Top Fed official says universal coronavirus testing needed to reopen U.S. economy
CBS News, “Face the Nation” | April 5, 2020
https://www.stlouisfed.org/from-the-president/video-appearances/2020/bullard-outlook-us-unemployment-cbs
(or https://www.cbsnews.com/video/top-fed-official-says-universal-coronavirus-testing-needed-to-reopen-u-s-economy/)

James Bullard, the CEO and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, disputes the notion that the job market is in freefall, saying Americans are staying at home to invest in national health.

Mass unemployment caused by lockdown as explained by the host at the beginning:

“. . . This week there were more than six and a half million new unemployment claims filed by now jobless Americans. Combined with over 3 million last week, that means nearly 10 million Americans have lost jobs in less than a month. . . . . “

Bullard proceeds to make the amazing standard justifications for the destructive policies that we have become used to all these months.

He says we are “investing” in “health.”

Nobody ever invested in health before in history by forcing healthy people to stay home and destroying their ability to pay for food, fuel, medical care and shelter–all the work and effort that goes into building and maintaining our societies and keeping ourselves and our families alive and well.

Just like 9/11, COVID-19 is an absurd cover story for these abusive policies which are intended to make our society completely monitored and controlled down to a biological level:

5m 38s into the video.

The host asks:

Do you think that this global economy is going to look the same on the other side of this pandemic? Are those jobs actually going to exist for people to go back to?

Bullard:

You know I have good news for you, Margaret. Because there is a solution using available technology today to fix the economic part of this problem. The solution is universal testing. What you want is every single person to get tested every day. And then they would wear a badge like they would after they voted or something like that to show that they’ve been tested. This would immediately sort out who has been infected and who hasn’t been infected. That would help the health care sector, but it would also help the economy because we could interact with each other with a lot of confidence.

Host:

We will talk about that surveillance portion of the equation that you just referenced there ahead . . .

So he is talking about a Mark of the Beast style system. He implies there is a condition placed on being able to interact with others.

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Another interview:

Bullard Discusses Testing to Mitigate the Crisis during CEPR Interview | April 16, 2020
https://www.stlouisfed.org/from-the-president/media-interviews/2020/bullard-mitigate-crisis-cepr

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard shared his views on the second quarter of 2020 and discussed the idea of universal coronavirus testing to help mitigate the crisis. He made his remarks during a video podcast with the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Bullard noted that the second quarter of 2020 is basically being written off on purpose to invest in health due to the pandemic. “You’re intentionally slowing down the pace of production of output, and you’re intentionally trying to tell workers to stay at home or use the unemployment insurance program as pandemic relief,” he said, adding that those are objectives during the second quarter.

That could also be called sabotage.

He estimated that the shutdown policy is costing about $25 billion per day in the U.S. To help mitigate the crisis, he noted that a solution using available technology is to have testing everywhere. “I think that would stop the crisis in its tracks,” he said, “and with these kind of numbers, there’s no reason we can’t set up a pop-up type industry that does exactly this.”

Bullard noted that testing would allow people to pinpoint where the virus is all the time, which would restore confidence. “You have to build the confidence that it’s OK to go back out and participate in the economy the way you normally would,” he said.

He likened the situation to the presence of a shark near the beach. “There’s a shark in the water, and people aren’t going to go back to the beach until you really show them a reason to believe that the shark isn’t in the water anymore,” he said

Interview:
https://voxeu.org/content/how-should-we-manage-pandemic (original link not working, set to web archived version)

On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HxSvf7VhgU

The first part of the interview includes a discussion of grants to small businesses and non-profits which was running out very quickly.

This raises the question as to what kinds of grants (and conditionalities) were given to larger businesses.

At about 15 min he says:

A lot of things you can do . . . would normally be considered way out of bounds

The surveillance discussion begins at about 13m:

. . .at these types of numbers you can start to do things that you wouldn’t have dreamed of doing to mitigate the crisis. This is costing us something on the order of 25 billion a day. . . .

. . . A simple solution I think with available technology, not waiting for a miracle to happen, . . is just to have ubiquitous testing everywhere, that you could get a test the same way you can get a cup of coffee.

I actually checked on the numbers of cups of coffee the US economy (13:33) produces every day and it’s on the right order of magnitude like several hundred million. Also eggs I checked on, there’s an egg every day for every person in the US.

So if you can produce other things like that, then what you should do is produce tests the same way. Now we wouldn’t normally think of that. That isn’t the normal thing but that is what you should do. We have (14:00) simple 15-minute tests that could be produced. And if you’re worried about it or you think you might be sick or you want to prove to someone else that you’re not sick you can just go take this test and be done with it.

I think that would stop the crisis in its tracks. And with these kind of numbers there’s no reason we can’t set up a pop up type industry that does exactly this. So one idea I’ve had is that the government could say, if you pop up a factory to produce tests, we’ll pay all your production costs and you guys can, if you can sell these tests anywhere, you can sell these tests at any price, that’s pure profit to you.

I think, if I have my economics right, that they’ll produce right up until that they get one penny for each test and then you’ll be totally satiated in tests and so I think something like that would be the right response to this because it is a little tricky for producers to think about whether they really want to produce these tests or not given that (15:01) maybe a vaccine will come out at some point and the tests will be worthless.

So I think there’s interesting economics there but that’s where we should put our energy and and with these crazy numbers and crazy costs around this really draconian response to the pandemic, there are a lot of things that you can do you would normally be considered way out of bounds but you might do them in these circumstances. . . .

. . .

(18:00) . . . combined with the testing idea which I think would stop the crisis in its tracks . . .

. . .

(18:57) There’s a shark in the water and people aren’t going to go back to the beach until you really show them a reason to believe that the shark isn’t in the water anymore and I think it’s only the testing which will allow us to pinpoint exactly where the virus is all the time everywhere. That’s the kind of thing that would restore confidence and allow us to live with the virus
until we get a vaccine or therapeutics that would get rid of this

He’s describing a form of total surveillance of human beings, and that’s the idea in the first place.

Note that the tests and their value are completely dubious (see summary below). And he points to a “vaccine” as the “solution.” When did a “vaccine” every “get rid” of any disease? We have seen the intensified focus on testing during the summer and still during the fall. When people test “positive” (because of some pieces of dead virus in their system for example)they are referred to as a “case” regardless of how mild or nonexistent their symptoms are. Because it’s a cover story to sell us totalitarian dictatorship. In a normal world, a “case” was when someone was sick and doctors only cared about treating a person who is actually sick.

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See COVID-19 Summary

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