Commercial motives for prolonging COVID

SARS-CoV-2 is a rather magical virus, and COVID policy displays an unprecedented degree of magical thinking. For example, unlike every other epidemic in history experts somehow knew from the start that nobody would be immune. Furthermore, no immunity would ever develop, so that we were told back in the spring that we would be required to adjust to a new normal, helpfully already prepared for us by bodies like the UN and WEF.

Then too COVID, magically and uniquely, is spread uncontrollably by asymptomatic individuals in nurseries and parks, who must be fearful for their lives even though the disease almost exclusively affects those within a year or two of death from other causes. And this is partly because it causes uniquely concerning “long” symptoms that happen to be of about the same severity and frequency as many other viruses (as I know well having once specialised in chronic fatigue syndrome). Alone amongst Coronaviruses SARS-CoV-2 has has been pronounced by the WHO non-seasonal, but coincidentally has produced something uncannily like a winter seasonal hump. And once more uniquely amongst Coronaviruses, it has a flu-like propensity to mutate quickly into forms both more transmissible and more deadly, so that lockdown measures that worked in March (magically before they were applied) must be made far stricter the following January.

Fortunately there is an effective vaccine, but Matt Hancock predicts that one will have to have it repeated twice a year forever because immunity will probably wear off, just as it always does naturally, which is why Boris Johnson, seriously affected by COVID in the Spring, had to self-isolate when a contact later developed it, had to have the vaccine at the earliest opportunity, and still has to wear a mask. The usual long-term T-cell immunity has been well documented, but for unspecified reasons it is considered irrelevant by SAGE.

Yes, COVID-19 is truly a one-off… or actually, it is falsely a one-off, as much of this pseudo-science was actually politically generated and maintained, for reasons one ought to acquaint oneself with.


The Chinese Communist Party has left the muddy footprints of its barefoot doctors all over this, but what about the big pharmaceutical companies and vaccine NGOs? What motives could they have to be involved with such left-wing skulduggery when their ambition is to cure, and make capitalist billions by doing good?

In fact, there is no incompatibility between those political extremes. Big Pharma, like most globalist corporations now, is deeply entrenched in the Chinese state as a huge market, and both in tandem effectively control trans-national organisations like the UN and WHO. Both benefit from a controlled market and a controlled population which can be organised for mutual benefit. But what of the specific possible motives in this case?

I recently wrote on John le Carré’s informed assessment of the pharmaceutical industry after he had researched his disturbing novel, The Constant Gardener:

As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realise that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.

A little thought will show you that, if one is cynically obsessed with profit, then the health industry is an extremely lucrative field to be in. People will sacrifice all for their health, or that of their children, as every snake-oil salesman knows. It’s a truism that every global industry must become progressively separated from its original social purpose, and increasingly concerned only with the corporation’s survival, growth and bottom line. Leo Fender may be interested in giving musicians the instruments they need – but once bought out by CBS, shifting units for maximum profit is the name of the game. Always.

Indeed, when an individual oligarch comes to control monopolies with more wealth than nation-states, the motivation can only really be about power, because only those so obsessed get to be monopolists rather than limiting their business to what best meets a fair market need. “Power” also becomes the yardstick by which to judge their philanthropy. To control the health of the world is almost the ultimate expression of power.

During this pandemic, noticeable efforts have been made to discredit simple and cheap solutions, using all the tricks le Carré attributes to Big Pharma, and therefore likely involving them despite covering their tracks. Vitamin D research was dismissed by government spokesmen who insisted on the peer-reviewed studies they have bypassed for lockdowns, masks, social distancing, testing protocols and vaccines. The safe and established hydroxychloroquine suddenly became too dangerous a poison to trial in COVID, rapidly generating two major journal articles that turned out to be fraudulent. Effective, safe and generic Ivermectin has been ignored in favour of hugely expensive, patented, and largely useless Remdesivir – it has just been made a criminal act even to import the former into South Africa, despite its widespread use in parasitic infections.

To achieve all this, one must control the universities, the journals, the legislative bodies, the governments and a good part of the medical establishment. Obscene wealth sees to that. The scam would be obvious to all if Big Pharma didn’t still carry the cachet of Alexander Fleming in the public perception, but PR works its magic there – who remembers the scandals over Pandemrix, or Opren, or Vioxx, or Risperdal? Who even heard that the big firms curing the pandemic paid out $35.7 billion for marketing fraud in the 24 years to 2013?

But there is a market limit to conventional pharmaceuticals, and the world market is now saturated. A firm spends billions on developing a new molecule to treat some disease (partly because the very model they are using demands it be expensive). But its competitors are out to corner the same market, thus diluting demand and sapping the profits.

There are various fixes: you tweak someone else’s molecule and produce a “me too” drug which you hope to sell by slick marketing of marginal benefits. Or you even tweak your own molecule just before it goes off-patent, ideally cancelling production of the old version several months before a generic becomes available, thus cornering the market for a few more years. At a pinch you can even invent new diseases to treat, or big-up the importance of old ones: hence there was a largely ineffective preparation for the genetic and normal male-pattern baldness, and the niche-market for botulinum toxin was made profitable by persuading young women to use it to make their lips look like tractor tyres.

But in the end, just as in the motor trade, a global corporation will saturate the global market, at least in those parts of the world that will turn a profit (the poorer nations are still useful as trial locations, even if the peasants will be unable to afford the finally approved product).

And that’s where vaccines come in, particularly if one can weaponize a new pandemic (the groundwork can be laid long in advance of course, because something suitable turns up every few years).

In fact, for most viral pandemics vaccines are entirely inappropriate: the virus will sweep the world and become endemic in a year or two, whereas a safe vaccine takes five or ten years to develop, by which time the world has herd immunity. Improving general immunity would be a more economic, and general, use of resources. But if they produce, or capitalise on, enough public fear companies can get exemption from or truncation of safety stages of research, and even indemnity against serious side effects (the burden for damage passes to the taxpayers, but since governments are bad at paying out, the burden is usually on the victims alone). The vaccine may then be more or less ready in time to find cases left to prevent.

And of course if you’re a public philanthropist in the vaccine industry you can go on TV and get away with the scurrilous blanket assertion that “Vaccines are safe,” thus cynically using your own avarice as a celebrity endorsement. It’s like Jimmy Savile promoting his own children’s charity.

A global pandemic will enable you to vaccinate not just all the sufferers of Parkinson’s disease or male-pattern baldness, but every man, woman and child in the whole world. However great your development costs, 7 billion doses X 2 will see your directors and shareholders (such as government science advisors) in clover, and seated amongst the rulers of the world. Repeating the exercise for every novel virus from Swine flu to MERS (or even for a magic virus that never produces immunity but always turns up in PCR tests) ensures perpetual growth for you, if not for the perpetually locked-down populations.

And hence, it is to Big Pharma’s advantage if a virus is seen as an ongoing existential threat to the world, even if it only has an IFR of 0.12%, mainly in those over 80 with terminal conditions. You will not want some retired immunology consultant to demonstrate that a cheap and plentiful off-patent remedy reduces the mortality to a point where it’s trivial to catch it. You will not want some independently-minded epidemiologist spoiling your pitch in your tame journals, or even on YouTube. You will certainly not want the world to see that the springtime makes the bug disappear for good, not least because the draconian control measures remind people how much they need the vaccine.

Engineering the requirement for vaccine passports, of course, is the ideal way of ensuring universal uptake, like the mark of the beast. Neglecting to research whether your vaccine actually prevents transmission ensures that guilt will make those who can’t conceivably benefit from it feel shamed into having the vaccine anyway.


But you may doubt that such short-termism is rational. If so much of the world’s treasure is to be spent on expensive vaccines, when it has already suffered an orchestrated destruction of its economy, surely at some point there will simply not be enough money left for people to sacrifice their daily bread for invisible benefits. What corporation would cut off its own future in that way?

Well, that’s a legitimate viewpoint – but I’m reminded that the entire Environmental Movement accuses the fossil fuel industry of doing just that, in their view not only endangering human well-being but the very existence of the planet. The profit motive is no more concerned with the future than State Communism is.

In any case, at the ideological end of Big Pharma there are those who are not only committed to vaccinating everyone in the world regularly and compulsorily, but who also believe the world to be greatly overpopulated. For such people, an ongoing COVID crisis is a win-win.

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
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