What I try to detail in the book, and what I’ve written about a lot over the last two years, is a painful reality. At the start of the pandemic, back in January and February of 2020, we knew about the shock doctrine. We knew about disaster capitalism. We learned all of this from Naomi Klein and others. We had a clear picture of it. And yet, as this pandemic played out, we saw all of the worst aspects of disaster capitalism come into play. We saw, first and foremost, corporations and individuals who sought to advance themselves economically and in their share of markets by cashing in on the fear, the concern, the crisis itself. We also saw politicians who aided and abetted this process at virtually every turn.
The end result is that there is simply no question that hundreds of thousands of people who died in the United States did not have to die. The Lancet study from around a year ago suggests that roughly 40% of deaths in the first year of the pandemic were unnecessary. Dr. Deborah Birx, who was the White House kind of lead on this issue, has suggested that after the first 100,000 deaths, the deaths that came, you know, later in 2020, in 2021 and beyond were exponentially larger or higher than needed. And so, we have this core reality that in the United States alone, hundreds of thousands of deaths occurred that did not have to occur. Globally, it’s in the millions. And the U.S. could have played a huge role in addressing that.
— source democracynow.org | Jan 13, 2022