This blog examines strategic management errors that resulted in failure to control the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction

What has been the outcome of accepting the medical advice?

Previous COVID variants have run out of control and Omicron has run further out of control. This leads to the conclusion that the governments and medical establishments of the world have collectively failed to control the COVID pandemic. You might say “Well it’s a pandemic and so it can’t be controlled”. But vaccines have been touted as the means of control. So this leads to the conclusion that the COVID vaccines widely implemented to date have not controlled the pandemic.

What led to losing control of the pandemic?

The major governments of the world (China, the USA and the UK) initially treated COVID as a political/ ideological problem rather than as a medical one, allowing it to spread uncontrolled throughout the world. When that proved disastrous, the level of scientific complexity surrounding of the only pharmaceutical solution (vaccination) being offered to governments was such that it was too difficult to challenge the experts. Just accepting their advice enabled accountability to be transferred and boxes to be ticked while governments could be seen to be doing something (anything).

What strategic management errors contributed to this failure?

Five such errors are identified below, all of which relate to the medical and management business model options chosen.

Choosing an ineffective medical option

The medical profession has effectively assured governments and their citizens that producing antibodies by injection, rather than by enhancing NK cell response (through supplementation to increase natural immunity or by traditional vaccination) was and is the best way to go. The existence of this choice seems to have flown under the public radar, with governments and the general public being largely unaware of the difference. This has enabled something that isn’t ‘traditional’ vaccination to be marketed as such, claiming all its benefits by linguistic association (correlation), including herd immunity. Governments and populations have not realised the significance of this switch, have trusted the medical advice and piled in.

But the desired outcome has not eventuated. None of the mutations/ variants were satisfactorily controlled by the vaccines developed for the previous one, and each variant requires an MRNA vaccine with a different genetic code that hasn’t been mass produced yet. However we are nevertheless being pushed to have more doses of the previous vaccines that are known to be ineffective against Omicron! This appears to be much more hope and desperation than science. Yet the compulsion through government mandate continues. And we are going to vaccinate children on this basis as well.

It seems obvious that an ineffective i.e. the wrong option has been pursued.

Failing to trial other options

Non-drug options supporting NK cell immunity have not been pursued at all. This ensured there could be no direct comparison of outcomes. Millions have been vaccinated and there’s now lots of statistics around that. But where was the placebo group/ country? Where were the trials of competing solutions – therapeutics and Vitamin D? This means we have no alternatives to compare the practical (as distinct from laboratory) effectiveness of vaccines against! That would appear to be a fundamental mistake of both management and methodology, on top of the procurement mistake of entrenching a monopoly, which is most unlikely to advocate an alternative product.

Overlooking implementation time scale

The vaccine could only ever come late to the party, with a high chance of mutations/ variants developing that would render it ineffective. The antibody vaccine ‘solution’ could only ever substantially lag the pandemic. But if that’s not brought to your attention and vaccination is the only answer being offered when you are desperate, and you think you are talking about a conventional understanding of the term “vaccine”, then you won’t think of that and will just do it anyway. It seems that governments have not probed enough, accepted the advice and off they went.

It seems that our medical scientists became fascinated with their new science, emboldened by the success of cracking the genetic code, giving promise of making an RNA vaccine for everything, where all that’s needed is the genetic sequence and the job’s theoretically done: The new vaccines can start rolling off the production lines in weeks.

This does seem rather attractive, until we look at what it actually means – that we have to inject everyone on the planet and keep injecting for every different variant that comes along! What a market! Who gets the benefit of that business model? But we’ve all seen how the logistics of that has worked out so far for the general public – exactly as we might have expected! This was a strategy that could never actually work for the greater public benefit; it would always have a time delay, with no chance whatsoever of stopping a serious pandemic that had already started.

Overlooking measures of effectiveness

It takes so long to implement an antibody vaccine strategy that it will inevitably span the period of multiple virus mutations, making its practical effectiveness impossible to measure, relying on luck as to whether the vaccine developed will be effective against the next mutation. This means there can be no basis on which to measure or claim success. Of course, this does not stop assertion based upon conviction or claims based on correlation. That is exactly what has occurred, and the media has bought it and on-sold it to the general public.

There is also the issue that the evolutionary trend for virus mutation is to become more virulent and less deadly so that its impact in terms of death rate eventually naturally subsides. This provides ample cover for any lack of vaccine effectiveness and for committed stakeholders to claim it worked, when they have no way of knowing whether it was the vaccine or whether it would have occurred naturally. They can only base their claim on correlation, because causation cannot be proven.

This is the situation we now find ourselves in with Omicron, which has becoming more contagious but less deadly. It spread throughout the world before a vaccination targeting it could be manufactured (even though the genetic code may now be quickly determined) and deployed. This will probably go overlooked and unacknowledged as self-congratulation mounts, expecting the general public to believe the assertion by correlation that the vaccination/ booster program did it. The reality is much more likely to be that after we’ve all had it, it will have actually been controlled by increased natural immunity rather than by any ‘vaccine’.

So the governments of the world have been sold a product whose actual (as distinct from laboratory) effectiveness is impossible to measure.

Suppression of internal medical debate

There has been significant disagreement within medical ranks, and it appears that one side has won the internal political battle. But, ignoring the spin to the contrary, that side has now lost the war against the virus and that’s what matters from a community wellbeing perspective. It seems it’s high time to take notice of what the medicos who took a different position have been saying and look at the research on other options.

There are some who have come out publicly warning of the dangers, but these voices have been ignored/ lampooned/ suppressed. One such person is A/Prof Edward J Steele, a molecular & cellular immunologist who says in https://www.bitchute.com/video/dni3GVNa6Pjh/ that a jab in the arm cannot possibly activate local mucosal oro-nasal immunity and secretary IGA in the nose, mouth & gastro-intestinal tract that binds with and neutralises a virus. He states categorically that medically, the COVID vaccines cannot possibly work. He also warns they are very dangerous and is concerned about serious side-effects that will have long-term consequences down the years.

Given the outcome we have now experienced, one wonders how much public money ($Bs? $Ts?) could have been saved had his advice been heeded? And how many lives could have been saved (Ms?). And how much physical and mental suffering and community division could have been avoided? And how much havoc wreaked upon industries other than the pharmaceutical industry could have been averted?

One also wonders why such significant disagreement by eminently qualified people within the medical profession has been overlooked and labelled as ‘misinformation’, with the full support of governments of all persuasions, as well as the Australian ABC and the media generally. If it wasn’t just a happy, accidental coincidence, the only reason that makes sense is the procurement problem of the profession’s capture by its monopoly supplier group. This has led governments into inadvertently taking sides in an internal battle within the medical profession.

You know something is seriously wrong when the Queensland Health Department issues an internal directive threatening medical practitioners with deregistration if they speak out on the issue. You know something is seriously wrong when 7,000 Queensland Health Department employees, accepting of previous vaccinations, were prepared to take the sack rather than a COVID jab. You know something is seriously wrong when a government itself causes such staff shortages by mandating these particular vaccines at a time when medical services are most stretched.

It means that governments have been aggressively promoting one group of commercial suppliers’ products, which they have no business doing. This is a significant failure of governance, within both governments and the medical profession. If there is some other cause or mitigating factor, then let it come out. But the happy coincidences don’t pass the pub test and there could be no possible public harm done by instituting governance arrangements that defend against such anti-competitive circumstances occurring.

Summary & discussion of these five errors

So, it appears that our medical scientists were seduced by their bright shiny new scientific toys without considering the downstream timescale practicalities of the business model required or the ability to measure results, and so the wrong method was chosen.

This seems to have been a groupthink enthusiastically embraced by all the young doctor, professor and CHO girls and boys who graced our screens while they were out and about on their various country management work experience placements, giving us boffinry unbounded!

Given these multiple strategic management errors and the groupthink that occurred, it is no wonder that the pandemic has not been controlled.

We already know that good ways to get groupthink/ change management disasters happening are to close down brainstorming too early, to exclude or ridicule those who come up with different ideas, or to jump straight into the first solution that comes to mind. All of that has happened with this pandemic response. But the management of medicine is different? Really?

It seems we got what some group of people thought would be a good idea at the time, without any opportunity for community or ethics review, or even any thought that the community could do so. Instead, the community has been gaslit, sledged and forced to take the jab just to keep their jobs.

Increasing natural immunity to all variants (by supplementing with adequate dosage and frequency of Vitamin D3) could also have been tried on a mass scale as good research had already been done on it for previous respiratory diseases. Doing this would have averted the long lag time for vaccine development and deployment. But it was not done.

The pharmaceutical industry monopoly over the medical profession has to be removed. The profession may think they’ve done it by stopping some gifts, free lunches and complimentary conferences in exotic locations but in reality the capture has been ingrained in their very education, attitudes and approach.

What have been the knock-on effects?

Six such effects are discussed below.

Vaccine mandates

Desperation to implement the flawed vaccine solution seems to have generated the desire within governments to force everyone to comply for the best interests of the whole community. This ran completely out of control, resulting in mass social division, with people who wanted to keep their eyes opened being shunned and ostracised within their communities and families by those who could not bring themselves to question the medical/ official line or resist the heavy weight of the associated mass brainwashing campaign. This resulted in lack of social cohesion at a time when it was most needed. It increased the sense of isolation and desperation for many. It transgressed the line between governing civic and personal matters.

The first fallacy of mandating is that if the vaccine is so good, it wouldn’t matter to the vaccinated and the risk would rather be with the unvaccinated. The second fallacy is that if it the vaccine doesn’t stop transmission, then it makes no difference anyway. So this can only ever have been wishful thinking – an unsubstantiated but strong desire or conviction that it must be so, based upon nothing more than correlation – linguistic association with a different method of achieving immunity. This was not science, even though it was promoted as such and backed by people with scientific qualifications. What a happy coincidence that it just so happened to align with vaccine manufacturers’ interests!

When it finally came out that the vaccines did not stop one from catching the virus, no one asked the obvious question about mandates. The blind faith the population has in the medical profession has resulted in people continuing to believe the previous propaganda in spite of its obvious inconsistency and lack of truth.

The latest and hopefully final word on this was published in the Lancet on 29 October 2021:

Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance. Nonetheless, fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00648-4/fulltext

This confirmed that banning the unvaccinated from contact with the vaccinated is unwarranted on health grounds.

Mandating vaccination means there is no free choice, and that individual control of what happens with/ goes into our own bodies has been taken away. This ‘one size fits all’ approach to public health is completely at odds with the concept of medical advice being tailored to the individual. It also interferes with the doctor patient relationship which has stood for hundreds of years. How can the medical profession have supported that? Of course, many medicos who support vaccination do not support mandating them. But supposedly democratic governments of various political colours have grossly over-reached in mandating vaccination, raising a fundamental issue in the operation of our system of government.

Governments have been spruiking informed consent while at the same time introducing and enforcing vaccine mandates. This is oxymoronic. You can’t have informed consent with mandating. Coercion is neither consultation nor consent. Many have been forced against their will to have a vaccine they don’t want, just to keep their jobs. This is the antithesis of democracy and this internal corruption of our values under the cover of just following the medical advice is a most serious threat to our democracy, especially when accompanied by a level of brainwashing not seen in the West since Nazi times.

Governments need to keep out of the religion business – attempting to control how individuals live their personal lives. Governments need to control civic matters but mandating ‘moral’ things can trigger descent into totalitarianism, whether by socialist, democratic or other routes, as has been demonstrated in multiple countries over the last century.

Governments just need to stop it immediately by removing all vaccine mandates.

Delivery of ‘alternative’ immunity

The pharmaceutical companies have sought and obtained legislated immunity from prosecution supported by medical advice. So the governments, politicians, medicos and the pharmaceutical industry are all fully protected from liability for any harm they may cause. They’ve been fully and effectively vaccinated against such contagion. Transmission of any adverse economic effects for them has effectively been stopped.

Pity the vaccines developed for the general public don’t stop actual virus contagion, and only support the immune system rather than providing full immunity.

Confusion over misinformation and who gets to decide what it is

Labelling something as misinformation is a negative debating/ PR tactic that can be used to either persuade or deceive, irrespective of whether the information is true or false. It can be used to discredit or close down an opposing viewpoint, to sledge the competing person or product, to alter their reality/ state of mind, or to conflate the issue with the person, all done by shortcutting reason with emotion. It is a technique that is useful for avoiding scrutiny, for hiding information and / or truth, for avoiding dealing with an issue that is uncomfortable for the labeller, or for fraudulently misrepresenting something. It provides a means for promoting emotion-based decision but does nothing for eliciting truth. It appeals to our primitive, tribalistic sense, giving us someone to look down on, where any alignment with truth will be incidental or accidental.

If we truly value freedom of speech, as we like to tell ourselves in our democratic societies that we do, then we need to recognise standard techniques that can take it away – like attaching the label ‘misinformation’ to fact or to considered scientific opinion.

Our ancestors in Australia spread and believed misinformation about our aborigines and attempted to exterminate them, the Americans did the same with their Indians, Hitler did the same with the Jews, and any number of other races have done it with minority/ ethnic groups. It seems to be programmed into humanity generally, causing us to label and consequently treat poorly those who are different to us, advantaging our own survival or desire to feel superior.

We have put so much effort into attempting to stop doing that with the disabled, with ethnic groups, with women, with LBGTI people and with the oppressed. Yet it seems we have learned nothing from any of that when we pile into condemning, marginalising and excluding by government mandate those who dare to express a different perspective on COVID vaccination, even when it is evidence based. Strong desire by proponents doesn’t qualify as science, no matter how highly educated they may be. But it seems there’s too much economic reward/ career progression and potential glory to be had for any obstacles to get in the way.

If you are not open to considering new evidence, then it is not science you are doing: It is bigotry or emotional influence. Using the terms misinformation, conspiracy theory or anti-vaxxer is doing emotional influence, not science. We should expect those in authority and those in positions of influence (including the media) to refrain from doing this and thereby protect freedom of speech. We should also expect them to separate the person from the issue.

‘Spinning’ the medical advice to the public

Every failure to control the pandemic has been ignored and met with more repetition of the previous propaganda, rather than with any questioning or logical explanation. There has been no sign of any consideration of any possibility that the medical advice might be flawed, even though various analyses have shown medical mistakes to be our third highest cause of death.

That is scientism – treating science as religion, firmly believing science enables us to control everything at will and at a time of our choosing. It is a hope, and quite likely a fantasy, presuming that all things to do with human relationships will bend and comply with some person’s deterministic will. It is certainly hubris. It also seems to align with the definition of madness attributed to Einstein – doing the same thing again and expecting a different result.

Vaccine implementation on a world-wide scale has made it too big to fail, or to be seen to have failed, with such massive investment of money, reputations and egos. And it is difficult for the ordinary person, as well as the media, to even consider the possibility that people/ institutions/ companies who were supposed to protect us may have, either deliberately or accidentally, not done so.

Glaring inconsistencies in the messaging and interpretation of data around vaccination have been ignored. For example, the ABC Queensland News at 7pm on 16/1/22 told us that 11 people had died in the previous 24 hours of Omicron, of which 1 had been unvaccinated. One! This is hardly ringing endorsement of the efficacy of the vaccines when 90% of the people who died that day were vaccinated. The health minister then came on TV repeating the ‘get vaccinated’ mantra, completely overlooking the conflict with the statistic just given! Furthermore, if vaccinated people die of COVID, we now usually hear that they hadn’t been boosted. A sceptical observer would presume from that omission that all ten who died that day had received their booster. But whether that was the case or not, there have been sporadic mentions in officially released figures of people dying who have received their booster. So we now find that even three jabs are not enough to give ‘immunity’. Yet the media apparently cannot see this and asks no probing questions?

However, hope may have arrived from an unexpected quarter, albeit for all the wrong reasons. Boris Johnson, in fear of his political life and serendipitously backed by the recently released research published in the Lancet (mentioned above) demonstrating that unvaccinated people are no more infectious to others than the vaccinated, has thrown it all away from 26 January 2022 – vaccine mandates and passports included. When this happened, our dear Auntie (the ABC) didn’t even cover it, even though it was close to the biggest international news story of the day. Was this ‘misinformation’?

Conspiracy theories

At a time when medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death, some people are more terrified of that than the virus. They fear the threat to their lives from State compulsion of mandates forcing them to put stuff into their bodies that they don’t want and that they know has killed people. They don’t want to play Russian Roulette with it.

Proceeding with a brainwashing campaign overlooking this key point has meant that those who are aware of the potential harm do not trust the official line or any of its data interpretation. They have seen enough and are not listening to the official position anymore. To explain what is happening, they have little alternative but to believe in conspiracy theories.

Democratic governments have contributed to the development of these theories by mandating stuff that’s against democratic principles, generating a significant credibility problem for themselves. That is only being ‘masked’ by the majority who have not yet experienced harm or become aware of the potential for harm, who give extraordinary deference to the medicos, associating them with having the power of life and death over their patients. This makes them willing to unthinkingly accept any inconsistencies, go along with any groupthink and enthusiastically join in persecuting those who don’t, so they can enjoy feelings of comfort, security and righteousness from that association.

The minority noticing the inconsistencies doesn’t want to accept the risks associated with the drug-pushing GP business model, other than for emergency treatment. They would also prefer natural health practitioners be given access to medical diagnostics that might enable them to effectively compete on a non-drug basis. The medical model is based on monopoly self-protection that might be sustainable for medicos and their suppliers, but not for the general public. It is not in the public interest for that to continue.

So, governance within and around the medical profession needs to be fixed. Those educated by and operating within it cannot see it. It is hard to see privilege when you are standing in it. If one is concerned about the proliferation of conspiracy theories, one needs to fix up the governance that allows them to fester. The medical profession would be better to inoculate itself from further criticism by doing that, rather than forcing upon the public the bright, shiny, newly discovered science it doesn’t yet have any idea of the long-term consequences of.

Rule following

During the pandemic, people have regarded government/ CHO set rules as being next to God and have religiously followed them, scared into believing that doing so gives the best chance of survival and them moralising around them. This is fine for civic measures and resulted in the pandemic being controlled by natural means many times in Queensland. But it is not good when it comes to moral measures that can be introduced around vaccine mandates.

The problem with creating and just following rules on moral matters has been identified before. Hannah Arendt’s observations in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the banality of evil found no monster, no genius or schizophrenia or evil intent in him. She rather saw a normal, uninteresting person who simply did two things very well: Not think and follow rules. She found evil comes from failure to think. In the pandemic, this has come from failing to recognise circumstances in which a one-size-fits-all approach is not appropriate for all.

Conspiracy theories presume there are people who are conspiring (to rule the empire/ be rich/ make the public/ proletariat/ workers downtrodden). While there may be some who do that, her point was that reality can be much simpler than that. People largely don’t think when too busy or too scared, lacking the time or resources to turn their minds elsewhere to investigate stuff. It is much easier and much more efficient in the short term to not think. Besides, thinking too much can also get you into trouble when it leads you to question rules. Somebody who can determine you promotion prospects might not like it!

Thinking is a bit like travel – most people who feel so inclined only get time to do it when they are young and when they are old. In between, we’re too busy paying mortgages, raising kids and trying to find time to relax and enjoy life. In those time it is much easier to not think, just follow rules (tick boxes?) and just get our promotions.

What can be done about it now?

In summary, governments worldwide have been spooked by the medical complexity of the issue, effectively abdicating control to the technical experts. Consequently, little challenge or common sense has been applied to the boffinry who have picked the wrong option by overlooking its feasibility from a business model perspective.

This is a very similar problem to that experienced by the IT industry over the last 50 years, where organisational managements have been spooked by the technical complexities that only their computing experts understood.

This has been resolved from a systemic knowledge perspective in that industry by recognising that:

1.     project customers need to be interested and involved, clear and articulate about the requirements they have and the outcomes they want from a business perspective, and

2.     the experts need to match their technical wizardry to achieving that.

While both do need to influence each other, implementation difficulties have been minimised when neither has abdicated responsibility for their own role.

This approach has led to common sense being applied to boffinry, limiting it from deploying fanciful/ untested stuff without adequate owner input or user acceptance testing. It has forced the technical experts to consider the business reality effects of their desires, without compromising their technical expertise. It has also facilitated establishment of workable governance arrangements.

Governments can save face by quietly removing vaccine mandates but continuing with encouraging the other simpler requirements of staying home when you have symptoms and wearing masks when appropriate to stop avoidable spread i.e. the same measures that have been used and reintroduced to limit the spread whenever the vaccines have been either non-existent or failed.

However, governments also need to reform their health departments to promote health, and the medical profession needs to fix its procurement problem of capture by its suppliers so that this whole world-wide debacle is not repeated.

Steve McGrath PhD

14 February 2022