Across the world, the response to Covid looked strangely alike: the same lockdowns, the same shuttered schools and businesses, the same insistence that there was only one responsible course and that to question it was to put lives at risk. Country after country moved in near lockstep.
To me, that uniformity remains one of the most troubling features of those years. Measures so similar, so sweeping, and adopted so quickly are difficult to explain as dozens of governments independently reach the same conclusion. Whatever the truth behind that coordination, the Covid era cannot be understood one nation at a time. What was done to people’s freedoms — and how each country now chooses to examine it, or to look away — concerns us all. What follows is one country’s reckoning.
From a distance, the Netherlands can look like an open society settling its accounts with the pandemic.
A civil case is moving through the court in Leeuwarden. Seven citizens — one of whom has died since the case began — are suing seventeen defendants for harm they attribute to the mRNA Covid shots. The defendants are not minor figures: the former prime minister, Mark Rutte; the former health minister, Hugo de Jonge; Marion Koopmans, the virologist who sat on the team of experts advising the cabinet; Jaap van Dissel, who as head of infectious-disease control at the national health institute chaired that team — the Outbreak Management Team (OMT), which steered the country’s Covid response from January 2020 until 2022 — and was the public face of the lockdown advice; the chief executive of Pfizer, Albert Bourla; and Bill Gates. Gates argued that a Dutch court had no business judging him. The court disagreed and kept the case.1 It continues, slowly.
To a foreign reader, that reads as a country with room to ask hard questions.
It is worth pausing on what became of the man who brought the case. Arno van Kessel, one of the two lawyers behind it, spent 260 days in pre-trial detention. He was arrested in June 2025 — the day after he filed papers in the case — in an investigation into a network of self-described “sovereigns,” people who reject the authority of the state. To my mind the label sits oddly on him: his whole method was the courtroom. He is a lawyer who took the government to court, not a man who denies that courts have power over anyone. No criminal court has convicted him of anything; he remains a suspect, and a suspect only. In late February 2026 the judges suspended his detention, in part because the prosecution’s case was moving so slowly.2 By then he had been struck from the bar and could no longer stand beside his own clients. And so the lawyer who had brought that suit against Rutte, De Jonge, Koopmans, and Gates had himself been shut out of the courtroom.
Then, on 29 May 2026, the inquiry into the Corona policy opened its public hearings. And a similar picture appears.
Hellbound and Down 