It’s recorded that Health Secretary Matt Hancock communicated frequently with Bill Gates in 2019. In mid-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 try to avoid using lockdowns, and the economy was going to be hit very hard ("lowest output in 300 years", said Mr Johnson in Feb 2021.) The national debt had reached £2.5-trillion in March 2023, in good part through borrowing to create furlough. [] [] [] On 12 March 2020, Sir Chris Whitty said on BBC One that there were four “stages” to the pandemic response. “.. and the Contain pha’ 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 copied 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 virus would be ‘delayed’ if a country-wide lockdown was imposed. ‘Mass testing’ was stopped on 12 March, because only hospitals would be using tests henceforth. [] [] [] 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 pha’ finishes from today”. He didn’t explain that the research and mitigate phases would not occur in any particular order: They were activities which could take place at any time during the Delay phase. What it all boiled down to was that there had simply been a decision to cease containing the disease with the help of test-and-trace. Instead, national lockdowns would occur while waiting for vaccine to be produced. 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 ignored S. Korea’s success with containing MERS-CoV inside hospitals. (China failed to make a similar system work.) In 2020, he could see that Korea’s ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ strategy was not going to make billionaires in the way that 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 was coping. Spending on containment strategies might have, in small ways, slowed the big-pharma gravy train a bit. He preferred that people stopped talking about containment.
In the UK, two people from Wuhan had tested positive by January 29, but testing kits were not yet being mass-produced. The WHO was not making it obvious that the South Korean trace-and-test response was working, or that their emphasis was on speed of response ("bali bali"). After 11 March, the BBC no longer spoke about S. Korea on TV until it screened a documentary on 11 December. The ONS provided data from which it's easily calculated that 1.5 million businesses shut up shop between 2020 and 2024 (see below.) Boris Johnson had ignored the South Koreans (who were very keen to protect their economy from lockdowns) in the first two months of 2020. He and Matt Hancock (with Chris Whitty in tow) shut down the PHE's fledgling team of contact tracers when it was realized that some hospitals were seeing scary cases and high numbers of them. Whitty announced it on 12 March (the day after the WHO finally admitted there was a pandemic), and thirteen days later they put the who...