The Deep State Goes Viral by Debbie Lerman is a deeply troubling book. Subtitled ‘Pandemic planning and the Covid coup’, the thrust of the book is that the United States response to Covid, largely followed across the world, was meticulously coordinated. Moreover, it was not a coordinated public health response, as sold to the public, but a military response coordinated not by public health experts but by the US Department of Defence and then, beyond the shores of the United States, by NATO.

Lerman’s thesis strikes at the heart of one of the biggest schisms within the lockdown and Covid sceptic community. Was it conspiracy or was it merely cock-up that led to the gross mismanagement and an extraordinarily panicked and ‘over-the-top’ response to what was after all a mild respiratory infection?

With my cards on the table, my inclination is, and always has been, towards the conspiracy end of the spectrum. I found that Lerman’s book confirmed a great deal of what I suspected. I had always found it difficult to fathom how what appeared to be a closely coordinated international response involving the introduction of untested and previously unused measures such as lockdowns, social distancing and masking, plus the grounding of international transport and the cessation of commerce could have proceeded at such pace and with such draconian implementation without, well, some coordination.

In the scenario posited by Lerman, public health officials such as Drs Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield were merely mouthpieces for what was being planned at a clandestine level. If my understanding is right, almost nobody in government and possibly President Trump (first time round) were fully aware of what was taking place. There is some face validity to this claim – and precisely the same applied in the UK – as people like Fauci and Redfield were advising calm and no extreme measures in response to the news from Wuhan about a ‘novel coronavirus’. But witness how quickly both Fauci and our then Prime Minister – within the space of a working week – went from advising calm and playing down the need for extreme and damaging measures, to being fully aligned with what became the Covid narrative.

That narrative was one whereby frankly inaccurate information – lies in many cases – were told, including an exaggerated lethality of COVID-19, the ‘everyone is at risk’ mantra and then the imposition of demonstrably harmful lockdowns, compulsory wearing of face masks, ridiculous social distancing rules and laughable scenarios such the famous ‘Scotch egg debate’ (does a Scotch egg constitute a meal and, therefore, could you legitimately sit in a pub and eat one?) Finally, of course, came the Covid vaccine rollout and all that entailed, with people losing jobs and being cancelled and the subsequent drug side-effects.

The question raised by the cock-up theorists is always, regarding a coordinated response, ‘who is coordinating it?’ A perfectly legitimate question and one to which I, certainly, had no answer. In my case, as a nursing academic, I worked with many people devoted to public health. However, due to the lack of robust evidence for anything they preached I always considered them to be religious style fanatics. While they, along with many of my nursing colleagues, lapped up the Covid-generated adulation I did not consider them capable of organising the proverbial booze up in the legendary brewery, let alone a coordinated response to COVID-19.

If Lerman is correct, and she makes a strong case, we have the answer to the question from the cock-up theorists: it was the US military. According to Lerman, and the book is meticulously referenced and written in considerable detail, the response to Covid was not a public health response but a bioterrorism response inflicted, initially in the United States, on the population of the world. Considerable evidence is presented that control of what was by then the pandemic response was either handed to or taken over by the US Department of Defence. Its officials were responsible for some key appointments of people to the relevant committees who, they knew, would not contradict what they were trying to do.

In some cases, people, for example Deborah Birx who was appointed as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, were appointed without even the relevant expertise. That people like Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield changed their tune and simply adopted the new narrative around Covid could be explained by it simply being more than their jobs were worth to speak out.

The point of the exercise enacted to manage COVID-19 was, according to Lerman, all leading to one thing: the mRNA vaccines. (To be clear, Lerman does not suggest that the virus was intentionally released for this purpose, just that the response was handled at the top level by the US military using a pre-prepared bioterrorism playbook.) The story was sold to the public that the only thing that could save us from impositions such as lockdowns was the development of an effective vaccine. mRNA technology, untried until that point for producing vaccines that were in general use, seemed to be the only tool in the cupboard and, given that this was a military and not a public health response, the usual rules about testing and safety did not apply, were by-passed, and COVID-19 vaccines based on mRNA technology were rolled out across the globe with unseemly haste.

The rest, as the cliché goes, is history. We are now reaping the harvest of problems from the widespread and repeated vaccination of millions of people with a product that demonstrably does not work and which has caused widespread and very serious side-effects, including stroke and death. Under any other circumstances, as Lerman points out, such a vaccine would have been withdrawn from use very early after its introduction due to the widespread reporting of side-effects. It is notable how other products, not based on mRNA technology, were downplayed and the UK-invented Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine – not made using mRNA technology and not without its own problems – was quietly and quickly withdrawn without explanation. The mRNA vaccines continue to be pushed by public health services across the world.

While some of Lerman’s claims may be disputable, one set of claims is beyond doubt and unites all lockdown and Covid sceptics. I refer to the prevailing censorship that existed during Covid whereby all mainstream media outlets – to their eternal shame – sang with gusto from the same Covid hymn sheet. In this respect, the author gets it right; I speak from experience. Otherwise, in places where she is speculating, Lerman makes that clear, as is the nature of a deep state and clandestine operation, it will probably remain impossible to tie all the loose ends together.

The book is not written in a consistent style. Some chapters are transcripts of Covid related proceedings, one is a mock interview. Others are more straightforward. Beginning some sections with phrases such as “I feel scared. Very scared.” seemed odd. The book could have been more direct in places; shorter in fact, and some judicious editing and rearranging of contents may have enhanced the reading experience. Nevertheless, the book will remain an excellent reference text due to its meticulous sourcing of original material. Some may criticise the author’s use of Wikipedia as a source in places but this is usually confined to how things are described. As anybody who has dabbled with Wikipedia knows, it is a tightly controlled platform.

Lerman may well have unearthed the murky work behind the scenes which inflicted such misery on the world for over two years. The question remains as to why this all happened. There is an even more pressing question: could this happen again? Disappointingly, I think few people care and many would gladly go through it all again.

The Deep State Goes Viral, published by the Brownstone Institute, may be purchased on Amazon.

Dr Roger Watson is Professor of Nursing at Saint Francis University, Hong Kong SAR, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.