By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

The closest thing we have in this country to a pandemic plan is called the Pandemic Action Crisis Plan or PanCap. It remains the prevailing unclassified document. It posits stay-at-home orders, school closures, business shutdowns, office closures, travel restrictions, testing, track-and-trace, and the creation and distribution of countermeasures called vaccines.

So far as anyone knows, it is still the prevailing document. It's one of many. Nothing has changed about any of them in light of what we learned from Covid. The CDC currently hosts all these documents:

National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza

National Strategy Implementation Plan

MMWR: Updated Preparedness and Response Framework for Influenza Pandemics

2017 HHS Pandemic Influenza Plan Update

2009 HHS Pandemic Influenza Plan Update

2006 HHS Pandemic Influenza Plan Update

2006 HHS Pandemic Influenza Plan Update

Allocating & Targeting Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Guidance

This approach has no precedent in the long history of public health. The old way was to keep calm, understand the illness, treat those affected, and use rational approaches to mitigate the impacts. The new way invented in 2005 is about command and control, pretending to manage the microbial kingdom like an engineering project.

This is still the operational manual. If a pathogen should leak and the machine clicks into gear, this is what will happen. It will be profoundly disturbing to civil society. Like last time, the results will not be good. The medicine will be worse than the disease. We can say this based on the experience from 2020 to 2023. And yet the plan survives.

The existing plan is PanCap-Adapted. It is still not posted on any government website. It was leaked to the New York Times and, again, so far as anyone knows, this remains the architecture of control. Why the latest is not posted is unclear. Don't the American people deserve to know what their government plans for them?

It is supplemented by dozens of other documents that pertain to nearly every federal government agency and are expected to be followed by downstream agencies in states, counties, cities, and towns. This is what is called an all-of-government response.

This is not some conspiracy theory. We need only look at one related document, the Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal, Interagency Operational Plan as produced by FEMA. It is out of classification and available for anyone to observe. It comes into operation with any pathogen that is new, perhaps manufactured in a lab as many of them are.

Halfway through this document you find a presumption of business closures, transportation restrictions and disruptions, widespread commodities hoarding by the public, stay-at-home orders, workforce shift to virtual environment, school and childcare closures, restaurant closures, hotel closures, reduced workforce, and plant closures.

This plan is still out there, waiting to be implemented under the right circumstances. The US Constitution does not pertain. American expectations of liberty do not pertain. Law does not pertain. Even now, the idea that an emergency requires the end of all normal expectations for freedom is baked into all pandemic protocols.

At this point, you might already be asking the very obvious question. How could this be true in light of the last experience? The answer points to the core problem. We've never had a reckoning for the Covid period. There has been no commission, no push for changes in underlying protocols, no fundamental shifts at the top other than new political appointees, and no real national statement that what happened was wrong and destructive.

In short, nothing has changed other than public opinion. That too is extremely malleable. People these days routinely say that they won't comply. What they mean is that under similar circumstances, they won't comply. But the circumstances will not be similar. A strain of Ebola, for example, ...