Britain's Health Minister Matt Hancock spoke frequently with Bill Gates in 2019, and a favorite topic of theirs was “infection control”. (Gates was also “good friends” with Penny Mordaunt, Minister of Defence.) In mid-March 2020, the East Asian trace-and-test method for containing SARS-CoV-2 (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 in vaccine only, 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 March 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. Gov.uk had it in black and white the next day without adding any detail: Britain was simply “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 then “tracing was scaled back” because “the UK moved to the ‘delay phase’ of tackling coronavirus in mid-March”. At the same time, testing for the virus was stopped except at hospitals. [][][][] Sir Whitty did not say why the alleged ‘second stage’ had been given the name, Delay. It seems, in hindsight, that he believed the spread of COVID-19 would be ‘delayed’ if a country-wide lockdown was imposed. Whitty had been 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 phases would not occur in any particular order: “Research” and “Mitigate” were activities which would happen 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. Nationwide lockdowns were to be used instead while waiting for vaccine. The first lockdown began on 23 March and vaccine was first available on 8 December. [][][][] "Health expert" Bill Gates (not qualified in medicine or biology) had given his long TED Talk in 2015 about the likelihood of future virus outbreaks. 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 for investors. In fact, the Koreans were discouraging companies from making profits out of the situation. However, global vaccine supply was certain to make some people rich. (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 its global promotion his ‘baby’, and he wanted governments to prioritize its financial support: He didn’t want them to use public money on containment strategies. (Spending on containment might, in small ways, have slowed the big-pharma gravy train slightly.)
Based on a comment on Facebook in July 2026: It's not widely appreciated 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, and in order to safeguard the vaccine finances, most countries (all but two being WHO members) would not be encouraged to copy the East Asian countries which had immediately begun the work of containing the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Simply put: Copying South Korea, Taiwan or Indonesia would have required funding which Bill Gates wanted to see going to vaccine. It didn't concern him that S. Korea had experienced 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, they worked h...