Health Minister Hancock chatted frequently with Bill Gates in 2019. Gates was also “good friends” with the Minister of Defence. A favorite topic was “infection control”. In March 2020, South Korea's method for containing COVID-19 was ditched in the UK. This suited Gates because he preferred that countries invest 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", said 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 was £1-trillion in March 2010 but it was £2.5-trillion in March 2023, explained in good part by the borrowing done to create furlough. [] [] [] On 12/Mar/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 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 but, “tracing was scaled back when the UK moved to the delay phase of tackling coronavirus in mid-March” (testing was stopped altogether except at hospitals.) 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. [] [] [] Sir Whitty was fleshing up his 12/03 announcement 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 ‘phases’ would not occur in any particular order: ‘Research’ and ‘Mitigate’ would both occur during the Delay phase. 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 made available on 8 December. [] [] [] Self-described "health expert" Bill Gates (not qualified in biology or medicine) had never spoken of S. Korea’s success with the containment of MERS-CoV in 2015. China failed to make a similar system work. In January 2020. Gates 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 so. (Oxfam reported that at least nine vaccine billionaires were made.) He increased his influence over the WHO (by helping them when Trump cut their funding) and over global vaccine supply, and he maintained his silence about S. Korea and Taiwan. (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 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", he said. In 2020, the WHO were assuming that SARS-CoV-2 was practically another version of MERS-CoV: They let China say that the novel coronavirus, like MERS-CoV, seemed to transmit from animal to human, not human-to-human. 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 faced a 56% chance of dying, in one study. (MERS wasn't spread geographically at rates that raised alarms, because its victims quickly felt too ill to get around much. It wasn't a matter of weak human-to-human infectivity. ) WHO were more interested in pushing the animal-to-human concept than they were in telling people that COVID-19 was a fast spreader because it had a low CFR. They also didn't read the 20...