Health Minister Hancock spoke frequently with Bill Gates in 2019, and one of their topics was “infection control”. (Gates was also “good friends” with Penny Mordaunt, the Minister of Defence.) In mid-March 2020, the South Korean method for containing COVID-19 was ditched in the UK on the day after the WHO declared a pandemic. This suited Gates because he preferred that countries invested only in vaccine, not in trace-and-test operations. It meant that Britain’s 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 a million “business deaths” between 2020 and 2022 (figures are from the ONS website.) 3. The national debt rose from £1-trillion in March 2010 to £2.5-trillion in March 2023, explained in good part by the borrowing done to create furlough. [][][][] On 12/Mar/2020, Sir Chris Whitty had said on BBC One that there were “four stages” to the pandemic response, “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 said that a team of "just under 300 staff" had been containing SARS-CoV-2 with the method borrowed from South Korea and Taiwan but, “tracing was scaled back when the UK moved to the ‘delay phase’ of tackling coronavirus in mid-March”, and testing was stopped altogether except at hospitals.) Sir Whitty did not explain why the second “stage”/”phase” had been given the name, ‘Delay’. It seems, in hindsight, that he believed that the spread of COVID-19 would be ‘delayed’ if a country-wide lockdown was imposed (an assumption which was last seen in London’s great plague of 1665.) [][][][] Sir Whitty was fleshing up his narrative to create an illusion 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 stages would not occur in any particular order: ‘Research’ and ‘Mitigate’ were activities which would occur during the Delay phase. Essentially, there had simply been a decision to stop containing the disease in the way that democratic Asians were doing it, and nation-wide lockdowns would occur while waiting for vaccine. (The first lockdown began on 23 March, made official on 25 March, and the first vaccine was provided on 8 December.) [][][][] "Health expert" Bill Gates (not qualified in biology or medicine) had done his TED Talk in 2015 about the possibility of future virus outbreaks, but he never spoke of S. Korea’s novel and effective method for containing MERS-CoV in 2015. (China failed to make a similar system work.) In January 2020, he could see that the expanded ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ strategy in S. Korea was not going to make any billionaires, but global vaccine supply was certain to do that. (Oxfam reported that at least nine vaccine billionaires were made.) He increased his influence over the WHO, by helping them when Trump had cut their funding, and he maintained his silence about the approach taken in democratic parts of East Asia. (Putting public money into containment strategies might, in small ways, have slowed the big-pharma gravy train slightly, so he preferred that people stopped talking about containment?)
Dr Xand on BBC Morning Live (11 May 2026) said he once worked for the WHO, and that the hantavirus is not like SARS-CoV-2: "Rather worry about crossing the road carefully than about catching hantavirus", he said. Early in 2020, the WHO were acting as though SARS-CoV-2 was simply another respiratory coronavirus like MERS-CoV: Halfway through January, they backed China with a tweet which relayed that there was no evidence of human-to-human infection ( busii .) Since 2012, WHO had been saying the same thing about MERS, admitting reluctantly in 2015 that H2H transmission might occur inside hospitals, "where there is close contact". In 2020, they made no comment about the difference in the case fatality rates: The chance of dying with SARS-COV-2 infection was below 3% for most people, but MERS patients had a 56% chance of dying ( nejm .) Furthermore, MERS made people feel ill quite soon after infection, causing them to retreat and be bedridden or hospitalized. Tha...