The Forgotten Dry Run for Lockdown

The Forgotten Dry Run for Lockdown
by Paula Jardine at Brownstone Institute

WE SHUT our schools, we emptied our streets, we shuttered our shops not because reason demanded it, but because fear commanded it. We followed the models, not the evidence. We fought a virus by locking down the healthy. We sacrificed livelihoods on the altar of safety. And we were told by Prime Minister Johnson: There Is No Alternative! That was the lockdown myth – a lie wrapped in panic, cloaked in science. And we complied in our homes, in our hospitals, in silence. But history will ask: was it necessary? Or was it, in the end, a fight against reason itself?

We don’t need to wait for history to judge, because a central part of the pernicious lockdown myth – that an unprecedented response was justified due to the unprecedented uncertainty of an invisible threat, that biodefense experts such as Sir Jeremy Farrar and Dr Richard Hatchett told us with all the sincerity they could muster, was certainly deadly – can be easily busted.

The myth that lockdowns were unprecedented before 2020 and that the practice began when Wuhan was imprisoned on the eve of CEPI’s announcement at Davos 2020 that Moderna had a newfangled vaccine ready to go into Phase 1 trials is just that: a myth. There is a precedent, and a highly instructive one at that.

The first lockdown occurred in April and May of 2009 in Mexico. That it took place little more than a decade before the Covid lockdowns makes it all the more remarkable that it has been erased from collective memory. Like the lockdowns of 2020, it was a shakedown and the fingerprints of one person, the aforementioned Dr Hatchett, are all over it. He was not a public figure in 2009 but he was a key figure advising the White House directly from his pulpit as the Director for Medical Preparedness Policy on the US National Security Council (NSC).

On April 17, 2009, the final day of President Obama’s visit to Mexico, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an advisory after swine flu (H1N1) was detected in two Mexican-American children in California. After showing flu-like symptoms, they’d had nasal-pharyngeal swabs taken as part of a surveillance study. Neither had severe illness and both recovered but the CDC sounded the alarm anyway, saying the children had no known direct contact with pigs.

The detected viruses, said the CDC, showed resistance to existing antivirals so they were testing two new ones, GSK’s Relenza (zanamivir) and Tamiflu (oseltamivir), which was developed by Gilead Sciences, a company linked to President G W Bush’s former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and licensed to the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, to see if either of those might work should the H1N1 virus start spreading in humans. 

As it was required to under the amended International Health Regulations 2005, the Mexican government reported cases of patients with severe respiratory disease to the WHO in early April and dutifully sent patient samples from these purportedly ‘unusual pneumonia cases’ to Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, one of the WHO Collaborating Centres for Influenza. On April 23, the NML reported detecting H1N1 swine flu. The Mexican government, which was now reporting 16 deaths from swine flu, swiftly ordered schools and businesses in Mexico City, the sprawling and densely populated capital, to close on April 24 due to the public health emergency. 

As Leslie Bassett, the deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Mexico City in 2009, said: ‘Waking up to a pandemic is like walking toward a beautiful garden and hitting a plate glass door. Without any warning, the expectations you never questioned are violently disrupted. Your brain reels, unable to process the brutal warping of reality. The British call this “gobsmacked.” A health crisis professional might describe this as the prelude to a pandemic response.’  

A day later, the New York Times reported that the World Health Organization (WHO) was considering raising the swine flu pandemic alert level (based on the hurricane scale to easily equate it to natural disasters) from 3 to 4. 

The New York Times soon stoked the embers of concern, reporting on April 26 that Felipe R. Solís Olguín, the Director of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology who showed President Obama around during his visit had died on April 23 with ‘flu-like symptoms’. The following day the White House issued a statement from the Mexican Embassy saying Mr Solis died from a pre-existing condition, not from swine flu. 

Meanwhile the real manoeuvres were happening in Washington, as Dr Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, helpfully explained in an interview with his alma mater, Vanderbilt University: ‘During the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, we had a fair amount of access to President Obama and good access to his senior staff. President Obama had the utmost respect for government scientists and institutions like the CDC and NIH and BARDA.

He was also willing to learn from history. At one point, he invited the surviving members of the team that had led the 1976 swine flu response to the White House and listened intently as they offered guidance and counsel based on their experiences and the mistakes they had made.’ On April 27, the US declared swine flu to be a national health emergency. The response was under the overall co-ordination of the US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano who released 12 million doses of Tamiflu from the national stockpile and said the US would begin making a new vaccine.  A Congressional research report from August 2009 says they also ‘enabled waivers of liability and a compensation program in the event that a vaccination program is carried out.’ 

The World Bank, led during the 2008-2009 global economic crisis by Robert Zoellick, another veteran of the G W Bush White House, awarded Mexico $205 million in fast-tracked funding. Twenty-five million dollars was to be spent on new drugs and related supplies, and $180 milion, which fell under a ‘Global Facility for Avian Influenza,’ was ‘to help the Government of Mexico finance the full range of strategic, epidemiologic, regulatory, institutional, and operational activities needed for an effective response.’ 

‘We’re extremely grateful for the prompt response by the World Bank – such promptness is always very, very appreciated,’ said Augustin Carstens, Mexico’s Finance Minister. ‘But beyond resources, what is also important is all the experience that the World Bank has accumulated in precisely having assisted other countries in this type of situation.’

With Representative Maxine Waters saying the next day that closing the US-Mexico border remained an option, the Mexican government soon extended the Mexico City lockdown into a national one that lasted until May 6, 2009, costing the Mexican economy $2.2 billion.

The problem the 2009 swine flu emergency solved was largely a US domestic one – how to extract additional funding for biodefense from Congress.

On the day Mexico’s national shutdown began, President Obama issued a statement saying: ‘I’ve requested an immediate $1.5 billion in emergency funding from Congress to support our ability to monitor and track this virus and to build our supply of antiviral drugs and other equipment, and we will also ensure that those materials get to where they need to be as quickly as possible.’

In the end, in the middle of a global economic crisis caused by the US subprime mortgage crisis, Congress released $9 billion in ‘emergency supplemental needs funding’ for the ‘Unanticipated Needs for Influenza’ account. Of this, a little over $2 billion was spent on GSK’s Pandemrix vaccine and another vaccine made by Novartis for the CDC-run vaccination campaign. An additional $1.3 billion was spent stockpiling Tamiflu and other antivirals.

‘I worked in the White House in 2009 and helped lead the response to the last pandemic,’ said Dr Hatchett. ‘We spent billions of dollars developing vaccines. We had hopes to have 100 million devices available by the beginning of October. By the end of October, we only had 30 million doses available. Ultimately we vaccinated 80 million people in the United States at the cost of billions of dollars. CDC later went back and estimated the total number of cases in the United States – estimated it prevented 1 million cases . . . and fewer than 300 deaths were averted through the vaccination program in 2009 where vaccine was delivered too late.’

Little wonder then that lockdowns were used to overcome the initial reluctance of governments to fund Dr Hatchett’s rapid response vaccines in 2020. On March 6, CEPI thanked the UK government for adding £20 million to its coffers for Covid-19 vaccine development, though it was a meagre 0.16 per cent contribution to the $2 billion pot Hatchett wanted.

Hatchett said: ‘It is increasingly clear that containment measures for COVID-19 can only slow down its spread and the virus is now entering a stage of unprecedented threat in terms of its global impact. While we heartily support the range of public health measures that governments are putting in place to protect their populations, it is critical that we also invest in the development of a vaccine that will prevent people from getting sick in the first place.

‘Working as part of the global response, CEPI has committed $100 million of its own funds and moved with unprecedented speed to initiate a programme of vaccine development with the goal of having vaccine candidates in early stage clinical trials in as little as 16 weeks. However, these funds will be fully allocated by the end of March and without immediate additional financial contributions the vaccine programmes we have begun will not be able to progress and ultimately will not deliver the vaccines that the world needs.”

When Dr Hatchett appeared on Channel 4 News later that day he said: ‘I’ve been working on epidemic preparedness for about twenty years. Completely dispassionately, without elevating the temperature or speaking hyperbolically, this is the most frightening disease I’ve ever encountered in my career, that includes Ebola, it includes MERS, it includes SARS, and it’s frightening because of the combination of infectiousness and a lethality that is, that appears to be many-fold higher than flu.’

The truth is that the lesson he applied was the one he learned in 2009 – lockdowns work. The day after the UK lockdown was announced, the UK government increased its funding award to CEPI to £240 million. Other governments followed suit.

It’s time that the 2009 swine flu shakedown comes out of the memory hole it’s currently in for no other reason than it might help stop the experts, such as some of the ones who appeared at last week’s Scottish Government’s Covid Inquiry, from nauseatingly excusing the 2020 lockdowns while calling for preparations for the uncritically accepted ‘inevitable next pandemic.’

Republished from The Conservative Woman

The Forgotten Dry Run for Lockdown
by Paula Jardine at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society