If we carefully analyze each aspect of the “world war” on COVID-19, we can see how each tactic and high-tech “weapon” has harmed human health, destabilized civil society and possibly disrupted the ecological balance between the human population and the virus, while enriching private interests and empowering financially captured government regulators.
Bill Gates has called the global response to COVID-19 a “world war.” His militaristic language has been echoed by Dr. Anthony Fauci and other architects of COVID-19 policy for the last two and half years.
To fight their “world war,” Gates and Fauci and their allies have deployed an arsenal of high-tech “weapons” and tech-enabled tools of social control — contact tracing apps, PCR tests, QR codes, digital passports, lockdowns, mask mandates, mRNA vaccines, social media censorship, mass surveillance and so on — with devastating consequences for civil societies, human health and even the environment.
As an advocate for wildlife conservation, I have been appalled as virtually all environmentalists, and most others on the left, have supported this disastrous high-tech “war” on COVID-19.
I believe that an ecological perspective reveals many of the flaws inherent in an aggressive high-tech attack on a pathogen, although most environmentalists have been too blinded by progressive political ideologies and the hysteria surrounding COVID-19 to see this truth.
In addition to criticisms leveled at pandemic policies by civil libertarians and public-health experts such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration — critiques that I appreciate — I tend to view the pandemic in accord with insights I have gained while trying to protect the planet’s biodiversity, a point of view that many critics may not have thought about, and may even be inclined to dismiss.
To me, the “war” on COVID-19 has been characterized by a destructive set of attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that appear to be deeply engrained in our political and economic institutions, and which form a pattern that should be recognizable to conservationists and ecologists:
- Aggressive intervention in complex natural processes using new, poorly understood technologies designed to achieve narrowly defined short-term goals, with disregard for the potential long-term ramifications;
- Profiteering by private interests that own the technologies, enabled by government entities and “experts” that have been financially captured by those interests;
- Followed by a cascade of unintended consequences.
Each aspect of the “war” on COVID-19 can be understood in these terms.
To explain, I will first elaborate on how I see the global response to COVID-19 through the lens of ecology.
Ecology and aggressive technological “wars” against complex living systems
“The first rule of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else,” wrote the ecologist Barry Commoner in the 1970s.
Or as the legendary naturalist John Muir, founder of Sierra Club (recently canceled by his own organization), wrote a hundred years before, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
Ecological damage often ensues when people aggressively try to control complex natural processes to achieve short-term goals without truly understanding how those living systems work, or what the full range of ramifications will be, usually with new technologies that promise “progress” but have a variety of consequences that cannot be managed over the long run.
In my opinion, this is one reason why our global industrial economy, which interferes in natural processes on a massive scale across the planet, has brought about a multi-faceted ecological crisis that has seen a dramatic collapse in the planet’s biodiversity, including an average 70% decline in Earth’s wildlife populations since 1970, among other symptoms of environmental degradation (I won’t even mention the “C” word).
An example of an ecologically destructive practice that fits this pattern is the Big Ag/ Big Pharma industry’s worldwide chemical “war” on plant and animal pathogens using herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals.
The world’s most popular herbicide, glyphosate, has harmed global biodiversity over the last five decades and has potentially caused many human health problems, including cancer. (Acknowledging these harms is not to endorse the anti-farmer measures recently enacted in the Netherlands, Canada and elsewhere).
The “war” on insects waged via the widespread application of the chemical insecticide DDT in the mid-20th century also caused vast ecological damage across many species that Rachel Carson exposed in her book “Silent Spring” giving rise to the modern-day environmental movement.
Studies still link DDT to elevated risks of cancer in children and grandchildren of women who were exposed to the chemical decades ago.
A similar ecologically destructive practice is the “war” that has been waged for decades on apex predators like wolves, bears and big cats at the behest of industrial agricultural interests, often accomplished through the large-scale spreading of chemical poisons across landscapes, triggering negative “trophic cascades” throughout U.S. and global ecosystems.
I cannot help but notice that the high-tech “war” on COVID-19 resembles these industrial “wars” against the natural world in many respects.
The whole “war” concept is based on a militaristic, mechanistic way of thinking that is obsessed with exerting technological control over natural processes to achieve short-term aims — often eradication of a “threat” like a pathogen or a predator — but cannot recognize the long-term consequences of interfering in the complex set of biological relationships that support natural ecosystems, and that ultimately provide the basis for human health and well-being.
Gates exemplifies this mindset, with his techno-utopian beliefs that human pathogens are like computer viruses, that human biology can be manipulated like computer code, and that vaccines can be regularly “uploaded” into the human body like software updates.
He has a wrongheaded, war-like notion, as observed by economist Jeffrey A. Tucker, that “with enough money, intelligence, and power, along with technological know-how at the helm, [a virus] can be stopped in its tracks.”
Gates’s militaristic COVID-19 strategy of retreat (lockdowns and masks) and attack (mass mRNA vaccination) was never based on a wholistic understanding of how human populations interact with pathogens and co-exist with them over time, how individual citizens remain healthy or how human societies thrive.
“The pandemic is not a war,” says Indian activist Dr. Vandana Shiva, one of Gates’s staunchest critics, and one of the only prominent ecologists to criticize his COVID-19 policies.
“In fact,” she says, “we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome [the set of all viruses present in the human body]. The biome and the virome are us.”
In other words, co-existence with pathogens is the rule in ecology, eradication of a pathogen from nature is the rare exception and declaring “war” on any part of a complex living system can have significant unintended consequences.
But for Gates and Fauci and others in power, waging high-tech “wars” on viruses is far more amenable to their interests than a humble approach based on the subtle principle of ecology (or the traditional precepts of public health prior to March 2020).
Using new technologies to control natural processes for short-term gain, with disregard for long-term ecological consequences, is the business model. In fact, the more ecological damage that is caused, the more that further technological interventions can be justified, raising the question of whether “unintended” consequences are in some cases intended.
As explained further below, the failure of each aspect of the “war” on COVID-19 can be described and understood in ecological terms, including lockdowns, masks, mRNA mass vaccination and even the origins of the virus itself.
Origins of the virus: Who is the real bio-terrorist, Mother Nature or Anthony Fauci?
Read the full story: The ‘World War’ on COVID — An Arsenal of High-Tech ‘Weapons’ of Social Control • Children’s Health Defense