AMID THE covid restrictions, a friend introduced me to the cogent critiques of Simon Elmer. I was startled by how thoroughly Elmer engaged with the official data, policies and legislation, showing that Covid-19 was not the deadly contagion depicted, but a health scare exaggerated for totalitarian ends. His articles included numerous graphs and statistical tables from Whitehall and the World Health Organization, which could (and should) have been used to confront corrupt minister of health Matt Hancock or the Ethiopian former terrorist in charge of the global health agency. But critics were not allowed near the corridors of power (or the corridors of NHS hospitals, where Debbie Hicks was arrested for filming the truth of buildings emptied of patients).
Soon after the mass vaccination programme began, I read State of Fear by Laura Dodsworth, a critic of lockdown. I was reviewing her carefully researched book but could not recommend it overall, because of a cardinal sin near the end. Dodsworth – surprisingly to me at the time – promoted the vaccine as a saviour. This, alongside other doubts cast on prominent sceptics, led to my epiphany, and I could never go back.
Covid-19, as I came to believe a year after its appearance, did not exist. I realised that the timing of the pandemic was too convenient and predictable, and that it was much easier to manage an artificial rather than actual pathogen. Why – given all the Great Reset agenda that Covid-19 facilitated – would the globalist technocrats have waited for an incidental viral outbreak?
And thus I diverged from many of the critics I had followed. I could still agree with them on the tyrannical interventions and on the ludicrous behaviour of the gullible public (such as wearing a mask while alone in a car). But their perspective on the plague differed fundamentally from mine. There were now three stances on Covid-19: belief in the official narrative, belief that the disease was exploited for ulterior motives (misanthropic control and corporate greed), and complete disbelief.
The term ‘controlled opposition’ was as overused among critics as was ‘disinformation’ by the official narrators. It is likely that some characters were performing a role for the regime. But there are many well-intended writers and YouTubers who are genuinely against all that was imposed on us from 2020 onwards, for a virus of mortality rate no worse than that of influenza (which miraculously disappeared in the pandemic).
One of the best of these writers is Sonia Elijah. I have written for TCW since soon after its launch 12 years ago, and I was proud that this site made a trenchant stand against the covid regime from the outset. Elijah, alongside editor Kathy Gyngell, statistician Norman Fenton, investigative journalist Sally Beck and many others, savaged the blatant abuse by ministers and tinpot dictators in NHS trusts.
Elijah, of Armenian background, was a BBC researcher who developed her skill as an evidence-based enquiry and incisive analysis. She has written 3/11: Viral Takeover, which she introduces as follows:
‘This book is a forensic investigation of a ‘one-in-a-century’ pandemic and what was done in its name.’
The title refers to the date of the WHO’s declaration of a deadly pandemic, and relates Covid-19 to 9/11. This is not because Elijah believes that both calamities were designed, but due to their dramatic impact and outcome. Here is the opening paragraph:
‘The origin of SARS-CoV-2, a virus that precipitated the most disruptive health event in a century, remains shrouded in contention. From day one, governments, the World Health Organization, elite journals, and influential scientists emphasised a zoonotic hypothesis: a bat virus jumping the species barrier at Wuhan’s Huanan wet market, a classic case of nature’s mishap. However, examination of available evidence reveals a more complex picture involving laboratory research, gain-of-function experiments, and conflicts of interest that were not initially disclosed. Key to establishing this narrative were three major papers, penned by influential scientists and published in elite journals, that locked in the natural-origin view while alternative ideas were dismissed as conspiracy theories.’
This paragraph sets the tone for my somewhat critical review of Elijah’s book. Conspiracy theories, from Elijah’s standpoint, are a bad thing, but if we have reasonable grounds to suspect conspiring by people in power, but are not given all the information and must rely on indicators and insights, theorising is what we must do. I suggest that Elijah embrace this term – because it’s what her book is all about.
Missing in the quoted paragraph is any doubt about the validity of the novel coronavirus. Obviously, people at the highest rungs of the ladder must have known that Covid-19 was being exploited for means far beyond containment of a public health emergency. But what if they – meaning our political leaders – knew that the virus was fake? That would take the criminality to another level.
I concur with most of the contents of Elijah’s book – on the callous weaponisation of behavioural psychology, overwhelming censorship, regulatory capture and state surveillance. As you would expect from a talented journalist, Elijah is objective rather than opinionated. She tells her story proficiently.
Her book begins on the platform for the plague – the PCR test. German virologist Professor Christian Drosten led a team that calibrated the polymerase chain reaction process to detect Covid-19. Following rapid publication of their paper in January 2020, the World Health Organization implored health authorities around the world to ‘test, test, test’.
Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for inventing PCR. But this was meant for DNA analysis, and Elijah notes that a video of Mullis asserting that the test is not a disease-screening instrument was removed by censors. However, she omits mention of Mullis’s warning that PCR could be used to find anything at all, because traces of everything are in our environment. Conveniently, Mullis died just before the purported pandemic.
Kit Knightly, editor of the OffGuardian website, suggests that PCR results were as random as rolling dice, with 1 positive and 2 to 6 negative, depending on calibration (reduced after launch of the vaccine). I think it more likely that the test was finding something real, such as exosomes (dead cell matter), which may be more prevalent in the elderly and infirm, and in sufferers of a common cold or other maladies.
For Elijah, though, the problem with PCR was its unreliability, as it produced a high proportion of false positives. Perhaps, on writing her book, she may have mused for a few seconds on the British government’s name for the testing campaign – Operation Moonshot. That’s a clear indication to cynics of a theatrical production, like the moon landing filmed in the Nevada desert.
Interestingly, TCW, which has always been cautious on conspiracy theories, had an article last week by Danny Lockwood on that very phenomenon, accepting or at least considering suspected conspiracies such as JFK, the moon landings, Princess Diana’s death and the World Trade Center attack (the timing was around the latest ‘moonshot’ by Nasa). The comments below the line show that faith in official history has been shaken, and many people (including me) were awakened by the Covid-19 scam.
The success of counter-narrative manipulation is apparent throughout Elijah’s book. For example, sceptics were drawn to the potential source of the disease in gain-of-function vital research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This work was previously being done in the US but was reportedly closed due to safety concerns. China, I believe, was chosen as the source of the virus because of its apparent impenetrability by Western journalists.
Yet somehow investigative journalist Ian Birrell, for a series of articles in the Mail on Sunday during the first British lockdown, obtained images of damaged refrigerator seals and dirty benches at the secure Wuhan laboratory. The intent was to guide sceptics into a hypothesis that reinforced the existence of the virus. Indeed, the gain-of-function lab leak led some critics to claim that Covid-19 was a bioweapon.
Despite my criticism, the book is a valuable record of the Covid-19 debacle. Elijah writes in a style of accessible intellect, with hundreds of citations to support her argument. I will use her book in my work as a trade union rep, in fitness-to-practise cases by professional regulators against dissenting healthcare workers. It would be futile and counter-productive for me to deny Covid-19 in representing a member at such hearings, but Elijah’s book is a sophisticated presentation of the sceptical stance, which could justify actions such as advising a patient that there are contrary views on whether the vaccines are as ‘safe and effective’ as politicians told them.
One of the most egregious failures of duty was by June Raine, chief executive of the British medicines regulator. The MHRA, according to Raine, had shifted under her leadership from prioritising public safety to acting as enabler for the pharmaceutical industry. As Elijah notes, Raine allowed untested Pfizer vaccines to be used (the batch that was tested was not the same as that shot into 50million arms).
The chapter ‘The Blind Watchdogs’ names and shames multiple bodies that abandoned their moral duty to give Pfizer free rein over the people of the world, bypassing ethical or democratic checks. Raine remained serene, as the MHRA studiously ignored a mounting toll of injuries and deaths, not conclusively but often temporarily attributable to the vaccine. Meanwhile EU fúhrer Ursula von der Leyen ordered 1,800,000,000 doses, enough for ten injections per resident. Brought to you by Pfizer – while the watchdogs closed their eyes.
The purpose of the vaccination programme was clear in the mandates imposed with varying force by supposedly liberal and progressive Western governments:
‘They build directly on the infrastructure first tested in the aftermath of 3/11: vaccine passports. Rolled out in 2021-2022, they were presented as temporary tools to reopen society while protecting the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. In practice, they became the first large-scale experiment in conditional digital access. Travel required proof for international flights, trains and borders, with many domestic routes following suit. Employers mandated passports for return to office or continued employment. Universities and some schools restricted attendance. Social life was curtained, with restaurants, bars, gyms, concerts, theatres and sports events barring entry without a valid pass.’
Lest we forget. The EU revealed itself as an administration devoid of the values that enthused millions of Remainers after the referendum. But Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain was little better. Elijah continues:
‘Vaccine passports were the proof of concept. They demonstrated that populations could be trained to accept exclusion based on compliance.’
This was pseudomedical apartheid. I will never forget a heckler at one of my local resistance group’s ‘yellow board’ outreaches on Carshalton High Street, who expressed the viciousness of the conformists. Spitting fury, she told us: ‘I’m a nurse in the ICU, and if any of you get admitted to my unit I’ll pull the plug out.’ Meanwhile doctors and nurses who raised legitimate concerns were punished by their professional bodies, and this is still happening years on.
Having unilaterally agreed to disagree on the veracity of Covid-19, I found Elijah’s book profound on the tyrannical actions of our leaders and the abuse of the NHS. The government was deliberately and shamelessly terrorising citizens with its Project Fear, and Elijah observes that some of the chief protagonists, such as Susan Michie, a communist and masking zealot, have disappeared from public view. As the book concludes, plausible deniability is not merely a tactic – it is the system for rulers who knowingly misrule on behalf of their masters.
Finally, I must acknowledge that on the existence of Covid-19, Elijah could be right and I could be wrong. Unlike Dodsworth’s mainstream-friendly book, I have no reservations in recommending Elijah’s 3/11: Viral Takeover as a critical perspective on the plague. Don’t expect to see it reviewed in the Sunday Times though!
This article appeared in Niall McCrae’s substackon April 3, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
