British Health Minister Matt Hancock spoke frequently with Bill Gates in 2019, and one of their topics was “infection control”. (Gates was also “good friends” with Penny Mordaunt, Minister of Defence.) In mid-March 2020, the East Asian method for containing COVID-19 (trace-and-test, known as ‘Containment’ in Taiwan) was abandoned 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, in effect, that Britain’s government would stop trying to avoid lockdowns, which meant that 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 establish furlough for salaried workers. [][][][] On 12/03/2020, Sir Chris Whitty had said on BBC One that there were “four stages” to the pandemic response. “and the Contain 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 when, “tracing was scaled back” because “the UK moved to the ‘delay phase’ of tackling coronavirus in mid-March”, and testing was stopped except at hospitals. [][][][] Sir Whitty did not say why the alleged second “stage”/”phase” had been given the name, ‘Delay’. It seems, in hindsight, that it was believed that the spread of COVID-19 would be ‘delayed’ if a country-wide lockdown was imposed. 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 items would not occur in any particular order: “Research” and “Mitigate” were activities which would occur during the “Delay” phase. In reality, there had simply been a decision to stop containing the disease in the way that democratic East Asians were doing it, and to apply nationwide lockdowns instead while waiting for vaccine. The first UK lockdown began on 23 March and the vaccine was first provided on 8 December. [][][][] "Health expert" Bill Gates (not qualified in medicine or biology) had given his TED Talk in 2015 about the likelihood of future virus outbreaks, but he never spoke of S. Korea’s novel and effective method for containing MERS-CoV that same year. (China, a country which received constant support from the WHO, 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 big money, but global vaccine supply was certain to do that. (Oxfam reported that at least nine vaccine billionaires were made.) Gates had increased his influence over the WHO by helping them when Trump cut their funding, and he maintained his silence about the approach taken by S. Korea and Taiwan. This was the first time that a vaccine was to be developed for a respiratory coronavirus, he had made it his ‘baby’ to be in control of its global supply, and he wanted governments to prioritize its financial support. If governments put public money into containment strategies, it might, in small ways, have slowed the big-pharma gravy train slightly.
Based on a comment on Facebook in July 2026: The general populace doesn't realise which influential people decided in 2020 that, for the first time in history, a respiratory coronavirus would be met with a global vaccination response: Politico . It was going to be a funding experiment as well as a health venture. In order to safeguard its finances, most countries (all but two being WHO members) would be encouraged to focus on making ready for a vaccine program, and not encouraged to copy South Korea and Taiwan, who had gone full tilt at containing the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Simply put: Copying South Korea would have used money which Bill Gates wanted to see going to vaccine. It didn't concern him that S. Korea had seen what lockdowns for MERS-CoV did to businesses in 2015. Politico East Asian democratic countries knew that there was value in developing a vaccine this time. S. Korea knew that other G8 countries would be able to provide one at some stage. In the meantime, the...