Thus, the book formally belongs to the category “solidly researched academic work”. For those short on time, at least the core section is recommended, in which the concept of multi-resilience is elaborated. At its core, the message is simple. It is: The Corona crisis is only one example among many of how our multi-connected, globalized world can slide into crisis. This time it was a virus pandemic. Soon it could be a commodity crisis, a war crisis or another form of political crisis. Our world and our societies are not sufficiently prepared for any of these crises. On the one hand, there are multiple dependencies of an economic and political nature due to an exuberant, but not well-regulated globalization, which, however, can hardly be transferred into democratic political structures due to poor regulations. The current approaches to global governance are inadequate. However, totalitarian approaches would not be suitable either. According to the authors, the observed retreats of a nationalistic nature to regional or national structures, that can be seen in the Brexit, in the anti-European attitudes of some Eastern European governments, or in the domestic opposition, do not offer a good solution either. Thus, this crisis has caught us off-guard during a half-baked globalization with poorly anchored or missing institutions to govern it. The fact that it was a viral pandemic was merely bad luck. It could have been anything. But a crisis stimulus of any kind would always have plunged us into the same dilemma: There are no structures that could master such a situation, that is global in nature, with a sufficiently democratic and efficient mandate. In this respect, the evaluation of this pandemic is actually irrelevant to the main argument, because it applies to any crisis.

Therefore, the recipe that the authors propose is multi-resilience. The concept is introduced on p. 143 as the antithesis of sustainability. While sustainability tries to avoid crises that originate from humans, the concept of resilience assumes that we cannot avoid living with crises at all:

Let’s pause here for a moment, because this is the central construct. Resilience evokes the image of a rubber ball. You can throw it anywhere, it bounces back (Lat. re-silire) and stays in shape. Resilience is thus a kind of inherent resistance to external attacks and inconveniencies. Crises, the idea goes, are inevitable in our complex world. Behaving in such a way that they do not arise in the first place is not an option. Therefore, we have to adjust social, economic, political systems as well as our personal state of mind to the fact that there will be crises and make them crisis-proof, that is, resilient. This cannot simply be left to the state; it must be done at all levels. This is an insightful idea that makes the book recommendable.

The matrix for this (p. 158) is a perspective of multi-resilience. It is basically indebted to the thoughts of some integral thinkers like Wilber and others, and distinguishes between subjective (inside) and objective (outside), micro vs. macro dimensions, resulting in a four-field scheme, each with different goals (e.g., personal vs. societal), different methods (qualitative-subjective vs. quantitative-objective). This scheme is then linked to the Panarchy Model of Adaptive Cycles and Viable Systems Model, two models of adaptation from systems and organizational theory, respectively, that lead to changes and adaptations at the respective higher level of development in recurring cycles and in each new cycle to be run.

From this then some basic principles and heuristics are derived, which are presented in 5 principles (p. 169ff.):

This model of multi-resilience is elaborated on the following pages. However, what will be found there first and foremost are enumerations of how the post-Corona world is changing. This is not much different than in Schwab, for example, who, by the way, is not cited (Schwab & Malleret, 2020): more electronic, technological developments, fault-lines between rich and poor, populist and democratic countries, the need for development within the limits of possible resources and social necessity. New developments such as an unconditional basic income, tele-health, etc. are unfolded and some other consequences of this framework are spelled out.

Perhaps one should also mention the seven policy recommendations described from pp. 267 to 290:

If one were to start from the pandemic, the entire system of the pandemic response machinery might well look very different. This small example shows us the main problem of this book: It is a collection of interesting ideas, findings and set pieces. But whether a consistent policy, let alone a consistent governance model, could be derived from it?

The first 120 pages actually consist almost exclusively of quoting and commenting on official news texts from radio, television and the Internet (BBC, AFP, agency reports, Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, etc.). The authors certainly pick solid sources. But they do not come up with the idea that the pandemic might actually begin where the corruption of the media landscape ends, although this is exactly what one must conclude when confronting the media coverage with the scientific findings. In general, quoting extraneous text, whether from media communiqués or books, takes up a lot of space. The book could have been a good 150 pages shorter if the quotations had been condensed to the most important and longish quotations had been reproduced by a good paraphrase. This copy-paste type of book writing has become rampant lately and is a bad habit stylistically.

But the fundamental problem, as I see it, is the uncritical acceptance of the mainstream narrative as factual truth, and the implicit presupposition that the main political structures are sound at their core. One would have liked to see at least some relativization in the course of self-reflexivity or at least some reflection on this position. Perhaps the comparatively early publication date of this book, which will presumably have been preceded by a relatively long period of writing and peer review, and thus the very early positioning of the work within this crisis, is an explanation for this fact.

Nevertheless, critical voices that doubted the factuality of the mainstream narrative are completely left out, such as the Great Barrington Declaration with – even then – some 700.000 signatories, Ioannidis's early analyses of the completely exaggerated Infection Fatality Rates (Axfors & Ioannidis, 2021; Ioannidis, 2020, 2021; Ioannidis, Axfors, & Contopoulos-Ioannidis, 2020), all of which were available as preprints months before final publication, as well as the critical analyses of the German Network for Evidence Based Medicine, which offered alternative views from the very beginning of the crisis (Schrappe et al., 2020; Sönnichsen, 2020; Sönnichsen, Mühlhauser, & Meyer, 2021) and solid criticism of the pandemic models that supported and justified the decisions that were available on preprint servers very early on (Kuhbandner & Homburg, 2020; Kuhbandner, Homburg, Walach, & Hockertz, 2022), such dissenting voices are left out of this text entirely. In a sense, they are dutifully assigned to the ‘fake news’ register.

If the authors had looked beyond their own horizons, they would have noticed that there is something shady about their own absolute confidence in the media coverage which feeds their view of the crisis. Formal analyses and objections to them probably did not exist at the time of writing (Frank, 2021; Meyen, 2021), but Gunther Frank, for example, had published very competent analyses on the “Achse des Guten” website very early on, which could and should have been taken note of.

Another implicit assumption that the authors make and that also underpins their concept of global governance is that our political structures, especially international ones such as the WHO and the private NGOs that support and fund them, are healthy at their core and thus capable of being expanded. There is plenty to argue about, but the authors avoid that argument. I have my doubts about the health of these structures. A vignette I recently came across illustrates this. In about 2004, Catholic bishops in Kenya voiced accusations that a WHO vaccination campaign in Africa used tetanus vaccines that contained conjugated human choriogenic gonadotropin (hCG) and were thus a sterility and abortion program in disguise. hCG is a hormone normally released at a low dose level by the corpus luteum and later by the placenta that maintains pregnancy. When conjugated with a tetanus toxin, it causes an autoimmune reaction that can be fatal to the fetus or prevents implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus. While tetanus vaccines are given at annual, and later at three- and four-year intervals, this vaccination campaign, in a completely atypical manner, used a series of 6-month intervals over several years. While tetanus campaigns are targeted to all people, men and women alike, especially younger ones, only women of childbearing age between 16 and 49 were targeted in this case.

A careful study by American scientists who reviewed the international literature on the subject, considered the WHO-prescribed vaccination schedule and examined the relevant vaccination batches in the laboratory, confirmed the suspicion (Oller et al., 2017). This means that the WHO either deliberately violated basic medical ethical norms and, for example, inadequately informed the vaccination candidates about the goal of the undertaking. Or it became a victim itself and an NGO associated with it or financing it, such as the GAVI vaccination alliance, conducted a human experiment in disguise through it. Neither of these things reflects well on this international organization, which is, after all, currently becoming the hub of global governance in the health sector and will then, if the current changes toward global decision-making power actually fall, have far-reaching powers to influence national and local legislation and emergency regulations in the health sector (https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/jeremy-farrar-who-chief-scientist/ accessed Feb. 1, 2023).

In essence, the concept of multi-resilience that the authors develop could be offered as a reasonable solution strategy even if one assumes that the mainstream narrative is false and that international systems are corrupt. In that case, one would, however, probably have to include a few additional points into the concept than those mentioned in the book.

Resilience is the new magic word. If we all become like rubber balls, nothing can happen to us. For social systems, the rubber ball version is a bit more complex – this book shows that beautifully. But it is not impossible. A little more awareness of this, please, a little more political education, a little more good will on everyone's part, and then as many pandemics as there are can befall us and we will emerge stronger, as if from a rejuvenating bath.

But what if the pandemics are not a necessity at all? What if things could be different? What if we had to think, act and manage differently at the very top? If perhaps the pandemics arise because no media writer or social scientist wants to get their fingers dirty by calling the problem by its name: Gain-of-function research undertaken by the military, supported by billions of public dollars (Hatfill, 2022; Lipsitch & Inglesby, 2014; Quay, Rahalkar, Jones, & Bahulikar, 2021; Wiesendanger, 2021; Pandolfo 2023)?

If so, resilience development is nothing more than the political silly-billy version of the social scientist who is either blind to the real problems or too cowardly to look and state the case clearly. In fact, it outsources responsibility from systems, organizations and political decision-makers to the subjective and private (Meyen, Karidi, Hartmann, Weiß, & Högl, 2017).

What if pandemics are disguised methods of warfare on the one hand and disguised methods of political intervention without democratic legitimacy on the other? Fake-news research by so-called fact-checking portals sponsored by governments or NGOs that want to see their respective policies washed clean can no longer convince me that what is written in a newspaper or circulated in a TV program is factually correct, since I myself became the object of such research, in which an equestrian reporter dismissed our study as scientifically not credible, which was quite differently seen by independent and competent peer reviewers (Walach et al., 2022; Walach et al., 2021).

These issues are far from trivial. It would be unfair to demand everything from a book, a good, competent overview of social science issues and a competent assessment of medical issues that require one's own judgment about the factual accuracy of media coverage. That is exactly what would have been necessary here. For, in essence, the question of how to evaluate media coverage of the Covid-pandemic determines what prescriptions one might suggest for dealing with a crisis in the future. This book chooses to believe the mainstream narrative and follows a consistent path. This is well-reasoned and thought out, and for those who share these premises, it is also a solid guide. It will get you into future policy commissions and expert councils.

But it's a bit like Venice: The foundations rest in the swamp. If the water rises, the city sinks. I think that danger is looming here. There is actually an abyss opening up: Trust in the factual accuracy of media reporting and in the reliability of institutions is the basis of all further options for action and decision-making. In this book, media reality is taken at face value. When one can't do that anymore, what happens then? Then even 400 pages of clever analysis won't help.