Yes, the origins of 'the virus' matter -- and are inextricably linked to the origins of 'the response'

Reaction to statements made by Debbie Lerman

I am again writing to the idea that the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 don’t matter —what really matters is the response thereto.

Previous articles on this topic include this one¹ and (more directly) this one:

Do the Origins of SARS-CoV-2 Matter?

Also relevant: two articles on false binaries of the COVID event (Part 1 and Part 2). All posts connected to the origins question can be found on this page. The basis of this response is two replies on X yesterday about Debbie Lerman’s statements here and here.

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During an appearance on Jerm Warfare’s show, Debbie Lerman, author of The Deep State Goes Viral: Pandemic Planning and the Covid Coup, said,

The whole point of my book and my research and everything, the message that I'm trying to get across is it doesn't matter what the virus was. It could have been real, it could have been fake. It could have been from a lab. It could have been from a raccoon dog. Whatever it was, the virus didn't kill the world. The response killed the world.

So the lockdown-until-vaccine response, which is a military response, it is not a public health response, killed the world. It killed millions of people who were injured and killed from the vaccines. It also killed people in hospitals. It killed people who were isolated. You know what it did? It deprived children of their ability to develop normally and of socializing, and it increased every kind of disease and depression that you could possibly imagine.

But that means what? That means if we say the virus didn't kill the world, it doesn't matter whether there was or wasn't a virus, because the response would have been the same. Okay? There would have been the same. So we have to look for the origins of the response. We can't look for the origins of the virus.

We can argue all day long. Do viruses exist? Do they not exist? We can argue. Did it come from a lab or did it not? Was it Fauci's lab? Was it Baric's lab? Was the lab China? Doesn't matter."

[Full interview: https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/covid-19-was-a-military-psyop]

To the extent Lerman means a sudden-spreading coronavirus did not kill people in 2019, 2020, or thereafter — and a pandemic declaration was entirely unwarranted — I heartily agree.

The mobilization of military forces worldwide is well-documented and consistent with what we all observed on the screen and, depending on one’s location, in real life. What happened was a psy-op on every front—and may have gone so far as manipulating all-cause mortality curves in selected places to make people think the impossible is possible.

However, I concur with Katherine Watt that Lerman errs in pitting military response against public health response. In a Bailiwick News post this morning, Watt said:

…it’s a false binary to separate the military character of the response to the events known as Covid-19, from the public health character of responses to the events known as Covid-19 and all prior alleged communicable disease outbreaks or threats in the United States.

In my view, the public health system, including the entire communicable disease control and vaccination system, is a component of the US military: more formally authorized as such since the Congressional enactment of the Public Health Service Act of 1944, and deployed nationwide as such since the 1955 polio campaign. The polio campaign was the military-public health seed from which grew the monstrous childhood immunization and adult poisoning schedules now recommended by the HHS-CDC.

In my view, the public health system, including the entire communicable disease control and vaccination system, is a component of the US military: more formally authorized as such since the Congressional enactment of the Public Health Service Act of 1944, and deployed nationwide as such since the 1955 polio campaign. The polio campaign was the military-public health seed from which grew the monstrous childhood immunization and adult poisoning schedules now recommended by the HHS-CDC.

In other words, the architecture of U.S. law not only permits but intends for the kind of “response” to a pretend public health threat like the one we experienced in 2020. It’s hard for me at this point to use the word “response” because events appear have been well-planned and executed - i.e., made to look like a response.

Either way, assertions like it doesn’t matter what the virus was, we have to look for the origins of the response, and we can't look for the origins of the virus are fundamentally flawed because the actions taken were taken in the name of a specific threat — namely, a novel coronavirus causative of a "new" disease is spreading/transmitting from human to human and needs to be slowed or stopped!

The ‘origins of the response’ cannot be divorced from the 'origins' and functionality of the thing called SARS-CoV-2. Implying otherwise is akin to saying it doesn’t matter if there really were Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), or if the Twin Towers came down only as a result of planes hitting each one. Of course it matters.

In the case of the COVID event, virus origin speaks to motive. If “it” emerged from nature and simply happened to be spotted in Wuhan, as Sunetra Gupta believes, then we are talking about a very different scenario than if something leaked or was released from a lab(s), like Jay Bhattacharya and Matt Ridley think.

Given the limitations of gain-of-function experiments, Martin Neil and Jonathan Engler have said ‘the virus’ could be something already out there and detectable in living things.² If that’s true, did someone co-opt it on purpose, or was it simply found and ‘overreacted to’? Based on the language in certain documents and statements from various officials, I’ve floated the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 could have covert, distinct, and/or unrelated origins. Who stands to gain, and who stands to lose under those conditions?

What if ‘there are no viruses,” as some say? Or, viruses are a thing but don’t “spread” between people or are effects (versus causes) of flu-like sickness and colds? The implications would extend far beyond the 2020 psy-op. For me, the core lie regards human-to-human transmission of something and the idea that the mechanism should be slowed or stopped.

Analysts have their own specialities and areas of interest. No one is saying everyone has to investigate or care deeply about the source or route of the purported pathogen. But saying we can’t or shouldn’t look for its origins, and have to look only for the origins of the response, makes little sense. Both understanding that a trick was played and investigating how it was played — including the nature of “cards” and props used — are equally important, though not everyone engaged in historical analysis needs to emphasize them equally.

Even if the "global pandemic" simulation/World War III drill isn't run again anytime soon, The Powers That Be have learned that they can allege a threat, not have to prove the threat exists, and shut down the world.³

The COVID Event also went a long way to expand apparatus critical to sustaining the seasonal shot/childhood vaccine racket, genomic sequencing, wastewater surveillance, year-round testing for respiratory ‘viruses,’ flu vaccine mandates, etc. The operation was a resounding success, with decades of falsehoods about respiratory illness still protected. For that reason alone, every bit of the official narrative has to be confronted and dismantled.

Will doing so necessarily stop the "global cabal" (as Lerman calls them) from continuing to keep doing, or keep trying to do, what they do in other forms? Of course not.

But knowing what happened, and how, could help prevent this particular brand of feigned emergency from happening again — and may go a long way in "stopping the shots" of all kinds.

To reiterate what I’ve said before: If pandemics involving spreading ‘viruses’ - whether deadly or harmless - are impossible (as we and many others believe to be the case), then we can pronounce the phenomenon counterfeit and cross it off the list of emergencies that officials and private parties can feign to their advantage and our detriment.⁴

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Related Substack note from Katherine Watt

1. FN added 18 June 2025: And this one: The Most Basic Questions (Hockett, 2024)

2. See also Claim of Function: It wasn’t a lab leak and neither was it from the wet market (Neil, Engler, Hockett, 2024)

3. See also clip from conversation between me and Jerm Warfare.

4. https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/on-dividing-a-resistance-the-existence