The Covid coup, five years on: 'A multi-organ failure of our societies’

By Dr Paul Cullen.

Could admitting to a lab origin for the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 be a ‘limited hangout’ designed to distract from even more unsettling revelations?

By Dr Paul Cullen

To mark the (approximate) fifth anniversary of the 2020 coup against human sovereignty and freedom, we publish, for the first time in English, this recent paper by Dr Paul Cullen, which examines several of the central questions concerning the ‘pandemic’ of 2020 which remain unanswered, sets out the facts underlying the ‘medical’ or ‘health’ dimensions of this operation, and disposes of some of the mythologies which have flared up in the wake of what the World Bank described as ‘The Covid Project’. The paper was initially published in German, in December 2024. This is its first publication in English.

On December 15, 2024, internationally renowned German physicist Roland Wiesendanger from Hamburg University discussed the 520-page US Congressional report on the Coronavirus Pandemic released on December 4, 2024, with Maximilian Tichy of the well-known conservative German blog ‘Tichys Einblick’ .

The most significant finding of this report was its conclusion that SARS Coronavirus Type 2 was almost certainly engineered in a laboratory using so-called gain-of-function research, at least partly as a component of a bio-weapon program. This report confirms a hypothesis that Roland Wiesendanger has been publicly advocating for in the German-speaking world since February 2021 (a detailed English version of Wiesendanger´s argument was released on research gate in April 2021). Wiesendanger faced strong criticism from many opponents supporting the so-called ‘proximal origin’ hypothesis, that is, that SARS-CoV-2 evolved by natural means, including from Christian Drosten, a prominent virologist at the historical Charité Hospital in Berlin and one of the main German advocates of stringent COVID-19 measures, including vaccine mandates.

On January 25, 2025, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), under its new director John Ratcliffe, also stated it now believes a ‘research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic [to be] more likely than a natural orgin’, a view shared by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Department of Energy.

However, Wiesendanger made a further statement that cannot go uncommented, namely that the manipulated virus caused a pandemic resulting in more than 20 million deaths worldwide, implying that in the absence of COVID, 20 million fewer people would have died during the past five years. An even more alarming conclusion was drawn by American filmmaker Jenner Furst, both in his documentary, Thank You, Dr. Fauci, released in October 2024, and during an interview with political commentator Tucker Carlson on December 20, 2024. Furst claimed the virus had a fatality rate of one to three per cent and is likely to be the second most contagious virus ever.

It is undisputed that this novel virus can cause severe and occasionally fatal illness, especially in older people with chronic health problems, but there is no compelling evidence to support the hypothesis that the pandemic caused an exceptional health crisis in Germany or globally.

As encouraging as the Congressional report's findings on the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 may be, other aspects of the report are troubling. The document includes a two-page letter from Congressman Brad Wenstrup, Chair of the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, summarising the main findings. Wenstrup writes: ‘Operation Warp Speed (i.e., the expedited development of the COVID-19 vaccines under President Donald Trump) was a resounding success and a model to build upon in the future. The vaccines, which should now be better referred to as therapeutics, have undoubtedly saved millions of lives by reducing the likelihood of severe illness and death.’

Just as I cannot accept the assertion that COVID-19 was an exceptionally dangerous disease that caused 20 million more deaths than might otherwise have been expected, so I must also question this statement regarding the COVID-19 vaccines.

In this article, I will present the true severity of COVID-19 in terms of its transmissibility and mortality rate. I will also address whether, on balance, the COVID-19 vaccines saved even a single life. Moreover, I will demonstrate why the notion of a ‘highly dangerous COVID-19 virus’ undermines efforts to hold politicians and officials accountable for their failures during the pandemic, thus hindering an overall reckoning with the COVID-19 era. I will also highlight how the narrative of a ‘deadly pandemic emerging from a laboratory’ could aid those who might, in the future, seek to restrict fundamental rights for their own interests during similar events. Lastly, I will pose the question as to whether admitting to the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 might be a ‘limited hangout’ serving to distract from even more critical findings in an attempt to prevent their exposure and investigation.

How contagious is COVID-19?

It is widely accepted that the virus variant that spread from Wuhan, China to the world in early 2020 was the most virulent. At that time, no effective treatment or vaccine were available — ideal conditions to study the natural course of this infection.

The virus’s infection rate became known relatively quickly, with data primarily coming from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and from household studies. On February 1, 2020, while sailing in the Pacific Ocean, the Diamond Princess was made aware that an 80-year-old man who disembarked in Hong Kong on January 26 had tested positive for COVID-19. Life aboard the ship continued as usual, with entertainment, parties, and communal dining, until February 3, when it was quarantined off Yokohama, Japan. The first passengers with negative test results were allowed to disembark on February 19, while the last passengers left on March 1, 2020.

By late March 2020, it became known that out of 3,711 people on board, only 696 (19 per cent) had tested positive for COVID-19, 410 of whom (59 per cent) were asymptomatic. Among those who tested positive, seven people (one per cent) died, three over the age of 70 years and four above the age of 80 years.

Household studies conducted in early 2020 estimated the likelihood of contracting SARS-CoV-2 within a household at ten to 20 per cent. This means that out of ten people in close contact with an infected individual in a single household, on average only one or two became infected. For comparison, the secondary attack rate for measles exceeds 90 per cent, for chickenpox it is 80 to 90 per cent, for the gastrointestinal norovirus and the respiratory syncytial virus about 40 per cent, for Streptococcus A 20 to 40 per cent, for hepatitis A 20 to 30 per cent, for influenza about 20 per cent, and for the common cold rhinovirus ten to 20 per cent.

Thus COVID-19, far from being the ‘second most contagious viral infection ever’, is actually one of the least contagious of the common infectious diseases.

How dangerous is COVID-19?

Roland Wiesendanger, Jenner Furst, and others who point to the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 use the purported danger of the virus as an example to highlight the risks of gain-of-function research. And it is indeed true that this type of research typically involves altering a pathogen to make it more harmful or more transmissible, or both, to humans.

While such research is undoubtedly dangerous and irresponsible, and rightly criticized by Wiesendanger and Furst, it is not the case that every pathogen engineered in this way necessarily causes high mortality or severe disease. In contrast to the alarmist descriptions circulating in the mainstream media and in large parts of the alternative media, the latter statement appears to apply to SARS-CoV-2, which was likely derived from a modified bat corona virus.

The best measure of disease severity is the fatality rate, the perentage of cases resulting in death. On the Diamond Princess, the fatality rate was one per cent, primarily among individuals over 80 years. In the ‘Heinsberg Study’, a German investigation conducted by the prominent virologist Hendrik Streeck in March 2020, the fatality rate was 0.4 per cent. As pointed out above, COVID-19 caused severe, sometimes fatal outcomes in older individuals with pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes and obesity. For the rest of the population, however, it posed no unusual risk.

It soon became clear that the severity of COVID-19 was comparable to that of moderate influenza, with an infection fatality rate estimated by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis at approximately one in 1,000. In Germany, the average age of COVID-19 deaths was 82.2 years — about five months above the general life expectancy of 81.7 years.

The Leibniz Institute for Economic Research reported that hospital bed occupancy in Germany did not increase in 2020 but rather decreased by about 14 per cent — this while the virulent Wuhan virus variant was circulating and no vaccine was yet available. On average, only about two per cent of all hospital beds and four per cent of intensive care beds in Germany were occupied by COVID-19 patients during that year. A study conducted by the University of Essen found that no more people died in Germany in 2020 than would have been statistically expected. This was also true for lung diseases. As reported by the statistical service of the German government Destatis, in 2020 ‘only’ 61,358 deaths from 'respiratory diseases' were registered in Germany, significantly fewer than in 2019 (67,021 deaths), or 2018 (71,719 deaths).

Effectiveness and Risks of COVID-19 Vaccines

The most significant and impactful ‘measure’ against COVID-19 was vaccination. By now, it is clear that the effectiveness of the vaccines waned significantly over time. However, let us set aside this fact and base our calculations on data from Pfizer's clinical trial (despite increasing revelations of the inconsistencies and deficiencies in that study), which suggested that 100 individuals needed to be vaccinated to prevent one COVID-19 case. Next, let us assume a pessimistic scenario, where four out of 1,000 SARS-CoV-2 infections result in death, as was observed in Heinsberg in Germany. How many people would need to be vaccinated to prevent one death? The answer is: 1,000/4 = 250 x 100 = 25,000 people.

Worldwide, about 5 billion people were vaccinated against COVID-19. Based on the above calculation, a maximum of about 200,000 lives (5 billion divided by 25.000) could have been saved globally due to vaccination — far from the 20 million saved lives often cited in the media. Data from Germany further show that most of the lives saved through vaccination were individuals above the age of 80, who gained, on average, only a few additional weeks or months of life. Young people hardly ever died from COVID-19, greatly limiting the number of lives that could be saved through vaccination in this group.

Obtaining reliable data on vaccine-related deaths is extraordinarily difficult. Physicians often fail to record such effects in a systematic fashion, and there is no way to verify if they have reported all recorded adverse events. There is little incentive to do so, as reporting is time-consuming and, at least in Germany, not reimbursed. Moreover, a physician who administered a substance in good faith that later proves harmful might be reluctant to report side effects, as it would imply an error in his or her treatment decision.

For all these reasons, reporting systems such as that provided by the Paul-Ehrlich Institute in Germany or the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States record only a small fraction — estimated as being as low as five to ten per cent — of adverse effects, including deaths that occur after vaccine administration. In February 2022, Andreas Schöfbeck, Chief Executive Officer of the German health insurer BKK ProVita, reported that 217,000 of their nearly 11 million individuals by his company had received medical treatment for vaccine-induced adverse reactions. This ratio of one case in 50 insured individuals (or about 1 in 40 vaccinated individuals, given the vaccination rate of 75 per cent at the time) exceeded the Paul-Ehrlich Institute's figures by a factor of more than ten. The explosiveness of this revelation is shown by the reaction of BKK ProVita's supervisory board, which dismissed Mr. Schöfbeck without notice on March 1, 2022, a highly unusual move in German business where employees often stay a lifetime with a single company and in which this kind of summary dismissal is almost unheard of, particularly at such a senior level.

By the end of 2021, the Paul-Ehrlich Institute had received reports of 2,222 deaths among about 50 million vaccinated individuals — a rate of one death per approximately 22,000 vaccinated individuals. These reports represent suspected rather than confirmed cases linked to vaccination, but the level of under-reporting described above must also be considered. It is of note that the reported rate of suspected deaths (one in 22,000) due to the vaccine is comparable to the maximum number of lives that could have been saved through vaccination (one in 25,000).

Thus, it is not clear if more lives were saved than were lost through vaccination against COVID-19. The balance of evidence suggests the latter; according to some estimates, based on insurance data and other indirect sources, as many as one in 1,000 vaccinated individuals died from the vaccine. This claim is supported by the observation of excess mortality in Germany since the start of the vaccination campaign, amounting to 40,000 to 50,000 deaths per year, at least for the years 2021 and 2022.

The risks of overdramatizing COVID-19

In his interview with Maximilian Tichy, Roland Wiesendanger claimed that COVID-19 caused ‘about 20 to 25 million deaths’ worldwide. The statistics website ‘Worldometer’ puts the figure at around seven million. Since anyone who tested positive for COVID-19 was classified as a ‘COVID-19 death,’ the question also remains as to how many people died from COVID-19 itself and how many died with a COVID-19 diagnosis, but actually from other causes. The crucial question, however, is not how many people died from or with COVID-19, but whether COVID-19 led to an increase in overall mortality — producing what is known as ‘excess mortality’ over and above that which would normally be expected in a given period of time.

For Germany, as noted above, there was no such increase in 2020, as excess mortality only emerged after the introduction of COVID-19 mass vaccination in 2021. In many countries with excess mortality in 2020, evidence suggests that this was mainly caused by the containment measures such as lockdown, wearing face masks and ‘social distancing’, and by inappropriate treatments such as inadequate antibiotic therapy for secondary infections, insufficient treatment of the inflammatory component of COVID-19, overdosing with sedatives, and improper use of assisted ventilation, and not by the COVID-19 infection itself.

Thus not only was there no ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’. there was no ‘pandemic’ whatsoever in the generally understood sense of this term, which is usually taken to denote a severe disease of unusual extent. What did exist was a moderately severe flu-like illness that could be dangerous for the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions but was mild for nearly all individuals under 60, most of whom had no symptoms.

This point is critically important. Based on what we now know, it would be naive to think that ‘gain-of-function’ research has ceased to exist. On the contrary, it is likely that such research has intensified since COVID-19, as the virus demonstrated the potential for authoritarian governments worldwide to exploit such infections. Thus, the next ‘pandemic’ is already preordained.

The prevailing narrative that COVID-19 was a particularly dangerous disease is of great interest to the establishment, as it justifies a wide range of previously unacceptable interventions up to and including mandatory treatments with novel and barely tested genetic products.

Even more critical for those who seek to spread panic and fear in the future is the insistence on equating ‘lab origin’ with ‘highly dangerous’ and embedding this equation into public consciousness, including among those who consider themselves ‘critical thinkers.’ This would enable a repeat of the COVID-19 episode at any time.

Gain-of-function research and bioweapon development

As I noted above, evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 was at least partially cultivated within the context of a bioweapons program. This does not mean that this virus was developed as a bioweapon or is itself a bioweapon, but simply that the programme in which it was developed has military implications. Gain-of-function research is carried out almost exclusively in a military setting, and I am not aware of any purely civilian applications for this research. Of course, no researcher in this field admits to developing bioweapons. Rather, he or she will claim that the aim is solely to improve defenses against a bioweapon attack by an adversary, part of the linguistic obfuscation designed to obscure the true designs of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex. Until 1947, for example, the USA had a Secretary of War, since 1949 merely a Secretary of Defense.

In bioweapons research, the development of a defense against the bioweapon is just as important as the bioweapon itself. For even when the weapon is developed with purely offensive intent, ‘blowback’, the risk that the weapon might get out of control and decimate one's own troops and population, remains a crucial issue.

These weapons are therefore always developed as a pair: the bioweapon plus its antidote, with the antidote being at least as important as, and generally more important than, the weapon itself. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, there are strong indications that the development of the vaccines was closely coordinated with the US Department of Defense, which commissioned these ‘countermeasures’ and funded them through an obscure mechanism known as an ‘Other Transaction Authority.’ In fact, one could plausibly argue that main reason for the development of SARS-CoV-2 was to justify the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. That is, the primary goal was to test the ‘countermeasures,’ particularly the vaccines, rather than the virus itself. This might be the case even if the virus was released by accident and not intentionally. In his ‘Rules for Radicals’ Saul Alinsky states that ‘in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication’, or as is the COVID episode, a precondition to action.

This interpretation fits what we saw happening on a worldwide level, where every single measure had the intention of forcing as many people as possible to take the vaccine.

Is the admission of a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 a ‘limited hangout’?

The term ‘limited hangout’ comes from the realm of espionage. When a secret can no longer be fully concealed, a part of it is admitted (i.e., ‘hung out’), while more damaging or critical facts are withheld. The hope is that the public becomes so fascinated by the released information, the new ‘shiny object’, that they stop pursuing the matter further.

Without wishing in any way to imply that Roland Wiesendanger or Jenner Furst are consciously participating in such a ‘limited hangout,’ this question must be allowed in relation to the report of the US Congress and the admissions of the other three-letter agencies. Could it be that the lab hypothesis is being promoted in order to salvage the ‘success story’ of vaccine development and the vaccination campaign? Could it be that this path is being used to subtly instill the link between ‘lab origin’ and ‘highly dangerous’ into public consciousness with a view to enabling future ‘pandemics’?

To prevent this effect, we need to repeat the key lessons of the COVID episode until they are firmly embedded in our collective consciousness:

1. There was not only no ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, but no ‘pandemic’ whatsoever in the conventional sense of this term.

2. The virus, which almost certainly originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology with US assistance, was about as harmful as a moderately severe influenza infection.

3. Infection with SARS-CoV-2 did not result in significant excess mortality. For this reason alone, none of the extraordinary measures taken was justified.

4. The COVID-19 vaccines, particularly the gene-based ones using modified mRNA or DNA, were barely and only temporarily effective and had a devastating side-effect profile that exceeds that of all other vaccines by a factor of 20 to 100.

5. It is highly likely that the COVID vaccines ended more lives than they saved. This is even more the case in relation to years of life lost or saved.

6. Almost all the lives saved by the vaccine were in people above the age of 80 years with pre-existing conditions, in whom the vaccine delayed death by a period of weeks to a few months.

As the German politician Hans-Georg Maassen has remarked, the COVID episode was a ‘multi-organ failure’ of our society. The fact that the virus likely originated from a laboratory in no way justifies the reactions of governments and organizations worldwide. We must not relent in our efforts to investigate and expose every component of this catastrophe. We must remain vigilant and alert to all future attempts to limit our rights and freedoms on foot of future ‘pandemics’, regardless of whether the suspected agent is a product of an infernal bioweapons programme or of untainted nature.

Note: The author would like to thank Dr. Sabine Brueckner for her contribution to the drafting of this manuscript. This work is partly a translation of an article published on December 29, 2024 on the German online magazine ‘Tichys Einblick’.

Biography: Dr Paul Cullen

Paul Cullen was born in Dublin in 1960. He grew up in Rathfarnham, attending De La Salle primary school and the Christian Brothers at secondary level, before going on to study medicine at UCD.

In 1984 he moved to Germany to work as a doctor, returned to Ireland to work for a brief period from 1987, and in 1989 moved to London for a three-year stint of research at Hammersmith Hospital. He completed his Masters in biochemistry and molecular biology at King’s College London, before returning to Germany, where he still works as a lecturer at Muenster University.

Dr Cullen has published some 250 scientific papers and several books. He has been a medical doctor for 40 years, specialising in internal and laboratory medicine, including a period managing a major diagnostics lab.

He has been, since mid-2020, a high-visibility critic of all things Covid, being active in a group of about 100 critical academics (mostly university professors) in Germany. He was successful in publishing or co-publishing approximately 20 Covid-critical articles in the German press, about half in the mainstream and half in alternative outlets. In 2021, an interview with Paul on YouTube attracted more than 1.3 Million views before being removed by an act of censorship. That video has since received some 300,000 further views on reloads to Odyssey and Rumble. His more recent video on DNA contamination in Covid ‘vaccinations’ is currently registering more than 400,000 views.

Paul regularly features in German media as a commentator (online, print, video, and online radio), most consistently in respect of the anti-human agenda: transhumanism, genetic engineering, neo-eugenics, bio- and reproductive medicine, cloning, climate scares, et cetera.

He is also the Head of Doctors for Life and a board member of the Federal Association of Right-to-Life Organisations

In 2021, he was the victim of a vicious but ultimately unsuccessful cancel campaign at his university, spearheaded by local Antifa activists, attracting local, national and some international reporting.

Paul is married and the father of two children — a daughter (aged 23) and a son (aged 14).