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.
Dr Xand on BBC Morning Live (11 May 2026) says he worked in the WHO and that the hantavirus is not like SARS-CoV-2: "Rather worry about crossing the road carefully than about catching hantavirus". What the WHO did in 2020 was assume that SARS-CoV-2 was practically another version of MERS-CoV: Both, they said, would transmit 'animal-to-human', not human-to-human in normal circumstances. WHO made no comment about the CFR. - If you caught SARS-COV-2, there was perhaps a 3% chance you'd die, but the people who caught MERS-CoV had a 56% chance of dying, in one study. (MERS wasn't spread at rates that raised alarms, because its victims quickly felt too ill to get around much.) WHO was more interested in pushing the animal-to-human concept than it was in telling people that COVID-19 was a super-spreader because it had such a low CFR. They also didn't read the Nature review paper which states that the symptoms of MERS would develop and be severe BEFORE the victim ...