Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The pattern is now clearly established. Major figures in and around the pandemic response are slowly walking back all the major claims surrounding the global compulsory regime that ruled life for two and a half years. And each statement is pointing to the same reality. The critics were correct all along. Yes, the very people whose social media accounts were throttled and banned for spreading supposed disinformation.

Consider the statement by Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). His tenure there overlapped with the beginning of the lockdowns but he always seemed out of his element, outrun and overwhelmed by the bureaucratic miasma that washed through the agency at the time.

He has always tried to be a team player but you can sense his bitterness today. He knows the power of his words and is choosing them carefully now. In the past, he has said decisively that the idea that the pathogen was a gain-of-function lab leak was indeed possible. He was never a great enthusiast for the vaccine, even making a video in 2020 in which he said that a homemade mask might be more effective.

In other words, he was never on board with the whole plan. He was even excluded from meeting with Fauci/Birx and company.

Now he has come out and said what many people said from the beginning. He says that healthy people under the age of 60 never really needed the shots, and, further, that the injuries from the shots are high and must be recognized and acknowledged. True, this is information that everyone who has kept up already knows. What’s significant is the source.

“Those of us that tried to suggest there may be significant side effects from vaccines … we kind of got canceled because no one wanted to talk about the potential that there was a problem from the vaccines, because they were afraid that that would cause people not to want to get vaccinated,” Dr. Redfield said.

He still thinks that the shots should be credited for saving “a lot” of lives, though that research is much in dispute. What’s remarkable is to have the former head of the CDC openly putting down the idea that healthy adults and children did not need these shots. They are included in the childhood schedule now and mandates still pervade academia and U.S. policy for citizenship. Clearly the pharma industry pushing these products remains more powerful than even former heads of the top agency in charge.

In addition, in compelling testimony, former head of the National Institutes for Health Francis Collins has admitted that there never was any science behind social distancing. The rule of six feet of distance, which sounds innocuous, masks a totalitarian ambition. It was the reason for the school closures since there was no way to practice it. It was why there were no gatherings. It was why businesses had to be only half-full or closed. It was the reason for the crazy dance everyone was doing for nearly two years. Even now, you sometimes encounter people who jump out of the way when a human is near.

There was never any science to it. We knew that from the very outset. The notion seems to have emerged out of a middle school science model based on the childhood game of Cooties, an imaginary virus that boys said girls had and girls said boys had. It was that dumb and yet it governed our lives.

Actually, there was a long science behind all forms of physical distancing. The research had been accumulating for 15 years in randomized controlled trials of physical interventions to interrupt virus spread. The overwhelming evidence was that they made no difference at all. That was the scientific orthodoxy going into 2020.

Still, they went ahead with devastating results. Gyms had to close—for the good of health. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy issued some 80 edicts for business closures. Those edicts have only now been completely overturned as unconstitutional and unjust, and all penalties assigned to violators have been reversed. This is hugely important news but essentially four years too late.

As for the damages done by the shots, the vaccine makers were indemnified by law against paying for any harms they caused. So there is no question of any liability on their part. The pharma companies say that if they had to be held responsible for damages that they could never make any vaccines. That claim alone should raise alarm bells. In a market economy under the rule of law, makers of products bear responsibility for harms caused by their use. Pharma should be no different especially with a product imposed by force on most of the population.

In addition, there is a real question of fraud against which the shot makers are not indemnified. Those claims are now in litigation. We shall see how they end up. No question that public opinion has dramatically turned against all the expert advice and mandates of this period of our history. It is more likely than ever that judges will test out the power of the judiciary by putting a solid stop on the power of the administrative state, at least in the United States.

In addition, we are seeing the Cuomo brothers (former N.Y. Governor Andrew and former CNN commentator Chris) attempting to walk back everything they did and said. Andrew is now frequently saying that all the mandates of the period were in fact completely unenforceable. This claim is completely wrong: the police roamed the streets in those days to ticket people for not distancing and shutting down businesses for not selling food with their drinks (as if that was going to achieve anything in terms of stopping the virus). Meanwhile, Chris has outed himself as being vaccine-injured and inviting ever more dissidents on his show on News Nation.

Now to the burning question. If all the evidence was clear that none of this could control a virus, and if even the vaccine trials were revealing high injury and a lack of effectiveness of the shots, why did they go ahead with the crazy experiment in the first place?

Here is where we have to get into some speculation. Having studied and written about all of this for four years, and looking even at the prevailing pandemic plans for the future, it’s my considered opinion that the whole protocol was designed for one purpose. The intention from the beginning was to preserve the immunological naivete of the whole population for as long as possible so that the vaccines could come to the rescue and save the population. In other words, everything they did, from closures to forced separation and masks, was designed to stop the emergence of natural immunity.

Does that sound crazy and conspiratorial to you? Maybe but I urge you to think about it. They had from February 2020 to December of that year, helpfully timed with an election they could force to be swung by mail-in ballots, to keep seroprevalence levels in the population as low as possible. That’s why there was such a wild frenzy to stop anyone in the population from catching so much as a cold. The idea was to pitch the shot based on new technology as the savior of humanity.

Can I absolutely prove that theory? Not really, not yet. But it makes sense of all existing facts, and it also makes sense of why they attempted so many cockamamie strategies even though they would not likely work. It was the best they had and they were quite desperate to make sure that the shots and the shots alone would save the day. It’s also why the World Health Organization changed the definition of herd immunity from including exposure to become exclusively a product of vaccines.

The plan was pretty far-flung but there were three major problems.

First, people quickly realized that the bug was nowhere near as serious as they made it out to be. Many people got the thing, felt rough for a few days, and shook it off. Such is life.

Second, people got exposed and thus obtained immunity anyway. There was nothing that could be done about that.

Third, and devastatingly, the shots did not work as intended. They didn’t stop infection and they didn’t stop the spread. Plus they caused enormous harm.

If there was a conspiracy, then, it flopped.

This is the scenario that I believe is waiting to be unearthed. It will be in time. The elites that were in charge are right now simply trying to delay the day as long as possible, while admitting as little as possible in the meantime. For this reason, the gradual walkback is going to take many years in the hopes that once people find out the real agenda, the intensity of public outrage will have died down as much as possible. Then the whole episode can fade into the woodwork of the history of our times.