https://www.amazon.com/Deep-State-Goes-Viral-Pandemic/dp/1630692999/
FOREWORD
It was about a month into lockdowns, April 2020, and my phone rang with an unusual number. I picked up and the caller identified himself as Rajeev Venkayya, a name I knew from my writings on the 2005 pandemic scare. Now the head of a vaccine company, he once served as Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense, and claimed to be the inventor of pandemic planning.
Venkayya was a primary author of “A National Strategy for Pandemic Influence” as issued by the George W. Bush administration in 2005. It was the first document that mapped out a nascent version of lockdowns, designed for global deployment. “A flu pandemic would have global consequences,” said Bush, “so no nation can afford to ignore this threat, and every nation has responsibilities to detect and stop its spread.”
It was always a strange document because it stood in constant contradiction to public health orthodoxies dating back decades and even a century. With it, there were two alternative paths in place in the event of a new virus: the normal path that everyone is taught in medical school (therapeutics for the sick, caution with social disturbances, calm and reason, quarantines only in extreme cases) and a biosecurity path that invoked totalitarian measures.
Those two paths existed side-by-side for a decade and a half before the lockdowns.
Now I found myself speaking with the guy who claims credit for having mapped out the biosecurity approach, which contradicted all public health wisdom and experience. His plan was finally being implemented. Not too many voices dissented, partially due to fear but also due to censorship, which was already very tight. He told me to stop objecting to the lockdowns because they have everything under control.
I asked a basic question. Let’s say we all hunker down, hide under the sofa, eschew physical meetings with family and friends, stop all gatherings of all kinds, and keep businesses and schools closed. What, I asked, happens to the virus itself? Does it jump in a hole in the ground or head to Mars for fear of another press conference by Andrew Cuomo or Anthony Fauci?
After some fallacy-filled banter about the R-naught, I could tell he was getting exasperated with me, and finally, with some hesitation, he told me the plan. There would be a vaccine. I balked and said that no vaccine can sterilize against a fast-mutating respiratory pathogen with a zoonotic reservoir. Even if such a thing did appear, it would take 10 years of trials and testing before it was safe to release to the general population. Are we going to stay locked down for a decade?
“It will come much faster,” he said. “You watch. You will be surprised.”
Hanging up, I recall dismissing him as a crank, a has-been with nothing better to do than call up poor writers and bug them.
I had entirely misread the meaning, simply because I was not prepared to understand the sheer depth and vastness of the operation now in play. All that was taking place struck me as obviously destructive and fundamentally flawed but rooted in a kind of intellectual error: a loss of understanding of virology basics.
Around the same time, The New York Times posted without fanfare a new document called PanCAP-A: Pandemic Crisis Action Plan - Adapted. It was Venkayya’s plan, only intensified, as released on March 13, 2020, three days before President Trump’s press conference announcing the lockdowns. I read through it, reposted it, but had no idea what it meant. I hoped someone could come along to explain it, interpret it, and tease out its implications, all in the interest of getting to the bottom of the who, what, and why of this fundamental attack on civilization itself.
That person did come along. She is Debbie Lerman, intrepid author of this wonderful book that so beautifully presents the best thoughts on all the questions that had eluded me. She took the document apart and discovered a fundamental truth therein. The rule-making authority for the pandemic response was not vested in public-health agencies but the National Security Council.
This was stated as plain as day in the document; I had somehow missed that. This was not public health. It was national security. The antidote under development with the label vaccine was really a military countermeasure. In other words, this was Venkayya’s plan times ten, and the idea was precisely to override all tradition and public health concerns and replace them with national security measures.
Realizing this fundamentally changes the structure of the story of the last five years. This is not a story of a world that mysteriously forgot about natural immunity and made some intellectual error in thinking that governments could shut down economies and turn them back on again, scaring a pathogen back to where it came from. What we experienced in a very real sense was quasi-martial law, a deep-state coup not only on a national but on an international level.
These are terrifying thoughts and hardly anyone is prepared to discuss them, which is why Lerman’s book is so crucial. In terms of public debate about what happened to us, we are barely at the beginning. There is now a willingness to admit that the lockdowns did more overall harm than good. Even the legacy media has started venturing out to grant permission for such thoughts. But the role of the pharmaceuticals in driving the policy and the role of the national-security state in backing this grand industrial project is still taboo.
In 21st-century journalism and advocacy designed to influence the public mind, the overwhelming concern of all writers and institutions is professional survival. That means fitting into an approved ethos or paradigm regardless of the facts. This is why Lerman’s thesis is not debated; it is hardly spoken of at all in polite society. That said, my work at Brownstone Institute has put me in close contact with many thinkers in high places. This much I can say: what Lerman has written in this book is not disputed but admitted in private.
Strange isn’t it? We saw during the Covid years how professional aspiration incentivized silence even in the face of egregious violations of human rights, including mandatory school closures that robbed children of education, followed by face-covering requirements and forced injections for the whole population. The near-silence was deafening even if anyone with a brain and a conscience knew that all of this was wrong. Not even the excuse that “We didn’t know” works anymore because we did know.
This same dynamic of social and cultural control is fully in operation now that we are through that stage and onto another one, which is precisely why Lerman’s findings have not yet made their way to polite society, to say nothing of mainstream media. Will we get there? Maybe. This book can help; at least it is now available for everyone brave enough to confront the facts. You will find herein the most well-documented and coherent presentation of answers to the core questions (what, how, why) that all of us have been asking since this hell was first visited upon us.
Jeffrey Tucker
Brownstone Institute
March 19, 2025
INTRODUCTION
For most of my adult life, I believed pretty much everything I read in The New York Times and heard on NPR. I thought there was a huge difference between Republicans and Democrats, right and left, conservative and liberal. And I was a proud, even self-righteous, liberal leftist Democrat.
Since March 2020, however, with the onset of the Covid lockdowns, all of those comfortable beliefs, and my former sense of belonging to a meaningful political and social movement, have evaporated. I find myself on the outside of the mainstream, attempting to construct a new worldview and find new people and institutions I can trust. One such newfound haven of sanity is Brownstone Institute – publisher of this book, and the website where most of the articles included here first appeared.
I’m lucky to be a pretty panic-proof type of person, so back at the beginning of 2020 I was not afraid. I did not think the virus posed a mortal threat to myself or my family. I knew it affected mostly elderly people with serious ailments. I also knew that there was never a pathogen in recorded history that was so transmissible and so deadly that it required locking down the entire world. And I found no evidence that the Wuhan virus, as it was called at the time, was such a pathogen.
Yet everyone else around me seemed to have completely lost their minds, first and foremost the media and public health experts. Instead of calming the public down and advocating common sense measures, they started screaming about “flattening the curve,” masking, social distancing, and the necessity of depriving children of education and socialization to “protect grandma.” Then they started bulldozing all of society into supporting not just untested and unregulated gene-based vaccines, but also coercive mandates of those vaccines.
It was utter madness.
Yet almost nobody else I knew saw things the way I did. Even when it became eminently clear that the virus posed little to no threat to children, they insisted that kids had to stay inside (the absolute worst thing I could imagine for a child) and wear masks. Then, when vaccine mandates were rolled out, even when it became indisputable that the vaccines did not stop infection or transmission, people turned vicious. “The unvaccinated” became a category of undesirable outcasts not allowed to participate in society. I found the irrational cruelty of people who considered themselves moral and compassionate to be downright terrifying.
The main cause of that irrational reaction was equally spine-chilling: a massive, global censorship and propaganda campaign undertaken by the entire online and traditional media apparatus. It was so gigantic that most people could not – and still do not – believe it could happen.
Due to that unprecedented narrative-control campaign, barely anyone was investigating what actually happened.
So I decided to do just that, and what I discovered was astonishing.
I discovered that the U.S. Covid pandemic response was not a public health response run by the HHS, CDC or any other public health body. Instead, it was a biodefense/counter-terrorism response, run by the Pentagon, National Security Council, and Department of Homeland Security.
When I continued to dig, I found that the same pattern was followed in many countries around the world. The pandemic response, according to all available evidence, was implemented according to globally planned and directed protocols.
None of this has been reported in the corporate media, and even in independent media spaces, very few have investigated or reported on these topics.
Why does it matter? You might ask. So what if the pandemic response was run by national security agencies according to a biodefense/counterterrorism playbook, rather than by public health agencies according to public health guidelines? And why is it surprising that most countries responded in similar ways?
Put simply, If it had been a regular public health response, Covid would not have differed from any of the viral epidemics or pandemics of the last century: The public would have been told to remain calm, wash hands frequently, and stay home if sick. Public health agencies would have tracked clusters of severe disease and treated them accordingly. This would have happened at different times, in different locations. Most people would barely have been aware that there was a novel virus circulating among them.
Instead, the response to Covid was the exact opposite: The media and public health agencies whipped the population into levels of panic massively disproportionate to the threat actually posed by the virus. Everyone was convinced that the only way to “beat the virus” was to lock down the whole world and wait for a never-before-tested or manufactured vaccine.
This book presents my attempt to understand why and how that switch happened: from a rational, medically, and ethically sound pandemic response to a global military-style lockdown-until-vaccine nightmare.
As you read the book, you will follow my understanding of what happened in reverse order: the first chapter is my analysis of the historical, economic, and political forces that converged to make the Covid pandemic response happen. Subsequent chapters delve into the details of the research that led to these conclusions.
What is “the deep state”?
Just a few words about what I mean by The Deep State in this book’s title.
As explained by a generally unknown civil-servant-turned-author named Michael Lofgren who, according to an NPR report, popularized the term “Deep State” in his 2014 “Anatomy of the Deep State, the Deep State can be understood as “a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state,” which constitutes a “government within the government” that “operates according to no Constitutional rules or any constraint by the governed.”
According to Lofgren’s definition, which I adopt in this book, “the military-industrial complex, Wall Street – they’re both about money, sucking as much money out of the country as they can, and control: corporate control and political control.” Plus, I would add, this is now happening not just on a national, but on a global, level.
My hope for this book
I hope the research and analysis presented in these chapters will wake more people up to the crucial understanding that Covid was not a public health event. Rather, It was a demonstration of the crushing power exerted by an ever-expanding global deep state – in this case, the biodefense global public-private partnership – on us, the people of the world. And, hopefully, with fuller awareness and understanding, more people will resist the efforts continually exerted by these entities to agglomerate control over all of the world’s wealth and resources.
For those who are skeptical, or who might consider such topics to be too conspiratorial, I hope this book can provide a new and interesting perspective.
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