A tweet by Dr. Simon Goddek Saturday asked users to share early indications that led them to believe the danger of COVID-19 was overhyped.
“What was the biggest red flag at the beginning of the plandemic for you that made you doubt the official narrative?” the biotechnology expert asked.
The responses rolled in, with fingers pointing at mainstream media and governments.
We have compiled a list of ten of the worthiest responses in no particular order.
1. As a retailer, I was distressed when individually owned boutiques or treat shops where you could easily juggle 1-3 customers entering were closed “for safety”… BUT huge box stores & groceries owned by billionaire franchises where you easily came into contact with hundreds of people were open. It destroyed livelihoods. ABC stores and Pot shops were open. Then the stupidity of entering a restaurant masked, but removing the mask safely to eat. It didn’t make sense. All fear theater.
Or, as another user succinctly put it:
Closing churches, but not closing strip bars.
In December 2020 a San Diego Superior Court judge ruled that strip clubs were exempt from the statewide lockdown imposed by Governor Gavin Newsom that shuttered “non-essential” businesses across the Golden State. Churches and synagogues, however, remained closed.
Across the country, large mega-chain stores such as Home Depot, Costco and Walmart remained open while small businesses were forced to close.
But not only were the large stores raking in profits during the pandemic while other businesses suffered, so were the politicians ordering the lockdowns.
Two public health officials in California made over half-a-million dollars while they were ordering stores and businesses to shut down during the pandemic. The government employees pulled in more than double the salary of California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer, who issued some of the harshest restrictions in the U.S., also made more than any other public health director in the U.S. Ferrer pulled in $557,625 in 2021, though benefits bring the total up to $637,066.
In 2020, when Ferrer first began shutting down L.A. County, she made $613,692, a significant increase from the previous year’s $585,134.
In March 2020 Ferrer ordered what became a six-month lockdown, and then ordered another in December. But by September nearly 40,000 small businesses had already been closed — more than any other state — with over half shut down for good.
Though less than Ferrer, then-San Francisco Department of Public Health Director Grant Colfax also pulled in a hefty sum of $579,959 in 2020.
2. People in power doing as they pleased . . . while the rest of us were locked up.
Perhaps one of the most tell-tale and painful reminders of the element of design within the pandemic was when many politicians who ordered restrictions were found shirking them.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was seen visiting a hair salon while hair salons were shuttered.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed attended a swanky party after urging citizens to avoid big gatherings. The next year, Breed was seen partying at a nightclub unmasked while ordering citizens to mask themselves. Breed defended herself, saying the “spirit moved her”.
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser traveled to Delaware to celebrate Joe Biden’s declared win while travel to such a high-risk state was not permitted. Months later, Bowser officiated at a mask-less wedding while imposing a mask mandate on regular citizens.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer attended a restaurant outing where she sat in close proximity to 12 other people despite her own social distancing orders and prohibition against more than six people sitting together in restaurants.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler posted a video in November 2020 telling residents to stay home. Adler recorded the video while at a vacation resort in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico after flying there on a private jet with eight other people. Adler had also recently thrown a wedding bash for his daughter with 20 participants, illegal for anyone else at the time.
California Governor Gavin Newsom was seen attending a dinner at an upscale restaurant with several people despite his own order restricting gatherings to up to three households.
Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney traveled to Maryland to attend a dinner party, which he had forbade residents from doing.
US Senator and then-Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman (D-PA) used taxpayer money to vacation on the Jersey Shore while advocating for harsh lockdowns. Pennsylvania State Police reportedly doled out $3,500 on food, lodging and overtime during the vacation from June 24–June 27, 2020, while the Pennsylvania Department of Health had already cautioned residents against non-essential travel. Just two days prior, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy had vowed to crack down on partygoers at the Jersey Shore.
The list of politicians who violated COVID lockdowns — all of whom did so more than once — is extensive, and not limited to the US. However, while American politicians suffered no consequences for their violations, politicians in other countries such as the UK lost their careers for partying during lockdowns.
3. Them allowing mass protests over George Floyd never claiming that the virus was going to spread.
While every Trump rally was a “superspreader”, George Floyd protests and riots were encouraged. White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha, who was then dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health and had led the charge for lockdowns, maintained that the Black Lives Matter protests and gatherings in 2020 were justified because racism carries with it “a serious risk and grave public health cost." Jha was joined by over 1,000 health “experts” who signed a letter saying that the riots should not be shut down out of COVID concerns.
Similarly, massive street celebrations after Joe Biden’s declared win were also not considered superspreaders.
4. Social distancing circles on the floors.
One of the universal mandates imposed by nearly all governments was physical distancing, even though there was no scientific evidence to support such a restriction. Politicians and federal scientists such as Dr. Anthony Fauci who demanded physical distancing did not bother to offer a scientific justification. Science, however, has shown that physical distancing has not only been ineffective, but economically harmful.
5. When they said that if you got vaccinated, you wouldn't get it, then they said that unvaccinated people were a danger to you. Wait....what?
While mainstream media currently try to claim that no one promised the COVID-19 vaccine would stop transmission and infection, many politicians, media pundits and “health experts” did make that promise. These groups included Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, news show host Rachel Maddow, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and others. But at the same time when the vaccinated were being assured of total immunity, they were also being told the unvaccinated were a threat.
6. The lockdowns quickly became creepy. A wide cross section of local law enforcement went public with statements that they would not enforce the restrictions. Within two weeks we had George Floyd and a war on local enforcement. Too coincidental.
While we found that two weeks was an exaggeration, the Washington Post reported in March 2020 that police departments across the country were refusing to enforce lockdowns. Two months later, a war on law enforcement was declared with the death of George Floyd.
7. How NY was saying they were stacking bodies but never even used the ship that Trump sent them. And while NY was saying they were overwhelmed by covid cases, we were shutting down hospital floors in CA because we had no patients.
As hospitals were reportedly being “overrun”, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sent away the USHS Comfort, a hospital vessel sent by President Trump to assist with the excess hospitalizations. Cuomo said the need for it did not match projections.
Media outlets around the world reported overloaded hospitals, though these claims were later discovered to be untrue.
Far into mid-2022 news outlets were still claiming that hospitals were being overrun by COVID-19 hospitalizations, a claim which was disputed by hospital doctors and administrators.
As LA County prepared to reinstate its mask mandate in July 2022 because of “increasing hospitalizations,” LAC+USC Chief Medical Officer Brad Spielberg said that as far as hospitalizations go everything was pretty much the same at the 600-bed hospital.
“It’s just the same,” he said in a video alongside LAC+USC CEO Jorge Orozco and epidemiologist Paul Holtom. “It’s been the same. It’s been like two months of the same.” Spielberg shared graphs showing how hospitalizations have largely plateaued, even though cases are going up.
“The numbers at LAC: COVID-positive tests continue to go up, but this isn’t because we’re seeing a ton of people with symptomatic disease getting admitted.”
8. When those two Bakersfield California emergency room doctors held a press conference disputing the government's initial response to Covid and the media labeled them "quacks". That got me thinking something wasn't right.
California physicians Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi publicly stated in an April 2020 press conference that they were “emphatically” opposed to isolation, lockdowns and shuttered businesses. They also suggested the federal government was overreporting COVID deaths.
Erickson and Massihi became the first public examples of what would happen to those who challenged the COVID-19 narrative, which set the tone for the entire pandemic.
The establishment’s response was swift and coordinated. In less than a week, YouTube had pulled the video off the platform. The Google-owned streaming video giant issued a statement claiming it removed the content because it “explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.”
Mainstream media quickly found doctors eager to defend the government and trotted them out to paint Drs. Erickson and Massihi enemies of science and outcasts from the medical community who were not qualified to speak about epidemiological matters.
The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) came out with a statement condemning the doctors for “COVID-19 misinformation” and said their “reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical society and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19.”
The assault was so total that a year later, MedScape was still talking about Erickson and Massihi and even using them as scapegoats to push for career-ending punishment for doctors who challenge federal science.
Of course, science has since decisively vindicated the doctors and conclusively shown that shelter-in-place orders and lockdowns not only added no benefit but were detrimental to individual health and society.
As far as the physicians’ claim that COVID numbers were inflated, by 2022 the CDC had admitted that a large chunk of reported COVID hospitalizations were not actually COVID patients and that it had withheld crucial data from the public.
Last month, totalitarian and mainstream media health expert Dr. Leana Wen, who once advocated for the unvaccinated being locked in their homes, called for the government to stop inflating COVID-19 deaths.
9. Suppression of safe and effective early treatments.
While many studies suggest that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) are indeed safe, cheap, and effective early treatments for COVID, many public health policymakers refused to permit their use to treat and prevent the disease. The FDA has repeatedly discouraged the use of ivermectin as an early COVID-19 treatment, harping on the fact that the drug was originally approved as an antiparasitic which is often used on animals.
“You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” tweeted the FDA last year. Responses show that the tweet had its intended effect.
The tweet came as a surprise to many because the FDA, which approved the drug in 1966, was fully aware that ivermectin is manufactured as an antiparasitic both for animals and humans.
Also puzzling was the FDA’s interference in the off-label use of an approved drug. About 20% of all prescriptions are written for off-label use, and the FDA typically leaves it up to physicians to determine its use.
The federal government and its Pravda operatives used a sleight-of-hand campaign which went unnoticed by many: while physicians around the world, particularly those from America’s Frontline Doctors, were touting ivermectin and HCQ as effective early treatments for COVID-19, the federal science apparatus left out the word “early” when discouraging the use of these cheaper treatments. The FDA, CDC and medical associations would present the public with studies showing that ivermectin is ineffective as a late-stage cure and say that “studies show ivermectin is ineffective against COVID-19.”
10. The moment they offered me a pork belly to get vaxxed I checked out.
As local, state and federal governments became more desperate to vaccinate citizens, many of them offered rewards for receiving injections. But some of these rewards were unhealthy and inappropriately encouraged by authorities who ostensibly cared so much about health.
The Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce, for instance, launched a "Shots for Shots" campaign which rewarded beachgoers who took the injections with free alcohol.
Some companies created marketing campaigns to encourage people to get the injections. Krispy Kreme offered one donut per day for the rest of 2021 to whoever presented a vaccination card. Nathan’s in Coney Island began offering free hot dogs, and New York City offered fast food burgers and fries.
