popped. But if we don’t stand up now and force them to – at the least – admit what they did and explain why, we may not be so lucky next time.
