Health Secretary Matt Hancock communicated with Bill Gates on several occasions 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. (Economic output dropped to its "lowest in 300 years", said Boris Johnson in February 2021. A million businesses were dissolved between 2020 and 2023.) 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 and that, “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. From 12 March on, he said, COVID-19 testing would only occur in hospitals. [] [] [] 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. What it boiled down to was that 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 expanded ‘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 kept silent about how well S. Korea and Taiwan were coping. Spending on containment strategies might have, in small ways, 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 January 29, but testing kits were not being mass-produced yet. The WHO was not making it obvious that South Korea's trace-and-test response was proving effective, or that the emphasis there was on speed of response ("bali bali" was their motto.) After 11 March, BBC television no longer provided information, or hosted anyone talking, about S. Korea until 11 December when the first of two in-depth documentaries was screened. In December 2021, Britain's ONS provided data from which it's easily calculated that 650,055 businesses had folded in less than two years ( onsgov .) Boris Johnson had ignored the S. Koreans in the first two months of 2020, who were very keen to avoid subjecting their economy to lockdowns (of which they'd had experience in 2015.) By March, Public Health England had assembled a team of "about 300" contact tracers, but they were stood down when it was ...