Narrative Dominance in COVID19 Reporting – Updated

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UPDATED – April 6, 2020

In late March, The Federalist Society put out “Inaccurate Virus Models are Panicking Officials into Ill-Advised Lockdowns” by Madeline Osburn.  The article raises questions about the nature and quality of the information relied on by government decision-makers and media when reporting on COVID-19. On the same day, The Federalist’s Twitter account was “temporarily locked for violating the Twitter Rules regarding COVID-19” in another  Federalist article.

Osburn’s concern was that the information used to drive decisions and inform the public was disproportionately coming from COVID Act Now, an organization whose very name signals a progressive posture. And progressive and techie it is. As Osborn notes,

• Founders of the site include Democratic Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and three Silicon Valley tech workers and Democratic activists — Zachary Rosen, Max Henderson, and Igor Kofman — who are all also donors to various Democratic campaigns and political organizations since 2016.
• Henderson and Kofman donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, while
• Rosen donated to the Democratic National Committee, recently resigned Democratic Rep. Katie Hill and other Democratic candidates.
• Prior to building the COVID Act Now website, Kofman created an online gamedesigned to raise $1 million for the eventual 2020 Democratic candidate and defeat President Trump. The game’s website is now defunct.

Adding to Osburn, Alaska Congressman Jonathan Kreiss-Tompkins was the topic of Politico’s “How to Turn a Red State Purple.”

Igor Kofman’s Twitter puts him in the middle of the tech community.

Zack Rosen’s biographical sketch states that “Zack pioneered the first large-scale Drupal website for the Howard Dean campaign in 2003, which helped revolutionize the business model of politics from offline to the Internet.”

Even Georgetown’s Rebecca Katz was “a participant in the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues faculty research group on global health.”

Indeed, there is no doubt that key leaders of COVID Act Now are a part of the mobilized opposition to the current administration.

While COVID-19 is a serious threat to public health, the House’s recent activities demonstrate that political ideologies are cynically leveraging this crisis to accrue power. Citizens should be forewarned that power, once seized on any pretext, is rarely if ever, relinquished once a crisis has passed.

The model driving COVID Act Now was created by the Imperial College, London. That model has come under scrutiny for the Bayesian nature of the assumptions. These assumptions were employed to drive catastrophic projections leading to “point of no return” scenarios that evoke visions of Monty Python’s “bring out your dead.” This explains why COVID Act Now states, “this model is designed to drive fast action, not predict the future” on its panic-centric webpage “Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now Reference/Assumptions.”

COVID Act Now’s statement could be paraphrased to read as “this projection is designed to panic a society into pre-scripted decision paths today before the science can be validated (or invalidated) tomorrow.” This scientized panic narrative remains among the more prominent tools in the Neo-Marxist toolbox.

In Re-Remembering the MisRemembered Left, Hegel’s “Science of Reason” was used to explain how ideologies are converted to sciences so that vanguards can enforce them against populations—for their own good, of course. Especially under progressive control, the all-powerful state, converts ideologies into enforceable sciences.

The Left has leveraged this time-honored tool since Marx conjured his scientific socialism. As with COVID-19, scientized ideological claims are often associated with actual scientific activities. Demands for dramatic intervention or immediate conformance are prime indicators that an ideology seeks enforcement through claims of scientific certainty. These demands are often based on unresolved “scientific” models that never convert over to reality.  These models depict “if we don’t act now” scenarios that warn that the sky will fall or we will hit “a point of no return,” or “the human race will face an extinction-level event.” The COVID Act Now’s narrative conforms to this pattern with precision.  (In Re-Remembering, see the section on Woodrow Wilson)

COVID Act Now’s role is to manipulate both public and governmental perceptions of the current pandemic to its “act now” ends. From the beginning, COVID-19 has been enveloped in a narrative arc that appears to have anticipated the virus while controlling its national conversation through the lifecycle of the COVID event to date. Thus, COVID Act Now should be viewed within a broader context.

Consider:

• June 30, 2017 – Fauci was on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Leadership Council along with the heads of The WHO, and UNICEF. [The date June 30, 2017 is cited because it is the last day Margaret Chan was Director General of The WHO and was listed on the form naming them both to the council.] Dr. Fauci’s current status is unclear.
• On October 18, 2019, “Event 201” held it’s “Global Pandemic Exercise” forecasting millions of deaths. Inserted into the Event 201 webpage is a link to the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins School, which it later felt compelled to add the following caveat: “We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million” While not challenging the Bloomberg School’s need to publish its own retraction, it nevertheless remains true that “Event 201” helped establish the narrative arc that favors the dominant view and continues to do so to this day.
  • Event 201 was funded by the Bloomberg School of Public Health, which is named in honor of Michael Bloomberg, who has contributed close to $3 billion to Johns Hopkins, in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Not exactly bi-partisan.
  • As with COVID Act Now, the “Players” at the Event 201 exercise are disproportionately not public health professionals.
• On November 6, 2019, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security reported on an “Event 201” exercise held on October 18, 2019, concerning “fast-spreading coronavirus with devastating impact.”
  • Support and funding of Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security come from Tianjin University, China, the World Health Organization, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taiwan, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and others.
• On November 7, 2019, Netflix released The Next Pandemic in which Bill Gates figures prominently.
• On November 17, 2019, the original case, patient zero, of the novel coronavirus emerged, according to official Chinese government sources, but was not recognized at that time.
• April 2, 2020 – The Washington Times reports that the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations at Washington State University generated statistics that Trump relies on to “set COVID-19 policy, said the U.S. would need 135,000 hospital beds by today — yet only about 31,000 patients are hospitalized.” “The institute projected that 135,000 hospital beds would be needed on this date, April. 2, four times the current hospital population for COVID-19 patients.” The Gate’s Foundation not only funds the model but IHME as well.
• April 3, 202 – The Gateway Pundit reports that Dr. Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, also sits on the Gates-funded Foundation Board, The Global Fund. As the White House coordinator, Brix promoted the Gates-funded model promoted by the Gates-funded Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation – IHME – that, as noted, turned out to be substantially inaccurate. As noted above, Dr. Fauci was and may still be on the Gates Foundation Leadership Council.

At what point is it not only appropriate but necessary to ask who controls the dominant narrative on COVID-19 in America and the White House and, with it, the decision-making it is structured to facilitate?

Based on COVID Act Now activities, the above timeline, and TWITTER’s suppression of The Federalist articles questioning the established narrative,  it is reasonable to argue that the COVID-19 epidemic has been contained within a narrative arc that enforces pre-existing lines of effort in support of a pre-COVID-19 agenda.

Unaccountable, ideological, and unexpertized actors have managed to establish and enforce a bundle of dominant narratives in a period of crisis where, in a free society, the public has a right to know the full range of the crisis.

As it stands, there is a deliberate and wholesale exclusion of competing data, competing expert interpretations of data, opinions, and conclusions. This should violate public policy; it is certainly not in the public interest.

Social media abused its dominant position when blocking a competing conservative information provider. The lords of social media are promoting maximalist scenarios structured to position panicked populations to accept unparalleled expansions of state power. Thus, they undermine all efforts that do not advocate or imply maximalist statist outcomes, including those of the current administration.

For example, public health is among the police powers that belong to the state. Yet, as President Truman famously said, “The buck stops here!” Actually, allocating blame for a viral epidemic is like stopping the tide from coming in. Consider:

• January 14, 2020 – Under the leadership of Secretary-General Tedros, The WHO assured the public that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus (was) identified in Wuhan, China.”
• January 26, 2020 – Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said the American public shouldn’t worry about the coronavirus outbreak in China, saying: “It’s a very, very low risk to the United States.”
• February 2, 2020 – Identifying racism as a higher concern, New York City Health Inspector, Dr. Oxiris Barbot said, “The risk for New Yorkers of the coronavirus is low, and our preparedness as a city is very high. While it is understandable that people feel anxious, that is no way shape or form an excuse for them to use that as an opportunity to spread misinformation, to spread racist ideas because that is currently the greatest risk to New Yorker’s [sic].”
• February 9, 2020 – Stated in terms of defying known epidemiological risks, Dr. Mark Levin, Chair of the New York City Health Committee, encouraged breaking minimum level public health protocols when Tweeting: “In powerful show of defiance of coronavirus scare, huge crowd gathering in NYC’s Chinatown for ceremony ahead of annual Lunar New Year parade. Chants ‘be strong Wuhan! If you are staying away, you are missing out!”
  • February 9, 2020 – New York Senator Chuck Schumer endorsed Dr. Levin in a re-Tweet: “So proud to join the Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade in New York City.” It appears that Schumer attended the parade.

  • NOTE: New York politicians placed the racism narrative above known public health concerns thus knowingly placing the citizens of New York at risk. The People’s Republic of China is governed by a communist regime. The WHO is run by a Marxist with a history that strains due diligence. As used in the current political climate, “Racism” is a weaponized Neo-Marxist attack narrative. To understand how the Neo-Marxist left plans to use the “racism” narrative in the upcoming election cycle, see the November 2019 memo, “Warning on Racism.”

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While the immediate issue confronting the United States is the COVID-19 epidemic, at some point, the chronic, pathological, institutionalized hatred of the current administration has to be incorporated into any balanced assessment. As ReRemembering the MisRemembered Left points out, what is popularly referred to as “biased reporting” by the “mainstream media (MSM),” a political warfare analysis identifies it as AGITPROP. Likewise, what is popularly labeled the “deep-state,” political warfare identifies as the Counter-State. The dominant COVID-19 narrative has taken on mass line characteristics.

A Communist country with a political warfare doctrine has envisioned leveraging public health issues to hostile ends.

A director general of the WHO rose to power as a leader in a murderous Marxist regime from a country in which he covered up epidemics and which is currently beholden to China.

Given the preceding information, a political warfare assessment of America in the COVID-19 crisis should sound an alarm.  Shrieking or otherwise, the alarm, as well as the assessment, should be mandatory. There is a difference between political opposition and the systematic undermining of an elected president in the execution of his enumerated Article II powers. There are consequences to obstructing a chief executive’s ability to govern. Consider:

• • • During the “Russia-gate” scandal, America’s national security was ignored.  Key national security leaders were busy churning phony narratives in Crossfire Hurricane and related activities to interfere with a presidential election, and then, later, to interfere with a duly elected president.
    • When COVID-19 was in the news and on the rise, the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence diverted attention away from a threatened pandemic and towards the impeachment of a president under questionable procedural grounds, and along deeply partisan lines. During the Impeachment, COVID-19 became a recognized public health concern. From Crossfire Hurricane to the Impeachment, the national security apparatus was purposefully distracted by processes that engineered to undermine the president’s ability to execute his duly elected responsibilities.

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Woe betide independent thinkers and journalists, government officials, healthcare professionals, and others who do not conform to the prescribed narrative. In that case, the enforcement narratives cascade to their secondary line of operation: delegitimization.

From the commanding heights of this dominant perch, national panic-pandemic narratives are crowding out competing credible epidemiological claims that are then under or partially reported, or not reported at all.

Examples of credible sources being crowded out include the life science and medical journal STAT that raised red flags over decisions based on the same questionable data driving COVID Act Now, Yale’s Prevention Research Center, Stanford’s Medical staff, MIT (even with political motivation caveats), and Germany’s elite Institute for Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. These expert voices should not have to compete with political activists from Silicon Valley.

NOTICE & UPDATE

This assessment does not take a position on which epidemiological opinions are correct. It simply points out that one side of the professional epidemiological debate is suppressed. Since two of the doctors followed up on their initial comments, they are provided below.

• March 26, 2020 – Suharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, wrote an “Open Letter from Professor Sucharit Bhakdi to German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel.” While recognizing the seriousness of the threat from COVID-19, he also noted the severe consequences inherent in the drastic measures being undertaken.
• March 31, 2020 –The Hoover Institute interviewed Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford doctor who challenged the prevailing maximalist approach to COVID-19 in the March 24, 2020, Wall Street Journal Article. In maintaining his position, he argued that Dr. Fauci is wrong concerning his estimates because he has no way of knowing whether they are correct or not, and bristled at “definitive proclamations of the model.” Dr. Bhattacharya also noted that he received very uncomplimentary negative responses demanding he “get with the program.”