A Timeline—Pandemic and Erosion of Freedoms Have Been Decades in the Making

A Timeline—Pandemic and Erosion of Freedoms Have Been Decades in the Making

by the Children’s Health Defense Team
May 21, 2020

 

From the moment of “COVID-19’s” naming—and particularly since the imposition of unprecedented restrictions on “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—some people have smelled a rat. And with each passing week, the smell becomes worse. A growing chorus of ordinary citizens and world-renowned medical and scientific experts is raising questions about matters ranging from the coronavirus’s origins to the rationale for continued lockdowns (see here, here and here).

The mainstream media have shown themselves only too ready to lob ad hominem attacks against any and all such non-conformists. However, one does not have to be insensitive to the illness and deaths associated with COVID-19 to recognize that powerful agendas are riding on the coattails of SARS-CoV-2. Citizens are waking up to the fact that the countries, officials and public figures who embrace draconian interventions such as immunity certificates, microchipping, forced vaccination and the removal of children from their homes also approve of making our sovereign rights—whether to earn a living, maintain bodily integrity, congregate to practice our spirituality, enjoy the arts or protect and educate our children—contingent upon our acceptance of these Big Brother measures and technologies.

To make it easier for the public to assess what is happening and what is at stake, Children’s Health Defense has put together the following timeline of selected events. We invite readers to consider how these events—some of them seemingly unrelated—and the network of partnerships and relationships that they illustrate have contributed to the unfolding set of circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

Notes/Explanatory Context

Gain-of-function research: COVID-19 has prompted renewed questioning about a long-debated branch of virology that, around 2012, scientists benignly rebranded as “gain-of-function” (GOF) research. GOF experiments seek to generate viruses “with properties that do not exist in nature” or, stated another way, “alter a pathogen to make it more transmissible or deadly.” One of the leading proponents of GOF work is Dr. Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC), a “legend in coronavirology” and “trailblazer of synthetic genomic manipulation techniques” who specializes in engineering lethal coronaviruses from “mail-order DNA.” Baric and other GOF enthusiasts argue that this type of viral tinkering is “critical to the development of broad-based vaccines and therapeutics,” but critics, such as Dr. Thomas Inglesby (director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security), dispute this putative benefit.

Big Data and Big Telecom: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dafna Tachover (director of  CHD’s “Stop 5G and Wireless Harms Project”) wrote on May 8: “5G has almost nothing to do with improving your lives; it’s all about controlling your life, marketing products, and harvesting your data for Artificial Intelligence purposes. The 21st century’s ‘black gold’ is data.” They note that Bill Gates, along with a number of other players and companies, is helping set up a “microwave radiation-emitting spider web [that] will allow Big Data/Big Telecom and Big Brother to capture what happens inside and outside every person at every moment of life” using a sinister brain-machine interface and other technologies, many financed by Gates. In short, “While the lockdown is a cataclysm for the world economy, it is an opportunity for Gates” and his billionaire brotherhood, ably assisted by an unadmirable fleet of medical and scientist yes-men.

Timeline of selected events

1998

May 18: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and 20 states file antitrust charges against Microsoft.

2000

2000: Bill Gates steps down from his position as Microsoft CEO, and Bill and Melinda Gates launch their eponymous foundation.

2000: The Gates Foundation (along with other partners) launches the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), known today as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The foundation has given $4.1 billion to Gavi over the past 20 years.

2001

November: After initially losing the antitrust lawsuit and appealing the decision, Microsoft settles its case with the DOJ out of court.

2002

November 2002: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) researcher Ralph Baric publishes a “breakthrough work” in gain-of-function research (studies that alter pathogens to make them more transmissible or deadly, see Notes above), describing the creation of a synthetic clone of a natural mouse coronavirus.

November 2002: China’s Guangdong province reports the first case of “atypical pneumonia” (later labeled as SARS).

2003

October 28: A paper by the Baric research group at UNC describes their synthetic recreation of the “previously undescribed” SARS coronavirus. (Writing in 2020, a scientist states, “The speed of the Baric group illustrates how quickly a qualified team of virologists can create a synthetic clone from a natural virus, and therefore make genetic modifications to it. Moreover, that was back in 2003. Today, a qualified laboratory can repeat those steps in a matter of weeks.”)

2005

December: Congress approves the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which authorizes the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “to issue a PREP Act Declaration . . . that provides immunity from liability for any loss caused, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from administration or use of countermeasures to diseases, threats, and conditions determined in the Declaration to constitute a present or credible risk of a future public health emergency.”

2009

2009-present (and earlier): The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awards millions of dollars in global health funding to Imperial College London; funding covers areas such as polio, HIV, family planning, malaria, health care delivery, agricultural development, information technology and “public awareness and analysis.”

2009: The Gates Foundation funds human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine trials in India, administering the vaccine to 23,000 young girls in remote provinces. Seven die and approximately 1,200 suffer autoimmune conditions, fertility disorders or other severe reactions. Ethical violations include forged consent forms and refusal of medical treatment for the injured girls.

October 2009: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), goes on YouTube to declare that serious adverse events for the H1N1 influenza vaccine are “very, very, very rare.” Months later, serious adverse events such as miscarriages, narcolepsy and febrile convulsions explode in multiple countries.

2010

January: Bill Gates pledges $10 billion in funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) and announces “the Decade of Vaccines.”

May 18: Senator and physician Tom Coburn calls out Dr. Fauci for misleadingly touting “significant progress in HIV vaccine research”—research that has ushered millions into NIAID’s coffers. Dr. Coburn stated, “Most scientists involved in AIDS research believe that an HIV vaccine is further away than ever.”

2011

December 30: Dr. Fauci promotes gain-of-function research on bird flu viruses, arguing that the research is worth the risk. The risks worry other “seasoned researchers.”

2012

April 20: Baylor College researchers publish their evaluation of four vaccine candidates for SARS, concluding that “Caution in proceeding to application of a SARS-CoV vaccine in humans is indicated.”

May: The 194 Member States of the World Health Assembly endorse the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP), led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with NIAID, WHO, Gavi, UNICEF and others. Dr. Fauci is one of five members on the GVAP’s Leadership Council.

2014

2014: Dr. Deborah Birx takes the helm of PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), which Dr. Fauci helped launch (in 2003) and which benefits from generous Gates Foundation support. Birx and Fauci are long-time allies, having worked together during the early years of AIDS and sharing overlapping career paths.

October 7: National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins announces a “new phase of cooperation” between NIH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, including partnering for vaccine development.

October 17: Under President Obama, the NIH halts federal funding for gain-of-function (GOF) research (see Notes) and asks federally funded GOF researchers to “agree to a voluntary moratorium.” The funding hiatus applies to 21 studies “reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” NIH later allows 10 of the studies to resume.

2015

2015: NIAID, under Fauci, awards a five-year, $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance (whose director gets credit on subsequent publications for “funding acquisition” rather than scientific work) to conduct gain-of-function studies on the “risk of bat coronavirus emergence.” Ten percent of the award goes to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which does “the bulk of the on-the-ground sample collection and analysis.”

September 24: UNC’s Ralph Baric is granted a patent for the creation of chimeric coronavirus spike proteins.

November 9: Baric and the Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zheng-Li (the leading GOF coronavirus researcher in China) publish what some refer to as “the most famous gain-of-function virology paper” (in Nature Medicine), describing their creation of a synthetic chimeric coronavirus. The authors state: “[T]hese data and restrictions represent a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens [emphasis added]. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.”

2016

2016: The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity states that “very few government-funded gain-of-function experiments [pose] a significant threat to public health.”

2017

February 8: The Modi administration in India severs ties with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, after researchers blame the Gates-funded polio vaccination campaign for almost half a million cases of childhood paralysis.

November 30: Shi Zheng-Li and coauthors publish a paper in PLoS Pathogens describing the creation of eight new synthetic coronaviruses.

December 19: The NIH and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID restore federal funding for gain-of-function research, ending the moratorium that began in October 2014.

December 19: Dr. Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health tells the New York Times that the type of gain-of-function experiments endorsed by Dr. Fauci’s NIAID have “done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”

2019

2019: NIAID awards a six-year renewal grant of $3.7 million to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology to continue their gain-of-function studies on bat coronaviruses. The renewal is approved “unusually quickly,” receiving a “really extremely high priority for funding.”

August 14: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) records show that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation owns 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle International Corp., representing the Foundation’s second largest tech holding after Microsoft. Crown Castle dominates ownership of 5G infrastructure throughout the U.S., including cell towers, small cell nodes and fiber.

October: A report released by NBC News in May, 2020 declares, “The analysis of commercial telemetry data in Wuhan suggests the COVID-19 pandemic began earlier than initially reported” and “supports the release of COVID-19 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” NBC’s May 8 summary states, “there was no cellphone activity in a high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, 2019, and that there may have been a ‘hazardous event’ sometime between Oct. 6 and Oct. 11.”

October 6: On May 5, 2020, British and French researchers publish a study estimating that COVID-19 could have started as early as October 6, 2019.

October 18: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security convene an invitation-only “tabletop exercise” called Event 201 to map out the response to a hypothetical global coronavirus pandemic.

November-December: General practitioners in northern Italy start noticing a “strange pneumonia.”

December 2-3: Vaccine scientists attending the WHO’s Global Vaccine Safety Summit confirm major problems with vaccine safety around the world.

December 18: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report the development of a “novel way to record a patient’s vaccination history,” using smartphone-readable nanocrystals called “quantum dots” embedded in the skin using microneedles—this work is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

December 31: Chinese officials inform the WHO about a cluster of “mysterious pneumonia” cases. Later, the South China Morning Post reports that it can trace the first case back to November 17.

2020 

January 7: Chinese authorities formally identify a “novel” coronavirus. 

January 10: China makes the genome sequence of the new coronavirus publicly available.

January 11: China records its first death attributed to the new coronavirus.

January 20: The first U.S. coronavirus case is reported in Washington State.

January 23: Shi Zheng-Li releases a paper reporting that the new coronavirus is 96% identical to a strain that her lab isolated from bats in 2013 but never publicized.

January 30: The WHO declares the new coronavirus a “global health emergency.”

Jan. 31, 2020: A group of Indian scientists publishes a study finding HIV sequences in the 2019-nCoV coronavirus. The scientists withdraw the study withdrew the study within 24 hours, presumably under some pressure.

February 4: With just 11 people in the U.S. who are confirmed to have COVID-19, HHS issues a Declaration, published on March 17 in the Federal Register, that places the new coronavirus under the umbrella of the 2005 PREP Act, making medical countermeasures (including vaccines) immune from liability. 

February 5: Bill and Melinda Gates announce $100 million in funding for coronavirus vaccine research and treatment efforts. 

February 10: French and Canadian scientists publish a paper about the new coronavirus describing an “important” anomaly—12 additional nucleotides—not observed in previous coronaviruses. They suggest that the distinct feature “may provide a gain-of-function . . . for efficient spreading in the human population.” 

February 11: The WHO gives the disease thought to be caused by the new coronavirus a name: “COVID-19.” WHO’s Director-General explains, “We had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease.”

February 24: Moderna, Inc. sends the first batch of its experimental coronavirus vaccine, mRNA-1273, to its research partner, NIAID.

February 25: Moderna stock shares trade 15% higher. 

February 29: The U.S. reports its first COVID-19 death. 

March 5: Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College (who has previously tried to develop a SARS vaccine) tells a Congressional Committee that coronavirus vaccines have always had a “unique potential safety problem”—a “kind of paradoxical immune enhancement phenomenon.” 

March 6: President Trump signs an $8.3 billion emergency coronavirus spending package, much of which “directly benefit[s] the drug industry.” 

March 10: Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia expresses concerns about the push to “rush [a vaccine] through,” particularly in the absence of “any history of making a coronavirus vaccine.” 

March 10: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome and Mastercard commit $125 million to identify, assess, develop and scale up COVID-19 treatments, forming the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. The $50 million in Gates Foundation funding is part of the $100 million in COVID-19 funding announced by Gates on February 5. 

March 11: The WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic. 

March 13: Bill Gates steps down from the Boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to “dedicate more time to philanthropic priorities.” 

March 16: Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, scientific advisor to the UK government, publishes his computer simulations warning that there will be over two million COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. unless the country adopts “intensive and socially disruptive measures.” 

March 16: Dr. Fauci tells Americans that they must be prepared to “take more drastic steps” and “hunker down significantly” to slow the coronavirus’s spread. 

March 16: NIAID launches a Phase 1 trial in 45 healthy adults of the mRNA-1273 coronavirus vaccine co-developed by NIAID and Moderna, Inc. The trial skips the customary step of testing the vaccine in animal models prior to proceeding to human trials. 

March 17: The Nation publishes an analysis covering conflicts of interest in the Gates Foundation’s charitable giving, describing “close to $2 billion in tax-deductible charitable donations to private companies,” including GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and “close to $250 million in charitable grants . . . to companies in which the foundation holds corporate stocks and bonds,” including Merck, GSK, Sanofi and other pharmaceutical corporations. A critic states that the foundation has “created one of the most problematic precedents in the history of foundation giving by essentially opening the door for corporations to see themselves as deserving charity claimants at a time when corporate profits are at an all-time high.”

March 22: U.S. bioweapons expert Dr. Francis Boyle repeats earlier statements that the purpose of Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) labs such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology “is the research, development, testing and stockpiling of offensive biological weapons” and that the new virus is a “weaponized” SARS coronavirus that leaked out of the Wuhan BSL-4 lab. 

March 24: Bill Gates announces significant funding for a company, EarthNow, that will blanket Earth with $1 billion in video surveillance satellites. 

March 26: Microsoft announces that it is acquiring Affirmed Networks, a company focused on 5G and “edge computing.” 

March 26: Dr. Fauci publishes an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (with senior NIAID official H. Clifford Lane and CDC director Robert Redfield), stating that “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza,” with a case fatality rate of perhaps 0.1%.

March 27: President Trump signs the $2 trillion CARES Act into law.

March 27: Children’s Health Defense publishes its video and article, “Dr. Fauci and COVID-19 priorities: therapeutics now or vaccines later?” Shortly thereafter, Mailchimp deactivates CHD’s account with no advance notice and no violation of Mailchimp’s rules.

March 29: President Trump extends nationwide social distancing guidelines until April 30.

March 31: White House coronavirus advisors Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Fauci cite models showing a potential 100,000 to 240,000 coronavirus deaths “even if the country keeps stringent social distancing guidelines in place.” Fauci describes social distancing and lockdowns as “inconvenient” but “the answer to our problems.”

April 2: Bill Gates states that a coronavirus vaccine “is the only thing that will allow us to return to normal.”

April 3: Forbes reports that Moderna’s CEO has become an overnight billionaire after the company ended 2019 with a net loss.

April 6: Dr. Fauci describes a COVID-19 vaccine as a “showstopper” and states, “I hope we don’t have so many people infected that we actually have . . . herd immunity.”

April 9: Dr. Fauci states that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus “looks more like the 60,000 [range],” adding the “models are really only as good as the assumptions that you put into the model.”

April 9: The Gates-funded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) reports that 115 COVID-19 vaccines are in the pipeline.

April 9: Children’s Health Defense publishes “Gates’ globalist vaccine agenda: a win-win for pharma and mandatory vaccination.”

April 11: Children’s Health Defense publishes “Here’s why Bill Gates wants indemnity… Are you willing to take the risk?”

April 15: Bill Gates pledges another $150 million to coronavirus vaccine development and other measures. He states, “There are seven billion people on the planet. We are going to need to vaccinate nearly every one.”

April 16: Moderna announces up to $483 million in funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to speed up the mRNA-1273 vaccine’s development.

April 18: Professor Luc Montagnier, recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of HIV, appears on French television and states that SARS-CoV-2 has been “manipulated” to include “added sequences” from HIV. Professor Montagnier asserts that this “meticulous” insertion could only have been carried out in a laboratory. Others raise similar questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

April 18: News outlets report that the country’s first coronavirus tests are ineffective due to CDC lab contamination and the CDC’s violation of its manufacturing standards.

April 21: Washington State announces plans to have a 1,500-person contact tracing team in place by mid-May.

April 23: Researchers issue a preprint reporting “direct evidence” of at least 30 different SARS-CoV-2 genetic variants.

April 23: News outlets report that American billionaires’ wealth increased by 10% during the first few months of COVID-19.

April 23: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. publishes “The Bill Gates effect: WHO’s DTP vaccine killed more children in Africa than the diseases it targeted.”

April 24: The NIH cancels the funding awarded to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses (funding awarded continuously since 2015). The NIH and Dr. Fauci decline to comment.

April 27: Former FDA head Scott Gottlieb (now with Pfizer) and former Medicare/Medicaid official Andy Slavitt urge the Trump administration to dedicate $46 billion to contact tracing and isolation.

April 28: A Newsweek article reports, “Dr. Fauci backed controversial Wuhan lab with U.S. dollars for risky coronavirus research.” Fauci does not respond to requests for comments.

April 29: Bloomberg publishes a story about President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” a planned pharmaceutical-government-military collaboration to shrink the development time for a coronavirus vaccine.

April 30: Bill Gates writes that “the world will be able to go back to the way things were . . . when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.” Gates also states that “Governments will need to expedite their usual drug approval processes in order to deliver the vaccine to over 7 billion people quickly.”

April 30: Dr. Fauci states that it is “doable” to have hundreds of millions of doses of a coronavirus vaccine available by January 2021.

May 1: Dr. Thomas Inglesby (director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security), discussing gain-of-function research, states that “laboratory systems are not infallible, and even in the greatest laboratories of the world, there are mistakes.”

May 1: Democratic Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois introduces the TRACE Act (“HR 6666: COVID-19 Testing, Reaching, and Contacting Everyone”). The conspicuously vague Act would allocate $100 billion to CDC-hired entities for contact tracing and “other purposes,” including family separation. (See also May 15.)

May 4: Bill Gates pledges another $50 million toward COVID-19, for a total of $300 million in commitments.

May 4: President Trump states that the U.S. will have a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020.

May 5: British and French researchers publish “Emergence of genomic diversity and recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2,” suggesting that the recurrent mutations detected “may indicate ongoing adaptation of SARS-CoV-2 to its novel human host.”

May 5: Neil Ferguson resigns from the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) after flouting his own social distancing rules. The married lover with whom Ferguson has his trysts works for an organization “loosely connected with Bill Gates, through the World Economic Forum.”

May 5: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. publishes “Redfield and Birx: can they be trusted with COVID?”

May 6: An anonymous software engineer (ex-Google) pronounces Neil Ferguson’s COVID-19 computer model “unusable for scientific purposes.”

May 6: New York governor Andrew Cuomo announces that the state will partner with “visionary” Bill Gates to restructure education by placing “technology at the forefront.” Cuomo appoints former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to lead a blue-ribbon committee for this purpose. Critics push back, describing past Gates-Foundation-funded educational fiascos that amassed “detailed personal information about millions of students” in the cloud.

May 7: Business Insider reports that over 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment over the seven-week period since COVID-19 restrictions began.

May 7: NPR reports that 44 states and the District of Columbia have plans to deploy a contact tracing workforce of over 66,000 workers.

May 8: NBC News releases a private report describing an unconfirmed shutdown of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in October 2019.

May 8: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dafna Tachover (director of  CHD’s “Stop 5G and Wireless Harms Project”) publish “The brave new world of Bill Gates and Big Telecom.”

May 11: UK chief medical officer Dr. Chris Whitty (an insider who has received millions in malaria research funding from the Gates Foundation and who endorses stigma as a useful public health intervention) states that COVID-19 is “harmless to [the] vast majority.”

May 13: Australian researchers report that “SARS-CoV-2 is uniquely adapted to infect humans, raising important questions as to whether it arose in nature by a rare chance event or whether its origins might lie elsewhere.”

May 14: Microsoft announces that it is acquiring UK-based Metaswitch Networks “to expand its Azure 5G strategy.”

May 15: The House passes the 1,815-page, $3 trillion HEROES Act (“Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act”), sneaking in portions of the TRACE ACT that would funnel $75 billion to the CDC for “coronavirus testing, contact tracing and isolation measures.”

May 18: Moderna announces interim results from the Phase 1 trial of its mRNA-1273 coronavirus vaccine. The company reports that three out of 15 healthy participants (20%) experienced Grade 3 systemic adverse events following a second dose. (The Merck Manual defines Grade 3 as “severe or medically significant but not immediately life-threatening; hospitalization or prolongation of hospitalization indicated; disabling; limiting self care.”)

May 18: Discussing the interim results from Moderna’s Phase 1 trial of its mRNA-1273 vaccine—co-developed with NIAID—Dr. Fauci states: “I must warn that there’s also the possibility of negative consequences, where certain vaccines can actually enhance the negative effect of the infection.”

May 18: After describing its interim Phase 1 results as “promising,” shares of Moderna stock soar 25%, closing at a “record high.” The company’s stock has gained 241% since the beginning of 2020.

May 19: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. publishes “How Bill Gates controls global messaging and censorship.”

May 20: Microsoft announces its new supercomputer intended to create “human-like” artificial intelligence.

Stop the conveyor belt

Around the world, many people are understandably reeling in shock at the rapid economic, social and cultural changes that have followed in the wake of the phenomenon called “COVID-19.” Many of these changes involve ever-tighter restrictions on our rights and freedoms, accompanied by inexorable messaging—both public and subliminal—that a “vaccine for all” and 24/7 tracking and surveillance are the only way out. Increasingly, however, there are hopeful signs that more members of the public are recognizing the duplicity and self-interest of those offering false salvation. Each of us needs to do our part to expose these issues, standing up for individual sovereignty and working to halt the transition “to a totalitarian singularity more despotic than Orwell ever imagined.”