Epsilon Theory PDF Download (paid subscription required): The Industrially Necessary Doctor Tedros
The World Health Organisation will lead a mission to China this weekend to start investigating the COVID-19 outbreak.
Sky News, FEBRUARY 15, 2020
“start investigating” … AYFKM?
There’s this pleasing mythology out there that the World Health Organization is like some international version of the Center for Disease Control, that it’s staffed by scientists and doctors flying all over the world and racing against the clock to battle infectious diseases and – against all odds – find The Cure.
I mean, that’s an actual subplot of Contagion, where an intrepid WHO scientist tracks down the disease origin in Hong Kong, goes to the remote Chinese village where all of the children are sick (the children!), is taken prisoner, and works heroically (if ultimately unsuccessfully) to get vaccines to the children (the children!).
This is a crock.
The World Health Organization is a political organization, bought and paid for by its sponsor countries (China foremost among them), with a single, dominant mandate: maintain the party line.
Literally.
The truth is that WHO has done nothing more than parrot the official Chinese Communist Party line since the day the world learned of COVID-19.
The truth is that only now – TWO MONTHS INTO THE EPIDEMIC – is WHO sending a “team” to “start investigating” the virus.
To be sure, WHO’s Director General, Dr. Tedros, has been to China several times since the disease broke out, glad-handing (again, literally) President Xi and all the other CCP mandarins.
So … I’m not going to get into the way China lobbied and pressured the UN to get Dr. Tedros appointed as WHO Director General, succeeding their hand-picked (again, literally) Director General, Margaret Chan, despite credible accusations that Tedros had covered up cholera outbreaks in his home country of Ethiopia. If you want to get into that, you can read this New York Times article: Candidate to Lead the W.H.O. Accused of Covering Up Epidemics.
And … I’m not going to get into the way Dr. Tedros appointed freakin’ Robert Mugabe as a Good-Will Ambassador for the World Health Organization, a toady move that was greeted by healthcare professionals (and anyone with a soul) as “a sick joke”. If you want to get into that, you can read this New York Times article: After Making Mugabe a ‘Good-Will Ambassador,’ W.H.O. Chief Is ‘Rethinking’ It.
No, no … I’m just going to highlight what Dr. Tedros said at the WHO Executive Board meeting in Geneva on February 4, a week after meeting with Xi in Beijing and a few days after senior Chinese diplomats started talking about the “racism” inherent in other countries stopping flights to China and denying visas to people with Chinese passports issued in Hubei province.
Tedros said there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade,” and he specifically said that stopping flights and restricting Chinese travel abroad was “counter-productive” to fighting the global spread of the virus.
This is the Director General of the World Health Organization. On February 4th.
“We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent,” said Tedros. Roger that.
There’s just one problem.
The “evidence” here – taken without adjustment or question from the CCP – was a baldfaced lie.
And everyone at WHO knew it.
How do I know that everyone at WHO knew that the official Chinese numbers were a crock on Feb. 4?
Because WHO-sponsored doctors in Hong Kong published independent studies on Jan. 31 showing that the official Chinese numbers were a crock.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30260-9/fulltext
Money quotes:
In our baseline scenario, we estimated that the basic reproductive number for 2019-nCoV was 2.68 (95% CrI 2.47–2.86) and that 75,815 individuals (95% CrI 37,304–130,330) have been infected in Wuhan as of Jan 25, 2020.
If the transmissibility of 2019-nCoV were similar everywhere domestically and over time, we inferred that epidemics are already growing exponentially in multiple major cities of China with a lag time behind the Wuhan outbreak of about 1–2 weeks.
I’ve attached a PDF of the full report here: Lancet nCov2019 Model.
This is what it looks like when the narrative tail of personal and professional corruption (must support my Chinese benefactors!) wags the public policy dog (sure, I’ll recommend that flights and visas should continue, based on evidence I know is false!).
Will this disease spread farther and faster … will more people DIE … because WHO Director General Tedros recommended as best practice on February 4th that flights and visa issuance in and out of China continue without significant disruption?
Yes. I think so.
And yet … and yet … we are told that the REAL DANGER for public health is questioning the official Chinese line and these Stepin Fetchit policy recommendations of Dr. Tedros.
Here’s what Tedros wrote in a South China Morning Post op-ed piece THREE DAYS AGO:
In addition, a wider strategy is needed to debunk pseudoscience and strengthen trust in everything from vaccination to public institutions. Misinformation thrives where trust in the authorities is weak.
In a fast-evolving disease outbreak, there is a fine line between the deliberate spread of misinformation and the well-intentioned but potentially still damaging redistribution of false claims.
And here’s a Reuter’s article, also from three days ago:
The rise of “fake news” – including misinformation and inaccurate advice on social media – could make disease outbreaks such as the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic currently spreading in China worse, according to research published on Friday.
In an analysis of how the spread of misinformation affects the spread of disease, scientists at Britain’s East Anglia University (UEA) said any successful efforts to stop people sharing fake news could help save lives.
And what is this “fake news”?
Fake news is now defined as anything that disputes WHO data, which means that fake news is now defined as anything that disputes the official China party line.
Why did China spend so much money to buy off the World Health Organization? This:
The World Health Organization is working with Google to ensure that people get facts from WHO first when they search for information about the new virus that recently emerged in China.
Since the outbreak began, a number of misleading claims and hoaxes about the virus have circulated online. They include false conspiracy theories that the virus was created in a lab and that vaccines have already been manufactured, exaggerations about the number of sick and dead, and claims about bogus cures.
Associated Press, Feb. 3, 2020
It’s not just Google. It’s also Ten Cent. It’s also Facebook. It’s also Twitter.
And no, you’re not misreading the clear narrative intent of these articles.
Where possible, China wants to criminalize any speech … any social media … that does not follow the official party line. Where it’s not possible to criminalize that speech, China wants to ban it through the cooperative censorship of global tech and media platforms. Where it’s not possible to ban that speech, China wants to shame it into the shadows by getting us to reject it as “fake news”.
And if you don’t see that the United States is about two minutes behind China in doing the same damn thing, then you’re just not paying attention.
I am certain that there are plenty of good people at WHO, and I am certain that they do good and important work, particularly in funneling money and resources to actual researchers and actual clinical programs.
But what is happening at the most senior levels of the World Health Organization is not just a disgrace. It is not just a humiliation for the people who are doing good and important work.
It is a betrayal of the entire world.
What’s to be done?
Getting Tedros the man out of the World Health Organization will feel good, and he deserves all the ignominy that’s coming his way, but it will accomplish nothing.
No, to accomplish anything here, we need to get rid of The Industrially Necessary Doctor Tedros.
See, the actual human being named Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesusis is not The Industrially Necessary Doctor Tedros. The human Tedros is just another on-the-make politician, one of a zillion Renfields who sell their soul on the daily. Sure, he was tapped by his Chinese patrons to play the role of The Industrially Necessary Doctor Tedros, but if it hadn’t been him, there were plenty of other guys and gals to take his place.
We must look through Tedros the man to see the Nudging Oligarchy and the Nudging State that created The Industrially Necessary Doctor Tedros.
We must look through so many of the ideas we take to be immutable truths of safety or goodness – whether those truths concern the food we eat or the stocks we buy or the health we seek to preserve – and recognize that they are not truths at all!
They are conveniences, and not conveniences for us, but for the sellers of the food we eat or the stocks we buy or the health we seek to preserve.
THAT’S what it means to be Industrially Necessary – a constructed social practice in service to those who would subvert our autonomy of mind and will, presented to us as Truth-with-a-capital-T by Missionaries who shake their finger at us and tell us HOW to think about the world.
Once you start looking for The Industrially Necessary Doctor Tedros, you will see him everywhere.
And that’s when your world starts to change.
PS. If you haven’t yet read our original note on how we can tell the Chinese data on COVID-19 is false, here you go:
Body Count
China is fighting nCov2019 exactly like the US fought North Vietnam … with policy driven more by narrative control than by what’s best to win the war. That was a disastrous strategic mistake for the US then, and it’s a disastrous strategic mistake for China today. … Continue reading
PPS. And if you’d like to read our core notes on the Nudging State and the Nudging Oligarchy, together with the Industrially Necessary meme …
The Industrially Necessary Egg
In modern farming and in modern investing, we have become prisoners of the monoculture. It’s efficient. It’s necessary for a mass society of ever-increasing Desire. But here’s the thing. In the investment monoculture, you’re not the farmer. … Continue reading
Clever Hans
You don’t break a wild horse by crushing its spirit. You nudge it into willingly surrendering its autonomy. Because once you’re trained to welcome the saddle, you’re going to take the bit. We are Clever Hans, dutifully hanging on every word or signal from the Nudging State and the Nudging Oligarchy as we stomp out our behavior. … Continue reading
Epsilon Theory PDF Download (paid subscription required): The Industrially Necessary Doctor Tedros
Do the UN/WHO/etc belong within one’s Globalization cartoon? I ask only because this haiku occurred to me after reading this note:
Globalization:
Leverage for corruption
Now, populism
In an environment of sovereign governments and their uncoordinated propaganda, there’s at least a kind of global market of narratives. As global regulatory bodies are added to the system, regulatory capture by deep pockets changes character. Markets as political utilities. #suckup
Maybe populism as a whole, even though it has particular instantiations with all kinds of problems, is a hopeful thing in this respect.
Is the corona virus a bioweapon?
Scientists have found HIV fragments in the virus DNA that seem unlikely to be naturally evolved.
We know that this virus has certain unprecedented behaviors, like long incubation period, asymptomatic transmission, ease of transmission and severe re-infection that seem designed to evade containment.
And FWIW, the White House announced an investigation of the virus as a weapon.
But, if you think that the shenanigans stop with the Chinese government, think again. Apparently, a Canadian lab (ie one exempt from strict post-9/11 rules on securing bio agents) has been in the habit of getting its vials ‘stolen’ by Chinese. Strangely, its director just died while attending a conference in Kenya. For details and background, see this link.
To make the plot even thicker, it seems the virus predominantly targets East Asians who have a far higher proportion of ACE2 receptor cells than Caucasians, Africans or Arabs. (It’s through these receptors that the virus binds to and attacks human cells.)
I don’t know anything beyond the public information. What I can say is:
Objectively, at the end of the expansionary phase of the asset-inflation cycle of the modern financial and economic system, it benefits the long-term stability of the system to have a reset or re-calibration. Such an event is always painful, at the very least transferring wealth from one set of people to another. But if it can be blamed on something other than the core nature of the system, then it’s a net benefit to the system. (This applies to the Chinese economy, all other economies, and the global economy as a whole.)
In other words, anywhere you go, there are people willing to put on a black Hugo Boss uniform.
Maybe the Weather Channel should cover pandemics!
It’s interesting that Tom Cotton and others have taken flak over suggesting that it is a bio-weapon as it has been “debunked.” By Whom, exactly? Well, here, for starters: “Cui Tiankai, Chinese ambassador to the U.S., denounced Cotton’s misinformation on “Face The Nation” earlier this month.” What possible motive would he have to say that? #BodyCount. More here: “Vipin Narang, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The Washington Post that “we don’t have any evidence” that the general population was exposed to a virus through an accident at a lab. He called Cotton’s speculation a conspiracy theory that was borderline irresponsible.” WTF?!! And: “Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Post that there was nothing in the genome sequence of the coronavirus that indicated it had been engineered.” “Debunked,” No evidence and nothing that indicated it was engineered is a “pretty f’ing far” from way from “disproven.” (H/T Marcellus Wallace). I think Cotton’s pretty far out there but to actively suppress this and call him out when we know pretty much next to nothing about the origins of the virus is part of the fiat news we are fed daily. Clear eyes, full heart, can’t get infected…I hope…
That this guy is still alive is a surprise ……he has written this long but beautiful piece from inside China……describing exactly what we discuss here on ET…
http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/viral-alarm-when-fury-overcomes-fear
a quote from the piece :
“Ours is a system in which The Ultimate Arbiter [an imperial-era term used by state media to describe Xi Jinping] monopolizes power. It results in what I call “organizational discombobulation” that, in turn, has served to enable a dangerous “systemic impotence” at every level. A political culture has thereby been nurtured that, in terms of the real public good, is ethically bankrupt, for it is one that strains to vouchsafe its privatized Party-State, or what they call their “Mountains and Rivers” while abandoning the people over which it holds sway to suffer the vicissitudes of a cruel fate. It is a system that turns every natural disaster into an even greater man-made catastrophe. The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance; the fragile and vacuous heart of the jittering edifice of state has thereby shown up as never before.
This viral outbreak, which has been exacerbated into a national calamity by the power-holders, is more perilous perhaps than total war itself, for everything is being caught up by the struggle—the nation’s ethical fabric, its politics, our society, as well as the economy. Let me say that again—it is even more perilous than total war, for it lays the nation open to a kind of devastation that even foreign invaders in the past had failed to visit upon us. The ancients put it well, “Only thieves nurtured at home can truly despoil a homeland.” Although the Americans may well be trying to undermine our economy, here at home The Axlerod is himself beating them to it! Please note: just as the epidemic was reaching a critical moment, He made a big deal about being “Personally This” and “Personally That“ [when meeting Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO on 29 January, Xi made a point of saying that he was “personally commanding” the response to the outbreak, a statement that was widely derided online]. Empty words that only serve to highlight the hypocrisy. Such claims served merely to elicit nationwide outrage and sow desolation in the hearts of the people.”
/looks uncomfortably at the dark grey Hugo Boss suit in my closet
I watched blue check marks repeating CCP propoganda and gleefully mocking those who dared to suggest that perhaps human error in a lab THAT STUDIES THESE KINDS OF VIRUSES could be the source of this whole thing. One has to be willfully stupid or well-paid to have the level of disconnect that some of them have. As if it’s not possible that a lab tech was having a lousy day–maybe he has a newborn at home and isn’t sleeping well–and misses some minor saftey procedure. It doesn’t take much for there to be accidental leakage. But suggest that to our media betters on Twitter and watch them as they chuckle at you, you country rube.
At this point, this being a bioweapon is not far-fetched as at first. Even if we discount the Indian scientists’ finding of HIV DNA parts in the virus, we have anecdotal evidence that HIV drugs are at least sometimes effective against this disease. Also, Japan has just announced it will use HIV drugs to treat its sick.
I totally understand why it seems unthinkable that the elites of any country would deliberately release a virus. But think of World War I, an even worse catastrophe. The media is still struggling to explain why Britain and the US joined the war and got almost 1 million Britons killed. Objectively, the war did achieve a necessary financial-imperial re-calibration where the seat of empire was moved from Britain to a friendly US, with unfriendly Germany decidedly knocked out of the running.
My mantra is ‘they may not want to, but they have to.’ Think of the consequences of inaction. If the long-built-up asset bubble is not deflated (or replanted,) its disorderly bursting would not only cause worldwide economic cataclysm, but this could more directly be linked to the money system in the public mind, thus threatening the entire basis of power of the elites of all countries.
All I’m saying is, let’s keep an open mind, for now.