Health Secretary Matt Hancock chatted frequently with Bill Gates in 2019. In mid-March 2020, the employment of South Korea's way 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 activities. It meant that the UK couldn’t avoid lockdowns and the economy was to be hit hard ("lowest output in 300 years", said Mr Johnson.) The national debt had reached £2.5-trillion in March 2023, in good part through borrowing to create furlough. [] [] [] On 12 March 2020, Sir Chris Whitty said on BBC One that there were four “stages” to the pandemic response. “.. and the Contain phase finishes from today”, he said. 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 said that a team of "just under 300 staff" had been containing SARS-CoV-2 with the method copied from South Korea and Taiwan, until mid-March when ‘the Delay phase’ began.) Sir Whitty did not explain why the second stage/phase was called, ‘Delay’. It seems, in hindsight, that he believed that the virus would be ‘delayed’ if a country-wide lockdown was imposed. Testing was stopped on 12 March, except at hospitals. [] [] [] Sir Whitty was obviously 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 phase finishes from today”. He didn’t explain that the Research and Mitigate phases would not occur in any particular order: They were activities which could take place at any time during the Delay phase. What it all boiled down to was that there had simply been a decision to quit the viral containment process. A national lockdown would be its substitute while waiting for vaccine to be produced. Lockdown began on 23 March (officially on the 25th) and the first vaccine was available on 8 December. [] [] [] Since 2015, self-acclaimed "health expert" Bill Gates (not qualified in biology or medicine) had ignored S. Korea’s success when they contained MERS-CoV inside hospitals. (China failed to make a similar system work.) In 2020, he could see that their ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ strategy was not going to make billionaires in the way that vaccine supply was certain to do. (Oxfam reported that at least nine became billionaires.) He increased his influence over the WHO and over global vaccine supply, and he kept silent about S. Korea’s trace-and-test. Spending on containment might have, in small ways, slowed the big-pharma gravy train a bit.
February 2026 : There is a new pandemic scare story, made possible by the same sort of informational bias that was propagated by the WHO after MERS. The bias gave China the confidence to say in 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 was only being caught by people who handled animals in the Huanan Seafood Market. The commentary below is backed with more detail in this blog. A popular misunderstanding was reinforced by what the WHO had on its website in 2020. P eople had been told that zoonotic viruses are ones which jump regularly (e.g. on a daily basis) from animals to humans. Only the rabies virus, which the WHO was describing as 'zoonotic', jumps between species regularly. It rarely infects humans nowadays, and it cannot spread fast enough to cause 'epidemic' outbreaks in any species. What the WHO should have been telling people was that respiratory coronaviruses which infect animals might have given rise to human infecting strains, i.e. a virus particle might mutate during its r...