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Continued from Part I.

Mass containment cannot be enacted at the whims of medical bureaucrats. Not even in China. Nationwide house arrest requires vast popular support, and so it is unsurprising to find that lockdowns and Corona alarmism travel together. 

In late January, as the WHO pondered whether to declare a public health emergency, social media filled with videos of people collapsing in the streets of Wuhan. In a curious pattern that we’ll see repeated over and over, these videos were immediately picked up by the press. The world has now witnessed almost 250 million official Corona infections. Nowhere in the West has anyone experienced sudden, incapacitating Covid symptoms like these. What is more, all of these videos appeared on or just after 23 January, the exact day that the Chinese locked down Hubei province. 

These videos were all fake. They strike us as farcical today, because we have been sold a very different Corona mythology. Our stories are more about how Corona will kill our grandparents, overwhelm our hospitals, reinfect the recovered, and cripple the healthy. They are part of a much different information campaign, and yet they belong to the same general playbook: First, a government opts into mass containment. Then, alarming information fills the airwaves to justify the restrictions.