Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future. —George Orwell
By Juan Carlos Sosa Azpúrua
There was a moment, between March 2020 and the end of 2022, when the entire planet turned into an experiment and we, its inhabitants, into laboratory rats. It was an instant in human history when the whole world stopped distinguishing between reality and narrative. The Earth lived through a real health crisis that transformed, with surprising speed, into a large-scale social experiment. It was not a deliberate laboratory with human rats, but it was a period in which governments, health institutions, media outlets, and technology companies built and sustained a shared reality of permanent exceptionality. That artificial reality, with its rules, its culprits, its heroes, and its heretics, was accepted by billions of people.
The vaccine significantly reduced hospitalizations and deaths during the main waves. Studies published in The Lancet estimate that, in the first year of rollout alone, between fourteen and twenty million deaths were prevented worldwide. In the United States, a Commonwealth Fund analysis calculated more than three million deaths avoided through the end of 2022. At the same time, real adverse effects were documented: myocarditis and pericarditis, especially in young men after the second dose of mRNA vaccines, with rates that in some groups reached dozens of cases per 100,000 or per million doses. Most of these cases were mild, but they existed.
Acknowledging both facts, population-level benefit and individual risk, is the minimum condition for intellectual honesty. Denying one or the other turns science into propaganda. The Anthony Fauci emails released under FOIA revealed internal debates over the virus’s possible origin, funding for gain-of-function research, and shifting positions on mask use. They do not constitute a «secret diary» of a master conspiracy, but they do show opacity, inconsistencies, and the distance between public discourse and the private conversations of those who held enormous power.
There is no need to exaggerate the data or invent figures to sustain this thesis: it is enough to look at the architecture of power assembled in those months. Governments that ruled by emergency decree, entire populations confined without prior parliamentary debate, borders closed, bodies demanded as a passport to citizenship, medical dissent silenced not through rebuttal but through direct censorship on the very platforms that control public conversation. This did not happen during a war, nor under a military dictatorship. It happened while humanity assured itself it was living through the freest era in its entire history.
Between 2020 and 2022 the world witnessed the greatest experiment in intellectual uniformity that Western civilization had known since the Second World War. Billions of people began repeating the same phrases, using the same language, accepting the same premises, consuming the same news, and morally condemning anyone who strayed even a few inches from official orthodoxy. The literary analogies imposed themselves almost on their own.
George Orwell did not imagine a world like this by accident. Orwell saw it coming because he understood how power works.
In 1984, the «Ministry of Truth» does not merely fabricate false news: it constructs reality. The function of the State is not only to forbid but to decide what exists, what may be said, what may be thought, what deserves to be remembered and what must disappear forever.
Orwell described a world in which control over language and historical memory allowed the present to be rewritten. He saw it with surgical precision: power does not need you to believe a particular lie; it needs you to accept that truth is whatever power says it is, today, and that tomorrow it may say the opposite without that shift striking you as strange.
The infection count, the usefulness of the mask, the duration of immunity, the origin of the virus: all of it was, at some point in the process, unquestionable official truth, and then, without ceremony or apology, stopped being so. That is the «Ministry of Truth» operating in real time, with the difference that Orwell imagined a single Orwellian superpower, while what we lived through was an almost choreographed synchrony among governments of opposing political systems, media outlets of different editorial lineages, and technology platforms that are supposedly competitors.
In Animal Farm, Orwell showed how principles of equality corrupt themselves when an elite declares itself more equal than the rest. During the pandemic we witnessed an equivalent mutation: the discourse moved from «the vaccine protects you» to «the vaccine protects you and others,» and, in the end: «whoever does not get vaccinated is a social threat who must lose their job, their freedom of movement, and their place in the community.» The commandment was rewritten on the fly, and those who had memorized its earlier version were accused of not knowing how to read.
For his part, in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury imagined a society that burns books not so much out of hatred for knowledge as out of fear of the discomfort that dissenting thought produces. During the pandemic, the label «disinformation» functioned in many countries as a mechanism of exclusion: ideas that questioned mandates, the efficacy of certain measures, or institutional transparency were silenced or stigmatized on digital platforms and in traditional media. It was not literal Orwellian dictatorship, but it was a rehearsal of narrative control justified in the name of the collective good.
The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, and later Marcuse, among others) had already warned that modern control did not run through ownership of the means of production, as Marx and Engels thought, but through the culture industry: advertising, entertainment, and mass media. They understood that advanced societies discipline themselves through the manufacture of consensus and of desire. Adorno and Horkheimer put it bluntly in their concept of the «culture industry»: mass entertainment is not a neutral space of leisure, it is an apparatus for standardizing consciousness that produces docile, predictable subjects, seamlessly integrated into the system that entertains them. Marcuse went further in One-Dimensional Man: advanced society does not need to repress dissent with violence when it can instead absorb it, turn it into a commodity, and neutralize it through saturation.
What these thinkers understood, decades before Netflix, Twitter, or a recommendation algorithm existed, is that whoever controls the narrative controls perceived reality, and whoever controls perceived reality no longer needs to control the factory: the factory follows along, docile, because its workers and its consumers share the same manufactured consciousness.
During the pandemic we saw that mechanism operate with an efficiency that even the Frankfurt thinkers themselves, pessimists as they were, would not have anticipated: a single narrative, sustained by governments, media, and technology platforms, capable of defining in real time what was thinkable and what was not. In 2020–2022 that culture industry accelerated: series, news, videos, and institutional campaigns reinforced a single plot of mandatory solidarity and existential risk. Those who departed from it were not merely criticized; in many cases they were treated as sanitary or moral threats.
In the pandemic years we witnessed something extraordinary. It was not enough to accept certain health policies. We also had to accept a particular moral interpretation of reality. Whoever disagreed was not simply mistaken, but a public danger, an enemy of science, irresponsible, selfish, a «conspiracy nut,» a moral pariah. Orwell called this mechanism doublethink: the capacity to hold two incompatible ideas and believe both simultaneously because power demands it.
This is not to deny that the virus existed or that it posed a real risk, it did, and we paid for it with lives. It is something else, and more troubling: the observation that a genuine health crisis was instrumentalized as the perfect occasion to rehearse, on a planetary scale, mechanisms of social control that in any other context would have been unthinkable. As though humanity, without knowing it, had agreed to enter Skinner’s cage and call it «the new normal.»
Every crisis is also an opportunity for ideological acceleration, and this was no exception. During lockdown, with audiences held captive in front of screens as never before in history, streaming platforms and major media pushed a particular cultural and identity agenda with special intensity, one that, under normal circumstances, would have met more resistance and more public debate. I am not passing judgment here on the content of that agenda itself, which belongs to the legitimate sphere of plural ideological debate, but on the method: the forced confinement, the absence of entertainment alternatives, and the collective emotional vulnerability were exploited to normalize, without open discussion, certain frameworks of thought. It is precisely the mechanism Huxley feared more than Orwell himself: not the violent imposition of a truth, but the constant seduction toward one that is no longer questioned because it arrives wrapped in entertainment.
Here I will be precise, because precision is what distinguishes a solid argument from mere indignation: the mRNA vaccines developed against Covid-19 did meet, in the technical and regulatory sense, the definition of a vaccine, and the evidence accumulated across multiple countries shows a real reduction in mortality and severe hospitalization, particularly among at-risk populations. That is not negotiable if we want the argument to withstand scrutiny.
What is questionable, and here lies the real scandal, is something else: the speed with which an emergency authorization, conceived for limited and reversible use, became a de facto universal mandate; the disproportion between the certainty with which efficacy against transmission was sold and how quickly that promise dissolved in the face of new variants; and, above all, the coercion. A citizen who loses their job, their right to travel, or their place in social life for refusing a medical procedure is being deprived of something that no modern code of medical ethics, beginning with the Nuremberg Code itself, born to prevent forced experimentation on human beings, considers acceptable. There is no need to exaggerate anything here: the mandate itself, as an instrument, is already the dystopia.
Bradbury did not imagine firemen who burn books because a tyrant orders it with explicit violence; he imagined something subtler and more frightening: a society that itself asks for what makes it uncomfortable to be burned, because it has learned to prefer narcotized comfort over the friction of thought. During the pandemic, the «book burning» took the form of channel demonetization, of «disinformation» labels applied to doctors with serious credentials who dissented from the official narrative, of algorithms that decided which questions it was legitimate to ask.
The case of Novak Djokovic is, in this sense, paradigmatic and needs no interpretation: the best tennis player in the world was deported from Australia in January 2022 and excluded from the Australian Open for refusing to be vaccinated, in an episode that combined judicial decision, political pressure, and international media mockery. One need not agree with his personal decision to recognize what the case illustrates: that autonomy over one’s own body ceased, during that period, to be a right and became a privilege conditioned on obedience.
I myself paid a price for upholding that same autonomy, albeit on a modest scale compared to Djokovic’s: I refused to get vaccinated and, as a direct consequence, could not board a plane to attend my nephew’s wedding. I do not relate this seeking sympathy, but because it is the kind of loss that statistics never record: it appears in no epidemiological report, it is not news, it generates no collective outrage. It is a human life, a relationship, a ritual, an affection, sacrificed on the altar of a policy that demanded conformity before informed consent. Multiply that loss by millions of similar stories around the world, and one begins to sense the real human cost of an era that congratulated itself on «saving lives» without ever counting the lives, not in the biological sense, but in the biographical one, that were cut short along the way.
Epidemics have always existed. What was new here was something else. For the first time in history, all of humanity consumed the same information simultaneously: images, graphs, figures, experts, phrases, and slogans. Never before had technological infrastructure allowed such emotional synchronization of the planet. Algorithms amplified one narrative while social networks punished another. Traditional media repeated the same headlines and governments issued identical messages. The great digital platforms determined what could circulate and what had to disappear. There was no need to censor a book; it was enough to reduce its reach.
There was no need to imprison a dissident; it was enough to expel him from public conversation. In Fahrenheit 451 the firemen no longer put out fires, they burned books. But the unsettling thing was not really the fire, it was that the population came to desire that censorship. Perfect obedience never needs much violence: it is enough to manufacture conformity.
Every literary dystopia has a beneficiary. In 1984 it is the Party; in Huxley’s Brave New World, which in many ways anticipated better than Orwell the control exercised through pleasure and consumption rather than terror, it is the «World Controllers.» In the real pandemic, the beneficiaries had names and public balance sheets. The pharmaceutical companies that produced the Covid-19 vaccines earned extraordinary profits, under contracts with States that in many cases included indemnity clauses shifting the legal risk onto the public treasury rather than the manufacturer. According to a SOMO report, Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, and Sinovac generated some ninety billion dollars in net profits related to Covid-19 products in 2021 and 2022. In 2022, Comirnaty alone brought Pfizer more than thirty-seven billion dollars in revenue.
These numbers do not prove a conspiracy, but they do reveal a very powerful system of incentives: accelerated research, advance-purchase contracts, legal indemnities, and demand guaranteed by the State. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of ordinary businesses, especially those based on physical contact: restaurants, bookstores, workshops, family businesses, tourism, personal services, which constitute the real economic fabric of any society, experienced mass closures or drastic reductions in activity. In the United States, the number of active small-business owners fell 22% (3.3 million) between February and April of 2020.
At the same time, the big technology companies, Amazon (a 40% rise in sales), Zoom, Google, Meta, and other remote-work and e-commerce platforms, captured the demand forced by lockdowns, absorbed that displaced consumption, and emerged from the pandemic with stock valuations and market shares that no normal competition would have allowed them to reach in so short a time.
The pandemic did not create these asymmetries, but it magnified them. It was not a conspiracy in the sense of a secret meeting with a written plan; it was something simpler and still more troubling: a structure of incentives that guaranteed that, whatever the virus did, certain actors would emerge stronger and others, systematically, would be destroyed. That is the kind of asymmetry no conspiracy theory needs to invent, because it sits in the balance sheet, in plain view.
Perhaps the great lesson of those years is not medical but philosophical, because freedom never disappears all at once. First we accept that others should think for us, and then that others should decide what information deserves to be known. Then we accept that others define language, and in the end we accept that others determine what we must remember and what we must forget.
And here I arrive at the philosophical core that has occupied me on another terrain, the literary one, and which the pandemic illuminated in a way I did not anticipate when I wrote my book La libertad individual y don Quijote de la Mancha. Alonso Quijano was not «mad»; rather, out of a library of chivalric novels, he built an alternative reality to carry out an existential game that let him feel life fully, coherent from the inside, and he inhabited it with a conviction so complete that it became his operative truth.
What is remarkable about Don Quixote is not that he is «wrong» about the windmills. It is that within his story, every element of external reality is reinterpreted to confirm that story, never to refute it. I wrote that Don Quixote is perhaps the finest reflection ever written on the human capacity to manufacture realities. We do not see the world: we see interpretations of it.
We live inside stories and fight for fictions. We love fictions and hate them. We die for fictions. The knight of La Mancha wanted to see giants where there were windmills. Cervantes forces us to ask an uncomfortable question. Who decides what things are windmills? Every society builds consensus, civilization manufactures narratives, and cultures need mythologies. The difference between freedom and servitude lies in retaining the capacity to question them. During the pandemic years that faculty seemed to vanish. There was not only a pandemic, but a mandatory narrative about that pandemic. And the two things are not the same.
Billions of human beings accepted a constructed reality, partly true and partly exaggerated, in some cases false, with the same conviction with which Don Quixote insisted that windmills were giants. And whoever tried to point out the gap between the narrative and the facts was not treated like Sancho Panza, with patience and affection, but as a heretic, as a public enemy, as a kind of epidemiological threat on two legs.
The difference between Alonso Quijano’s individual stance and the «collective madness» of the pandemic is that the first moves us, because we recognize in it the endearing position of a lone man against the world, while the second reveals how easily billions of people can, simultaneously and with no apparent coordination, accept the same fiction as indisputable reality. This, to my mind, is the deepest and most uncomfortable lesson of these years: the reality we call «objective» is, to a far greater degree than we are willing to admit, a narrative construction sustained by the consensus of those who repeat it.
No chip is needed, no Matrix-style digital simulation, to live inside an artificial reality: it is enough for the media that manufacture the narrative to control the channels of distribution, and enough for us to prefer the comfort of that shared narrative over the solitary effort of verifying things for ourselves.
If anything should remain from this reflection, it is not a new certainty. To replace one dogma with another would repeat the very error I am trying to highlight. We must cultivate a discipline: that of one’s own judgment, sown with patience, with serious reading, with the will to hold on to an uncomfortable question even when doing so costs a job, a plane ticket, a tennis tournament, or social applause.
The world between 2020 and 2022 was, in a literal and not merely metaphorical sense, a laboratory, and all of us were, to varying degrees, its rats. The only vaccine that can protect us from some future Dr. Fauci, some future government, or some future corporation repeating the experiment is not manufactured in a pharmaceutical laboratory: it is manufactured in critical reading, in historical memory, in the habit of asking who benefits from my believing this. That, and nothing else, is the individual freedom truly worth defending.
I want to insist on something: it would be a mistake to turn these pages into a verdict on Anthony Fauci. Individuals pass; structures remain. What is unsettling is not that an official can be wrong, can retract, or can be criticized. What is worrying is a political culture that turns certain figures into unquestionable authorities during a crisis while, at the same time, swiftly marginalizing or discrediting dissent. In the years since, various decisions, official communications, and conflicts of interest related to the management of the pandemic have been the subject of investigations, public debate, and historical review. That process of review is characteristic of open societies and recalls the importance of critically examining the conduct of institutions.
We do not need another Dr. Fauci. It is enough to have another system willing to replace thought with obedience. No secret police will even be necessary anymore, because the «Ministry of Truth» now lives inside us. History shows that the greatest enemy of freedom is not always the tyrant. It is often the citizen who gives up his will to exercise his own judgment. That is why the true vaccine against any future form of manipulation is not manufactured in a laboratory, but in education, in reading, in the study of philosophy, in history, and in the cultivation of independent judgment.
Because a person who learns to think for himself may be wrong, but it will be hard for others to manufacture his reality for him. And as long as there are citizens capable of distinguishing between facts, interpretations, and propaganda, no «Ministry of Truth», whether political, technological, economic, or media, will be able to turn the human being into a mere laboratory rat.
It is likely that this is the most lasting lesson of the pandemic years: not that fear can change the world, but that a society which stops exercising critical judgment risks handing over its freedom without noticing. The most solid defense against any future abuse does not consist in accepting or rejecting a narrative out of ideological affinity, but in preserving the capacity to examine evidence, question power, whatever power it may be, and recognize that the freedom to think is the first requirement for remaining human.
The deepest lesson is not that there was a single plot directed by a handful of villains. It is that fear, combined with institutional power and the culture industry, can produce an operative reality so convincing that millions live it as the only possible one. In that context, one’s own judgment becomes the only lasting antidote. To study, to cross-check primary sources, to tolerate uncertainty, and to resist both the absolute official narrative and the absolute conspiratorial counter-narrative, that is the work of adult freedom. Only developed critical judgment protects against becoming, in future crises, raw material for new experiments in control, sanitary, economic, or political, led by future officials, companies, or coalitions of power that will, as always, claim to be acting «for our own good.»
Individual freedom is not a slogan. It consists in the capacity to keep the question open when everyone around us seems to have already closed the book.
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