Few people realize that Health MP Matt Hancock communicated with Bill Gates frequently in 2019. One of the things they’d talk about was “infection control”. In March 2020, South Korea's way of containing COVID-19 was abandoned in the UK. This suited Gates because he wanted countries to invest only in vaccine, not in trace-and-test operations. It meant that the UK government would no longer be trying to avoid lockdowns, and the economy was going to be hit very hard: 1. Economic output dropped to its "lowest in 300 years", quoting Boris Johnson in February 2021. 2. There were approximately a million “business deaths” between 2020 and 2022 (figures are from the ONS.) 3. The national debt had climbed from £1.0-trillion in 2010 to £2.5-trillion in 2023, explained in good part by the borrowing done to create furlough. [] [] [] On 12 March 2020, Sir Chris Whitty said on BBC One that there were “four stages” to the pandemic response. Then, he said, “and the Contain (phase) finishes from today”. The next day, gov.uk had it in black and white without adding any detail: Britain was “moving out of the Contain phase and into Delay". A PHE boss later explained that a team of "just under 300 staff" had been containing SARS-CoV-2 with the method borrowed from South Korea and Taiwan, until mid-March when the Delay phase began. Sir Whitty did not explain why the second stage/phase was referred to as ‘Delay’. It seems in hindsight that he believed that the spread of coronavirus would be ‘delayed’ if a country-wide lockdown was imposed. He said that COVID-19 testing would only occur in hospitals from 12 March onward. [] [] [] Sir Whitty was fleshing up his narrative to create an impression of detail when he said, “As we’ve always said, from the beginning, there were four stages to this: Contain, Delay, Research and Mitigate, and the Contain ’ finishes from today”. He didn’t mention that the third and fourth ‘phases’ would not occur in any particular order: ‘Research’ and ‘Mitigate’ were activities which could occur at any time during the Delay phase. In reality, there had simply been a decision to stop containing the disease in the way that the democratic Asians were doing it. Instead, big lockdowns would occur while waiting for vaccine. (The first lockdown began on 23 March, made official on 25 March, and the first vaccine was available on 8 December.) [] [] [] Since 2015, self-acclaimed "health expert" Bill Gates (not qualified in biology or medicine) had never mentioned S. Korea’s success with containing MERS-CoV inside hospitals. China failed to make a similar system work. In 2020, Gates could see that the big ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ strategy in S. Korea was not going to make billionaires in the way that global vaccine supply was certain to do. (Oxfam reported that at least nine vaccine billionaires were made.) He increased his influence over the WHO and over global vaccine supply, and he maintained his silence about how well S. Korea and Taiwan were containing COVID-19. Spending on containment strategies might, in small ways, have slowed the big-pharma gravy train a bit, so he preferred that people stopped talking about containment.
In the UK, two people visiting from Wuhan had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 on 29 January. Testing kits were not being mass-produced yet, so contact tracing didn't begin for some time: There's no online record of when it began, there are only items which state that it was stopped on 12 March, e.g. youtu . The WHO was not making statements about South Korea's trace-and-test response, or that the emphasis there was on speed of response ("bali bali".) On 12 March, BBC television stopped talking about S. Korea altogether. Its success story was held back until 11 December when the first of two in-depth BBC documentaries was screened. It's important to note that the second system mentioned above, "NHS Test and Trace", was very limited in scope: It only recorded visits that people made to caf é s, pubs and restaurants, and it only sent text messages to any such people if they'd been in such venues when a known COVID-19 case had been in one at the sam...