The Norfolk Group's Presumptive Pandemic

I reject the assertion, "Pandemics are recurring events throughout history, and there will be future pandemics."

Until a follower reminded me, I had forgotten about the Norfolk Group: Eight respected Americans with strong scientific and medical credentials initially brought together by Brownstone Institute in Norfolk, Connecticut, in May of 2022, who went on to write “Questions for a Covid-19 Commission”.¹

Although the document represents only the consensus position of its authors, the ideas therein have become part of the U.S. “Team Reality” and Health Freedom perspective proliferated in the post-Omicron era.

People coalescing around a common viewpoint is expected and good. But when assumptions or elements of the viewpoint are insisted-upon as things that everyone who dissents from the government’s COVID narrative should believe or support as priorities in order to accomplish certain short- or long-term political goals, the result is (ironically) the same kind of dogma that suppressed dissent in 2020. This is exactly what has happened, with no single culprit responsible, yet a desperate need for it to stop.

As Great Barrington Declaration² author and Norfolk Group member Jay Bhattacharya illustrated recently, debate among those who agree that “lockdowns” were harmful but disagree on whether there even was a pandemic - or a risk-additive pathogen suddenly spreading from person to person - is hard. It’s also a Big No-No among brand managers, media mavens, & political strategists.

I get it, to a point: There is “strength in numbers,” after all, and when one has spent four+ years honing a core message and endured many challenges professionally as a result, dissenting dissenters can feel like gadflies. Right or wrong, I prefer to think of myself as a pitbull/Jack Russell terrier mix - versus a gadfly - but I don’t mind being a person who barks says out loud, “Nope, I disagree and think these experts whom I otherwise appreciate are wrong to the point that it is going to enable the perpetrators who hurt my children and theirs.”

The Norfolk Group was/is obviously well-intentioned and comprised of exceptionally smart, accomplished, and amenable men & women who have fought valiantly against the worst of what federal, state, and local officials have said and done in the name of mitigating a “new” cause of death.

Unfortunately their document was wholly predicated on legitimacy of the WHO’s pandemic declaration on March 11, 2020 — and the idea that pandemics are scientifically-verified phenomena and once & future threats to humankind.

I take issue with claims made in every sentence in the introduction (which captures the spirit of the document as a whole).

My reactions to the Intro follow - for what they’re worth. [Norfolk statements in bold]

America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic failed on many levels of government and in many aspects.

Unless “COVID-19 pandemic” has a covert or alternate meanings, there was no pandemic. Pandemics are creatures of political/social science, tools for economic exploitation, & ways for those in authority to gain or preserve power and should be studied as such.³

It is strange that no serious group of American scientists, doctors, and academics have come to this realization; worse, I don’t know of one that even encourages open discussion about it.⁴ What do the authors of the Norfolk Group think of Denis Rancourt’s early and cogent paper All-cause mortality during COVID-19: No plague and a likely signature of mass homicide by government response? (The core claim is in the title.)

Certainly, deaths are unavoidable during a pandemic.

People can’t avoid death, but deaths during Political Power Grabs and Human Rights Heists like the one we saw in 2020 are absolutely avoidable. Further, after a fair amount of reading and analysis, I fail to see how pandemics are biologically or epidemiologically possible.

It seems we’ve been lied to for decades about respiratory illness, vaccine efficacy, “pandemic potential pathogens,” and the like. There are entire fields that need to conduct serious self-examination and analyze the quality and conclusions of the research undergirding some of their most fundamental assumptions. (Epidemiology and SEIR models are one example; virology and the use of genomic sequencing is another.)

However, too many U.S. policy makers concentrated efforts on ineffective or actively harmful and divisive measures such as school closures that generated enormous societal damage without significantly lowering COVID-19 mortality, while failing to protect high-risk Americans.

There was no new cause of death in 2020 and never a casual link established between the thing called SARS-CoV-2 and a particular or unique illness/disease.⁵ The WHO lied (sadly) but it is no surprise that member countries simply said “okay” when given a new ICD code and an excuse to print money.

All Americans need to be protected from Democide via iatrogenic measures, including directed euthanasia. Without question, those in poor health - as well as precipice populations and damaged ships in hospitals & congregate settings - need protection from being used to create the appearance of a “novel” spreading pathogen.

As a result, Americans were hard hit both by the disease and by collateral damage generated by misguided pandemic strategies and decisions that ignored years of pandemic preparation guidance crafted by numerous public health agencies, nationally and internationally.

There was no new disease that “hit.” Viruses don’t “hit” and such war-time language/mindset was nothing less than coordinated government propaganda.

“Pandemic preparation guidance” is pointless and the pandemic preparedness industry a massive racket because pandemics are not actual threats. It’s true some guidance was ignored but it should also be recognized that pandemic prep and bioterrorism prep had effectively become the same thing in the U.S. I hope everyone can agree that whatever was activated in New York City looked nothing like a pandemic response plan and everything like a Broadway musical/reality TV show/disaster film mash-up covering for a militarized bomb-drop or chemical attack drill.

Many crucial mistakes were made early on, in January, February, and early March 2020, and not corrected later.

What “mistakes” were made? Made by whom? It is clearer than ever that much of what was done was NOT a mistake.

Mistakes made during this early critical window at the beginning of the pandemic affected our ability to collect data about COVID-19 and protect those most at risk and laid the groundwork for loss of public trust and confusion.

“Early critical window” at what point in time exactly? There was never evidence that something new was spreading, and an infection fatality ratio divorced from iatrogenic harms was never calculated. (Hopefully, even the often-cited John Ioannidis can recognize as much, despite having called lockdown orders “justified initially” at a May 6, 2020 hearing.)

These oversights led to unnecessary morbidity and mortality, particularly in nursing homes, and a lack of much-needed medical supplies, reagents for testing, and required medications.

More Americans died in hospitals than in nursing homes — including from/with “COVID-19” positivity - and there is no federal data source that shows how many nursing home residents died in hospitals irrespective of cause of death.

Shortages were contrived, in my opinion, as part of the “emergency” and “spreading virus” narratives.

Where is the evidence that more testing would have saved more lives from iatrogenic measures? Patterns in clinical observation did NOT precede the launch of mass testing in hospitals, and there is no sign of a deadly coronavirus in any data of any kind until after the federal government declared a national emergency.⁶

Delays in initiating research on key questions such as effectiveness of therapeutics, modes of transmission, length of infective periods, and other questions, meant that policy decisions were based on assumptions rather than on solid data. To this day, many of these questions have not been adequately addressed through robust trials.

What research was “delayed”? On the contrary, numerous large- and small-scale studies were launched in March 2020, with IRB protocols that had been written and submitted in February 2020 or sooner.

The testimony of one doctor and other contemporaneous evidence strongly suggest that the federal government mobilized studies already being conducted by cadres of specialists in critical and palliative care as part of the Lockdown/Wait for Shot vs. Herd Immunity/Early Treatment false dichotomy that left zero room for considering if the pandemic declaration and claims about a new cause of death were legitimate.

As for “modes of transmission,” person to person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 was NEVER demonstrated. Indeed, the first such instance in the U.S. appears to have been nothing of the kind. (Scott Gottlieb deleted his January 2020 tweet about China confirming transmission after I drew attention to it earlier this year.)

Hopefully, the Norfolk Group authors are themselves wondering if we’ve all been sold a bill of goods about how and why people get sick with any kind of respiratory illness. (I know I am!)

At hospitals, morbidity and mortality (M&Ms) conferences are used to examine errors or omissions in order to improve medical care. Aviation agencies conduct detailed investigations after airplane accidents and incidents.

Where is the call for hospitals to be investigated - starting with New York City? Why the primary focus on nursing homes as though hospitals were bit players? What’s the difference between medical errors and serious ethical breaches?⁷ Did only the former occur and not the latter? How do we know?

Pandemics are recurring events throughout history, and there will be future pandemics. It is thus critically important that we thoroughly examine federal pandemic responses and decisions so that we can identify and learn from mistakes.

I reject the core assertion that pandemics are recurring events throughout history and that there will be future pandemics. What empirical phenomenon does “pandemic” describe? Pandemics are not hurricanes or earthquakes. They are declared, not observed, and cannot be separated from testing regimes, vaccination programs, and political motivations.

I agree the Feds need to be examined — VERY CLOSELY and without presuming anything was a “mistake”.

Individual states should take on the responsibility of conducting similar processes to analyze their own responses to the pandemic.

“The pandemic” = the federal government endorsing the WHO pandemic declaration and issuing a national emergency decree & activating the Stafford Act in all 50 states, from whom the proper response should have been, “Thanks but no thanks!”

Moreover, New York State just paid millions for an “independent” review that revealed nothing new, so I’m not super hopeful about similar taxpayer-funded pandemic-presumptive exercises.

Other countries have conducted such inquiries (Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Denmark) and made results available to the public and to decision makers. The United States is notably absent from this list.

The inquiries haven’t really addressed the core questions or yielded much truth, as far as I know. The most honest inquiry happening is in Scotland and has been largely ignored by American influencers. Moreover, the X account of an independent citizen covering the Scottish Inquiry has been suspended, so that probably tells us something about the state of affairs on a platform that many of the Norfolk Group authors might think has become a bastion of free speech/press.

Last part:

These inquiries pose important questions to key decision makers during the pandemic, including (i) politicians, (ii) leaders of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), (iii) state health departments, (iv) university presidents, medical school deans, hospital executives, medical journal editors, and leading public health scientists, as well as (iv) news media and technology/media companies.

This document is not a report from such an inquiry. Rather, we present a blueprint containing key public health questions for a COVID-19 commission. In separate chapters we summarize key background information and propose specific questions about failures to protect older high-risk Americans, about school closures, collateral lockdown harms, lack of robust public health data collected and/or made available, misleading risk communication, downplaying infection-acquired immunity, masks, testing, vaccine efficacy and safety, therapeutics, and epidemiological modeling.

We chose not to discuss economic issues, although we recognize that negative effects on the economy have long-term negative effects on public health. We have also chosen not to engage in issues regarding media handling of the pandemic, nor questions of how, when and why the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated. Public health responses to a pandemic are devised and implemented independently of viral origin.

While there’s nothing wrong with delimiting a focus in a document such as this one, the presumption of a pandemic permeates the parameter-setting, with each chapter affirming a new cause of death having come on the scene in 2020.

The Norfolk Group’s hope was for a “COVID-19 Commission” to accept a pandemic and proceed accordingly, so that America can do better in a Next Pandemic.

I have a different idea: A commission driven by the questions

“Was there a pandemic at all? Has there ever been one - and why do we say so?”

Final Thoughts

I hope my reactions to the Nolkfolk Group’s work are taken as a good-faith attempt to draw attention to the fact that there are considerable differences between various groups of people who oppose what governing authorities did to us in early 2020. It is only through acknowledging and engaging these differences that some semblance of the truth can eventually be revealed.

Having been a part of various formal and informal “groups” myself over the past four years, I think the most disturbing pattern I’ve observed more recently is the contempt & disregard some COVID-Resisting scientists & doctors arrogantly express toward the questions and contributions of anyone who isn’t a “real” scientist or medical professional. (That includes people who were onto the Pandemic Scam earlier than most.)

Expert Blindness can be…blinding. It therefore seems rather short-sighted to assume that the same fields that helped get us into this mess are the way out, or the only way out. If I know one thing from my own field of study it’s that people outside of a particular discipline who are not encumbered by or entrenched in certain beliefs or accepted ways of thinking can help illuminate a problem, or raise a possibility that wouldn’t otherwise be considered.

Galileo rightly observed,

"In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man."

The words of Erwin Schrödinger also apply to the ongoing study of the COVID-19 event:

"The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees."

In the case of Presumptive Pandemics, I suspect the task is to think what nobody wants to think about that which nobody has ever seen, yet has been made to believe they have.

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An earlier version of this post misstated the month of the pandemic declaration as February 11, 2020 (the day the WHO announced the name of a new cause of death: “COVID-19”).

1. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the document has informed the work of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. (Side note: Why “coronavirus pandemic” and not “COVID-19 pandemic”?)

2. I signed the Great Barrington Declaration when it debuted and have not requested my signature be withdrawn, simply because I want the record of what I did to stand but I could eventually change my mind about that. I respect those who have made such requests and think anyone who feels compelled to do the same should follow suit and let others know, as

Jonathan Engler

has done by excellent example. Plenty of people never signed it, like Denis Rancourt, who said he saw it as “a baseless call to harm and isolate the elderly, for no valid reason.”

Norman Fenton

also never signed.

3. https://x.com/Wood_House76/status/1747276001053385158

4. Readers can apprise me of a group I have overlooked. I make no claims to knowing all of them!

5. Even the virologists tasked with naming/re-naming 2019-nCoV did not have to think about causality. Must be nice!

6. I’ve spoken to and interviewed a number of doctors and nurses in different parts of the country: Not one has said he/she noticed anything unusual before the hospital was given tests.

7. Although I challenge the claim that hospitals were beset with a disease-spread emergency in spring 2020, disaster-medicine-type protocols were definitely in effect. As the Memorial Hospital incident demonstrated, doctors are not impervious to crossing the line when under pressure.