• NLP and applied behavioural psychology used in the “Covid-19” operation, with the example of “Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives”;

• why apologies for the UK Government’s behaviour during Covid do not wash;

• Matt Hancock’s duper’s delight;

• the use of shock for psychological control purposes;

• the mainstream news as 24/7 propaganda deployed against the domestic population;

• Wag the Dog and the heavily mediated nature of wars in the post-Cold War era;

• how we consume information from the media, both mainstream and alternative, and the need for greater critical discernment on the part of viewers and listeners;

• my Guide to Identifying Camp 2 as a framework for people to use when consuming any kind of media;

• organisations paid to disrupt genuine truth seekers;

• World War III, Omniwar, and the war for technocracy, waged by stealth across every area of human life;

• the controlled demolition of liberal democracy, hidden by the mainstream media;

• China, technocracy, and China-maxxing; the ruling classes of all countries are acting in unison in the Omniwar;

• the failure of the political Left in 1933 and 2020;

• a reminder that fear of the government is not a good thing!;

• syringe-injectable nanotechnologies;

• smart devices and the war on children;

• stay critical and think for yourself!

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• the difficulty in knowing what the public really thinks;

• how the public would respond were it in proper possession of the facts;

• left/right vs. revolution from above/below;

• finding the courage to act;

• withdrawing consent/mass non-compliance; and

• practical measures that can be taken to counteract the global technocratic coup.

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Many thanks to David Skyman and Richard House, aka Skyman and Housie of A Walk On The Brightside, for this fun discussion of my work and the world in which we find ourselves. Talking points included:

• the generosity of the anonymous donor who gave £13,000 to make “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy open access;

• IBM and the Holocaust, plus the role of Big Tech today in creating a surveillance and control network;

• the role of the legacy media and academia in making sure that certain historical truths are not taught;

• the academic manner of my presentation;

• psychopathy, intelligence crime, and the need to resist inhumane behaviours;

• the psychological benefit of taking action and why actions should not necessarily be linked to outcomes;

• the Fleming Blicher series of interviews on Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State;

• getting rid of smartphones;

• why I left academia and the crisis of academia today;

• the failures of the professions during Covid, with specific reference to the British Psychological Society;

• the failure of academia to speak truth to power, with reference to “9/11”;

• the importance of understanding classical Marxism;

• Volume 2 of “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy;

• the information-liquidation model from the Holocaust to the present;

• Palantir and the Agentic State;

• the personal dangers of doing this kind of work;

• the importance of being answerable to conscience and making each day count;

• the promises and pitfalls of “independent academia”; and

• anecdotal evidence that more and more people are “waking up.”

David Skyman helps to run ClearAir.fm, where an audio version of this podcast will be airing at 5pm on Thursdays and 7pm on Fridays for the next few weeks and will be added to the playlist.

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• why I decided to write the chapter;

• the Nazi New Order vis-à-vis the New World Order;

• the centralisation of power;

• slavery;

• ecofascism;

• the logic of the camp;

• eugenics and euthanasia; and

• systematic mass murder

The final part will discuss possibilities for resistance.

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Introduction

The previous three sections of this chapter argued that there are no good reasons to try vaccinating the population en masse, yet that is precisely what governments around the world ostensibly sought to do during the “Covid-19” pseudopandemic. Scandalously, experimental products with minimal safety data were even offered to pregnant women and children, with the pressure of expectation being placed on virtually everyone to take them.

But what about those who refused? Around April 2021, it became evident that more heavy-handed tactics would be used against those who did not comply. For example, consider WHO guidance dated April 13, 2021:

Contemporary forms of “mandatory vaccination” compel vaccination by direct or indirect threats of imposing restrictions in cases of non-compliance [...] Despite its name, “mandatory vaccination” is not truly compulsory, i.e., force or threat of criminal sanction are not used in cases of non-compliance. [...] Still, “mandatory vaccination” policies limit individual choice in non-trivial ways by making vaccination a condition of, for example, attending school or working in particular industries or settings, like health care. Such policies are not uncommon [...]. (WHO, 2021, pp. 2-4, my emphasis)

Here we see the origins of the coercive – though typically not illegal – policies that were rolled out by governments transnationally in a bid to maximise “vaccine” uptake. The threat of imposed restrictions was, unfortunately, a key driver of that uptake (see Hughes, 2024a, pp. 300-303).

The day after the WHO issued the above guidance, Professor Michael Northcott (2021) noted in a submission to the UK Science and Technology Committee that threats to those refusing the “vaccines” and “vaccine passports” had already extended in various jurisdictions to loss of access to “business, cultural, economic, educational, employment, political, religious and social organisations and venues,” as well as the ability to travel, use a bank account, receive social security, and even leave the place of residence.

For Lieutenant General Jonathon Riley (2021), also writing on April 14, 2021, “What became apparent was a coercion strategy – and that all the population would have to be vaccinated whether they needed it or not.” Or at least, that was the sense that was strongly created at the time.

Under the guise of “safety” and “protection,” the messaging shifted to not giving people a choice about taking the injections. For example, according to UNICEF (2021), “no one is safe until everyone is safe,” and the accompanying UNICEF advertisement threatened: “Nobody gets out of the Covid-19 pandemic until we get everyone protected around the world.” This was later echoed by Klaus Schwab’s (2022) menacingly intoned claim that “nobody will be safe if not everyone is vaccinated.”

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock claimed on May 19, 2021, that it was “incredibly important” to “get vaccination even to the final few percent and encourage that take-up” (Department of Health and Social Care and the Right Hon. Matt Hancock MP, 2021). The mission statement, so to speak, was clearly to “vaccinate” everyone.

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The Threat of Unemployment

A key lever used to drive “vaccine” uptake was the threat of unemployment. On October 15, 2020, the World Health Organisation openly called for the extortion of employees in order to further the “vaccination” agenda: “being able to stay in the workforce and provide for one’s family, might also encourage vaccination” (WHO, 2020, p. 9).

It did not take long for that idea to filter down to the national level. For instance, on November 13, 2020, Tom Tugendhat became the first British MP to suggest that employment should be made contingent upon vaccination: “I can certainly see the day when businesses say: ‘Look, you’ve got to return to the office and if you’re not vaccinated you’re not coming in’” (cited in Williams, 2020).

The Mail asked on November 25, 2020, “Could UK employers force staff to get a Covid vaccine? Lawyers say mandatory jabs might be legal but are ‘highly unlikely’ while the Government has no power to make someone accept one” (Blanchard, 2020). The issue was not so much the dubious legality of forcing staff to take the shots, but rather to create the misimpression in the public mind that it might be possible for employers of any kind (not just in healthcare) to do so.

On January 28, 2021, the Telegraph published a comment piece titled “No jab, no job policy should be the law” (Lynn, 2021). The former Chancellor of the Exchequer and erstwhile editor of the Evening Standard, George Osborne (2021), wrote “If governments don’t police [vaccination], then businesses will.” The BBC proposed on February 18, 2021, that “‘No jab, no job’ policies may be legal for new staff,” citing Justice Secretary Robert Buckland and proposing that new staff could be jabbed first, existing staff later (“Coronavirus: ‘No jab, no job’ policies may be legal for new staff,” 2021).

Yet, blanket “no jab, no job” policies, especially for existing employees, would have been legally risky, because employers could have faced unfair dismissal or discrimination claims depending on the circumstances. Whether an employer could lawfully have required vaccination depended on factors such as the nature of the job, health and safety obligations, whether the requirement was a reasonable management instruction, potential discrimination issues under the Equality Act 2010, and human rights considerations. Legally speaking, vaccine mandates for businesses are a minefield, yet every effort was made to convince the public that businesses could introduce vaccine mandates on a whim.

The House of Commons Library briefing document, Coronavirus: Returning to work (April 13, 2021) states that “The UK Government asks employers to encourage staff to get vaccinated against Covid-19” (Ferguson, 2021, p. 29, my emphasis). This is different from asserting the right of businesses to mandate vaccination.

A World Economic Forum article dated May 17, 2021 asked “Will employees be required to get the COVID-19 vaccination?” (Charlton, 2021). Citing a survey by the Rockefeller Foundation, the WEF, and Arizona State University, it claimed that 88% of employers would require/encourage employee vaccination (of which 40% will require it and a further 16% will require it for at least some employees). Consequences for non-compliance included not allowing employees to return to the physical workspace (favoured by 44% of employers) and “disciplinary action up to termination” (favoured by 31%). There was no reference to the legality of such measures, only the conjuring of a sense of inevitability that “vaccination” would soon be coming to the workplace, like it or not.

UK media headlines on May 18 and 19, 2021, read “This is what we do about anti-vaxxers: No job. No entry. No NHS access” and “Threat to Army jab refuseniks: Troops who decline Covid vaccine could face discipline, official papers suggest” (O’Grady, 2021; Nicol, 2021). Here again is the threat of imposed restrictions and disciplinary measures. Whether or not those restrictions and measures could actually be implemented made little difference to the effectiveness of the threat, which most people assumed to be real. Many demoralised workers consented to getting the “vaccine” on the false assumption that they would have to do so anyway.

Pimlico Plumbers

Pimlico Plumbers, whose PR was once handled by disgraced publicist Max Clifford, is no stranger to political communication. In 2018, for instance, it erected a controversial “Bollocks to Brexit” sign on top of its Waterloo premises.

In January 2021, Pimlico Plumbers’ managing director, Charlie Mullins, announced plans to introduce “no jab, no job” contracts for employees, a move which, according to the Guardian, would entail the company “drafting new employment contracts for its 400-strong workforce to include the vaccine requirement, although employment lawyers questioned whether it would be legally enforceable” (Jolly, 2021).

Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi branded the move “discriminatory,” misleadingly implying that a plumbing company could, of its own volition, introduce vaccine mandates for employees (Scotto di Santolo, 2021).

A plumbing company is representative of the trades, and tradespeople in particular would have paid attention to the Pimlico Plumbers story. Pimlico Plumbers was widely cited as an example of a company mandating vaccination for employees.

For example, the House of Commons Library briefing document mentioned above notes that

the Government has not legislated to require or prohibit employers from checking the vaccine or Covid status of staff or customers. Nevertheless, a number of employers have implemented so-called “no jab, no job” policies that require new staff to be fully vaccinated. (Ferguson, 2021, p. 30)

“A number of employers”? The attendant footnote references only one company: Pimlico Plumbers. The briefing document was intended as a guide for politicians, who may therefore have gleaned the misimpression that employers could lawfully introduce “no jab, no job” policies of their own accord, based solely on the Pimlico Plumbers story.

By May 30, 2021, Pimlico Plumbers boss Mullins (then 68) had still not been “vaccinated,” despite “Covid-19 vaccines” having been available to the 65-69 age range since mid February 2021 (Castle, 2021).

Although Mullins had first announced the “no jab, no job” policy in January 2021, it was not until June 10, 2021, that the company put out a job advertisement making “coronavirus vaccination” a condition of employment for new staff (Jackson, 2021). As for existing staff, Mullins announced six days later that from January 1, 2022, all “unvaccinated” employees (excluding those with medical exemptions) would be “given the boot” (“Covid vaccine: Pimlico Plumbers to force staff to have jab”, 2021).

There was an obvious problem with this, however, namely that existing work contracts were unlikely to include any mention of vaccination against “Covid-19,” meaning that new contracts would have to be drawn up (“Employment rights offer UK immunity to mandatory workplace Covid jabs,” 2021). There are no verified reports of this having happened, or of Pimlico Plumbers having fired anyone for refusing the jab, despite Mullins’ highly-profile threats to do so.

In September 2021, by which time all eligible adults in the UK had been offered the shot, Mullins sold his 90% stake in Pimlico Plumbers for over £125 million, removing any obligation to follow through on his threats to fire unvaccinated employees (Harding, 2021).

The entire Pimlico Plumbers story therefore appears as a psychological operation designed to deceive the public that employers could, of their own volition, introduce “no jab, no job” policies, and thus to demoralise workers into getting the jab when there was no need to do so.

US Federal Government Mandates

Two executive orders signed by President Biden in September 2021 mandated “Covid-19 vaccination” for all executive branch employees plus certain employees of federal contractors, subject to medical and religious accommodations (Paretti et al., 2021; Shen, 2022). This covered over four million workers, including ca. 2.9 million in the federal civilian workforce, the large majority of whom had already consented to getting injected.

Previously, vaccines had only been mandated within the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Indian Health Service, and the National Institutes of Health. Biden’s executive orders marked a significant departure in that respect.

However, the main executive order, EO 14043 (issued on September 9, 2021), which required injections for federal executive branch employees, was implemented unevenly and only partially enforced. Relatively few employees were fired for violating it. Tens of thousands of requests for medical and religious exemptions first had to be processed. Most agencies also followed a lengthy disciplinary process that included counseling, education, suspension, and opportunities to comply before removal (Runyan, 2023).

On January 21, 2022, typically before those disciplinary processes were completed, a federal district court issued a nationwide injunction blocking enforcement of EO 14043 while litigation proceeded. Agencies generally stopped taking adverse employment actions based on the mandate, and many administrative processes were paused. The mandate technically remained on the books, but was largely unenforceable because of the injunction.

The “vaccination” requirement for federal employees, federal employees, and international air travellers was rescinded on May 11, 2023, and EO 14043 was revoked in January 2025 (The White House, 2023; Executive Office of the President, 2025). Once again, the threat of job losses for not taking the “vaccine” largely came to nothing.

OSHA’s Vaccine-or-Test Requirement

On November 4, 2021, the White House (2021) announced that the Department of Labour’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was introducing a requirement for employers with 100+ employees to ensure that all employees were “fully vaccinated” by January 4, 2022, or tested twice weekly for “Covid-19.” This would affect an estimated 84 million workers, or approximately two thirds of employees nationwide (Mason et al., 2021).

OSHA issued the Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) on November 5, 2021, when it was published in the Federal Register.

However, on January 13, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked OSHA’s vaccine-or-test requirement, finding that “Although COVID-19 is a risk that occurs in many workplaces, it is not an occupational hazard in most” (National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 2022). OSHA’s authority is limited to occupational hazards.

The court ruled that OSHA could regulate where the danger is occupational — for instance, research laboratories working with the virus, healthcare settings, and crowded or high-risk work environments.

However, the court found that when an agency claims the power to make decisions of vast economic and political significance, such as would have affected 84 million workers, the authority for doing so must be clearly delegated by Congress. In the case of OSHA’s ETS, this was not the case.

OSHA formally withdrew the ETS on January 26, 2022 (de Vogue, 2022; OSHA, 2022). Once again, executive power had run up against legal constraints.

“Covid-19 Vaccination” Mandates in the US Military

“Covid-19 vaccination” was mandated for active-duty and reserve US military personnel via an order issued by the Secretary of Defence on August 24, 2021 (Department of Defence, 2021). All branches of the US military were covered, and “vaccination” requirements were enforced through military chains of command, subject to medical and religious exemptions. Service members were told that their careers depended on compliance.

The US military “vaccine” mandate was arguably the most controversial of all such mandates, because it was enforced with gruesome consequences, as documented in the film Duty To Disobey (Burrowes, 2026).

A primary focus of the film is “involuntary immunization,” i.e., forced vaccination against the individual’s will. Instructions for carrying out the military mandate called for “using as much force as necessary.” In the documentary, a brigade surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel Theresa Long, M.D., recalls her horror upon receiving such instructions, stating “That’s, by definition, medical rape.”

The documentary shows that military personnel were physically and psychologically abused, to the point of being hospitalised. During the period of the mandate, 1,000 of them committed suicide.

The astonishing point made by the documentary is that because the order to take the “vaccine” was unlawful, service members had a duty to disobey the order. That is how far things went.

Ominously, one service member observes that “Once [a practice] becomes normalized in the military, it often very quickly finds its way into the civilian population.” This is precisely why the US military mandate must not be forgotten or condoned.

The military mandate was eventually rescinded in January 2023 after Congress required the Department of Defence to end it in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 (Department of Defence, 2023).

Conclusion

The use of threats and coercion to maximise “vaccine” uptake was one of the most unseemly and sinister aspects of the entire “Covid-19” operation. Why did governments and their private sector partners resort to such measures to get unlicensed, experimental technologies into the arms of as many people as possible?

Threatening people’s livelihoods though was particularly egregious, and the legacy media bears significant culpability for deceiving the public that job losses could follow in any sector based on a refusal to take the shots.

The case of Pimlico Plumbers in the UK looks, in retrospect, like an obvious psychological operation intended to make tradespeople and other ordinary workers assume that their employer could make “vaccination” a condition of employment. That was never the case, however, and there is no evidence that Pimlico Plumbers employees were forced to get “vaccinated.”

In the United States, the OSHA mandate that applied to two thirds of employees nationwide was not backed by an executive order and was struck down by the Supreme Court. “Vaccine” mandates for executive branch employees and employees of federal contractors proved similarly toothless when a federal district court issued a nationwide injunction. Nevertheless, it is astonishing that such mandates were attempted.

The “Covid-19 vaccination” mandate for US military personnel was most disturbing because its enforcement through military chains of command. That form of “medical rape,” as one bridge surgeon characterised it, must never be allowed to happen again, let alone become normalised or enter the civilian population.

Part 5 will explore “vaccine” mandates for healthcare workers and the ongoing threat of such mandates for the wider population.

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References

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Burrowes, B. (Director). (2026). Duty to disobey [Film]. Children’s Health Defense Films. https://dutytodisobeyfilm.com/.

Castle, A. (2020, May 30). Charlie Mullins admits to not having Covid vaccine – despite requiring employees to be jabbed. LBC. https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/andrew-castle/charlie-mullins-admits-to-not-having-covid-vaccine-despite-requiring-employees-t/.

Charlton, E. (2021,May 17). Survey: Will employees be required to get the COVID-19 vaccination?” World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/employers-covid-19-vaccination-homeworking/.

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O’Grady, S. (2021, May 18). This is what we do about anti-vaxxers: No job. No entry. No NHS access. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/antivaxxers-vaccine-coronavirus-nhs-b1849437.html#Echobox=1621346192.

Osborne, G. (2021, February 9). To lead a normal life you’ll need a Covid passport - here’s why. Evening Standard. https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/george-osborne-covid-passports-normal-life-b919119.html.

Paretti, J., Hammock, B., Goldstein, D., Wood, J., & Mishra, D. (2021, September 9). White House announces vaccine mandates for employees of large private employers, federal contractors, and most healthcare employers. Littler. https://www.littler.com/news-analysis/asap/white-house-announces-vaccine-mandates-employees-large-private-employers-federal.

By Jim , Brad Hammock, David Goldstein, Jeremy Wood, and Devjani Mishra

Riley, J. (2021, April 14). Weasel words and broken promises — A roadmap to endless lockdown. TCW. https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/weasel-words-and-broken-promises-on-the-road-to-endless-lockdowns/.

Runyan, D. (2023, July 27). Written testimony before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability: Because I Said So: Examining the Science and Impact of COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates. United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Danielle-Runyan-Testimony-FULL-PACKET-small-FINAL91.pdf.

Schwab, K. (2022, April 10). Nobody will be safe if not everybody is vaccinated [Video]. YouTube.

Scotto di Santolo, A. (2021, January 18). Pimlico Plumbers’ Charlie Mullins lambasted by Zahawi over ‘discriminatory’ vaccine rule. Daily Express. https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1385399/pimlico-plumbers-charlie-mullins-nadhim-zahawi-coronavirus-vaccine-vn.

Shen, W.W. (2022, May 17). State and federal authority to mandate COVID-19 vaccination (CRS Report No. R46745). Congressional Research Service. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46745.

The White House. (2021, November 4). Fact sheet: Biden Administration announces details of two major vaccination policies. Internet Archive Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20211104141006/https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/11/04/fact-sheet-biden-administration-announces-details-of-two-major-vaccination-policies/.

The White House. (2023, May 1). The Biden administration will end COVID-19 vaccination requirements for federal employees, contractors, international travelers, Head Start educators, and CMS-certified facilities. Internet Archive Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20230501220546/https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/05/01/the-biden-administration-will-end-covid-19-vaccination-requirements-for-federal-employees-contractors-international-travelers-head-start-educators-and-cms-certified-facilities/.

UNICEF. (2021, May 24). No-one is safe until everyone is safe – why we need a global response to COVID-19. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/no-onesafe-until-everyone-safe-why-we-need-global-response-covid-19.

Williams, T. (2020, November 13). Anti-vaxxers “could be banned from going into work if they refuse Covid jab.” The Metro. https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/13/covid-vaccine-refusal-could-result-in-ban-from-going-to-work-13587535/.

World Health Organization. (2020). Behavioural considerations for acceptance and uptake of COVID-19 vaccines: WHO Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences For Health, meeting report, 15 October 2020. World Health Organization. https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/337335/9789240016927-eng.pdf.

World Health Organisation. (2021, April 13). COVID-19 and mandatory vaccination: Ethical considerations and caveats. https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/340841/WHO-2019-nCoV-Policy-brief-Mandatory-vaccination-2021.1-eng.pdf.

• Willem de Lint’s concept of intelligence crime;

• US foreign policy since 1945 as a catalogue of war crimes and violations of international law;

• US war crimes committed in North Korea;

• US atrocities committed in South America and Southeast Asia;

• a brief history of false flag operations;

• the mysterious reduction of major terrorist attacks in 2020;

• the “Covid-19 pandemic” as intelligence crime; and

• face masks as psychological torture instruments.

Part 5 will address Chapter 7 of the book, titled “Where It Leads.”

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Nevertheless, the idea of mandatory vaccination was seeded early during the “Covid-19 pandemic.” Promises that only the most vulnerable groups would be vaccinated were quickly reneged on. Within a matter of weeks, the rhetoric shifted to vaccinating everyone, and even pregnant women and children were offered the jab despite a paucity of safety data.

Seeding the Idea of Mandatory Vaccination

As early as May 4, 2020 — barely six weeks after the first UK “lockdown” was declared — Health Secretary Matt Hancock claimed that “very, very high levels of vaccination” should be possible without making it mandatory, owing to the “obvious benefits to individuals and their families and their communities and indeed the whole nation” (cited in Rough & Powell, 2021, p. 70).

On May 9, 2020, the BBC dismissed the idea of compulsory vaccination as a “rumour” (Goodman, 2020). We will return to the distinction between compulsory and mandatory vaccination below, but for now it is enough to note that the British state broadcaster quickly floated the possibility of compulsory vaccination, even while ruling it out.

No sooner had Pfizer announced positive clinical trial results on November 9, 2020, than ITV’s Good Morning Britain ran a feature titled “Following the news that a Covid-19 vaccine could be just around the corner, should the vaccine be mandatory?” In an accompanying poll, 64% of 40,000 respondents said no, leaving over a third supposedly in favour of violating the principle of informed consent (Cain, 2020).

A contemporaneous petition titled “Prevent any restrictions on those who refuse a Covid-19 vaccination” garnered 337,000 signatures, prompting the government to respond that “There are currently no plans to place restrictions on those who refuse to have any potential Covid-19 vaccine” (Castle, 2020, my emphasis). This did not rule out such restrictions, which did eventually come into force.

Health Secretary Hancock claimed on November 16, 2020, that the government was not considering mandating vaccinations for NHS workers, but that he had learned “not to rule things out during this pandemic” (cited in Yorke, 2020). A year later, most NHS workers were told they would need to get the shot to keep their jobs.

The Prime Minister claimed on November 23, 2020, “There will be no compulsory vaccination. That’s not the way we do things in this country” (Reuters, 2020). His words were chosen carefully: according to the House of Commons Library briefing paper, UK Vaccination Policy, “compulsory” refers to “the criminalisation of vaccine refusal,” whereas “mandatory” means that “social goods or services offered by the State may be withheld [...]” (Rough, 2021, p. 39). Johnson thus did not rule out the latter forms of coercion.

An email from the office of Nadine Dorries MP on November 24, 2020, revealed how things could work: “if you [choose] not to take the vaccine, then you will face short-term restrictions to prevent you infecting anyone else until society has achieved herd immunity. Your fundamental rights to choose whether or not you take the vaccine do not include a right to endanger others” (Goffe, 2020). The email was blamed on the junior member of staff who sent it, yet it uncannily foreshadowed what followed in 2021.

On November 30, 2020, Hancock told a press briefing “we do not plan to mandate the vaccine,” leaving “vaccine” mandates open as a possibility (Hayes et al., 2020).

On December 2, 2020, the Prime Minister told Parliament “it is no part of our culture or our ambition in this country to make vaccines mandatory. That is not how we do things” (Hansard, 2020). Once more, the idea of mandatory “vaccination” was seeded – and the rollout was only just beginning.

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“Just the Most Vulnerable”

At first, messaging around “vaccination” was pitched at a level that made epidemiological sense: “vaccinate” the elderly and the vulnerable so that they are protected against “Covid-19.” For example, on December 8, 2020, when the first “Covid-19 vaccine” was given in the UK, Matt Hancock told Talk Radio that the government could ease restrictions once the most vulnerable people in society had received the vaccine (Sansome, 2020).

On December 27, 2020, a Metro front page headline read “UK ‘could be free of lockdowns by February’ once 15,000,000 have jabs” and a similar headline in the Mail on January 3, 2021, read “Countdown to 15 million jabs... and freedom day” (King, 2020; Adams, 2021). The 15 million figure referred to vulnerable groups.

According to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (an “independent expert advisory committee” that advises UK health departments) on December 30, 2020, “It is estimated that taken together, these groups [i.e., the over-50s plus ‘frontline workers’] represent around 99% of preventable mortality from COVID-19” (JCVI, 2020). Therefore, in terms of preventable mortality, there was no need for the under-50s and non-frontline workers to get “jabbed.”

Chief Medical Officers in the UK recommended that “as many people on the JCVI priority list as possible should sequentially be offered a first vaccine dose as the initial priority” (Department of Health and Social Care, 2020). There was no obvious indication at the time that the “Covid-19 vaccine” rollout would extend beyond the JCVI priority list.

“Covid-19” appeared on the death certificates of very few people under the age of 60, falling to almost no children (Office for National Statistics, n.d.). So again, why “vaccinate” the under-60s? Why “vaccinate” children? Even for the over-60s, the risks of the virus may have been worth bearing. It turned out, for instance, that 99.95% of under-70s survived “Covid-19” (Ioannidis, 2021).

“Vaccinating” the Entire Population

Limiting the number of people getting injected was never the plan, however. On January 3, 2021, Blair claimed on Sky News that the UK could potentially “vaccinate the entire population in a matter of weeks” (cited in Shaw, 2021, my emphasis). For the first time, the spectre of universal vaccination slid into view.

Mark Harper MP (2021) asked Matt Hancock in Parliament on January 6, 2021: once the most vulnerable groups had been vaccinated against Covid, what possible reason was there for restrictions to remain?

On January 9, 2021, Hancock claimed that “the goal is not to ensure that we vaccinate the whole population before [hospitalisation rates decline], it is to vaccinate those who are most vulnerable” (cited in Forsyth & Nelson, 2021). This implied that the “vaccine” rollout would continue even after hospitalisation rates declined.

The following day, the BBC’s Andrew Marr put it to Hancock: “The inventor of the Pfizer vaccine said you had to vaccinate everybody by the autumn. Are you going to be able to do that?” (“Covid-19: ‘Every adult will be offered a vaccine,’” my emphasis). Hancock replied with an enthusiastic “Yes!” and proceeded to explain that “we’ll keep going down the age spectrum,” offering a “vaccine” to every UK adult by September 2021. A BBC write up of the Marr interview buried a solitary mention of the plan for universal “vaccination” near the bottom of the article, evidently keen not to draw too much public attention to it (“Covid-19: Hancock warns,” 2021).

On February 9, 2021, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne (2021), claimed that “we [who, exactly?] could make vaccination compulsory,” like jury service and paying taxes, even though this “smacks of state compulsion.” It is far from clear that this was ever the case, but the threat was used to intimidate people into taking the shot anyway.

Dr. Susan Hopkins of Public Health England (an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care) told Sky News on February 12, 2021, “I think we are going to have to have some measures in place until the whole population is vaccinated, at least all of the adult population. And even then I think we’ll need to know more about transmission before we can release everything and get back to life as it was” (cited in Allegretti, 2021).

On February 14, 2021, the BBC offered the flimsiest of pretexts for expanding the “vaccination” programme to all adults by September, i.e. that the under-70s accounted for just under half of “Covid-19” hospitalisations (Triggle, 2021). Here, the rush to inject was not even justified by saving lives primarily.

Vaccinating Pregnant Women

If the “vaccines” were “safe and effective” for everyone, then the litmus test was surely pregnant women. There are very good reasons to be extra careful around vaccinating pregnant women, because of potential harm to the fetus.

Again, the advice began sensibly. For instance, according to Public Health England (2020) on November 27, 2020, “Although the available data do not indicate any safety concern or harm to pregnancy, there is insufficient evidence to recommend routine use of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy. Vaccination should be postponed until completion of pregnancy.” This guidance was echoed by the JCVI (Kitching, 2020).

According to UK Government Regulation 174 (as applied to the Pfizer-BioNTech product) on December 4, 2020, “Animal reproductive toxicity studies have not been completed. COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is not recommended during pregnancy.” It was “unknown” whether Pfizer’s product had an “impact on fertility,” and women of childbearing age were advised to “avoid pregnancy for at least 2 months after their second dose” (see Cummings McLean, 2020).

The JCVI (2020, p. 7) advised on December 30, 2020 that “breastfeeding women may be offered vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech or AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.” Yet, a year later, after the rollout was mostly complete, the December 2021 version of Regulation 174 admitted “It is unknown whether the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is excreted in human milk” (Department of Health and Social Care and MHRA, 2021). In other words, no one knew whether the “vaccine” contents were passed on to breastfeeding babies.

“Covid-19 vaccines” were offered to pregnant women in the UK without adequate safety data, but with the blessing of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Health, Professor Lucy Chappell (Beck, 2022).

In the United States, early CDC “V-safe” data on the Pfizer-BioNTech “vaccine” were alarming. By Day 5 (December 18, 2020), 112,807 registrants had received the first dose, including 514 pregnant women, and already 3,150 “health impact events” had been registered, defined as “unable to perform normal daily activities, unable to work, required care from doctor or health care professional” (Clark, 2020). That is 2.79% of the total, implying that 14 pregnant women were harmed if the “health impact events” were distributed evenly across demographics.

Pfizer and BioNTech commenced a global clinical trial to evaluate the vaccine in pregnant women on February 18, 2021. Yet, already by February 12, 2021, the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had received 111 reports of adverse events experienced by women who were pregnant at the time of their Pfizer or Moderna injection, 31% of which involved miscarriages or preterm births (Children’s Health Defence Team, 2021). By April 1, 2021, the combined miscarriage and preterm birth rate was 29% as per VAERS, far higher than the standard miscarriage rate of 23%, dropping to 5% from Week 6 (Mercola, 2021).

Nevertheless, both the CDC and the WHO advised pregnant women to get vaccinated.

In September 2021, Public Health England recommended that women be told about “the limited evidence of safety for the vaccine in pregnancy” and should discuss the risks and benefits with their doctors (Rough & Powell 2021, p. 37).

The December 2021 version of Regulation 174 likewise states that the Pfizer-BioNTech “vaccine” should only be considered for pregnant women “when the potential benefits outweigh any potential risks for the mother and foetus” (Department of Health and Social Care and MHRA, 2021).

Yet, the risks were barely made known amidst an avalanche of pro-”vaccine” propaganda. The BBC, for instance, began promoting the “vaccine” for pregnant women as early as January 2021, even though no manufacturer was due to complete a scientific trial in expectant mothers before December that year (Beck, 2021). It also played down the risks of the shots by only pointing to period changes as a short-term side effect (Robinson & Schraer, 2021). Tony Blair in October 2021 called for pregnant women to be vaccinated faster (Culbertson, 2021).

Vaccinating Children

The US Food and Drug Administration noted on December 10, 2020, that there were “insufficient data to make conclusions about the safety of the vaccine in subpopulations such as children less than 16 years of age, pregnant and lactating individuals, and immunocompromised individuals” (FDA, 2020, p. 49).

Nevertheless, the FDA approved Pfizer’s Comirnaty “vaccine” for those aged 16 years and under in August 2021, and by September 2021 under-16s were being injected transnationally. “Emergency” Use Authorisation for that product was granted for those aged six months to four years (!) in June 2022, long after the “Covid-19 emergency” was over.

I wrote at the time about the lack of adequate justification for extending the “vaccine” rollout to children:

The rollout has been predicated on shifting narratives, obfuscations, faux justifications, outright lies, regulatory capture of supposed guardians of the public interest, and mass propaganda. Evidence of actual and potential injuries to children has accumulated from before the beginning of the rollout, in spite of repeated attempts to cover it up. (Hughes, 2022, p. 209)

“Lockdowns” were scandalously used to promote the “vaccination” of children, which was medically senseless and unethical (Hughes, 2022). For example, SAGE’s John Edmunds claimed on June 30, 2021, that school children needed to have at least one injection before restrictions could be relaxed (Davies, 2021).

According to Sunday Times science editor Ben Spencer (2021), “Lockdown bought us this freedom. Now focus on vaccinating the young.” In reality, “lockdowns” represented the worst assault on freedom in supposed peacetime history, and the idea that even children needed to be injected for restrictions to lift was scientifically false and morally abhorrent.

WEF agenda contributor Trisha Greenhalgh, along with Susan Michie (SAGE and Independent SAGE), Christine Pagel (Independent SAGE), and others, wrote on July 7, 2021, that “the government should delay complete re-opening until everyone, including adolescents, have been offered vaccination and uptake is high” (Gurdasani et al., 2021). Even as restrictions were finally lifted on July 19, 2021, Michie claimed that this should not happen “until we’ve finished the vaccination programme” (cited in Allen, 2021).

The end of restrictions meant that there was no emergency that could legitimise the ongoing “vaccine” rollout. Yet, still the rollout continued, working down the age ranges until, shamefully, it reached children in September 2021.

Brandon Schadt, a Regional Business Lead at Johnson & Johnson, was exposed by Project Veritas (2021) that month as claiming “It’s a kid, you just don’t do that, you know? Not something that’s so unknown in terms of repercussions down the road, you know? [...] Kids shouldn’t get a f***ing [Covid-19] vaccine.”

Conclusion

There was no good reason to try “vaccinating” everyone. Indeed, the sudden unexplained switch from “only the most vulnerable” in late 2020 to offering the “vaccine” to everyone in 2021 was deeply suspect.

Offering products with minimal safety data to pregnant women and children who did not need them was ethically fraught and morally reprehensible. Those who pushed the shots on those groups – politicians, media talking heads, regulators, so-called “experts” – have much to answer for.

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Roffe, E. (2020, November 25). Nadine Dorries MP blames “mandatory vaccine” response on young caseworker. Bedford Independent. https://www.bedfordindependent.co.uk/nadine-dorries-mp-blames-mandatory-vaccine-response-on-young-caseworker/.

Rough, S. (2021, January 21). UK vaccination policy. Briefing Paper CBP 9076. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9076/.

Rough, E., & Powell, T. (2021, September 15). Coronavirus: Covid-19 vaccine roll-out frequently asked questions.” House of Commons Library. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9081/.

Sansome, J. (2020, December 8). GMB’s Dr Hilary Jones issues coronavirus vaccine caution. Manchester Evening News. https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/tv/gmbs-dr-hilary-jones-issues-19417593.

Shaw, I. (2021, January 4). Former PM joins sector calls for Government to involve all pharmacies in Covid vaccine rollout. The Pharmacist. https://www.thepharmacist.co.uk/news/covid-19/former-pm-joins-sector-calls-for-government-to-involve-all-pharmacies-in-covid-vaccine-rollout/.

Spencer, B. (2021, April 18). Covid-19: Lockdown bought us this freedom. Now focus on vaccinating the young. The Times. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/covid-19-lockdown-bought-us-this-freedom-now-focus-on-vaccinating-the-young-rm5tbwgvw.

Triggle, N. (2021, February 14). Covid: Vaccine given to 15 Million in UK as PM hails “extraordinary feat.” BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56062976.

Yorke, H. (2020, November 16). Matt Hancock refuses to rule out making Covid-19 vaccine mandatory.” The Telegraph. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/matt-hancock-refuses-to-rule-out-making-covid-19-vaccine-mandatory/ar-BB1b3DYt?ocid=msedgdhp.

• The role of George Kennan in the development of the US national security state and why his reputation deserves to be reevaluated;

• what Hans Morgenthau in 1955 called the “dual state”;

• the CIA as “the base of a kind of dual power, an illegal, parallel government” that is “more a conspiracy against the USA itself than the USSR,” to quote one critic in 1974;

• the transnational nature of the deep state, the “Grand Area” concept, and NATO;

• Operation Gladio, its history, development, and role in foreshadowing the “War on Terror”;

• why the “Cold War” concept and attendant narratives need to be reappraised;

• Wall Street’s conjuring of an existential threat to the West that never existed;

• close ties between Wall Street and the Soviet Union from the beginning; and

• the Cold War as seen through the lens of transnational class relations

Part 4 will explore intelligence crime and the history of US foreign policy since 1945.

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Introduction

There are powerful ethical, political, and scientific arguments against mandatory vaccination, especially en masse.

No such considerations were evident, however, in the drive to inject as many people as possible with undisclosed substances masquerading as “Covid-19 vaccines” (Hughes, 2024, pp. 236-248). Rather, governments and the legacy media resorted to every trick in the book to maximise “vaccine” uptake.

Although not everyone was injected, a precedent was set that helped to normalise the idea of mass vaccination. Most people (ca. 77% of UK adults, skewed towards older age ranges [UKHSA, 2022b, Table 5]) got at least one shot, regardless of whether they really wanted to and of whether they actually needed to do so.

One important tactic in driving “vaccine” uptake was to create the misimpression that vaccination could be made mandatory for everyone. This began by seeding the idea of mandatory vaccination while denying that it would happen, then offering the jab to at-risk groups, before unnecessarily rolling it out to all age groups with the clear expectation that everyone (unless granted a medical or religious exemption) should roll up their sleeves.

The threat of unemployment was dangled over those who refused, even though there was no legal basis for this in most cases. In the UK, “vaccine” mandates for care home workers, plus the announcement that similar mandates would be introduced in the NHS (the world’s fifth largest employer) created an ominous sense that it would only be a matter of time before “Covid-19 vaccines” were mandated for everyone.

That sense of inevitability no doubt prompted some people to receive the injections who otherwise would not have done so — and should not have done so.

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Ethical and Political Arguments Against Vaccine Mandates

After details emerged of Nazi medical experiments and murders in concentration camps, often involving the use of syringes (Lifton, 1986, p. 269; Hughes, 2024b, pp. 142-147), the Nuremberg Code (1947) enshrined the principle of informed consent at the heart of medical ethics. This was confirmed by subsequent frameworks, such as the Declaration of Helsinki (1964) and the Belmont Report (1979).

Vaccine mandates, however, violate the principle of informed consent, and thus the Nuremberg Code and attendant frameworks. They mean that those who do not wish to be vaccinated can be injected against their will.

Professor David Feldman defines bodily integrity as “a right to be free from physical interference.” This includes

freedom from physical assaults, torture, medical or other experimentation, immunization and compelled eugenic or social sterilization, and cruel or degrading treatment or punishment. It also encompasses some positive duties on the state to protect people against inference by others. (Feldman, 2002, p. 241).

When the state assumes the right to violate the bodily integrity of those within its jurisdiction, it effectively assumes legal ownership over their bodies, turning them into slaves (Davis, 2021).

This is consistent with Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) notion of “biopower,” i.e., direct control over human bodies without recourse to the rights of citizenship. As the nation-state breaks down, Agamben predicted, biopower, which was witnessed in Nazi concentration camps, would emerge as “the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West,” whereby “the state decides to assume directly the care of the nation’s biological life as one of its proper tasks” (1998, pp. 175–181).

The attack on bodily autonomy during Covid (Hughes, 2026), along with the advent of so-called “mRNA vaccines” allegedly capable of “programming” human cells to produce specific proteins (Hughes, 2024b, p. 144), are consistent with the rise of biopower. Mandatory vaccination for all would mark the advent of a totalitarian society in which individuals are no longer sovereign over their own bodies.

Scientific Reasons Not to “Vaccinate” Everyone

Regardless of “safe and effective” propaganda, the risk posed by “Covid-19 vaccines” was substantial because of the lack of any safety data beyond just a few months. As the former Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer’s Allergy & Respiratory Research division, Mike Yeadon (2020b), stated two months before the rollout began, “You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects.”

There was no point in “vaccinating” those who had already had “Covid-19” (Shrestha et al., 2022). There was no benefit, only risk.

Although certain medical exemptions were allowed, the drive to inject as many people as possible must have meant that, in many cases, previous medical history was not adequately taken into account. The “Covid-19 vaccines” were not suitable for everyone, yet everyone was encouraged to take them.

To illustrate this point with an analogy, 2% of Westerners have a peanut allergy (Lieberman et al, 2021), possibly because of peanut oil having been put in vaccines (Rojas, 2023). If everyone had been forced to eat a spoonful of peanut butter in 2021, the number of serious adverse reactions would have been in the tens of millions. No product should be pushed on the entire population.

The US CDC in 2021 redefined “vaccination” to exclude all reference to immunity: alleviation of symptoms, rather than preventing infection or transmission, was sufficient (Hughes, 2022, p. 210). But if the “vaccines” only alleviated symptoms, why give them to asymptomatic people? People without HIV are not given HIV medication, for instance.

According to Doctors For Covid Ethics (2023), mRNA vaccines are harmful from first principles, so should never have been administered. The authorities must have known this.

Legal Arguments Against Mandatory Vaccination

In Montgomery vs Lanarkshire Health Board (2015), the UK Supreme Court ruled that “an adult person of sound mind is entitled to decide which, if any, of the available forms of treatment to undergo, and her consent must be obtained before treatment interfering with her bodily integrity is undertaken.” This set a clear legal precedent defending bodily integrity and informed consent.

A House of Commons Library briefing document from May 2021 notes that vaccinations in the UK are not mandatory, even during a pandemic, and that consent to vaccination must always be given (Rough & Powell, 2021, p. 70). It adds that, whilst section 45C of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 provides for a “public health response to the incidence or spread of infection or contamination,” it explicitly excludes “requiring a person to undergo medical treatment,” including vaccination.

The Coronavirus Act 2020 created temporary emergency powers (e.g., for managing healthcare staffing, postponing elections, and enforcing quarantine), but it did not amend or repeal Section 45C(6) of the 1984 Act. Nothing in the Act authorises compulsory vaccination.

The Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020, pertaining to “lockdown” measures, were made, in part, under Section 45C, as their opening line makes clear: “The Secretary of State makes the following Regulations in exercise of the powers conferred by sections 45C(1), (3)(c), (4)(b), (4)(d), 45F(2) and 45P of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984).”

UK politicians should, therefore, have been aware that vaccine mandates for the general population were without foundation in UK law.

Where vaccination was later mandated (for care home workers and NHS workers, though the latter mandate was never implemented), this was done through employment regulations, not public health regulations under Section 45C.

Tactical Arguments Against Mandatory Vaccination

Arguments against mandatory vaccination were well established even by pro-vaccine advocates when the “Covid-19 vaccine” rollout began.

It was known, for instance, that the element of coercion risks turning people against vaccination (Salmon et al., 2015). There is no evidence that mandatory vaccination has been effective in increasing vaccine uptake; on the contrary, it risks alienating people (Bedford & Elliman, 2019). Preferable to mandatory vaccination is to improve vaccination rates through education (Hadjipanayis et al., 2020). The risks and harms of removing personal choice must be taken into account (Hadjipanayis & Efstathiou, 2020, p. 206). Mandatory vaccination undermines personal freedom and autonomy (Patryna & Zagajaa, 2016, p. 2204). A system of medical, religious, and/or philosophical exemptions should be considered (Pierik, 2017, p. 220).

All of these studies are pro-vaccination and seek to combat “vaccine hesitancy,” especially among parents on behalf of their children, yet they all draw the line at mandatory vaccination. They are all cited in a House of Commons Library briefing document titled UK Vaccination Policy, dated January 21, 2021 (Rough, 2021).

UK politicians should have known, therefore, that mandatory vaccination was not something to be considered, not even for tactical reasons.

Summary

Vaccine mandates in the UK cross every conceivable line. They violate the principle of informed consent, they violate bodily integrity, they make no scientific sense as applied to the general population, they are illegal under public health regulations, and even pro-vaccination advocates recognise that they are tactically inadvisable.

Nevertheless, as we will see in the next section, the UK authorities, as elsewhere, went all in on trying to convince the population that almost everyone – even pregnant women and children – could and should be “vaccinated.”

References

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer. Stanford University Press.

Bedford, H.E., & Elliman, D.A.C. (2019). Should measles vaccination be compulsory? BMJ, 365, Article l2359. https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2359/.

Davis, I. (2021, December 22). COVID jabs: Ineffective, oppressive and dangerous. https://iaindavis.com/covid-jabs/

Doctors for Covid Ethics. (2023). mRNA Vaccine Toxicity. https://doctors4covidethics.org/mrna-vaccine-toxicity/.

Feldman, D. (2002). Civil liberties and human rights in England and Wales, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press.

Hadjipanayis, A., Dornbusch, H.J., Grossman, Z., Theophilou, L., & Brierley, J. (2020). Mandatory vaccination: A joint statement of the ethics and vaccination working groups of the European Academy of Paediatrics.” European Journal of Pediatrics, 179(4), 683–687. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31773329/.

Hadjipanayis, A., & Efstathiou, E. (2020). Editorial commentary on the paper, “Mandatory vaccination in Europe.” Translational Pediatrics, 9(3), 206-208. https://tp.amegroups.com/article/view/43960/html.

Hughes, D. A. (2022a). “Covid-19 vaccines” for children in the UK: A tale of establishment corruption. International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, 2(1), 209–247. https://doi.org/10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i1.35.

Hughes, D.A. (2024a). “Covid-19,” psychological operations, and the war for technocracy. Palgrave Macmillan.

Hughes, D.A. (2024b). Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State. Skyhorse.

Hughes, D.A. (2026). “Covid-19” and the attack on bodily autonomy. https://davidahughes.net/covid-19-and-the-attack-on-bodily-autonomy/.

Lieberman, J.A., Gupta, R.S., Knibb, R.C., Haselkorn, T., Tilles, S., Mack, D.P., & Pouessel, G. (2021). The global burden of illness of peanut allergy: A comprehensive literature review. Allergy, 76(5), 1367-1384. https://doi.org/10.1111/all.14666.

Lifton, R.J. (1986). The Nazi doctors. Basic Books.

Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11; [2015] 1 A.C. 1430. https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2013-0136-judgment.pdf.

Patryna, R.K., & Zagajaa, A. (2016). Vaccinations—Between free will and coercion. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 12(8), 2204–2205. http://europepmc.org/article/MED/27070840#free-full-text.

Pierik, R. (2017). On religious and secular exemptions: A case study of childhood vaccination waivers.” Ethnicities, 17(2), 220–241. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1468796817692629.

Rojas, J. (2023, July 22). Where did the Peanut allergy epidemic come from? THE RISE OF VACCINES. “The big change came with vaccines. Peanut oils [...] [Tweet]. X.

Rough, S. (2021, January 21). UK vaccination policy. Briefing Paper Number CBP 9076. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9076/.

Rough, E., & Powell, T. (2021, September 15). Coronavirus: Covid-19 vaccine roll-out frequently asked questions.” House of Commons Library. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9081/.

Salmon, D.A., MacIntyre, C.R., & Omer, S.B. (2015). Making mandatory vaccination truly compulsory: Well intentioned but ill conceived. The Lancet, 15(8), 872-3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(15)00156-5/fulltext.

Shrestha, N.K., Burke, P.C., Nowacki, A.S., Terpeluk, P., & Gordon, S.M. (2022). Necessity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination in persons who have already had COVID-19. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 75(1), e662–e671. https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciac022.

UK Health Security Agency. (2022). Weekly national influenza and Covid-19 surveillance report, week 27. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1088929/Weekly_ Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w27.pdf.

Yeadon, M. (2020, October 16). What SAGE has got wrong. Lockdown Sceptics. https://lockdownsceptics.org/what-sage-got-wrong/.

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• the role of the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil in powering the Nazi war machine;

• the role of the Rockefellers’ Chase National Bank in financing fascism;

• the fascist sympathies of the DuPont family and the role of GM in retooling production for war in Nazi Germany;

• the role of IBM in facilitating the Holocaust;

• the Harrimans, the Bushes, the Hamburg-America Line, the Union Banking Corporation, the Silesian-American Corporation (and Auschwitz), and Brown Brothers Harriman;

• Henry Ford and Hitler; Ford’s role in manufacturing vehicles for the Wehrmacht and playing both sides during WWII while its facilities were protected;

• the failure of the Nuremberg Trials to achieve meaningful justice;

• the Bank for International Settlements;

• the role of the Vatican in laundering Nazi treasure;

• the suppression of the working and middle classes then and now;

• the failures of deNazification; and

• the failure of decarterlization;

Part 3 to follow next week!

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Because there is so much to cover in the book, we resolved on doing a four-part interview series, of which this is the first part, focusing on the first two chapters.

Issues we discussed included:

• academic justification of the term “deep state”;

• how I came to write the book;

• the “asocial” concept in Nazi Germany;

• The concept of Gleichschaltung in 1930s Nazi Germany and again during Covid;

• Roosevelt’s New Deal and Wall Street interests sympathetic to fascism;

• Revolution from above and keeping the working class poor and exploitable';

• health surveillance in Nazi Germany and again today; and

• discontinuities between 1930s Nazi Germany and the political economy of the West since 2020

Hopefully Part 2 should follow in a week’s time.

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Introduction

In retrospect, it is obvious (as it was to many at the time) that a primary objective of the “Covid-19” military operation was to inject as many people as possible with unlicensed, experimental substances lacking in long-term safety data, whose precise contents and purpose remain a mystery (Hughes, 2022; Hughes, 2024, pp. 246-248, 335-352; Nixon, 2025).

This chapter aims to document the many techniques that were used to maximise the public uptake of the “vaccine.” As a reminder, I put “vaccine” in inverted commas, because it does not meet the traditional definition of a vaccine and because the pseudopandemic was a military operation rather than a genuine public health crisis (Hughes, 2024, pp. 221-226, 236-241).

This first part considers various means of extortion that were deployed to bully the public into taking the shots – threats, essentially, that failure to get “vaccinated” would have consequences, both for the individual and for society at large. It concludes with some reflections on the legitimacy, or otherwise, of such treatment of the public in an ostensible democracy.

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“Vaccination” and the Return to Normality

The CIA’s KUBARK Manual, which codifies the findings of ten years of research into interrogation (torture) techniques, states “It is not enough that a resistant source should be placed under the tension of fear; he must also discern an acceptable escape route” (CIA, 1963, p. 91).

This principle applies to the “Covid-19 vaccination” agenda. The public was placed in a condition of fear through propaganda about a deadly virus, “locked down” (a prison term), and forced to endure a deeply unpleasant “new normal” (Hughes, 2024, Chaps. 2 & 4). A clear way out of that uncomfortable situation was offered: take the “vaccine.”

From the beginning of the “Covid-19” crisis, the “vaccine” was promoted as the path back to normality, with Bill Gates setting the tone. On April 5, 2020, Gates claimed that “things won’t go back to truly normal until we have a vaccine that we’ve gotten out to basically the entire world” (“Bill Gates on his 2015 ‘Virus’ Warning,” 2020). Four days later he claimed, “But you don’t have a choice, people act like you have a choice [...] Normalcy only returns when we have largely vaccinated the entire global population” (“Transcript: Bill Gates speaks to the FT about the Global Fight against Coronavirus,” 2020). On April 30, 2020, he wrote, “Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine” (Gates, 2020).

Other influential voices amplified Gates’ “normalcy” rhetoric. Zeke Emanuel, who five months later would be named on President Biden’s “Covid-19” Advisory Board, claimed on April 7, 2020, “We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine or effective medications” (“Dr. Zeke Emanuel On The Return To ‘Normal,’” 2020). World Economic Forum director Klaus Schwab wrote in June 2020 that “a full return to ‘normal’ cannot be envisaged before a vaccine is available” (Schwab & Malleret 2020, p. 38). Sir John Bell (Oxford University), whose undisclosed financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry created conflicts of interest in his role on the UK Government’s Vaccine Taskforce (Thacker, 2021), suggested in November 2020 that the “vaccine” could allow life to return to normal by the spring of 2021 (cited in Gallagher, 2020).

“Vaccination” as the Path to Freedom

According to the UK Prime Minister’s Office (2022), “the government and its advisors were clear from the start that vaccines were our way out of this pandemic.” Indeed, the image of the vaccine as the route out of “lockdown” and back to freedom was propagated from the beginning of the rollout.

On December 2, 2020, the day the Pfizer-BioNTech “vaccine” was granted emergency authorization by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam told a Downing Street press conference that in order to “get back to a much more normal world [...] you have to take the vaccine when it is offered to you. Low uptake will almost certainly make restrictions last longer”; the Independent’s headline for this was “Get a vaccine if you want your freedoms back” (Merrick, 2020).

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in the foreword to a report published by his Institute for Global Change on January 21, 2021, discussed “the path back to normality” and issued an ultimatum: “mass lockdown or mass vaccination [...] The faster we vaccinate, the sooner we end lockdown and prevent further mutations” (Mulheirn, 2021).

On February 22, 2021, Boris Johnson set out his roadmap “cautiously but irreversibly toward reclaiming our freedoms,” as though the government had any legitimate right to lay claim to them in the first place. Lifting all restrictions no sooner than June 21, 2021, would, he claimed, be subject to four conditions: the success of the “vaccine” rollout, evidence of “vaccine” efficacy, pressure on the NHS, and the emergence of new variants of the virus (cited in Woodcock, 2021).

Health Secretary Matt Hancock (2021) tweeted on February 28, 2021: “The vaccine is our route out. When you get the call, get the jab!”

The rhetoric of reclaiming freedoms continued into the summer of 2021. For instance, on June 22, 2021, Hancock claimed “We’re working on plans to allow the vaccine to bring back some of the freedoms that have had to be restricted to keep people safe [...] that’s the whole point of the vaccination programme” (cited in Gutteridge, 2021).

Four days later, NHS England chief executive Sir Simon Stephens claimed that “With every jab [we] give, we are one step closer to our summer freedoms” (“Covid-19: ‘Grab a jab’ for all over-18s opens in England,” 2021).

The same rhetoric continued into the autumn. In October 2021, the new Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, urged the public to take “booster shots [...] not just to save lives, but to keep your freedoms too” (cited in Penna & Riley-Smith, 2021).

In November 2021, Boris Johnson claimed “If we want to avoid new restrictions on our daily lives, we must all get vaccinated as soon as we are eligible” (Prime Minister’s Office, 2021).

The problem with all these claims is that it was not freedom in the first place if it was something to be granted.

“Vaccination” to Reopen the Economy

Another form of extortion was to paint economic recovery (from the shock of the “lockdowns”) as contingent upon the population getting “vaccinated.”

Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 41), for example, threatened that “a sustainable economic recovery [...] won’t happen before a vaccine or a treatment is found.”

Boris Johnson claimed “It’s the protection of vaccines that will ultimately allow us to reclaim our lives and get the economy moving again” (cited in Roberts, 2020).

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (2021) proposed that “vaccine passports” would facilitate a sustainable reopening of the economy.

Melinda Gates warned that “economically we’re not going to have a swift recovery in the United States or in Europe if we don’t make sure that everybody gets vaccinated” (“Melinda Gates on Pandemic’s Impact on Women,” 2021).

Given the damage to many people’s livelihoods through enforced business closures, furlough, disruption to supply chains, etc., this kind of rhetoric was calculated to leverage financial stress to increase uptake of the “vaccine.”

“Vaccination” to Enjoy Popular Pursuits

In the section on Incentives in my chapter on Applied Behavioural Psychology, I describe various ways in which the public was incentivised to get the jab. These included not only cheap forms of bribery (junk food, lottery tickets, etc.) but also negative forms of incentivisation.

In the absence of “vaccination,” people were told that they would be unable to go on foreign holidays, engage in international travel, attend major sporting and live music events, go to nightclubs, etc. There might even be a “knock at the door” from public health officials.

These threats to deprive people of things (typically sources of pleasure) and to “pay them a visit” if they did not get “vaccinated” again amount to a form of extortion.

Discriminating Against “the Unvaccinated”

On March 3, 2021, the Daily Mail raised hopes that “lockdown” restrictions in England could ease faster than expected because “Covid deaths” were falling faster than SPI-B forecasts “thanks to vaccine success” (Blanchard, 2021), and not because the forecasts were artificially inflated in the first place (Spectator, n.d.). The logic here is that the more people get “vaccinated,” the less rationale there is for restrictions.

So, for example, when MPs voted on renewing the UK Coronavirus Act in March 2021, Esther McVey MP argued that doing so would “demonstrate a lack of confidence and belief in the Covid vaccines” (McVey, 2021).

With the threat of ongoing “lockdowns” ever less justifiable as more and more people took the shots, new measures were introduced to put pressure on those unwilling to take the “vaccine.”

For example, blunt “lockdowns” affecting all of society gradually gave way to targeted discrimination against “the unvaccinated.” Blair, for instance, claimed on June 6, 2021, that the time had come “to distinguish for the purposes of freedom from restriction between the vaccinated and unvaccinated” (cited in Helm, 2021). Those able to prove their “vaccination” status securely would see certain restrictions removed, according to proposals by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (2021).

Blair’s proposals were premised on the pseudoscientific claim that “the fully vaccinated are much less likely to infect others [...], less likely to die, be hospitalised or develop Covid-19 symptoms compared to pre-vaccine” (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 2021). In reality, the “vaccines,” by their proponents’ own eventual admission, prevented neither transmission nor infection (Loffredo, 2021), and the “vaccinated” were more likely to be hospitalised and to die than the “unvaccinated” (Hughes, 2024, pp. 306-307).

Threatening “the Unvaccinated”

As “vaccine”-free individuals came to find themselves discriminated against through various forms of “vaccine” apartheid (Hughes, 2024, pp. 209-306), the tone of the messaging became increasingly threatening. Blair, for instance, told the Andrew Marr Show on June 6, 2021, that it was unacceptable to turn down the “vaccine” without a good medical reason (Goodwin, 2021).

Nine days later, the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges told Talk Radio that the “carrot” approach towards BAME people and “vaccine” sceptics had failed, therefore “the tone now has to change. We’ve had enough of this now, we’ve been through enough of this. The vaccine is our way out [...] I am sorry, there are no excuses now, you have to get the vaccine” (cited in Allen, 2021a).

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned: “if anyone who doesn’t have a legitimate medical reason for not getting fully vaccinated chooses to not get vaccinated, there will be consequences” (cited in Gray, 2021).

US President Joe Biden told the unjabbed “our patience is wearing thin” (“Biden’s Message to the Unvaccinated,” 2021). It was never made clear what exactly the “consequences” would be for exercising one’s lawful right to refuse a violation of one’s bodily integrity.

As late as January 14, 2022, UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid claimed that those who had chosen not to take the shot should “understand the consequences of their decision for the rest of society” (Wareham, 2022). The following month, the war in Ukraine displaced Covid from the top of the news agenda; there were no “consequences for the rest of society.”

Threats of Fines

A transnationally coordinated propaganda campaign in December 2021 saw threats of fines being used to coerce injection.

In Greece, for example, it was reported that “Covid-19 vaccination” would be made obligatory for those aged 60 or above, and that those who failed to book a first shot by January 16, 2022, would face monthly fines of €100 (Kitsantonis, 2021).

In the UK, LBC’s Nick Ferrari proposed a series of escalating fines for those aged 40 and above who refused to take the “vaccine,” starting at £100 (see Allen, 2021b).

Austria threatened to fine those who had not taken a “Covid-19 vaccine” up to €3,600 a quarter (“Austria plans to fine vaccine holdouts up to 3,600 euros a quarter,” 2021).

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to fine businesses $1,000 and rising if they did not comply with a “vaccination” mandate for private sector workers: proof of one dose would be required by December 27, followed by a second dose within 45 days, i.e. by February 10, 2022 (Chen & Nahmias, 2021).

Conclusion

Numerous methods were deployed to extort “vaccination,” including the promise of a return to normalcy, imposing conditions for the return of “freedoms,” making economic recovery contingent upon “vaccination,” depriving people of popular pursuits unless they got jabbed, discriminating against the “vaccine”-free, threatening them with “consequences,” and threatening to fine them.

It all has the feel of a mafia protection racket about it: agree to let us “protect” you (in this case, by getting jabbed rather than paying money), or else we will continue to make trouble for you.

In a democratic society, there is a fundamental lack of legitimacy about such behaviour. Governments and their partners are supposed to work for the people; they are not supposed to bully and extort the citizenry. Such methods are reflective of the Omniwar being waged against populations worldwide.

According to a classical political science definition,

We speak of authority, therefore, if the willing unconditional compliance of a group of people rests upon their shared beliefs that it is legitimate for the superior (person or impersonal agency) to impose his will upon them and that it is illegitimate for them to refuse obedience. (Blau, 1963, p. 307)

In the case of governments pushing “Covid-19 vaccines” upon their citizens, the only possible legitimacy would have arisen from persuasive scientific evidence that near-universal “vaccination” was necessary to combat a deadly pandemic. No such case can be made, however, and instead governments relied on a pseudoscientific propaganda construct called The Science™.

A significant feature of the “Covid-19 vaccine” protection racket was the level of bluff that was involved. Extortion involves threats, but it does not necessarily require a willingness or ability to execute those threats in the event of non-compliance.

For example, “lockdowns” could not have been maintained indefinitely had the majority of people refused to take a shot, nor could the disruption to the global economy have been prolonged without catastrophic consequences. In 2022, just a year after the rollout began in earnest, “vaccination” was no longer required for most foreign travel, attending sports events, going to nightclubs, etc. Greek plans to fine “unvaccinated” people aged over 60 were abandoned in March 2022 (Chrepa, 2022).

Thus, the entire project to inject as many people as possible rested on mind games. It was yet another psychological operation carried out against the people in the opening campaign of the war for technocracy.

References

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Allen, R. (2021b, December 1). Little fat man wants to fine vaccine refuseniks. https://richieallen.co.uk/little-fat-man-wants-to-fine-vaccine-refuseniks/.

Austria plans to fine vaccine holdouts up to 3,600 euros a quarter. (2021, December 9). Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/austria-announce-details-planned-covid-19-vaccine-mandate-2021-12-09/.

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Central Intelligence Agency. (1963). KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/docs/doc01.pdf.

Chen, E., & Nahmias, L. (2021, December 15). New York City to fine businesses $1,000 for defying vaccine mandate. Portland Press Herald. https://www.pressherald.com/2021/12/15/nyc-to-fine-businesses-1000-for-defying-vaccine-mandate/.

Chrepa, E. (2022, March 23). Greece to stop monthly fines for unvaccinated seniors. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/greece-to-stop-monthly-fines-for-unvaccinated-seniors.

Covid-19: “Grab a jab” for all over-18s opens in England. (2021, June 26). BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57620771.

Dr. Zeke Emanuel On The Return To ‘Normal.’ (2020, April 7). MSNBC.

Gallagher, J. (2020, November 3). Covid vaccine: First “milestone” vaccine offers 90% protection. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54873105.

Gates, B. (2020, April 30). “What you need to know about the COVID-19 Vaccine.” GatesNotes: The Blog of Bill Gates. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-you-need-to-know-about-the-COVID-19-vaccine.

Goodwin, H. (2021, June 6). Let vaccinated people quit lockdown, Tony Blair urges. The London Economic. https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/let-vaccinated-people-quit-lockdown-tony-blair-urges-273481/.

Gray, M. (2021, August 17). President of largest public sector union “will not stand” for termination of unvaccinated civil servants. CTV News. https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/federal-election-2021/president-of-largest-public-sector-union-will-not-stand-for-termination-of-unvaccinated-civil-servants-1.5550820.

Gutteridge, N. (2021, June 22). HOLI-YAY: Holiday boost as quarantine-free travel for double-jabbed Brits “absolutely something” gov working on, Hancock says. The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/travel/15353740/matt-hancock-fully-vaccinated-brits-quarantine-holidays/.

Hancock, M. (2021, February 28). I’m delighted more than 20 million people across the UK have now been vaccinated. A magnificent achievement for the country [Tweet]. Twitter.

Helm, T. (2021, June 6). Tony Blair calls for new pass to allow vaccinated people more freedoms. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/06/tony-blair-calls-for-new-pass-to-allow-vaccinated-people-more-freedoms.

Hughes, D.A. (2022c). What is in the so-called Covid-19 “vaccines”? Part 1: Evidence of a global crime against humanity. International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, 2(2), 455–586. https://doi.org/10.56098/ ijvtpr.v2i2.52.

Hughes, D.A. (2024). “Covid-19,” psychological operations, and the war for technocracy. Palgrave Macmillan.

Kitsantonis, N. (2021, November 30). Greece makes vaccines mandatory for people 60 or older, with fines for not complying. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/world/europe/greece-vaccine-fine-covid.html.

Loffredo, J. (2021, November 15). Fauci, Gates admit Covid vaccines don’t work as advertised. The Defender. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/jeremy-hunt-fauci-gates-covid-vaccines-boosters/.

Melinda Gates on Pandemic’s Impact on Women. (2021, March 17). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-03-17/melinda-gates-on-pandemic-s-impact-on-women-video.

Merrick, R. (2020, December 2). Get a vaccine if you want your freedoms back, Deputy Chief Medical Officer tells Britons. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/covid-vaccine-lockdown-restrictions-van-tam-b1765265.html.

Mulheirn, I. (2021, January 21). Sunlit uplands? Vaccine rollout and the return to normality. Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. https://institute.global/sites/default/files/articles/Sunlit-Uplands-Vaccine-Rollout-and-the-Return-to-Normality.pdf.

Nixon, D.B. (2025). Active microscale construction in Pfizer Comirnaty: Investigating complex self-assembling structures. Journal of BioNanoTechnocracy, 1(1). https://laquintacolumna.info/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/active_microscale_construction_in_pfizer_comirnaty_english.pdf.

Penna, D., & Riley-Smith, B. (2021, October 21). Politics latest news: Booster jab rollout must go ‘as fast as possible’ amid fears of winter Covid surge, Boris Johnson warns. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/10/21/politics-latest-news-boris-johnson-sajid-javid-vaccine-booster/.

Prime Minister’s Office. (2021, November 15). PM opening statement at COVID-19 press conference: 15 November 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-opening-statement-at-covid-19-press-conference-15-november-2021.

Prime Minister’s Office. (2022, February 19). Prime Minister to set out plan for living with Covid. https://web.archive.org/web/20220219223307/https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-to-set-out-plan-for-living-with-covid.

Roberts, M. (2020, December 2). Covid-19: Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine judged safe for use in UK. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55145696.

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Wareham, S. (2022, January 14). Steve Baker MP asks health secretary Sajid Javid to tone down language on unvaccinated people. Bucks Free Press. https://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/19849273.steve-baker-mp-asks-health-secretary-sajid-javid-tone-language-unvaccinated-people/.

Woodcock, A. (2021, February 22). Life back to normal by 21 June at earliest, Boris Johnson announces. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lockdown-roadmap-end-boris-johnson-june-b1805715.html.

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Introduction

By now it is well known that “Covid-19” was preceded by two decades of planning exercises around “pandemic preparedness,” which are more accurately described as war games (Kennedy Jr., 2021, p. 382; Hughes, 2024, pp. 227-228).

Less well appreciated is the pivotal role of a group of scholars at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in getting those exercises off the ground, not as “pandemic preparedness” exercises, but as fictional bioterrorism scenarios. Dark Winter (2001) has achieved notoriety in that regard, but it was preceded by two fictional scenarios involving smallpox and anthrax in 1999, as well as a tabletop exercise called TOPOFF in 2000.

This article addresses those various outputs from 1999 to 2001 with a view to highlighting the origins of “biosecurity” in the “War on Terror” context, as well as the scientific fraud upon which it is premised. Numerous false assumptions embedded in the bioterrorism scenarios from the very beginning have continued to subvert thinking about public health emergencies ever since.

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The Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies

In 1998, Dean A. Henderson founded the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, ostensibly to increase awareness of the threats posed by biological weapons such as smallpox and anthrax, which terrorists could unleash upon a population, and to develop policy accordingly (Rienzi, 2001).

Henderson is credited, rightly or wrongly, with having led the programme that culminated in the WHO declaring smallpox eradicated in 1980. The end of routine smallpox vaccination, he claimed, created a new vulnerability should smallpox be unleashed in a biological weapons attack for which public health systems were ill prepared.

In 1999, the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies published two fictional scenarios relating to smallpox and anthrax attacks in the United States, which were ostensibly “intended to provoke thought and dialogue that might illuminate the uncertainties and challenges of bioterrorism” (O’Toole, 1999; Inglesby, 1999).

One of the authors of those scenarios, Tara O’Toole went on to serve as Under Secretary for Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security (2009–2013) and as Executive Vice President of In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture capital arm) in 2014. The other author, Thomas Inglesby, played a prominent role in Event 201, which forecast a global coronavirus outbreak just weeks before the “novel coronavirus” was announced in late 2019.

In retrospect, the two scenarios appear almost cartoon-like in their overblown descriptions of escalating disaster. Since the two are structurally similar in terms of a US city being overwhelmed by a deadly infectious disease whose spread cannot be contained, we only need to consider one of them to get the gist.

Smallpox: An Attack Scenario

The smallpox scenario involves a bioterrorist attack during a vice-presidential visit to a fictional city with a population of 2.5 million (O’Toole, 1999). The attack takes place on April Fool’s Day, a day seemingly beloved of intelligence agencies when trying to communicate to those in the know that a hoax is taking place (Hughes, 2025).

“Only a terrorist supported by the resources of a rogue state would be able to procure and deploy smallpox,” O’Toole (1999) begins, thus providing a theoretical pretext for an attack on the “rogue state.” As with the Project For A New American Century (2000) and its anticipation of a “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a ‘new Pearl Harbour,’” the seeds of a cataclysmic state-sponsored terrorist attack against the United States were being sown before “9/11.”

O’Toole’s (1999) smallpox attack scenario proves to be highly unrealistic. It is premised on a raft of assumptions that bear little to no relation to the actual history of smallpox or what is known about it scientifically. Given that the infecting strain of smallpox in the scenario is not bioengineered (i.e., is no different from what has been witnessed historically), there is no reasonable excuse for this failure from a supposed expert in public health.

Far more likely, following Kennedy Jr.’s (2021, p. 382) description of O’Toole as a “CIA spook,” is that we are looking at the infiltration of academia by US intelligence to help create an imaginary threat that could potentially be used for political purposes, such as deciding to invade another country.

Contagion

The fundamental premise of O’Toole’s (1999) scenario is that smallpox has been successfully weaponised and deployed by terrorists.

Yet, there is no evidence that weaponised smallpox has ever existed or could exist (Billauer, 2017, p. 365). For it to be weaponised effectively, it must spread through the air, which is rare at best, despite some reports of it happening in hospital and laboratory settings, where the risk can be reduced (CDC, 2024). Historically, airborne transmission is said to have played a role in only one known smallpox outbreak (in Meschede, Germany, in 1970), yet there are many reasons for doubt (Billauer, 2017, pp. 389-90). In fact, the mode of smallpox transmission has never been conclusively established (Milton, 2012).

Patients in O’Toole’s (1999) scenario start presenting with symptoms 11 days after the attack but are sent away with ibuprofen and told to drink fluids. Smallpox is first confirmed on Day 15 and a contagious disease emergency is declared by the hospital epidemiologist.

This implies that smallpox was spread by patients without obvious symptoms for the first ten days. Yet, according to the CDC (2024), smallpox patients are considered infectious “from the time the first sores appear in the mouth or throat” and smallpox historically was “spread by direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact between people.” How exactly, therefore, was the smallpox in the scenario supposed to have spread?

One is reminded of the claim in 2020 that “asymptomatic transmission” drove the “Covid-19 pandemic,” whereby a deadly disease was purportedly spread by outwardly healthy people. There is something obviously fictional about such claims.

The delay in diagnosis in the scenario is painted ominously, as though smallpox has had ample time to spread unchecked. Historically, however, smallpox was commonly not diagnosed for over two weeks, and in some cases over four weeks, yet this never led to a runaway epidemic (Wehrle et al., 1970, p. 676). Today, laboratory testing happens faster than in the past, so there is even less cause for concern.

Second, third, and fourth generation smallpox cases are witnessed in the scenario, with the contagion appearing to spread at roughly the same rate from generation to generation. Yet, in real life smallpox epidemics over the course of the last century, the peak replication rate was typically reached during the first (or perhaps second) generation, then sharply declined (Billauer, 2017, p. 399).

By the end of the scenario two and a half months later, 15,000 cases of smallpox have been reported in 20 US states, resulting in over 2,000 deaths (including a secret service agent and members of the vice-president’s staff, to grab political attention). There are smallpox cases in four other countries (including England, Japan, and Canada).

Yet, it is never quite clear how exactly the disease has spread; in one instance where it appears in a large city in another state, “there was no discernible contact with known smallpox patients or their contacts.” The disease thus has a kind of magical quality that allows it to appear menacingly at any place, any time.

The number of new smallpox cases reported worldwide finally subsides owing to vaccination and the seasonal decrease in the spread of virus as warmer weather returns. Smallpox becomes endemic again.

This seems like a deus ex machina, however, given the inadequate supply of vaccines in the scenario (see below) and the seemingly unstoppable way the disease spreads. It is reminiscent of how Omicron was the latest threatening variant in December 2021, only for “Covid-19” to disappear from the top of the news headlines a few weeks later. In neither case did the end of the crisis seem very convincing.

Fear

Although history and epidemiology suggest there would be no need to panic, fear spreads rapidly in O’Toole’s (1999) smallpox scenario. This largely has to do with media speculation and misinformation.

For example, local and national news networks gather outside the hospital which is sealed off by police following the first confirmed infection. Rumours begin to circulate about what the contagious disease might be. Senior officials from the mayor and the governor all the way up to the FBI director and the President go on television to manage public perception of the event.

As more and more smallpox cases are identified across the city and in an adjoining state, media reports claim that the government does not know how widespread the outbreak might be. The CDC puts all state health departments on alert for possible smallpox.

False reports of an additional attack involving Ebola cause chaos and confusion. Senior officials demand to know why they were not informed about it. Healthcare workers walk off the job. Patients start flooding emergency rooms and doctors’ offices requesting vaccination and evaluation of symptoms.

The irony of all this is that O’Toole’s (1999) scenario is itself a primary driver of fear vis-à-vis a potential smallpox epidemic. Indeed, it was seminal to the creation of a series of bioterrorism simulation exercises orchestrated by O’Toole and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins, all of which were premised on junk science to make a terrifying scenario appear unexpectedly realistic. O’Toole even admitted that she and her colleagues had to “take some of the responsibility” for giving smallpox an extremely scary reputation, although she also blamed the media (cited in Enserink, 2002, p. 1593).

Vaccines

As the smallpox epidemic spreads in the scenario, demand for vaccines dramatically outstrips supply. The assumption is that mass vaccination is the way forward.

This, too, does not match reality. In terms of vaccine supply, it turned out in 2002 that the DoD had 75-90 million doses of smallpox vaccine available, easily enough to deal with a potential outbreak (Billauer, 2017, pp. 408-409). Smallpox vaccine is also effective when diluted, meaning there was enough diluted vaccine for every person in the United States at the time.

As for mass vaccination necessarily being desirable, ring vaccination (i.e., choking off an affected area) means that mass vaccination may not be required, plus not everyone will be susceptible to infection. In general, adequate scientific evidence that mass vaccination is the best mechanism to protect the public “did not (and does not) exist” (Billauer, 2017, pp. 361-362).

In the scenario, with vaccine stocks sufficient to cover only 15% of affected states’ populations, an “accelerated crash vaccine-production program” is announced that will reduce vaccine-manufacturing time to 24 months. That may seem quaint in light of proposals today to reduce the time to 100 days, but it serves as a marker of when this reckless quest to reduce vaccine manufacture time (without concern for long-term safety data) began.

Department of Justice representatives in the scenario raise questions about “potential legal liabilities associated with adverse vaccine effects,” yet vaccination goes ahead regardless. The rush to vaccinate thus looks reckless, much as it did in real life in 2020, although the profits for the vaccine manufacturers will of course be huge – something which is not mentioned by O’Toole (1999).

Non-pharmaceutical Interventions

A city-wide quarantine and travel bans are proposed by the NSC, but are rejected by state authorities. Later in the scenario, there is civil unrest and the National Guard is called in to help police keep order in affected areas. Thus, the scenario consistently tends in the direction of martial law.

Home isolation of unvaccinated contacts is considered in the scenario but disregarded for legal, logistical, and ethical reasons. That “problem” was solved during Covid by using assorted techniques of psychological manipulation to get the public to consent to “self-isolation” and being “locked down.”

In the scenario, the CDC recommends that hospital patients with fever who cannot be definitively diagnosed be quarantined, but hospitals object that they cannot afford to isolate so many patients. The origins of the “overwhelmed hospitals” propaganda that was deployed during Covid can thus be discerned (see Hughes, 2024, pp. 128-134).

In affected areas, tourism, small business, attendance at large public events, and schooling are all severely impacted, as they were during Covid. Domestic and international travel is greatly reduced, with some countries refusing to admit US citizens without proof of recent smallpox vaccination (anticipating the idea of “vaccine passports” in 2020). Other countries impose 14-day quarantines on everyone visiting the country from abroad (anticipating “quarantine hotels” during Covid).

In sum, in O’Toole’s (1999) smallpox attack scenario, we see many of the same outcomes that were witnessed during Covid (e.g., claims about asymptomatic spread being used to drive fear, the push for mass vaccination, travel restrictions, and economic disruption), but they are not grounded in sound science. Rather, the scenario appears motivated by “War on Terror” considerations – two years before the “War on Terror” began.

TOPOFF (May 20-23, 2000)

The little-known TOPOFF exercise of May 2000 has attracted scant attention, perhaps because the main academic journal article on it (co-authored by Dean A. Henderson, Thomas V. Inglesby, Tara O’Toole, and Thomas V. Inglesby, Jr.) is paywalled and does not appear to be freely available online (Henderson et al., 2001).

“TOPOFF” is short for “top officials,” and the $3 million exercise simulated how local, state, and federal officials would respond to a chemical weapons event in Portsmouth, NH, a radiological event in the greater Washington, DC area, and a a bioterrorist attack involving the aerosol release of Yersinia pestis (the plague) in Denver, CO. Henderson et al. (2001) deal only with the latter.

The cost and scale of TOPOFF are indicative of government-level planning to deal with a CBRN attack, and it appears to be the first simulation dealing with a bioterrorist attack.

Arguably the most interesting feature of the write-up by Henderson et al. (2001) is the appendix, which notes:

The 1996 Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act, commonly referred to as the “Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Act,” designates the Department of Defense as “the lead agency to enhance domestic preparedness for responding to and managing the consequences of terrorists’ use of [WMD].” In fiscal year 1997, the Department of Defense received $36 million, whereby it initiated the Domestic Preparedness Program to enhance existing first-responder training in dealing with terrorist incidents involving radiological, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons [...]. (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 444)

Here we learn that “preparedness” is a military concept and that preparedness programmes were initiated by the Pentagon in 1997.

On March 15, 2000, Colorado House Bill 00-1077 was passed, establishing a 19-person “Emergency Epidemic Response Committee” that would provide expert advice to the governor during an epidemic crisis with legal immunity (Hoffman & Norton, 2000). Hospitals were also granted legal immunity if they followed the executive orders of the governor during such a crisis. The bill also called on healthcare facilities to adopt certain standards for responding to such a crisis (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 444). This real world development is why TOPOFF was set in Colorado.

In the context of an epidemic crisis, TOPOFF highlighted problems in terms of leadership and decision-making, prioritisation and distribution of scarce resources (in particular antibiotics), health care systems becoming overwhelmed, and how to contain the spread of disease (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 436). Similar lessons would allegedly also be applicable to other infectious diseases such as smallpox or pandemic influenza (Hoffman & Norton, 2000).

Contagion

The concept of contagion was critical to TOPOFF, for as one participant reflected,

Many previous bioterrorism exercises dealt with noncontagious diseases. It is just beginning to dawn on us how dramatically different this was as the exercise ended [...] It had all of the [characteristics] of an epidemic out of control” (cited in Henderson et al., 2001, p. 443).

Indeed, only a contagious and deadly disease that threatens to spiral out of control can legitimise the kind of authoritarian measures needed to contain it.

The simulation was guided by “controllers,” who gave the participants “injects” (i.e., new information) at key points. This gave the exercise a heavily pre-scripted feel:

One participant said that it appeared preordained that the plague epidemic would spread beyond local control. Other artificialities of the scenario included a greater risk of person-to-person spread than that which has been reported historically and a laboratory diagnostic process that was tested only on paper. (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 437).

Thus, as with O’Toole’s (1999) smallpox scenario, the “extraordinarily stressful conditions” generated by TOPOFF were based on dubious premises regarding contagion and testing (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 436).

The odds of a disease appearing with this combination of virulence (reports of 3,700 cases with 950 deaths, or over 4,000 cases and over 2,000 deaths) and rapid spread (to other US states, England, and Japan within four days) seem very low based on real world experience.

(Source: Henderson et al., 2001, p. 438)

Henderson et al. (2001) do not mention asymptomatic spread, but this is essential to the idea of a highly contagious deadly disease, for otherwise the disease quickly kills the host and thereby reduces the spread. Asymptomatic spread was a key part of “SARS-Cov-2” propaganda in 2020.

Overwhelmed Hospitals

As with “Covid-19” hospital propaganda (Hughes, 2024, pp. 128-134), the hospitals in TOPOFF are quickly overwhelmed and have insufficient antibiotics, ventilators, and beds to deal with a tenfold increase in patients, including the worried well (Henderson et al., 2001, pp. 438, 441). One hospital cannot dispose of dead bodies fast enough which accumulate in the emergency department and wards. The concept of a “security lockdown” at hospitals is discussed but deemed unfeasible. This is the earliest usage of the term “lockdown” that I know of in the “preparedness” context.

One point that is not directly addressed in TOPOFF is “how decision-makers would know a hospital had been overwhelmed, given the absence of historical precedence or systems to make such a judgment” (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 441). Again, we are dealing with fiction and hypotheticals here – or, in the case of “Covid-19,” propaganda.

It is because pneumonic plague patients cannot be isolated that the stay at home order for the general population is issued (Hoffman & Norton, 2000). Thus, we see that population-wide stay at home orders rely on the narrative that hospitals are being overwhelmed. During “Covid-19,” that narrative was demonstrably a lie (Hughes, 2024, pp. 128-134).

Decision Making

It was not clear in TOPOFF who was in charge as participants looked to the state public health agency, the State Attorney General’s office, and federal law enforcement for leadership (Henderson et al., 2001, pp. 438-439). They lamented the diffusion of responsibility, lengthy inefficient conference calls that led to indecision, and the inability of different emergency operations centers to coordinate management and make effective decisions.

The anti-democratic nature of the exercise emerges at this point. One participant commented that “in public health, most decision-making is through democratic processes and consensus building, but for some decisions, this cannot work” (cited in Henderson et al., 2001, p. 439). In a state of emergency, the logic goes, public health must be subordinated to centralised command and control, as we saw during Covid (Corbett, 2021). Planning how that will work is the whole point of “preparedness” exercises.

In an interesting twist, because the Colorado governor did not participate in the simulation, his Emergency Epidemic Response Committee ended up de facto making decisions, even though it did not have the legal authority to do so (Henderson et al., 2001, pp. 439). This is an early precursor of decision-making being outsourced (or being seen to be outsourced) to “experts” during Covid.

Controlling the Spread of Disease

For two of the participants, the “single most important lesson” learned from TOPOFF was that demand for healthcare services would not diminish unless the spread of the disease was controlled (Hoffman & Norton, 2000). The important point here is that the concept of a highly contagious deadly disease has universal, rather than merely local (e.g., city-level) application. It ultimately demands a “global health” infrastructure capable of implementing authoritarian measures at the flick of a switch – as the planners surely knew.

The measures enacted in TOPOFF included travel bans, stay at home orders for the healthy, and the wearing of face masks (“dust masks”), all of which were later features of the response to “Covid-19.” Moreover, the public was told that contagion can only happen “if you are within 6 feet of someone who is infected and coughing” (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 438). Here we see the origin of the antihuman “social distancing” measures in 2020. It is striking that such politically and scientifically dubious measures were an immediate feature of “preparedness” exercises – and were never questioned.

The stay at home order in TOPOFF was particularly problematic. As one observer noted, “They told one million people to stay in their homes. How would we have enforced this?” (cited in Henderson et al., 2001, p. 442). The police and National Guard admitted that they would have been unable to enforce it. Messaging and use of the media therefore became vitally important. One suggestion was “announcing to the public that this was like ‘The 1918 influenza epidemic’” (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 442), a lie that was actually used in 2020 (Hughes, 2024, pp. 120-122).

The planners of TOPOFF understood that messaging would determine the degree to which panicked people might not seek the care they needed or, alternatively, might dangerously crowd health care facilities (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 442). During Covid, messaging such as “STAY HOME. SAVE LIVES. PROTECT THE NHS” saw hospitals under-utilised while patient waiting lists and deaths at home dramatically increased (Hughes, 2024, pp. 129-132).

Closing state borders, though enacted in TOPOFF, was deemed “delusional” by observers, because of disruption to food and essential supplies; notional riots broke out in the exercise.

So-called “holding tanks” were proposed (but not implemented), which would involve quarantining healthy people for seven days before allowing them to leave the state (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 442). “Quarantine hotels” performed a similar function during Covid, only for people entering the country rather than leaving (Nickson & Mullens-Burgess, 2021).

Instead of vaccines, the emphasis in TOPOFF is on antibiotics that can be used to prevent or treat plague. These are in short supply, and difficult decisions have to be made regarding who should be prioritised to receive antibiotics. Logistical and security problems also present themselves in terms of how the antibiotics should be delivered safely from a national stockpile. Only 140 people an hour can be given antibiotic prophylaxis at a centre established for that purpose – nowhere near enough for a city of 1 million (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 440). This is a far cry from “Covid-19,” by which time the problem of how to “vaccinate” the entire world had miraculously been solved.

Contact-tracing was not part of TOPOFF, but was deemed critical in a “real epidemic” (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 442). It was introduced in 2020 to condition the public to accept surveillance right down to the bodily level, albeit in the context of a “pseudopandemic” (Davis, 2021).

Recommendations

TOPOFF concludes that better systems and resources must be put in place in order to manage an attack of the kind simulated. In particular, there needs to be “strong and clear leadership,” “efficient decision-making,” and the “sustained counsel of a multidisciplinary body of experts” (Henderson et al., 2001, p. 443).

Despite a nod to “civil liberties,” the fictitious scenario, premised on dubious science, thereby tends towards technocracy. Real-time surveillance, antidemocratic rule by “experts,” command and control of the population, and major restrictions on personal freedoms amount to a form of authoritarianism instigated in the name of public health.

Of course, the idea is that such measures would only be temporary, until the emergency has passed, but as Agamben (2005) realised, the state of exception created by the “War on Terror” is effectively permanent: democracy and the rule of law can be overridden any time. That is exactly what we have seen in 21st century “emergency” responses to terrorism, financial crisis, the “pandemic,” etc.

Dark Winter (June 22-23, 2001)

In February 2001, the US Commission on National Security/21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission) predicted a direct terrorist attack on US soil and recommended the creation of a new homeland security agency.

In June 2001, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (founded in 1998), the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Analytic Services Institute for Homeland Security (established in April 2001), and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (founded in April 2000) collaborated on the Dark Winter exercise that simulated a covert smallpox attack on the United States in early December 2002 – “the first such exercise of its kind” (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 972). The event took place at Andrews Air Force base just outside Washington, D.C., highlighting its military character.

The ostensible purpose of Dark Winter was to “increase awareness of the scope and character of the threat posed by biological weapons among senior national security experts and to bring about actions that would improve prevention and response strategies” (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 972). The simulation involved three National Security Council (NSC) meetings held over 13 days.

The exercise took its name from Robert Kadlec’s claim that “it could be a very dark winter for America” on account of lack of smallpox vaccines. Kadlec had also been warning of an imminent anthrax attack since the 1993 World Trade Centre attack and was part of a team of UN weapons inspectors that searched in vain for Saddam Hussein’s suspected stores of anthrax and botulism following the Gulf War (Kennedy Jr., 2021, p. 380).

Key Actors

The “principal designers, authors, and controllers of the Dark Winter exercise” were Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby (Johns Hopkins) and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier (ANSER) (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 972). O’Toole and Inglesby were also behind the 1999 smallpox and anthrax scenarios (O’Toole, 1999; Inglesby, 1999), as well as TOPOFF.

The key players in the simulation (and the characters they were playing) included: Sam Nunn (President), James Woolsey (CIA Director), Frank Wisner (Secretary of State), Frank Keating (Governor of Oklahoma), Margaret Hamburg (Secretary of Health & Human Services), David Gergen (National Security Advisor), George Terwilliger (Attorney General), John White (Secretary of Defence), Jerome Hauer (Director, FEMA), John Tilelli (Chairman, JCS), William Sessions (Director, FBI), and Paul Hanely (White House Communications Director).

Of those participants, former Senator Sam Nunn, who played the President, was responsible for the 1996 “Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Act” which placed “preparedness” against terrorist use of WMD in the hands of the Department of Defense. In early 2001, he co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative with Ted Turner. Its ethos, like that of “preparedness” exercises, is planning radical measures to deal with a potentially catastrophic but highly unlikely event.

James Woolsey directed the CIA between 1993 and 1995. His involvement in the exercise, alongside that of Tara O’Toole, Randy Larsen and Ruth David, confirms for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (2021, p. 35) “the intelligence community’s ubiquitous but shadowy presence in biosecurity and all things vaccine.”

In addition, five senior journalists were invited to participate in a mock press conference, namely NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski, CBS’s Mary Walsh, the BBC’s Sian Edwards (who the following year was assistant producer on the fictional documentary Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon), freelance Lester Reingold, and the New York Times’ Judith Miller (more on her below).

Links to “9/11”

There are multiple linkages between Dark Winter and “9/11” (which took place three months later), making it highly likely that US military intelligence was behind both the “preparedness” exercises and the actual attacks.

For example, the involvement of the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Dark Winter is significant, because clear lines of continuity can be traced from the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and the attacks of September 11, 2001, including the drafting of the USA Patriot Act and the undermining of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (Hughes, 2024, pp. 8-9).

Sam Nunn told Congress a month after Dark Winter that the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act passed in 1991 (also known as the Nunn-Lugar legislation) involved “some waivers of the posse comitatus statutes” and “needs updating” (cited in Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs, and International Relations, 2001). Militarising the domestic environment was thus a common concern.

In Dark Winter, 3,000 people were infected with the smallpox virus in three simultaneous attacks on shopping malls in Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, and Atlanta (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 974). In real life, 11 weeks later, 3,000 people were killed in four simultaneous attacks allegedly involving hijacked aircraft.

In Dark Winter, the intelligence community deems, explicitly without good evidence, that Iraq was behind the biological attack and “Polls of US citizens show overwhelming support for retribution when the attacker is identified” (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 979). This, of course, is exactly what happened following the September 11 attacks.

In Dark Winter, a fictional news anchor claims that “Iraq might have provided the technology behind the attacks to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.” Dark Winter participant Judith Miller’s dubious reporting about Iraqi development of WMD for the New York Times (from which the paper later sought to distance itself) was seized upon by the Bush administration to legitimise the US invasion.

Anthrax Attacks

In Dark Winter, an anonymous letter sent to major news agencies demands the immediate removal of all US forces from Saudi Arabia and all warships from the Persian Gulf, lest there be new attacks involving anthrax and plague (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 979).

In real life, in the weeks following the September 11 attacks (between September 18, 2001, and October 12, 2001), anonymous letters containing lethal anthrax spores were mailed to major news media offices and two U.S. Senators, resulting in 17 infections and five deaths. The Johns Hopkins report on Dark Winter notes this coincidence but finds it strangely unremarkable (O’Toole et al., 2002, pp. 982-3).

Dark Winter participant James Woolsey was tasked by Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq War, with investigating Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks and anthrax outbreaks (Harnden, 2001). He sought tirelessly, even under oath (Pringle 2005), to persuade the public of those non-existent links.

Dark Winter participant Jerome Hauer was the managing director of Kroll Inc., informally known as the “CIA of Wall Street,” which managed security at the World Trade Centre. Absent from his WTC office on September 11, 2001, he advised Vice President Cheney’s staff that very evening (i.e. before the anthrax attacks) to take the Ciprofloxacin to prevent anthrax infection (Webb, 2020).

Richard Betts (1998, p. 32), who had ties to the CIA, cited a 1993 study by the US Office of Technology Assessment, claiming that “a single airplane delivering 100 kilograms of anthrax spores [...] by aerosol on a clear, calm night over the Washington, DC, area could kill between one million and three million people.” The idea that “such an attack will take place sooner or later” was reiterated by Lipschutz (1999, p. 412). The anthrax threat was thus manufactured several years before the actual attacks.

In a book-length examination of the anthrax attacks, the late Graeme Macqueen (2014) concludes that “insiders deep within the US state apparatus” were responsible for them, and that these were “the same people who planned the 9/11 attacks.” Given the evidence presented above, it seems hard to disagree.

The anthrax attacks were, in Macqueen’s (2014) view, designed to “facilitate a seizure of power by the executive branch of government through intimidation of Congress and US civil society” and thereby to help initiate the “War on Terror.” The two senators targeted, for instance – Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle – had sought to slow the rush to war, and the USA PATRIOT Act was passed on October 26, 2001.

Judith Miller, in contrast, was sent harmless white powder

Scientific Fraud

Dark Winter embodies all the same faulty scientific assumptions as O’Toole’s (1999) smallpox attack scenario. Given the obvious political motivation behind the exercise, those faulty assumptions – which no serious public health expert should make – may be regarded as scientific fraud. They can be summarised as follows:

(1) because modern doctors are unfamiliar with smallpox, diagnosis would be delayed, allowing missed cases to infect others; (2) today’s population is largely unvaccinated and therefore more susceptible to infection; (3) increased air travel will disseminate smallpox faster, making tracing difficult; (4) smallpox is highly infective, more so than common diseases such as flu and measles; (5) airborne transmission is a viable means of infecting large populations with a viral disease; (6) there will be at least four generations of spread; (7) the replication rate will be ten to twenty throughout the four generations of spread; (8) the case fatality rate will be thirty percent; (9) there will be an insufficient supply of vaccine for mass vaccination, the preferred means of response, leading to mass hysteria; and (10) it will take three or more weeks to get enough vaccine. (Billauer, 2017, pp. 376-377)

Some of these have already been dealt with in the Smallpox Attack Scenario discussed above, but some additional remarks are worth making.

For example, it is not true that today’s unvaccinated population is more susceptible to smallpox than in the past. To contract smallpox, there must be enough exposure to reach the threshold dose; brief contact usually fails to induce illness, so much so that variolation was once used to prevent the disease (Billauer, 2017, p. 401).

Far from international air travel increasing the likelihood of a pandemic, the number of disease outbreaks has decreased while air travel has greatly increased (Billauer, 2017, p. 404). This probably has to do with increased host resistance owing to modern industrialized life-styles involving better hygiene, medical care, intervention and nutrition (Roberts, 2003, p. 660).

Smallpox is far less infectious than measles and various strains of flu; according to Enserink (2002, p. 1592), it is “a barely contagious and very slow-spreading infection.”

Not only is airborne transmission of smallpox dubious for reasons given above, but Dark Winter falsely assumes that the winter weather in Oklahoma City in December 2002 will increase the spread of the virus. In reality, there was an ice and snow storm in Oklahoma City in early December 2002, meaning that people would mostly have stayed at home rather than going out and spreading the virus (Billauer, 2017, p. 372).

As in O’Toole’s (1999) smallpox scenario, the smallpox epidemic in Dark Winter lasts three to four generations, with 3,000 people infected in the first generation and 3,000,000 by the fourth, implying a roughly constant replication rate across all four generations (Billauer, 2017, p. 365). This is nonsense for the reasons given above.

Dark Winter assumes a replication rate of at least ten for smallpox, which, according to biological weapons specialist Milton Leitenberg, is over three times the historical average (cited in Bain & Cirincione, 2006). According to a team led by the CDC’s Martin Meltzer, a replication rate of two is more representative of actual past epidemics (see Enserink, 2002, p. 1593).

Dark Winter envisages “up to three million cases and one million deaths from smallpox,” implying a case fatality rate (CFR) of 33% (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 975). Yet, the worst-case CFR for smallpox over the last century is between 15%-20% and for post-WWII non-endemic countries falls to 16% or lower (Billauer, 2017, p. 403).

In Dark Winter, 12 million vaccine doses are available at the time of the outbreak and new vaccine doses will not be available for at least four weeks. Vaccine scarcity induces panic and hysteria in the exercise. Yet, in reality, the CDC had 15 million vaccine doses on hand in December 2002, the DoD had a further 75-90 million doses, and Anthony Fauci determined that vaccine dilution was effective at 1:10, implying more than enough vaccine for the entire US population (Billauer, 2017, p. 366).

In sum, far from being informed by scientific expertise, Dark Winter proves to be nothing more than “an imaginary fable” bearing no discernible relation to reality (Billauer, 2017, p. 364).

The Attack on Civil Liberties

The scientific fraud in Dark Winter is far from innocent, because it is used to legitimise the most draconian of measures in response to the notional bioterrorism attack.

For example, the push towards martial law in Dark Winter is undeniable. One slide from the original presentation moots “forcible restrictions on citizens” and the “need for martial law.”

(Source: Democracy Manifest, 2024, with event date added)

Underscoring the need for authoritarian measures, O’Toole et al. (2002, p. 978) ask:

Should patients with smallpox be confined to facilities dedicated to care for them? Should contacts of patients be forced to remain at home or in dedicated facilities until they are proven to be free of smallpox? Should national travel restrictions be imposed? How can disease containment best be balanced against economic disruption and the protection of civil liberties? To what extent can and should the government infringe upon civil liberties? Under what conditions can those powers be exercised?

This is brazen. A key purpose of the exercise was evidently to explore how far the government could go in infringing upon civil liberties under the pretext of a bioterrorism attack. Again, this was three months before “9/11,” suggesting that planning for using terrorist attacks to undermine civil liberties was already at an advanced stage.

Vaccines

With only 12 million doses available in Dark Winter, how should vaccines best be distributed? Should vaccination be made mandatory? (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 977). Here, the gruesome spectre of mandatory vaccination, which violates the Nuremberg Code, is raised, even though the scientific foundation of the exercise is bogus.

As vaccine supplies dwindle in the exercise, public unrest grows and misinformation about the smallpox outbreak starts to appear. In words that anticipate the Covid “lockdowns” almost two decades later, “Schools are closed nationwide. Public gatherings are limited in affected states. Some states limit travel and nonessential gatherings” (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 977). There is mandatory isolation of those infected as well as their contacts. Again, all these draconian measures are based on scientific fraud.

Finding themselves in a so-called “war,” which predates the announcement of the “War on Terror,” Dark Winter participants opt for “a crash production program for new smallpox vaccine, despite unresolved liability issues,” and accept the offer of a Russian smallpox vaccine (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 979). Thus, rapid vaccine production (which ignores liability issues and the usual FDA regulations) and international collaboration were proposed as the way out, just as they were during Covid.

Dark Winter participants “worried that it would not be possible to forcibly impose vaccination or travel restrictions on large groups of the population without their general cooperation” (O’Toole et al., 2002, p. 982). Sam Nunn, for instance, observed that “The federal government has to have the cooperation from the American people. There is no federal force out there that can require 300,000,000 people to take steps they don’t want to take.”

The problem remaining was, thus, how to get the population to consent to its own oppression, and the answer was largely supplied in 2020.

The Congressional Hearings of July 23, 2001

One month after Dark Winter, on July 23, 2001, two Congressional hearings were held on the theme of bioterrorism. Common to both was the need to give the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) a central coordinating role in responding to bioterrorism attacks.

The Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs, and International Relations (2001) conducted a hearing titled “Combatting Terrorism: Federal Response to a Biological Weapons Attack.” Meanwhile, the International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services Subcommittee (2001) conducted a hearing titled “FEMA’s role in managing bioterrorist attacks and the impact of public health concerns on bioterrorism preparedness.”

Those addressing the first hearing included John Hamre (President and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies), Frank Keating (Governor of Oklahoma), former senator Sam Nunn (Chairman and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative), Margaret Hamburg (Vice President of NTI Biological Programs), Jerome Hauer (Managing Director, Kroll Associates), Dean Henderson (Director, Johns Hopkins Center for Bioterrorism Prevention), Major General Ronald O. Harrison (Adjutant General of Florida), Major General William A. Cugno, (Adjutant General of Connecticut), Dr. James Hughes and James LeDuc (Directors, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Patricia Quinlisk (medical director and State epidemiologist, Iowa Department of Public Health) and Jeffrey Duchin (Head of Communicable Disease Control, Epidemiology and Immunization, Seattle and King County, WA).

In the first hearing, Nunn told Congress that “FEMA is going to have to play a big role.” Keating proposed that healthcare professionals be “trained at the State level to recognize [...] contagious diseases, and then to be able to access perhaps through FEMA the body of knowledge necessary to respond quickly.” Hauer, who played the role of Director of FEMA in Dark Winter, claimed that “FEMA needs to be the overarching agency that does the coordination of this at the Federal level and then rely on agencies like HHS for [...] expertise.” Hamburg testified that the “comprehensive coordinator” should be FEMA. Cugno advocated for a central role for the Adjutant General, who commands the State Office of Emergency Management in 23 US states and is “keenly aware of the role of FEMA.”

The second hearing was all about “FEMA’s role in managing bioterrorist attacks.” O’Toole told the Subcommittee “I would encourage FEMA, in particular, to design, assess and use drills that might reveal the vulnerabilities and inspire coordination and improve awareness of the issues and options that a biological weapons attack would present to decisionmakers” (cited in International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services Subcommittee, 2001).

Such options, judging by the first hearing, principally involve mass vaccination and forced isolation/quarantine of the population. On mass vaccination, for instance, Hauer observed that “The logistical infrastructure necessary to vaccinate the people of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago is just – would be mind-boggling.” Hamre noted that “we would have to waive a fair amount of Federal regulation in order to get vaccines available on an expedited basis.” Hamburg asked “what does it mean to in an emergency use drugs or vaccines that haven’t yet been licensed?,” noting that in Dark Winter “we made the decision early on that given the gravity of the situation, we would certainly move forward.” The pseudoscience in Dark Winter was thus successful in legitimising the push for injecting the population with unlicensed substances, a dominant feature of the “Covid-19” debacle two decades later.

In terms of forced isolation/quarantine, Hamre testified that in Dark Winter “we were confronting the reality that forcible constraint of citizens’ behavior was probably going to be required to be able to stop that fourth generation of infections.” This would mean that “you at gunpoint put your own citizens under, in effect, house arrest.” Hauer asked “At what point in time do we use force on the citizens of this country? And who makes that decision?,” noting that “the use of military assets” would be required.

Thus, within the space of a month, Dark Winter had translated into recommendations to Congress that legal provisions be made for mass vaccination and house arrest, to be enforced by the military under FEMA’s coordination.

The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act

The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (“the Act”; MSEHPA) was drafted by the Center for Law and the Public’s Health (CLPH) at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities at the request of the CDC days after the first cases of anthrax were confirmed on October 4, 2001 (Gostin, 2003, p. 20). Its aim was to provide US states with the necessary powers to detect and contain a potentially catastrophic disease outbreak (Gostin, pp. 4-5).

A first draft was ready by October 23, 2001 and a revised version was published on December 21, 2001 (MSEHPA, 2001).

Some of the language in the original draft was removed from the revised version, such as “Control of Persons” (which became “Protection of Persons”), “mandatory medical examinations” (“medical examination and testing”), “shall be performed immediately upon the order of the public health authority without resort to judicial or quasi-judicial authority” (changed to requiring judicial review) and “to compel a person to be vaccinated and/or treated for an infectious disease” (changed to allow exemptions on religious grounds). Nevertheless, the original intent to “control” people through “mandatory” testing and compulsory vaccination without recourse to judicial authority is clear.

The premise of the Act is that

Emergency health threats, including those caused by bioterrorism and epidemics, require the exercise of extraordinary government functions [...] The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act therefore grants specific emergency powers to state governors and public health authorities. (MSEHPA, 2001, p. 6)

In the case of smallpox, which featured in Dark Winter, we know that premise to be false for the reasons given above.

Nevertheless, based on that premise, a raft of draconian legislation was proposed, particularly in Article VI ( “Special Powers During a State of Public Health Emergency: Protection of Persons”). For example, Section 602(c) provides that

The public health authority may isolate or quarantine, pursuant to Section 604, any person whose refusal of medical examination or testing results in uncertainty regarding whether he or she has been exposed to or is infected with a contagious or possibly contagious disease or otherwise poses a danger to public health.

In other words, anyone suspected of being infected who refuses medical examination can be forcibly isolated/quarantined. The same fate awaits “persons who are unable or unwilling for reasons of health, religion, or conscience to undergo vaccination” in Section 603(a)(3). They may be held in isolation for up to 30 days, and this can be renewed.

One of the authors of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act addressed some of the many concerns that had made it “a lightning rod for criticism” (Gostin, 2003, p. 5). The revised version, he noted, made clear that it was not intended for endemic diseases such as influenza or HIV/AIDS, that a governor’s decision could immediately be overridden by a majority decision in the legislature, and that any criminal penalties for refusing to comply with public health orders had been removed (Gostin, 2003, p. 21).

Nevertheless, he had no problem with such people being forcibly isolated or quarantined: “the Model Act does not permit public health officials to vaccinate, test, or medically treat people against their will. At most, individuals may be isolated or quarantined to reduce their risk to others” (Gostin, 2003, p. 26).

Such measures, he argued, could be justified by “rethinking the public good” so as to give greater importance to the “well being of the populace” (Gostin, 2003, p. 31). Here we see a precursor of the “common good” rhetoric witnessed during Covid. In an emergency, we are told, individual rights and liberties must be subordinated to “the common good.”

But how do we know it is a genuine emergency? Gostin’s (2003) entire defence of the MSEHPA rests on a bioterrorism threat assessment cooked up by the intelligence agencies. For example,

A report by the National Intelligence Council for the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that infectious disease is not only a public health issue, but also a problem of national security: the U.S. population is vulnerable to bioterrorism as well as emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. (Gostin, 2003, p. 7)

Or again: “In 1999, the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century concluded that biological agents are the most likely choice of weapons for disaffected states and groups” (Gostin, 2003, p. 8). And “Documents recovered in Afghanistan suggest that Al Qaeda has conducted extensive research on weapons that can cause mass fatalities, including biological weapons” (Gostin, 2003, p. 9). He also cites TOPOFF and Dark Winter, which were products of the national security state.

Gostin (2003) does not realise that those exercises are premised on highly implausible scientific assumptions. Instead, he emphasises that, under Article IV of the Act, “a Governor may declare a public health emergency only if a series of demanding threshold conditions are met,” including “a high probability of a large number of deaths” and/or disabilities (2003, p. 17). Technically, no one needs to have died; there need only be the “imminent threat of an illness or health condition” (Gostin, 2003, p. 17). Therefore, the legitimacy of the Act depends entirely on whether the threat assessment is credible. Judging by Dark Winter, it clearly is not.

Impacts on Policy, Public Health Discourse, and Education

The work of O’Toole, Inglesby, and Henderson between 1999 and 2001 was clearly aimed at conjuring scare stories aimed at benefiting the military-pharmaceutical complex, and in that respect, it was successful. Their scenarios, though pie-in-the-sky, had real world impact.

For example, following the 2001 anthrax scare, US bioterrorism priority lists were updated as the CDC refined its list of high-profile bioagents based on the conclusions of Henderson and his Working Group on Civilian Biodefense (Billauer, 2017, p. 349). Smallpox featured prominently as the most dangerous of the Class A bioterrorist agents.

The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act went on to serve as “an important catalyst for state action in the field of bioterrorism preparation” (Martin, 2004).

Nunn told Congress in July 2001 that a US public health system capable of dealing with the bioterrorist threat will need “some real money spent” (cited in International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services Subcommittee, 2001). The Project BioShield Act of 2004 authorised $5.6 billion over ten years to accelerate the development and acquisition of medical countermeasures against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats. By 2017, allocations to US biodefence had reached $80 billion (Billauer, 2017, pp. 355-356). Such massive spending diverts resources from more quotidian public health concerns such as combatting infectious diarrhea, which claims two millions lives a year (Billauer, 2017, p. 413).

O’Toole called for “a substantial research and development program that involves biomedical talent in the private sector and the universities” (cited in International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services Subcommittee, 2001). Federal spending created large incentives for institutions and individuals to produce outputs that aligned with the biodefence agenda, even where this involved twisting the facts and the scientific evidence.

A shift occurred in public health discourse towards uncritical endorsement of vaccines. As Schrader & Campion (2003) put it, “The public health question has changed from ‘Are we at risk from a smallpox attack?’ to ‘Whom should we be vaccinating?’” Their own attitude was “If necessary, we must also roll up our sleeves and be vaccinated” – perfect compliance, generated through a series of scientific fantasies and fairy-tales.

By 2007, the United States operated over 1,350 level three biosafety labs and 15 level four labs, ostensibly to guard against bioterrorist and pandemic threats. Given that those threats appear wildly overstated, and that the results of the research from those labs are “murky at best” (Billauer, 2017, p. 351), we might wonder what else is going on in those labs.

During the 2009 confirmation hearings for O’Toole’s nomination to undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan noted that “many top scientists have said that the Dark Winter exercise was based on faulty and exaggerated assumptions about the transmission rate of smallpox” (cited in Kennedy Jr., 2021, p. 386). That did not block O’Toole’s appointment, however, because the exaggerated assumptions are an integral part of “homeland security.”

When it came to “Covid-19,” the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (including subsequent revisions of it) was invoked by US states. As was feared by critics in the early days, the Act served to legitimise “an unprecedented increase in unilateral lawmaking by governors,” thereby undermining democratic legitimacy (Weiss, 2021, p. 1853). This was despite the fact that the Act was “not intended to apply to chronic emergencies such as COVID-19, with unilateral decision-making going on for over a year, or to responses such as social distancing regulations or mass lockdowns” (Weiss, 2021, pp. 1876-1877).

Conclusion

The erstwhile Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, stated at a White House press briefing on January 22, 1999 that “Bioterrorism is perhaps the first time in American history in which the public health system is integrated directly into the national security system” (“Press Briefing,” 1999).

That was precisely the point of the early bioterrorism simulations involving Johns Hopkins scholars between 1999 and 2001, as well as the many “pandemic preparedness” simulations that have taken place since. They essentially propose means of bringing the public healthcare system under the control of the national security state.

The smallpox and anthrax scenarios by O’Toole (1999) and Inglesby (1999), the $3 million TOPOFF exercise, and Dark Winter were all aimed at shifting perception and mainstreaming the credibility of a major bioterrorist attack in the United States, so that new measures could be proposed to deal with the alleged threat. As with the “War on Terror” in general, those measures hand disproportionate power to the executive branch and represent an affront against a free society.

Just as it is scientifically impossible that two planes caused three skyscrapers to disappear on September 11, 2001, so the Johns Hopkins bioterrorism scenarios are laced with scientific fraud. Virtually all of their key assumptions, certainly about smallpox, are flawed. Given that Dark Winter predicts with a high degree of precision what would later unfold following the “9/11” attacks, there is almost no chance that the authors of those scenarios simply “got it wrong.”

Rather, they were actively helping to bring about a new reality in which the public felt ever-threatened by the possibility of terrorist attacks involving WMD and was willing to cede its liberties accordingly. As Billauer (2017, p. 347) puts it, “rather than modeling actual weapons of mass destruction, in essence, the exercise [Dark Winter] artificially creates weapons of mass hysteria.”

This set a precedent that has continued up to the present day, whereby threat projections for bioterrorism and pandemic planning have consistently used mathematical modelling to come up with “reasonable worst scenarios” while ignoring biological plausibility, relevant historical data, and modern medical practice. Thus,

Past pandemic projections for avian flu, smallpox, anthrax, swine flu, and Ebola grotesquely overestimated the disease’s incidence and mortality illustrating deficiencies in current models, and in some cases, generating adverse health consequences more severe than any realistic epidemic. (Billauer, 2017, p. 347)

Exactly the same was true of “Covid-19.” The threat was wildly overhyped (Hughes, 2024, Chap. 4) while the measures instigated to mitigate it proved catastrophic for many people.

A quarter of a century after the US anthrax attacks, which were perpetrated by the deep state (MacQueen, 2014), there has still not been a major bioterrorist attack on a Western country. This gives the lie to decades of fearmongering claims about the inevitability of such an attack given the ease with which it could allegedly be carried out.

In the final analysis, we should see bioterrorism and “pandemic preparedness” planning as fundamentally illegitimate. They are not about protecting the public against deadly diseases, but, rather, devising cunning ways of persuading the public to part with its liberties.

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