Health Minister Hancock spoke frequently with Bill Gates in 2019. One of their topics was “infection control”. (Gates was also “good friends” with the Minister of Defence, and popular with other Tory MPs.) In March 2020, South Korea's method for containing COVID-19 was ditched in the UK. 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”, 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 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 named, ‘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 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’ 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 never spoken of S. Korea’s success with containing 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 exactly that. (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 the approach taken in 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. Early in 2020, the WHO were acting as though SARS-CoV-2 was, in essence, another coronavirus like MERS-CoV: They backed China with a tweet which said there was no sign that SARS-CoV-2 would spread human-to-human. Even when 'H2H transmission' was acknowledged by the WHO, they made no comment about the Case Fatality Rate: Infection with SARS-COV-2 brought a 3% chance of dying, but MERS patients had a 56% chance ( nejm .) Furthermore, MERS wasn't spread at frightening rates and that was because its victims felt ill quickly and were soon bedridden/hospitalized. MERS clearly did have human-to-human infectivity, but the WHO were intent on pushing a suspicion of animal-to-human transmission. They weren't helping people to understand that the low CFR of COVI...