Covid-19 as a structural deep event: Cutting to the chase on perpetrators and motives

Abstract

It is increasingly clear that the so-called Covid-19 pandemic was a staged event, designed to enable profound changes desired by powerful forces at the expense of majority populations around the world. However, unlike previous episodes that have been interpreted as structural deep events (SDEs), the Covid-19 ‘operation’ lacks a settled account of the perpetrators and their motives. This paper seeks to address this gap by reviewing and assessing the range of claims with a significant presence in the published and web literature. It argues that only one hypothesis passes basic tests of plausibility and explanatory parsimony. This sees the Covid episode as a ‘live-fire exercise’ led by Western military and security forces to enable the uptake of mRNA-based products, conceived as highly promising, as well as privately profitable, bio-terror counter-measures. Even this version of events remains to be completely settled, however, in that it needs to accommodate statistical data that are incompatible with usually accepted assumptions about how SARS-CoV-2 showed up where it did.

1. Introduction

The Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ episode has all the hallmarks of a structural deep event (SDE) as defined by Peter Dale Scott (2017) and developed conceptually by Aaron Good (2022). In other words, as argued by Robinson and Ryan (2024), it bears comparison with such historically consequential criminal undertakings as the murder of President Kennedy in 1963 (Douglass, 2008; Lane, 2012) and the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11^th 2001 (Griffin, 2004; Henshall, 2007; Ryan, 2013; MacQueen, 2014).

In the Kennedy and 9/11 cases, several things have been established beyond reasonable doubt. To anyone giving the matter serious attention, it is clear that on both occasions, powerful actors and their followers in the US deep state instigated events that turned the course of history in new directions. While not all of the details are ever likely to be known, identifiable people and organizations have been shown to have had powerful motives for doing what they did, as well as means and opportunity. In both instances, the trigger event was believed necessary by the perpetrators in the sense that policy actions they strongly desired could not have been implemented without it. Clinching the matter, the official interpretations of the episode put out to obscure the truth have been comprehensively debunked.

By comparison with the JFK killing and 9/11, the events surrounding the pandemic declaration of 2020 are the subject of a large but somewhat incoherent body of evidence-based analysis and debate. Certain basic claims contrasting with the official narratives are fully established. There is wide agreement that the policies followed in response to the pandemic declaration – the extended lockdowns and fast-tracked vaccination campaigns – caused massive medical, social and economic harms (Chossudovsky, 2022; Craig, 2023; Green and Fazi, 2023). This becomes clearer as each year passes, with both accumulating anecdotal reports and studies (Dowd, 2022; HART Group, 2023; Kory and Pfeiffer, 2023; McCarthy, 2023; Bergman, 2025b) and incontrovertible statistical evidence on worldwide patterns of excess mortality (Rancourt, 2023; Mostert et al., 2024; Rancourt et al., 2024; Kirsch, 2025b, 2025a; Rancourt et al., 2025; Lerman, 2025c). The harm was done by the policies, not by any observable impacts of the virus officially named SARS-CoV-2 (Unbekoming, 2025).

There is a similar level of consensus about other features of the episode that are suggestive of an SDE interpretation. The way the lockdown-until-vaccine policies were adopted at high speed and disseminated across the world on the basis of scant and/or manufactured evidence is strongly reminiscent of the US Government’s behaviour in 1963 and 2001 (Robinson and Ryan, 2024: 29-31; see also Lerman, 2024a: Part 2). How these choices were supported with tendentious data analysis and manipulation of science (Robinson and Ryan, 2024: 31-33; see also Breggin and Breggin, 2021; Malone, 2022; Craig, 2023; Huber, 2023; Jefferson et al., 2023; Fenton and Neil, 2024) and then protected from rational criticism with fear-inducing propaganda and media censorship (Robinson and Ryan, 2024: 33-35; see also Dodsworth, 2021; Kingsley et al., 2023) similarly supports the view that the pandemic declaration was an SDE. Finally, the high-level table-top training exercises undertaken in the few months preceding the Covid-19 episode are strongly suggestive that the event was not merely planned for but, in some sense, actually planned (Robinson and Ryan, 2024: 35-37; see also Mercola and Cummins, 2021; Kheriaty, 2022; Kennedy, 2023b: Ch 1).

Less clear and agreed, at this point, are precisely which actors instigated the episode, their motives and how exactly they were able to bring it about. The literature and ongoing internet debate is not short of claims about responsible parties and their motives, often by simple inference from the principle ‘cui bono?’ – in other words, anyone who benefited from what happened is considered a suspect. Although initially appealing, and often buttressed by perfectly justified wider concerns about the state of the world, not all such claims pass simple tests of plausibility.

As suggested by the JFK and 9/11 precedents, direct evidence of culpability of the ‘smoking gun’ type may not be obtainable. If that is so, the question is whether it is possible to identify a definite set of actors who qualify as likely perpetrators on at least two of the classic investigative avenues: motive, means and opportunity. As to motive, can we point to an unusually powerful driver such as the perpetrators’ perceiving a vital need to overcome a blockage to their preferred policy line? As to means, were those suspects equipped with the technical capabilities and institutional instruments needed to put into effect the extraordinary measures that have been documented by critics of the Covid-19 ‘operation’.

As it happens, in the case of the Covid-19 SDE, we do have a significant amount of direct evidence as to the perpetrators’ identity. However, some typical claims rely on indirect reasoning, in which case assessment of means and motive is some help in structuring the investigation. A second set of evaluative criteria that seems applicable concerns explanatory parsimony. Following the indications of Occam’s Razor, explanatory theories are to be preferred that account for the facts with appeal to the smallest number of assumptions.

This paper undertakes a critical review of the Covid-19 literature in so far as it relates to alleged perpetrators and their motives. It proceeds by setting out six distinct sets of claims, based on representative literature, and then evaluating them for prima facie plausibility and explanatory parsimony. In doing so, it confronts a couple of significant difficulties.

To begin with, it is often unclear what exactly is being claimed. The best early study of the Covid-19 episode (Green and Fazi, 2023 – first edn. 2021) distinguished rigorously between documenting effects and offering explanations, reserving its judgement on the latter. Such discipline is unusual. Most studies that appear at first sight to be about the origins of the Covid-19 episode are, on closer reading, mainly devoted the opportunities the ‘pandemic’ created for the promotion of anti-democratic, illiberal or otherwise harmful policy agendas. Even so, the authors often fail to resist insinuations about causation. We are therefore obliged to deal with mere hints, rather than carefully crafted propositions.

Another difficulty is that those contributions that do identify perpetrators seldom restrict themselves to a single explanatory hypothesis. The claims about responsibility come in bundles. Different sets of actors with diverse motives are jointly accused. For example, the otherwise brilliant book by Kees van der Pijl (2022 – first edn. 2021) nominates no less than four sets of motives and perpetrators under an umbrella thesis about ‘the ruling oligarchy’ and its need to ‘keep the global population in check’.[1] I believe such portmanteau interpretations of the Covid-19 experience must be unbundled and stripped down to their essentials so that each individual claim can be subjected to critical scrutiny on its merits

Table 1 attempts an initial unbundling. In this tidied-up form, each claim or set of claims is distinguished by a particular type of alleged motive, an associated dimension of the Covid-19 policy response and a nominated perpetrator or set of perpetrators.

Table 1: Six sets of claims

	Motive	Policy dimension	Actor(s)
1	Stabilizing the financial system, permitting further concentration of capital	Engineering of quasi-recession conditions	Big financial institutions and big capital
2	Transfer of authority on ‘global’ issues from national to international organizations	Creation of a panic that leads nations voluntarily to cede authority to supra-national bodies	UN agencies and globalist elites clustering around the World Economic Forum (WEF) and similar
3	More effective technocratic policies, with full exploitation of digital innovations	Lockdowns normalizing restrictions on citizen freedoms + ‘vaccine passports’	Global elites with technocratic ‘planning’ mind-sets around WEF and similar
4	Reduction of population/population growth	Excess deaths due to Covid-19 policy response, including ‘vaccines’	Millionaire foundations/civil-society deep actors
5	Creation of a market for mRNA and other novel pharmaceuticals	Panic creation and extended lockdowns inducing acceptance of dangerous injectables	Pharmaceutical firms and investors, private and public
6	Normalization of lockdown-until-vaccine as acceptable bio-terror response	Deep-state takeover, completing the removal of former protections to public-health decision-making	US and allied bio-security deep state/Global Biodefense Public-Private Partnership

The remainder of the paper summarizes the central ideas behind each of these types of claims with reference to major sources, and suggests an evaluation in terms of the following criteria:

Motive: Was the attributed motive both a) genuinely held and coherent and b) powerful enough to drive exceptionally consequential actions?

Means: Were the nominated actors themselves equipped to undertake the exceptional measures that constitute the Covid-19 episode?

Parsimony: How large are the assumptions required for this claim to work as an explanation of the Covid-19 SDE?

Section 2 conducts an evaluation of Claims 1-5, concluding that, with the partial exception of Claim 5, the evidence as to motive and means does not stack up, or does so only at the price of large and problematic assumptions about the world. Section 3 sets out the case for Claim 6, beginning with the accumulating direct evidence and proceeding to means and motive.  Section 4 considers the possible need to adjust Claim 6 in the light of the latest thinking on the nature of the Covid-19 deception. Section 5 concludes.

2. Clearing the ground: five claims

There is no doubt that the public policies pursued during the Covid-19 ‘emergency’ had the effect of strengthening several of the most disturbing features of capitalism and the global order in the 21^st century. Already worsening inequalities of income, wealth, education and power deteriorated further under lockdown policies. The balance between democratic and technocratic decision-making, and between nation-states and supranational authorities, tipped further in favour of the latter, with the ‘pandemic’ as the justification.  Pharmaceutical and information-technology investors made huge fortunes with minimal justification, while the potential for the use of big data to control rather than liberate was illustrated as never before.

These matters – both the long-term tendencies and their acceleration from 2020 – are of fully justified concern. Nothing that follows suggests otherwise. But we should not be led by our legitimate worries about national and global trends of change into supporting weakly evidenced causal propositions about the particular constellation of events that concerns us, the Covid-19 episode.

Claim 1: Engineering economic chaos in the interests of big finance?

The first distinct claim to be considered focuses on the dominant financial sector of the capitalist class, recapturing one of the classic concerns of social critics on the Left. While the political Left has on the whole sided with the mainstream official view of the pandemic response, some writers on Covid-19 are of the sort that take pride in being called old Marxists. Among them, it seems natural to reach for explanations of the episode that invoke an economic imperative relating to the stability of the world capitalist system.

One example is Michel Chossudovsky’s chapter entitled ‘Engineered Economic Depression’. This boldly asserts: ‘The instructions came from above, from Wall Street, the World Economic Forum, and the billionaire foundations’.  The suggested motive is to cause chaos in the real economy using the excuse of a health emergency, thereby enabling the financial establishment to appropriate assets from bankrupted companies and from the state (via debt-funded public spending) (Chossudovsky, 2022: 50-51). Chossudovsky’s reasons for including the WEF and foundations in this broadside have to do with matters other than finance that will be discussed in later sections. Simplifying therefore, the claim to be evaluated here is that big finance was a leading perpetrator of the Covid-19 crime and was motivated by the desire to create quasi-recession conditions which would yield it fresh sources of profit.

An equally economistic interpretation, originally fielded by Critical Theorist Fabio Vighi (2021), has been elaborated in several places by Simon Elmer (2022a, 2022b). According to these authors, the Covid-19 lockdowns were nothing to do with a virus but instead a desperate measure to address the ‘insurmountable structural impasse’ encountered by 21^st century capitalism. ‘Lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing’ (Vighi, 2021: 3; Elmer, 2022a: 71). The evidence cited is a short-lived spike in interest rates on the ‘repo market’ in New York in September 2019, in response to which the Federal Reserve temporarily stopped its reversal of the Quantitative Easing (QE) of the years 2008-14 and injected substantial fresh liquidity into the banking system. To accommodate this change of stance by the monetary authorities, the argument continues, ‘the real economy had to be shut down’ (Elmer, 2022a: 71; 2022b: 5). Why? To avoid the risk of runaway inflation. In other words, as in Chossudovsky’s hypothesis, the Covid-19 lockdown was a quasi-recession. In this version, the purpose was to limit inflation.

These two examples do not exhaust the field of speculations around macroeconomic factors in the Covid-19 episode. For example, van der Pijl, whose main focus is on other matters, includes impending financial collapse and the Marxist doctrine on the role of recessions in capitalist renewal in his explanatory mix (2022: 103-106). This is echoed by David A. Hughes (2024a: 10-12), who includes an ‘acute crisis of capitalism in 2019’ as one of three proximate triggers of the Covid-19 operation, citing a variant of the argument about the Fed and QE. Michael Bryant (2023: 2, 3) adds a fresh dimension, suggesting that the Covid hysteria was required to distract attention from the Fed’s operations which, otherwise, would have generated market panic and ‘inevitable social disorder’. This apart, the arguments offered do not add significantly to those previously cited.

In assessing these claims, we may begin with motive. Are the claimed motives coherent and powerful? I would argue that the motive adduced by Chossudovsky is implausible for being insufficiently powerful. Even assuming that big finance invariably seeks to make profits, it is hard to see any sense in which it was blocked from doing so prior to 2020 because of an insufficiency of takeover opportunities or a lack of debt-financed public spending. Both have been in generous supply in the years since the 2008 crash.

The Vighi/Elmer claim as to motive is not coherent. Neither the September 2019 repo spike[2] nor the Federal Reserve’s response look, on the face of it, like critical systemic events, still less markers of an ‘existential crisis’ (Bryant). The authors’ arguments that give them that appearance seem to stem from a misreading of two sources on which they largely rely. These are working papers, both published in August 2019, by staff of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the BlackRock Investment Institute respectively (De Fiore and Tristani, 2019; Bartsch et al., 2019).

A phrase in the abstract of the first paper calls for ‘unconventional measures [that] insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions’. The second paper argues for ‘unprecedented policies’ of a similar kind but warns that these need to be accompanied by ‘unprecedented coordination’ to mitigate the potential risk of uncontrolled fiscal spending. In the Vighi/Elmer interpretation, these suggestions are tantamount to an admission by global financial experts that the hyperinflation likely to result from the credit expansion needed to save the financial system might require such abnormal follow-up measures as locking down the real economy. However, that is not what the cited papers say or imply.

Both papers are centrally concerned with the challenge of re-igniting economic growth and avoiding ‘the next downturn’ in a period (now past of course) when both ultra-low central-bank interest rates and traditional forms of fiscal stimulus seem to have reached the limits of their effectiveness. They explore new ways of getting credit directly into the hands of public and private sector spenders, by-passing the commercial banks, which are seen as hamstrung by their high post-2008 monitoring costs and the consequent wide spreads between their deposit and lending rates. The phrase insulating the real economy, adopted in quotation marks by Elmer (2022b: 5) in connection with the assumed inflationary danger, is used by the BIS authors exclusively in connection with protecting growth in the real economy from any further deterioration in the efficiency of the financial system. The BlackRock paper does have concerns about the inflationary potential of the credit policy it calls ‘going direct’, particularly in the case where it is governments that get the additional spending power. It does, therefore, call for additional precautions, but these involve nothing more sinister than a closer coordination of fiscal and monetary policy. In short, the cited papers do not support the notion that in 2019, ahead of the Covid scare, the world economy was on the verge of an outbreak of hyperinflation that could only be averted by a general lockdown.

That leaves whether big finance and the Fed had means and opportunity. It may be claimed that the exact specification of actors and actions is redundant once a systemic need has been identified. But that would be to commit one of the classic fallacies associated with the ‘functionalist’ tradition in social science. As pointed out long ago (Demerath and Peterson, 1967: Ch 6; Giddens, 1976, 1981; Elster, 1982, 1986) invoking ‘needs’ of this sort is legitimately explanatory only if backed by a causal story involving the behaviours of specifiable actors. It is only necessary to call for that kind of detail for ‘economic’ accounts of the Covid-19 episode to collapse. None of the organizations suggested by the phrase ‘Wall Street’ had the power to declare a pandemic, impose lockdowns or order new vaccines. No evidence has been produced to suggest that any of them had a direct line to those who nominally or really did have that power. Thus, on all counts the engineering of a quasi-recession by finance capital lacks a solid evidence base.

Claim 2: A power-grab by globalist elites?

It may be noticed that in Table 1 the World Economic Forum (WEF), the organization that hosts famous international meetings at Davos in Switzerland, appears twice in the right-hand column. This reflects the fact that distinct claims about Covid-19 are often bundled together with the WEF as the common factor on account of its role as an organizer and disseminator of the beliefs of a certain kind of international elite. On the libertarian Right of politics, everyone loves to hate the WEF, for reasons that are mostly sound in the present writer’s view. However, our purposes require us to unbundle claims and deal with them in a focused way.

This is not easily done, as several things have conspired to make it appear that the Covid-19 episode was all about the WEF and its agenda. Some years before 2020, the WEF’s founder Klaus Schwab, picked up a neat metaphor from the world of computing – the Great Reset. On the morrow of the pandemic declaration, he quickly produced a book with this phrase in its title (Schwab and Malleret, 2020). The book is a fairly platitudinous review of current international issues and debates – hardly a manifesto for radical change – but, given the timing, the title was provocative. It prompted critics of the WEF to issue a series of polemical counter-blasts, using variants of the same wording, seeming to accept that the ‘pandemic’ was indeed a means of imposing a ‘reset’ on the world.

For example, the prominent influencer Alex Jones (2022) argued that the appearance of Covid-19 was, if not a deliberate act, then taken as an opportunity to advance the WEF’s long-cherished plans for global governance. Simon Elmer (2022a: 74-75) argued that huge strides in the Great Reset were completed under the ‘cover’ of the Covid lockdowns. In Jacob Nordangård’s account (2024: vii-viii), the pandemic was the perfect ‘trigger event’ for a ‘global coup’ to implement a Great Reset centred on the requirements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as understood by Schwab. For Michael Rectenwald, the Covid crisis provided Schwab with a ‘pretext’ for enacting the Great Reset. Or, more strongly, Covid-19 was ‘staged by global elites centered around the WEF as an alibi for initiating the Great Reset’ (2023: 22, 40; emphasis added). With the exception of the last, these formulations stop short of accusing the WEF of having itself perpetrated the Covid-era policies, but the followers of these authors on the internet are not always so reserved, and others are less cautious, so the matter calls for closer attention.

Both supporters and critics would probably agree that the advocacy out of Davos boils down to three main themes:

1. The superiority of ‘stakeholder capitalism’, a system where firms are held accountable not just to their shareholders but in terms of their performance on a range of Economic, Social and Governance (ESG) or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) measures;
2. The urgent need for more effective global governance, meaning a greater role for international and multilateral organizations in addressing pressing world challenges, including the environment/climate change, advancing the liberal trade regime and public health;
3. The obvious desirability of exploiting to the maximum the potentialities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, meaning the application of digital technologies in areas such as e-commerce, big data-processing for planning, identity cards and central bank operations (including digital currencies).

I propose that, in assessing the place of the WEF in an account of Covid-19 perpetrators and motives, these themes should be addressed individually.

Despite Elmer’s suggestions (2022a: 109-121), the claim that the Covid-19 episode was prompted by a frustrated desire to implement stakeholder capitalism/ESG/DEI seems particularly weak, because the timings are all wrong.  Having been picked up very widely in the wake of the 2008 shock, ‘woke’ ideas and business practices were old news by 2019. As explained by Ramaswamy (2021), ESG/DEI rating was by this time firmly established across the corporate world. While DEI in the shape of Black Lives Matter received something of a boost under the extraordinary conditions of early 2020, what Ramaswamy calls the ESG bubble (2021: Ch 5) was already at bursting point by then. On these grounds, it is not even clear that advances for the stakeholder capitalism agenda was one of the effects of the Covid-19 policies. As for providing a powerful motive, sufficient to justify an action as extreme as staging a pandemic, overcoming resistance to ESG/DEI will not do. That battle had already been well and truly won.

The other two ‘Davos’ strands are more promising and call for fuller discussion. They are addressed here and in the next section.

That Covid-19 was the excuse for a power grab by international bodies is another theme developed by Elmer (2022a: 7-14). While the ‘pandemic’ response did much harm to regular health programmes around the world, including those supported by United Nations (UN) bodies (Green, 2023; Green and Fazi, 2023: 261-272), Covid-19 was undoubtedly a winner from the perspective of the prestige, power and funding of the World Health Organization (WHO). The ‘pandemic’ focused fresh attention on the functions and prerogatives of the WHO and attracted additional funding to it, notably generous from the German government (Kogon, 2024a, 2024b). Without Covid-19, the ongoing discussions geared to enhancing the powers it exercises under the International Health Regulations (Roguski, 2025) would likely not have been started. Was the whole affair, then, set up to move forward the globalist agenda, understood as increasing the role of UN bodies – and thereby reducing the powers of national governments – in addressing major challenges?

This would not be without precedent. UN agencies and their friends in places like Davos have an impressive track record of exploiting putative global crises to arrogate science-steering and policy-making functions to themselves. An extensive literature (led by Booker, 2009: Ch 1-2; Booker, 2018: 6-8) has recorded that the global warming story, and within it the influential role now played by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), exemplifies a globalist power-grab of this sort. The details of this story are worth recalling.

Back in the 1980s, the UN Environmental Programme and its first director, Maurice Strong, needed a crisis. UNEP was an underfunded, low-prestige, member of the UN system. A previous attempt to attract funding by constructing an elaborate myth about desertification as an urgent global problem requiring coordinated solutions (Thomas and Middleton, 1994) had not succeeded. ‘Global warming’ met the need spectacularly. Moreover, the details provided by Booker and other historians of the matter provide plenty of evidence to convict Strong and his friends as perpetrators of fraud around human-induced warming. They had the means and the opportunity, and they visibly took advantage of them, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and at every influential international gathering since.

This precedent, however, suggests several weaknesses in the hypothesis that the Covid-19 episode was brought about in order to permit the capture of new authority and resources by the WHO. Unlike UNEP, the WHO in the 2010s was not an obscure and underfunded agency, nor were its pretensions to be the world’s most important shaper of health policies blocked in any significant way.

Moving to means and opportunity, the WHO obviously had unrivalled power to disseminate and effectively to enforce the lockdown-until-vaccine policies, and it visibly used that power, notably to extend the approach to most of the developing world. But did it, or the WEF on its behalf, originate the policies it was disseminating?

Helping to put the WEF/WHO partnership in the frame are several much touted facts: that the WEF was one of the sponsors of the notorious table-top Event 201 in 2019; that its annual meeting in Davos in January 2020 was the venue selected by Moderna and the sponsors of the new mRNA technology to announce to the world the huge potential of their invention (Chossudovsky, 2022: Ch VIII); and that the official declaration of the pandemic by the WHO on 11 March followed close on the heels of a meeting in Davos attended by the organization’s head (ibid.: 16). However, at least two cautions are needed before drawing strong conclusions from this sequence of events.

First, providing an attractive echo-chamber for corporate publicity is not the same as being an executive actor taking decisions. Second, in the more general sequence of events that has come to be documented in recent years, the WHO’s decisions and the deliberations at Davos appear relatively late, after key policy shifts had been made to happen thanks to powers of a different kind in the USA.[3] In this light, if Covid-19 amounted to a victory for the globalists, it may have been an unearned victory, a reward for performing to a script written by others.

Claim 3: A Trojan horse for technocratic control/digital surveillance?

Picking up the third Davos theme, were the perpetrators of the Covid-19 operation global elites who finally lost their patience with what they may have viewed as mere ‘Luddite’ resistance to Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies? Schwab certainly saw the pandemic as a welcome ‘catalyst’ for accelerating digital transformation over libertarian reservations (Schwab and Malleret, 2020: 153). In Alex Jones’ view – varying the metaphor – the Covid-19 policy response was a ‘Trojan horse’ for the normalization of digital surveillance systems (2022: 76, 148). Jones’ language clearly implied a perpetrator role for Great Reset activists. Other authors (e.g., Elmer, 2022a; van der Pijl, 2022; Hughes, 2024a) go further, both in their characterization of the rise of digital technocracy as no less than creeping fascism, and in seeing the Covid-19 operation as driven by forces motivated to accelerate this trend.

For certain, the potentials, for good and bad, of digital technologies were revealed as never before during the Covid-19 years. E-commerce and electronic conferencing prospered greatly thanks to the lockdowns. Algorithm-based propaganda and censorship on internet platforms took off, extending to public health dissidents what had previously been applied most egregiously to climate change ‘deniers’. Digital identity initiatives took a significant step forward through the introduction of ‘vaccine passports’ or their equivalent in several countries. This has been viewed as the first effective trial run of the comprehensive digital identity system that some have advocated, at Davos among other places, for some years. Arguably, it took a pandemic declaration to allow this to overcome the resistance, and that this battle having been won, the road is now open to the introduction of central bank digital currencies, which – it is plausibly argued – have even more worrying surveillance and control implications.

Stated in these, mostly non-alarmist, terms, then, there is something in the digital surveillance line of analysis. One might contest whether, for example, the issues around the place of identity cards in a liberal-democratic state is as one-dimensional as some authors maintain. But the matter that concerns us is not that but, strictly, who initiated the Covid-19 episode and why. In this regard, the question is whether those ideologically disposed to go full speed down the mass surveillance route were so frustrated as to take on the challenging task of fabricating a global crisis, whether they had the necessary power and, if so, whether there is any evidence they actually took corresponding actions.

On motivation, van der Pijl (2022) aims to convince his readers that the Western world’s ruling oligarchy was so alarmed at the scale of popular protests of various kinds during the years following the 2008 financial meltdown that it felt compelled to instigate the Covid-19 lockdowns, and the associated fear-based information war, as a way of restoring order and discipline. Not only had the world population been growing at a scary rate but ‘since 2008, humanity has also become restless, on a scale unlike anything seen before. Strikes, riots, and anti-government demonstrations have broken existing records in every category during this period … Of all the factors at work in the Covid crisis, [this] threat of an uncontrollable world population is the most fundamental’ (2022: 34).

While hesitating, like others, between claiming the Covid crisis has been either ‘seized upon’ or ‘actually unleashed’ by the nominated perpetrator (the ruling oligarchy), van del Pijl essays several alternate lines of explanation, including the one we shall be exploring as Claim 6. Any one of these, were they to prove robust, would be sufficient to explain much of the actual unleashing that went on. However, he insists on the primacy of his main claim about the disciplining of the world’s population by the ruling oligarchy, so we must focus on that.

The trouble with this approach is that it works as an explanatory hypothesis only if we accept two very large assumptions. One is that the extraordinarily diverse panorama of forms of popular protest or uprising that are a feature of the 21^st century world – van del Pijl highlights the 2019 anti-Modi protests in India, student riots in Chile and gilets jaunes movement in France – are reflections of the same cause[4] and are threatening to established orders in the same way. The other is that the ‘oligarchy’ itself is a coherent group, with the capacity to act in its perceived common interest, like a modern equivalent of the ‘bourgeoisie’ of Karl Marx’s political writings. An explanatory hypothesis about Covid-19 that requires two such large, and debatable, assumptions is, according to the stricture of Occam’s Razor, a poor hypothesis.

The same objection applies to the work of Hughes (2024a, 2024b), who paints a picture with similarly bold brush strokes, inviting the reader to share some big assumptions about the way the world works. In this version, the Covid-19 operation was the first step in a ‘controlled demolition of liberal democracy and the institution of global technocracy – a novel, biodigital form of totalitarianism that threatens to lead to the irreversible enslavement of humanity’ (2024a: 1). This ‘first step’ was triggered by the alarm in the ‘numerically tiny transnational ruling class’ prompted in 2019 by 1) the same worldwide social protests cited by van de Pijl, 2) the coincidental ‘crisis in the international monetary and financial system’ invoked by Chossudovsky and others and 3) a further ‘crisis’ – that of the Western propaganda system. This final trigger was the growing recognition by the powers that be that the internet might be turning into a powerful force for democracy and a threat to the long-established modalities of official propaganda (2024a: 2, 10-15).

Again, the plausibility of this account of the causation of the Covid-19 episode is weakened by the scale of the assumptions it requires us to make. Hughes’ governing assumption is not timid: ‘Globally, the ruling classes have no choice but to join forces and push for a world state/global dictatorship, while the rest of humanity has no choice but worldwide social revolution if it wishes to avoid permanent subjugation and enslavement’ (2024a: 8). Those looking for a parsimonious theory about the Covid-19 episode may reasonably reject one that depends on such a radical claim.

The other thing both van der Pijl’s and Hughes’ hypotheses lack is a description of how the ruling elite might have obtained the power to initiate the key events that upturned the world in March 2020 and any direct evidence that they did. Neither of these authors nor Elmer is able to present substantial evidence of global oligarchs or world-rulers-with-technocratic-mindsets actually doing anything to bring about the Covid-19 SDE. We shall see later that in 2020 there were actors who, without being either ideologically driven Davos types or members of the transnational ruling class, were promotors of digital surveillance, among other illiberal measures. Some of these demonstrably were perpetrators of the Covid-19 fraud, as indeed van der Pijl helps to show (2022: Ch 4-5, esp. 194ff). However, this does not help the thesis on which these authors have elected to centre their Covid-19 analysis.

Their assumption may be, of course, that public officials and other agents with executive power did what they did on behalf of the ruling classes.  Once again, however, this raises a concern about the assumptions we are required to accept. The thesis that the groups that run the state are typically mere servants of those that dominate the economy is not only a large assumption. It is also one that has been very unfashionable among historians and social scientists for decades.

As argued in landmark works by Fred Block (1977, 1980) and Theda Skocpol (1979, 1985), ‘ruling’ (meaning economically dominant) classes generally lack the capacity to govern, while state office-holders typically concern themselves with the interests of the state. For tax reasons among others, state managers pursue in normal time policies that facilitate capital accumulation. Yet, many major revolutions and other key events in world history are traceable to decisions by the holders of state power deliberately to override the interests of the dominant economic groups. Even within Marxist analytical tradition, the old ‘class reductionist’ approach to political analysis has been thoroughly critiqued, leading to a more state-centred account of key events like the French Revolution (Elster, 1985: Ch 7; Comninel, 1987).

It would be strange and regrettable if we were unable to make sense of the Covid-19 episode without reverting to a very outmoded concept of the nexus between economic dominance and state power. As we shall see in Section 3, moreover, we hardly need to do so. There we shall consider literature on how those in charge of critical parts of the state in the US and elsewhere had their own reasons for mounting an operation that would have the effect of enriching the rich and harming the world.

Claim 4: Depopulating the planet?

One of the commonest claims concerning the Covid-19 episode is that it was all about population policy, or in the words of Robert Malone, ‘depopulating the world’ (Malone, 2023).  In Malone’s contributions (2022, 2023) – which are focused on the harmful effects of the mRNA technology – the principal grounds for making the link to population control is the observation that the US national security establishment has been concerned about the pace of global population growth since at least 1974, the year of the Kissinger Report on the subject. That report committed USAID and the CIA to actively supporting fertility decline through birth control programmes across the world, leading to the suspicion this is also what Covid-19 interventions were about.

Other analysts draw attention to the long history of panics around the sustainability of future population numbers and estimated resource availability on a global scale. Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and the Club of Rome reports of 1972 and 1992 are generally seen as particular landmarks (e.g. Rectenwald, 2023: Ch 8-9). Other authors cite the succession of conferences and reports involving members of the Rockefeller family as evidence of an enduring concern in the upper reaches of the US policy system (Nordangård, 2024: 24-25). Almost always (e.g. Chossudovsky, 2022: Ch XIV; Nordangård, 2024: Ch 7), the clinching argument offered is that Bill Gates, who is an enthusiastic vaccine promoter and funder, and an early mRNA investor, is also a declared supporter of population control.

There are, however, several reasons why all this is less than persuasive. To begin with, those advancing the claims often display an unsophisticated understanding of global population issues and, in particular, show little familiarity with the theory of demographic transition. Following that theory, the principal worry among policy thinkers is not, and never was, current population numbers. It is the timing of the transition, the moment in the history of a country or region when average fertility begins to decline in response to socio-economic development, especially improvements in child survival rates and girls’ secondary education. This timing, for major world regions, determines the expected global population at the moment it will stop growing, which is the variable of ultimate concern.

By 2020, the demographic transition was approaching completion globally, fertility having declined dramatically everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa, falling below replacement levels in many other parts of the world. The demographic challenges of today are about ageing populations in the world outside of Africa and a youth bulge south of the Sahara. The best-evidenced Covid-related mortality spikes seem to have occurred, due to harmful treatment protocols, among poor and elderly people living in the vicinity of large hospitals (Rancourt et al., 2025; Unbekoming, 2025). The health, and likely fertility,[5] impacts of the mRNA jabs appear to be concentrated among the highly vaccinated, who are mostly in the global North, where fertility is already below replacement level. A case might be made, therefore, that there was a hidden intention to cull the numbers of elderly people in the richer parts of the world, although almost no one[6] has made it. Otherwise, any policy that relied on the vaccines to influence global population growth would have been extraordinarily badly targeted. So, the alleged motive is not coherent.

As for Gates, he is specifically concerned with the persistence of high fertility in Africa, at levels of income per head above those that triggered the transition elsewhere. This is a legitimate concern, shared by many specialists (e.g. Paice, 2021). It is going to be the main factor determining the eventual size and composition of the population of the world. The equally conventional link to vaccination campaigns, such as those funded through GAVI and other Gates Foundation vehicles, is that vaccination reduces infant and child mortality, which reduces the desire to have many pregnancies and large families. In other words, when it works it works by saving lives.

The proposition that Gates’ thinking is conventional in this way can be checked against the clip from his much-cited 2010 TED talk (Gates, 2010). The sentence usually quoted, beginning ‘If we do a really good job on vaccines …’, has been very widely misinterpreted on social media in connection with Covid-19 vaccines. It clearly expresses Gates’ belief in vaccines as a life-saving tool, affecting indirectly the final destination size of the global population. This misrepresentation is a rare instance where the generally unreliable USAID-funded ‘fact checkers’ (e.g. Reuters Fact Check, 2021) were actually right to put the record straight. Gates, in this writer’s opinion, is mistaken on very many things, including climate change, the role of childhood vaccination in public health and the safety and effectiveness of mRNA shots. His role during the Covid episode was consistently on the wrong side of the debate. But none of this means that the Covid-19 SDE was a population-reduction operation.

Returning for a moment to the Malone version of the depopulation thesis, we shall see that his claim that the mRNA roll-out was a CIA venture (2023) has much to support it. The mistake lies in moving too easily from the observation that the CIA/USAID has historically been active on birth control to the assumption that this had to be the motive for promoting mRNA platform.

Claim 5: Market creation by big pharma?

The big pharmaceutical firms, especially those that were already invested heavily in mRNA technology as 2020 approached, are clearly in the frame as SDE perpetrators. They had a very strong motive to seek to remove a major obstacle to their future profitability – the likely resistance of publics and governments to a completely untried application of the science of genetics. The lockdown-until-vaccine policy was the sine qua non for generating mass demand for a novel and potentially risky product, as it created circumstances in which people would only regain their freedom (and/or retain their employment) if agreeing to be vaccinated.

As summed up by Brett Weinstein, speaking to Tucker Carlson (2024), ‘Pharma had a potentially tremendously lucrative property that it couldn’t bring to market because a safety test would have revealed [the] unsolvable problem at its heart. And […] it recognized that the thing that would bypass that obstacle was an emergency that caused the public to demand a remedy to allow them to go back to work and to living their lives. That would cause the government to streamline the safety testing process so that it wouldn’t spot these things’.

Former pharma executives Robert Malone (2022, 2023) and Mike Yeadon (2021, 2022, 2024) have gone out of their way to declare that their former colleagues who developed and marketed the Covid jabs had the intention to kill, pure and simple. That is, they knew all along the mRNA technology would be dangerous to life and potentially harmful to human fertility because of the results of the testing on mice. Therefore, the harm was intentional.

Willingness to kill, however, requires a motive. To be sure, the material incentives involved were extraordinarily large, probably sufficient to sink the moral scruples of all but the most conscientious. However, I would submit that, as with the cases of 9/11 and JFK, it is possible to visualize another simple and possibly more persuasive interpretation of the evidence on motivation, namely that the leading perpetrators had – or convinced themselves they had – noble intentions. Returning to the Weinstein/Carlson dialogue (2024), the mRNA investors owned ‘a beautiful technology […] something truly brilliant that would potentially not only allow a bright future from the perspective of creating new treatments […] but that it could do this indefinitely into the future’. Given the ubiquity in their research field of the yardstick of ‘net benefit’, the pharma business ‘on a normal day is composed of people who […] have to be comfortable with causing a certain amount of death. […] So once you have stepped onto that slippery slope […] then I believe it becomes very easy to rationalize that the greater good is being served by X, Y or Z’.

Be that as it may, big pharma – and those, including Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates, most heavily invested in the new gene therapies – clearly wanted very much what lockdown-until-vaccine gave them. However, the other question is whether they had the means to make it happen. This is doubtful because the firms, although powerful lobbyists with friends in high places, did not directly control policy. If there was a consortium of actors that produced the Covid SDE – as suggested in the next section – then Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, and their allies in government, the quangos and the foundations, were a part of it. Operation Warp Speed and its equivalents in other countries could hardly have taken place without their active collaboration. The question is whether the firms and their immediate allies were in the driving seat. As we shall see, all of the best evidence suggests they were not.

3. Claim 6: direct evidence, means and motive

The multiple hypothesized perpetrators we have considered so far have in common that while they may have been somewhat motivated to play a part in initiating the Covid-19 SDE, they have little credibility as actors with the means to bring about the extraordinary policy measures of the Covid-19 episode. There is no direct evidence that they themselves played any executive role, and the suggestion that the real perpetrators were acting on their behalf calls for large and questionable assumptions. When we turn to Claim 6, matters could hardly be more different. We are able to start with compelling direct evidence of the role of a definite constellation of forces and then go swiftly into how they acquired the means to do what they did, ending with reflections on motive. The nominated perpetrator in Claim 6 is what has been variously termed the global bio-security military-industrial complex or Global Biodefense Public-Private Partnership (GPPP).

The primary responsibility of the GPPP for setting in motion the Covid-19 operation has been most compellingly established by the discoveries of a network of exceptionally persistent free-lance researchers. Much of this work has been dispersed until recently around blog platforms such as Brownstone and Substack. However, recent efforts have started to bring it together in more easily digested forms, including an eminently readable paperback by Debbie Lerman (2025a), the updated ‘COVID Dossier’ put together jointly by Lerman and Sasha Latypova (Lerman and Latypova, 2025) and a synthetic Powerpoint presentation by Latypova (2025a).

The work of these researchers covers three key issues: who was really in charge of the ‘pandemic response’; how they were able to get away with the crime despite the existence of seemingly robust institutional safeguards; and what processes of change in the economics and governance of public health during the decades and years up to 2020 supplied the motive for what occurred. In this section, I assess the claims made under each of these headings.

Who was really in charge?

Contrary to the deliberately fostered public imagery, leadership of the response was only briefly in the hands of the designated public-health officials. In the US, the institutional set-up determined that the response would be shaped and driven not by health specialists but by the National Security Council (NSC) – that is by biodefense officials, the military and the CIA. ‘Lockdowns were counterterrorism, not public health’ (Lerman, 2023a, 2023b). The public health leaders who announced the measures and defended them in the name of ‘the science’ (Fauci, Redfield and Collins) did not design the policies they were advocating, which helps to explain some of their otherwise bizarre changes of opinion. Nor were they in charge of implementation. The NSC was (Lerman, 2024c, 2024b).

Operation Warp Speed – the ordering of the Covid-19 ‘vaccines’ – was claimed by President Trump as his initiative. However, the modalities came from an existing Pentagon programme for ‘platform technologies to rapidly develop and manufacture medical countermeasures (MCMs) … in response to biological threats’ (Latypova, 2024). Key personnel from that programme moved into new roles and the Defense Production Act – allowing the government to direct private industry – was invoked initially without the required presidential decision (ibid.). The meticulously documented book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (2023b: Ch 18, 38) provides further details and good summaries.

Several of the same things seem to apply to the Covid-19 policy responses of at least a number of other member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  In the UK, the government’s approach switched abruptly in mid-March 2020 from a ‘Plan A’ based on established public-health principles to a ‘Plan B’, which was ‘a surveillance and lockdown response, modeled on responses to terror attacks, led by intelligence operatives, and operating in secrecy’ (Lerman, 2024e: 4). Again, the experts who were the public face of the pandemic response (Whitty, Vallance, van Tam) did what they were told, to their enduring disgrace. In the Netherlands, the Minister of Health has acknowledged in parliament that her country’s Covid response was a ‘military operation’, under the direction of the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) and the Ministry of Defence. It was designed ‘in compliance with NATO treaty obligations’ (Bergman, 2024).

Elsewhere in Europe, the information leaked from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), ‘Germany’s CDC’, has confirmed that the Covid risk assessment and policy advice offered by the public health specialists was overruled on 27 February by the NATO General who was the Institute’s top authority, to be replaced with lockdown-until-vaccine policies and communications. Exactly the same date saw the activation of the European Union’s Integrated Political Crisis Response (IPCR), which is governed by a body on which countries are represented by their intelligence agencies (Lerman, 2024d).  The one European country that famously deviated from the norm of strict lockdowns, Sweden (Anderberg, 2022), was perhaps significantly a member of the EU but not, at the time, of NATO.

As Lerman (2024d) points out, virtually identical Covid policy shifts were highly synchronized not only across NATO and the EU but also among the members of the Five Eyes security collaboration (Australia, Canada and New Zealand as well as the US and UK). In view of the very varied reported epidemiological time-lines involved, especially between the Northern and Southern hemisphere countries, this is strongly suggestive of active coordination by defense and intelligence networks. The investigations of Lerman and company are ongoing and their latest reporting covers additional countries and lists the responsible personnel by name (Lerman and Latypova, 2025). All this implies that an even wider hypothesis may need to be entertained, that across the world – including in South America and much of Africa and Asia – Covid policy responses may have been shaped by the nature of a country’s formal or informal military and security entanglements as well as, more obviously, by the authoritative guidance received from the WHO.

How could they get away with it?

In legal terms too, the fingerprints of the biosecurity establishment are all over the pandemic episode. In some countries, critical voices can legitimately criticize their health-products regulators for releasing Covid-19 injections known to be dangerous, of questionable effectiveness and manufactured with scant quality control. They also have the right to deplore the abrogation of the principle of informed consent in large areas of the medical response to the Covid panic. However, in the USA, as Sasha Latypova (2022; Kennedy, 2023a; Latypova, 2025b) and Katherine Watt (2022) have shown, the law has been modified over many years in ways that severely restrict the scope for regulatory action and medical ethics.

A series of congressional decisions, going back to 1938 but strengthened in the years preceding the Covid episode, eliminated the application of Federal safety and efficacy standards to products granted authorization in circumstances determined (by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) to represent a ‘public health emergency’ (Latypova, 2022). As the official record shows, the then Secretary of Health, Alex Azar, gave notice of such a determination as early as 4 February 2020 (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2020b). This was followed up on 17 March by the invoking of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act providing liability immunity to those involved in the development and distribution of ‘countermeasures’ (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2020a). Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) exempt those administrating the product from the duty to provide the information required for informed consent, and they remove the recipient’s right to obtain it (Watt, 2022). The special category of product designated by the Department of Defense (DoD) as medical ‘countermeasures’ are not legally pharmaceuticals at all, so the Food and Drug Administration has no authority over them (Latypova, 2022).

The gradual militarization of public health in the US (Kheriaty, 2022) has been further reinforced by the typical organizational and contractual arrangements between the government and its private-sector partners, including the drug companies. The official organizational chart of Operation Warp Speed shows the DoD as the Chief Operating Officer. The next most senior level includes only US Government entities, and covers all the supervisory roles for manufacturing, clinical trials, distribution contracting and legal cover. The pharma companies are a third level down in the chart, in the role of ‘fulfilling orders’ (Latypova, 2022).

As for the contracts between the military and the companies, these have typically been handled by the method of Other Transaction Authority (OTA), which releases them from standard government contracting rules and laws on disclosure and intellectual property (Latypova, 2022; Malone, 2024). The main contracts signed under Operation Warp Speed remained secret until they were obtained under Freedom of Information requests because they were routed through a defense contract management firm called Advanced Technologies International, Inc. (Roguski, 2024).

Despite being protected from the public’s gaze, the contracts were far from being ‘arms-length’ deals. The DoD exercised detailed control over the clinical trials, the manufacture and the distribution of the products, utilizing a range of military contractors. The big-name pharmaceutical firms, despite being protected from litigation under the PREP Act (Lerman, 2025b), had a limited role in the process. To disguise what was essentially a Pentagon-made product, they – in Robert F Kennedy’s words – ‘essentially paid the pharmaceutical companies for their brand names so people would think they were getting something from Pfizer and Moderna’ (Latypova, 2022; Kennedy, 2023a: 5).

What kind of motive?

If the Covid-19 episode was military-led and, at least in the US, fully prepared with a panoply of enabling laws and public-private contracting modalities, where did the plan come from? How was it put together and for what purpose? The answers to these questions are now thoroughly documented. A cogent summary has been provided by Lerman (2024a: Part 1). Much of the supporting detail is to be found in the relevant chapters of Kennedy’s books (2021, 2023b).

In Lerman’s treatment of its antecedents, the Covid episode appears as ‘a predictable – if not inevitable – outcome of the evolution of the U.S. national security state and its convergence with global public-private partnerships, in the period since the end of the Cold War’ (Lerman, 2024a: Part 1; Lerman, 2025a).

Paraphrasing and further summarizing Lerman, the key moments in this process were:

• At the end of the Cold War, and especially in the wake of 9/11, the adoption of the ‘war on terror’ as the new income-generating basis of the US military-industrial complex;
• Around the anthrax letters episode following 9/11 (MacQueen, 2014), the fomenting of terrifying claims about the potential for bio-terrorism, resulting in the launch of an equally lucrative and budget-expanding ‘war’ – the one on bioterror;
• The emergence in the same period of ‘public-private partnerships’ as the favoured modality of capitalist development, facilitating, among other things, the rise of a globe-spanning biodefense/pandemic preparedness cartel based on the mutual interests of public regulatory and funding bodies, private healthcare producers, research entities and non-profit advocates and lobbyists;
• Encouraged by the increasing availability of public funding linked to this ‘war’, the merger of longstanding, but relatively modest, secret military and intelligence activities in the field of biowarfare ‘countermeasures’ with disease-outbreak preparedness in the public-health and medical research spheres, resulting in increasingly ambitious joint schemes;
• In the US, the cementing of this merger in 2006 by the creation of a military/intelligence-run entity, ASPR, within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS);
• In the decades after 2001, growing interest within the merged biodefense/pandemic response field in the discovery of a ‘platform technology’ that, lacking the limitations of traditional vaccines (e.g. the one for ‘flu’), could provide protection from any conceivable bioweapon or novel viral outbreak;
• The fact that by 2019, in Lerman’s words, ‘both arms of the biodefense complex had invested a huge amount of funding and hype into a specific technology called “mRNA vaccine platforms”‘, while in Kennedy’s words, particularly ‘hefty bets’ had been placed on Moderna, a startup firm with no marketable products but only ‘an experimental vaccine platform awaiting a disease’ (2023b: 3);
• The huge size of the global business around this investment, putting it into the category, of unhappy memory since the policy responses to the 1978 bank crashes, of ‘too big to fail’;
• The globalization of the US national biodefense complex, though military and intelligence alliances, international public health and governance bodies, research collaborations and international ‘philanthrocapitalists’ and their networks, to form a Global Biodefense Public-Private Partnership (GPPP);
• The very long ‘dry spell’ in terms of biodefense disasters that was brought to an end by the declaration of a public-health emergency in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019, and the plausibility of the claim that this could be the start of a pandemic given Wuhan’s notoriety as a centre of potentially dangerous research on bat viruses.

Lerman concludes by declaring that ‘if it had not been SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, it would have been a different triggering event somewhere else – and the global pandemic response would have been the same’. The implications are clear: the military-led biodefense/pandemic preparedness GPPP that perpetrated the Covid episode did so for one broad and one more specific reason. The broad motive was to refresh the public’s fear about potential disease outbreaks and faith in mass vaccination as the required response, the twin bases of its long-term business model. The specific reason was to make good the investments made in the mRNA platform and other as yet untested wide-application technologies, by creating conditions in which governments would be prepared to pay for the move to large-scale production, and populations would be willing and even eager to accept the shots.

As Kennedy shows, this rationale was almost explicitly acknowledged by some of the key players towards the end of 2019. Six days after the Event 201 exercise, a gathering of top virologists and vaccinologists was convened to discuss ways of combating the global ‘crisis’ of vaccine hesitancy. An intervention by Rick Bright, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) at the Department of Health and Human Services ‘hinted that only a global health crisis – like a pandemic – could induce government and industry to commit the billions of dollars necessary to create a new generation of “plug-and-play” mRNA vaccines, and to remove traditional safety requirements so as to streamline coercive mass vaccination programs’ (2023b: 8).

The pharma interests on their own did not have the power to make this happen, but the biodefense GPPP did. Thus, having prepared the ground with the series of table-top war games that culminated in Event 201, the military/security leaders of the cartel committed to a real-world ‘live-fire’ exercise with the population of the world as participants. Even if, as Jessica Hockett (2025) believes, various other motives than these contributed to the Covid-19 operation, I propose that this line of explanatory approach stands out for its economy and close correspondence to the currently known facts.

As argued earlier, the executives and investors of the pharma companies knew they were going to lend their brand names to products that were untested on humans and likely dangerous. Whether gross material and career interests or more elevated ‘net benefit’ calculations, of the kind suggested by Weinstein, were the principal suppressor of any moral qualms that may have been felt remains a matter for conjecture. As for the bio-defense enthusiasts, it is possible that they too believed that causing large-scale collateral damage was morally justified. The Covid-19 scare may have been seen as serving the greater good of achieving a thorough testing of a technology that would meet a truly devastating threat, should one ever materialize. Although Watt and Latypova may well be justified in using terms like ‘mass murder’ in connection with the roll-out of more or less compulsory mRNA injections, their own account of the crime, emphasizing the long gestation of the counter-measures doctrine, very much suggests an interpretation on these lines, at least in respect of the military/intelligence actors and their stooges.

As with most deep state events, the question of motivation probably needs to be addressed in a layered way. While the true-believers may have had few moral compunctions, given their high-minded certainties, others in the leadership of the GPPP may have been unpersuaded by this ends-justifying-the-means rationale. In this case, bald monetary and professional self-interest may have been sufficient – given the scale of the rewards – to drive out the moral courage that objecting would certainly have required. Further down the hierarchy, habits of obedience and ‘groupthink’ may have sufficed to sustain the noble lies and the secrecy, as in earlier accounts of deep-state processes (including Lofgren, 2016). The question of motivation needs further attention but these are some of the elements needed for a mature Covid SDE analysis.

We know, then, who did it, how they were able to do it, and why they did it. They – the GPPP – rolled out unsuitable, harmful policies without a proper (public health) rationale, taking advantage of legal and regulatory enabling conditions that had been building for decades. They had powerful reasons, as they saw it. On all of this, the evidence is significantly more compelling than it is on most of the claims considered in Section 2. However, in one significant respect the account provided by Lerman, Latypova and company remains incomplete and contestable. This is the subject of Section 4.

4. The nature of the crime revisited

Lerman concludes that the perpetrators took advantage of a trigger event that happened to be a seemingly novel disease outbreak in China but could easily have been something else. Many critics of the mainstream narrative on Covid-19 would agree with this. Most would also accept that what was told to the public about that event was in many respects false, if not actively fraudulent. However, some questions about the extent of the deception remain unresolved. These need to be considered before we reach a final conclusion as to how the perpetrators achieved what they did.

Assumptions about origins

Most aspects of the misrepresentation of Covid-19 have been well explored in the critical bio-medical literature, including in works referenced in the Introduction. After a long wait, syntheses of this thinking are now reaching the formally academic public domain in the shape of peer-reviewed journal pieces. A good example is the article (Quinn et al., 2025) signed by some 37 prominent figures in the Covid truther community – among them Clare Craig, Norman Fenton, Robert Malone and Jessica Rose. Possibly as a condition of publication, this article is set up in terms of ‘learning lessons’. It avoids any language that might be deemed provocative. It nonetheless provides a nearly complete account of the deceptions committed in selling the lockdown-until-vaccine policy to the world.

That said, the article has a flaw. One policy assumption about which surely there are ‘lessons to be learned’ is not questioned at all: that, during 2020-21, there was, as a matter of observable fact, a more or less novel pathogen spreading across the world from a point of origin in Wuhan.

The persistence of this assumption in otherwise sceptical quarters is what explains the energy that has been devoted over the years to the question of viral origins, focused, in a binary way, on the laboratory-leak versus wet-market debate. It also inspires the perennially absorbing question of what exactly was being covered up by the network of scientists and funding agencies that formed around the initial denial of the lab-leak theory. We do not need to revisit those issues here, as the literature is well known.[7] The relevant point is that whether the virus was engineered or not, escaped or was released, or was ‘zoonotic’ after all, the assumption that has continued to underpin the debate is viral spread from a single point of origin in China.

This is a problem from the perspective of an accurate characterization of the Covid-19 SDE. According to some serious researchers, no genuinely novel pathogen played a significant role the events of 2020-21. Alternatively, if there was something new in the air in ‘Covid hotspots’ of 2020 like New York City, Bergamo or London, it did not get there by spreading by itself outward from Wuhan. In other words, not only was the medical threat exaggerated and misrepresented in the various ways set out by Quinn et al. (2025) but it was entirely fabricated.

We may leave for another occasion the important but rather technical reasoning that underpins some parts of the ‘no new pathogen’ argument.[8] The part whose consideration may not be postponed, however, is what careful analysis of the worldwide data on all-cause mortality can teach us about the assumption of viral spread.

As Denis Rancourt and team (Rancourt, 2023; Rancourt et al., 2024; Rancourt et al., 2025) have demonstrated in analysis first outlined as early as June 2020, the spatial and temporal patterns of all-cause excess mortality worldwide cannot be reconciled with any hypothesis about a spreading viral respiratory disease. As others have confirmed, the synchronicity of the mortality peaks registered in the cities of New York, Madrid, London and Stockholm and in northern Italy between March and May 2020, and the observation that excess mortality most often failed to cross borders and state lines, rule out absolutely any explanation in terms of an infection spreading out from a point of origin (Dee, 2023; Sy, 2023; Engler, 2024a; Fenton and Neil, 2024: Ch 18; Harrity, 2024). Thus, in a stronger sense than admitted by the rest of the critical consensus, there was no pandemic.

In a similar vein, Jonathan Engler (2022a, 2022b), Jessica Hockett (2024b; Hockett and Engler, 2024) and colleagues (Verduyn et al., 2023) have examined closely the experiences of Bergamo, in northern Italy, and New York City respectively. Again, we find dramatic peaks of geographically concentrated excess all-cause death immediately following the WHO pandemic declaration. The months before the peak show no signs of excess death despite suggestions of various kinds that what was subsequently called SARS-CoV-2 was already in circulation (Engler, 2024b). And in the months after, all-cause mortality returned to normal and remained there until the vaccines begin to be delivered. Again, viral spread is excluded and deadly treatment protocols are left as the most obvious explanatory factor. The scale of the mortality indicated in the official statistics is also such as to suggest something else, or something additional, namely statistical fraud.

Hockett has been pressing the city authorities in New York for corroborative evidence of what, in any other circumstances would have been seen as a mass casualty event. So far, her requests have been denied. Meanwhile, we are reminded of the reports from observers in Bergamo in March 2020 suggesting that the dramatic scenes of army lorries forming queues at hospitals to carry away the coffins of the dead were clearly staged in the full theatrical sense – designed to indicate a far more deadly outbreak than actually occurred (Jefferson and Heneghan, 2024; Hockett and Engler, 2025). Like the dramatic scenes allegedly from the streets of Wuhan that circulated around the world in late January 2020 (Dodsworth, 2021: 17-18; Engler, 2025), these were all part of the military/security-led fraud.

Who exactly mounted the Chinese parts of this deception remains to be settled. However, Michael P. Sanger, the author who made the original case that it was Chinese propaganda that ‘shut down the world’ in 2020 (2021), has changed his mind. He now (2023) blames the Western intelligence community, suspecting them of making use of a murky combination of Communist Party disinformation and Chinese dissident internet materials, such as the Wuhan videos, for their own purposes.

Implications

If the Covid-19 episode was comprehensively staged in this way, we have to rethink the nature of the crime we have been investigating. The reasons for holding culpable deep state actors associated with the GPPP seem to be deepened by this supplementary evidence, in so far as only actors with extraordinary behind-the-scenes reach across continents and spheres of activity could have managed the coordination of such a comprehensive fraud. The perpetrators are likely guilty of quite a lot more than we suspected.

As Hockett and Robert Kogon are right to remind us, also, dismissal of viral spread from a single point of origin does not mean the possibility of malfeasance involving viruses goes away. What becomes irrelevant is only the origin question framed in terms of accidental events in China such as leaks and zoonosis. In view of ‘all the other evidence of premeditation in the “response”, what we should be looking at is the possibility of laboratory creation and deliberate release’ (Kogon cited in Hockett, 2024a). In particular, it seems just possible that a pathogen or a more-or-less novel sort was ‘seeded’ in specific locations around the world, using aerosol technologies that have been a component of US biological warfare research for decades (van der Pijl, 2022: Ch 5; Kennedy, 2023b: Ch 8; Fleetwood, 2024). The statistical patterns on the timing and location of excess mortality spikes studied by Rancourt and team are consistent with this alarming possibility.[9] Again, this has a bearing on the identity of the perpetrators. Only the US military and their close allies could have delivered the ‘seeding’ scenario, if that is what we have to consider.

5. Conclusion

The starting-point of this paper was that Covid-19 shows all the signs of being a structural deep event (SDE), an episode staged by powerful forces to turn history in new directions at the expense of majorities across the world. Yet analysis of the Covid-19 story has remained incomplete and confused in respect of the identity of the perpetrators, their motives and some aspects of what exactly they staged. Numerous different actors with a variety of motives have been accused, not always plausibly. The paper has aimed to address this problem by critically reviewing some six sets of typical claims.

It has been necessary to separate firm claims about authorship of the key events of 2020/21 from suggestions that the episode was profitable or otherwise beneficial to actors with socially undesirable change agendas. That done, we have assessed the plausibility of the imputed motives and means, and the degree to which the implied explanation of the episode satisfies the requirement of scientific parsimony. Some five sets of claims have been found wanting in terms of one or more of these criteria, leaving the sixth standing out as both well evidenced and powerfully explanatory.

Despite appearances, the Covid-19 episode was engineered by the US and allied bio-security deep state, otherwise known as the Global Biodefense Public-Private Partnership. This constellation of perpetrators put into effect a long-gestating plan for a ‘live-fire’ exercise responding to a hypothetical bio-medical threat, enabling the formula lockdown-until-vaccine to become institutionalized and a new generation of ‘medical countermeasures’ in the shape of untested mRNA products to come to market. Enabling conditions included the legislation quietly passed by the US Congress in the years after 9/11 to remove policies and products classified as bio-medical countermeasures from the scope of public health safeguards, and the integration of much of the rest of the world into the US bio-defense system via NATO, Five Eyes and, very likely, covert CIA influence elsewhere.

While this fills satisfactorily the main current gap in analysis of the Covid-19 SDE, we have seen it to be insufficient. The likely extent of the Covid-19 fraud continues to be underestimated by the most widely accepted critiques of the mainstream narrative. It does not seem to be true that the virus associated with Covid-19 symptoms spread by itself from a single point of origin. The spatial and temporal patterns seen in the global data on all-cause mortality rule this out. This raises a further set of research issues regarding who did exactly what to give the impression of a perilous pandemic. However, it also adds force to the main finding of this review about the perpetrators and their motives, as only forces embedded at some depth in the Western bio-security apparatus could have pulled off the scale of fraud indicated by the data.

Footnotes

1. The four subordinate themes are the avoidance of financial collapse, the hunger for profit from mRNA technology, combating bio-terror and preventing the reelection of Donald Trump.
2. A Brookings explainer article written at the time (Cheng and Wessel, 2020) is helpful on the technicalities.
3. See Section 3 above and, in particular the evidence unearthed by Sasha Latypova (2024, 2025a) showing that already on 4 February 2020 an executive of the pharma company AstraZeneca was telephoned by the US Department of Defense to advise switching the business’s priorities from flu since ‘the newly discovered Sars-2 virus posed a national security threat’.
4. Reflecting, van der Pijl seems to believe, the common concerns of a global population that ‘can no longer expect anything positive from capitalism’ (2022: 92).
5. See, among many, Pfeiffer (2022), Naked Emperor (2023) and Bergman (2025a).
6. Vernon Coleman (2023, 2025) and Michael Bryant (Unbekoming, 2024) are exceptions.   
7. See for example, Chan and Ridley (2021), van der Pijl (2022: Ch 5), Washburne (2024), Ridley (2025) and especially the second half of RFK Jr.’s The Wuhan Cover-Up (Kennedy, 2023b), where the topic displaces the other aspects of the background to the Covid episode so well covered in earlier chapters.
8. One part centres on whether medical science was ever equipped to distinguish rigorously between the allegedly novel Covid-19 and any of a range of typical conditions, including bacterial pneumonia (Neil et al., 2023a; Neil et al., 2023b; Fenton and Neil, 2024: Ch 17, 20; Kory, 2024; Neil et al., 2025). Another raises doubts about the scientific claims typically made in support of Gain of Function funding applications and whether it is ever in fact possible to ‘edit’ viruses to alter their harmfulness or transmissibility (Fenton and Neil, 2024: Ch 22; Neil and Engler, 2024; Neil et al., 2024; Craig, 2024). A third literature questions the scientific standing of the whole field of virology (Bailey, 2022; Bailey and Bailey, 2024; Roytas, 2024; Stone, 2025).
9. Several well-known experts, in the context of defending their belief in the novelty of the pathogen causing Covid-19, report having personally or clinically witnessed an illness with highly unusual symptoms. They might now be invited to consider this alternative explanation. This writer’s own interest in getting to the bottom of the Covid-19 episode was originally prompted by a similarly odd personal experience. I lost a young family member to an acute pneumonia that was attributed at post-mortem to Covid-19 in January 2021. The affliction was virtually symptom-free until the very end, representing a remarkably extreme case of ‘silent hypoxia’.

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About the Author

David Booth, retired researcher, politics of development, London, UK (davidkennedybooth@gmail.com). I am grateful to Jonathan Engler, Jessica Hockett, Martin Neil, Björn Eklund and the Editors and referees of this journal for comments on previous drafts.