I’m going to cover this off in two sections, which will be updated slowly over time as new information emerges: the experts and the institutions.

Having published my own suggested questions for a New Zealand Royal Commission of Inquiry into C-19 I was interested to see a blueprint for every national commission being suggested by the Norfolk Group, which includes famous epidemiologists like Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, who led the original fight in 2020 against many of the original actions like lockdowns. It’s more detailed and comprehensive in scope than mine, but the executive summary with ten key questions for the American institutions is a good place to start.

However, John Sullivan notes some basic problems even with that approach, as the UK is finding out with their rubbish inquiry:

  1. Judges and lawyers are completely unqualified to investigate and assess what was ultimately a catastrophic failure of democratic politics and management.
  2. The very last people who should have a voice in assessing the shambolic response are those who got it all wrong but now claim to have “seen the light”.
  3. We need to heed those who got it right from the beginning, because they are the ones who understand the basic truth of things.
  4. We must recognise the pre-existing environment in which the Covid hysteria was allowed to spread.

He goes into each question, and that last one is of special interest because I’ve not seen it asked elsewhere: the growing monster of health and safety thinking is one aspect he addresses.

And as this writer points out, it’s very likely that there will never be an apology for Covid-19 overreaction?, whether from individuals, politicians or institutions.

The Expert Pushers

Aside from our own toxic trio here in New Zealand the key American players were Dr Fauci and the lesser known Dr Birx, plus Robert Redfield director of the CDC (Center for Disease Control) and his successor Rochelle Walensky.

Fauci has retired now of course, with his massive government pension intact, plus the millions he’s made from medical corporate investments over the years. That article looks back not just on his C-19 work but AIDS in the 1980’s and 1990’s where he applied the same patterns of thinking.

He advised against a well-known antibiotic that was already being used for people whose immune systems had been destroyed by cancer treatment – in other words, perfect for AIDS patients. How many thousands died before his advice was over-ridden will never be known. Is it any wonder that he had no time for therapeutic treatments for C-19, although monoclonal antibody treatment was too widespread for him to stop it. Unfortunately its cost restricted its use.

In the 1980s, he made national news by warning that the AIDS virus could be spread by “routine close contact” among family members, becoming one of the early prophets of the AIDS “heterosexual breakout” that would supposedly decimate the general population. That prospect needlessly terrified the public for more than a decade, but it boosted public funding for AIDS research, including a long and costly Fauci project to develop an AIDS vaccine.

The vaccine venture failed, but it enabled Fauci and two of his collaborators, Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield, to develop a relationship that they exploited during their service on the White House COVID Task Force.

The wonders of bureaucracy as they all supported each other decades later in another health crisis.

Is it any wonder that this article identifies seven of his decisions – often contradicting earlier positions of his – that could rightly be used to prosecute the little bastard rather than just allow him to skate off into wealthy retirement. The flip-flops started early, with him saying that C-19 was “not a major threat”, to masks being useless and then necessary, to lockdowns, including schools, to knowing all along that that the C-19 vaccines could not possibly prevent either infection with or transmission of the virus. The writer concisely summarises what Fauci wrote in an article for the magazine Cell, including the key point (bolded):

Fauci lied, and now he is admitting it. In writing. In a peer-reviewed journal. To be clear, Fauci is not claiming that the vaccines were utterly worthless. He still maintains that in certain specific cases–atypical, but the ones that generally kill you–the vaccines serve as a sort of pre-treatment. Not a great one, but a somewhat effective one. But he flat out admits that the claims about the vaccine possibly preventing infection and transmission are simply bogus and always were.
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[R]espiratory viruses do not generally enter the bloodstream, and when they do they are far past the point of infecting you and being passed along to others. You breathe them in, they replicate quickly, get expelled to infect others, and then may or may not enter the rest of the body. There are other types of viruses that infect you through your respiratory system that have their major impacts systemically, and vaccines can work against them. But for viruses like RSV, Influenza, and COVID-19 this is rarely the case.

There are more Fauci quotes from Cell in that article explaining that this is one of the reasons flu vaccines still don’t work very well even after sixty years of research.

Plus there was his crowning glory of having directed funding to the Chinese Wuhan Lab for Coronavirus gain-of-function research in the first place. And when he was put on the spot by two Republican State Attorney Generals in November of 2022 as part of a lawsuit against several Social Media companies, the deposition showed that Fauci had claimed an absence of memory 174 times. Just one example:

When asked if he did in fact put together this secret sub-group of insiders and influencers — the point of which would be to convince the others that they had it all wrong, and that the virus was definitely not engineered — Fauci says: I don’t remember if that ever happened.

Note, however, that the precise outcome desired of such a smaller sub-group — that he could flip some of them to reverse their positions and begin claiming “No, no, never, this virus could never have been man-made” — is precisely what happened. Two of the scientists who came to him telling him the virus looked engineered reversed themselves in 48 hours and began proclaiming it was obviously naturally arising, and anyone saying otherwise was being snookered by conspiracy theorists.

Those two scientists received grants from Anthony Fauci, of course.

His longtime associate Dr Birx was perhaps worse because although Fauci was the primary public figure, Birx was the one crafting the Task Force policy. All its advice to the states came from her. All written recommendations were from her and she conducted almost all the visits to states on behalf of the Task Force.

She was forced to resign much earlier than Fauci, in December 2020 for violating her own stay-at-home order. But the depth of her deceptions were not revealed until two years later, when she blatantly admitted to them in her book about the whole event (Silent Invasion), starting with her two-level lie about lockdowns at the start:

 “We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown,” she writes. “At the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had done—a tall order. We were playing a game of chess in which the success of each move was predicated on the one before it.”
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“At this point, I wasn’t about to use the words lockdown or shutdown. If I had uttered either of those in early March, after being at the White House only one week, the political, nonmedical members of the task force would have dismissed me as too alarmist, too doom-and-gloom, too reliant on feelings and not facts. They would have campaigned to lock me down and shut me up.”

As that Brownstone review shows, she and others wanted full lockdowns but knew they didn’t have the evidence or the PR power (meaning the fear factor) to make them happen. The second-level of lie came when they did at least get the now infamous “Fifteen days to slow the spread”:

No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. “Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread” was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. In the meantime, I waited for the blowback, for someone from the economic team to call me to the principal’s office or confront me at a task force meeting. None of this happened.”

She openly admitted to tricking Trump by telling him that the evidence did exist. She was fanatical, as a different reviewer, The Tablet noted:

She also admits that her guidance regarding the maximum allowable size of social gatherings—10 people—was arbitrary, because her real goal was zero—no social contact of any kind, anywhere… Nowhere in the book does she reveal an exit strategy. Not even vaccines qualify.

As for the confusion that grew between the States and the Trump Administration, you can “thank” Birx again as she simply altered the weekly reports and recommendations:

After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points...Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked...In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.

When Dr Scott Atlas was brought in by Trump to get a handle on things, starting with the nutty testing routines being advised, she subverted that too:

This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in….Bob [Redfield] and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being transparent with the powers that be in the White House…

Atlas was her great enemy, even more so because his analysis turned out to be right.

This is not how this is supposed to work. As a senior adviser you give advice and if it’s not followed you either follow orders or you resign: you don’t stick around to subvert your loss into a win. In the Tablet’s review of her book they state it plainly:

Virtually every page of Birx’s new book reads like a how-to guide from the front lines of subverting a democratic superpower from within. It bears repeating, from the outset, that lockdowns were never part of any democratic country’s pandemic preparedness plan prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan, China.
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It would have been impossible for an enemy agent armed with anything less than nuclear weapons to have inflicted so much damage on America’s economy, social fabric, and historical freedoms in such a short period of time.

That review differs from the Brownstone one in that the Tablet goes into the detail showing that Birx basically got all these ideas from China, and was totally influenced by video and other information flowing out of China, much of which was quickly revealed to be false.

As part of promoting her book she reached the stage where she just openly admitting to lying about the C-19 vaccines (watch):

You can tell she has no remorse and no fear at all that she might face backlash for brazenly lying in order to try to manipulate the American people.

Meantime I’ll give credit to another person heavily involved in this, Fauci’s other partner-in-crime, Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, because he at least sounds a bit more humble in admitting mistakes:

[Collins] noted that he and his colleagues demonstrated an “unfortunate” narrow-mindedness.
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“If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is,”
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“So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”

And there was more to it than just the medical fanaticism of people like Fauci and Birx; there was politics also, as explained by one Dr. Paul Elias Alexander, a Canadian epidemiologist who was brought in to the Department of Health and Human Services to help with the Covid response. He reported in his memoir how the workings of the deep state were explained to him, since he was from Trinidad, spoke with a Caribbean accent, and therefore had assumptions made about his political leanings resulting in people speaking freely to him about something worse than Covid-19 – President Trump:

It shocked me when I was told, “And we in the bureaucracy are dedicated to making every day of his life a living hell. When Americans watch the evening news, all they’ll see will be another day of the country not working under this president. Ungovernable, unmanageable, chaotic, infections going up and up. Americans will want anyone but Trump and we are doing it, for we have all the health agencies like CDC and NIH and FDA working with us. We have Fauci with us, we have Birx with us. How could he win? Our job is to make the pandemic response appear to be a disaster, and we coordinate roughly every day across the different agencies to make it look that way and achieve the goal.” 

CDC Director Redfield would quit in early 2021, for no obvious reason, and was replaced by Rochelle Walensky, who is now eating crow, especially about the vaccines, so much so that by early 2022 she was claiming that:

I think all of us wanted this to be done. Nobody said ‘waning.’ … You know, ‘Oh, this vaccine’s going to work.’ [Nobody said,] ‘Oh, maybe it’ll wear off.’ Nobody said … ‘What if it’s not as potent against the next variant?’”

But as this article bluntly points out, ‘Half The Country’ Did Speak The Covid Truths The CDC Director Insists ‘Nobody Said’ — And They Were Smeared.

The Experts who Pushed Back

And that’s the other side of the people issue. Those who fought against this crap were not just “smeared” (Issues & Insights):

I believe that this is the first time in history that so many doctors and nurses have been threatened, persecuted, censored and tormented for doing their job, or for rendering a professional judgment. This contemptible behavior has been by leftist hysterics, by journalists, by latte-sipping cocaine-snorting celebrities and, incredibly, even by some of their peers/
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[They] have been subjected to a torrent of insults, to censorship, and even loss of jobs and/or certification – simply for doing what health care workers have done throughout the centuries, that is, giving their professional opinions?
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What a contrast from the start of the epidemic in early 2020 when they were justly called heroes, when the lockdown citizens of Paris, Rome, Barcelona and elsewhere for weeks would go out at night on their balconies and applaud, and shout praise and songs of gratitude and admiration for their doctors and nurses in hospitals, many of whom were dying doing their duty!

Despite all that, the pushback by the medical community steadily built up until by early 2022, you had situations as far afield as this in California…

In medical circles, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) is one of the most prestigious medical schools and hospitals in America.  Attending or working at UCSF carries with it tremendous cachet.  “You must be good” is what springs to people’s minds when they hear those letters.  That’s why it matters that four UCSF doctors, including the director of the COVID response for the emergency department, are pushing back against California governor Gavin Newsom’s “mindless” COVID rules in schools.

… And in Israel, courtesy of one Professor Ehud Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and one of the leading Israeli immunologists, who, in January 2022, wrote an open letter sharply criticising the Israeli – and indeed global – management of the coronavirus pandemic: Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure:

Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.

You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.

Professor Qimron at least kept his job, but the list of medical people who got fired, compiled in that Issues & Insights article is staggering – and that’s just just the prominent doctors who got hit by this avalanche of Two Minute Hate. It also includes the key points of opposition that they made, which have now been proven correct. Reading through that list is an exercise in sadness in contemplating the fanaticism of those who attacked them. It needs to be preserved.

Prof. Hendrik Streeck, Drs. William Briggs and Jay Richard, Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, Dr. Simone Gold, Dr. Ramin Oskoui, Dr. Scott Atlas of course, Dr. Sunetra Gupta (his UnHerd post is worth reading as he looks back at what he got right), plus the famous ones, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, and many, many others – and that’s before we get to the unknown ones who signed on to opposing this garbage:

In May 2020, more than 500 doctors urged the president to end the lockdowns
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The Great Barrington Declaration, more than 916,000 scientists and physicians have signed it (all of them ignorant, uneducated, irresponsible fools, according to the propaganda outlets and the authoritarian politicians)
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In Austria, Dr. Andreas Sönnichsen penned a letter signed by 200 doctors against the vaccine
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In Quebec, over 100 doctors, nurses and other health care individuals held a protest against the insane “vaccine passport.”

As always, read the whole thing.

Then ask yourself whether you’ll be seeing any of these people interviewed by our garbage MSM or invited to testify to Commissions on C-19, Royal and otherwise.