On 12 March 2020, Sir Chris Whitty said on BBC One that there were four stages to Britain’s pandemic response, “..and the Contain phase finishes from today”. Britain was “moving out of the Contain phase and into Delay" (quoting gov.uk). 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. (However, Whitty did not explain the use of the name ‘Delay’, i.e. that government believed that the virus would be ‘delayed’ if they imposed a country-wide lockdown.) Testing would stop immediately, except at hospitals to detect who was infected. ~~ Whitty was obviously 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”. (He didn’t mention that the Research and Mitigate phases would not occur in any particular order. They were activities which could take place at any time during Delay.) In reality, there had simply been a decision to quit achieving containment and to lock down instead while waiting for vaccine to be produced. Lockdown began on 23 March and the first vaccine doses were available 37 weeks later. ~~ Since 2015, self-acclaimed "health expert" Bill Gates had ignored S. Korea’s success with a containment method for MERS-CoV. (China failed to make a similar system work.) In 2020, the ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ strategy in S. Korea was not going to make billionaires in the way that vaccine supply was certain to do. Gates increased his influence over the WHO and over global vaccine supply, and he’d never wanted governments to invest in containment activities, because they might, in small ways, slow the big-pharma gravy train a bit.
February 2026: Here is a new pandemic scare story, made possible by the same sort of informational bias, propagated by the WHO, which led to China saying in 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 was only being caught by people who handled animals in the Huanan Seafood Market. The comment underneath is backed with more detail in this blog. A falsity was generated by what the WHO had on its website in 2020. They'd oversimplify things and let people imagine that zoonotic viruses are ones which jump regularly from animals to humans. (Only the rabies virus jumps between species regularly, and it never spreads fast enough to cause epidemics.) What the WHO should have told people was that respiratory coronaviruses infecting animals might have given rise to human infecting strains, i.e. a virus particle might mutate during its replication phase and produce human infecting progeny which would constitute a novel, human-infecting strain. It's not the same as saying that a zoonotic virus is one which, ...