Thomas Fazi

On March 8, 2014, at around 1:20am, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished from radar screens just off the coast of Malaysia, never to be seen again. Nine years later, the Boeing 777’s disappearance remains the most astonishing, and terrifying, mystery in aviation history. In this age of constant real-time monitoring of everything that moves through the skies, in which even an unidentified balloon can cause the scrambling of fighter jets, how could a massive high-tech airliner carrying 239 people vanish into thin air? Several experts have tried to answer this question — many of whom are featured in a new three-part Netflix documentary, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. In my latest article for UnHerd, I explain all the problems with the official narrative — including all the things left out in the documentary — as well as look at the alternative narrative proposed by Le Monde journalist Florence de Changy in her book The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370.

I’ve got a new piece out in UnHerd about the plans underway to give the WHO sweeping powers of intervention in the public health affairs of nation-states. This is problematic for a number of reasons — not least the WHO’s disastrous handling of the pandemic, which I talk about in the article — but first and foremost because the organisation has largely fallen under the control of private capital and other vested interests, most notably Bill Gates, the second-largest funder of the WHO. By transferring even more power to the WHO, we would effectively be transferring it to Gates and his corporate partners. It would mark the definitive transformation of global health into an authoritarian, corporate-driven, techno-centric affair — and risk making the Covid response a blueprint for the future.

A few days ago I also published an article in Compact which I consider to be one of the most important articles I’ve written in a while. In it, I trace the decades-long rise of “health security” or “biosecurity” as a new authoritarian paradigm and ideology of social control — and of the massive biosecurity complex that it engendered, which by 2020 had burgeoned into a mammoth of terrifying power and proportions, encompassing the world’s largest pharma and biotech companies, the biometrics industry, social media giants, traditional media conglomerates, national security (military and intelligence) apparatuses, global and national public health organisations such as WHO, the World Bank’s health division, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and their equivalents in other countries, private philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation, and trans-Atlantic planning groups-cum-think tanks such as the WEF as important intermediaries between the various actors.

Finally, I also wrote a short piece about the extraordinary revelations contained in the Lockdown Files, based on more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between the then-UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, and other ministers and officials at the height of the pandemic. The conversations relating to the management of care homes (the site of around 30% of all UK Covid deaths) confirm what we’ve been saying for some time, and that is that a huge number of Covid deaths, particularly in the first wave, weren’t caused by the virus itself, and certainly weren’t caused by the decision not to lock down sooner. They were caused by the decision to abandon the kind of focused protection of at-risk groups championed by all pre-2020 pandemic plans, in favour of a completely untried and untested “lockdown” model. This didn’t just have a devastating impact on people’s livelihoods, physical and mental health, education, and civil and democratic rights. It also failed disastrously in achieving the one thing it was supposed to achieve, as the Lockdown Files make clear: reducing Covid deaths.

A little update on my latest pieces. I’ve got a new article out about the UK’s Covid-19 Inquiry, which begins its preliminary hearing today. In it, Toby Green and I look at some of the questions the Inquiry should ask — and answer — if it’s serious about addressing the true causes of the pandemic catastrophe. Such as:

• How and why did Britain’s and the world’s political-scientific establishment cohere around a completely untried and untested model — “national lockdown” — for dealing with the Covid outbreak, which had not only never been implement but had never been conceived of before 2020?
• Why was the UK’s pre-2020 pandemic planning — which emphasised balancing the costs/benefits of interventions according to the principles of proportionality and flexibility, minimising the disruptions to everyday life, and protecting the vulnerable — thrown out of the window?
• Why was no risk/benefit analysis conducted in relation to lockdowns given that the collateral damage of the shutting down of society — in terms of physical and mental health, education, culture, the economy, incomes, etc. — was easily predictable and indeed had been predicted?
• Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence that Covid was not a risk for children/young adults and that schools were not major sources of spread, and the obvious damage the closure would have on the education and mental health of children/young adults?
• Why was there an almost exclusive focus on Covid to the detriment of all other aspects of public health, including cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, childhood vaccinations and mental health — all of which have worsened since the pandemic?

You can read the rest of the article here.

I had two more pieces out last week. One was about the surge in anti-migrant protests in Britain, where I argue that it’s not primarily driven by racism — but by a desire to have a say over the form, pace and scale of immigration.

The other one was about the New York Times’s decision to take the European Commission to court over Ursula von der Leyen’s refusal to release the text messages she exchanged with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in which she personally negotiated the purchase of up to 1.8 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. This is the latest episode in what is shaping up to be one of the most colossal political-corporate scandal in the EU’s history.

I’ve got a new piece up over at UnHerd about the push — in the UK and elsewhere — towards central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The official explanations don’t add up, while the risks of giving governments and central banks such sweeping powers of surveillance and control are being seriously downplayed.

Now and then, even the most seasoned politician happens to slip up and accidently speak the truth. This is what occurred during a recent debate at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, when the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock openly stated that “we are fighting a war against Russia”. The German government was quick to say her words had been “misinterpreted”, but the truth is that she did nothing more than say it how it is. Almost a year into the conflict, the narrative of Western intervention in Ukraine — that “NATO is not at war with Russia” and that “the equipment we’re providing is purely defensive” — is being revealed for what it always was: a fiction. Read the article over at UnHerd.

Toby Green and I have written an article about the highly disturbing (but underreported) phenomenon of excess deaths: in all Western countries, people are dying at much higher rates than the pre-pandemic average, and only a fraction of these deaths are attributable to Covid. More young people are dying today than during the pandemic. This is the opposite of what you would expect in the receding phase of a pandemic — one which has largely spared young people in the first place. What the hell is going on? The collapse in routine healthcare appointments (due to the single-minded focus on Covid at the expense of all other pathologies), and the impact of lockdowns on people’s physical health, clearly play a role. But could there be other factors at play took? What role, if any, do the Covid vaccines play? Read on.

Everything you need to know about the world’s elites annual get-together.

Hi all, I’ve written an article explaining why it’s high time we overcame our irrational fear of nuclear energy — a perfectly safe, zero-emission clean energy source — and embraced its revolutionary potential to offer cheap abundant energy for decades to come. The article is filled with lots of of myth-busting trivia about this tragically misunderstood technology.

Hi all,

I’m proud to announce that the book I co-authored with Toby Green of King’s College London — The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left — is finally out!

Here’s the description:

During the first years of the pandemic, the political mainstream agreed that “following the science” with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But social science reveals the true human cost of this policy.

The Covid Consensus provides an internationalist-left perspective on the world’s Covid-19 response, which has had devastating consequences for democratic rights and the poor worldwide. As the fortunes of the richest soared, nationwide shutdowns devastated small businesses, the working classes and the Global South’s informal economies. Gender-based violence surged, and the mental health of young people was severely compromised. Meanwhile, unprecedented health restrictions prevented participation in daily life without proof of vaccination.

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi argue that these policies grossly exacerbated existing trends of inequality, mediatisation and surveillance, with grave implications for the future. Rich in human detail, The Covid Consensus tackles head-on the refusal of the global political class and mainstream media to report the true extent of the erosion of democratic processes and the socioeconomic assault on the poor. As the world emerges from the pandemic to confront new modes of monitoring and control, this left-wing reappraisal of global Covid policies exposes the injustices and political failings that have produced the biggest crisis since the Second World War.

You can buy the book the book here: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-covid-consensus/.

I’ve also got a new piece out at Compact Magazine: The Deglobalization We Need. It’s a review of Rana Foroohar’s latest book, Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World. In it, I argue that Foroohar’s analysis of the opportunities offered by the end of hyperglobalisation is compelling, but that the author tends to gloss over the imperialistic drive behind the US’s embrace of deglobalisation.

Following the easing of Covid-19 polices in China, which was quickly followed by a spike in cases, several countries — including the US, Japan, Italy, Spain, France and, most recently, the UK — have reacted by reintroducing restrictions for passengers from China, requiring them to show a negative PCR or antigen test before boarding. The fact that Western countries are still resorting to such tried-and-failed policies as pre-departure testing — which had no effect on the global spread of previous variants from several countries — is a staggering indictment of just how little they’ve learnt from past failures. Indeed, the uselessness of such policies is now so clear that it’s hard to shake the impression that the decision is a purely political one. Part of the explanation is that politicians, by peddling a pro-lockdown narrative for the past three years, have now created an artificial demand for restrictive measures among their fear-stricken constituents, some of whom are now even making the case for wearing masks forever or for the permanent institutionalisation of what Giorgio Agamben might call “bare life”. Even more worryingly, it appears to indicate that Western governments have little intention of giving up the powers they’ve claimed under the guise of “fighting the virus”. You can read the rest of the article, which I’ve co-authored with Toby Green, in UnHerd.