Who Benefitted From This Chaos?
Two years ago on this day, I posted a piece that was very hard to write. It concerned precisely who was benefiting from the lockdowns, masking, and all that was associated with it, including school and business closures and travel restrictions.
As much as we would all prefer for everyone to be concerned about big issues like public health and human rights, it’s sadly the case that industrial interests (and even ruling-class evildoers) sometimes prevail over both.
Obviously, most people all over the world have lost so much over three years, not only health and income but also hope. It’s tragic. Meanwhile, many others seem to have made out like bandits during the biggest transfer of wealth in the shortest time in the history of humanity.
Many groups and sectors had a kind of hankering for a pandemic. They turned a widespread and mostly manageable pathogen—doctor/patient relationships and reasonable cautions on the part of the vulnerable—and converted it into the basis for a global panic of compulsion and coercion that overthrew centuries of progress in law and liberty.
Let’s just go through the list of beneficiaries I first compiled two years ago.
1. The tech companies that became so enraptured with the digital world—and we can include online retailers in this—that they forgot all the people who cannot and do not want to live entirely outside the physical world. To be sure, many of these high flying companies are now coming back to earth thanks to higher interest rates. Even Zoom may be falling on hard times. To which I say: Schadenfreude.
2. The pharmaceutical companies with hundreds of billions of investment in labs and distribution circles that wanted to ply their wares in the midst of emergencies, in addition to the PCR testing industry, not to mention mask and ventilator makers and so many other grifting companies in this space. They not only gain from tremendous subsidies and indemnification from damages; they even got governments to conscript their customer base.
3. Public health intellectuals, who for at least a decade and a half had fallen for the romance of computer modeling, were itching to try out a new method for disease mitigation. They must have gotten quite a kick out of watching the experiment tried out in real time. Speaking of: we haven’t heard from these people in a very long time. They seem conveniently very quiet. Notice how the prophets of doom who were all over the news three years ago, with their magic ability to see the future with precision, have completely vanished?
4. The mega-billionaire Bill Gates found himself vexed by computer viruses that were wrecking his Windows operating system and thereby developed a passion for blocking viruses in general, while failing to understand the difference between biology and computer hardware. He seems to have done very well for himself, not only with his investments but now with his new book telling us how he will single-handedly change the path of the global climate.
5. Government officials certainly had a field day trying out new uses of power. My goodness, they even got their mitts on social media, scripting who gets to speak and who cannot. The national security state hasn’t had this much fun since the Cold War. It was, in short, the most successful ramp up of government power the world over in modern times or maybe ever. Disease panic proved more advantageous to them than ever war and economic depression.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/who-benefitted-chaos