By Jeffrey A. Tucker: The Big Picture of Extraordinary Evil in 428 Words

Rob here: Over the last 6 years I’ve made many attempts to write a concise summary of what happened and why during covid.

I’m still trying, most recently a reply I wrote to a reader yesterday, which explores dimensions not covered by Jeffrey Tucker’s summary, and which I’ve copied below as an addendum.

In case you’ve never tried to succinctly explain all of the important elements of covid, it is REALLY hard because so many big evil complex things happened.

Given that covid is the biggest crime ever committed, and given that no one has been held to account, it is important that we keep trying to increase awareness, and to break through the ignorance and apathy of most citizens.

None of my attempts to write a summary have been as complete, or compelling, or concise as these fabulous 428 words published today by Jeffrey A. Tucker.

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-big-picture-of-extraordinary-evil-in-428-words

Here is Tucker’s introduction to his summary. Note his invitation to collaborate on creating an even better summary.

Life seemed to be going along pretty normally when the third month of 2020 hit and all our lives, and the lives of billions around the world, were thrown into upheaval. We’ve spent the last six years trying to figure it out and so have many others.

The revelations are flying fast and furious, so much that we can hardly keep up. We have meetings, groups, publications, phone calls, and share as many links and data points as we can. No matter what we do, the big story continues to be elusive.

There are two reasons for this. First, the national media does not care. It happened. It’s over. We survived. Who cares? Second, the reality is literally incomprehensible. Too many data points. Too many institutions. Too many motivations. They all flew into motion at once. Separating prime from second movers is impossible.

Those who try to make sense of it all come across like conspiracy theorists at best and babbling lunatics at worst. I don’t like to sound this way. But every time I try to present what I know in a calm, rational, wholly reasonable way, I sense that I’m not capturing the fullness of it all.

What I’ve attempted below is my best undertaking at reconstruction. It has no links so I invite you to use the AI tool on this website that has been trained by 4,000-plus site records and countless numbers of outside links.

If it sounds implausible, I can only assure you that it is not. You might know more than I do and could write something better. If so, drop me an email and we might publish a compendium. The goal is short (no longer than 500 words), evocative, comprehensive, no exaggerations, and verifiably accurate.

Here is my own attempt.

The Big Picture of Extraordinary Evil in 428 Words

In 2019 or before, a US-funded biolab in Wuhan, China, one of some 120 in 30 countries, made a virus and inoculation based on an American recipe that leaked and spread, causing worry that US/UK officials would be blamed. They formulated a well-rehearsed fallback: lie about the lab origins and prepare the population for the antidote based on a new gene-editing technology that otherwise would never have been approved on grounds that it was too dangerous and not effective. That scheme could turn would-be villains into saviors.

That required buying time while preserving pre-leak immunity profiles of the population via lockdowns for nine months until the injection was put through perfunctory trials and available; hence the travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders, masks, distancing, and canceled events.

During this time there had to be mass censorship of people who caught on, a manufactured panic, widespread trauma, school closures, a removal of other therapeutic options, millions of business failures, a shutdown of the arts and religious practice, plus various technical manipulations along the way like redefining exposures as cases, running PCR tests at high cycle rates, and paying for death misclassifications. This was essentially cosplaying a level of severity that did not exist – despite inevitably rising seroprevalence and natural immunity – in order to ramp up demand for the incoming pharmaceutical product.

There was also a political coattail rider: infectious disease panic enabled a new experiment in mail-in ballots, encouraged by the CDC even before the lockdowns began, thus unleashing mass ballot fraud designed to defeat the rise of populism in all countries and creating conditions for closer citizen surveillance and digital identification systems necessitating mass data centers.

The scheme also required a printing/spending binge to paper over vast economic damage, policies that would hack off a third of the value of the dollar, leaving vast carnage, but permitting an indemnified pharmaceutical experiment on the whole population, meaning that mass injury would have no recourse in law. When the shot finally appeared, uptake was too low to create the expected profit windfall, plus government had a surplus it needed to dump before expiration, thus triggering urban segregation in five major US cities plus mandates for millions enforced on pain of losing their jobs.

The entire time, most of academia, corporate America, and major media played along for reasons of careerism and also overt and implicit threats from Deep-State actors to do their part lest they prolong the pandemic they created. No one has been punished for any of it, and the mainstream media has no interest at this late date.

Addendum I – Rob’s latest summary

A reader yesterday asked me to comment on the efficacy and safety of mRNA transfections, and on the trustworthiness of public health institutions.

This was my reply:

You’re over the bullseye Bob.

Another important issue is the source of the virus, but that’s so obvious now it’s not worth discussing. It’s still an open question whether the lab leak was accidental or deliberate, but I lean accidental.

I spent WAY too much time during covid trying to figure out what was going on and most importantly WHY. As my confidence grew in understanding the science and evidence, my anger also grew.

I remain very angry about what happened, and that most citizens don’t want to know, and that no one has been held to account, and that no lessons have been learned.

Rather than providing you with many links to complicated rabbit holes I’m going to share with you what I have distilled the key issues to think about are.

• mRNA is a new unproven complex technology.
• mRNA technology has nothing in common with the vaccine technologies we grew up with and trust(ed). They called mRNA a vaccine to deliberately mislead us. I call it a “transfection”, or if you prefer, a gene therapy.
• Several attempts prior to covid were made to commercialize mRNA. All failed the safety and effectiveness tests. That should have been a huge red flag for anyone with integrity thinking about injecting it into billions of people after extremely abbreviated testing.
• Given the short time frame, a competent person with integrity would have preferred a lower risk vaccine using conventional technologies like China and Russia used.
• A new vaccine using proven technologies takes about 10 years to properly test and scale up. They developed and tested a novel mRNA technology for covid, that had failed every prior attempt, in about 1 year, and then assured us it was safe and effective, before coercing it into billions of people, including pregnant mothers and children that were never even tested.
• It was physically impossible for them to have known if the covid mRNA was safe and effective, which means they rolled the dice and lied.
• If you review the little testing that was done you will find that it was statistically insignificant, and they had to perform fraudulent commonly used tricks on the data to make it appear more effective than it was.
• If you think back on the messaging from our leaders, they were singularly obsessed with transfecting every citizen, young and old, at risk or not, with mRNA. Why?
• There was no discussion of prevention, or alternate treatments. For example, Vitamin D is super safe and cheap, and was known to reduce risk, yet they were silent on it. For example, Ivermectin is a noble prize winning drug known to be effective treating RNA viruses, and is super safe and cheap, yet they ruined people’s careers for even discussing it.
• mRNA was known very early on to not stop covid transmission, and they never even tested for this property. Why then would a person with integrity push a new technology with side-effect risks into young healthy people who were not at risk from the virus?
• There are simple to understand reasons to expect harmful side effects from mRNA.
• How does mRNA work?
• mRNA causes cells to produce non-self proteins that stimulate the immune system to create antibodies that are (hopefully) effective against the virus. Questions you should ask are : 1) What cells in the body are affected? Just the muscles at the injection site? Heart? Brain? Arteries? 2) How long do the cells produce the non-self protein? 3) How much non-self protein is produced? (i.e. what is the dose?)
• They told us mRNA would remain local to the injection site. That was proven to be untrue. mRNA went everywhere in the body.
• They told us mRNA was only active for a few days. That was proven to be untrue. I saw one study that proved it was still active after 60 days and then they stopped the study.
• They did not have good control on the manufacturing process and dose, at least in the early days. Hot harmful batches are known to exist.
• Think about the effect of cells producing non-self proteins, for indeterminate time, at indeterminate doses, in all organs of the body, including organs like the heart and brain, that do not readily repair the damage of cells being killed by the immune system because they appear to be non-self cells. You would expect to see what we saw, with young healthy people dying unexpectedly from heart related problems, and an increase in stroke frequency.
• Think about the effect of an immune system being persistently over stimulated against one threat. You would expect to see what we saw, and still see, which is an increase in many other diseases like cancer.
• Determining the causes of changes to health trends is tricky business. Especially when there’s a novel virus, plus novel interventions, plus lifestyle changes that occur during a pandemic. Nevertheless, healthcare professionals with integrity and competence would be vigilant, and would collect and analyze the data necessary to understand what it going on, and would take corrective action when signals appeared. Our “professionals” did none of this. In fact they aggressively denied all evidence that might have cast a bad light on their policies. If you were paying attention, it was obscene. (See more on this below in Addendum II.)
• The most reliable data for detecting a problem is all-cause mortality. The data can’t be screwed up. You are either dead or alive. When you transfect billions of people with a novel technology to protect them from a deadly disease that you claim is killing them, a person with integrity would monitor all-cause mortality. If all-cause mortality goes down when transfections begin, that’s good. If it goes up, that’s bad. It’s easy to collect and analyze yet very few countries reported on all-cause mortality. UK was one of the few that did and they stopped as soon as the data started to make their mRNA policies look bad.
• There were many obvious signals like VAERS (vaccine adverse events), and morticians reporting unusual clots, and athletes dropping dead on TV, that indicated possible problems. They ignored them all. No attempt was made to investigate and adjust policies to reflect the safety and effectiveness data, nor the reduced threat from later virus variants.
• I could continue writing for many more hours and still not present all the evidence that condemns our “leaders”. I’m going to stop now, because it’s not good for my mental health.

Addendum II – By Senator Ron Johnson: The story the media — and the government — don’t want you to hear

No one has been held to account for:

• engineering a virus that directly and indirectly killed 20+ million
• fomenting panic about a modest threat
• coercing unsafe and ineffective mRNA transfections into people that did not need protection, like children
• blocking other safe and effective responses
• and as follows, ignoring clear safety signals

One hero in the battle for covid accountability and justice is US Senator Ron Johnson.

On April 29, 2026, as Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, I held a hearing and released a report titled “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.” There has not been a bigger government scandal during my lifetime, and yet even now that we have documented proof of corruption, most of the legacy media refuses to report on it.

My report details how in March 2021, Peter Marks — director of the FDA center that approves vaccines and is responsible for safety surveillance (CBER) — was briefed that the algorithm they were using to analyze the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) would mask or hide COVID-19 vaccine adverse event safety signals. Twenty-six days later, using an updated algorithm, senior FDA officials were shown 25 safety signals, including sudden cardiac death, pulmonary infarction, cerebral artery occlusion, basal ganglia stroke, agonal rhythm, and Bell’s palsy.

For the next three months, they received updates showing more serious safety signals. Instead of warning or informing the public, they ordered the data analyst to “cease and desist” and then lied to the American public that “they weren’t seeing safety signals” and that any adverse events were “rare and mild.” The whole point of using sophisticated algorithms to analyze VAERS is to find needles in the haystack — nonobvious potential harms that doctors and patients should be alerted to.

With the COVID-19 injections, we didn’t need sophisticated algorithms. The sheer volume of adverse event reports overwhelming VAERS was enough to trigger my oversight efforts. We faced impenetrable stonewalling until Secretary Kennedy’s commitment to radical transparency provided my Subcommittee with 11 million pages of documents. The documents make clear that FDA and CDC officials did not use an “err on the side of caution” standard to alert the public. Rather, they insisted on definitive proof of causation — a standard they knew would never be met.

They were far more concerned about not causing vaccine hesitancy than they were about informing the public of adverse events. They wanted to ensure that the injections would receive full licensure approval so that President Biden could mandate them to the military and millions of civilians, including healthy college students.

Perhaps the most egregious coercion involved healthy children who had virtually zero chance of serious harm from COVID-19. That coercion was based on another false claim that the injections would stop transmission. Some children were killed and others have been permanently disabled from the COVID-19 injections. Imagine being the parent who believed all the lies they were told and decided to have their now deceased or injured child injected.

Also in March 2021, Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), began leading a team of clinical researchers who were diagnosing and treating individuals with serious COVID-19 injection injuries. Twenty-three study participants were diagnosed and treated, then instructed to “not talk about the study” until the NIH could release its findings and conclusions. Dr. Nath maintained that early recognition and intervention were crucial for effective treatment. Yet no guidance was provided to physicians — one participant remarked that the NIH scientists had “taken the data and left us hanging.”

Adding insult to injury, in April 2021 the CDC published a report stating that similar adverse events were “anxiety” — not a problem with the shots. It was not until study participants began speaking publicly in 2022 that the NIH quietly posted its study on a preprint server that virtually no one read, leaving medical teams nationwide in the dark and the injection-injured left untreated.

We will never know the full extent of the harms (or the benefits) of the COVID-19 injections. But we do know that federal health officials were aware that serious harm was being done within months of them granting Emergency Use Authorization. We also know that those same officials turned a blind eye toward the safety signals that were screaming at them, but they refused to warn the public. The public pays federal health officials to evaluate drugs for safety and efficacy, and we have the right to be informed.

How many deaths and injuries could have been avoided had federal health officials simply done the job we paid them to do?

Currently, VAERS shows 1,676,100 cumulative worldwide adverse events and 39,099 deaths associated with the COVID-19 injection, with 9,332 (24%) of the deaths occurring within 2 days of injection. Most of these tragic adverse events occurred well after federal health officials should have informed the public about the risks they knew existed. Instead, they hid or downplayed those risks. As a result, millions were harmed after being denied their right to fully informed consent.

That’s why I consider this to be the biggest government scandal in my lifetime, and one that is crying out for full media attention and coverage.

Addendum III – By Jeffrey A. Tucker: Summary of Fauci’s diary

Edit 31-Jul-2026: Rob here, I added this addendum.

The truth is coming out now.

Our leaders make me sick. They are evil and incompetent.

I was right about everything.

All of my friends and family were wrong about everything.

Many intellectuals I respect, were wrong about everything.

Covid revealed a lot about a lot of people. None of it good.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, the covid truth hero who inspired the post above, has just finished reading the recently released diary of Fauci.

Here is his summary.

Took me almost a full week, but I’ve finally finished the Fauci Diaries. It is a look inside the state/corporatist system possibly without precedent. It doesn’t provide the entire picture of events but it is remarkably candid.

The first spin on this book is partially correct: it’s an exercise in vanity. True. But there is much more here. It’s the story of the descent of a soul at every stage of decline: social climbing, egomania, megalomania, duplicity, self deception, intensifying levels of malice, exhaustion using courtiers as salve, and ending in total defeat realized only inchoately.

Reading it is a remarkable experience. It’s obviously not well written but that is a strength, a bit like how the “Blair Witch Project” is scarier due to its low budget. It’s raw and painful, alarming and shocking, and ultimately speaks to much more than the life of the author. It’s really a window into systemic corruption of nearly all the commanding heights of society itself, and offers a devastating indictment of the ruling class in government, media, science, and industry.

Does Fauci catch on that the media is using him as much as he is using them, that is, that he inhabited a world of fakery? Maybe but he decides early on that it is only choice. He has to keep it up else his whole world crumbles. This Icarus just kept flapping his wings without realizing that they were melting.

Another feature that stands out: It was always political theater and never about science. Multiple times, Fauci overrides evidence in favor of messaging toward his preferred political and industrial end.

Then you have this strange and persistent obsession of Fauci of maintaining social position with daily infusions of assurance that he is great, loved, admired, admitted to all the right parties, attended all the best events, with a contacts list that included the world’s rich, famous, and powerful. This is all he had to assure himself of his grand life. Even in the end, he does not seem to realize the role he played in upending the very system to which he so desperately wanted to belong.

Yes, nearly every page makes me angry but finishing it leaves me with something I had not expected; something like the sadness you feel in a Gothic novel when a promising life takes a terrible turn toward perdition and somehow cannot find the escape from that path.

The Picture of Dorian Grey also comes to mind. Fauci guarded his reputation as a scientist just as Dorian guarded his seeming youth. To do so required a costly exchange. In both stories, the status of the soul (represented by the painting for Dorian) belies appearances.

Nowhere could he have anticipated during the writing of the book that six years after his apotheosis that he would be trapped in a chair in a Senate chamber, ashen and defeated, surrounded by silent lawyers, his accusers on all sides, pleading the 5th amendment 111 times.

The wings completely melted. De profundis clamavi.

I invite you and everyone to spend time with this book for the ages.

There are certain moments in Fauci’s book that just send chills up the spine, causing an experience of darkness for which no one can prepare you. This inauspicious and cold passage did that for me. Seems like nothing but actually 1) we knew for sure that children are of near-zero risk of medically significant effects of infection, 2) the injectable product did not stop infection, 3) the injectable product did not stop the spread. Even so, you have Fauci celebrating how paid-off and deeply compromised “experts” voted unanimously to push shots on the kids, and for only one reason: it indemnifies the industry against claims of harm. This is really hard to take, from Nov 21, 2021.

This is Feb 6, 2020. Astonishing revelation: it was Fauci who pushed Trump to get Xi Jinping to allow a WHO delegation to tour Wuhan (in defiance of travel bans). They did that and the result was a puff piece on the glories of lockdowns, issued by WHO with an urge that the whole world would follow.

The new information here: it was Fauci who pushed Trump to ask China for what turned out to be a Potemkin Village tour. It was decisive for the whole world. I’m just sitting here amazed because though I have written extensively on that trip and its implications, I never knew that it was Fauci who arranged it and Trump who asked for it.

I’m absolutely gobsmacked.

Dr. Anthony Fauci confirms he’s received an “alert” from the (now) Nobel Prize winning professor (for technology used in mRNA injections).
https://x.com/Humanspective/status/2081848415303193031/video/1
About how “the uterus and ovaries take up mRNA-LNPs and translate the mRNA.”

Days later, Dr. Anthony Fauci is publicly saying there’s “no red flags” for pregnant women.

Drew Weissman PhD (Feb 8, 2021) – “the mRNA-LNPs go to the placenta and fetus, measured by translation of the mRNA and cause an immune response in the amniotic fluid. In non-pregnant female mice, the uterus and ovaries take up mRNA-LNPs and translate the mRNA”

FAUCI (Feb 8, 2021) – “Thanks for sending this.”

Fauci days later (Video, Feb 10, 2021) – “No red flags.”

Doctors and (now Nobel Prize winning) scientist for pseudouridine, were warning Fauci privately.

Publicly, Fauci presented absolute certainty of safety.

And also, another email (Senator Rand Paul’s email drop) from the NIH on March 2, 2021 says:

“The SMEs on that call (especially obgyns) were aware that mRNA might reach the fetus.”

Whilst former CDC dir. Rochelle Walensky was publicly saying they:

“did not find any safety concerns for pregnant people who are vaccinated”.

Whilst all this is going on in the background, the VAERS database is signalling all of them.