By the way, why did the media downplay the issue when COVID first appeared? If all of this was planned then why didn't they immediately push the narrative that they have now?

I've seen other users mention this before, but here's an excellent post from Keith Woods' Telegram:

I don't think the entire crisis was planned but the establishment has since taken a ridiculously disproportionate response and is obviously using it to extend technocratic control of peoples. Additionally, the vaccines do not prevent the spread and the mandates are totally unjustified. I also think it's obvious the adverse reactions are more numerous than reported and there's reason to be concerned about as yet unknown long term effects.

However, I have since gotten some pushback for not affirming the "hard" version of the covid conspiracy, i.e. that the entire thing, from the manufacture of the virus to the vaccine rollout, was planned years in advance, with a public conference called Event 201, and the vaccines are intended to sterilise or kill their recipients. Some say it is effectively supporting the Great Reset to not promote this conspiracy - apparently it's not good enough to oppose vaccine mandates simply because they're wrong and unjustified, you have to claim that the vaccines contain razor blades, testicle destroying nanobots, 5G activated explosives, or microscopic octopuses (just some of claims I have seen in the past few weeks). If anything, jumping on every claim like this does more to discredit opposition to the tyrannical covid response than anything, because if your theory is so incredible people have reason to doubt your other claims. But is it credible? Well let's look at the "costs" of believing the hard version of the conspiracy. If you affirm it you are affirming that:

1. This was meticulously planned years in advance, involving thousands of people, yet no one leaked the plans or became a whistleblower since.
2. It was kept top secret, but for some reason they made the event planning it public. All the hundreds of other elite wargames scenarios which have not yet come to fruition apparently were not conspiracies to telegraph a planned event (though I'm sure if a solar flare hits the earth in the next ten years the same people will be pointing to Pentagon wargames of that scenario from the 2010s as proof it was a false flag.)
3. Every country in the world was in on it, no country like Iran or Russia decided to go renegade and expose the globalist technocracy and discredit the entire western establishment by showing it was a manufactured crisis.
4. The virus was just a setup to roll out the vaccine to transmit the gene editing, the question then is why not just use the manufactured virus to do so? The Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses an adenovirus to deliver a genetic payload. The typical response to this is that putting it in a virus would effect everyone including the elite, so they needed a vaccine to be selective. This takes us to the next problem:
5. The vaccines are intended to sterilise/kill people, yet liberals, leftists, elites, and Jews are taking it more than anyone. Israel are on their fourth booster. Apparently the covid skeptics will inherit the earth as they'll be the only ones left with functioning reproductive systems. The response to this has often been that Gates, Biden and Israel are receiving placebo shots, so therefore:
6. Not only was there no whistleblower on the planning, but the list of conspirators is now extended to the thousands of workers involved in manufacturing and distributing the placebo shots, and the tens of thousands of people with inside knowledge of the existence of placebo shots. Amazingly, there has been no leaks or whistleblowers from any of these conspirators, and they have managed the mammoth logistical task of ensuring the right people get the placebos.

I don't get into this much because unfortunately it's impossible to have a thoughtful discussion about this anymore and people on both sides try to turn it into an endless civil war and a litmus test for who's pro-white. Anyway, the bottom line is regardless of the origins the tyrannical overreach in response is still unjustified.

These are great points and I wonder what the "plandemic" side of the debate has to counter them?