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, "is transmitted between animals and people", which is what WHO had as a 'Key fact' on their site until December last year.
N.B. The WHO's description of MERS-CoV in 2012 was the beginning of their enduring habit of saying that a respiratory coronavirus will tend to transmit from animals to humans. (It was the theme of Bill Gates' Event 201 conference in 2019, chaired by a top WHO executive.) Never mentioned, there was no physical proof that MERS transmitted from camels to people who handled them: There was just one anecdotal report that a man who had died was shown to be carrying a virus which was "almost identical" to a sample taken from his sick camel.
Even if there was some animal-to-human transmission of the MERS coronavirus, the WHO was ignoring ample proof of human-to-human infection. (In 2015, they conceded that some H-to-H transmission might occur "where there is close contact" between people.) Why did they do this? They wanted to highlight/exaggerate the possibility that animals might become a serious source of health threats to humans? Or did they push the concept so much because it was grounds to argue that China shouldn't become a victim of travel restrictions (an assertion which they made for MERS when nobody had even suggested restricting travel between S. Korea and China)?
There certainly has been no proof that anyone caught COVID-19 from an animal.
Other recent comments are at the bottom of this page/blog
Seen in Facebook on 21.12.2025:
Donald Trump had reacted to the WHO's facilitation of China's cover-up, but he was turning denialist and focussing on re-election: He gave the job to Anthony Fauci, who also ignored the rationale/success of lockdown-free responses in East Asia (guaT).
6 December 2025, DailyMail:
"One grant recipient was Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the biggest advocates for vaccines and whose advice to Prime Minister Boris Johnson led to the UK lockdown in March 2020, and who famously resigned as a government adviser two months later after it emerged he broke rules to meet his married lover."
1. Twenty-six SAGE Covid-19 advisors had received millions from top pharma people who would make money from the vaccine.2. SAGE told Johnson's government to forget 'the original advice' (i.e. 'copy South Korea and keep the UK out of lockdown'.) Aligning with Bill Gates, the WHO, Davos and the CCP, the UK government would now terminate "the Contain phase" and put all resources into the vaccine effort.
Previously (July 2022), re. the original advice:
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See Bill Gates refer to himself as "health expert" in April 2020: Bill Gates: Few countries will get 'A-grade' for coronavirus response - BBC News
His long-term influence on the Tories encouraged them to ignore East Asian responses to SARS-CoV-2, and to inflict business-destroying lockdowns and furlough-sized national debt on the UK.
According to Jeremy Hunt MP, Mr Johnson's "great plan" on 2nd March 2020 was not what Britain's emergency scientists had advised him to do. The plan stopped an alleged PHE trace-and-test team from working beyond 12 March, and replaced their operation with a lockdown which triggered the folding of businesses in their hundreds-of-thousands. There was an historic level of borrowing to create furlough, and MPs "conspired" to keep the debt under the radar. It's said that the plan delivered one of the highest COVID-19 death rates, "in the developed world" (nih/nlm) and it brought the economy to a 300-year low: Fintim.
Use Ctrl+F to find key words, e.g. factsheet, the fines, video, 9 million jobs, CNN, copying South Korea, Resolution 2758, Li Wenliang, shipped, BBC, whole country, high street, 2% and 3%, video, shedding, 300 years, business deaths, billionaires, refuseniks, Moderna, good effect, whistling, boycott, Copenhagen, New Zealand, Jenner, health expert, blog intro, GAVI, commercially, restaurant, the cover-up, progeny virus, Biden, hypothetical, 27 December, 09/2022, from Taiwan, Nature, Johns Hopkins, Event 201, equilibrium, JCVI, the plod, thermal, screening, Sridhar, Spanish, instruction book, NERVTAG, Omicron, THRCC, vaccination began, LSHTM, stayed away, slow down on, scramble, bali bali, surprising development, malhotra (Tip: highlight a word/phrase, press Ctrl+F and hit Enter)
Nobody on British TV ever seemed to mention an ONS report of 6 December 2021 which showed the quarterly figures for "business deaths" since the first quarter of 2020: ons.gov.uk. The 23-month total was 650,055 companies permanently closed, and many more employees must have been affected. ONS lets the reader do the summation:
The BBC has been seen to play down this disastrous aspect of Britain's pandemic response. For example, BBC claimed in 2024 that "25,000" businesses went bust in the previous year, and that this was a "30-year high, the highest number since 1993": bbc.co.uk. What the BBC headline neglected to tell anyone is that, while 309,000 were closed down in 2023 (ONS23), only 25,000 of them had actually become insolvent?
| Considering what was reported by ONS in 2021, the underlined part of what follows must be a lie?: "More than 25,000 company insolvencies were registered in 2023, the highest number since 1993, as firms struggled with rising costs and interest rates" (see bbc24). Not lying, the BBC is simply making use of a statistic to help conceal the fact that there were 309,000 "business deaths" in the same year, 2023. (For the fourth year in a row, people were shutting up shop because they could see that their livelihoods were not going to survive the lockdowns.) ONS23. |
The number of businesses written off was even higher in 2022 than it was in 2021: 345,000 (parl.)
A February 2023 report from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales killed any notion that only "25,000" businesses would be shut down across the financial year: ICAEW. 2023 saw a downturn in the number of businesses closing down, but it was a year in which big concerns closed many branches, not excluding the banks: Forbb.    |
The first signs of a novel SARS in 2019.
On 6 February 2020, the BBC reported that Wuhan ophthalmologist Li Wenliang had died of COVID-19: bbcLi. A year later they called him, "the Wuhan Whistleblower" (bbcw) but all he had done on 30 December 2019 was tell his university alumni contacts, in a WeChat group, that he'd been privy to a diagnostic report of a suspected case of 'severe acute respiratory syndrome': Wiki.
On the same day (30 December), people at local hospitals had been alerted to the SARS report by the Wuhan CDC: Wiki. They too were soon using PPE against viral infection at work. However, in the UK on 6 March 2020, Mr Johnson was offering handshakes to people at a meeting of vaccine scientists (facb. He had bragged about doing the same thing at a hospital on 3 March: teno.) He was rejecting PPE and playing down the health risk because he anticipated a long wait (it would turn out to be 40 weeks) before vaccine would be available, and he had no intention to scale up a 'trace-and-test' program as S. Korea and Taiwan had begun to do in January.
Johnson had his cabinet ministers in tow, e.g. Dominic Raab insisted that 25,338 deaths in the UK between 27 March and 29 April 2020 did not indicate a surge in cases: bbc+. He argued that the BBC's figure of "26,097" included deaths since 2nd March, ignoring the fact that there had only been 759 deaths by 27 March.
Find more about this below by using Ctrl+F for 'raab'.
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| See at: Coronavirus in England: Latest updates on Friday 27 March - BBC News |
Find more about this below by using Ctrl+F for 'raab'.
Also see that Raab rejected WHO advice about facemasks, simply because Mr Johnson was flouting the advice.
The "great plan" of March 2020.
On 2 March, a "very, very confident" Mr Johnson said: "we do have a great plan, a plan to tackle the spread of coronavirus": stndrd. (A PHE spokesperson later said that there had, at the time, been "a contact tracing response team" of "just under 300 staff" working to get the virus contained: rehis.) Mr Johnson's words in a cBBC report on 3 March depicted a response like those in S. Korea and Taiwan: "that for the vast majority of the people of this country, we should be going about our business as usual" (cbbc).
Nobody was told that 'the first stage/phase' of the great plan, i.e. "Contain", was going to end abruptly in the very near future. Such tracing of disease contacts was stopped on 12 March, because "Delay" was beginning, meaning that any further spread of the virus was going to be 'delayed' by a lockdown from 23 March onwards. Britain's "fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease" (sprep, 2 March) were terminated, "as we've always said, from the beginning" (quoting Chris Whitty, yout at 13:10 minutes.) All testing equipment was solely for use inside hospitals from 12 March onwards.
The launch of 'NHS Test and Trace' on 28 May was not a resumption of PHE's alleged containment efforts before 12 March. The new service was only an advisory one, warning people by SMS if they had been in a café, pub or restaurant when a known COVID-19 case had also been there. It couldn't force anyone suspected to be a COVID contact to get into a car and drive to a distant testing centre. (More about this can be found with Ctrl+F for, '17 April'.)
"A former director of the WHO told the hearing that contact tracing, testing and isolation could have continued for longer across the UK and would have enabled the government to lock down London while leaving other areas of the country with fewer restrictions. - Prof Anthony Costello, the head of the Institute for Global Health at University College London, pointed out that Yorkshire had fewer than 10 cases identified in 300,000-400,000 people around the time that contact tracing and community testing were halted and, as such, could have avoided a complete lockdown." - Matt Hancock "declined to comment on why the UK did not isolate or trace people arriving in the country from overseas, while adding that this policy could potentially change in the future: “We’ve always said that we don’t rule out taking steps if that’s what the science advises.” (Gua, N.B. Genuine contact tracing was not being resumed as the title implies. This is explained further below)
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| Indp (2025), Deadl. |
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News on 25/07/2025, see GBNcov.
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Britain's response was one of many which, through a lack of respect for the "bali bali" (quick, quick) operation in S. Korea and Taiwan, became a watching and waiting game for two months. Then, the WHO's belated pandemic declaration was taken as the signal to 'stop mass testing' on 12 March, and to begin a lockdown on 23 March. (Only after that could facemasks be bought in the supermarkets.) Officially, there were two lockdowns before vaccine was available about nine months later (on 8 December.) Matt Hancock had been listening to Bill Gates (now practically in control of the WHO) since January 2019, and Hancock's boss (Mr Johnson) also didn't care for the Korean strategy, in spite of his confidential SAGE advice which told him copy it. A big US study calculated that lockdowns kill a lot more people than do the virus outbreaks for which they are imposed: NLoM. Many were lost through cancelled medical treatment: 
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*It helps the Tory Party today that the BBC continues to play down the bad, long-term effects of the lockdowns used in 2020/21,
e.g. More BBC 'error' was seen in August 2025:
"Britain has lost more than 1,100 pubs"
Of note: The people working 'bali bali' to limit the spread of COVID-19 in S. Korea didn't have time on their hands to create new laws or fines. Therefore, they couldn't later punish the Daegu sect leader who'd preached defiance of social distancing. However, there were 580 recorded deaths in S. Korea by the Sunday before 13 December 2020 (Reuters), while 
the UK's count had reached 70,752 by 27 December 2020 (Skyy.)
In 2022, a scan of at least 230-thousand scientific papers concerning the pandemic was completed which led to the above conclusion. (Relevant papers were detected after observing which authors were most likely to have studied lockdowns.) News articles still appear which describe bad consequences of the British lockdowns, e.g. Telg.
Some large health organizations matched what the WHO was saying, e.g. see, "MERS is spread between animals and people" on the NHS website.
Most of the World's governments looked to the WHO in January 2020 and "got the feeling" that any threat to public health was minimal: "authorities have found no clear evidence that COVID-19 could transmit human-to-human". Tedros Ghebreyesus was saying that outbreaks could be beaten without travel restrictions: reu. Then, the homespun theory of 'herd immunity' was being revived in the UK while the coronavirus was not being contained (athe.)
On 16th March, five days after the pandemic was declared officially by the WHO, it was announced that the UK deaths total had reached 55: bfpg. However, it could soon be seen that relying on 'herd immunity' to take care of things had been 'whistling in the dark' (a phrase which Boris Johnson used to deride the idea that trace-and-test operations could help: Lbc). In spite of a sudden increase in cumulative deaths to 40,000 by 12 May (2,352 had died before 1st April, see Gov1a), MPs on TV didn't ever mention S. Korea or Taiwan, whose warnings they must have heard about. It was Jeremy Hunt who broke form eventually and said, "Why weren't we copying South Korea?": video.
On 28 May 2020, 'NHS Test and Trace' began to observe some of the daily movements of Britons' phones if they downloaded the "World-beating app" (as urged to do by Mr Johnson on TV.) NHS would be sending text messages to anyone who happened to visit a pub, café or restaurant at about the same time that a COVID-19 carrier was there. However, it was very late in the game to begin curbing the spread of virus in this way. 
MPs were talking about a, "nasty flu" which was, "not that deadly": sprep. On 2nd March, a scientific model was presented which said that the coronavirus could infect 80% of the British population, and kill 1 in every 100 people ('3' or '4' would have been a better prediction.)
The tweet on 14 January 2020 reported that China believed there was, "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus". While seeming to be impartial, Tedros Ghebreyesus showed immediate concurrence with China by saying that decisions to restrict travel by certain countries were, "not evidence-based". He accused them of isolating China's economy: Reu.
US officials showed no interest in the Taiwanese expert's warnings either (Wash), regardless of his country's "top position in a survey of the World's healthcare systems, and its history of coping with viruses, including SARS of 2003" (natint.)
The MPs had control of BBC One, and S. Korea's response was never discussed, not even by experts appearing on BBC Breakfast. There was a special MPs' boycott of all non-BBC journalists: see pmorg and mgove, therefore no independent journalists could raise the topic with the MPs. Mr Johnson couldn't say that he was leading the way with his late-starting lockdown response, but he spoke of a "World-beating app" at the end of May. The app served a system called "NHS Test and Trace" which, in spite of its title, was not designed to do what 'Trace, Test and Treat' had been doing since February. The overwhelming limitation of the NHS system was that it couldn't force people to get tested if it had traced them as, potentially, virus contacts.* (See more under 'Public spending' below.)
Korean-style trace-and-test was also done by Indonesia and a few other countries. S. Korea had begun exporting its know-how to any interested countries before the WHO had even declared a pandemic: Schw (published on 11 March 2020.) It's unlikely that S. Korea would not have offered anything to the UK: President Yoon attended the G7 summit in Cornwall in 2021 (an event at which Mr Johnson showed off his swimming skills.)
N.B. Some, temporary continuation of animal-infectivity has been reported 'after a zoonosis occurred' (it is mentioned in Wikipedia) but that would not be surprising: When a novel, human-infecting coronavirus emerges because of error during the replication of just one animal-infecting virion, other animal-infecting virions identical to that one will replicate without error. Therefore, their progeny virions will be identical to them, i.e. infectious to the animals.
Also on 27 March, Mr Johnson was reported to be infected: bbcnews. He went to a hospital on 5 April and spent time in an ICU, possibly because there were no other suitable places for isolating him. He was not put on a ventilator: guar.
On 27 April, in his first public address after coming out of hospital, Mr Johnson spoke of the virus very energetically as, "an unexpected and invisible mugger": Guar (also see: Gif.)
No such stories came out of S. Korea, where Taiwan's warnings had been acted on in January. At one stage, Mr Johnson suggested that our human losses were caused by neglect of procedure at care homes: Guardn.
On 24 April 2020, it was written as follows in Bloomberg: "Dropping widespread testing ran counter to WHO advice, and experience elsewhere. In South Korea, where contact tracing is in place, the government managed to contain the outbreak to a much lower level than in most European nations. By halting the tracing of people in the U.K. who had contact with patients who had tested positive, those without symptoms were able to keep spreading the virus."
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In its Lockdown 1.0 documentary of December 2020, the BBC said that Britain's airports had continued to receive flights from China, including three per week directly from Wuhan. The inbound flights were also mentioned in: Sungu. A well-known American writer accused China of shipping the disease out regardless (alara), but contrary reports said that outbound flights from China were stopped (e.g. cgtn and factc.) The "three direct flights from Wuhan each week" are also mentioned in a British Medical Journal article about the measures which were installed at UK airports in January 2020: bmj.
By 13 December 2020, 580 people in S. Korea were known to have died of COVID-19: Reuters (Use Ctrl+F to find '580'.) "587" appeared in Google search results the next day.
In 2015, Bill Gates posed as a medical expert concerning epidemics: see Gatestube (also bbc/news of April 2020.) However, he didn't talk about the success of S. Korea's trace and test approach when it had proved effective in containing MERS-CoV that year. The WHO also didn't talk about S. Korea's (or Taiwan's) use of trace-and-test in 2020, because the WHO keeps China happy by showing little interest in those countries. (Taiwan is excluded from the UN because China has veto powers. S. Korea 'embarrasses' the UN with its long history of supporting Taiwan. Both democratic countries have American education systems and US military bases.)
At a PHE meeting on 1 March 2020, Mr Johnson said that he expected the virus to spread "a bit more" in the UK. It was, "vital" that the public knew that he had "a great plan, a plan to tackle the spread of coronavirus". He also said that hand-washing was the best way to stop the spread: "twenty seconds, two times Happy Birthday, I'm told, with hot water and soap": Standard (use Ctrl+F to find "great plan" in the article. Also see metro.) Johnson was accused of being a clone of Trump, but Trump came under much closer scrutiny for his pandemic denialism: Guard.) 
The WHO was silent about S. Korea's "bali bali" (quick quick) motto (see bbc), just as it had been when the trace-and-test method was used in 2015 against MERS-CoV (see 'The cover-up' below.) WHO called for an increase in PPE production worldwide before it admitted that there was a pandemic: 3Mar'20.
Facemasks were in short supply in the first quarter of 2020, and thermal screening was officially rejected as a measure at airports and the Eurotunnel.* In June, there would be a "World-beating app" which served a system that used up resources heavily (consumed an estimated £29.5bn): 'NHS Test and Trace' was launched on 28 May 2020, and its name gave the impression that it was 'bringing back' Britain's attempt to copy what Taiwan and South Korea had done since January: theGu (Chris Whitty had halted the initial contact tracing team "of just under 300 staff" on 12 March: "We are clearly now stopping the contain phase of this operation": youtube at 13:10 mins.)
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By 2023, it was suspicious that Mr Johnson had still had never said a word about S. Korea's quick success with trace, test and treat. (Chris Whitty had avoided using the word, "trace" in his 12 Mar 2020 appearance. He seemed a less happy man from that day on.) In December 2023, Mr Johnson said in front of the National Covid Inquiry: "There was no other tool (apart from lockdown) that I know of": yahoo.
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During the UK lockdown which became officially enforceable on 26 March 2020 (the first of three lockdowns: inschart and gdsblog), there was almost no mention of S. Korea's pandemic response on BBC television. Therefore, it's not surprising that the majority of Brits didn't notice what happened in that country at the start of 2022.
By the end of 2021, more than 86% of S. Koreans had received vaccine against COVID-19 (reute), with many having a booster dose. However, the country's highest ever deaths rate was about to ensue.
A WHO website page which appears to show the funding provided by the "UK and NI" has a table which suggests a contribution of, "$135.13-million" (whoB), an amount which is less than one-third of the UK's total contribution as shown in the 2020/21 table on the USA page (pasted above). The legend below the "UK and NI" table (pasted below/right) has the following: "UK was 4th overall WHO donor and the number one Core Voluntary Contributions Account (CVCA) contributor in 2020-2021, with more than US$ 135 million". In other words, that table is not showing total contributions, but it also is not suggesting to any reader that the UK gave the WHO anything beyond "US$ 135 million" in 2020-2021. (It has not been updated since 2022.)
Changes were made to the "UK and NI" page in April 2024, so that it no longer mentions a big donation further down in its text (below the table.) Previously, it said that "Boris Johnson" had pledged a sum which "includes .. £500 million" for "COVAX advance Market Commitment".
Currently (2025), the 'totals' table (who1) shows that the US was giving $1,284-million for 2022/23. There's no way to know what the Biden administration was providing for 2024/25, and Donald Trump withdrew all US support again in January 2025: berke.
The contribution by Bill and Melinda Gates was listed in second place in 2020/21, after Germany. In the table showing today, the Gates are in third place because the US contribution was almost doubled for 2022/23. Yesterday (21/Jan/2025), Mr Trump signed an order that the US leaves the WHO again: BBCtr. Therefore, the Gates will be back in second place.
On 5 March 2020, Chris Whitty had said that there was a "large iceberg" of symptom-free carriers in the UK: lonec. That was, presumably, his way of saying that a meaningful level of virus containment would be already be too difficult to achieve in the way that S. Korea and Taiwan had begun to do in January. Those countries knew to waste no time, because any delay would allow a rapid increase in case numbers. S. Korea used the words "bali, bali" (quick, quick) to create a sense of urgency. (Is that where the WHO got its idea to say "Test, test, test" on 16 March?)
Rather than pointing out what might be achieved in future, thanks to S. Korean ingenuity, the WHO simply said that it did not recommend travel restrictions for South Korea*. As in 2012, WHO claimed (again without scientific corroboration) that MERS-CoV, "does not seem to pass easily from person to person unless there is a close contact". (Find 'nature review' in this blog for a proper explanation of the slowness in human-to-human spread of MERS.)
When people were housed together indoors, as in hospitals, MERS-CoV was as contagious as any other respiratory disease. S. Korea had taken it very seriously as a public health threat. It's the most deadly coronavirus, with high Case Fatality Rates which have always been more than ten-times those of COVID-19: wik. (The NEJM reported a MERS CFR of 56%. The WHO still has, "35%".)
S. Korea's first case, confirmed on 20 Jan 2020 (bfpg), was detected only because there was thermal screening at Incheon Airport: Nothing had suggested that she was unwell apart from her elevated body temperature: csis. As such, she was typically, 'asymptomatic'.
A certainty: The UK would have seen far fewer human losses if methodical trace-and-test containment had been sustained, and if the 5,000 trained tracing staff in councils had been deployed: Guardt.
Apparently, Matt Hancock was censured for trying to put in his memoirs that the CCP had influence over the WHO (by sending it, "tens of millions of Dollars"): oake. Seen in the light of the WHO's website table of top donors, there's nothing remarkable about, "tens of millions of Dollars". Was Hancock merely posturing in order to placate people who were frustrated with Tory attitudes and actions?)
It was a foregone conclusion that, regardless of what the UK government did, the private sector would work hard and come up with a vaccine. Vaccination would be the longer-term response and, in 2021, it was said to be getting the expected results. However, without an effective trace-and-test operation, the UK still often lost more than a hundred people daily: The 7-day average was 157 deaths daily at the end of October 2021. (That's more in three weeks than South Korea lost in the first 20 months.) The UK's 7-day deaths average climbed above 150 per day at least once in December 2021. On 03 Jan 2022, it was reported to be 123.
For future reference: S. Korea and Taiwan have a lot in common. Both play baseball, have USAF bases and educational alignment with the US. Both also suffer hostile acts from communists (expansionist people who usually oppose worship and strive to destroy ethnic culture) on their northern frontiers. Taiwan was the first to realize how bad the outbreak was in Wuhan, and to let S. Korea and some other countries know about it straight away: yah. The rest of the world was following the WHO, which began by helping China to cover things up, ignoring Taiwan's email (Fran.)
As desired by the MPs, few Brits became aware of the dichotomy which had developed in 2020: 1. Non-communist Asian states immediately slowing the spread of the virus to a level at which most people could live normal lives. 23 May 2021: Dominic Cummings told us what working with Mr Johnson was like at the beginning of 2020 (Teleg), but there are important questions that he didn't draw attention to.
N.B. If South Korea had not been using thermal screening at airports, it might have been quite a while before anyone had certifiable evidence that the virus was moving country to country. The Korean TTT strategy might not have been deployed as promptly if that woman with a raised body temperature had not been detected on 19/01/2020.
At first, there were few reports that criticized government specifically for failing to help care homes keep the virus out: ind, bbc, itv, stan, see point 3 below.
Part 1: The BFPG timeline.
Part 2: General news media timeline of 2020.
Go to Atlan
February
Above: Just one of the countries in the graph flattened the curve in March 2020, after being afflicted with many cases initially. (N.B. The vertical scale is logarithmic: Compare the actual figures given next to each coloured line.) WHO never openly corrected their own version of what the CCP had said: "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission". (The "infamous tweet" still displays that misguidance to the World today.) The WHO then criticized users of travel restrictions on the basis of the tweet's content: If there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, then there was no evidence that travel restrictions should be used. Ghebreyesus excoriated users of travel restrictions for quite some time (see Reut1 of 2021, voa), as though the CCP's proposal, "only those who came into contact with infected animals" (bbcw), had been proved correct.
April (mostly)
Sridhar's new stance was part-charade, mostly pretending to oppose the MPs after having obeyed their demand for silence about S. Korea and Taiwan for over ten months. On 13 September 2022, she was expressing another opinion which also wasn't compatible with her "rubbish path" narrative. Now, she was backing the people who said that, 'Yes, lockdown was the best way to respond, but it should have begun earlier in 2020 than 23 March': times. 
China did more under-reporting in 2023: yah23
Some conclusions
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Reut
A new graph which shows indirectly that lockdown was not the effective way (almost 200,000 Brits lost):
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10228527871929557&set=a.1332983292410
Bill Gates was going from place to place in 2015 and saying that there was a worldwide need to get ready for epidemics. He didn't seem to notice South Korea's response to a deadly respiratory coronavirus inside four hospitals that year. The WHO behaved as he did and never acknowledged that it was the Koreans who first used nucleic acid testing in the pursuit of virus containment. Come 2020, most countries had gained nothing from Gates' long talks because he didn't mention 'test-and-trace'.
Top Tories knew that the lockdown path they chose to get through the pandemic would have historic impact on the economy. They also know that the Section 21 system puts renters at risk of a merciless landlord. The best they could come up with was a temporary denial of possession orders? bit.ly/nohold 
We're such a trusting lot. Craftily, 'NHS Test and Trace' was presented as if it was doing what South Koreans had been doing from the start. However, it was not tracking contacts down. All it did was send you a text message if you'd frequented a place that a known case had also been to. (Launched on 28 May 2020, the 'NHS Test and Trace' did not pursue the contacts of known cases to get them tested. All it did was snoop where everybody went and then told you if you'd been in the same place, e.g. a pub, as frequented by a a known case.) We, conveniently, got the impression that everything possible was being done to "track" down and contain the virus. The phone app was praised as, "World beating" by Boris Johnson. (Cost-wise, that might have been true.)
That time in 2020 when the Danish killed mink by the millions, it was based on the WHO's opinion that SARS-CoV-2 was primarily moving animal-to-human in wet markets (an idea coming from the CCP.) Of course, that was the least likely way to explain all the cases but WHO top dogs wanted to keep up the pretence that travel restrictions weren't "evidence-based", to 'protect China' from becoming, "economically isolated".
It's appalling that nobody's set the record straight and that farmed animals have continued to be slaughtered by the million (e.g. super-massive chicken farms in the US where birds had their air cooling systems turned off even though the avian flu has appeared to kill very few people (and were those people already ill before infection?) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct36b8
There are those in high circles who keep pointing at animals as a source of human disease. The WHO did this in 2020 by implying that there was only animal-to-human transmission of the coronavirus: "no sign of human-to-human transmission". Animals then were slaughtered by the millions, e.g. in Denmark and small pets were culled in China.
Look at the genetics and realize what they were omitting from the picture - A virus very rarely jumps to a different host species and, if one does, it's explained by a one-off mutation event which happens during the replication of just one virus that's inside a host animal/human at the time. In other words, if a human is unlucky enough to be infected by a newly evolved 'zoonotic' virus that's emerging for the first time from one animal host, that host will be THE ONLY animal that's become a source of the mutant virus. No other animals will become sources of the new virus because it has evolved to infect humans, not animals (unless, even more rare, it retains the ability to infect animals and can now infect both).
Furthermore, there is no proof that the original SARS-CoV-2 didn't emerge during the replication of a virus that was 'already' a human-infecting pathogen. (Zoonosis is often mentioned as though its involvement was a certainty.)
How did a £70bn “hole” become a £30bn “surplus”?
This photo says it all: Why save lives by containing the virus when you can just lock 'em all down and let market forces speed the supply of vaccine?
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| In the same week, "more than 2,200 pubs since the start of 2020" was said on ITV's Good Morning Britain (18 Aug 2025). Heaven forbid anyone mention what Jeremy Hunt revealed in a video in 2022: that lockdowns could have been avoided if "government" had followed their confidential SAGE advice. January 2026: a glimpse at the current state of the high street Watch Tom Kerridge and ask yourself, 'Were those tories really right to kill the South Korean approach in March 2020 and lock everything down instead?' He mentions that a junior 40 hrs hospitality worker before the pandemic would cost a company £17,000 a year, but now costs £29,000.p s. When they created 'NHS Test and Trace' at the end of May, it achieved almost nothing because, 1. It only traced people who visited pubs, cafés and restaurants. (There was no COVID surveillance in supermarkets, petrol stations, or on public transport.) 2. All the system did was send a text message to a patron of a pub, café or restaurant if they'd been in such a venue at roughly the same time that a known case might have spread the virus there. 3. It couldn't make anybody get on a bus and go for a COVID test: They only needed to do so if they wanted to return to the same pub, café or restaurant where it was decided that they might have been exposed to the virus. |
Animals were culled on the assumption that any mammalian species would transmit the novel coronavirus. There were no grounds for this assumption:
For more than a decade, China had listened to the WHO when it insisted that the MERS coronavirus was not often seen to transmit human-to-human. Camel herders only caught it from the camels, it was said.
In 2021, the CCP killed people's small pets while they were in quarantine for COVID-19: NPR. After all, the WHO's website factsheet for MERS said that "zoonotic" viruses are "transmitted between animals and people”:
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N.B. Look at the 5th/last Key Fact (above) as it appeared since before 2019 until the revision of 11 December 2025. (The factsheet is very different today: factsheet.) |
The WHO's insufficient definition of zoonosis in the context of respiratory coronaviruses might have made it seem reasonable of Denmark to cull millions of mink in 2020: Gurd. After all, SARS-CoV-2 had been designated, 'zoonotic'.
The Gates-funded 'Event 201' conference at Johns Hopkins University in 2019, chaired by WHO Executive Director Michael Ryan, had proposed that the source of future virus outbreaks would be animals: Ryan asked people to imagine, "a SARS-like virus, germinating quietly among pig farms in Brazil before spreading to every country in the world": wikispooks.com/wiki/Event_201. It was scare-mongering dressed up as science.
(It was the 5th 'key fact', but the format and content was changed completely in the revision of 11 December 2025: factsht.) WHO had described MERS as a disease which transmits to a human "directly" from a camel, not via another human. It didn't attempt to explain how MERS-CoV transmitted person-to-person frequently in S. Korea, in places where there were no animals (e.g. inside those four hospitals.)
June 2025: It's being assumed that country-wide lockdown, supported with furlough, is a sustainable practice ongoing. A treaty has been signed which lets the WHO call lockdowns in the future: teleg. Since 2020, it's been ignored how well S. Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, and others managed to avoid long lockdowns, coming through with much better human and economic survival (e.g. elem). In the UK, providing furlough to so many people for the better part of a year must have involved a level of government borrowing never imagined before in peace time: CNN (see under 'Conspiracy of silence'.)
Gates didn't want the responses of S. Korea and Taiwan to influence what most other countries decided to do. It suited him much better if people simply waited, in lockdowns, to be vaccinated. He preferred that governments only invested in vaccine, not in containment efforts. As a matter of 'principle', he wouldn't get into conversation about any sort of data survey for the tracing of coronavirus contacts. Any access to personal data was 'to be frowned upon' (but there has since been a much bigger issue involving his company's sharing of data with the IDF, for military targeting inside Gaza: Guarga.)
Together with the poster below, Hancock's tweet shows that Gates and Hancock met on three known occasions in 2019. “Infection control” was something that they talked about.
The CNN article of July 2024 said that Britain's two big political parties were accused by the IFS of conspiring to conceal "the poor state of public finances".
Never acknowledged by the WHO, the fourth 'Key Point' in the 2016 Nature paper reveals why MERS coronavirus did not spread rapidly among people: "Patients do not shed large amounts of virus until well after the onset of symptoms, when patients are most probably already seeking medical care." The pneumonia got people off the streets quite quickly (usually within 5 days: CDC) and into sickbeds. Only then did progeny virus begin to appear in their breath, mucus or saliva.
In other words, when a case of MERS infection had progressed to the point that the patient was shedding progeny virus from his/her own body, that patient was already suffering harsh symptoms and was usually withdrawn from societal contacts.
There was a Gates-funded conference in 2019, just months before the first COVID-19 outbreak: Event201. 'Zoonosis' was a persistent theme and people were still being told that MERS-CoV would spread camel-to-camel and camel-to-human, but not human-to-human "unless there is close contact".
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A correct definition of a zoonotic coronavirus would tell you: (1) that it infects humans and, (2) that it is a strain which is descended, through mutation, from a solitary virion which, itself, could only infect an animal.
In sharp contrast, there were reports of CFRs between 2% and 4.2% for SARS-CoV-2 (ijid), and carriers often shed progeny virus before symptoms had become noticeable to them, symptoms which in many cases didn't become severe enough to warrant hospitalization. 
"Many countries were locking down, so why were we wrong to do likewise?" Answer: All but two countries are members of the WHO and, as such, they assumed they would be told (by WHO) what their choices were in a health emergency. At the moment when it was essential to get busy (before the end of January), the WHO gave no clear guidance for copying Taiwan or S. Korea. It wasn't until 18 March that WHO promoted the use of contract tracing: “Tracing every contact must be the backbone of the response in every country”: Guac, rehis, yaho and Alje.
According to the UN, there are 195 countries and only two of them are not UN members (the Holy See and the State of Palestine.) The UN doesn't regard Taiwan (the ROC) as a sovereign country, in spite of its global importance as a supplier of microchips. In 1945, the People's Republic of China was given Taiwan's place in the UN, and then PRC became a part of the Security Council in 1971, a position which gives the power to veto any new UN resolutions. Therefore, Taiwan will always be excluded from the WHO.
On 13 May 2020, Mr Johnson's narrative was said to be "bluster", while American journalists had been applauding S. Korea's clarity of purpose: Grdc and Guard. (The same containment strategy was even more effective in Taiwan because of its island geography and societal vigilance.) Democratic Asians weren't to become bewildered by destructive lockdowns.
Meanwhile, S. Korea was marching on with its methodical approach in which COVID-19 contacts were pursued and tested: Grdc. Living with hostility from across their northern borders, both S. Korea and Taiwan couldn't afford to drop their guard and have big lockdowns, so they worked "bali bali" to become adept at containing SARS-CoV-2. Americans have since been learning from them (Penn),
but Mr Sunak has chosen the costly route again: by giving Moderna £1-billion to build a centre which will have vaccine ready 'quicker, next time': Finti. 
Moderna's surge in share price was said to have fed a hedge fund which Mr Sunak had co-founded: Gurd.
How Bill Gates misled the World on pandemic preparedness.
In a late-evening US talk show: "Will the World still need humans?"
"Uh, not for most things", says Gates: "Making things and growing things, like food, will have become solved problems". facebook.com/reel/1372736903851017/?rdid=0IXbXldlo0BrSxlx#
Gates met with Matt Hancock a few times in 2019 (their photo is in Hancock's tweet of 24 January.) 
His powerful GAVI alliance didn't suggest to any countries that copying S. Korea and Taiwan would make it possible to avoid lockdown. (Those two countries were not counting deaths in the tens-of-thousands by December 2020.) The countries who chose lockdowns are now substantially worse off, and government debts are vast: cnn/global-debt-crisis (see the section under 'Conspiracy of silence'.)
As mentioned above, more than 650,055 UK businesses were folded between 2020 and 2021(ONSlkdn.) In 2019, the Retail Gazette had reported a very much smaller loss of "85,000 jobs" in a year.
It can be shown that Gates (e.g. at his Event 201 conference) helped the WHO to propagate the belief that people usually contract respiratory coronaviruses "directly" from animals*. Therefore, the tracing of human-to-human contagion would be pointless. The implicit message was: 'Until you can prove human-to-human transmission for any of these novel viruses, do nothing. If the situation turns bad, just lock down and wait for vaccine'.
Expecting that the WHO would guide them with expertise, countries turned away from what they'd heard about S. Korea and Taiwan. The WHO have never made any correction to their "infamous tweet" of 14/01/2020: busii. They never reminded anyone that S. Korea and Taiwan were doing well without locking down.
Trump stopped America's funding of the WHO again in 2025, and he also clawed back $2.6-bn from GAVI, which is Bill Gates' vaccine-pushing organization.
*e.g. It was claimed that Event 201, which was a Gates-funded conference at Johns Hopkins University, had "illustrated areas where private/public partnerships" could, "diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences" of a coronavirus outbreak, such as one escaping from "infected pig farms": Event 201 | Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
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In September 2025, the BBC screened a documentary about 'Disease X'. They consulted with academics at Johns Hopkins University, where William H. Gates Snr. founded an institute: You can bet Jr. was behind the eerie excitement in the BBC documentary. There was no mention of trace-and-test, S. Korea or Taiwan. With Gates, the focus is always entirely on vaccine.
Johns Hopkins University was named after a philanthropist, something which Gates wants people to think he is. His father's institute there was recently renamed: WHGjhu. The WHO had the privilege of renaming the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security in 2022: WHOgets-to-namethings. Remember that WHO made everyone call India's variant, 'Omicron', and they told countries, "Please don't politicize this virus".
Johns Hopkins University was named after a philanthropist, something which Gates wants people to think he is. His father's institute there was recently renamed: WHGjhu. The WHO had the privilege of renaming the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security in 2022: WHOgets-to-namethings. Remember that WHO made everyone call India's variant, 'Omicron', and they told countries, "Please don't politicize this virus".
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| Johnson ridiculed the trace-and-test method which South Korea was using: "legions of imaginary Clouseaus" (LBCcum.) He made the BBC keep the success of S. Korea's prevention strategy out of its daily conversations*. By 2023, thanks to the need for furlough when your "only tool" is lockdown, the UK national debt had risen by 150% of what it was when Tories took over, and we can barely meet the interest payments. *Between 12 March and 11 December 2020, the BBC's TV news programmes and BBC Breakfast never let anyone mention that S. Korea and Taiwan were probably the two countries in the World most driven to avoid lockdown. Who in those countries would have been happy to stay at home for "weeks and months", watching it all "evolve", knowing that North Korea or the PRC is always watching them? (Find 'boycott' below by using Ctrl+F) |
Gates and Matt Hancock chatted about "infection control" in 2019. Gates must have mentioned his plans for global vaccine supply. By having a few small partners in every 'alliance', it wouldn't be obvious who the main player was: Politico. 
There was just a week or two of "the Contain Phase" (sometimes referred to as, "Track and trace") in Britain before Chris Whitty said, "and the Contain finishes from today" on 12 March 2020: youtube (at 13:10 mins). Lockdown was announced eleven days later.
It all suited Gates, because he never wanted trace-and-test operations to get money from governments. He wanted the ethos to be that, apart from the provision of PPE, nothing should draw on government funding which could go to vaccine programs. Lockdowns weren't going to hurt his plans: In fact, lockdowns would make his pandemic plans easier to implement: Politico.
Britain's 'NHS Test and Trace' didn't prevent a second national lockdown from occurring in November. Apart from being launched so late (on 28 May), the NHS system had no way to force people to travel to testing centres, one person per car: UKparl (discussed further.)
Somehow, a great number of Brits were happy to go into lockdown. They were encouraged to have fear: this virus was a "mugger" (Gif.)
In 1578, a family would be locked in their London home if a case of the plague had been discovered at their address (pmc.ncbi), but lockdown on 23/03/2020 was on a scale never imagined before.
There was to be a pause of 11 days after Mr Johnson told the country on 12 March that loved ones were going to die (and Chris Whitty said, "As we've always said, from the beginning, the Contain phase finishes from today".) The eleven-day pause made it less obvious that they had waited for the WHO to make a declaration, which it did on 11 March?
While full-blown lockdown was bound to hit trade and commerce extremely hard, Mr Johnson had said as recently as 1st March: "there is always the potential for an economic downside" to a "mass epidemic" but "we are ready for that": Reut0. He'd gone on to shake hands "with everybody" in a hospital two days later (teno), and then at a meeting of scientists on 6 March (Ledby.)
The MPs had 7 parties in December, by which time the country had lost almost 71,000 people. S. Korea had lost fewer than 600, Taiwan hadn't lost many more. Mr Johnson had written in May that the non-Draconian trace-and-test method from East Asiawas, "whistling in the dark", "legions of imaginary Clouseaus", Guar, LBC.
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| He said on 2 March 2020: "There's always a potential for an economic downside" to a "mass epidemic, .. and we are ready for that" (Reu2/3). Ten days later, he and Chris Whitty shut down the trace-and-test operation which PHE says it had put together, and for which 5,000 council staff had been trained but never deployed (rehis). By the end of 2022, the lockdowns will have made a million British businesses shut down, and Mr Sunak will have borrowed many hundreds of billions to give furlough to those who were forced to languish at home. |
Background facts:
(An online reference is given for each point in this summary, or in the main text below it.)
(An online reference is given for each point in this summary, or in the main text below it.)
In 2017, Britain's MHRA was "awarded over £980,000 for collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization" (Govuk.) In 2015 Bill Gates had said that, while the WHO did monitor disease outbreaks, it was “not funded” to help countries prepare for them (see his TED talk, at 02:59.) At some stage, Gates would have told Health Secretary Matt Hancock that most countries weren't ready to do a serious amount of "infection control". However, he wouldn't have mentioned S. Korea's success with containing the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus in 2015.
The Gates Foundation made a contribution in 2018 when ‘chaebols’ in S. Korea gave funding for RIGHT (Research Investment for Global Health Technology: Schwak.) In 2020, the same private sector was supporting a ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ action plan for reducing the spread of SARS-CoV-2. At the time, Gates was busy raising money for the WHO after Donald Trump had cancelled America’s membership. Gates didn't talk about 'TTT', because he saw the COVID-19 outbreaks as a great moment for GAVI, an alliance which he'd founded with the WHO to gain control of global vaccine distribution (gavi.) Boris Johnson pledged £548-million for the WHO to set up ‘COVAX’, which was directed by GAVI in collaboration with the EU (Govcov.) Mr Johnson had also sent WHO a ‘bonus’ of £55-million directly in April 2020, showing solidarity against Trump (the RT reference hasn't been accessible since Russia invaded the Ukraine.)
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The WHO’s website factsheet for MERS had said, for years, that a “zoonotic” virus “is transmitted between animals and people”:
Seventeen-thousand people were locked down against MRES in S. Korea. (Thirty-six died: bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51836898.) Making no reference to the effectiveness of their trace-and-test approach inside hospitals, WHO spokesmen continued to say only that MERS-CoV spreads from camel to human. It wasn’t until 2015 that WHO were willing to imply 'some' human-to-human transmission of MERS: One of their spokesmen mentioned an effort to trace human disease contacts in Hong Kong (see MERSinfects10.*)
The UN/WHO rarely spoke of S. Korea at all. Its longstanding alliance with Taiwan displeases the CCP, and WHO have been seen to prioritize CCP interests. The Taiwanese are the people who escaped the communist coup in mainland China in 1949, and S. Korea helped them militarily. It wasn’t until July 2021 that the UN announced that S. Korea has a “developed economy” (ktimes), as though companies like Samsung, LG and Kia could have been built in an under-developed place.
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S. Korean businesses incurred losses through the MERS lockdowns in 2015. It was hoped that an expanded ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ approach would make lockdowns avoidable in 2020, even if SARS-CoV-2 was spreading rapidly. (The city of Daegu did opt to lock down for a while in February 2020, to make it easier for the TTT task force to establish some control of its big outbreak.) Tedros Ghebreyesus didn’t say anything about TTT or about lockdowns, he only complained that a restriction of international travel (a key component of a containment strategy) would be hurting China’s economy.
WHO leadership was still advising against the use of travel restrictions in November 2021 (Reut1), and they never did promote ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ explicitly to any member states, i.e. all of the World’s countries bar the Vatican and the State of Palestine. (Taiwan is not recognized as sovereign.) “Test, test, test” and, “Tracing must be the backbone of the response in every country” were said by Tedros Ghebreyesus only in the second half of March 2020. It’s obvious that he avoided talking in clear terms about ‘trace-and-test’ (known as “Containment” in Taiwan) because the method worked best in combination with restriction of travel.
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| From bbct |
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Bill Gates was never heard saying anything about containment, nucleic acid tests, or contact tracing. He was only interested in vaccine supply as an enormous business opportunity**. His long 2015 TED Talk didn’t help anyone to slow the initial spread of COVID-19: There had been 70,752 deaths in the UK by 27/12/2020, while there had been 587 in S. Korea by 14/12/2020, a country with 88% more people in the average square mile.
It wasn’t until the end of 2021 that Taiwan’s cumulative deaths total reached 850. The vast majority of its subsequent 19,000 deaths occurred after the trace-and-test strategy (i.e. 'Containment') was ended in 2022. Fearing that China might be spurred on by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, the Taiwanese had wanted daily life ‘back to normal’, with resumption of international travel. It was assumed, mistakenly, that vaccination had made most Taiwanese safe by 2022: jfma. The threat from China had made it risky to do anything which might reduce the country's military readiness. It was felt that the Containment strategy should be terminated after Russia attacked the Ukraine.
Likewise in S. Korea, the deaths rate increased steeply when trace-and-test was being abandoned at the end of 2021. 86% of the populace had been vaccinated when TTT was shelved officially in February 2022, but the case numbers were climbing like never before: Fewer than 6,000 people had died before January 2022, but the cumulative total was 24,000 before the end of May.
* In 'MERSinfects10' of 29 May 2015, the WHO official says: "Hong Kong authorities were tracing the people with whom the South Korean man was in contact", but he doesn't say anything about S. Korea's frequent use of such tracing, or that it had provided control of the spread of MERS-CoV inside hospitals.
China had tried to put a contagion tracking system together after SARS, but it failed: NYT.
** politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969
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| The signing of the treaty glosses over the problem that the WHO helped China to delay pandemic awareness. The UK's continued backing of the WHO, always at very generous levels, is assured implicitly. Even before the pandemic, the UK taxpayer was giving the WHO four-times the amount forfeited by an American taxpayer: The UK was giving a larger sum, and the USA has four-times as many tax payers. Joe Biden tried to change this by ramping the USA's bi-annual contribution from circa $400-million to almost $800-million, but Trump's brought it to zero again. Britain has fallen in with Bill Gates' side of the argument, who preferred that our pandemic money went only to a vaccine program. Gates would have been pleased when he heard that 'PHE's trace-and-test operation was halted mid-March 2020'. |
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William T. G. Morton was a dentist in Massachusetts who wanted people to suffer less pain during tooth extractions. He was persuaded by his in-laws to study medicine, and he was taught about the anaesthetic properties of diethyl ether by Charles T. Jackson.
In a state-of-the-art operating theatre at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846, Morton revealed the power of 'ether' to other medics for the first time. They were dumfounded when a man had a tumour removed from his neck without uttering a whimper. He would ordinarily have been screaming like those during limb amputations in the same place, high in the building where the rest of the hospital wouldn't hear them.
Within a couple of months, ether was being used in Britain and then Europe. However, Morton struggled because he'd spent money developing its production but he wasn't allowed to sell it under a protected brand name, and there were suggestions that he'd stolen ideas from his first business partner. He ‘redeemed himself’ by volunteering as a surgeon in 1862, then using ether on more than 2,000 wounded soldiers in the Civil War.
Both Taiwan and S. Korea have made great gains through their affiliations with America, but the success of their containment method for COVID-19 in 2020 still seems to be ignored by leaders everywhere (men who preferred to borrow massive amounts and run lockdowns: CNN.)
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| She was a sign of the times. In S. Korea, there was an explicit policy that no companies would make profit on anything that helped control SARS-CoV-2, but Mr Johnson preferred Bill Gates' approach (one which he'd taught to Michael J. Ryan before Event 201): Lockdowns for the people, lucrative contracts for mates. |
Bill Gates knew how to exploit the tendency to dumb-down and lock-down. He could simply whisper in certain ears that contact tracing was, politically, a hot potato: "You'll be messing with their data privacy. What might that do to you in the next election?"
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| Gates never suggested that any country should try to avoid lockdown. It was in the time of infamous Henry VIII that families were first locked indoors if a member had caught the plague (bacterial.) |
The private sector in S. Korea adopted a nonprofit policy for products which helped the country respond to COVID-19. In the UK, MPs took steps to have news of the 'Trace, Test and Treat' strategy excluded for nine months from BBC television. MPs appeared on no other channel, and were shielded by a boycott of all non-BBC journalists: gove and pmorg. That way, nobody could ask them 'why on Earth' Britain's alleged trace-and-test effort was "finished" on 12 March 2020.
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| Ref. HInews. The HIN's report seems far-fetched but it couldn't have been entirely off the mark. In the first and second years of the pandemic, there wasn't an obvious account of the scale of Gates' influence on governments (see politico.) He guided them to focus only on waiting for vaccine, ignoring the way that S. Korea and Taiwan had kept themselves out of lockdown. |
The fact that Gates never spoke about lockdowns or said that they might be avoided (with the help of trace-and-test operations) was consequential. He had cultivated a lot of influence over several years. Every country had to wait until December for COVID-19 vaccine, a very long time to keep businesses burdened with costly restrictions. Oxfam has revealed that nine or more insiders became vaccine billionaires:
From the Politico article: |
MPs had been encouraging Gates to participate in Britain's health governance, e.g. He gained formal collaboration with Britain's MHRA in December 2017: govuk. Gates said nothing when Chris Whitty shut down PHE's new trace-and-test operation for containing SARS-CoV-2 on 12 March 2020: youtu (at 13:10 mins). It didn't concern him that a wait of 37 weeks for vaccine was going to be endured in lockdown or with other severe restrictions. 'Trace-and-test' just wasn't something lucrative that he could get control of, so he simply kept quiet about it (or did he say to leaders that it was politically hazardous because of invasion of phone and bank card locational data?)
By rescuing the WHO from the impact of Trump's cuts, Gates had secured their assistance with his global vaccine supply scheme: Politico.
Referring to himself as a "health expert" on BBC Breakfast in April 2020 (bbc/g), Gates went on to roundly criticize the quality of pandemic responses in different countries. He didn't mention the success of East Asian democratic states, where any lockdowns were localized and short-lived. He said nothing when journalists reported the "exceptionalism" of the S. Korean response*, e.g. BBCsk (12 March) and Atlantic (6 May.)
*2015 was when the S. Koreans first made it obvious that a trace-and-test approach can limit the spread of a respiratory coronavirus to manageable levels. Come 2020, they and the Taiwanese didn't want to be vulnerable in lockdowns while the PRC and North Korea were watching them, as always.
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Politico explains that Gates and three relatively small partner organizations gained control of the provision of vaccine globally. His access to top Tories helped him influence what sort of response would be followed in Britain. He didn’t want any of Britain's (or any other country's) resources going to trace-and-test operations, but he accepted that there were efforts to make the British public think they were being protected that way. Former MP, Andrew Bridgen says Gates' influence over the UK's medical drugs regulator and JCVI led to short-cuts being taken in the screening of vaccine: bridvid. |
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| "Old friends reunited" in 2023. |
In most countries, mass vaccination became the only goal that governments pursued. They'd received no early prompts from the WHO to consider what was being done in affluent East Asian countries. (After all, WHO was co-founder of GAVI which was only interested in vaccine provision.)
Economies were to be badly shaken by interruption of trade and commerce: In the UK, there were almost 37 weeks of Draconian restrictions, with substantial police enforcement (see GrdE). In order to provide furlough during the lockdowns, the MPs borrowed on an enormous scale. Big borrowing which also occurring in some other countries: CNN.
Something that never seemed to be mentioned on TV: There were 650,055 "business deaths" in the UK between January 2020 and 6 December 2021: ONSlkdn. (BusL is a list of big businesses which folded between 23 March 2020 and 1 April 2021.) By comparison, in 2019 the Retail Gazette reported a loss of 85,000 jobs in a year.
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| Above: The quarterly "business deaths" of 2020/21 reported by ONS on 6 December 2021. The figures add up to 650,055. |
See a short video of Jeremy Hunt (the Health Minister before Matt Hancock) saying in 2022 that the S. Korean response should have been copied, and that copying it would have been backed by every British scientist if they could have seen the SAGE advice which the MPs kept confidential.
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No genuine 'trace-and-test' occurred in Britain after 12 March 2020, and there's no proof that much was done before that date: A PHE official said there was one tracing team of "just under 300 staff ...up to mid-March" (see REHIS.)
The scale of S. Korea's response was described in detail by the Centre for Health and the Public Interest on 4 April 2020: CHPI. S. Korea managed well with 1,000 contact tracing operatives, so assembling a comparable task force would have been feasible in Britain: The REHIS article mentions that 5,000 trained council staff were never deployed.
It's made obvious in the 2024 article by CNN that the UK borrowed on a historic scale to provide 80% furlough to salaried people for the duration of the lockdowns. Ministers could, instead, have borrowed very much less by keeping people at work while slowing the spread of COVID-19 with a trace-and-test strategy. "British politicians have also buried their heads in the sand ahead of a general election Thursday. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, an influential think tank, has decried a 'conspiracy of silence' between the country’s two main political parties, over the poor state of public finances."
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| Above: Having assumed that lockdowns would be a good way to 'delay' the spread of SARS-CoV-2 while waiting 9 months for vaccine, Mr Johnson became ferociously critical of anyone who didn't run along and get a jab. (Lockdowns had been used before in 1578 but, remember, the plague was bacterial and not respiratory.) |
Update of 29 Dec 2024: America is seeing an 18% surge in homelessness which, says the BBC, is partly attributable to the ending of pandemic financial support. If American people had experience of lockdowns like the UK did, they might be interested in the way that Bill Gates helped countries to ignore S. Korea's 'trace, test and treat' strategy. All he needed to do was call national leaders and remind them that contact tracing might mean "aggressive" access to people's personal data. "Rather put all your money into vaccine. It's much safer, politically speaking"? His influence made it certain that most countries invested in nothing but PPE and vaccine: Some governments still pretended to do containment, e.g. in the UK, 'NHS Test and Trace' was launched on 28 May 2020, but it had no effect on the number of COVID-19 cases because it couldn't make people get into their cars and drive to testing centres. As for the "aggressive" invasion of data privacy, please see one example which reveals that S. Korea was careful and thorough in safeguarding the rights of the individual: Hank. Their motto was, "No one is safe until everyone is safe." They didn't issue tens of thousands of fines (see 'The fines', below.)
Would Britons have been so congenial about Draconian lockdowns (at unknown national cost) if they'd been aware that the MPs had rejected the SAGE advice to copy a 'bali bali' ('quick, quick') strategy which was doing well in S. Korea and Taiwan since two months before? Hunt_video.
On 28 May, "NHS Test and Trace" was launched, but its surveillance of contagion was limited to pubs, cafés and restaurants, and it couldn't persuade anyone to go for a COVID-19 test at a distant place if they didn't want to. People were urged to download the NHS', "World-beating app!" but it was scrapped before 18 June: Reco. More than 40,000 Brits had died by 12 May because the "Contain Phase" had been "finished" on 12 March: Guar, Govuk. That cumulative total was almost doubled by the end of December, when S. Korea's total was approaching 600.
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| Gates was shown by Politico to have gained control of big parts of the world's pandemic response in 2020. His influence with our MPs was already well established in 2019, particularly with our Health Secretary. It's easy to see that he wasn't even slightly interested in keeping us out of lockdowns. He just didn't want governments putting resources into Korean style trace-and-test strategies: He wanted governments to believe that all available monies should go to vaccine supply (including his global scheme.) Matt Hancock cast a politically devastating slur at Andrew Bridgen (who is currently still suing him for it) because he had drawn attention to consequences of the cosy relationship between the JCVI (Britain's vaccine authority) and the Melissa and Bill Gates Foundation (youBrid.) |
A BBC report from 12 March 2020 rings true in important ways, looking back: BBCsk. It was published on the day all eyes watched Boris Johnson, Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty on a BBC One special announcement. (The WHO had declared a pandemic the day before.) If people had read BBCsk before watching the three on TV, they would have been dumfounded when Chris Whitty said, "and the Contain (phase) finishes from today": youtu at 13:10 mins. (soon confirmed at Govuk.)
The WHO had made it easy to misapprehend what a respiratory coronavirus was likely to do.
The WHO's narrative contradicted a key point in a Nature review paper in 2016: nature.com/articles/nrmicro.2016.81. That paper had provided the proper explanation for the fact that the spread of MERS-CoV was moderate and localized: There was always a 'delay' in the shedding of progeny virus by a MERS patient. In other words, people who'd caught it were in sickbeds before their bodies first released virus, and that explained why outbreaks did not become epidemic in scale.
Since 2012, the WHO had been saying that the people who caught MERS were those who worked with camels. The coronavirus, they said, "cannot" transmit easily human-to-human: Reu1. It wasn't until 2015 that the WHO mentioned the possibility of some human-to-human transmission, "where there is close contact": Reut.
In contrast to the above, people who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 could be shedding virus before they even suspected that they had symptoms of pneumonia. An infected person was far less likely to die (the Case Fatality Rate of COVID-19 was very much lower than that of MERS), but he/she was far more likely to cause other people to become infected.
The WHO did not include the above information in its website revisions. In 2019, WHO were still letting people think that a respiratory coronavirus didn't readily transmit human-to-human, and that a 'zoonotic' virus was one which, "is transmitted between animals and people", i.e. the fifth 'Key fact' on their MERS factsheet prior to the revision of 11 December 2025 (when it was changed extensively: WHO_int.)
The original is pasted below:
While there was frequent mention of 'zoonosis', the WHO provided no adequate description of that concept as it applies to respiratory coronaviruses. This led to a false anticipation of the qualities of any novel coronavirus: e.g. "Don't worry about this one. It'll also be transmitting directly from animals to people, not human-to-human" (see in bbcw, above where it's written, "We hope you can calm down and reflect on your behaviour".)
A report about the Event 201 Conference reveals that there was a strong expectation that 'the next outbreak' would be spreading from animals to humans. It's said that the conference had, "illustrated areas where private/public partnerships" could, "diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences" of a coronavirus outbreak, such as one escaping from "infected pig farms": Event201. (There was no mention of the public/private partnerships which were made in S. Korea once the MERS outbreaks of 2015 were contained.) Gates and his groupies were making it seem that countries should now only be ready for a novel, 'zoonotic' virus which will spread, "between animals and people" (N.B. The factsheet has been extensively changed by the revision of 11 December 2025: factsh).
The "next outbreak" (the title of Gates' tedtalk) would be similar to the last one: 'mainly affecting people who handled animals'. ("Don't sweat the details", thought Gates to himself, "Just talk as though vaccination is the only appropriate tool when responding to outbreaks of novel viruses".)
Gates never said anything, in or before 2020, about the trace-and-test method for achieving the containment of a respiratory coronavirus. Nevertheless, it was quite well known in Britain that such containment was essential if lockdowns were to be avoided (e.g. see REHIS.)
Avoiding lockdowns was a very wise thing to do in the countries being watched closely by the CCP and Kim Jong Un. It was the third month of 2020 before the WHO promoted aspects of S. Korea's strategy to its global audience, and S. Korea itself wasn't mentioned. The WHO slogan on 16 March was, "Test, test, test". On 18 March it was: "Tracing must be the backbone of the response in every country" (yaho, Alje.) By that time, most countries were not giving the WHO their full attention. At best, one or two had trialed trace-and-test procedure in ways which couldn't achieve a lot (Guac, rehis.)
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When S. Korea had contained the spread of MERS-CoV inside four hospitals in 2015, the WHO only said: "The virus does not seem to pass easily from person to person unless there is close contact". By continuing to insist that most people caught the virus directly from camels (see MERS infects 10), WHO were suggesting that S. Korea's approach had no purpose: It could not have prevented human-to-human spread of the disease, because MERS didn't transmit human-to-human in most situations.
After a revision in 2022, the MERS factsheet on the WHO website still said that a "zoonotic" coronavirus, "is transmitted between animals and people" (see copy below.) MERS was still characterized as an 'animal disease' which, in most cases, only infects people if they handle camels. (The revision of 11 December 2025 has changed the factsheet entirely.)
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| ^ The fifth Key fact in the MERS factsheet before 11/12/2025 ^ |
N.B. It's not claimed in this compilation that animal-to-human transmission of a novel zoonotic virus never occurs more than once, or a few times, after that virus makes its first appearance (following its mutational emergence inside a host animal.) It's reported that a man had died in November 2013 after tending to a sick camel, and that the sample of virus obtained from the camel was "virtually identical" to one taken from the man: wikip (pasted below.) What is claimed here, however, is that the WHO was wrong to describe such animal-to-human cases as the norm, and as characteristic of MERS in every country.
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Since 2012, the WHO had said that human-to-human transmission of MERS-CoV was not being seen. In 2015, this was brought up to date with, "unless there is close contact", but the general message remained the same: 'This virus spreads animal-to-animal, and you might catch it if you handle camels'. WHO did not signpost that the Case Fatality Rate of MERS was high, e.g. "56%" in one study: nemj. WHO also did not signpost that infected people were usually struck with respiratory symptoms within 5 days: CDC. The WHO's factsheet said (before the revision of 11 December 2025) that MERS infects people by "direct" transmission from infected camels, and that some people housed in close contact might infect each other. What the WHO wrote was being written more cautiously at govuk: The disease was said to be found among people who handled camels, but there wasn't actual proof of camel-to-human transmission, e.g.: |
It's very problematic to suggest that almost every human case of MERS was due to virus transmission from an infected camel. That would be very unusual when the case fatality rate of a respiratory disease is so high. (The New England Journal of Medicine reported a CFR of 56% in 2013: nemj.) If every case had been caused 'directly', i.e. by contact with a camel, then the following statement would have been true: "If 100 people had handled infected camels and caught MERS, 56 of them soon died, and none of them infected other people". Does it sound likely?
In striking contrast to MERS, the case fatality rate for COVID-19 was reported by the WHO to be 3.4% in 2022 (WoM), and some agencies had calculated local CFRs below 2%. (Recent papers explain that many factors can affect measures of CFR: it will change with time, and be different from place to place, but no reports suggested a value above 10% for COVID-19. See NIH under, 'Results'.)
Another problem: The WHO's factsheet stated that camel-to-human transmission of MERS occurred in "the Middle East, Africa and South Asia". (N.B. The revision of 11 December 2025 has extensively changed the factsheet: MERS_int. See the original 'Key facts' pasted below). Surely, the spread of MERS to camels in different deserts, separated in some cases by seas or oceans, could only be explained by human's carrying it to them? That would entail a significant amount of human-to-human transmission, because people who'd caught MERS were usually soon in sickbeds, not taking trips to different parts of the world.
In December 2019, China was telling the WHO that another 'typical coronavirus' situation had emerged in Wuhan: 'Once again, they couldn't see any evidence that such virus was spreading human to human': bbcw, bfpg (at '31 Dec'), tweet. The WHO implied that the spread of SARS-CoV-2 was as they'd described it for MERS-CoV in 2012, i.e. It was 'safe to assume' that, 1) the virus would be transmitting animal-to-animal and, occasionally, animal-to-human. 2) There wouldn't be much, if any, human-to-human transmission.
N.B. They never said explicitly that SARS-CoV-2 killed animals or, if it did, what the numbers of animal fatalities were.
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Penny Mordaunt works in the tobacco industry now: bbc/2025. She was "good friends" with Bill Gates in 2020, and his influence on our Health Minister (both men rejecting the better way that Taiwan and S. Korea were doing "infection control") can be traced to the frequency of meetings they had in 2019.
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Note: The definition of a 'zoonotic virus' on the MERS factsheet until 11/12/2025 ("is transmitted between animals and people") differed from another definition on another part of the WHO website, as shown below:
The WHO's alternative description of zoonosis is similar to one which is widely accepted among scientists, and it does not suggest that there will be multiple animal-to-human infections of any novel virus: Once a zoonotically mutant virion gets into a human, that virion is replicated, and a chain of human-to-human infection ensues. Erroneously, the WHO built its description of MERS on the idea that, 'there's almost no human-to-human infection', and the very 'abstract' definition of zoonosis on its MERS factsheet didn't make that idea seem unusual.The alternative definition (above) is more adequate, and much closer to one which says that a zoonotic virus is a mutated form of an animal-infecting virus, an 'evolutionary offshoot'. - The animal-infecting virus continues to exist, but one of its virions has, due to mutation during its replication phase, given rise to human-infecting progeny.
A correct definition of a zoonotic coronavirus would tell you: (1) that it infects humans and, (2) that it is a strain which is descended, through mutation, from a solitary virion which, itself, could only infect an animal.
Before 11/12/2025, there was nothing in the WHO's MERS factsheet which indicated knowledge of the fourth "Key Point" in the Nature review of 2016 (Natrev), i.e. "Patients do not shed large amounts of virus until well after the onset of symptoms, when patients are most probably already seeking medical care". The Nature paper explained why the spread of MERS among humans was not epidemic in scale: MERS symptoms would cause an infected person to suffer debilitating symptoms (keeping him at home), before progeny virus was being shed from his body. In S. Korea, most people who'd caught MERS soon found themselves in hospital wards which had measures to protect staff.
MERS-CoV showed some very high Case Fatality Rates, for example 56%: nemj. (The WHO suggested an average CFR of '35%' when another source had reported '37%'.) A high CFR can coincide with lower rates of infection, simply because it indicates that infected people tend to die before they come into contact with many other people. As described above, a natural 'delay' in the shedding of MERS-CoV will further significantly reduce the frequency of infective contact.
As per the 2016 Nature review of research papers on MERS, progeny virus is shed quite late in the progression of an infection, only after symptoms are debilitating. In most cases, harsh symptoms will have slowed the patient right down before any virions leave his/her body, therefore it's possible that no other people will become infected through contact with that patient. (This was particularly the case if the patient was hospitalized in S. Korea.) The Nature paper explains sufficiently why MERS didn't spread rapidly through human populations. There was no need to conjure the idea that MERS-CoV was not able to transmit human-to-human in most situations.
It's different with COVID-19: Following infection, SARS-CoV-2 virions can be shed from a person's body before that person has become concerned about symptoms, symptoms which might not ever become severe (this had also been seen in some MERS cases, but less frequently.) Thus, many 'asymptomatic' carriers of COVID-19 would be spreading virus wherever they went.
By leaving out the fourth Key Point of the 2016 Nature review, the WHO's description of MERS was (in 2024) at least nine years out of date. The following would be more acceptable as a description:
MERS-CoV is a respiratory coronavirus which is shed from the human body only after symptoms are obviously developed. The harsh symptoms hinder the daily activities of most infected people, therefore there are never many of them who are still physically active when their bodies have begun to shed progeny virus. People were kept safe inside S. Korean hospitals by the use of PPE, tracing-and-testing, and the isolation of confirmed cases.
The WHO's talk of "no virus mutation" (Reut2015) was off-topic, and their emphasis on "direct transmission" was not even based on sufficient collection of data. Their constant message that multiple animal-to-human transmission events were taking place (by inference from their insistence that there were very few human-to-human infections) had prevented them from noticing what explained the sub-epidemic case numbers.
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Living always with hostility from a neighbouring state to the north, both Taiwan and S. Korea didn't want country-wide lockdowns in 2020 (see jfma.) By late-December, the UK had lost at least 125-times more people to COVID-19 than S. Korea had (and S. Korea had contained a big surge in cases in February 2020: kort.) In 2015, S. Korea had seen significant economic consequences of localized lockdowns.
2020 in Britain:
On 4 July 2022, Mr Jeremy Hunt MP said that "government" didn't follow the confidential SAGE advice which it received early in 2020. "Why weren't we copying South Korea?", he asks in the video clip (see after the first 50 seconds.) The unanimous advice from the many British experts was kept confidential, and Mr Hunt feels that all scientists would have backed it if they could have known about it.
(Note: The WHO also has a group called, 'SAGE' which is entirely unrelated in function.)
Opportunities to secure PPE had been ignored: Grdn.
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Nine or more people saw that they could make a lot of money from the sudden global demand for vaccine, while UK businesses were ruined because the lockdowns spanned a year:
SAGE had advised No. 10 to copy S. Korea's trace-and-test approach, to keep the number of deaths low and avoid the hardship that lockdowns inflict. Bill Gates had raised a lot of funding for the WHO to organize vaccine supply, so 'why even bother to talk about trace-and-test, S. Korea or Taiwan'? (In a second BBC interview, he again said nothing about efforts to achieve containment: bfast.) Critical of governments in general and not praising any in particular, Gates said that a quick supply of facemasks and vaccine was what they had failed to provide quickly enough (because they hadn't watched his TED talk in 2015?) He'll never say that adherence to the SAGE advice would have curbed the UK's death toll (kept it well below the "150,000" recorded by 8 January 2022: bfpg), and would have prevented a historic level of government borrowing (CNN) and business deaths: ONSlkdn. |
| Gates didn't want countries to have trace-and-test teams containing the spread of COVID-19. There was no simple way for him to get involved in that, and he preferred that nothing might compete for the enthusiasm that governments had for his vaccine scheme (politico.) |
Contact tracing had already been stigmatized as an "aggressive" invader of locational data of infected people, whereas nobody was about to challenge the World's biggest-ever vaccine rollout!
It suited Gates that most governments quickly forgot about trying to keep society out of lockdowns. It's good that he didn't have such influence in places like S. Korea, Taiwan (jfma), Japan (NIH/JGFM, bmjJ), Vietnam and Indonesia (pubm), where an ethic of medical self-sufficiency was strong.
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In April 2020 (bbc/news), it's likely that Gates and our MPs had already agreed in online meetings that "the Contain Phase" would be stopped when the WHO declared a pandemic, which it did on 11 March 2020. "Rather see if this comes to anything first, and then have a lockdown if it does", they'd have agreed. "I'll be organizing vaccine supply worldwide', Gates would have said, 'It'll be easy now that the WHO is beholden to me for so much funding." (HInews, politico.) Gates is worth $117-bn but it's said that he borrowed $5-bn from USAID for the vaccine organization 'GAVI', which fronts as evidence of his epic 'philanthropy'. (The online reference has gone, but see Newst.) A grant of $2.6bn has been terminated by Trump: bmjGav.  Below: Melinda Gates also campaigned on behalf of the WHO after Trump cut its US support in 2020: Reut20
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Discovered in 2025:
In March 2020, the WHO was caught dodging conversation about Taiwan: bbcT. Most world leaders followed suit, and they turned a deaf ear to news of the containment approach which was proving so effective (jfma).
MPs and top medics knew that Chris Whitty had, also in March, abruptly stopped PHE from continuing with the procedure which could make lockdowns avoidable in Britain (or, at least, shorter and smaller in scale). They created narrative to make it seem that there was, in fact, a "Track and trace" system still at work behind the scenes. (The launch of "NHS Test and Trace" on 28 May was another way to make the public think that the UK had teams doing what the S. Koreans had been doing since January.)
The imaginary operation which they would still mention quite often (sometimes calling it "Test and trace") had been referred to as "the Contain phase" by Chris Whitty on 12 March, when he announced that, "the Contain finishes from today": yout at 13:10 mins.) On 28 May, "NHS Test and Trace" was said to be picking up where "Contain" had been stopped (Govuk.) However, while NHS Test and Trace did have a contact tracing service, it was only an advisory one: It sent text messages to people if they'd been in pubs, cafés or restaurants at times when known COVID-19 cases had also been present. It was ineffectual because any such 'traced' people could decide for themselves whether or not to pursue a PCR test at a distant NHS facility. There was no obligation to show proof of a negative test result unless they wanted to return to the place where they'd been identified as possible disease contacts.
Mr Johnson was busy with Brexit in January and February (his chief adviser wanted him to be shielded from any distractions: itvhan) and he preferred a monetized approach in which he would be "king" of a pandemic "war" cabinet, simply arranging contracts (see Glaw.) After keeping the SAGE advice hidden which recommended the S. Korean approach (and seen to it that the tracing team of "just under 300 staff" was disbanded on 12 March: REHIS), Johnson said: "We've done what can be done to contain this disease, and this has bought us valuable time, but...": yout. Only 9 days previously, he'd said that Britain was "extremely well prepared" with "fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease": sprep.
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| 30 Nov 2023: Mr Hancock told the UK Covid Inquiry that "No. 10 actively worked against" his 100,000 tests per day goal: ipap. |
Lockdown was followed by a surge in business closures:
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| See Indep. |
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On 17 April 2020, it was reported that contact tracing was due to "begin again" in Britain: theGu.
Earlier that month, Public Health England had said that the country's tracing team of "just under 300 staff" was disbanded "when the UK moved to the Delay phase of tackling coronavirus in mid-March": Guac. Neither "phase" had been mentioned by anybody on BBC TV, nor were the "Research" and "Mitigate" phases mentioned. ("Contain, delay, research and mitigate" was said only by Matt Hancock once in a Parliamentary debate, and then by Chris Whitty on 12 March just before he said, "and the contain phase finishes from today": Yout at 13:10 mins.)
It can be seen in a cBBC kids' report that "Research" and "Mitigate" were not "stages" or "phases" in any chronological sense. They were proposed activities which could be run at any time during the "Delay" phase:
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| The explanation of "Contain, delay, research and mitigate" (above) was provided by Mr Johnson for young audiences on 03/03/2020: cBBC. All trace-and-test activity was stopped by Chris Whitty nine days later because, he said, "Contain finishes from today": Yout at 13:10 mins. It's inherently baffling how the "great plan" was going to "slow the spread in this country" (quoting Mr Johnson) if it had "always" been agreed that the PHE tracing team would be disbanded so soon (and so would the 5,000 trained council staff who were never deployed at all), and there would be no further COVID testing except in hospitals, i.e. "when the UK moved to the delay phase of tackling coronavirus in mid-March": REHIS. |
The "tracing again" prediction in The Guardian on 17 April was followed by the launch of 'NHS Test and Trace' on 28 May. The important point, never made openly, was that a visit to a COVID-19 testing centre was not obligatory if this new system warned anyone, by text message, that they had probably been in contact with a known COVID-19 case in a pub, café or restaurant. (There was no Test and Trace surveillance in shops, supermarkets or on public transport.) In hindsight, the 17 April article shows that Mr Johnson lied to the UK Covid Inquiry in December 2023 when he said, "I didn't know what other tool I had". He obviously knew that Taiwan and S. Korea were following a trace-and-test strategy without lockdowns, because PHE says it tried to do likewise during the, "Contain phase" (REHIS). Also see yaho.
The trace-and-test technique would probably have made it possible to slow the spread of COVID-19 sufficiently to keep life normal enough in Britain, but it asked leaders to try something new, perhaps with a risk of accountability if it didn't work well. If somebody (e.g. Sir Patrick Vallance) said, 'Let's play it safe and just lock the country down', who would have argued otherwise?
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| Sir Patrick Vallance said that Mr Johnson failed to fully absorb concepts central to covid. |
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| From: yaho1, updated on 2 April 2020. |
Between 29 January (when the first two COVID-19 cases, recently arriving from China, were detected in Britain) and 23 March (the day that the UK was locked down) there was no expressed plan of action from No. 10.
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A 2024 paper describes Taiwan's response: jfma.
With a cumulative total of 21-thousand COVID-19 cases in March 2022, Taiwan decided to terminate its 'Containment' operation. There was a desire to resume a normal lifestyle, and the invasion of the Ukraine meant that China might be inspired to make hostile gestures again soon. It was assumed that most Taiwanese were protected from further coronavirus infection by the vaccine they'd recently received.
Not mentioned in the JFMA paper, a startling increase in number of new infections occurred as soon as 'Containment' was ended. (Formally, it was ended in April 2022.) Taiwan's cumulative total number of cases rose from 24,033 before 3 April 2022, to more than 10-million before the end of February 2023: MinHW (see the green area in the chart below.)
In other words, there was a 416-fold multiplication of COVID-19 cases inside less than eleven months, because the containment operation had been ended in the belief that vaccine was making people secure. (Also use Ctrl+F to find 'taiwan had very' below in this blog.)
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| Visit the interactive chart at MinHW |
A massive increase in the number of COVID-19 cases also began in S. Korea when 'Trace, test and treat' was being abandoned at the end of 2021. TTT was officially shelved in February 2022, but it was launched again within the same month because of the consequent surge in cases: Reut2 (also see teleg). Regaining control was not easy, and S. Korea's cumulative deaths total had reached 24,000 before the end of May 2022, after being below 6,000 at the start of January. (For more, find, 'a surprising' below in this blog.)
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There was no discussion of the probable effects of lockdowns on UK businesses. Officially, two lockdowns had been declared before vaccine was first issued on 8 December.
In the UK, the pandemic was to hit the economy hard. MPs had ignored the advice they got directly from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE, see video.) They didn't want the inconvenience of thermal screening or COVID-19 testing at airports or the Eurotunnel, where lorry drivers were already held up by Brexit rigmarole. Mr Johnson said in December 2023 that he, "didn't twig", i.e. was left with no choice but to impose a full-scale lockdown: "I didn't know what other tool I had", he said: yahoo.
Matt Hancock told the UK Covid Inquiry that he chose to lock the whole country down, "rather than having a London-specific lockdown", because he'd found it "striking how the country had come together in observing the restrictions" (theGu)*. He said that didn't want to break up the "national unity" by separating "one part of the country from another" in terms of lockdown. *Strangely, Hancock forgot that no "restrictions" were in place before the lockdown decisions were made? (How could his decisions have been based on the way the country "had come together to observe the restrictions", if restrictions weren't yet in place? yah1)
"A former director of the WHO told the hearing that contact tracing, testing and isolation could have continued for longer across the UK and would have enabled the government to lock down London while leaving other areas of the country with fewer restrictions. - Prof Anthony Costello, the head of the Institute for Global Health at University College London, pointed out that Yorkshire had fewer than 10 cases identified in 300,000-400,000 people around the time that contact tracing and community testing were halted and, as such, could have avoided a complete lockdown." - Matt Hancock "declined to comment on why the UK did not isolate or trace people arriving in the country from overseas, while adding that this policy could potentially change in the future: “We’ve always said that we don’t rule out taking steps if that’s what the science advises.”
Most people saw Mr Johnson announcing lockdown on 23 March, but Matt Hancock claimed that he'd declared it on 16 March: Fullf.
In the first week of May 2020, Dominic Cummings had sent Mr Johnson a list of reasons to stop hoping for an effective trace-and-test operation in the UK. He said, "skim through this", and Johnson replied, "The whole track and trace thing feels like whistling in the dark; legions of imaginary Clouseaus and no plan to hire them": Lbc. By saying "feels", not "felt", he might have been referring to the trace-and-test operations in East Asian countries, because such tracing had already been "finished" in the UK by Chris Whitty on 12 March: youtube at 13:10 mins. However, "legions of imaginary Clouseaus" was obviously a sneer at the 5,000 tracing staff in British councils who were trained and ready, but were never put to work: Guarcl.
To keep the public convinced by Mr Johnson's original narrative (e.g. "fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease": sprep), it was announced on 17 April that contact tracing would begin again soon: theGu. A large PCR test-processing system was launched on 28 May and given the name, "NHS Test and Trace". It did trace some COVID-19 contacts by recording visits that people made to pubs, cafés, and restaurants (but not to shops, supermarkets, trains or buses.) However, while it sent text messages to warn an individual if he'd been in a pub when a COVID-19 case had also just been there, it had no way to make him attend a PCR testing centre. (Traced people only had to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test result if they wanted to again enter the venue that the NHS system had warned them was probably contaminated the last time they were there.) NHS Test and Trace obviously had other functions too, and it consumed £29.5-bn (fullfac).
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26/01/2024 on BBC News: 'Lorry-driving is losing its appeal, and a shortage of drivers could hurt the supply of essential goods.' In his first PM speech on 24 July 2019, Mr Johnson said: "and it's we conservatives who've had the best insights into human nature ...into how to manage the jostling sets of instincts in the human heart ...Time and again it is to us that the people of this country have turned to get that balance right..." (1stspeech < this version has subtitling). Less than 6 months later, he presumed to reject the confidential SAGE advice which recommended S. Korea's strategy for containing the coronavirus: Hunt. 'He quit science at school when he was 15', said Patrick Vallance. In May 2020, Dominic Cummings (the PM's Chief Adviser) asked Johnson to "skim through" a list of reasons for giving up on trace-and-test, and he wrote back that the method was, "legions of imaginary Clouseaus" and, "no plans to hire them" (Lbc, Guard.) Bill Gates was in a feature BBC interview in April (bfast), and it was obvious that he only backed vaccine supply, not ever mentioning trace-and-test or how it might make lockdown avoidable (politico.) He said that no country had impressed him with its pandemic response, and he made no mention of East Asian states who had built up their containment strategy to avoid locking down. (New Zealand had also made much use of trace-and-test, with minimal use of short, closely-timed lockdowns in specific emergency situations: wikNZ.) Gates had big influence in the WHO by then, which had waited until 18 March before saying, "Tracing every contact must be the backbone of the response in every country". The WHO said nothing about avoiding lockdowns. Taiwan had a "health care system recently ranked No. 1 in the World, for the second year in a row" (natint), but Mr Johnson was one of many who showed no interest in its warnings, remaining aloof to its lockdown-free response (jfma. Also see bbct.) He said that his colleagues and the experts had let him down by being slow to pass on key information.  MPs quoted the WHO, and WHO was not promoting trace-and-test strategy in explicit ways, or soon enough to help anybody. Tedros Ghebreyesus was being very vocal about protecting China's economy from travel restrictions (voa), but he never suggested that countries might try to protect their own economies from lockdowns. He kept quiet about Taiwan and S. Korea because the first thing they had done was restrict travel.  |
The WHO had created a false impression of what a novel respiratory coronaviruses was likely to do. When the MERS factsheet definition had said, year after year, that a zoonotic virus "is transmitted between animals and people", that became a premise for the culling of people's pets in 2020. The CCP did this while the animals' owners were in quarantine. The Danes had killed millions of mink after reading the same insufficient definition of zoonosis? (Their culls had no legal or evidence-based justification: Guam.) 
Regrettably, Mr Johnson found the WHO useful in a gaslighting narrative. He and Hancock would mention them and say, "We're following the science". He sent them lots of money (find more about this in a separate section below.)
Why bother with a lockdown-beating trace-and-test effort when Penny Mordaunt MP was "good friends" with Bill Gates? Gates was now directing the WHO informally, and it suited him that the Tory attitude was, "Control them closely until they've had vaccine" (which wasn't available before 8 December.)
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How convenient that a top MP was "friends with" Bill Gates - He had the WHO at his beck and call because he'd organized big funds for it after Donald Trump cut the US support: Hinews. Tedros Ghebreyesus was persistently advising against "travel bans" because, he said, they would "isolate China economically". Never mind what lockdowns would do to anyone else's economy. It explains why he didn't hint at copying S. Korea /Taiwan /Indonesia until 18 March 2020: "Tracing every contact must be the backbone of the response in every country" (Guac, rehis, yaho.) N.B. The Koreans didn't believe that they could trace, "every contact". They simply strove to trace as many as they could when circumstances permitted. |
The fines
People in the UK were fined for inconsequential breaches of Matt Hancock's pandemic restrictions, e.g. two women who were fined in a rural location, getting some fresh air and exercise. Why send police to the countryside where catching a respiratory disease is least likely to occur? Why fine people on beaches and in parks? It was a bullying exercise, instilling fear and compliance into the population as a whole, rather than leading people to think sensibly. Surely, people were far more likely to catch a respiratory virus inside supermarkets, where police didn't go?
On Friday 5 January 2024, a program rerun on ITV showed a man getting a £4,500 fine at Heathrow, because he hadn't arranged costly PCR tests. It was filmed in July 2021, and the program's host said, "More than 100,000 fines have been issued since March 2020" (which amounts to more than 6,666 fines per month): heathrow-britains-busiest
While there were plenty of pandemic-related fines at airports and elsewhere, the MPs had made sure that there was never any thermal screening at any border port. They didn't want the complications that might arise from trying to control people who were arriving in the UK with the most easily-detected sign of COVID-19, a high body temperature. They'd also foreseen that lorry queues would be caused by Brexit rigmarole at the Eurotunnel port (Tele), and thermal screening would make that situation worse.
"On 13 January 2020, the Ministry of Public Health announced the first confirmed case, a 61-year-old Chinese woman who is a resident of Wuhan. She had not visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, but was noted to have been to other markets. She developed a sore throat, fever, chills and a headache on 5 January, flew directly with her family and a tour group from Wuhan to the Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok on 8 January, where she was detected using thermal surveillance and then hospitalised. Four days later she tested positive" (wikTh.)
N.B. On 19 January 2020, South Korea's first case was also spotted on thermal screening, at Incheon Airport. Without such screening, it might have been quite some time before the disease was detected outside of China. It was only such evidence that could force WHO officials to admit that the virus was spreading country-to-country. Even with access to intelligence from many countries, the WHO didn't declare a 'pandemic' until 11 March.
... Having seen the whole thing now on ITV 1+1.... The man getting the £4,500 fine at Heathrow in 2021had neglected to pre-arrange PCR testing online, which was a requirement because he'd visited a 'red-listed' country. Government was making travellers pay £170, "to lessen the burden on the NHS", even though lateral flow tests were everywhere by then (and had been made universally available in April 2021.) People had been admitted freely at airports in 2020 when there were no measures in place, apart from picking up some COVID-19 advisory leaflets. The fined man was ardently against making such payment, "to the Tories". The police could issue fines of up to £10,000.
The biggest punishments were delivered on businesses: A café in Devon was caught letting customers sit down on 6th and 7th November 2020, after the second lockdown had been declared on the 5th. The couple who ran the popular place lost £42,000 in fines and court costs. A few weeks later, parties began in Downing Street, and the MPs later received £50 fines retroactively. p.s. Red-listing could stigmatize poor countries while affluent countries were not challenged for hoarding vaccine: https://theconversation.com/a-granular-look-at-uks-covid-19-red-list-shows-why-its-deeply-flawed-168615  Compare the UK situation with a report about "full cafés" in S. Korea, seven months previously on 18 April 2020: bloom.
Tories were quick to engage in denialism. In contradiction of what could be seen in the records, Dominic Raab insisted that there had been no surge in UK cases in April 2020: bbc+. He claimed that this was because the cumulative deaths total of 26,097 on 29 April, "includes all deaths since 2 March". However, the BBC had reported a cumulative deaths total of 759 on 27 March (bbc-), meaning that 25,338 died in the following 33 days, which clearly did indicate a surge. Could it be that Raab actually wanted the public to fear that the health threat was enormous, 'worthy of a country-wide lockdown', so he feigned a complacency about 26,000 deaths?  Above was in November 2021: Huff. |
An "evidence-based analysis" argues that lockdown was not the correct approach for COVID-19 (nor for the Spanish Flu and other pandemics), because a lockdown's negative effects on public health was likely to have caused twenty-times more deaths than the virus did: USAgov.
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| The image above is from a section of video which is less than 2 minutes long: video. There is a transcript in the poster below. The second half (in bold print) is Mr Hunt's testimony that S. Korea's response to the pandemic (owid) had been recommended to No. 10 by the UK's scientific emergency group, SAGE (not to be confused with the WHO group with the same acronym: SAGE.) |
Mr Sunak has not denied that his hedge fund shares grew substantially in value through investment in Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine: Goodl and Gurd. Might it explain why he said nothing when Mr Johnson ignored the SAGE recommendation to copy S. Korea and avoid lockdowns?: video. 'Why save people and protect the economy with a trace-and-test strategy, when you could just sit in lockdown and wait for vaccine profit'? Moderna became the UK's main supplier in 2021 (bmj), and it signed a £1-bn deal with government in 2022, to make preparations for "future pandemics": Finti.
April 2024: Good Law Project has made some progress: They'll be able to see emails to/from Mr Sunak concerning a hedge fund which must have made "huge profits" from vaccine sales: GoodLP.
| p.s. to the above: There is a 3rd flaw. It was well known as far back as 1980 (from personal memory) that someone could carry a virus without showing symptoms. In fact, that was the popular definition of a 'carrier' at the time. |
Matt Hancock MP said, in so many words: "You can't condemn us for not preventing the relocation of patients from hospitals to care homes. We didn't know there could be asymptomatic cases." (bbcCH) As Health Secretary, surely he knew that the second infected person to be found outside of China, detected on 19/01/2020 in thermal screening at Incheon Airport, was observed to be healthy in appearance. It was only the next day at a hospital that she was shown, by means of nucleic acid testing, to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. She was a typical, 'asymptomatic' case. Furthermore, a pre-pandemic definition of a carrier shows that there was nothing new about, 'asymptomatic cases':
On reflection, had they let cases be shipped into care homes so that people would learn how contagious the virus really was, thereby convincing them that lockdown was unavoidable? ("There was no other tool", said Mr Johnson in 2024.)
Video: "How Boris led the UK to one of its worst ever public health disasters": facebok
On 31 December 2019, China told the WHO about Wuhan's pneumonia cases. However, not mentioned in the Led-by-Donkeys video, the Chinese said, "only those who came into contact with infected animals could catch the virus": bbcw. Also see it in bfpg under '31 December': "There was no evidence that the virus was spread by humans".
Two weeks later
, the WHO shared China's message in a more 'technically-worded' way: There was, apparently, "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission": tweet. On 22 January, the WHO's Mission to China was quoted, "data suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan but more investigation is needed to understand the disease's transmission": Time. (See more about China's concealment of information at Bloo.)
, the WHO shared China's message in a more 'technically-worded' way: There was, apparently, "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission": tweet. On 22 January, the WHO's Mission to China was quoted, "data suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan but more investigation is needed to understand the disease's transmission": Time. (See more about China's concealment of information at Bloo.) Since 2012, the WHO insisted that MERS-CoV was being transmitted animal-to-human, not human-to-human "unless there is close contact". In 2016, a better understanding of the disease dynamics of MERS was provided in Nature (see the 4th Key Point): Most people who caught it were soon feeling ill and staying at home or in hospital, before their bodies began to shed virus. Thus, the virus was taken to the sickbed and it didn't often spread any further. (Also, the Case Fatality Rate of MERS was very high, therefore a significant percentage of people died before they might spread the virus to many other people.)
However, the WHO website until 11/12/2025 said, foremost, that MERS is caught by handling camels. Its advice for preventing 'possible' human-to-human infection is rudimentary, and placed lower down in the MERS factsheet. The WHO's 'animal-to-human' bias was not corrected in the 2022 revision of the factsheet, which still didn't mention that, with MERS-CoV, the shedding of virus from a human body happens well after symptoms are full-blown. The WHO's preoccupation with 'animal-to-human' infection is discussed further below. N.B. The factsheet revision of 11 December 2025 differs extensively from the one that hadn't been altered much in ten years (MERS_int.)
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| Above is from the version of the MERS factsheet which had been updated in 2022 (before it was completely changed in the revision of 11 December 2025.) |
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| Tue 12 May, 2020 |
S. Koreans had been making some of the world's best smartphones, but in 2020 it was assumed that they had no respect for data privacy. Their contact tracing, when it was mentioned at all, was described as, "aggressive" because it accessed some personal data. Their virus containment method was not properly described in the media, and it wasn't made clear that they had learned in the 2015 with the MERS coronavirus that lockdown should be avoided as much as possible. Regardless of their need to deal with a big surge of COVID-19 cases in February 2020 (kort, Atlan), nobody in western governments kept watch to see if their TTT strategy was working.
See sprep for examples of the ways in which our politicians, and some journalists, brushed off news of the S. Korean exceptionalism, e.g. never mentioning the lessons learned in 2015 with NAT technology (and never saying that MERS had a very high CFR.) It was implied that S. Korea was one of the "Asian states" which "were more ready to resort to... lockdowns and other Draconian measures" (see figure below). The proof of the pudding is in the eating, but the COVID-19 statistics of S. Korea and Taiwan were ignored by the MPs while they organized seven Downing Street parties in December 2020. By then, Britain had lost 71,000 people when S. Korea had yet to lose 600 (a country close to China, with 88% more people in the average square mile.)
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| from sprep |
Although very costly*, the NHS tracing system couldn't achieve anything if the potential contacts that it detected didn't want to go and get tested. People had complied with PPE and social distancing advisories, followed by lockdown rules, and they no longer had an appetite for long drives to PCR test centres, not even when a text message suggested that they'd had 'possible contact' with an infected person somewhere.
Between 27 March and 29 April 2020, the total number of COVID-19 deaths in the UK rose from 759 to 26,097 (compare bbc- and bbc+), but Dominic Raab denied that there'd been a surge in cases.
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| Above: from the report of 27 March (bbc-), see '759' under 'Summary'. |
Hearing nothing about S. Korea from the WHO before January 2020, many UK scientists had not become familiar with the use of a NAT to identify people who are infected with a respiratory coronavirus. No sort of testing had been used when there were outbreaks of flu virus, and it's said that UK scientists thought that the disease in Wuhan was a novel flu: Sky (Matt Hancock mentioned this on TV.)
On 3rd March, Boris Johnson said that Britain was "extremely well prepared" with, "fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease": sprep. (He "shook hands with everybody" in a hospital which had coronavirus cases: teno.) However, it was announced nine days later that the whole system (suddenly being referred to as the "Contain phase") was to be terminated immediately.
In April 2020, it was reported that Jeremy Hunt, as Chair of the Health Select Committee of MPs, had previously pointed out that S. Korea had 1,000 contact tracers when PHE had "290 people doing this at their peak": theGu.)
A 'special report' of 7th April 2020 mentions S. Korea only once, in a list of Asian countries which includes China. It says that the Asian countries were adopting "draconian measures". It doesn't mention that S. Korea had worked "bali, bali" (quick, quick) to avoid Draconian lockdown by expanding its Trace, Test and Treat strategy.
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| N.B. Praise from the WHO was reported on 2 April (shown above) but there was, otherwise, no news of the WHO ever mentioning S. Korea. |
Different experts were coming to different conclusions, not realizing how differently things were being done in Taiwan and S. Korea. Only an inner circle was aware that Mr Johnson had been advised confidentially to, "copy South Korea" (revealed by Jeremy Hunt in July 2022: see the second half of a 2 minute video.)
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Above (underlined): NERVTAG swallowed China's opinion that the virus wasn't one which spreads human-to-human. NERVTAG is the elite group which backed the notion that British ports of entry should have no thermal screening. Mr Johnson didn't want any screening at the Eurotunnel, because it would slow down the transport of goods, perhaps more so than Brexit was already doing. |
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| In the UK on 3 March 2020, it was, "I'm shaking hands with everybody you'll be pleased to know" (teno.) In S. Korea since 20 January, it had been more like, "Ring the bell and run like hell." |
It was only on 18 March 2020 that the WHO said, "tracing every contact must be the backbone of the response in every country" (Guac, yaho, Rehis.) Before that day, Tedros Ghebreyesus had never mentioned S. Korea's contact tracing which began early in February. He'd said, "Test, test, test" on 16 March (vclip), but he never said, 'Trace, Test and Treat' (TTT), which would have conveyed immediately what the approach was in non-communist Asian states: bloom, jfma. The number of cases and deaths in the UK by 12 May showed that the opportunity to get control by copying S. Korea, Taiwan or Indonesia had been missed: Gua2.
In a BBC documentary at the end of 2020 (Lock1), WHO executive Maria Van Kerkhove referred to, "the diplomacy that we use" when asked why nobody blew the whistle on China. The CCP had stifled communications about the true nature of the coronavirus outbreak, so that other countries wouldn't close borders. The WHO's own, written assumption about a 'zoonotic' coronavirus was that it, "is transmitted between animals and people" (not between people and people). The WHO's inadequate verbiage suited the CCP well (and it also suited people in Denmark who wanted to destroy the mink fur industry: Guam)
Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus complained that China was "facing increasing international isolation", due to restriction of travel by countries which, he implied, were not making "evidence-based" or "consistent" decisions: reu, voa, enp, voa2. It was obvious that his criticisms were aimed at South Korea, Taiwan and the others who'd quickly closed borders so that their trace-and-test work would get the R value down as quickly as possible. ('R' represents the average number of people becoming infected through contact with one infected person.) Ghebreyesus had already decided, by 3rd February 2020, that travel restrictions were "not needed to beat China virus": reu.
Nothing said by the WHO's spokesmen acknowledged any country's need to avoid using lockdowns. S. Korea had found that locking 17,000 down in 2015 took an economic toll: smag. (Thirty-six people died of MERS: BBCsk.) There was a strong desire to keep lockdowns to a minimum in 2020. The WHO kept quiet about the unpleasant effects of lockdowns, and it did not suggest that any country might want to imitate S. Korea.
Monetary impacts in the UK:
The decision to sit on the advice that SAGE had sent confidentially (Hunt) led, within months, to a £400-billion spend on keeping salaried workers on furlough. Many thousands of businesses lost traction, many through forced suspension of high-street trading. While cash-strapped care homes could not get PPE at normal prices, £548-million was sent by Whitehall, as a priority, for the WHO to collaborate with the EU/France and create 'COVAX' (which was directed by Bill Gates' GAVI alliance: wikip, govcov, gav). Gates had, allegedly, raised $82-billion to support the WHO (HInews), but Boris Johnson also helped him get British finance for a new green investment project: govdotuk. Donald Trump was said to have cut a billion Dollar grant which GAVI was receiving in March 2025: NPRgov (a "$2.6-billion" cut is reported by bmj.) For a man with "$117bn" of his own, Gates wasn't shy of spending the tax-payer's money on his pastimes.
Also see Carbis_Bay where Johnson splashed out in a literal sense.
______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______
A poster:
poster:
A top politician is able to compensate for bad decisions while in office by spinning a yarn for the wealthy in the US lectures circuit afterwards, e.g. bit.ly/bjwales. The author of, 'Clear and Present Danger' in 1989 gave his opinion on this trend: Jack Ryan confronts the corrupt president and is told to forget his principles, take the fall, and go earn a nest-egg in the US lectures circuit.
Note: An analysis of how the WHO presents information on its website follows below. ('INTRODUCTION' is now the next chapter.)
A video about viral replication is worth watching: khan.
The World's first big outbreak of a novel respiratory coronavirus occurred in 2003.
Years of activism by Bill Gates seemed to begin with his TED talk in 2015. His alarmism engendered a poor grasp of the actual nature of respiratory coronaviruses, in good part because S. Korea's innovative response to MERS-CoV, also in 2015, was never mentioned by him.
With seemingly technical verbiage, the WHO's website made it easy for the CCP to see a way to play down an outbreak of a novel respiratory coronavirus: "Simply suggest that animals are the daily source of infection, not people."
In December 2019 and January 2020, China was talking about SARS-CoV-2 in ways which had been published by the WHO for MERS-CoV: "Only those who came into contact with infected animals could catch the virus" (see BFPG and bbcw, or the image below.)
What 'China' was saying was consistent with a 'Key fact' which had been displayed on a WHO website page about MERS. In 2024, the factsheet still said that a "zoonotic virus ... is transmitted between animals and people". (Today, the whole thing has been rewritten: factsheet.)
A different WHO website page displays an older, slightly different, definition: "A zoonosis is any disease or infection that is naturally transmissible from vertebrate animals to humans": Whofa. While this is slightly more informative, reading it in isolation also can give the impression that a human catches a respiratory coronavirus from an animal, and that there might be 'no human-to-human transmission'.
A Wikipedia entry mentions a statement (by the NEJM) that a sample of MERS-CoV was taken from a camel which was "almost identical" to a sample taken from a man who cared for the camel and then died. The WHO's MERS factsheet (unchanged in the 2022 update) had been written on an assumption that the, "very strong evidence that the man had gotten the virus from the camel" can be extrapolated to mean that almost all human cases of MERS were caught from camels. (The factsheet today has been extensively rewritten. The big changes were made in the revision of 11 December 2025.)
A very important point, not found anywhere in WHO website factsheets before 2020, is that there can be a zoonotic respiratory coronavirus which transmits human-to-human with high frequency, e.g. SARS-CoV-2. (Wouldn't natural selection 'show favour' to a respiratory coronavirus which spreads human-to-human, because humans are a highly social species which do a lot of face-to-face communication?)
In the "infamous tweet", the WHO had published China's suggestion in its own words: "no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus". By inference, this was a way of saying that animal-to-human infection was taking place with regularity. ('If you didn't handle animals in the Huanan seafood market, you didn't need to worry'.) A Taiwanese expert visiting Wuhan pointed out that so many pneumonia cases in one place at the same time could not be caused by a virus which has no human-to-human infectivity: SkyT. The expert also made the medics admit that they had a case who had never been to the seafood market, and therefore she must have caught the virus from her husband. The Chinese didn't argue with him, but the WHO was giving no credibility to intelligence from Taiwan: Time, Taip, cdctai.
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| PublishTime：2020-04-11. (pasted below) |
It was not at all likely that COVID-19 was being caught only by people who had contact with animals.
It can be shown that the WHO's 'key facts' are only partly consistent with a respected theory of how a zoonotic coronavirus comes into existence: The genetics suggests that a coronavirus gives rise to a zoonotic strain of itself when a mutation occurs during the replication phase of just one, solitary virion. During replication of that virus particle's RNA, an error in the copying process causes genetic recombination which, by chance, makes the progeny virions transmissible to humans. In other words, 1) the replication error changes the RNA coding which determines the host-specificity of the progeny virions, and 2) when the mutation is 'zoonotic', the error has given human infectivity to the progeny virions.
The probability of any zoonotic mutation happening more than once is extremely low, therefore it wouldn't be normal to seek evidence that zoonotic mutation can be a recurring threat to World health: It's much more likely that an existing zoonotic coronavirus might give rise, by mutation, to a novel 'version' of itself.
Both of the WHO's website definitions are likely to engender misunderstanding: They imply that any zoonotic virus is likely to be transmitted, with frequency, from more than one animal to more than one person, and vice-versa.
The spread of Rabies virus (mentioned in the WHO page, 'Zoonoses') has involved many instances of animal-to-human transmission, but human-to-animal and human-to-human spread of rabies is not heard of in modern times. In contrast, the spread of zoonotic respiratory coronaviruses has tended to be human-to-human. (Such a coronavirus might be called 'zoonotic' if it was initially formed by mutation during the replication of a solitary, animal-infecting coronavirus particle. Any subsequent, novel 'zoonotic' coronaviruses would simply be mutated versions of the original one which was formed through the crucial zoonotic mutation.)
In December 2019, it was not normal to propose that a novel respiratory coronavirus was, in most cases, infecting humans by animal-to-human transmission, causing outbreaks by spreading from many animals to many humans. In that scenario, a big outbreak of human cases could only be explained by a high frequency of both animal-to-animal transmission and animal-to-human transmission.
To be scientific and responsible, the WHO should state that a novel respiratory coronavirus which is spreading in a human population might never, or only rarely, infect an animal. SARS-CoV-2 is a good example, and there's been no convincing evidence that it spreads well among any animals: e.g. No mass deaths in livestock have ever been attributed to SARS-CoV-2.
Note: Any novel zoonotic coronavirus will transmit animal-to-human for a limited time, i.e. immediately after it has come into existence: 1. Mutation (error during the replication phase) imparts human-infectivity to the 'progeny' of an animal-infecting virion, 2. the progeny viruses are shed from the host animal's body, and they infect the first humans that are encountered (which is why they are called, 'zoonotic'.) 3. After that, there will be human-to-human propagation of descendant 'generations' of virions.
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News of South Korea's TTT strategy (e.g. Atlan, Schwak, Penn and Csis) was not shared on BBC television during the long UK lockdowns. The BBC had provided a website report on 12 March 2020 which justified a sustained interest in TTT: BBC, but the subject wasn't aired on BBC television until December 2020, at night: Lock1.
*'NHS Test and Trace' was designed to monitor people's visits to pubs, cafés and restaurants, and it informed individuals by SMS if they might have been near somebody in such public place who was known to be positive for SARS-CoV-2. In contrast, when the Koreans found an infected person, they traced who the virus might have spread from, tested any such people, and put any who were test-positive into isolation.
A Korean teenager set up a website to show where and when COVID-19 cases had been detected. It achieved, very cheaply, more than what the "£29.5bn" NHS system could provide. (NHS did not provide a website for people to consult and see where UK cases had been detected.) See parliament.uk.
Gua3 is a good summary in hindsight, considering that its publication date was two days before the UK was put into lockdown.
The SAGE advice which recommended "copying South Korea" (Jeremy Hunt's words in the two-minute video) was kept confidential by the MPs who were deferring all sorts of things under the banner of "getting Brexit done". (It suited them to do nothing for as long as possible, and they simply waited for the WHO to declare a pandemic on 11 March: NLM.) It's almost certain that Bill Gates would have reassured them that Britain's 'strategy' need only be a program of vaccine provision. Mr Johnson was still urging people to shake his hand on 6 March: Ledby. For three years or more, he never said the words, "South Korea" in the context of the pandemic.
When American journalists wrote that the WHO had backed the CCP in its attempts to make the virus seem unremarkable, the BBC kept such exposé to a minimum. When the BBC did make two long documentaries which explored China's cover-up in detail, the first one was only shown at the end of the year at a time when a small fraction of the populace watches the BBC: Lock1 and 54days were aired after 8 PM in December 2020 and January 2021, respectively. The documentaries were available on iPlayer for only the standard amount of time. A very small part of "54 Days" can still be watched on Facebook: Fbk.
As mentioned above, the WHO began to receive extra money from Downing Street in April 2020. An RT.com article reported a £55-million bonus payment. (access to the article was blocked after the invasion of the Ukraine.) RT also mentioned that the donation openly defied Donald Trump's decision to take the US out of the WHO. Within months, the UK had sent more than twice the amount it normally pledges biannually to the WHO: Circa £1bn could be calculated from information which was spread across various pages of the WHO's website until recently. (The website has changed now, but evidence of the funding is detailed below: Use Ctrl+F to find 'WHO's extra'.)
It was likely that countries would underestimate the threat to public health (and to economies where there was not a quick response), because what China was saying in December 2019 seemed to fit with what the WHO had been saying about 'zoonotic' coronaviruses since before 2015, i.e. 'there's no human-to-human transmission unless there is close contact':
Normally among scientists, the label, 'zoonotic' is used to describe a certain pathogen which infects humans after evolving from a pathogen which infects only animals. However, on a website page about MERS, the WHO says simply that a zoonotic virus, "is transmitted between animals and people" (The factsheet is now changed beyond recognition in the revision of 11 December 2025: who_int.)It's assumed that a human-infecting coronavirus comes into existence through error in the genetic replication of just one, solitary, animal-infecting virus particle*: The copies of that virus particle (the progeny virions with the alteration in their RNA code) are human-infecting, and their subsequent replications will provide more virions that infect humans. (*Any novel virus comes into existence through error in the genetic replication of just one, solitary, virus particle.)
It's assumed that a human-infecting coronavirus comes into existence through error in the genetic replication of just one, solitary, animal-infecting virus particle*: The copies of that virus particle (the progeny virions with the alteration in their RNA code) are human-infecting, and their subsequent replications will provide more virions that infect humans. (*Any novel virus comes into existence through error in the genetic replication of just one, solitary, virus particle.) Zoonosis is seen to occur in one evolutionary direction: The animal-infecting coronavirus gives rise to a human-infecting coronavirus, not vice-versa. The product of such mutation is not, ordinarily, seen to be a species-jumping coronavirus which transmits equally 'both ways' (animal-to-human and human-to-animal.)
While a coronavirus might be called 'zoonotic' if it is newly infectious to humans, there's admittedly no guarantee that there will not appear to be continued infection of animals. What seems to be infection of animals by the novel virus might actually be explained as follows: While a novel, human-infecting coronavirus is created by RNA copying error during the replication of just one animal-infecting virion, other animal-infecting virions identical to that one will be replicated without any such error, and their progeny will continue to infect only the animal host species.
At Event 201 in 2019 (hosted by Bill Gates and led by Michael Ryan of the WHO), making a constant theme out of 'zoonosis' seemed to be justified by the WHO's assertion that MERS-CoV transmitted animal-to-human in the majority of cases. In 2015, the WHO had updated that assertion by saying that MERS-CoV doesn't transmit human-to-human, "unless there is close contact" (reut2), but the opinion remained that the coronavirus couldn't propagate easily among people.
It's a well established fact that the case fatality rate of COVID-19 was low, commonly said to be between 1% and 3% (e.g. see wikim).
Strikingly different, the CFR for MERS was between 37% (wik) and 56% (nejm). Such high mortality from catching a respiratory disease would not normally lead anyone to suggest that human-to-human transmission was rare.
For many people, the symptoms of COVID-19 were not noticed very soon after catching the disease, e.g. wik1 says it could take 14 days for symptoms to become problematic. As a result, there were infected people who adhered to their daily cycles of activity while progeny virus was shedding from their bodies.
In contrast, the much higher CFR of MERS suggests that it immobilized people quite quickly. Some suffered severe symptoms within a week (wik2, and CDC: "Most patients develop symptoms approximately 5 days after an exposure to an infected person or camel".) A high proportion were likely to become hospitalized.
The WHO still hasn't 'processed' the fact that, only with MERS did patients typically began to suffer debilitating symptoms before new virus was shedding from their own bodies: Nature (see the fourth Key Point.) Therefore, they'd be hospitalized (or in a bed at home) before they'd become infective to other people. It is consequential that the WHO was still saying in 2025 that MERS-CoV couldn't propagate well from human to human.
In 2020, infected people commonly didn't realize that they had COVID-19 (were shedding SARS-CoV-2 from their respiratory mucosa) until they were tested. Some had remained socially active with symptoms being mild at first, sometimes never becoming severe. Therefore, there were always many opportunities for SARS-CoV-2 to transmit person-to-person. When the novel coronavirus had infected a lot of people in Wuhan, it was plainly not reasonable to propose that it was only being contracted by those who handled animals in the Huanan Seafood market (bbcw.)
In 2020, infected people commonly didn't realize that they had COVID-19 (were shedding SARS-CoV-2 from their respiratory mucosa) until they were tested. Some had remained socially active with symptoms being mild at first, sometimes never becoming severe. Therefore, there were always many opportunities for SARS-CoV-2 to transmit person-to-person. When the novel coronavirus had infected a lot of people in Wuhan, it was plainly not reasonable to propose that it was only being contracted by those who handled animals in the Huanan Seafood market (bbcw.)
The WHO 'hasn't noticed' the Key Point in a 2016 publication which makes it obvious why the numbers of MERS patients did not mushroom like the numbers of COVID-19 patients did: With MERS, "Patients do not shed large amounts of virus until well after the onset of symptoms, when patients are most probably already seeking medical care" (Nature.) MERS-CoV did spread human-to-human, but progeny virus wasn't shed from the patient's body until he/she was already in a sick-bed.
There is no intrinsic quality of the MERS coronavirus which prevents it from transmitting human-to-human. If people who visited hospitalized patients had not been wearing PPE, they would have been at serious risk: "Analysis of hospital surfaces after the treatment of patients with MERS showed the ubiquitous presence of infectious virus":
By saying/emphasizing on its website that a zoonotic virus, "is transmitted between animals and people", the WHO leads people away from realizing that a zoonotic respiratory coronavirus might not infect animals with any significant frequency. It's appropriate that there was no call for a COVID-19 testing program for animals in 2020/2021, not even when lateral flow tests were widely available. Were the occasional reports of infected animals corroborated by independent, reputable scientists? Nobody reported animal deaths.
The suggestion that animals catch COVID-19 from other animals, or even from humans, came from a few one-off reports. The results of those tests should be scrutinized in rigorous ways. It was tragic that millions of animals were slaughtered in Denmark after a COVID-19 test displayed a positive result (Guam.) Did the Danes do any replication of the testing, to be sure that they hadn't got a false positive? [Wasn't there a populist incentive to shut down the mink fur industry? It's a country where big slaughters of dolphins still occur, and a giraffe was culled in Copenhagen Zoo on the pretence that its dissection would make a helpful public spectacle.] Denmark's mink cull was not based on any solid evidence that mink could infect humans with a respiratory coronavirus. (Isn't the mink's breathing zone down near our ankles?) It wasn't long before the CCP was visiting people to cull their small pets: NPR. (See an ugly reminder that Hong Kong is controlled by the CCP now: Reut.)
More about the misleading narrative which the WHO disseminated:
On their factsheet page about MERS (before its 'update' of 11 December 2025), the WHO's definition of zoonosis was adequate for describing the way that the Rabies virus can spread, i.e. from animal to animal, animal-to-human and, conceivably, from human-to-animal. (In former times, there were probably cases of human-to-human infection in times when rabid people couldn't be confined.)
On a different WHO factsheet entitled, 'Zoonoses' (see pasted below), Rabies is included simply because it can infect humans (see the fourth 'key fact' in: Whofa.) 
The Rabies virus infects many species of mammalian vertebrates (Wikipedia says it can also infect reptiles), and people have been infected by it for at least 4,000 years. In important ways, rabies is different from the coronaviruses of recent years, e.g. in most cases, rabies is spread when an infected animal bites another animal. (The more animal species there are that rabies can infect this way, the less likely it is that a 'dead-end infection' will occur due to the host animal not biting 'the right species' before it dies.)
Thought: Rabies virus and the respiratory coronaviruses are described by the WHO under the same banner (i.e. 'zoonotic') without drawing attention to how different they are. As far as we know, the rabies virus might not have changed at all in thousands of years. In contrast, coronaviruses mutate so often that we have been told of new variants evolving within months or weeks.
For more than a decade, the WHO has made it hard to notice that zoonosis in respiratory coronaviruses can be very different from what happens when other types of pathogen become zoonotic. The following points are worth mentioning:
* Zoonosis (mutation which confers human infectivity) takes place when the pathogenic unit (virus, bacterium, protozoon) is multiplying itself. Unlike a cellular pathogen, a virus cannot replicate without making direct use of organelles inside the living cells of the host organism. In contrast, there is a human-infecting protozoon which spends a part of its life cycle in the body of an insect, and it further proliferates inside that secondary host (e.g. malaria.)
* A coronavirus genome consists of RNA, and 'RNA viruses' replicate at a higher rate than do DNA viruses (such as rabies.) Consequently, RNA viruses can have replication errors much more frequently, causing them to mutate so often that new variants evolve within months or weeks. In sharp contrast, Rabies virus has been around for thousands of years without giving rise to new variants of itself.
* When the evolution of a zoonotic respiratory coronavirus begins with the 'faulty' replication of a solitary virion, so that its 'progeny' are infective to humans, the progeny virions will not usually have the animal-infecting capability that their 'parent' virion had. This fact helps us to see that we needn't live in fear of the evolution of a respiratory virus which can infect many vertebrate species (as the rabies virus can.)
A limitation on the spread of respiratory coronaviruses "between animals and people" would be that people don't often breathe air in the same locales that animals are breathing it. The emergence of a respiratory coronavirus which could infect a diversity of vertebrate animal species is also unlikely because only a few species of vertebrates spend a lot of time enclosed in close proximity, breathing the same air. Our species is the only one which often stands face-to-face while communicating verbally.
Review points:
Casual and excessive use of the word 'zoonotic' by WHO aficionados had led people to think that a novel respiratory coronavirus would not ordinarily transmit human-to-human: because it would be "transmitted between animals and humans" (as written in the WHO website factsheet before the revision of 11 December 2025: It was the fifth Key point): Consequently, when medics in Wuhan were chatting about a novel severe acute respiratory syndrome in December 2019, the first governmental reaction was to demand proof of human-to-human transmission while suppressing their attempts to raise concerns any further.
In 2015, S. Koreans had made use of a nucleic acid test to enable contact tracing, so that outbreaks of MERS-CoV inside hospitals could be contained. However, the WHO's spokesmen had continued to say only that MERS is caught from animals in the majority of cases. (It was still written that way in their factsheet until the revision of 11 December 2025.) See more under, 'The Cover-up' below.
Response to COVID-19 was stalled widely because the WHO first advanced China's version of events, and held back the report of high case numbers (sent them by the Taiwanese expert who visited Wuhan: SkyT.) Chief Executive Director Michael J. Ryan was secretly recorded entreating fellow WHO executives to warn countries more sufficiently, so that they could begin to respond effectively: This was shown in the BBC documentary, '54 Days' in January 2021.
Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus revealed immediately that he supported China's opinion that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, when he said that the use of travel restrictions was not "evidence-based". The logic he offered?: 'If you have no evidence that people are spreading it, then you should not try to limit their travel to/from China'. His campaign against travel restrictions was still evident in November 2021: Reut1. (It had begun as an effort to ingratiate with the CCP who preferred that there would be no hindrance to peaks in travel during the Chinese Lunar New Year: cdctai.)
The use of trace-and-test strategy to achieve containment of COVID-19 was never promoted in clear terms by the WHO. When Ghebreyesus said on 18 March 2020 that "tracing must be the backbone of every response", S. Korea and Taiwan were still not mentioned. The WHO were 'treading carefully' because the CCP resents South Korea's friendship with Taiwan. The two freedom-loving countries had ignored Ghebreyesus' attempts to stop travel restrictions.
A definition from Merriam-Webster is one that describes zoonotic respiratory coronaviruses more adequately than the WHO's definition does: "zoonotic, ˌzō-ə-ˈnä-tik, adjective; A zoonotic virus is a virus that lives naturally in an animal and can infect human cells, perhaps mutating slightly in the course of passage, which enables the virus to start a chain of infection through human hosts." —Richard Preston
Waiting until 11 March for the WHO to declare a pandemic, British MPs had ignored what their appointed experts told them was likely the best way to keep the spread of infection down, and there were consequences that make for unhappy reading today: Mirror2023. 
12 March was the day that Mr Johnson's hand-shaking escapades (to help build 'herd immunity'?) had stopped. Chris Whitty, standing next to him, said that the UK's trace-and-test effort (which he called "the contain phase") was finished that day, "as we've always said, from the beginning": youtube at 13:10 mins.
Also on 12 March, there was a BBC article online about the previous seven weeks in S. Korea, where nobody had waited for the WHO to provide a truthful report: bbc12Mar. Most people in the UK wouldn't have seen the BBC article, and important news of S. Korea (and Taiwan) was never spoken of by the MPs on BBC TV in 2020 or subsequently.
A family would be locked in their London home in 1578 if a member had contracted bacterial plague (pmc.ncbi), but lockdown in 2020 was about to happen on a scale never imagined before. There was to be an unexplained pause of 11 days after Mr Johnson told the country that things were serious ("loved ones are going to die") on 12 March: Was it to 'space things out a bit', and make it less obvious that they had delayed because they were waiting for the WHO to make a declaration (which happened on 11 March)? While such a massive lockdown was bound to hit businesses hard, Mr Johnson had said as recently as 1st March: "there is always the potential for an economic downside" to a "mass epidemic, .. and we are ready for that" (ReutO.)
See 2023 estimates of the cost of the lockdown per person: yaho. As yet, there's been no attempt to measure the ongoing impact of so many businesses closing for so long (see LoEc, 2024.) By April 2023, the UK national debt had reached £2.537 trillion: Wikd.
The word 'bluster' appeared again in a review of an independent TV channel's documentary which was screened in May 2020: Grdc.
2023 BBC Question Time:
On 1 June 2023, the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, George Freeman said on BBC Question Time that the World had seen a COVID-19 deaths total of, "one hundred and twenty thousand people". Nobody reacted to his extreme inaccuracy, and he went on to say that the UK's economic output had dropped lower because of lockdown than it had at any time in the last "300 years". (Mr Johnson had also said "300 years" in 2021. Fintim.)
Mr Johnson today makes it seem that locking the country down on 23 March 2020 was the only way to respond: "I didn't know what other tool I had", he said in front of the Inquiry: yahoo. When Britain was made to lock down, S. Korea had been making good progress without lockdowns for almost 2 months, and Jeremy Hunt MP has said, for the record, that SAGE advised government to copy S. Korea: Fcbk. Mr Johnson is a journalist, and he must soon have noticed reports of the success of containment strategy in East Asia, e.g. guar (April) and Atlan (May). He must also have known that Britain's PHE had a contact tracing team of "just under 300 staff", copying S. Korea until "mid-March": Rehis. Instead of expanding the PHE operation, Chris Whitty was made to say on 12 March that "the Contain phase" was only ever meant to be a short part of a 'four-phase plan'. (It was actually a plan with two phases and two associated plans of activity.) The next phase, "Delay" was about to begin, because "the Contain finishes from today", he said: yout (at 13:10 mins.)
Johnson wrote to Dominic Cummings in April 2020 that "The whole track and trace thing feels like whistling in the dark; legions of imaginary Clouseaus and no plans to hire them": Lbc, Guard. By saying "feels", he must have been referring to the containment work running in East Asian countries, because contact tracing had already been stopped in the UK, and the use of nucleic acid tests had been restricted to hospitals (yout at 13:10 mins.)
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Observations formerly known as, 'INTRODUCTION'
(There is some repetition, but a fact's importance can become more obvious in the context of other facts.)
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What Jeremy Hunt MP said on 4 July 2022 suggests that Mr Johnson did not act in the country's best interest in the first quarter of 2020: A short video segment reveals that we were put into lockdown because "government" had not listened to SAGE, its scientific advisory group for emergencies: video Other news reports give substance to Mr Hunt's opinion (e.g. see bloom).
The S. Koreans never lost control of COVID-19 until they stopped doing test-and-trace at the end of 2021, in the mistaken belief that vaccination had made most people safe by then. 86% of S. Koreans had been vaccinated but the country's deaths total was quadrupled in less than five months because they'd stopped using trace-and-test to contain the virus: Reute. This is detailed in another section: Use Ctrl+f to find 'a surprising'.
For descriptions of the 'Trace, Test and Treat' response, see: CHPI (April 2020), Penn (2022), Csis (2020), and Schwak.
Also see Schwa about the exporting of TTT to other countries: Since 2010, there'd been a policy in S. Korea to share health expertise with other countries.
Many relevant publications by Juliette Schwak can be found with Google.
S. Korea had sufficient control of the disease to keep shops and cafés open in April 2020: bloom.
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England's first known case of COVID-19 was detected on 29 January 2020. The WHO declared a "public health emergency of international concern" the next day (bfpg.) There was a confirmed death in the UK on 28 February.
On 3rd March, Mr Johnson said, "I shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know" in a hospital which had COVID-19 patients: guard, yout. He was also filmed persuading some scientists to shake his hand on 6th March: Ledby. It's since transpired that the 'herd immunity' concept was being embraced by top civil servants: herd. Was Johnson spreading the virus, by shaking hands, 'to help society acquire herd immunity'?
The spirited denialism at No. 10 was replaced by a show of foreboding on 12 March: youtu. The WHO had declared a "pandemic" the day before: NLM. On 23 March, Mr Johnson said, "I must give the British people a very simple instruction. You must stay at home": govuk. By 27 March, 759 Brits had died, 181 being the latest number in one day: bbc-.*
In spite of reports that cases and deaths in Britain had multiplied alarmingly since the end of March, Johnson said (reported on 27 April) that the British people had already, "wrestled .. the assailant .. to the floor" with their "good sense", "forbearance", "altruism" and "spirit of community", and that people should "press home the advantage" and continue to "turn the tide" by obeying lockdown restrictions: Mirr. Two days later, in no way confirming his assertion that "the assailant had been wrestled to the floor", the BBC reported a cumulative UK deaths total of 26,097: BBC29/4. (Very illogically, the foreign Secretary D. Raab asserted that the figure didn't mean that a "sudden surge" had occurred.)
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| From The Mirror on 27/04/2020. |
Also 'praising' the public, Matt Hancock had said on 17 April that he'd decided to safeguard the "national unity we have seen" by locking the whole country down instead of just the areas with significant numbers of COVID case : theGU.
Mr Johnson had not been so amiable beforehand when he, "escalated his language as he urged people to comply with the more stringent measures" (Guard, 23/3) At that time, he'd made it plain how the public should behave: “If you don’t follow the rules, the police will have the powers to enforce them, including through fines and dispersing gatherings.”
*The 27 March cumulative figure of "759" deaths (bbc-) was already bigger than the number that S. Korea would lose by the end of the year. 
Officially reported on 12 May 2020, the UK deaths total had climbed past 40,000: Guar. A second wave was detected in Autumn (Sky, Wiki) and the cumulative total by 27 December was 70,752: Skyy (use Ctrl+F to find '70,752'.) In contrast, S. Korea had lost 580 people by 13 December: Reuters.
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| S. Korea's TTT strategy wouldn't create the path to big profit that vaccine supply guaranteed. 'Rather just lock the people down, borrow money to give furlough to people who aren't essential workers, and let market forces drive the supply of vaccine'? See Oxfam and Politico. |
Sir Chris Whitty has told the UK Covid Inquiry that locking down on 23 March 2020 was, "a bit late", but also that there would have been "nothing to gain from locking down a bit early".
On 12 March 2020, Whitty had said, "we are clearly now stopping the contain phase of this operation": youtube (at 13:10 mins.) He meant that the activity of the country's trace-and-test team, "finishes from today". Reported in REHIS, a PHE boss said that the team of "just under 300 staff" had thus far traced "3,500 people". She did not confirm Whitty's insistence that it had "always" been a part of the plan to stop tracing in the middle of March, when "moving from Contain to Delay".
The REHIS article reports the following as the explanation given for ending Britain's trace-and test effort on 12 March: "Once virus infection numbers have tipped, manual contact tracing is unworkable". Even if that opinion could have been rooted in experience, it wasn't a valid reply because, fifteen days after Whitty's announcement, the UK's cumulative deaths total had reached '759' (27 March: bbc-). 759 deaths is not a figure which suggests that "virus infection numbers have tipped". (Also remember that Dominic Raab MP insisted that no surge could be seen in a cumulative deaths total of 26,097 on 29th April: bbc+).
With no further trace-and-test activities in the UK after 12 March, there was nobody searching for infected people and isolating them, to stop them from spreading infection. Whitty's words, "as we've always said, from the beginning" implied that it could, at some stage, have made sense to end 'the Contain phase' so soon after it first became operational (no start date has been seen in any reports.) His announcement was displayed formally at govuk: "The government has announced that we are moving out of the contain phase and into delay", but it wasn't explained why "contain" would be halted so soon, or what was meant by, "delay". (The two other phases, "research and mitigate", remained a mystery to most people, and were never mentioned again on TV.)
It was said that testing would continue at hospitals after 12 March. However, a shortage of materials was soon reported when it emerged that hospital patients were being transferred into care homes without being tested: bbcCH, bloo, nurst, nuffi. The excuse for allowing that to happen was, "We didn't know that there could be asymptomatic cases". However, a pre-pandemic NIH definition of a 'carrier' is: 'a person who carries a pathogen without being immediately affected by it' (see poster below.) It was common knowledge in the 1980s that people might carry a virus without seeming ill, but nobody was using the words, 'asymptomatic cases' back then.
On reflection, had they been careless with the care homes because they wanted to demonstrate that the virus could spread quickly, thereby justifying such an extensive lockdown?
It almost seems that "the approach" at Downing Street (just before the WHO finally came clean and declared a pandemic) was as follows: 'It might save lives if we keep trying the methodical way that South Koreans contain the virus (as SAGE advised us to do) but we don't have much PPE, and won't it be a lot easier to just lock everyone down when things get bad? We can get on with Brexit, give contracts to mates (e.g. byline, glaw), and orders of new PPE will have arrived by the time people are settled in their homes. Vaccine supply will follow: It's a big business opportunity, being assisted by Bill Gates and his friends in our JCVI' (politico.)
Such cold-blooded calculations weren't suspected at that time, but it was shown that Health Minister Hancock wrote as follows in a text message: "The plod got their marching orders", meaning that Johnson had told the police to beef up the enforcement of lockdown rules in January 2021: yaho. (Also see: GrdE.)
18 July 2023: A consequence of playing down the health risk and waiting for the declaration from the WHO on 11 March: Mirro23.
"What about the businesses, Boris?" (see the video below) - Retail was about to suffer like never before, because Mr Johnson had only decided to protect the big supermarkets and 'essential services' from a series of lockdowns that didn't end until March 2021: GOV. High street retailers were to become deprived of their customers for "weeks and months" but, somehow, they would simply bounce back in 2021? In the podium speech of 27/Apr/2020, Johnson had only said that a complacency toward lockdown rules might cause economic harm, urging people to 'stay the course', Guard.
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| Above: Was his Brexit-driven attitude toward businesses something that hurt them in 2020? See DaiPol |
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| 1 March at PHE in Colindale. |
On 30 December 2019, Li Wenliang told his Wuhan university alumni in an online chatroom that he'd received an internal diagnostic report of a case of severe acute respiratory disease (SARS). He suggested that they warn their families to be careful, and consider using PPE more at work. Someone told the CCP, who soon visited Li to make him sign a gag order. The BBC reported on 6 February that he had caught COVID-19 and died (BBCd), but Boris Johnson said on 3 March: "..there were actually a few coronavirus patients ... and I shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know" after visiting a hospital: Gif.
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| A 2023 report: bit.ly/Wenliang |
Also on 03/03/2020, Chris Whitty said that any locking down of British cities was unlikely, "not a part of the battle plan": Reut. (Daegu in S. Korea had recently opted to lock down for a while, after a spate of outbreaks had been caused by very large assemblies of a religious sect.)
If it hadn't been important to have a substantial trace-and-test operation running as soon as possible, i.e. before the beginning of March, the title of the following American article wouldn't make any sense: NPR - Flaws in COVID testing "cost weeks" in the US, because virus hotspots could not be detected and, therefore, could not be contained.
>> 2 May 2023: A man who was jailed by the CCP for documenting Wuhan's outbreak and sharing videos of it, has been released after three years: bbc.
On 1st March 2020, Mr Johnson said at PHE in Colindale: "It's not, you know, the most serious disease you can get. It's something that the vast majority of people survive very well" (video of this could be seen at Chan but it's no longer available since June 2023. There is a review at Grdc. Key points are included below, e.g. under 'March' in Part 2.)
On the same day, the PM expressed optimism about the UK's economic outlook: "there is always the potential for an economic downside" to a "mass epidemic, .. and we are ready for that": reut2. He never once actually said that trace-and-test operations might limit viral spread and mitigate the need for lockdowns. The national lockdown began three weeks later and people were soon to be dealt with who tried to keep their businesses running (e.g. Herd, plym). In sharp contrast, see what it was like in S. Korea: bloom.
Was there method in the madness? It's been said that Mr Johnson's Chief Advisor, Dominic Cummings, never wanted news of the virus to be a 'distraction' to his boss: He wanted his boss to talk about nothing but Brexit: itvhan.
Copying the S. Koreans would have been a serious undertaking. It wasn't as "simple" as a lockdown would be. With the BBC being controlled by the Tories, it would be much easier to tell Brits to stay home en masse before hospitals began to struggle with the issue. Immunization would get us back out of lockdown sooner or later, so 'why bother with anything but lockdown'?
In May 2020, by which time reports of S. Korea's approach had begun to circulate on the internet, Johnson referred to people who did tracing of COVID-19 contacts as: "legions of imaginary Clouseaus and no plans to hire them", "The whole track and trace thing feels like whistling in the dark" (Lbc and GuarC). N.B. By saying "feels" (not "felt"), he might have been referring to trace-and-test operations in East Asian countries, because trace-and-test in the UK had already been "finished" by Chris Whitty on 12 March (yout at 13:10 mins.) However, "imaginary Clouseaus" was obviously a sneer at the 5,000 council staff in Britain who were trained to do contact tracing, but who were never put to work: rehis.
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| Patrick Vallance, the man who said that Mr Johnson failed to fully absorb concepts central to covid. |
When the first lockdown was over, Mr Johnson said that Britain's economic output was lower than it had been in "three hundred years" (see Fint.) Was it pressure from academic people like Vallance that defeated his desire to avoid hurting the economy with lockdowns? S. Koreans were managing well: Atlan, Penn and bloom.
8 Feb 2023: MSN, "..the UK loses £100 billion a year in economic output".
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Recap:
On 12 March 2020, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty announced that Britain's trace-and-test effort (which he referred to as, "the contain phase") was being stopped ("finishes from today"): see youtube at 13:10 minutes; see athe and bloo1.
Eleven days later, while declaring a national lockdown, Mr Johnson said, "and I want to begin by reminding you why the UK has been taking the approach that we have". However, he changed the subject immediately and didn't say what that "approach" had been (Grdn or youtube at 0:20. See a written transcript at govuk.) No commitment to any strategy had been discernible in news reports before 12 March: bfpg, bloo1. The Health Minister, Matt Hancock, said in December 2022 that Johnson had told him in January: "You keep an eye on it. It will probably go away": itvHan. A month later, "Bash on" was all Hancock could get when he tried to say that it was probably too late to avoid "going down" (i.e. into lockdown) by methodically containing the virus.
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White lies vs. Whitty lies. Chris Whitty said on 12 March 2020: "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" (youtube at 13:10 minutes.) The general public hadn't heard of an operation with "four stages" before, and Whitty's choice of words didn't make it clear that he was terminating an activity which, in Taiwan and S. Korea, was proving very worthwhile. After listening to Patrick Vallance for 13 minutes, Whitty was adding detail to build an illusion: He was implying that, "we" had been hard at work, trying to copy S. Korea. Nobody had seen or heard the names of anyone who was involved in a "contain phase", i.e. people who actually traced and tested the contacts of Brits who were showing positive for SARS-CoV-2. However, in April it was said that a team of "just under 300 staff" had been tracing COVID contacts until "the UK moved to the Delay phase of tackling coronavirus in mid-March": Rehis. Also see govuk - Nobody spoke of the 'four phases' again, or explained why it was 'planned in advance' to finish 'Contain' on a specific day in the very near future. Even if a level of control had been achieved by 12 March, trace-and-test would still have been needed to maintain that control. - Use Ctrl+F to find, 'surprising' below: S. Koreans lost control of Omicron when they stopped doing 'trace, test and treat' at the end of 2021. The same thing happened in Taiwan.
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Mr Johnson did sometimes reveal a desire to avoid locking down, but Patrick Vallance saw lockdown as the expedient option, the 'safe way' in terms of public accountability?: Guarr. Rather than accepting any help from S. Korea, which was offering its TTT strategy to any interested countries, time was given to predicting how Brits might react to lockdown measures: athe (see above.) |
In the video below, the Health Secretary who used to say, "I'm too busy saving lives" when journalists did sometimes manage to get his attention:
| It had been noticed in the US that the WHO had not provided crucial early information. WHO had held back the truth, to delay travel restrictions which would affect China's economy. |
  For eight years, the WHO had been saying that people catch 'zoonotic' coronaviruses from animals: They called it "direct" infection ('direct from animal to human'). Proof of human-to-human infection of MERS-CoV was not signposted in WHO communications. - See nejm of 2013 which mentions some of the evidence of human-to-human infection. The WHO's MERS factsheet (updated on 5 Aug 2022) implied that, because MERS-CoV is considered to be zoonotic, it was correct to think that it, “is transmitted between animals and people”. There was only basic advice, in the lower half of the factsheet, for preventing the coronavirus from spreading human-to-human. (Print-screen copies of the entire factsheet are posted at the end of this blog.)
 It's essential to keep in mind the mechanics of a mutation which causes an animal-infecting coronavirus to give rise to zoonotic progeny (i.e. human-infecting virions): A lineage of zoonotic coronavirus begins through an error in the replication of just one, animal-infecting virus particle. The error causes recombination somewhere in the virus' nucleic acid molecular chain (the RNA), altering the genetic code (the sequential arrangement of nucleotides) which determines which species of mammal can be infected. If, by chance, the progeny virions inherit new code which makes them infectious to humans, the mutation is said to be 'zoonotic'. It wouldn't make sense to assume that the progeny of such mutant virions are, “transmitted between
animals and people": The body of evidence has shown that a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmits human-to-human. Reports of further infection of some animals (e.g. by MERS-CoV) should be investigated thoroughly, with a view to understanding the underlying mechanism. (Probably, the 'continuing' infection of animals is by transmission of the 'siblings' of the solitary virus particle which gave rise, through mutational replication, to the zoonotic virions?) For a novel zoonotic coronavirus to be able to spread animal-to-animal as well as human-to-human, its genome would need to have retained the original ('parental') coding for animal infectivity while gaining novel code for human infectivity during the mutation event. Such 'cumulative' inheritance is unlikely to occur: 'Insertion mutation' (found in eukaryotes) is not possible in a virus genome. 'Insertion sequences' can bring an accumulation of traits in bacteria (Nih) but a virus genome is smaller and less complex. Even if a respiratory coronavirus can, somehow, inherit the ability to infect back-and-forth between different host species (including the human species), observations suggest overwhelmingly that it would not spread at the same rate human-to-human, human-to-animal, animal-to-animal and animal-to-human: The sociability of humans make them far more susceptible to spreading a respiratory disease, human-to-human. Descriptions of zoonosis must be consistent with virus genetics. It's never likely that multiple members of an animal population will be infecting lots of people with a novel coronavirus. A re-hash of the basic principles makes this easier to see: (1) When mutation that 'creates' a zoonotic coronavirus occurs, it involves the RNA of just one virus particle which has gained access to a cell in an animal's body. (2) Mutation is caused by a chance error in the RNA duplication which occurs during the replication phase of that solitary virus particle, and many mutant progeny viruses are created. Abundant replication of each of the progeny viruses will also occur subsequently, so the total number of mutant virions becomes very big. (3) When a mutation amounts to a change in the virus' host specificity*, the progeny viruses will be able to infect a different host species. If the new host species is Homo sapiens, the novel virus is said to be 'zoonotic'. When, as just described, erroneous replication of an animal-infecting virus particle has generated virions that infect humans, the progeny of those zoonotic virions will also be able to infect humans. (4) The evolution of a zoonotic respiratory coronavirus is not ordinarily thought to bring about situations in which multiple animals are carrying the mutant virus, leading to the infection of multiple humans (or vice-versa) 'because they handle the animals'. The evolutionary event is a one-off 'launch' of a novel, human-infecting coronavirus, mutating from a virus particle inside a cell of a host animal, and then propagating human-to-human. (If the novel zoonotic coronavirus is able to infect animals as well as people, that would suggest that the mutation event has, somehow, caused an accumulation of genetic traits. As mentioned above, such genetic accumulation is not yet known in RNA viruses. 'Insertion sequences' cause it to happen in bacteria, and there is a similar mechanism in large DNA viruses: Nih.) *not forgetting that mutations can affect a range of virus traits, not just host-specificity. For several weeks after publishing its "infamous tweet", the WHO was not telling governments that they'd do well to contain the virus with trace-and-test efforts. Ghebreyesus did not say, "Test, Test, test" until 16 March: vclip.  |
There was a silence on BBC Television about China.
When our first-ever national lockdown began on 23 March 2020, nobody on BBC One (the government's chosen platform) mentioned that China was going to lift its restrictions two days later (so that international travel could be resumed over the Chinese New Year: Reut.) Also see: voa and Reu2.
At the end of January 2021, Mr Johnson was still in no hurry to close Britain's border: BBC, LonLB, Huff. (How could he close airports while keeping the Eurotunnel open? 'It wouldn't look consistent'?)
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| 3 Feb 2021 |
If Beijing really did stop scheduling outbound flights, then it made no sense that it "denounced" countries who didn't keep receiving flights: VoA and Asean.
While the exact truth about flights from China might be hard to establish, there was already a long list of "straightforward" charges made by the NY Times against central CCP in March 2020: cfsp. (See Part 2 below for a detailed list.)
Health aficionados rarely uttered the words, "South Korea" on BBC TV in 2020, and MPs never did. The WHO was also not mentioning SK (or Taiwan) by name. Nothing's changed in that regard, not even by the UK Covid Inquiry.
The early SAGE advice which said, in so many words, "copy the South Koreans" was rejected and kept confidential: Hunt. On the other hand, the WHO was often referred to by MPs after it declared a pandemic on 11 March, along with the phrase, "following the science".
In 2023, Elizabeth Oakeshott reported that there was still an unwritten ban on criticizing China in the civil service. Mr Hancock's written remarks were censored by government: Oake (although he didn't seem to write anything which matched other reports.)
Comparisons which weren't made on BBC One in 2020:
By 27 December 2020, 70,752 in the UK were known to have died: Sky. (Use Ctrl+F to find '70,752'.) Not every Scottish case was included in the UK count.
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Sky - 27/12/2020 |
HoLlibrary reports an estimate of "470,000 lives saved as a result of the UK's first lockdown". It also mentions what was lost through locking down. Just imagine how many people must have been saved by 'TTT' in South Korea, which has 88% more people per square mile, and had no big lockdowns.
(Scoffing at the stats wouldn't make sense, because there's never been a bigger world-wide scrutiny of medical data, enhanced by use of an internet.)
Seven booze parties occurred at Downing Street in December 2020: gufulllist, btweet and Sky1812.
By 17 December 2021, almost 178-thousand people had died in the UK (Use Ctrl+F to find 177,977 in guard.) South Korea's total hadn't reached 6,000 by the end of 2021, even with spikes in new variants, such as the UK variant in January.
>> The rate of infection (incident rate) began to climb quickly in S. Korea at the end of 2021, because the TTT strategy was being less rigorously followed after near-completion of the public's inoculation with COVID-19 vaccine. TTT was suspended officially in February 2022 on the assumption that a vaccinated public was safe. - See below under 'then and now'.
Might the following be true?: An excited Bill Gates was on UK television in April 2020. It had been agreed tacitly that a South Korean type of response wouldn't generate enough profit to attract investors. 'Rather just say that TTT involves aggressive access to bank card and phone locational data, making it politically a hot-potato'. 'Keep them feeling safe in lockdown, borrow money and give furlough to the monthly-paid workers, and focus on the big money-maker: COVID-19 vaccine supply'. (politico, oxfam.)
Almost 9 million British jobs were being furloughed in May 2020 (see figure below.) If, for example, those jobs were paying £1000 per month, that would mean that government would have been providing £7,200,000,000 that month. Of course, most people earned more than £1,000 per month before lockdown, and quite a few would have been receiving the full £2,500 furlough per month. The payments lasted through to September 2021. Read in a 2024 CNN article that the Institute for Fiscal Studies accused Tories and Labour of conspiring to hide "the poor state of public finances". Such state will have resulted from the giant expense of furlough and other aspects of supporting lockdown. The national debt stood at about £2.8-trillion in May 2025.
| N.B. The well-respected Nature journal in 2016 reported as follows: The shedding of virus from the body of a MERS patient becomes significant only after that patient is suffering severe symptoms. This fact explains why MERS didn't spread rapidly among people: Patients were already in sickbeds, often hospitalized, when they began shedding virus that could infect other people: Nature (see the fourth Key point.) There had been no basis for the WHO to say, time and again, that the virus had very little human-to-human transmissibility, implying that nearly all human cases were caused by contact with animals (camels.) |
Gates had probably seen straight away that backing 'trace-and-test' wouldn't lead to easy opportunities for big profit. On the other hand, vaccine supply was going to be very lucrative. (The Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is, "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks" - quoting Andrew Bridgen, beginning at 14:00 mins.)
In May 2023, the WHO reported that fourteen billion COVID-19 vaccines had been used (ref. BBC News on 6 May 2023. Also see Stand.) Andrew Bridgen argued that the safety of the vaccine had not been properly demonstrated: "Members of the JCVI have huge financial links to The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, running to billions of Pounds". Rishi Sunak is known to have invested public money in a ten-year supply of vaccine from Moderna, a company in which he'd had financial interest through hedge funding: Goodl (2023), Gurd (2020) and: video. Was he as careful with public money as he is with his own? - see Skyfe (£21bn was lost to 'COVID fraud'.)
Mr Johnson, Bill Gates, the WHO and the CCP had become aligned in their rejection of the East Asian containment strategies. None of them ever commented on the control achieved in S. Korea after its initial big outbreaks. On 23 March, Mr Johnson's message for his island country could be summed up as: 'It's simple: Go home and stay there (while we get vaccine organized.)' Everyone did as instructed, and jabs arrived on 8 December.
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This photo of Penny Mordaunt and Mr Gates further suggests that he did bring his monetizing influence to the UK: "It's too late to try South Korea's complicated trace-and-test approach. Anyway, the WHO says it's an animal virus or whatever, and vaccine supply is where the money is." ?  |
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The original blog intro, updated May 2025:
All observations below are backed with reference hyperlinks in other parts of this blog.
MERS-CoV caused deaths in 21 countries in 2012. In 2015, it broke out inside four hospitals not far from Seoul, and some form of detection was wanted so that infected people could be separated into special wards. A nucleic acid test (specifically, an rt-PCR test) could indicate when a person's saliva/mucus contained RNA with nucleotide sequence that's unique to the MERS-CoV genome.
As MERS was caused by a respiratory coronavirus, it made sense to find any people who'd been in the vicinity of those now showing 'positive' in the test. Once found, such 'contacts' would be tested as well. All four hospital outbreaks were thus traced to one man who'd been recently in the Middle East. Not being a typical case, his symptoms had not soon become harsh enough to stop him from seeking help at each of the hospitals. (A small number of cases were presenting with less severe symptoms.)
In Wikipedia, it says that MERS-CoV killed 37% of the people it infected, but a CFR of 56% was reported in Nemj in 2013. There was not a rate of spread which would cause fear of an epidemic, and no travel restrictions were applied. Harsh symptoms could appear 5 days after infection (CDC), but patients did "not shed large amounts of virus until well after the onset of symptoms", by which time they were in sickbeds at home or in hospitals (see the fourth Key Point in Nature.)
On 13 January 2020, a Taiwanese expert on a fact-finding mission in Wuhan persuaded medics that they had clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19. The wife of one patient had caught the disease, but she had not been to the seafood market which other patients had visited: yah. CCP information, disseminated by the WHO, had said there was no such evidence.
On 19 January, a migrant worker from Wuhan was noticed in thermal screening at Incheon Airport. She looked healthy but was taken to a hospital and found to have walking pneumonia. It turned out that she was positive in the rt-PCR test for SARS-CoV-2. It was decided that the trace-and-test method of 2015 would be expanded to all known or suspected SARS-CoV-2 hotspots, and a task force would strive to test all contacts.
'COVID-19' was spreading quickly, in part because the symptoms of it did not develop quickly: It could easily be more than a week after infection that a person began to feel unwell. Case Fatality Rates of 3% or below were being seen.
In order to begin tracing COVID-19 contacts in S. Korea, people who'd tested positive could usually be interviewed so that their recent movements could be ascertained. (It was also very helpful to look at data from their mobile phone and bank card records.) A teenager made a website to display the recent movements of those who'd shown positive in the test, so that other members of the public could see if they might have crossed paths with them. In the interest of privacy, 'personal identifiers were not shown on his website'.
An alternative to putting infected people into isolation was to lock everyone down, but South Koreans preferred to avoid general limitations of societal freedom. (They suffered oppressive Japanese rule until 1945.) Furthermore, the economic impact of locking 17,000 people down during the MERS outbreak had made it clear that lockdowns should be used sparingly. Furthermore, the need to keep daily life as normal as possible was made more dire by the constant hostility from across their northern border.
The WHO showed only a momentary interest in S. Korea's response to Covid-19. Before 2023, nothing that specifically mentioned S. Korea was added to who.int/republicofkorea/our-work since 1 January 2019. The WHO doesn't interact much with a country which has angered the CCP by always supporting Taiwan.
In 2012, a WHO spokesperson had said that MERS, "cannot be easily transmitted from person to person" (Reu1.) It was said that infection occurs through contact with an animal, not through contact with another human. (WHO advice, still on its website after a 2022 revision, was to wash hands after handling a camel.) In 2015, the same thing was said again by the WHO in a more 'technical' way: "it is direct transmission and not sustained human-to-human-transmission": Reu2 ("direct" here means, 'directly from animal to human'.)*
*It is believed that most viruses are evolved to infect just one host species. (The rabies virus is a well-known exception which can infect many mammalian species, including humans.**) The WHO's insistence that MERS-CoV was transmitting animal-to-human was surprising. Such A-to-H transmissions could only be frequent and sustained if there was also substantial animal-to-animal transmission (so that a number of animals would be carrying the novel coronavirus at any given moment.) Significant numbers of sick animals were not reported, and there was little or no testing of animals back then. It's very probable that WHO staff were not keeping in mind the genetic mechanism which is believed to bring about the appearance of a 'zoonotic' coronavirus. In various ways, they'd said the same, incorrect, thing in 2012, 2015 and 2020: 'only those who came into contact with infected animals could catch the virus'.
**The WHO makes a point of classifying Rabies as one of the 'zoonotic' viruses, but Rabies is not a respiratory virus: One rabid animal infects another by biting it, and many vertebrate species can be infected that way. The rabies virus occupies the body of the host for quite some time before it induces biting behaviour. It follows that rabies virus does not spread quickly enough to cause epidemics.
If MERS was being caught from camels and not spreading human-to-human, it would have been pointless to attempt any tracing of human contacts. However, proof of human-to-human transmission had appeared in scientific literature (e.g. nejm, scidi), and it's obvious that the S. Korean outbreaks settled the matter: No camels were handled at the hospitals or elsewhere in S. Korea. However, the WHO still preferred to emphasize animal-to-human transmission, e.g. "the virus does not seem to pass easily from person to person unless there is close contact": Reut2 (No scientific measure of "close contact" was suggested.)
On 14 January 2020, the WHO tweeted China's proposal in its own way: "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus". Tedros Ghebreyesus then said that this meant there was, no clear evidence that supported limiting travel to and from China (even with the imminence of New Year celebrations which cause peaks in travel.)
A reiteration: Taiwan tried to communicate with the WHO about the human-to-human spread of the disease (Franc, Time, yah), but the WHO was only relaying what the CCP was saying: tweet. SARS-CoV-2 was being characterized in the same way that the WHO had described MERS-CoV, i.e. People were sharing the same air inside buildings in Wuhan, but were 'not catching SARS-CoV-2 from each other'. Ghebreyesus revealed immediately that he backed the CCP's fabrication when he said that travel restrictions were, "not evidence-based": voa. Even in 2021, he insisted that it was unscientific and, therefore, wrong to "isolate China's economy" by restricting travel.
The WHO spoke of coronaviruses in ways which defied common sense. Their narrative was that respiratory coronaviruses are normally animal-borne but, through evolution, one could appear which infects both animals and people: After infecting a human, the mutant would not then transmit human-to-human.
Even if there was such a thing as "direct transmission" of a respiratory coronavirus, 'from animal to human', there are no normal circumstances in which animal/human interactions take place often enough to cause many such infections: However, it was implied that animal-to-human transmission could explain the sizeable human outbreak in Wuhan. It's obvious that droves of animal-to-human transmissions won't happen if the animal is a vertebrate. (If the animal host was an insect, there could be many animal-to-human infections, e.g. Many people might catch malaria through mosquito bites. However, there's no such 'secondary host' in the spread of a respiratory coronavirus.)
Tedros Ghebreyesus never asked China for hard data to back the "no human-to-human transmission" idea but, for almost two years, he kept implying that travel restrictions were not "evidence-based". Any decision to trace disease contacts within a human population was, according to his model, also 'not evidence-based': Until proved otherwise (while not gathering data), the WHO was assuming that each infected person had caught COVID-19 from an animal.
Ghebreyesus was sticking to the position that zoonotic coronaviruses spread animal-to-animal and, when people became infected, 'Oh, that's caused by animal-to-human transmission'. In his opinion, there was barely, if any, human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2, so if a few people did carry it into another country, they would not cause significant outbreaks there.
While WHO executives pretended to wait for "evidence" of human-to-human transmission, the attention from world leaders began to wane, and some toyed with denialism. The American CDC did no mass testing until six weeks after first cases were confirmed in the US, simply because there was a desire to develop a more sophisticated test than the one offered by the WHO as a website download: forbes. After the novel virus was detected in the UK on 29 January (see bfpg), politicians gave it almost 2 months to spread, and then a national lockdown (govuk) was "the only tool". Facemasks were said to be the best defence against catching COVID-19, but none were for sale in British supermarkets until April, a fact which must have driven the decision to lock down.
The WHO knew that it should recommend a wide use of testing, but Tedros Ghebreyesus waited until 16 March before he said, "Test, test, test" (vclip.) By then, it was too late to achieve containment of SARS-CoV-2 in the way that Taiwan and South Korea had done. Britain's Chief Medical Officer had already shut down Britain's contact tracing team on 12 March: "the contain phase of this operation .. finishes from today" (Rehis.)
WHO continued to let details go uncorrected in order to maintain the illusion that travel restrictions wouldn't help and/or 'would not merit the harm they'd do to China's economy'. (Even today, 2026, its "infamous" tweet remains unchanged.) 
WHO member countries were still kept in the dark about the good progress being made in East Asian countries where the Korean model was followed, where human survival was better protected, and economies were not overly damaged by lockdowns.
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Mr Johnson saw nothing to bother Beijing about in 2020. China was shielded from criticism because of its importance in getting nuclear power stations built and other big contracts fulfilled? e.g. setting up of the only significant car-building factory in the UK at the time: youtub and JusB. 
(Turn your English-branded toaster over and you might find a 'Made in China' stamp between the company's logo and their UK address.) It was promised to journalists at a press conference in 2020 that China would be challenged later over its COVID-19 cover-up, but the subject hasn't been spoken of again. Instead, there's been ongoing resistance to any criticism of China: Oake and Hanc.
Journalists who'd wanted to bring up-to-date information from democratic Asian states were ignored by the WHO, see: Nation (3 April, two poster below.) 
The British reporter who wrote about the doctor gagged by the CCP (BBC, February 6) was, for all intents and purposes, ignored by Hancock and Johnson. Ditto the British reporter who made it clear that South Korea was beating the odds with its trace, test and treat approach: BBCi,12 March. The big-brother blinkering continued for the whole year: The subject of S. Korea was clearly off-limits while the locked-down public was likely to be watching BBC One.
Not even one year after the UK was put into lockdown, it was said that her economic output was at a 300-year low: Fintim.
Donald Trump stopped WHO funding (reut) because they had helped Beijing to deceive people on a very big scale. As a reaction to Trump's simple measure, Bill Gates got busy organizing extra support for the WHO, and Joe Biden was soon to reverse Trump’s sanction as if there’d been no hint of dereliction. Also in 2021, Gates got Johnson to arrange that £200-million would come from the UK private sector for a new ‘BEC’ project: goov. 
In its 2018/19 funding cycle, the WHO received more money from Britain than it did from the USA. In 2021, our tax payer still forfeited four times the amount taken from a US tax payer. (The US and UK totals were comparable, but there are more than four times as many tax-payers in the US.*)
Johnson, Gates, the WHO and the CCP continued to keep silent about S. Korea, which had a COVID-19 cumulative death total of 587 on 14 Dec 2020, thirteen days before Britain's toll was 70,752. *detail is provided - use Ctrl+f to find 'much of'.
Britain's first trace-and-test effort was called "the contain phase" by Chris Whitty on 12 March 2020 when he said that it, "finishes from today" (youtube at 13:10 mins). The Tories put the UK into lockdown eleven days later. (Ann Widdecombe expressed on TV that she thought we should rather be using South Korea's method, and she left the Conservative Party some time later.) Care homes for the aged soon reported a grim shortage of PPE: nurst, grdn, nuffi, bloo. 
S. Korean nursing homes had been closed on 21 February, before the disease might be walked into them: bfpg.
PPE in storage was said to be insufficient in the UK: nurst, bbci, bbcii, NAO, huff. The shortage might have made it difficult to run sufficient trace-and-test efforts, but former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, expressed in 2022 that government should have copied South Korea, which suggests that it was possible to do so: video. A 2020 article reported that the UK did have a contact-tracing team of 300 staff until 12 March 2020 (at which time S. Korea had 1,000 staff), but 5,000 trained people, employed by councils, had not been deployed: Guardt (reviewed in REHIS.)
As a priority, S. Koreans had secured their supply of facemasks in February 2020: see Schwak - fifth paragraph.
The impact of so many Brits leaving their workplaces and going home to lockdown favoured an almost cheerful atmosphere, and there was no talk of shortcomings in our epidemic preparedness. PPE shipments would be arriving from overseas before long, and there was no expressed urgency, because facemasks weren't yet seen as a necessity while people retreated to their homes. Thus, declaring a lockdown had the effect of keeping criticism of government at bay, and it wasn't until May that an interview with Jeremey Hunt confirmed that our existing PPE stockpile had passed its expiry date: JHchan4. 
Analyses of 2020 mortality figures: sky1, sky2. Official figures to June 2022: govuk.
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| After ignoring SAGE when it told them the best way forward, they let things drift until lockdown seemed unavoidable. Then, they borrowed on a scale never known before in peacetime - CNN. (Did furlough double the national debt or was it worse than that? It climbed from £1-trillion in March 2010 to 2.5-trillion in March 2023.) |
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| CNN in 2024 says that governments borrowed hugely during the pandemic. Most didn't heed any good advice to imitate S. Korea and Taiwan (and thus avoid big lockdowns.) Simple arithmetic suggests that the UK took on more than £1-trillion in debt to make furlough available, and the CNN mentions a conspiracy of silence by the two top UK political parties to keep that fact under wraps. |
In S. Korea, there was easy cooperation between the health authorities and the public. In Atlantic: "By March 5, South Korea had tested 145,000 people - more than the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, and Japan combined". (Also see: Schwak.)
An updated time-line confirms that the World Health Organization was being unnaturally slow to communicate concerns, and it didn't use the word 'pandemic' until 11 March: TGHealth.
A non-BBC documentary about S. Korea's early success (vs. fateful gaps in the WHO's provision of guidance and in the UK response) was aired in the first week ofMay 2020, and it was available online until June 2023: channel4/the-country-that-beat-the-virus/, but there is no trace of it today.
There was an immediate review which is at Grdc.
__________________
On 29 April 2020, Dominic Raab caused puzzlement by denying that there was any "sudden surge" in infections, regardless of proof that the UK's Covid deaths total had reached at least 26,097 that day: bbcRaa. The cumulative total had been 759 a month before on 27 March: bbcnews. Tories were doing everything possible to play things down, and they were still keeping silent about the success of S. Korea's TTT' approach (as they all have done ever since, with the exception of Jeremy Hunt on 4 July 2022.) They launched 'NHS Test and Trace' on 28 May 2020 but, unlike S. Korea's 'Trace, Test and Treat', it didn't actually send anybody to do tests on people who might have become disease contacts. It simply sent text messages, advising people to get tested if they'd attended a pub, café or restaurant where a known case had been at about the same time. There was no obligation to obey such text message unless the recipient was planning to return to the venue in question.
Public spending under Mr Johnson was vast: parliament.uk (A fact-checking group says £29.5-billion was the amount "actually spent" on NHS Test and Trace: Fullfact.)
However, any similarity between 'NHS Test and Trace' and the democratic East Asians' containment process was in name only: The NHS sent text messages to potential disease contacts so that they might then get themselves tested, but it could not oblige them to do so. (A text message arrived if you'd been in a pub, café or restaurant which had, at roughly the same time, also been visited by someone who was COVID-19 positive, but you could ignore the text if you wanted to. You only had to stay away from that one place until you could prove to its staff that you'd since got a negative test result. Supermarkets, petrol stations and public transport didn't participate in the new tracing program, so you could keep getting your essentials regardless.) In contrast, the Koreans traced and tested as many potential COVID-19 contacts as they could, to get infected people off the streets.
A teenager in S. Korea had made a website which, in effect, provided more tracing information than NHS Test and Trace did in Britain. He knew that the people had an appetite for the information on his website, because they could consult it to see where known cases might have been. He was providing knowledge (of the recent movements of infected people) much earlier in the pandemic, helping to achieve containment of the virus before it could proliferate beyond hope of control. His system was not costly, because he didn't snoop anybody's movements or send messages to anybody. Rather than simply making the recent movements of infected people known to the public, NHS Test and Trace monitored potentially everybody in the UK. Then it informed individuals, by text message, if they'd perhaps been near an infected person in a pub, café or restaurant. The privacy of infected people was better protected, but the snooping of the general public was another form of privacy invasion. Was it all worth £29.5-billion, being four months late anyway?
The use of the words 'NHS Test and Trace' would obviously lead Brits to thinking that the NHS was doing what Koreans had always been doing: i.e. getting as many Covid-19 cases as possible into isolation. The system did not have sufficient impact on the spread of infection to prevent a second lockdown. Few people noticed news of the issue and, even if they did, they probably thought that the success of "trace-and-test" in East Asian countries had been exaggerated (even if Google searches did show the fresh stats every day): "Trace-and-test just couldn't work well in Britain", they'd think. "Boris has been right all along: Contact tracing is, 'legions of imaginary Clouseaus'. Relying on it would have been "whistling in the dark'": Lbc. 
(There are written corroborations of the 'parliament.uk' report. e.g. Guardi.)
Of course, the new NHS system did other things beyond supporting the phone app, e.g. running PCR tests for hospitals and the general public, but it was sold on the promise of preventing further lockdowns, and that objective was not achieved.
* Testing of inward-bound Eurotunnel drivers was announced for the first time on 28 March 2021 (to begin on 6 April 2021) for any drivers who visited the UK for longer than 48 hours. The new policy was an admission that it had never been a good idea to keep the Eurotunnel devoid of any measures: Eurotun.
Mr Johnson stayed away from COBR meetings because he'd decided, early on, that the UK's pandemic response would be "simple", i.e. We'd go into lockdown and wait until vaccine was made and distributed. (The first vaccine was available on 8 December.) He wasn't interested in the East Asian focus on "prevention" of infection, even if that was key to avoiding comprehensive lockdowns. By staying away from COBR, wasn't he dodging accountability: making it easier to pretend that 'the scientists' had made the key decisions?
It was convenient that Bill Gates had also been leaving the word, 'prevention' out of the conversation.
Gates seemed to enjoy saying in a BBC Breakfast interview, "It's like a war zone!" while keeping both of his hands raised with fingers quivering. He did the same thing on BBC News: bbc/news. (Such a 'war-zone situation' wasn't conducive to a methodical test, trace and treat strategy?) Gates would have been pleased to see Johnson committing everything to vaccine: "the Gates Foundation is heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks... Members of the JCVI have huge financial links to The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, running to billions of Pounds" (quoting Andrew Bridgen MP, at 14:00 mins.) The pandemic was an opportunity of guaranteed magnitude in Gates' eyes.
Rishi Sunak was said to already have had interests in Moderna: video.
A new revelation was made in December 2022 by Matt Hancock. He said that, given the focus on Brexit, he couldn't get fellow MPs to take the pandemic seriously until the second week of March 2020: ITV.
The UK's emergency science group had made it clear that South Korea was the example to follow.
A Google result said in 2022 that £400-billion had been spent on the lockdown. (There was a report of £210-billion spent in the first six months of 2020: Guard.) On top of that, many companies lost months of business that they couldn't recover once the lockdowns were over: Bloomberg. Scientists both sides of the Atlantic have said that lockdowns did not help significantly to prevent deaths, e.g. yahoo, usagov.
On 4 July 2022, former Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, revealed that an early SAGE recommendation to "copy South Korea" was rejected by "government": video (see second 50 seconds.) He said that the UK's many scientists would have given full support for a trace-and-test strategy if they'd only known about the idea. (Very few seemed to know about the "just under 300 staff" who were sent home on 12 March 2020 by Chris Whitty: Gurdn.)
Scientists (and businessmen) would not have opted for a "simple" lockdown if they'd known how S. Korea were managing to avoid that (after having experienced the economic damage done by MERS.) It's doubtful that many people realised the gravity of what Chris Whitty was saying on 12 March: "We are clearly now stopping the contain phase of this operation, that we've always said from the beginning, there were four stages to this: contain, delay, research and mitigate; and the contain finishes from today" (youtube at 13:10 mins.) Even if some scientists were watching Whitty that day, this key part of his press conference moment was brief and easily missed. It was very puzzling how anyone could have decided, at the beginning of an epidemic, that they would stop trying to contain the disease on a certain date in the very near future.
(It can be seen in a cBBC article that "Research" and "Mitigate" were not "stages" or "phases" in any chronological sense. They were proposed activities which could be run at any time during the "Delay" phase.)
Nobody doubted that delivering a vaccine was a worthwhile goal, but there would have been only minor lockdowns while waiting for it if a trace-and-test strategy had been embraced. If they'd paid attention to what S. Koreans were doing, nobody would not have forgotten to look after the care homes properly. (Nobody would have applied guidance that relied on the enthusiasm of private sector operatives at a time of PPE shortage.)
Was there any good explanation for keeping the SAGE advice hidden from the country's scientists? Why did the Downing Street team close ranks and act like a war cabinet? - see Gua - Was that the easiest way to forget about a big number of Covid-19 deaths, by seeing them as 'unavoidable casualties of a war'? Why not get advice from the Koreans by talking to them (on their Samsung phones), since they had tackled a respiratory coronavirus in 2015? Why prevent BBC television from talking about them during the restrictions and lockdowns? (and why make MPs boycott the journalists working for all other media companies? Also see: Eustice.) Was the PHE's contact tracing operation shut down simply because there was a very limited stockpile of PPE in the UK, meaning that staff wouldn't have been able to work safely for very long? - What's revealed in JHchan4 suggests that was the reason: There were tons of PPE but it had expired (although it probably was still fit for purpose.)
One publication dated 2 April 2020 says that the WHO did praise S. Korea for its pandemic response: yaho1:
However, that praise wasn't followed by any WHO advice which said that countries should adopt the trace-and-test strategy. The WHO said nothing when S. Korea was offering to 'export' its strategy to other countries, which it was already doing before the WHO had formally declared a pandemic: Schwa.
Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus didn't say, "Test, Test, Test" until 16 March, by which time the virus was already well spread in Europe and America. He wasn't seen to say, "South Korea" in any televised announcements shown in the UK. The one-off praise of S. Korea by the WHO is exaggerated in the yaho1 article: S. Korea was not "held up as a beacon" in any obvious way.
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There was no sustained coverage of what S. Korea was doing. The WHO never openly U-turned on its January 14 announcement, i.e. "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission". (The tweet is still in place today on X.) In the opinion of Tedros Ghebreyesus, there was no "evidence" that "travel bans" would achieve anything, because a virus which showed poor human-to-human transmission would not spread across national borders, or wouldn't go far if it did.
After the SAGE advice to copy S. Korea was ignored, it wasn't long before the WHO was being quoted frequently by MPs on the BBC television, and a £55-million 'bonus' was sent to them in April: RT.com (the Russia Today reference cannot be opened since the invasion of Ukraine, and Google searches are not finding other reports. However, there's ample evidence on the WHO's website of large sums received at the expense of the UK tax-payer: Use Ctrl+F to find 'WHO's extra' below.)
In line with what Ghebreyesus said about "travel bans", No. 10 didn't scramble to keep SARS-CoV-2 from crossing the UK's national border. There was no thermal screening at airports or the Eurotunnel (discussed below) and the PM never stopped dragging his heels over closing of the UK border (a fact which would have pleased Ghebreyesus!): BBC.
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| 3 Feb 2021 |
By 16 March 2020, the WHO had stopped pretending that 'the coronavirus' was not contagious among people. Its Director-General said, "Test, test, test" (bbc, youtu), and he started using the word "isolate". (He was not ready to say "trace" for another two days, because that might have revealed why Taiwan and Korea had been doing the right thing for about seven weeks already: testing and tracing.) CCP informants are employed at the WHO, and China would not have been pleased to hear that Tedros was affirming Taiwan's pandemic response (Overs, FPcom, AEI)
The UK's "fall in output"
Rishi Sunak did the paperwork for Boris Johnson's unvetted decision to lock Britain down, knowing that payment of furlough to people would greatly placate any resistance they felt toward the lockdown approach. But furlough didn't guarantee that many enterprises wouldn't fail after being inactive for so long. On 30 January 2024, it was said that the number of UK businesses closing for good had hit a thirty-year high in 2023. (Also see onsgov: 650,055 "business deaths" in 2020/21.) The number of closures in 2022 had already been, "the highest since records began", about a thousand per day if you exclude public holidays: Inde.
In July 2022, Mr Johnson said at his last session of PM's Questions that the country's "output" had dropped more than at any time since 1722: youtu at 13:30 mins, although "three-hundred years" was obviously a guesstimate. (Also see at: fintim.)
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| See Indep. What's more valuable to a society, 345,000 long-established businesses, or 337,000 start-ups? |
No. 10 actively worked against the Health Secretary
Several testimonies indicate that Mr Johnson was not impressed by S. Korea's methodical 'TTT' response when it was suggested to him by SAGE. It called for a new way of doing things, with speed and economy. He'd made up his mind that an operation to find and isolate COVID-19 cases should be satirized as, "legions of imaginary (Inspector) Clouseaus and no plans to hire them": Guardian ("no plans to hire them" refers to the 5,000 council staff who were trained to participate in the tracing effort, but were never deployed.) On 26 Apr 2020, the PM had written this to his top adviser Dominic Cummings that to rely on a test-and-trace strategy, "feels like whistling in the dark" (i.e. pretending that progress was being made when, in fact, "a great number of deaths would occur" and the "financial hit might be the biggest in Europe.") N.B. When writing, "feels", he must have been referring to the continuous trace-and-test activity in East Asian countries: because "the Contain phase" had been "finished" in the UK on 12 March (yout at 13:10 mins.)
The emails between Cummings and Mr Johnson suggest that two stages were originally intended for trace-and-test in the UK: Chris Whitty was to oversee trial runs, adapting the method to the British environment, then Health Minister Matt Hancock would put a big operation together.
A change of plans ended Whitty's involvement on 12 March, but Johnson's email to Cummings suggests that Hancock still had the big operation in mind: Johnson was inviting Cummings to see that Hancock should also be persuaded to ditch the whole idea, particularly since 'Hancock was failing to provide testing even at care homes': cumsub. In 2023 at the UK Inquiry, Hancock "claimed that No 10 'actively worked against' his 100,000 tests a day goal": ipap.
Mr Johnson's, "legions of imaginary Clouseaus", suggests that he had never backed trace-and-test as a way to avoid lockdown. (His satirizing habit was regrettable, e.g. Women who wear burkas, "look like pillar-boxes"; Sir Kier Starmer was a "pointless human bollard". People who tried to protect ancient woodlands from the HS2 project were, "hair-shirt wearing, tree-hugging, mungbean munching eco freaks". Also see: Carbis Bay.)
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After two months of lockdown, with police disturbing people who went to parks and beaches, a system called 'NHS Test and Trace' was launched on 28 May 2020. People obeyed its instructions on their phones, in the belief that they were helping to contain the virus (Gov). However, there was no reason to think that government had set up a system which could do what the East Asians were doing.
The purpose of our 'NHS Test and Trace' was only to observe people's movements and send them text messages if they'd been in a pub, café or restaurant where a known COVID-19 case had also been recently. The system wasn't finding and visiting people who'd been at risk, to test and see if they should be isolated.
20/09/2022 - the UK's mortality remains very high
Joe Biden said yesterday that the pandemic is "over", but a startling fact emerges when comparing the following articles: 21/04/2021 and 21/04/2022. The first article shows a week's COVID-19 deaths total in the UK of 168. The second one shows a week's total of 1,636.
Ten-times more Brits died in the first week of April 2022 than in the first week of April 2021. Vaccine had not been quick to protect anybody, let alone the 2% who were likely to be killed by the virus. (Vaccine provision had begun on 8 December 2020: Govuk.)
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| 21 April 2021 |
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| 21 April 2022 |
Most of South Korea's Covid deaths occurred in 2022
By the end of 2021, more than 86% of S. Koreans had received vaccine against COVID-19 (reute), with many having a booster dose. However, the country's highest ever deaths rate was about to ensue.
An increase in cases was noticed before 1 January 2022. and the slope continued to steepen month on month (see the figure below.) The cumulative deaths total rose from below 6000 on 1st January, to above 24,000 on 24th May: Ourw (see the graph under the ninth question/heading, also pasted below) This super-spike occurred because tracing-and-testing had been abandoned on the assumption that vaccinated people were safe.
TTT was stopped officially in early February 2022 (references are below under, 'S. Korea then and now'), but it was running again before the end of the month, and the 'vaccination pass' requirement was waived so that even the un-vaccinated could visit a testing centre: 28-02-2022. However, the Omicron variant had escaped containment and it wasn't easy to regain control. It's fair to conclude that test-based containment keeps deaths well down, but the good effect that vaccination has (on a society) can be slow and changeable.
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| By January 2022, more than 86% of S. Koreans had been vaccinated, but the cumulative deaths total began to climb steeply because trace-and-test was no longer being done and vaccination wasn't a good substitute. (The data are from a Johns-Hopkins study. There are charts that confirm the JH data at: Worldo.) |
Once the virus had escaped containment, it's not surprising that regaining control of it (by resuming TTT) would take some time: An up-to-date chart of case totals through time can be seen at Worldo, pasted below:
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| From https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/ |
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This blog was pasted-over by mistake in 2022, and then it was discovered that Google no longer found some of its reference articles, e.g. the RT.com article which reported that the WHO received £55-million from the UK as a 'bonus' in April 2020.
Much of the WHO's extra funding came from the UK.
(Some of the WHO website information which is mentioned/shown below will have been updated/changed by now.)
In 2020, the WHO said on its website that it received, "$464-million" from the UK in the 2018/2019 funding cycle, which was more than the USA had provided. It meant that the average British taxpayer forfeited more than four times the amount taken from an American taxpayer (because there are so many American taxpayers.)
Subsequently, the same table showed a UK contribution of $487-million for the 2020/21 cycle (click on the copy pasted below.) - Strangely, this table has always appeared only on the page devoted to the USA's funding: who1. It currently has been updated for 2022/23.
Today, we still need to 'explore' the WHO website before we get the impression that the UK's total contribution was significant during the pandemic: Nothing on the page which appears to be dedicated to the 'UK and NI' guides the reader to seeing the total which is in the table on the USA page, pasted above (who1 - It is now updated and showing figures for 2022/23). Today, there's no mention of the "£500 million" from Boris Johnson "for COVAX" anywhere on the WHO website*, and anyone looking at the "UK and NI" page still only sees, "4th overall" donor and "$135 million" in its table. (Will many Brits notice that our total, shown only in the table on the USA page, is $396-million?)
*There remains other online evidence of Johnson's pledge for COVAX, e.g. see govcov: "£548m to the global Covax initiative, making the UK the largest single donor". Wikipedia says that the WHO and the EU were the founders of COVAX: Wikip. The WHO website now says that WHO was one of five organizations which "co-led" the "multilateral effort", but it doesn't mention that the UK was a major donor: WHOco. It's interesting that COVAX is directed by GAVI, which was founded by Bill Gates (who has a $117 billion bank balance) and the WHO: gav.
The table on the WHO's 'USA' page (who1) revealed that America's fixed contribution was increased by Joe Biden in the 2020/21 cycle (up from the, "$450 million" mentioned by Trump in May 2020: Reut.)
See the 'USA' page's table updated for 2022/23:
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In 2015, Bill Gates said that the WHO is funded "to monitor" epidemics but not to help countries prepare for them: youtube (at 2:59 mins). Gates might have helped many countries if he'd simply acknowledged that S. Korea had worked out a new way to slow the spread of a respiratory coronavirus. (The quick-killing MERS coronavirus had found its way into four hospitals: wik, bbc.) Even though he's professed to be so interested in "infection control", he ignored S. Korea's new method because his interest was in the business of vaccine supply, nothing else. He's also said nothing about S. Korea's full-blown 'TTT' strategy of 2020.
The WHO didn't mention anything significant about S. Korea on its website between 2019 and 2023. Until December 2025, its updated pages still said that MERS-CoV was transmitting between camels and people, not between people and people 'unless there is close contact'. This biased description would have made the CCP feel comfortable when saying initially that people only caught SARS-CoV-2 through contact with animals. By backing that assertion with its own tweet, WHO were preventing their many member countries (only two small states were not members then) from realizing what S. Korea was doing 'bali bali' (quick, quick.)
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To be more helpful in 2015, Gates could have campaigned for a world-wide readiness to produce facemasks and coronavirus tests, and he could have suggested ways to quickly share knowledge of any novel coronavirus outbreaks.
New in 2022: Points raised in an important MP speech confirm reports that Gates was all over the WHO in 2020, because WHO could negotiate sales of vaccine to countries everywhere: "Members of the JCVI have huge financial links to the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, running to billions of Pounds". The Gates foundation is, "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks." In September 2020, a report appeared which describes how Gates and three small partners came to control the World's COVID response: Politico.
A "wilful blindness", as described by Andrew Bridgen (see bridvid), explains why Mr Johnson deprived us of a good virus containment system like the one in Taiwan and S. Korea.**[As soon as the S. Korean's stopped running trace-and-test at the end of 2021, they began to experience a massive surge in omicron cases, and their deaths total was multiplied by four within five months. This also happened in Taiwan, where vaccination targets had also been surpassed.]"The poacher paying the game keeper", said Bridgen, i.e. The UK's medical drugs regulator had conflict of interest. Beginning at 14:00 in the video: "Members of the JCVI have huge financial links to The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, running to billions of Pounds". That Foundation is "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks." - It's easy to imagine why Bill Gates never mentioned the trace-and-test method for containing a coronavirus in his monologs about virus epidemics: Vaccine supply was, commercially, the great opportunity, not 'TTT'. Gates and his three smaller partners in the health industry (see politico) wouldn't have have been drawn to investing in COVID-19 testing equipment when the demand for vaccine was, so obviously, going to run to billions of units. Furthermore, people were attaching stigma to the tracing activities in S. Korea (because of the data surveillance), whereas nothing was going to impede the World's vaccine rollout.Matt Hancock was, again, in contact with Gates in 2020 when he was campaigning to get the WHO sufficiently re-funded (after Trump had reacted to its role in helping China do a cover-up.) Did Gates and Hancock decide that Britain would simply have lockdowns until vaccine was available, regardless of what lockdowns would do to the economy?**The 'NHS Test and Trace', which was launched on 28 May 2020, did not pursue COVID-19 contacts to get them tested. It only provided a monitoring system that alerted people if they'd visited a pub, café or restaurant where a known case had been at about the same time.
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Mr Johnson's decision to put off what SAGE had advised him (see Hunt) resulted in a £400-billion spend on furlough within less than a year, and the folding of hundreds of thousands of businesses. He sent £548-million for the WHO to collaborate with the EU and create 'COVAX', which is directed by Bill Gates' GAVI organization (wikip, govcov, gav). He even helped Gates get financial input for a new green investment project: govdotuk.
p.s. See Carbis_Bay where Johnson splashed out in a literal sense.
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12 March 2020: Chris Whitty stops the UK's test and trace effort.
During a visit to Public Health England on 1 March 2020, Mr Johnson was told: "Yes, exactly!" when the following answer would have been correct: "Definitely not. Don't imagine that this disease only hurts some old people in China." (chan4 - discontinued in 2023, reviewed at Grdc.)
Eleven days later, Chris Whitty said on BBC TV that Britain's containment of the coronavirus "finishes from today". He said that there was always meant to be a very short "contain phase", followed by three other phases: "delay, research, mitigate"*, see youtube at 13:10 mins (this was also viewable in chan4.) Minutes before Whitty spoke, the PM had just said, "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time": yoguard (it was also in chan4.) Testing, Whitty said, would continue to be used at hospitals, but there was to be no more "mass testing", i.e. for the purpose of finding and isolating people who were infected.
*(It can be seen in a cBBC article that "Research" and "Mitigate" were not "stages" or "phases" in any chronological sense. They were proposed activities which could be run at any time during the "Delay" phase.)
From 12 March on, 'testing at hospitals would facilitate the separation of infected people from other patients'. However, it was later divulged that the hospitals had a shortage of testing materials.
It soon became obvious that the plan of action on 12th March was to lock the UK down until vaccine was created and dispensed. However, lockdown was not announced until 23 March (enforceable on 26 March), so Johnson and Whitty's statements, side-by-side, left something unexplained: If there was to be no "Contain phase" from 12 March onward, what was going to prevent the spread of virus (and the consequent loss of loved ones) on the next day? i.e. Why not lock down immediately?
The 11-day gap served to control public perception: by preventing people from noticing that the decision to 'stop containing the virus and have a lockdown' had been triggered simply by the WHO's belated announcement of a pandemic on 11 March: NLM. It seems likely that Hancock and Johnson were playing for time: The longer things were delayed, the later the man-in-the-street would wonder where he might find a facemask (JHchan4). Opportunities to secure PPE quickly had been ignored: Grdn.
Moving forward, everything S. Korea had done was simply never mentioned by our MPs (neither by the WHO after the initial praise it had made: yaho1.) A 2020 video makes it clear that stockpiles of PPE in Britain had become too old to use: JHchan4. That would have made it hard to expand a trace-and-test effort, tempting to shut it down and pretend that doing so was always, 'part of the plan'. Considering the gravity of the situation, couldn't some use of the 'expired' PPE have been made?
'Mr Johnson silenced anyone who queried the wisdom of locking down.'
A report from August 2022 (bbcnews) says that Rishi Sunak had not been taken seriously when he expressed concerns about the imposition of lockdowns: "He said the negative impacts of lockdowns on society were 'never part' of internal discussions, adding that meetings were 'literally me around that table, just fighting.' .. 'Ministers were also told not to discuss the potential downsides in interviews'". 
Mr Sunak also said that ministers were, 'not given enough information to scrutinise analysis produced by official scientific advisers on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)' and, 'internal opposition to certain measures from advisers was not reflected in official minutes of meetings.'
"He insisted he had made an 'emotional' plea to keep schools open, but was met with 'a big silence' from his colleagues.." N.B. Such a plea might have seemed reasonable in a place like S. Korea, where a Trace, Test and Treat operation was taking virus carriers off the streets all the time. Perhaps Mr Sunak, like so many others in the UK, had let himself think that 'NHS Test and Trace' (launched on 28 May) was Britain's version of the 'TTT' strategy. (It had been easy to miss the point that Chris Whitty made on 12 March 2020: Britain's mass tracing and testing of infected people by a team of "just under 300 staff" (Gurdn) was ended permanently before it had found its feet, "finishes from today". Also see 'Public spending...' above.
The cover-up.
An entry for 14 January 2020 in the BFPG timeline shows that China's government had begun restricting news of Wuhan's outbreak as soon as it could:
"Reporters from Hong Kong taken to police station after trying to film the situation within Wuhan hospital". (14 January was also the date of the WHO's infamous tweet.) 
Early in February, a 34 year-old doctor died who was one of eight accused of "spreading rumours"(Nyti, bbc.) CCP had wanted a 'calm' Chinese New Year celebration during which people would travel to relatives overseas and vice-versa. Honest medical alerts which appeared online were removed by CCP: CNN, bbcCh. 
On 3rd February, another report showed that China's suppression of news about Wuhan's outbreak was already well established: Forpol:
Medics had set up a warning system in 2022 for sharing information with analysts in Beijing, but local officials had 'political aversion to sharing bad news' and they prevented the system from being used: NYT. After Beijing admitted that there was a problem in Wuhan, CCP obstructed medical data and interfered with procedures at hospitals. Diagnostic criteria were imposed that would cause many obvious cases to go unregistered: Exp. 
There were instructions on the street to, "be calm": 54days, Guar. See "how state media and censorship took on coronavirus": bbcCh.
The Reuters article, 'MERS infects 10' of 29 May 2015 revealed two opinions which would be pushed again by the WHO five years later, when COVID-19 was spreading out from Wuhan. First, we saw claims that MERS doesn't usually spread human-to-human. Then, we saw an assertion that travel restrictions should not be applied. Both of the above happened again in 2020.
Rather than commending the Koreans on the innovative way in which they'd brought hospital outbreaks of MERS under control, the WHO simply repeated what it had said in 2012, i.e. that the coronavirus "cannot" spread easily from human to human: rtrs. Independent proofs of human-to-human spread in France and Tunisia drew no comment from the WHO (also see nejm.)
The S. Korean hospital outbreaks are mentioned by the WHO (in the Reuters article) as further evidence that the virus had weak transmissibility, by inference from the fact that there hadn't been a massive number of cases. In reality, those outbreaks were proof that the virus had jumped from one man to at least one staff member in each of the four hospitals he'd visited, and then spread to other people inside the hospitals: bmj ("The initial case, a 68-year-old male presented with non-specific symptoms such as high fever and cough starting on May 11. He went unrecognized for more than a week before finally being diagnosed on May 20 at the 4th hospital he visited".)
The fact that the hospital outbreaks of MERS were quickly brought under control proved that S. Korea's trace-and-test method could be trusted to slow the spread of a dangerous respiratory coronavirus (the CFR was reported to be 37%: wik; another measure was 56%: nejm). But the WHO never gave S. Korea credit for what it had achieved: The only mention of tracing in the Reuters article refers to what was being done in Hong Kong:
*S. Korea hadn't suggested a restriction on travel in 2015. - The WHO did not mention that it was migrant workers from China who would have been adversely affected if there had been such restrictions. What can be seen is that WHO were already 'protecting' China's economy in 2015. It's relevant because Tedros Ghebreyesus would repeatedly criticize countries for using "travel bans" in 2020 (voa) and 2021 (Reit1).
Thanks to the way that WHO personalities chose to talk about MERS, nobody reading the 2015 Reuters article learns anything about S. Korean trace-and-test. Instead, the impression is created that MERS died out because it "cannot" spread easily human-to-human (bmj.)
CCP members employed in the WHO will have sworn oaths to always put CCP interests ahead of all others. It's tempting to imagine that they would have advised Beijing to stall for time by pretending that the 2019 coronavirus wasn't contagious human-to-human, because the WHO had said the same thing, time and again, about MERS-CoV since 2012. Any novel coronavirus could be portrayed simply as, 'an animal virus which might infect some people occasionally'. (A 2022 summary can be found at: Guard.)
2 May 2023: A man who was jailed by the CCP for documenting Wuhan's outbreak, particularly for sharing videos, has been released after three years: bbc. The whereabouts of a lawyer is still unknown.
Skip to where this blog began by reading Part 2 now.
S. Korea then and now.
Koreans make some of the best tech. Boris Johnson's "World-beating app" was downloaded onto millions of Samsung phones, and BBC One's pandemic talks were viewed on millions of LG televisions. It was the Koreans who found a way to slow the spread of a very deadly respiratory coronavirus in 2015. (MERS-CoV killed at least 37% percent of the people it infected, nemj reported 56%.)
By February 2020, S. Korea was using the trace-and-test beyond hospitals and on a much bigger scale, and SAGE told Downing Street to copy the method: video. However, the MPs began saying that there was "no instruction book" to tell them what to do. (The WHO had not been telling anybody what S. Korea had discovered about controlling the spread of a respiratory coronavirus.)
A surprising and unhappy development in 2022:
An unforeseen demonstration of the power of S. Korea's TTT occurred when that strategy was no longer being followed. With vaccination targets having been reached by the end of 2021, it was thought that trace-and-test activity was surplus to requirements, and it was officially stopped early in February 2022.* The cumulative national deaths total was still below 6000 on 1 January 2022, but it began to climb steeply, passing 24,000 before the end of May: See Ourw (scroll to graph under the 9th question, or see it pasted below.) The Omicron variant was very contagious, but cases suddenly multiplied because infected people were no longer being traced, tested and isolated.
By January 2022, more than 86% of S. Koreans had been vaccinated. It was assumed that there was no longer a need for trace-and-test. The national COVID-19 deaths total began to climb steeply as soon as TTT was put on hold. (The data are from a Johns-Hopkins study.)
*FinT, Jtime and Tele report S. Korea's official reasons for having stopped trace-and-test. Later in February, Reute explains that TTT was soon restored, and that the vaccine pass rule was waived so that unvaccinated people could also visit testing centres.
UK care homes.
"Despite warnings of the potentially devastating impact of Covid-19 on care-homes in the UK, the first wave of the pandemic saw an extraordinary number of excess deaths among residents": nuff. "Between 2 March and 12 June 2020 .. 28,186 'excess deaths' were recorded in care homes in England, with over 18,500 care home residents confirmed to have died with Covid-19 during this period": amnesty. The care-home situation was under-reported: bbc. Matt Hancock later tried to deny that he'd said there would be a "protective ring" around care homes: Indep. 
S. Korea did not suffer a comparable loss of elderly people, because it closed nursing homes on 21 February: bfpg. When the restriction on incoming travel was eased to let Koreans return home, the UK variant got past airport screening and the cumulative deaths total was quickly doubled. However, as mentioned above, the virus was back under control by 27 January 2021 - The hyperlink to that Korea Times article is lost, but see 26 Jan 2021.
There was experience to look back to, but the WHO had ignored it since 2015.
Two previous respiratory coronavirus diseases, SARS and MERS, hadn't become a concern world-wide, and the WHO stated in 2012 that MERS-CoV, "cannot be easily transmitted from person to person" (rtrs.) However, through tracing and testing, S. Koreans determined that it was just one man who'd carried MERS into four hospitals in 2015: NYtimes.
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| From wik - see CFR in table |
In 2016, a proper understanding of the alleged infrequency of human-to-human spread of MERS was provided in Nature (see the 4th Key Point, pasted below): Most infected people were already feeling very sick by the time that their bodies began to shed progeny viruses. Their social interactions were greatly diminished by the time that they could be a source of infection.
There were complaints in S. Korea about the economic impact of locking 17,000 people down in 2015. The response to MERS "dented the economy" (smag.) Not only would a big lockdown in 2020 (for a virus that was spreading rapidly) have been very damaging to businesses, it would also have been seen as an oppressive measure, 'typical of the PRC'.
Of course, there was no crystal ball to show if COVID-19 really was very contagious (the urgency was based on the report of two Taiwanese medics in Wuhan), but the S. Koreans played it safe and persevered with finding and isolating every case that they could: It wasn't long before they realized that there was a large outbreak in Daegu (bbcDu.)
By the middle of March 2020, Trace, Test and Treat was proving to be the best response for SARS-CoV-2: Science (dated 17/03/2020.)
Privacy invasion
The 'privacy invasion' done in S. Korea to enhance the detection of disease contacts was met with silent disapproval among Westerners. The following statement was made to reassure Koreans who might fear embarrassment through surveillance of their phone and bank card locational data: "Legislation enacted since then (i.e. after MERS) gave the government authority to collect mobile phone, credit card, and other data from those who test positive, to reconstruct their recent whereabouts. That information, stripped of personal identifiers, is shared on social media apps that allow others to determine whether they may have crossed paths with an infected person" (Science.) Koreans in the South are averse to authoritarianism, but this "state surveillance" was in no way reminiscent of the oppressions they had endured in the past, before democracy: bma. The 'privacy invasion', which the S. Koreans had carefully weighed and legislated, was no excuse for other countries to simply shun the trace-and-test method outright. Political correctness shouldn't stand in the way of making people safe: Remember how Edward Jenner tested his theories on his own children and came up with the World's first vaccine? Privacy trade-offs are nothing new in the West: e.g. forb.*
The UK's "World-beating app" invaded privacy on a much bigger scale: It sent text messages to anyone who'd been in a pub, café or restaurant where a COVID-infected person had been recently.
Privacy invasion for the purpose of contact tracing was thought to be problematic in the West, but couldn't we have done 'data tracking by consent', i.e. asking each infected person for permission to access phone and bank card location histories, to see where he/she might have taken the virus recently?
*On 07 Dec 2021, the BBC mentioned the privacy 'trade-off' that will be unavoidable as Facebook, now known as 'Meta', will be developing 'the metaverse'.
The UK's lockdown was Draconian (see inde.)
A man in Devon who defied lockdown out of fear for his business was swiftly dealt with: devon. More businesses were forced to close as time went by: itv. Fixed penalty notices became commonplace: packet. 
While the MPs broke rules at parties in December, there was no sympathy for those who'd recently been driven by their "instincts" to try and keep their trading alive, e.g. Plym.
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| 1stspeech |
Nobody in government suggested any sort of amnesty for the many thousands of Brits who were fined heavily ("more than 100,000 fines" by July 2021: itvx.)
Various forms of authoritarianism occurred in 80 nations worldwide, e.g. Nytim.
The PM watched and waited for more than six weeks after hearing about Wuhan's outbreak, as if any danger to the British public couldn't be believed before it was seen. In the end, he took action because the WHO made it official on 11 March: There was a 'pandemic'. He couldn't keep up the pretence any longer, after pushing hand-shakes at a meeting with antibody scientists as recently as 6 March. 
Three direct flights per week were still coming from Wuhan to the UK months after lockdown began: Lock1, sungu. Airport screening was promised in January (Guar, bmj), 
but thermal screening was then ruled out: It was first ruled out at the Eurotunnel because it would complicate transport of goods: Drivers showing high body temperature would be held back for testing, and then would have to wait for test results. Where would their trucks be kept? The 'no screening' policy was extended to airports (for consistency?) However, the NHS made thermal screening compulsory at test processing facilities, and hospitals later followed suit: DigiH.
British and American health academics pointed out that there would always be some asymptomatic cases which would not be detected by thermal screening. This observation was then used by NERVTAG to argue that thermal screening was 'unreliable' and not to be used at British ports-of-entry (discussed below under 'More about thermal screening.')
As time went by, the MPs often appealed for a sense of principle: "Do the right thing!", while coldly analysing which variables they could play with to achieve the ends they thought were most desirable. It was a one-step-removed approach which did not always have humane outcomes, e.g. they focussed on lockdown measures which might reduce hospital loads, but they let thousands die unprotected in care-homes. The MPs didn't have the 'every-life-matters' approach as the South Koreans did: "We are not safe as humans unless everybody is safe", see Penn. The Koreans had closed nursing homes on 21 Feb 2020, bfpg. In June 2022, data from Johns Hopkins University showed, indirectly, how effective Korea's 'TTT' had been. Between February 2020 and December 2021, the South Korean strategy kept numbers of deaths to a small fraction of those in the UK: circa 6,000 vs. 200,000. However, after S. Korean vaccination targets were reached at the end of 2021, it was assumed that the test-and-trace work had been made surplus-to-requirement by the protection that vaccine would be giving to people. TTT was terminated officially by government early in February, but they soon realized that it was still key to preventing deaths: The cumulative deaths total had jumped from below 6,000 on 01/01/2022 to more than 24,000 on 25/05/2022: facebook (sourced from: ourworldindata- see the graph under the ninth question, also pasted below.)
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Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said on 12 March 2020 that only one short 'phase' of virus containment had ever been planned. He spoke as if expecting objection from his audience: "First of all, we are clearly now stopping the contain phase of this operation, that we've always said from the beginning: There were four stages to this: contain, delay, research, mitigate, and the contain finishes from today." Watch youtube at 13:10 mins. (It was also shown in: channel4.com/the-country-that-beat-the-virus/ - which was last viewable online in June 2023.)
Mr Johnson had said in the same broadcast that more families were going to, "lose loved ones before their time". (Would the South Koreans have begun with such resigned prediction? No, their determination was to prevent every death that they could: owid.)
Regardless of what Chris Whitty had said on 12 March 2020, "track and trace" continued to be mentioned by MPs on BBC TV, as though government, behind the scenes, was 'still' doing what S. Korea was doing. There was a 'Track and trace' call centre north of Plymouth long after 12 March. Its many staff sat in silence waiting for calls, and then they all disappeared because they were sent to 'work from home'. On 28 May, the illusion was again reinforced by the naming a new service for COVID-19 testing: "NHS Test and Trace". (See more about the NHS service by finding, 'Public spending under' above.)
Regardless of what Chris Whitty had said on 12 March 2020, "track and trace" continued to be mentioned by MPs on BBC TV, as though government, behind the scenes, was 'still' doing what S. Korea was doing. There was a 'Track and trace' call centre north of Plymouth long after 12 March. Its many staff sat in silence waiting for calls, and then they all disappeared because they were sent to 'work from home'. On 28 May, the illusion was again reinforced by the naming a new service for COVID-19 testing: "NHS Test and Trace". (See more about the NHS service by finding, 'Public spending under' above.)
The UK soon started to lose a lot more people than S. Korea did (71,000 vs. 600 in the first eleven months), but a knighthood was proposed for Whitty and others.
The nine Covid billionaires (oxfam) got rich faster because of the way so many countries ignored what S. Korea had learned from handling MERS, and how it had put that into action in 2020 (also see: bbct.)
Rather than urging countries to do trace-and-test, the WHO provided distraction with its tweet: "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission". In effect, it was backing China's proposal : "Only people who handle animals in Wuhan are at risk." This was exactly what the CCP wanted the world to think while it blocked other sources of information. - also see NYPost , alara. Many in Europe and America watched and waited while the containment opportunity slipped away.
The extent to which the UK's lockdowns were life-savers has been calculated: yahoo (i.e. "0.2%".) Social distancing and facemasks probably helped but, before April 2020, there weren't any facemasks that the man-in-the-street could obtain (while there were many in storage which were officially 'too old': JHcha.) 
'When you've got no facemasks, you'd better lock down or risk becoming the laughing stock in the modern world'? See Guardian: “the double distinction of being the European country with the most fatalities and the biggest economic hit”.
Didn't locking down do more harm than good?
"Evidence-based analysis" says that lockdown was not the correct approach for COVID-19 (or for the Spanish Flu and other pandemics that have occurred). The negative effects of lockdowns on public health could have caused 20-times more people to die than would have died by viral infection (e.g. Many people suffered extreme delays in medical interventions): USAgov. This conclusion was reached in 2022 after a systematic 'scan' of at least 230-thousand scientific papers on COVID-19 (to find the authors who were most likely to have provided appropriate information.)
Matt Hancock might have been wrong in March 2020 to simply assume that a national lockdown would help hospitals significantly. A 0.2% life-saving benefit has been estimated: 0.2pc in first wave. If we'd had facemasks on time, could we have kept calm and carried on almost as normal? (see webmd)
In 2020, lives everywhere should have been saved by following a trace-and-test strategy, but the WHO didn't hint at it until 18 March when its message was simply, "tracing must be the backbone of the response in every country" (Guac, yaho, Rehis.) To anyone who knew and agreed with the logic in that announcement, it was very obvious that it should have been said it six weeks beforehand. China and the WHO had formed a "united front": Ftimes.
UK politicians didn't only dismiss the twice-proven Korean method outright in February 2020, they also diligently kept news of it off BBC television during the 9 months of restrictions and lockdowns that followed. It was said in September 2020 that £210-billion had already been spent through the decision to keep people at home: Guardi. Many thousands of businesses are now gone from the high street, thousands of animals slaughtered because there was no way to keep farms running properly.
It was widely reported that there were no extra facemasks in the UK when we went into lockdown, beyond what was normally needed by medical staff: nurst. Why didn't the MPs explain the situation honestly to the British public, and become receptive to any helpful ideas? e.g. Could small companies have got busy making cloth facemasks? Could people have been shown how to make masks themselves? Were the 'expired' facemasks really not fit for purpose? (Also see: JHcha.)
The WHO was quoted on BBC television through the weeks, months and years, and a serious inquiry into its CCP-appeasing delays at the start was promised. Part 2 (below) lists the ways in which the WHO went along with the CCP's first moves, which included endangerment of medical staff by not warning them of the new situation: FPol. 
The CCP's claim that, "only those who came into contact with infected animals could catch the virus" was an echo of what the WHO had said about MERS-CoV since 2012 (proved wrong in 2015 by MERS getting into four South Korean hospitals.) Ghebreyesus' insistence that there was 'no evidence that travel restrictions would help' was simply a 'logical extension' of what was in the infamous tweet: "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus", 14 Jan 2020. It was nonsensical and deleterious to be vigilant against travel restrictions: reu, reut, Reut1.
Time went by, and Matt Hancock might have realized that it would have been better to place orders for facemasks in January or earlier. However, he did realize that he could say that the hospitals would soon be filled to capacity if he didn't get everyone into lockdown right away: Once at home at the end of March, people wouldn't be struck by the fact that a trickle of facemasks was only then beginning to appear in supermarkets. (2023 update: see more about the lack of PPE in a video: Facebk.)
On BBC 'Breakfast' in 2021, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said that if the UK gave surplus vaccine to other countries who had none, it would be like neglecting to put in some extra tent pegs when there might be a storm in the night. Somehow, the 'tent blown away in the wind' is analogous to a total loss of immunity if we didn't keep all vaccine for ourselves?
WHO executives didn't appear to think about the genetics that explains coronavirus epidemiology. The way they kept quiet about the containment strategy of non-communist East Asians before 11 March 2020 had far-reaching consequences.
With its "infamous tweet" of 14 January, the WHO provided a global reach for the suggestion that there was: "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission". The idea wasn't inconsistent with the way WHO spokesmen were misdescribing MERS-CoV since 2012: rtrs. Tedros Ghebreyesus didn't care about S. Korea's desire to avoid economically-damaging lockdowns. He only wanted to prevent travel restrictions so that China would not suffer "economic isolation". His argument was: 'If there's no proof that people are able to infect each other with SARS-CoV-2, then they should be free to travel!' (Reut.)
WHO blamed world leaders for the delay that it had engineered
On 5 Jan 2020, the following appeared on the WHO website (see the last line, under, 'WHO advice'): "WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the current information available on this event". The "infamous tweet" followed on 14 January: Xtweet.
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| Above is from NPR |
Meanwhile, "Government inaction" did seem to be widespread: Pol.
The following paper says that human rights were neglected in the UK through government incompetence, but it assumes that lockdowns were what government 'should have done, but better'. It makes no mention of lockdown-free responses which worked very well in progressive East Asian countries: pubmed.
In Taiwan, it was decided that coronavirus outbreaks should be prevented as much as possible. With Beijing always always watching, there was a strong need to avoid the disruptions caused by lockdowns. (Many Taiwanese adults play roles in a military readiness for Chinese invasion. They wouldn't have felt secure sitting at home for months on end.) One medical expert had seen first-hand that this novel disease was very infectious, and he raised an alarm that was taken seriously by most non-communist Asians: yah2, The Nat.
Very soon, there was expansion of the strategy which had worked against MERS in S. Korea. This time, COVID-19 was showing a case fatality rate of only 1.9%, but it was spreading much more than MERS did: wik, whocfr. By 2022, the global CFR of COVID-19 was 3.4%, according to the WHO: worldcfr. (MERS was seen to kill 56% of infected people in one study: nejm.) This was the third coronavirus outbreak in two decades, but western authorities seemed to avoid consulting with S. Korea or Taiwan, at least until it was too late to have a share in their success.
Taiwan is denied membership of the WHO. South Korea is a member but is ignored on anything that isn't mundane. In 2021, another UN institution decided to admit that S. Korea "is a developed economy": ktimes, hani. The WHO has a website page which appears to be about the work it does with S. Korea but, until 2023, the most recent publication on it that mentioned S. Korea specifically was dated 31 January 2019: WHOint. There's still no clear appraisal of how well the Koreans responded to SARS-CoV-2.
Instead of trying to catch up with Taiwan/S. Korea and limiting the spread of 'the coronavirus', many governments did as the WHO did: They briefly acknowledged S. Korea's Trace, Test and Treat, but rarely brought that subject up again. The attitude was: 'Oh, they've had previous experience. We can't be expected to get the same results'. In the UK, MPs made sure that S. Korea's TTT strategy was not mentioned for nine months on BBC television in 2020. All channels but the BBC were boycotted by the MPs, who never said, "South Korea". (Explanations for the boycott were not satisfactory: gmb and morgan.) << videosideos
Not long after the WHO had made it easy for the CCP to do a cover-up, our MPs sent a bonus donation of £55 million: Rtcom (no longer viewable due to the Ukraine war.) In the year spanning 2018/19, the UK had given the WHO £464-million. The WHO website in 2022 showed the 2020/21 figure as: "$487-million". (It was not shown on the 'UK and NI' page, but in a table on the USA funding page. N.B. Today, it is showing figures for 2022/23.) China was said to give much less: £40-million: reut,
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| Trump in May 2020 (reut) |
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Some will say that a UK total of 232 thousand deaths is a small fraction of our population, but the South Koreans always refused to let any number die without having fought to prevent their infection. Their cumulative deaths total didn't reach 3000 until 25/September/2021.
Once 86% of its population had been vaccinated, S. Korea began to relax the dedication to trace-and-test procedure at the end of 2021. It was a mistake because the all-time death toll began to climb faster than ever before: Ourw (see graph under the 9th question, pasted below) Cumulative deaths was below 6000 at the beginning of January 2022, but it had climbed past 24,000 by 24th May (also see reuter.) Trace and test strategy was quickly resumed, but control was not easily regained.
The UK continued to give more than $450-million to the WHO bi-annually. The WHO ignored what the Taiwanese should have been praised for, i.e. making the CDCP in Wuhan admit that there was human-to-human transmission (yah1, bbct.) S. Korea is a friend of Taiwan, and neither heeded the WHO's assertion that the restriction of travel should be avoided (Reut.) In 2015, S. Koreans hadn't taken seriously the WHO's 2012 update which suggested that MERS-CoV "cannot" transmit easily human-to-human (reu1.) Likewise in 2020, neither country had time for the proposal that COVID-19 was not spreading human-to-human.
The WHO had latched onto unsupported details concerning zoonosis and respiratory coronaviruses.
Five years before the first outbreaks in Wuhan, the WHO had proposed that zoonosis might produce a novel coronavirus which would infect a human, but not then spread human-to-human. This idea hadn't been validated anywhere, but it required some effort to show how unlikely it was. In a textbook description of zoonosis, a solitary coronavirus particle is in its replication phase (making copies of itself) inside an animal cell, when an error occurs in the RNA duplication process which makes the genome of the progeny viruses different to that of the 'parent': Purely by chance, it makes them able to infect humans. When one of the first progeny viruses gets inside a human and itself undergoes replication, it would be expected that more progeny viruses are formed which will infect more people. However, the WHO was saying that human-to-human transmission is rare with MERS-CoV, and it supported China for saying the same thing about SARS-CoV-2.
'Dead-end infection' is known with the Rabies virus (wiki), but: 1. Rabies virus is not respiratory, and 2. rabies only 'dies out' inside a host if that host dies before it manages to bite another animal while in its virally-induced phobic state.
If we could imagine a novel zoonotic coronavirus with no human-to-human transmissibility (as proposed by the WHO) in a scenario with several people who are showing symptoms of infection, the only explanation for the outbreak would be that all of those people had handled the same host animal inside which the novel virus had evolved, unless it had also spread to other host animals. (Those people were each infected by mutant virions in an animal's exhaled breath and/or saliva.) If there are so many people showing symptoms that they could not all have handled the original animal which was host to the first generation of mutant virions, then it would be required that:
1. The first generation of the novel virus could infect both humans and animals: i) The novel virus then 'gets around' by infecting animals and, ii) It occasionally transmits animal-to-human.
and/or
2. the same virus mutation has occurred inside more than one host animal at the same time, producing more than one mutant strain with the same new 'adaptation'. <<< Such an explanation is too far-fetched - There are no examples of multiple mutations having the same phenotypic effect in the real world.
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| Link for the reference: factsht |
Conventional theory states that a 'zoonotic virus' comes into existence just once: 1. Error occurs during replication phase of a solitary, animal-infecting virion. 2. Purely by chance, the genetic error gives the progeny virus the ability to infect a human. 3. When the mutant virions infect human cells and undergo their own replication, their progeny can go on to infect more humans. (Human-to-human infection will persist because every descendant of the first mutant progeny carries the novel genetic coding.) By chance, the initial replication error has given rise to a viable novel virus, therefore evolution has occurred.
While it's a very rare mutation that brings a zoonotic virus into existence, it's more likely to happen in RNA viruses because they can have much higher replication rates than do those in which DNA is the genetic material. There is, in theory, a chance that the same 'zoonotic' variant could come into existence on more than one occasion, but there's no way to prove that it has ever occurred in any type of living organism. It's important to remember that most genetic errors give rise to non-viable offspring in any kind of living organism.
N.B. The above considerations are probably made redundant by a simple fact which appeared in a 2016 review paper in the Nature journal: "Patients (with MERS) do not shed large amounts of virus until well after the onset of symptoms, when patients are most probably already seeking medical care." (Nature, see the fourth Key Point). In other words, MERS did spread human-to-human. It quickly made people feel ill, so that they went to bed or to a hospital. Only then did their bodies begin to shed progeny viruses, therefore the virus was contained inside health care settings, and it wasn't carried much from place to place.
South Korea was also not spoken of in Scotland.
The people of Scotland don't have BBC One (they don't pay TV Licence). The pandemic guidance they received from their First Minister (Nicola Sturgeon) in 2020 was advised by Prof. Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health. It's notable that Mrs Sturgeon announced that there was no purpose in following the pandemic stories of other countries: fgoog and Dec20. Also see: TheHe.
Everything suggested that Prof. Sridhar was persuaded by London MPs to keep Mrs Sturgeon from saying anything about the lockdown-free responses of S. Korea or Taiwan. Prof Sridhar had appeared more than once in Channel 4's documentary about S. Korea's pandemic response (aired in May 2020: Chan - no longer playing but see Grdc), but she didn't mention anything from that documentary when talking on the BBC many times in the mornings. BBC television was omitting all such newsworthy information throughout the long lockdown, and all other TV and radio channels were being boycotted by the London MPs: morgan and gmb.
At the end of October 2020 on BBC News, Prof. Sridhar displayed anger after Boris Johnson announced a second lockdown (31/Oct/2020). She called his decision: "this rubbish path", which was surprising because she had, for months, been cooperative with Downing Street's suppression of East Asian pandemic news. She almost never said "South Korea" in her many BBC Breakfast appearances, except once when she claimed that there was harsh treatment of the sect leader in Daegu who had told his many followers to defy social distancing. No such harsh treatment of anyone in S. Korea was shown anywhere in the Channel 4 documentary. It showed video of the sect leader being handled politely by S. Korean officials, his worst punishment being some heckling when he had an opportunity to apologize to a public audience. (More detail can be found in Part 2 under 'April'.) After her outburst against Johnson, Prof. Sridhar was replaced by Linda Bauld in the frequent Zoom talks on BBC Breakfast.
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| Above is from The Guardian article about Channel 4's documentary of 4 May 2020, which has gone, without a trace, from 4's website after more than three years' availability online. |
For future reference: S. Korea and Taiwan have a lot in common. Both play baseball, have USAF bases and educational alignment with the US. Both also suffer hostile acts from communists (expansionist people who usually oppose worship and strive to destroy ethnic culture) on their northern frontiers. Taiwan was the first to realize how bad the outbreak was in Wuhan, and to let S. Korea and some other countries know about it straight away: yah. The rest of the world was following the WHO, which began by helping China to cover things up, ignoring Taiwan's email (Fran.)
A reminder: The WHO did eventually declare an emergency on 30 January (bfpg) but, four days later, it was again discouraging travel restrictions by saying that they weren't, "evidence-based" and were causing China to face, "increasing international isolation": Reut
Recap: Prof. Devi Sridhar was Nicola Sturgeon's adviser in June 2020 when she said: "It's not helpful to compare countries' pandemic responses". At the time, South Korea had lost 277 people while Britain had lost 41,698. (Also see courier.)
The No. 10 team feigned the confidence of a war cabinet: Guarl
In the UK, facemasks weren't obtained soon enough: 200-million in storage were expired: JHchan4.
Since a facemask is not biodegradable, could some use have been made of the expired 200 million? - That's at least three for every person in the UK, and it might have been sufficient to equip a genuine trace-and-test operation for more than a week or two.
With nothing to give the man in the street as protection against breathing in the coronavirus or to act as a reminder to be careful, 23 March became the day to lock most people down. Non-essential international travel 'would stop once holiday-makers had returned home'. The Eurotunnel would stay open, and there would be no thermal screening at any border crossings.
After lockdown was imposed, Matt Hancock would monitor how well the NHS hospitals coped. It was assumed that vaccination, when it became available, would reduce infections directly, and then the lockdown could be lifted. The UK public wouldn't know that the response was primarily a vaccine waiting game: The BBC would mention "Track and Trace" (subsequently, "Test and Trace") quite often, and that would make people think that government was striving to contain the virus in the same way that democratic Asian countries had been doing.
Given that the UK pandemic response only began after the virus had been spreading across the country for at least 7 weeks, locking down was implied to be the only immediate way to stop the case numbers from soaring further. But not everyone was shielded: Care homes were given guidance that did not stop viral ingression, and the MPs didn't appear to keep their vulnerability in mind: Hospitals began to transfer patients into the homes. Between March and June, there were 28,000 "excess deaths" in care homes, two-thirds of which were confirmed to have been killed by Covid-19: nuffiel.
13 Sep 2021 on BBC Politics: It was reported that people had kept traveling abroad. There was a complaint by the Labour Party that government wasn't keeping an eye on those returning from 'Red-listed countries'. Labour said that nobody was checking that the 'Red-listed' visitors were self-isolating for the required duration when they came back. The Labour Party also said that government had not put India onto the Red list soon enough to prevent people from bringing the Delta variant to the UK.
Note: There is no evidence that Red-listing is as powerful as it might sound: It takes just one virus particle to start an outbreak. Red-listing could stigmatize poor countries while affluent countries were not challenged for hoarding vaccine: Convers.
No MPs mentioned that there was no thermal screening at airports or the Eurotunnel. Thailand and South Korea had each detected their first cases that way, and such screening was shown to be working very well at a Chinese airport in the BBC documentary, 54days. (The screening 'lit up' one man very obviously in a queue, because he had a high temperature.) It's regrettable that the two important BBC documentaries which were screened at the end of 2020 were given no time extension on BBC iPlayer.
It was decided that 'moderate' death rates in Britain would be tolerated while vaccine was being developed. Hancock was only looking to keep deaths rates 'low enough' to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed. 'Details', such as people being especially vulnerable in care homes, were not taken care of.
It's been assumed that lockdown was effective in reducing the number of people dying, but a 2022 analysis concludes there was a 0.2% benefit. Getting facemasks in January 2020, rather than near the end of March, would have helped slow the infection rate and made it possible to keep a genuine trace-and-test team operational. Chris Whitty never did actually give detail of any trace-and-test team, or the name of any person in the team. A PHE spokesperson said in April 2020 that it had a tracing team of "just under 300 staff" until Whitty "moved the UK to the Delay phase of tackling coronavirus in mid-March" (Rehis.) All Chris Whitty really said was, "the Contain phase finishes from today" on 12 March 2020.
MPs were quick to forgive the WHO for peddling the "no human-to-human transmission" story as proposed by the CCP. WHO received a bonus of £55 million from the UK in April 2020 (RT reported it, but RT was blocked online), and a £548m contribution was provided when the WHO was working with the EU to establish COVAX, a body which is directed by GAVI (founded by Bill Gates and the WHO: govcov, wikip, gav.) Nobody has calculated how many times less costly the South Korean response was, compared to the consequences of many months of British lockdown.
Channel 4 provided an account of the trace-and-test response of S. Korea one evening in May 2020: Chan (not playing now but see Grdc), but BBC Television didn't discuss such countries in any detail for another five months. Then BBC 'caught up' by airing a documentary on 19 November 2020 at 8 pm: Lock1. It confirmed observations made in the Channel 4 production.
A second BBC documentary (54days) on 26 January 2021 gave more detail, and revealed how the WHO's "diplomacy" with China (i.e. keeping quiet about the cover-up) led to late responses in most of the World's countries. The documentaries showed that baffling decisions were supported in the UK by NERVTAG, an elite group of 'Respiratory Virus' experts operating since at least June 2019 (see in BBCii.)
Boris Johnson said in June 2020 that Public Health England had been sluggish initially in providing pandemic information: Guar. However, it's since been revealed that he was confidentially advised by SAGE on the best known way control a respiratory coronavirus, but he did not follow that advice: facebk. Also watch: bbctack.
More about S. Korea
Thermal screening was in place at Incheon Airport on 19 January 2020 and an infected migrant worker from Wuhan was detected. The traveller didn't look sick, but it was announced the next day that she was carrying the novel coronavirus (csis, chan or Grdc.) Two people tested positive in the UK ten days later: bfpg.
Thermal screening was in place at Incheon Airport on 19 January 2020 and an infected migrant worker from Wuhan was detected. The traveller didn't look sick, but it was announced the next day that she was carrying the novel coronavirus (csis, chan or Grdc.) Two people tested positive in the UK ten days later: bfpg.
Before the end of February 2020, South Korea had done as follows:
i. tested tens of thousands, and isolated anyone who was test-positive (145,000 were tested by 5 March: atlan.)
ii. found and tested recent contacts of the infected,
iii. closed nursing homes when a southern outbreak (fuelled by huge gatherings of a faith group) was killing people,
iv. created hospital COVID-19 wards which had independent ventilation,
v. developed a phone app so that doctors could consult in safety with patients in those wards (chan or Grdc.)
vi. Installed more sophisticated forms of thermal screening at airports (although ear thermometers did get results.)
By 5th June 2021, the cumulative Covid-19 deaths total was still below 2000, in spite of the outbreak of the very contagious UK variant which arrived in December 2020 after travel bans had been relaxed. (See the obvious spike in the chart below, caused by the UK variant:)
i. tested tens of thousands, and isolated anyone who was test-positive (145,000 were tested by 5 March: atlan.)
ii. found and tested recent contacts of the infected,
iii. closed nursing homes when a southern outbreak (fuelled by huge gatherings of a faith group) was killing people,
iv. created hospital COVID-19 wards which had independent ventilation,
v. developed a phone app so that doctors could consult in safety with patients in those wards (chan or Grdc.)
vi. Installed more sophisticated forms of thermal screening at airports (although ear thermometers did get results.)
By 5th June 2021, the cumulative Covid-19 deaths total was still below 2000, in spite of the outbreak of the very contagious UK variant which arrived in December 2020 after travel bans had been relaxed. (See the obvious spike in the chart below, caused by the UK variant:)
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| The spike of deaths in the above graph between '23 Nov' and '20 Feb' correlates with the arrival of the UK variant in S. Korea. |
The UN's Resolution 2758 supports China in its claim that it "owns" Taiwan, which is why China allowed a medical expert from Taiwan to visit Wuhan in January 2020. The medic saw that a worrying situation was being mishandled, and he alerted South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam (people from Hong Kong and Macau were in the visiting team with him.) He also sent an email to the WHO headquarters: yah. His associates wanted to prevent the spread of this disease in their own countries but, when those countries imposed travel restriction, the WHO criticized them: "China is facing increasing international isolation due to ... bans on travellers from China": reut, guar. A 2021 article confirms that the CCP had gained an influence over the WHO beyond the simple fact that it forces WHO (by threat of a UN veto) to exclude Taiwan: times, oake.
South Korea's population density is 88% higher than Britain's, and its government had faced criticism for imperfections in its response to the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak between 2002 and 2004. This time, a response would come with clear terminology, and the approach would be based on the success had with 'trace-and-test' methodology in hospitals in the 2015 response to MERS-CoV. Trace-and-test became the key component in a system of "detection and surveillance".
Access to personal data was by no means an indispensable part of the S. Korean response, e.g. The outbreak in Daegu was brought under control with minimal tracing of contacts because the task force was kept busy by the size of the outbreak.
Governments in the West were looking uncritically to the WHO for guidance, not considering the fact that it had been ignoring 'capitalist' South Korea's achievements.
There was persistence of a hope that the virus couldn't spread far in the UK or be very deadly, a hope that had been cultivated by the WHO's January tweet (See Part 2 below, under 'March'.)
South Korea was ultimately in need of a vaccine as much as any other country was, but there was no point in trying to duplicate the work of well-established vaccine producers in other countries. (SARS-CoV-1 in 2002, and MERS-CoV in 2015, had been survived without vaccine.) In 2021, there was a good supply of imported vaccine, and the bullet had been dodged: S. Korea had gone after the virus with a clear strategy while it waited for a vaccine, and there was no general lockdown either (abcnews.)
There was persistence of a hope that the virus couldn't spread far in the UK or be very deadly, a hope that had been cultivated by the WHO's January tweet (See Part 2 below, under 'March'.)
South Korea was ultimately in need of a vaccine as much as any other country was, but there was no point in trying to duplicate the work of well-established vaccine producers in other countries. (SARS-CoV-1 in 2002, and MERS-CoV in 2015, had been survived without vaccine.) In 2021, there was a good supply of imported vaccine, and the bullet had been dodged: S. Korea had gone after the virus with a clear strategy while it waited for a vaccine, and there was no general lockdown either (abcnews.)
While not duplicating vaccine development, the Koreans did invent an 'antibody treatment' which contains a monoclonal antibody found to help the infected: alar, inqu. Such treatments were soon being used widely in the USA. Commercial profiteering was consciously avoided in S. Korea's pandemic response: kher1.
SK vs. the UK
In June 2021, cumulative deaths in S. Korea and the UK were 2,000 and 129,000 respectively. Later in 2021, daily deaths in the UK still rose frequently above 100 (a trend which continued into 2022.)
Western leaders showed confidence in the WHO, while S. Korea had not been in the habit of relying on WHO communication. S. Korea has a strong motivation to be self-sufficient in health matters, and has not let itself imagine that the WHO sees itself accountable for any country's wellbeing. In contrast, Westerners acted as though the WHO was entirely reliable in 2020, regardless of frequent reports to the contrary. After it was established that the WHO had made it easy for China to run a pandemic cover-up, the UK continued to send close to half-a-billion USD biannually, plus 'bonuses' and a special "£548-million for COVAX" (see above under 'Much of the WHO's extra funding'.) Interestingly, the UK dropped its contribution to $396-million in 2022/23, when Joe Biden had raised the US contribution to $1,284-million (85% higher than the amount it gave in 2020/21, which was already a 53% increase on the 2018/19 contribution. In 2018/19, the UK was a bigger donor than the US was. It's not known what Biden had been sending when Donald Trump withdrew US support again in 2025: Berke.)
There was a tendency in the UK to 'go easy' on China after some years of big collaborations, e.g. the completion of the DP World London Gateway in 2017. (BBC 'Coast' mentioned that its cranes were built in China.) Also see Oake, which reveals an ongoing suppression of anyone's criticism of China and its relationship with the WHO.
When SARS-CoV-2 reached the UK in January 2020, S. Korea's history of fighting coronaviruses was little known (although a BBC Newsnight episode had, some years previously, shown how well prepared they were for future epidemics after MERS-CoV.)
While UK government and scientists didn't put WHO guidance under any scrutiny, they also didn't seem to consider the possibility that any non-communist Asians might have helpful advice and expertise. (The Jeremy Hunt video from July 2022 makes it obvious what had happened: video)
There was manipulation of what the British public would perceive. 'NHS Test and Trace' was not what it seemed to be.
Control of public thinking was improved by making BBC One the only televised source of government guidance during the lockdowns. Brits at home on furlough watched BBC One for the official daily updates, and nobody else could talk to the MPs. The MPs were obviously following two instructions:
(1) Do not talk on any TV channel but the BBC: see morgan, gmb. Piers Morgan didn't seem to realize what the media boycott was really all about:
(2) Never say, "South Korea" and don't get into any dialogue about that country's type of pandemic response. (Even now, we've never heard members of Johnson's cabinet talk about, "South Korea" or "Taiwan".)
It had become obvious by May 2020 that the BBC television channels were giving the S. Korean response no attention, in spite of the fact that a few British (and several American) journalists were praising it as something exceptionally good, e.g. Grdc and Atlantic. Nobody on BBC family-time TV discussed the trace-and-test strategy, but one regular guest did falsely accuse S. Korea of mistreating its people: Devi Sridhar, Head of Global PH in Edinburgh, was given a role as commentator in the Channel 4 documentary of May 2020 (now discontinued, but reviewed at Grdc), but she never mentioned its content when she was asked for commentary on BBC Breakfast (several times per week). Then, she seemed to want to take things a step further by choosing S. Korea as her example of a place where lockdown brutalities had occurred. She didn't mention China or Africa, rather saying that there had been mistreatment of the faith leader in Daegu who had urged his hundreds of devotees to defy social distancing (Teleg.)
All guests on BBC Breakfast had likely been added to WhatsApp groups, where they could receive instruction to avoid mentioning Taiwan, S. Korea and any other of the East Asian states who had the same containment approach: See 'April' below in Part 2.
2. The majority of the WHO's member states, not equipping themselves to contain the virus, rather imposing big lockdowns when case numbers began to climb significantly (while waiting nine months for vaccine to be available.)
Once people were settled at home in lockdown in the UK, "Track and Trace" was mentioned quite often on BBC television (later called, "Test and Trace"), to give the impression that Korean-style containment was in progress. However, there was no Korean-style pursuit of people to get them tested if they'd probably had contact with known cases.
Once people were settled at home in lockdown in the UK, "Track and Trace" was mentioned quite often on BBC television (later called, "Test and Trace"), to give the impression that Korean-style containment was in progress. However, there was no Korean-style pursuit of people to get them tested if they'd probably had contact with known cases.
People were being monitored by 'NHS Test and Trace' after it was launched on 28 May, but they were put under no serious pressure to get themselves tested. Those who'd scanned their pandemic phone app at the same pub, café or restaurant that an infected person had visited, would simply receive an alert by text message. They couldn't enter that venue again unless they took proof that they'd had a PCR test and shown negative for COVID-19, but they could still visit supermarkets and ride buses if they chose to.
Note: Big retail and transport services* weren't included in the NHS' surveillance program: Nobody scanned the NHS app in supermarkets, buses or trains because those were given no role in the gathering of data. It was absurd, because more people visit supermarkets than go to pubs, cafés or restaurants. Visiting a centre for PCR testing involved a significant car trip for most people, one person per car, so it's almost certain that very few of those traced bothered to get a PCR test done.
*It was reported that many bus drivers caught the virus: Longov, BBCb.
There was no sign that our PM was alarmed when SARS-CoV-2 was detected in England on 29 January 2020 (BFPG, Grdc.) He bragged on 3 March that he'd been "shaking hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know" at a hospital where "there were actually a few coronavirus patients!" (Gurdh, Ledby, Chan.) The academics which he'd favoured didn't discuss the fact that the S. Koreans had adapted a NAT (nucleic acid test) for making swift detection of coronavirus possible. (It took S. Koreans just one day to confirm their first case after she was noticed in thermal screening at Incheon Airport.) The UK modelers had thought that they were facing a novel flu virus: sky.
No Korean-style trace-and-test was done in the UK after 12 March 2020. (PHE said that it had a temporary tracing team of "just under 300 staff": REHIS.)
"The oronavirus" was spreading quickly across the UK in January 2020, while S. Korea was slowing its spread sufficiently to keep life quite normal: bloom. Having sufficient facemasks and a highly-motivated Trace, Test and Treat organization, including heightened border control, the Koreans didn't plan to have big lockdowns that would hurt their economy and make them look vulnerable in North Korean eyes.
The UK relies on goods moving to and from France through the Eurotunnel, so it was kept open in spite of the pandemic. It seems pertinent that more than 133,000 British and 115,000 French died in little more than a year. In 2021, both continued to lose a lot of people daily in spite of vaccination.
Vaccination began on 8 December 2020 in the UK (Govuk.)
Months went by, and the deaths count showed that vaccination was not a quick fix.
For example, Western Bridgford Wire reported 168 deaths in the week up to 21 Apr 2021 (see wbridg.) However, the same newspaper reported 1,636 deaths in the week up to 21 Apr 2022 (see wbridg2.) That was a ten-fold increase in spite of 16 months' provision of vaccine. There was never stability in the number of deaths after vaccination was provided: It can be seen that mortality had climbed ten-fold at least once between April 2021 and April 2022 but, for all we know, the rise and fall might have been greater at times.
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In the month of September 2021 alone, the UK saw daily losses which would amount to 61,000 deaths in a year. (S. Korea had lost 6000 people in the first two years, during which it had resumed some international travel and responded to the 'UK variant'.)
MPs complained that there was "no instruction book" to help them: None of them admitted openly that S. Korea had shown expertise in slowing the spread of the previous respiratory coronavirus, MERS. The UK public was never included in the discussion: There was at least at least one English expert who happened to be a specialist in respiratory virus outbreaks, and he said he was never contacted by government. (He was interviewed in Lock1, which was not given any extra playing time on BBC iPlayer.)
All response decisions in the UK were being made by a few men at the top, no women, while S. Korea had women in key positions. (Two of them spoke several times to Channel 4's documentary team, and both were well-versed and confident in the subject matter. Grdc.)
If it was vital to the UK that the Eurotunnel wasn't closed, then could we have combined with France to run a response like that of Taiwan and S. Korea, i.e. closing the border to the rest of Europe, doing sufficient trace-and-test work, and isolating all who tested positive? (We worked with the French to build Concorde in the 1960s.) Instead, we were told by Chris Whitty on 12 Mar 2020 (youtube at 13:10 mins) that "the Contain phase finishes from today". Containment of the disease by means of trace-and-test was to be replaced, in "the Delay phase", by a "simple" (quoting Boris Johnson) locking down of Britain on 23 March, and the Eurotunnel border was kept open.
Transparency was seen to be lacking
There was a constant sense during lockdown that there were important matters which were not disclosed, and that people had simply to accept what was fed them (or hidden from them) on BBC television. Essential workers, not getting a farthing of furlough (and still being taxed), were mostly too busy at their jobs to study the pandemic content on BBC Breakfast every day. The only time public opinion could be heard was when it was realized that MPs hadn't been observing the social restrictions they had imposed on everyone.
Deficiencies in government transparency were soon written about in 2020: Guar. There was lack of clarity surrounding, "Test and Trace", which was often mentioned without saying who was doing such work, i.e. finding infected people and putting them into isolation, Chris Whitty had said, without any real explanation: "the contain phase ... finishes from today" on 12 March 2020, but he didn't offer any data to tell us how many infected people had been put into isolation. By comparison, Germany openly shared its trace-and-test record: bzfeed.
Our Prime Minister was striving to make us think that our pandemic response was, "World-beating". Media-control was designed to keep the people calm and compliant. (The CCP had also urged people to be "calm" while it erased the true information being placed on-line: Lock1.)
The following paper asks fundamental questions that were not raised on BBC television: Teleg. (If similar questions were raised in two BBC documentaries after lockdown was over, the documentaries weren't given any extra time on BBC iPlayer. They were aired after 8 PM on weekdays, and only a small percentage of the populace saw them.)
"But what Cygnet, like Cygnus, did not do is consider how a pandemic virus might be stopped, as happened in so much of south east Asia. Of all the mysteries surrounding Exercise Cygnus, this remains the biggest unanswered question. Why did the simulation not try to slow the spread of the virus in week four when the tools existed to do so?"
Politicians who make decisions with one eye on the effect they will have on votes excluded the containment option because of its negative association with breaches of data privacy. They never considered that we only have vaccines at all because Edward Jenner tested his ideas on his own children: He didn't put public opinion first.
Private data, mostly locational, was accessed to assist in the tracking down of coronavirus contacts in South Korea. Such tracking of people by surveillance of their mobile phones and bank card transactions was frowned upon in many countries. However, S. Korea also used interviews and CCTV to obtain information that would help find where the virus was taken by an infected person (and the Korean people knew that the privacy invasion would not include internet or email snooping: It was simply a matter of looking at data which internet and banking service providers have access to.) S. Korea's success was not heavily dependent on contact tracing, which was suspended for a while during the response to the big Daegu outbreak in February (chan - video now terminated, see Grdc; bbcDu)
While the British public was assumed to be averse to having their daily phone locations under surveillance, we could have had contact tracers trying other methods, e.g. doing interviews and checking CCTV. We could also have simply asked infected people, individually, if they minded that their 'data' be observed for the greater good. Instead, we had nothing after 12 March until 28 May, when NHS Test and Trace began monitoring which people went into pubs, cafés and restaurants. The value of that was very limited (surveillance at supermarkets would have provided knowledge of a much bigger cross-section of society.) Even if the NHS' system could tell someone that they might have caught the disease in a pub (because of a known case having gone there too at about the same time), there was no way to make that someone get in a car and drive to a test centre. Now (September 2021), we regularly lose more than 100 people in a day because of our lack of a good containment system. (Public attitude to safety measures was slipping on 3 Sep 2021: On BBC One's 'Morning Live', people on the street were speaking well of those who had gone back to shaking hands at job interviews and getting physical with friends.)
Politicians took things lightly before 12 March, and the scientists had an ivory tower quality
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| It was at a hospital on 3/Mar/2020 that he did this. He did it again on 6 March: Ledby |
Of note: Having gambled with spreading infection by pushing handshakes onto groups of people on at least two occasions in March 2020, Mr Johnson pointed the finger at "vaccine refuseniks" less than a year later: "they endanger not just themselves but the rest of us."
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The PM skipped five COBR meetings, and it had not impressed him that some non-communist Asian states had brought the spread of the novel virus under control within weeks. He and Health Minister Matt Hancock only planned to lock the UK down at some point, watch the hospital statistics, and wait for a vaccine to be developed, govuk. (It was 8.5 months after locking down that the first vaccine was issued.)
Perhaps dominated by Johnson, Matt Hancock followed the paths of least resistance. If he was jotting ideas down in a notebook, it might have read as follows:
'Wait and see if it comes to anything' (Johnson had said, "It will probably go away": ITVhan),
'Ignore the South Koreans and Taiwanese, and keep their news off the BBC. Boycott all other channels so that the herd only watches the BBC.' (boyc)
'It's simple. Just tell everyone to go home and lock down',
'Forget that the WHO backed China's proposal that only animals could transmit the virus. Forget that the WHO delayed warnings so that China had time to do its cover-up, so that there might be fewer countries using travel restrictions. Just send the WHO a bonus so that it seems that we're working in tandem with 'World experts'.'
'Speak as though we're doing lots of "Tracking and Tracing", when all we're really doing is waiting for a vaccine',
'Let's have no thermal screening at airports, because we don't want people asking why there isn't any at the Eurotunnel, which is as busy as ever. Rather just say that thermal screening isn't much good. - Get a NERVTAG scientist to back you on that.' N.B. Evidence that these were the decisions is presented further below, and references are provided. Note: Regardless of the NERVTAG opinion, thermal screening was made compulsory by the NHS at all test-processing facilities in 2021/22. (Staff would always enter at the front door even if they worked at the back, because the thermal screening was at the front.) It was the same at hospitals.
Question: "Do you really think Britain would tolerate the Draconian measures that South Korea used?" Answer: S. Koreans were right to think that lockdowns are oppressive, typical of the CCP. It's what drove them to work much harder at slowing the spread of SARS-CoV-2, and thus to protect their economy from impacts we have yet to fully appreciate. Anyway, are phone and bank card locational data 'private' in a strictly legal sense? How often is such data studied in crime detection: Should police never be able to see where criminal suspects have been if it means accessing such data?
23 May 2021: Dominic Cummings told us what working with Mr Johnson was like at the beginning of 2020 (Teleg), but there are important questions that he didn't draw attention to.
1. Mr Cummings said that our national border should have been closed immediately, "as in Taiwan" but he didn't mention the Eurotunnel and what its closure would have done to life in the UK. (The Eurotunnel was closed briefly just once, by the French when they feared ingression of the UK variant in December 2020: TheStan) 2. Why, like all of the people Cummings talks about, does he still never mention South Korea, a country which is comparable with the UK in size and demography? It's practically an island with its northern border sealed against North Korean aggression.
3. Until now, we never heard Mr Cummings complain about the care homes being wide open to the virus when everybody else had been sent to the safety of their own homes (bbc.)
The CCP had pushed an idea it saw in the WHO's description of MERS since 2012, i.e. that a novel respiratory coronavirus might 'not transmit human-to-human'. Chinese doctors were silenced, hospital data was seized and obstructed. Diagnostic criteria were imposed so that many obvious cases were not recorded: Exp. (Also see Guar and ccpglob.)
"they're only getting it from animals" was an idea which the CCP learned from the WHO, which had been describing MERS that way since 2012.* Denmark soon killed millions of small mammals when a handful of infected mink shed operatives could easily have caught COVID-19 from outside the workplace (or from a colleague in their break-room.) The cull had no legal justification: Guam.
For eight years, WHO had favoured the 'animal-to-human transmission' interpretation of MERS outbreaks, saying that reports which confirmed human-to-human transmission only applied to a minority of new cases inside hospitals "where there is a close contact". (Use Ctrl+F to see [The cover-up] and [It was likely] above.)
WHO ignored the 2016 review paper in Nature which explained why MERS did not spread rapidly: In most cases, MERS-CoV is shed from an infected person after the symptoms are full-blown and the person has already taken to a sickbed, usually in a hospital: nature.com/articles/nrmicro.2016.81.
*Regardless of what the WHO has on its website, the emergence of a novel 'zoonotic' virus is a very rare event. What can occur much more frequently is the evolution of an existing zoonotic virus to a slightly different version of itself. Also, never made clear by the WHO: When zoonosis happens, at least one human is infected by mutant progeny virus of an animal-infecting virus (after those progeny are shed from the host animal.) When such mutant progeny go through their own replication in a human host, their progeny virions are shed, and other humans will likely become infected. If circumstances favour the survival of this novel zoonotic strain, more and more people will be infected by an exploding number of mutant virions. Therefore, it's not expected that the novel virus will show no human-to-human transmissibility. That would be unusual.
It wasn't natural to imagine that such a rare evolutionary event would happen in China and Denmark at the same time. It was also not natural to anticipate that the first progeny virions from the mutational replication would be able to infect humans, but that their own progeny would 'not transmit human-to-human'.
👿 'It's not contagious.' 👿 'Don't close borders.'
When Wuhan had the first outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 at the end of 2019, the CCP demanded that people "be calm" while it took steps to stop "the spread of rumours": This was shown in the BBC documentary, 54 days (no longer playing.)
By mid-January 2020, the WHO had posted some technical-sounding jargon on the internet. China's, "Only those who have contact with animals can catch it", was followed by the WHO's, "authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission": tweet.
Accurate news of the outbreak was placed online by citizens of China, but it was deleted by the CCP whose communications encouraged an irrational phobia: 'Animals are the source of each infection!'. Wuhan's hospitals were already overcrowded, but the CCP was insisting that each patient had caught pneumonia in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
When the CPP did concede that nucleic acid testing for a coronavirus should be done, it imposed diagnostic criteria which ensured that a significant section of cases would not be recorded: exp. 
Of similar impact, the WHO's Director-General criticized countries who closed borders and were, "causing China to become economically isolated": Reu.
Months later, it suited the CCP when Denmark began to destroy millions of mink. By doing so, Denmark was also suggesting that this was primarily an animal-borne disease, 'therefore CCP decisions at the start had been understandable'. Before long, the CCP was visiting people to destroy their small pets.
Can the WHO really be relied upon when it didn't query that hasty slaughter of millions of mink? Did WHO really deserve a £55-million bonus from the UK in April 2020?
Can the WHO really be relied upon when it didn't query that hasty slaughter of millions of mink? Did WHO really deserve a £55-million bonus from the UK in April 2020?
The mink cull had no legal justification: Guam.
One man took steps to help the outside world
Zhang Yongzhen did something very brave in January 2020 to help outside countries (wikip.) He defied the CCP by revealing the RNA sequence of SARS-CoV-2 through a website: virological. His lab in Shanghai was shut by government the next day "for rectification".
Also in January, Dr Michael J. Ryan at the WHO was secretly filmed entreating his colleagues, at times passionately, that the World should be better informed of an imminent need for structured emergency response. However, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove says in the same BBC documentary ('54 Days') that "the diplomacy that we use" was what the WHO needed to be careful about: They chose to, "work with China behind the scenes" without challenging its repression of important information. (Unfortunately, the documentary was given only the normal life-span in BBC iPlayer.) "We work with everyone, everywhere", said Van Kerkhove, forgetting that they'd ignored communications from Taiwan at the start (bbct), and continued for months to leave out news of its Containment response (JFMA.)
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| From bbct - Mr Aylward is the assistant WHO Director-general. |
💧 Taiwan had very few deaths in 2020/21. 💧 'Containment' was ended in March 2022 and the deaths rate began to increase very rapidly.
"Overall, 823 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including a total of nine deaths, were reported to Taiwan CDC in 2020": NLMtai. After keeping case numbers down so well for so long, Taiwan's 'Timeline COVID-19' chart (below) shows that the country's cumulative number of cases began to increase at an extraordinary rate in April 2022: The figure climbed from 24,033 cases by 2 April 2022, to 115,883 by 30 April, and then more than ten-million new cases were found between 30 April 2022 and the end of March 2023. The totals daily were still higher in March 2023 than they ever were before April 2022: MinHW (the chart is pasted below. The green area represents the massive increase in cases.)
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| From Taiwan's 'Crucial Policies for Combatting COVID-19'. Visit the interactive chart at MinHW (scroll to make it load completely.) |
A 2024 paper by Chen and Fang explains why Taiwan decided to end its containment of SARS-CoV-2 in March 2022: JFMA. Most people had been vaccinated, and there was a desire to "open borders and align with the West" again. Russia had invaded the Ukraine, reminding Taiwan of its vulnerability to China. It's obvious that the ending of the containment process in March 2022 provided the conditions for the explosive surge in cases which was noticed in the next month, represented by the green area in the chart above. (Also use Ctrl+F for 'Most of South Korea's'.)
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The WHO did publish helpful material in January 2020, but its infamous "no clear evidence" tweet had the bigger impact. The tweet encouraged governments to stand down (relax) at a time when the spread of the virus would have been much easier to contain (if they had known to copy South Korea, something which the WHO did not suggest.)
The rejection of thermal screening
In the UK, NERVTAG backed the WHO's narrative by supporting the decision that there would be no thermal screening at UK airports. Thermal screening was said to be 'probably unreliable because people are asymptomatic for the first five days after infection': Lshtm, bbc.
From a Daily Mail article on 6 January 2021: "Minutes of the group's first meeting (i.e. of NERVTAG) on Covid-19 revealed the group was 'fully aware' that the case in Thailand (i.e. the first case outside of China, detected on 14/01/2020) was detected by a thermal image scan. But they concluded that port of entry screening was 'not advised'."
The 54 Days documentary showed thermal imaging instruments being very effective in China, making the elevated temperature of one man in a busy queue very noticeable. S. Korea also detected its first case with airport thermal screening. Having arrived on a short flight from China, she was their first sign of a 'pandemic' risk.
Quarantine for arrivals at British airports only began on 8th June 2020 (bbc), and fifty countries were taken off the quarantine list only a month later: bbc50. UK Government was still filibustering about closing the border in 2021: busin, bbc. "Up to 20,000 per day" were arriving at our airports on 10 Feb 2021, huf21. 
Matt Hancock has tried to deny that he said there would be a "protective ring" around care homes: Indep. 
Investing in thermal screening at airports was weighed against the fact that people might be carrying the virus for some time before their body temperatures were noticeably affected by infection. (Even raging symptoms aren't a always a sign that a person might be spreading infection: A 2016 Nature review reported that a person can be infected with the MERS respiratory coronavirus, but not shedding any progeny virus until after harsh symptoms have become established: Nature, 4th Key Point.)
The Eurotunnel was kept open with no screening in place: Holding back a lorry driver if he had an elevated body temperature would be disruptive (and where would the lorry be kept if the driver was put into isolation?) The border in the Eurotunnel was closed by the French in December 2020 when the UK variant frightened them, but Boris Johnson made it clear that they should open it again for good relations to be maintained: reut, gov.
Even if thermal screening could detect 80% of sick lorry drivers, the other 20% would drive on and spread infection where they got food and refreshment. 'Therefore, if the Eurotunnel was to be kept open, the coronavirus would keep getting into Britain, with or without thermal screening.' (Some scientists claimed that screening only detected 9% of infected people: Lshtm.)
MPs and their consultant scientists never mentioned the Eurotunnel in any TV appearances. On BBC Two in December 2020, NERVTAG only spoke about the decision to have no screening at airports, and there was no mention of the Eurotunnel at all (Lock1.) In an indirect way, a desire to keep the Eurotunnel out of the news would suggest a hidden motive for not having thermal screening at airports: If the screening had been allowed at airports, somebody might have asked: "Why not at the Eurotunnel?" - MPs didn't want to be openly inconsistent, and they didn't want the Eurotunnel decision to become noticeable in the public arena, so the airports didn't get any screening either.
It might be argued that the number of inbound flights was being reduced anyway, so why even bother with airport thermal screening? - Answer: Flights were never stopped altogether, and many people who were coming back from skiing holidays brought coronavirus: 03/2020 and 12/2020. The risk that people could be bringing virus into GB was still high in the second year of the pandemic: 02/2021.
The BBC said that there continued to be three direct flights from Wuhan every week: Lok1.
The NHS obviously held a different opinion from that of NERVTAG (see Daily): It made thermal screening compulsory at Covid test processing facilities (personal exp.), and NHS hospitals later followed suit: DigiH. (Heat sensors were used non-stop at some private companies who continued to function during the lockdowns. That screening surely provided some comfort to workers in times which were said to challenge mental health: Those who never triggered a heat sensor, during a year or more of daily thermal screening at work, could at least assume that they probably had not been infected during that time.)
While the UK public wasn't being told anything that it didn't 'need to know', NERVTAG knew well that the Eurotunnel was staying open (and also that the UK's "track and trace" had been "finished" by Chris Whitty on 12th March 2020.) On BBC Two one evening, a NERVTAG scientist said that, in hindsight, thermal screening at airports would have achieved very little. He didn't mention that it would have been worthwhile to have travel better restricted in January, or to have a serious trace-and-test program straight away (not a team of "just under 300 staff" for a week or two: Rehis. There's been no concrete evidence that 'the team' ever existed, only the word of one PHE employee.)
N.B. If South Korea had not been using thermal screening at airports, it might have been quite a while before anyone had certifiable evidence that the virus was moving country to country. The Korean TTT strategy might not have been deployed as promptly if that woman with a raised body temperature had not been detected on 19/01/2020. The WHO announced in May 2020 that infected people don't always show COVID-19 symptoms, but this was very old news: When South Korea's first case was identified four months earlier, it was observed straight away that she didn't seem unwell (in spite of being detected with thermal screening.) It was only the next day at a hospital that she was seen to have walking pneumonia, and to be positive for SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, it's fair to say that raised body temperature is a symptom of coronavirus infection which might be detectable when other signs are not obvious and the patient might be called 'asymptomatic'.
26/Aug/2021: Anyone entering certain NHS facilities these days must enter by the front door (even if they work at the back) because that's where the thermal screening is done. In contrast, our airports still have no thermal screening.
Elevated body temperature is, obviously, not always an indicator of COVID-19. No virus is likely to cause symptoms for at least a few hours after gaining access to the human body. But looking more closely at people with elevated temperature was worthwhile, because cases were found which had presented as otherwise 'asymptomatic' to the naked eye. There was readiness among Western authorities to dismiss thermal screening outright, but there is no other technique which quickly finds infected people, on-the-spot, in a public setting.
With the WHO not saying anything about South Korea, and the MPs keeping all that good news off BBC TV, academics tended to ignore the value of thermal screening used at Incheon Airport (Flir.) The MPs were eager to have no screening, because the detection of lorry drivers with raised body temperatures would slow down traffic at the Eurotunnel port (and there were already traffic delayss arising from Brexit rigmarole.) During eighteen months or more, there must have been many infected people entering the UK who would have been intercepted if there had been thermal screening. There are people who might be alive now if they hadn't become infected by progeny of the virus that was brought in by those inbound cases.
With the WHO not saying anything about South Korea, and the MPs keeping all that good news off BBC TV, academics tended to ignore the value of thermal screening used at Incheon Airport (Flir.) The MPs were eager to have no screening, because the detection of lorry drivers with raised body temperatures would slow down traffic at the Eurotunnel port (and there were already traffic delayss arising from Brexit rigmarole.) During eighteen months or more, there must have been many infected people entering the UK who would have been intercepted if there had been thermal screening. There are people who might be alive now if they hadn't become infected by progeny of the virus that was brought in by those inbound cases.
Anecdote: The average human body has 37 trillion cells. "Let's remember that when an individual is infected with the virus, that individual can make up to a billion, even a trillion copies of the virus."
Another article: bbchealth, quotes the WHO mentioning a difficulty with standardization of thermal screening, i.e. getting different people to use the instruments with the same efficacy. The WHO gave thermal screening a thumbs-down, forgetting the praise it directed at S. Korea initially (yaho) after thermal screening had provided the second proof that the virus had crossed an international border. (Thailand found the first case in the same way, at an airport.)
The BBC Health article (above) also quotes a scientist who said that there were "other, more suitable tools" for on-the-spot detection of infected people in public places: "They (the heat sensors) are… only one tool among many," says James Ferryman, professor of computational vision, from the University of Reading. However, none of the "many" other "tools" is named or described by him. In truth, thermal screening is the only tool for spotting people in a public place who might deserve closer attention when looking for signs of infection, just as a sniffer dog can suggest which suitcases to open when looking for drugs.
Koreans knew that infection with a coronavirus doesn't always cause symptoms that are easily seen by the naked eye, and that's exactly why they strove to test all contacts of any people who were confirmed infected. Their approach was to make big efforts to find and isolate the virus in any way possible: Thermal screening helped because it did get results, even if it didn't get all of the results.
In the UK, government did not 'pursue' the virus in the same way. Lockdown was the preferred form of prevention, on the assumption that vaccination would soon become available, and it would quickly slow the rate of infection.
For many months, we didn't realize that Hancock's pandemic plan had actually been so simple: We'd lock down and wait for a vaccine to be developed. Coronavirus was still coming through our ports of entry and, with no measures in place at the Eurotunnel, we were obliged to lock down in a big way, to keep away from that ingression of virus. It would be 9 months before vaccine could be issued, and it was purely speculation that a vaccine would work well against a respiratory coronavirus.
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| Bill Gates had been schooling Matt since at least January 2019, training him to assume that vaccine provision was the only way to do "infection control". |
With Downing Street being reluctant to restrict border crossings, and refusing to screen for signs of infection, it was even more unlikely that our 'NHS Test and Trace', launched at the end of May, would identify and contain cases quickly enough to make the UK any safer. (In fact, the NHS did not have powers to contain anybody in physical terms. NHS couldn't force anybody to travel to a COVID-19 testing centre after informing them that they'd probably had contact with a virus in a café, pub or restaurant, i.e. the only places that it monitored.)
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| 3 Feb 2021 |
Testing of inward-bound Eurotunnel drivers was announced for the first time on 28 March 2021, to begin on 6 April 2021, for any drivers who visited the UK for longer than 48 hours. The decision to do this was a very late admission that it was never ideal to keep the tunnel free of any measures: Eurotun.
Thermal screening was not rejected in those Asian countries who'd quickly applied border controls. Even if airport screening only detected of 50% of cases (for example), that would still be helpful. The screening, of course, was accessory to trace-and-test activity, which would be continually putting COVID-19 cases where they wouldn't infect other people, "nipping it in the bud", 54 days.
S. Koreans had realized in 2015 that using an RNA test to confirm the presence of a coronavirus was an innovation with great potential. Their pandemic strategy was not concealed from the public: Anyone could contribute, e.g. the teenager who created a website where people could see if they had been recently near a confirmed carrier of coronavirus (Chan or Grdc.) Furthermore, keeping commerce and industry safe was high on their list of priorities. It wasn't a crisis if one or two infected people did get past airport heat screening, because the trace-and-test operation would be constant, running every week, every month. (N.B. Things did get worse for S. Korea in December 2020 when people were allowed to return from overseas visits. An airport arrival who was carrying the UK variant was not detected in the thermal screening, and the all-time Covid-19 deaths total was soon doubled.)
S. Koreans had realized in 2015 that using an RNA test to confirm the presence of a coronavirus was an innovation with great potential. Their pandemic strategy was not concealed from the public: Anyone could contribute, e.g. the teenager who created a website where people could see if they had been recently near a confirmed carrier of coronavirus (Chan or Grdc.) Furthermore, keeping commerce and industry safe was high on their list of priorities. It wasn't a crisis if one or two infected people did get past airport heat screening, because the trace-and-test operation would be constant, running every week, every month. (N.B. Things did get worse for S. Korea in December 2020 when people were allowed to return from overseas visits. An airport arrival who was carrying the UK variant was not detected in the thermal screening, and the all-time Covid-19 deaths total was soon doubled.)
More about the control of information
Control of the UK media was key to setting up what the public would see as 'the big picture'. It was preferred that most people didn't get news from the BBC about S. Korea and Taiwan, and didn't realize that the Eurotunnel was being kept open, or that there was no thermal screening at the country's ports of entry.
Control of the UK media was key to setting up what the public would see as 'the big picture'. It was preferred that most people didn't get news from the BBC about S. Korea and Taiwan, and didn't realize that the Eurotunnel was being kept open, or that there was no thermal screening at the country's ports of entry.
The PM expressed no enthusiasm for virus containment through trace-and-test procedure, preferring the "simplicity" of lockdown (also see: PMsaid.) 
(Trace-and-test would have been undermined 'anyway' if the virus it removed from circulation was being replaced by lorry drivers coming in through the Eurotunnel.)
The public was not rewarded for interacting with the "NHS Test and Trace" call centres, and almost no calls were received. It was said that the service wasn't well integrated: guar. (In contrast, that teenager's inexpensive website in South Korea had been helping people to avoid locales of infection, months before our "World-beating app" did tracing at pubs, cafés and restaurants, nowhere else.)
Hancock needed containment of information, because there might have been outrage if the simplicity of the real plan became obvious. He decided to control the BBC so that its viewers (i.e. all of the families in lockdown) wouldn't start thinking about ingression of virus through the Eurotunnel, or about the success of trace-and-test in South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and others. WhatsApp grouping became useful in maintaining control of what information would be mentioned by guests on BBC Breakfast (also see Part 2 below.)
Family-time BBC television was keeping any mention of S. Korea's trace-and-test to a minimum between March and November 2020. In contrast, "Test and Trace" was said a lot to give the impression that government was continually finding and isolating infected people and their contacts. In reality, our test stations served to gather data about viral spread, and to help people know if they should go into self-isolation, but our 'tracing' system was not making people get tested if it detected that they might have been near a source of infection inside a pub, café or restaurant (supermarkets and buses were not monitored for COVID-19 carriers. See above under, 'Public spending...'.)
The public was not rewarded for interacting with the "NHS Test and Trace" call centres, and almost no calls were received. It was said that the service wasn't well integrated: guar. (In contrast, that teenager's inexpensive website in South Korea had been helping people to avoid locales of infection, months before our "World-beating app" did tracing at pubs, cafés and restaurants, nowhere else.)
Hancock needed containment of information, because there might have been outrage if the simplicity of the real plan became obvious. He decided to control the BBC so that its viewers (i.e. all of the families in lockdown) wouldn't start thinking about ingression of virus through the Eurotunnel, or about the success of trace-and-test in South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and others. WhatsApp grouping became useful in maintaining control of what information would be mentioned by guests on BBC Breakfast (also see Part 2 below.)
Family-time BBC television was keeping any mention of S. Korea's trace-and-test to a minimum between March and November 2020. In contrast, "Test and Trace" was said a lot to give the impression that government was continually finding and isolating infected people and their contacts. In reality, our test stations served to gather data about viral spread, and to help people know if they should go into self-isolation, but our 'tracing' system was not making people get tested if it detected that they might have been near a source of infection inside a pub, café or restaurant (supermarkets and buses were not monitored for COVID-19 carriers. See above under, 'Public spending...'.)
It's assumed that Lockdown brought our R-value down but, judging from the figures by December 2020, it took very much longer to do so than the S. Korean strategy did, and lockdowns caused an untold number of businesses to fail. Trace-and-test teams had mobility in S. Korea, where they pursued people if there was any chance that they were infected. They literally followed the virus around, rather than trying, foremost, to set up big PCR test-processing centres in all parts of the country.
Matt Hancock said in February 2020 that the safety of elderly people was going to be a priority. (The PM was in hospital, assuming that Hancock would take care of things?) In reality, COVID-19 cases were being moved from hospital beds to care homes. It was still happening in May 2021: Mirro.
At first, there were few reports that criticized government specifically for failing to help care homes keep the virus out: ind, bbc, itv, stan, see point 3 below.
Conclusions
1. Hearing the WHO echo China's story that the virus was only being transmitted "directly" from animals to people (in a seafood market), and assuming that there was nothing much to learn from non-communist Asians*, our PM said on 03/03/2020 at PHE: "It's not, you know, the most serious infection you can get". If the virus did turn out to be deadly in the UK, there would simply be a lockdown while waiting for vaccine.
2. All efforts to copy S. Korea by doing trace-and-test were "finished" in the UK on 12 March, eleven days before the lockdown. Matt Hancock knew that coronavirus would keep coming through the Eurotunnel, but "Eurotunnel" was never said on TV in official pandemic updates (neither was, "South Korea", nor "Taiwan".)
3. Unlike millions of other people in the UK, care home residents could not simply go home and sit in lockdown. They were already 'at home', with care staff coming and going daily. Would trying to protect them have exposed how little PPE there was in Britain? (Guar, cumm.) If care homes had received more attention from government, might that also have generated curiosity for places like S. Korea who, "closed nursing homes" on 21 February 2020?: bfpg, also see Part 1, below.
2. All efforts to copy S. Korea by doing trace-and-test were "finished" in the UK on 12 March, eleven days before the lockdown. Matt Hancock knew that coronavirus would keep coming through the Eurotunnel, but "Eurotunnel" was never said on TV in official pandemic updates (neither was, "South Korea", nor "Taiwan".)
3. Unlike millions of other people in the UK, care home residents could not simply go home and sit in lockdown. They were already 'at home', with care staff coming and going daily. Would trying to protect them have exposed how little PPE there was in Britain? (Guar, cumm.) If care homes had received more attention from government, might that also have generated curiosity for places like S. Korea who, "closed nursing homes" on 21 February 2020?: bfpg, also see Part 1, below.
*Anyone who was interested in what S. Korea had been doing would have noticed that family-time BBC was excluding the story. The head of GPH, Devi Sridhar was making frequent BBC One appearances, but she only mentioned S. Korea once, in June, when she implied that its response included maltreatment of a religious sect leader there: "We are lucky here in the UK", she said ('compared with people in such oppressive countries'.) Her false criticism of S. Korea made it all the more obvious that the BBC was being made to prevent a true understanding: because she had recently appeared as a consultant in Channel 4's documentary, in which there was no criticism of S. Korea, only praise: Chan (no longer online) or Grdc. The 4 documentary had shown the S. Korean officials being polite with the sect leader, and he was later found 'not punishable' in court because of insufficient legislation at the time of his defiance: kortim. (Compare it with the treatment of a 'non-compliant' man in China: bbc.) See more detail in Part 2: April below.
It was in February 2020 that Matt Hancock said that caring for the elderly was going to be a priority (although what he meant was that they would get the vaccine first when it was available, in December?) It became obvious that the pandemic "battle plan" had always been a simple one: i.e. 'Lock down and wait for a vaccine'. The "world-beating app" kept us preoccupied when we were out and about in April, but it never did feed to a trace-and-test operation which could get infected people off the streets. Money would be "sprayed" (starm) at "NHS Test and Trace", but the conditions that made the Korean system work were not provided, i.e. prompt restriction of travel, and working with the contacts of infected people everywhere (not only people who'd visited pubs, cafés and restaurants) to persuade them to submit to testing.
Matt Hancock denied that there was a critical shortage of PPE in March 2020, but Dominic Cummings insisted that was the case: cumm (Jeremy Hunt MP confirmed what Cummings said, independently: JHchan4. ) The lack of facemasks (or of willingness to make use of the 200 million 'expired' ones) was disastrous, because people might have gone on with their daily pursuits if they'd had facemasks. Surely, a lack of PPE made it difficult to scale up any initial containment effort (if there really ever was one? REHIS.)
See the PPE timeline at Guar.
The following is official corroboration that there was a dire shortage in March: naouk, e.g. point 8.) Even if Hancock, not Cummings, was the truthful one, that would only make it all the more puzzling that care homes were widely reported to be short of PPE (noppe.)
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On one occasion, Boris Johnson was shown on TV saying, "South Korea" to a man in a street somewhere, but he wasn't talking about the pandemic. Every MP and scientist avoided saying, "South Korea" on TV once lockdown was imposed. There was also the MPs boycott of all TV channels but the BBC (morgan, gmb), which didn't report on the trace-and-test story of S. Korea until November 2020: Lock1.
Keeping the Eurotunnel open did not come without any resistance. The lorries were stopped for a while in December 2020 when France became afraid of the UK variant: businsid, politico.
2 April 2021: Having been vaccinated, care home residents suffered restrictions which were introduced long after they were hit by the 2020 wave of infection (face-saving measures?) Many were still deprived in 2021 of visits by loved ones, and of any recreational activities: aptch. The Johnson Tories never talked about this.
2 April 2021: Having been vaccinated, care home residents suffered restrictions which were introduced long after they were hit by the 2020 wave of infection (face-saving measures?) Many were still deprived in 2021 of visits by loved ones, and of any recreational activities: aptch. The Johnson Tories never talked about this.
Part 1: The BFPG timeline.
The BFPG time-line became available in May 2020, and it showed that the US took action on 31 January: "The US suspends entry into the country by any foreign nationals who had travelled to China in the past 14 days". (The WHO had declared an emergency the day before.)
The situation didn't seem to develop quickly. On 24 February: "The Trump administration asks Congress for $1.25 billion for coronavirus response. The US has had 35 confirmed cases and no deaths."
The timeline revealed that South Koreans did lock down in some ways where they saw the need, e.g. 21 February: "The South Korean government shuts down thousands of kindergartens, nursing homes and community centres following a surge in infections".
In the UK on 22 January: "Public Health England announces it is moving the risk level to the British public from ‘very low’ to ‘low’". (Wuhan was locked down the next day.)
29 January: "The UK’s first two patients test positive for Coronavirus after two Chinese nationals from the same family staying at a hotel in York fall ill. A plane evacuating Britons from Wuhan arrives at RAF Brize Norton. Passengers go into a 14 day quarantine at a specialist hospital on Merseyside."
4 February: "The UK directs its citizens to leave China if possible." However, quarantining of Brits returning from overseas didn't become a general practice until 8th June (bbc.)
29 January: "The UK’s first two patients test positive for Coronavirus after two Chinese nationals from the same family staying at a hotel in York fall ill. A plane evacuating Britons from Wuhan arrives at RAF Brize Norton. Passengers go into a 14 day quarantine at a specialist hospital on Merseyside."
4 February: "The UK directs its citizens to leave China if possible." However, quarantining of Brits returning from overseas didn't become a general practice until 8th June (bbc.)
The THRCC had been scrapped by the Prime Minister in July 2019, to "slow down on things" that didn't help him get Brexit done: Euron, telegraph. (Next, the PM shut down Parliament unlawfully in September, also to give priority to his Brexit activities: guar, polhom.)
People in China were sharing the Wuhan story on the internet in December 2019, but that material was quickly removed by the CCP. Doctors were accused of 'spreading rumours', and were forced to sign gag orders. The WHO gave support to China's proposal that this coronavirus was not transmitting human-to-human: tweet.
When CCP did acknowledge a need for response to the novel virus, diagnostic criteria were imposed by its officials which made it impossible for a true record of infections to be made: Expr. (See a formal chronology at: crsrep.) All transport out of Wuhan was halted on 23 January, but the WHO didn't declare an emergency of international concern until 7 days later.
The BFPG time-line does not make it obvious that the numbers of COVID-19 deaths in S. Korea and Taiwan were kept low, while tolls climbed quickly in Europe and America. Experts from Taiwan and other Asian states had visited Wuhan mid-January, and they'd decided that there should be an emphasis on prevention of infection in their own countries (yaho, Chan or Grdc.) Taiwan tried to get the word out globally, but made the mistake of trusting the WHO to warn other countries.
In Britain, no sense of emergency was conveyed to the public until 12 March, the day after the WHO declared a pandemic. Most scientists went home for "lockdown" on 23 March, and watched BBC One for government pandemic updates. (The Head of GPH, Professor Devi Sridhar, was on her kitchen laptop in the mornings, talking to BBC Breakfast.) MPs were not making appearances on non-BBC TV channels, and they never made reference to what was being done in S. Korea or Taiwan: video.
There are BFPG time-line entries which show that criticism of China and the WHO, mainly by Americans, was valid. For example: 7 February, "The Chinese doctor Dr. Li Wenliang, who tried to ring early alarms that a cluster of infections could spin out of control, dies after contracting the virus. He was reprimanded by authorities in early January and he was forced to sign a statement denouncing his warning as an unfounded and illegal rumour."
Some BFPG entries reveal that China did react strongly against suggestions of a threat to public health:
21 December: "Epidemiologists with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published an article on 20 January 2020 stating that the first cluster of patients with ‘pneumonia of an unknown cause’ had been identified on 21 December 2019".
31 December: "Chinese authorities confirmed they were treating dozens of cases of pneumonia of an unknown cause. Days later, researchers in China identified a new virus that had infected dozens of people. "There was no evidence that the virus was spread by humans." is also in the second entry in the BFPG time-line.* "China contacts the WHO and informs them of ‘cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology’ detected in Wuhan." *(Also see: bbcw.)
It's then reported that China said its first known COVID-19 death didn't occur until three weeks after it announced the "cluster of patients" in the 21 December report, in spite of there being "dozens of cases" in the 31 December report:
11 January, "Chinese state media reported the first known death from an illness caused by the virus. It was a 61-year old man who was a regular customer of the market in Wuhan where the virus is believed to have originated, and had previously been found to have abdominal tumors and chronic liver disease."
- Digesting that: There were clusters of cases on 21 December, dozens of cases on 31 December, but only one death, on 11 January, of a man who was very sick anyway. (The idea that the virus killed only infirm old people was to become a global one, in spite of the fact that a doctor who died in February was 34 years old and healthy: Wenliang.)
If the disease was so innocuous in China before the 'first death' on 11 January, then why do we see the following entry for 2 January: "Central Hospital of Wuhan banned its staff from discussing the disease publicly or recording them using text or image that can be used as evidence"? The CCP was still cracking down on people like Wenliang who 'spread rumours' in chat groups online.
The well-funded watchdog didn't bark for three weeks:
8 January: "The Chinese government agrees to accept a WHO scientific team to assist their own researchers".
23 January: "Wuhan (population over 11 million) is cut off by the Chinese authorities. Planes and trains leaving the city are cancelled, and buses, subways and ferries within the city are suspended. 17 people had died at this point and 570 were infected in Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, South Korea and the US."
But it was 30 January before the WHO announced an international emergency, and: "Another month and a half went by before the WHO called Covid-19 a pandemic": the MSN reference article is no longer online but see: statnews, NIH, NPR, BBC.
8 January: "The Chinese government agrees to accept a WHO scientific team to assist their own researchers".
23 January: "Wuhan (population over 11 million) is cut off by the Chinese authorities. Planes and trains leaving the city are cancelled, and buses, subways and ferries within the city are suspended. 17 people had died at this point and 570 were infected in Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, South Korea and the US."
But it was 30 January before the WHO announced an international emergency, and: "Another month and a half went by before the WHO called Covid-19 a pandemic": the MSN reference article is no longer online but see: statnews, NIH, NPR, BBC.
Thinking about another BFPG timeline entry:
14 January: "Reporters from Hong Kong taken to police station after trying to film the situation within Wuhan hospital". - How did the CCP conceal its repressive actions from the visiting WHO team? The team must have noticed that honest Chinese medics were talking about the way that the CCP was behaving: Expr, also see: Guar. It was on 14 January that the WHO published its infamous tweet which displayed the CCP's proposal (first announced on 31 December) that there was no sign of human-to-human infection.
(On 19 January 2021: ITV 1 showed a Chinese TV recording from 20 Jan 2020, in which Beijing first admits that the virus is contagious human-to-human.)
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| Above is from NPR |
Reminder: The WHO did eventually declare an emergency on 30 January but, four days later, its Director-General again implied that travel restrictions (which had been imposed by S. Korea, Taiwan and others) were not "evidence-based" or "consistent". "Travel bans" were causing China to face "increasing international isolation", said Ghebreyesus: Reut.
China's persistence in linking the disease with animals (saying there was no human-to-human transmission) set the stage for unbridled slaughters of mink in Denmark*. CCP later culled people's small pets during its 'zero COVID' campaign. *not forgetting that a healthy giraffe was killed at Copenhagen Zoo some years before, to stage a public dissection which could yield nothing 'educational' that a rat dissection couldn't provide: wiki, Natgeo. Large-scale slaughter of dolphins still occurs in northern Europe. (p.s. In a BBC series about a British zoo in 2024, Kate Humble said that a big giraffe was going to be euthanised because of typical aging signs in its ankles. The animal shown was obviously good humoured and a splendid specimen.)
"In the United States, more than 825,000 people have died from Covid. China’s official Covid death count is… 4,636.": forbes.
Part 2: General news media timeline of 2020.
Americans have said that their response to COVID-19 was slow because China had claimed that Wuhan's pneumonia was only being caught by people who visited the Huanan seafood market (where there were, presumably, some mammalian species of animal?): see bfpg under 'December 31st 2019' (and Atlan.)
On 14 January, the WHO had put the CCP's story onto a global platform: tweet. The WHO did not suggest that this coronavirus was any more contagious than the previous two were (SARS-CoV-1 in 2002, and MERS-CoV in 2012), and it ignored email from Taiwan's top medic on the matter. (He'd seen the Wuhan crisis first hand: yaho and bbct.)
"It's deadly stuff", said Mr Trump on 7 February, but the American CDC was making the situation worse by deciding to develop its own, more sophisticated, coronavirus test, and then failing at that for six weeks: forbes - A Bing search finds multiple articles on US testing failures - also see NatPub and Science.
(A protocol for making a simpler test could have been downloaded since 13 January, see WHO - although the WHO only began to recommend mass testing on 16 March.) Other failings followed in the US: Techrev and Vox.
The New York Times wrote of China's CCP: “Act decisively they did - not against the virus, but against whistle-blowers who were trying to call attention to the public health threat.”
See the list of CCP actions which prevented good medics from
organizing an effective response to Wuhan's outbreaks: CFSP.
One man spent three years in jail for making videos in Wuhan: bbc2023,
6.9 million died worldwide: statista
CCP officials deleted online information and restricted what hospitals could do: "Practises were so abnormal...": Expr. The medic from Taiwan (Prof Chuang Yin-ching) who visited Wuhan mid-January went home with plans to prevent similar outbreaks. He and other visitors (from Hong Kong and Macau) persuaded their governments to establish border controls and quarantines, and to set up "detection and surveillance" systems: see yah, Chan (no longer online), Grdc. Yin-ching tried to alert the outside world by emailing the WHO, but his email 'wasn't processed': Time.
The WHO would say that it had published a protocol for making a coronavirus test on 13 January: WHO. However, China was allowed to keep its society "calm" by not telling anybody how concerning the situation really was. (This can be deduced from what's shown in the BFPG timeline.) The WHO never did amend its "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" message (see it now: Xtweet.) It was the visiting Taiwanese medic, not the WHO, who must take the credit for the fact that China stopped all transport out of Wuhan on 23 January: The city was locked down after he had persuaded officials there that they did have clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. yah, bfpg.
The BFPG timeline indicates that the UK followed China's advice to evacuate its citizens on 29 January. However, no MPs appeared to communicate with the non-communist neighbouring countries who'd scrambled to prevent viral spread. For another ten months, MPs and scientists who appeared on family-time BBC One television (mornings and early evenings) said nothing about S. Korea and its methodical Trace, Test and Treat strategy.
(Taiwan's strategy was not well known until a report was published in 2024: JFMA.) It wasn't until 13 May 2020 at 8 pm (on Channel 4, not BBC) that any Brits saw how the S. Koreans had acted with speed and determination: Chan or Grdc. Most Brits wouldn't have been watching that channel at that time of the evening. MPs weren't ever talking about S. Korea, and they only spoke on BBC television because they were boycotting all other channels: morgan, gmb.
As well as keeping any talk of S. Korea to a barest minimum (using WhatsApp grouping to tell TV guests what shouldn't be discussed 'until a proper inquiry had been done?'), BBC One also kept quiet about the WHO's loss of American support. It didn't mention the big pledges for the WHO that were then solicited by Bill and Melinda Gates: Bill, Melinda. While the WHO did catch up with reality and urge the World to "Test, test, test" on 16 March, it never retracted its criticism of countries who imposed travel restrictions, and continued in the same vein in November 2021: Reut1. (The restrictions had been essential where the virus was contained through trace-and-test. Also see jfma.)
The BBC did publish a second website article (a video) about S. Korea in May, but such material was not seen or heard on television. (N.B. Use of the word "aggressive" in the article draws attention to the 'privacy invasion' that took place in order to trace the recent movements of infected people. Such 'invasion' was not concealed from South Koreans by their government, and they tolerated it for the greater good.) *
Only nine days after that BBC online article had appeared, visitors from S. Korea to Gloucester formally commemorated British wartime support, and brought some PPE as a gift: bbc video.
*MPs never broached the subject of access to personal location data, because they never openly debated copying the South Korean response. The 'NHS Test and Trace' system, launched on 28 May, invaded privacy on a big scale. People had become accustomed to obeying Mr Johnson without question, and they 'voluntarily' scanned their phone apps at pubs, cafés and restaurants. - He'd told them that the app was "World-beating". It fooled people into thinking that government was doing what S. Korea did, i.e. tracking down people who were likely to be infected, and getting them tested ASAP. But all that NHS Test and Trace could do was send text messages to people if they had been to a pub, café or restaurant where a known case had also recently been. The SMS recipients could return to the venue only if they'd then attended a testing venue and could provide proof of a negative result. Apart from that, there was no social disadvantage to ignoring the text message.
The following article says that our human rights were affected by government incompetence, but it assumes that lockdown was what government 'should have done better', and makes no mention of East Asian lockdown-free responses which worked much better: pubmed.
The UK continued to be a member of the WHO, overlooking its collusion with China and sending it a bonus of £55 million in April (Rtcom - now blocked due to the invasion of Ukraine.) £548-million was then sent for the WHO to establish 'Covax' in collaboration with the EU (small change in Bill Gates' world, whose GAVI organization directs Covax: gav.)
February 2021: It's been said that the US' pandemic response became dysfunctional in late April 2020, and that Mr Trump had become a denialist, turned his back on the White House medical advisor: NYTi. A subsequent report is at Huffp.
December/January
President Trump cut America's funding of the WHO (Reut, toro) after independent sources had provided accounts of its role in the CCP's cover-up: ITV, Ftimes. Also see Wholapdog for analysis of his decision, and Trutwt for a copy of his letter to the WHO.
+ The CCP stated that there was no sign of the disease moving from person to person: DailyRec, pcp. It said that only the people who went to Wuhan's seafood market were catching the virus, from animals: bfpg (look at 31st December), Chan, Grdc. The WHO provided an international platform for the CCP's fable by means of a tweet, Also see: Insidr, xinhua. 
+ The CCP forced Wuhan doctors to stop saying that the novel pneumonia was very contagious. One doctor disappeared: missing, another died: BBC, Expre.
+ The silencing of doctors in China was done in anticipation of upcoming New Year celebrations, during which there would be a peak in travel to and from China: Atlan. The WHO said that travel restrictions were not needed (Reut.)
+ The WHO, "backed China in spite of substantial undercounting of its SARS-CoV-2 cases and deaths": Chang (or Wholapdog.)
+ WHO executives must have known that the CCP let Chinese medical staff go on working without informing them of the new risk to health: ForP, ITV. 
+ Copied from a WHO page dated 30/Jan/2020: "The Committee welcomed the leadership and political commitment of the very highest levels of Chinese government, their commitment to transparency, and the efforts made to investigate and contain the current outbreak.": WHOpage. (Use Ctrl+F to find 'the committee welcomed'.)
+ When the CCP did concede that there was human-to-human transmission, a system of diagnostic criteria was imposed by its officials at hospitals. Their criteria prevented a good number of infected patients from ever being noticed: Exp. There was also "obstruction of data, and staff became convinced that testing was being blocked."
+ The WHO presented facts in ways that would not contradict what the CCP had said: xinhua. Tedros Ghebreyesus argued, repeatedly, that any travel restrictions being applied were not "evidence-based": WHO, Reut.
+ The WHO delayed its declaration of a “public health emergency of international concern” until 30 January: bfpg, WHO. (Wuhan itself had been shut down by government on 23 January: bfpg.) It was another 6 weeks before the WHO declared a 'pandemic': pubmed.
+ Even after the WHO's declaration on 30 January, its Director-General criticized travel bans in countries that received flights from Hubei Province: voa. (More than once, he said that travel bans inflicted "isolation" on the Chinese economy: Reut. He didn't warn any country about the economic damage wrought by lockdowns. He was still campaigning against travel "bans" on 30 Nov 2021: Reut1.)
+ A point not made by the American journalists: The WHO had never signposted the fact that South Korea saved lives in hospitals where outbreaks of MERS-CoV occurred in 2015: The test-isolate-trace method (later becoming known as 'Trace, Test and Treat') should have been promoted worldwide in February 2020, but the WHO kept silent. "Test, test, test" was not said until 16 March by Tedros Ghebreyesus: video. (S. Korea had discovered high case numbers in February which could be traced to large gatherings of a religious sect in late January: bbc)
The above list is complemented by one that gives detail of CCP culpability: csfp.
China made it seem that the viral pneumonia in Wuhan was transmitting from one species to another (animal to human), but that it wasn't transmitting between members of the second species (human to human) at an observable rate. The same, incorrect assertion had come persistently from the WHO since 2012 when talking about the MERS coronavirus. Their website has described MERS that way ever since: rtrs. 
Until 2025, the MERS factsheet on the WHO website still helped the CCP's misinformation seem consistent with 'previous findings': A respiratory coronavirus was, still, said to be transmitting "between animals and people"
The CCP and WHO were both saying that a species of animal was carrying the coronavirus, and individual people were then becoming infected "directly", i.e. by contact with the animals: They asserted that the majority of human cases had not been infected by transmission from other humans.
Their theory suggested that a 'pool' of animal-infecting coronavirus particles was hosted by a population of mammalian animals, and one of the virus particles gave rise (by chance mutational error) to progeny virions which could infect both the animals and humans. They proposed that descendant progeny of the zoonotic virions would 'not easily' transmit human-to-human (doing so only when there was 'close contact'.)
The 'pool' concept works well in the description of a disease like malaria: Many female mosquitoes are, collectively, a container of malaria sporozoites, and people become infected when the mosquitoes transfer sporozoites to them while taking a blood meal. However, the 'life cycle' of a virus does not work this way, because a virus cannot replicate outside of the living cells of its primary host species. A virus has no secondary host in its 'life cycle'.
Even if the body of a virus-infected animal could shed many zoonotic progeny virions (after mutation has caused one 'normal' virus particle to give rise to the many virions which have human infectivity), that animal might only encounter one or perhaps a few humans in its lifetime. If, as suggested by the WHO's description of MERS, the zoonotic virions do not show human-to-human transmission, the immediate human contacts of an infected animal will be the only people infected. This would beg the question: How would 'outbreaks' occur which involve good numbers of people? Anyone suggesting, "no human-to-human transmission" of a zoonotic virus should feel driven to come up with an explanation if there is clearly an abundance of human victims, as there was in S. Korea in 2015.
Note: It seems possible that the WHO were assuming the following scenario to explain a large number of human coronavirus cases where there is no (or very limited) human-to-human transmission: The genotype of a newly-evolved human-infecting virus could, theoretically, also still contain genetic code for animal transmissibility, and thus be able to spread back into the animal host population. Then, it would access more human hosts if they handled the infected animals. However, animal-animal interactions in the wild are far less frequent than human-to-human interactions are (primates and colonial bats being typical exceptions), and humans are always talking to each other. The relative scarcity of animal-to-animal interactions in the wild reduces the likelihood that animals will infect each other with zoonotic respiratory viruses. Even if a novel, human-infecting respiratory coronavirus could, like the unmutated 'parent' strain it recently evolved from, still spread animal to animal, there are very few situations in which many people are handling such live animals at close quarters.
A crucial finding, not mentioned in WHO website material:
In the well-respected journal 'Nature' in 2016, it was reported that MERS-CoV is shed from infected people only after they have begun to suffer severe symptoms, symptoms which have usually put them in a sickbed at home or in a hospital (see the 4th Key Point.) Such 'late' shedding of progeny virus is the obvious explanation for limitation in the number of MERS cases outside of health-care settings: People took themselves 'off the street' and into bed before they began to shed progeny virus.
If someone at the WHO had read the Nature review, they might have considered what could occur if a novel coronavirus appeared which is shed from a patient's body at about the same time that he/she first notices symptoms, or before symptoms are noticed. There could also be significant spread of such a novel coronavirus if the symptoms are mild in some people, not severe enough to keep them at home. 
Where a significant percentage of people experiences only mild symptoms after infection by a novel virus, the shedding of progeny virus from their bodies will result in spread of infection regardless of whether shedding occurs before or after symptoms take hold. This is why the CFR value is an important indicator: It was 2-3% for SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 (not many infected people were dying, and a good number were feeling well enough to be out and about), but it reached 56% for MERS-CoV in 2013 (therefore many were dying and very few were active in society. Ref. nemj.)
The WHO seemed to forget that the evolution of a 'zoonotic' coronavirus is a rare, one-off genetic event. It's likely that any subsequent zoonotic coronaviruses are just genetic variants of the first one.
Recap: Error during the replication of a single virus particle (a virion that's shaken off its protein coat) gives rise to genetically-altered progeny which have gained, by chance, a viable change in their host-specificity. The mutation is called 'zoonotic' when the change confers human-infectivity. All subsequent human infections could be traced back to the novel virions which first appeared after erroneous replication of the 'parental' genome occurred inside one infected animal.
The WHO liked the "no H2H transmission" idea in 2020 because they were interested in speaking out against travel restrictions: 'If it is not spreading human-to-human, then why stop people from travelling?' As such, the WHO was giving priority to its political interest in safeguarding China's prosperity, even if that put the health of many other countries at risk: Reut.It's regrettable that the WHO had been pushing their 'no human-to-human infection' idea for respiratory coronaviruses since 2012. As the years went by, they implicated animals more seriously in health threats (e.g. at Event_201 in 2019), while not sharing knowledge of the new way to prevent human-to-human spread in S. Korea. WHO influence paved the way for regrettable actions, e.g. the Danish slaughter of millions of mink without justification (Guard) and the many people losing their pets to culls in China.
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| See factsht |
There is another way to show just how unlikely a 'no human-to-human transmission' scenario was: A virus can remain dormant inside its host, and it will not be causing symptoms of disease. It is when a virus particle (in this case, a zoonotic one that's found its way into a human) makes copies of itself that the host's symptoms can begin: Each virus copy makes copies of itself, and those copies make copies of themselves, and so on. (see khan), consuming cellular resources and causing cell death, which makes the human feel unwell. Before long, very many genome copies (each one soon to become a 'virion') have accumulated. Once each genome copy has a protein coat (a capsid), it is identical to the virion that was able to infect the human host, therefore it will also be to able infect a human....
..... It wouldn't be routine to suggest that zoonotically-mutant progeny of an animal-infecting virus, having entered a human host and caused symptoms (indicating that viral replication was taking place) would produce further progeny virions that could not then infect other humans. But that's what the WHO led people to think about MERS-CoV between 2012 and 2015, and then endorsed for SARS-CoV-2 when China proposed it. A Wikipedia page shows the suggestion that the WHO had made: "The WHO update on 28 September 2012 said the virus did not seem to pass easily from person to person" (wik.) While others were proving that there clearly was human-to-human transmission of MERS-CoV, the WHO still said only that it didn't transmit between people "unless there is close contact".
What the WHO should have been saying about MERS-CoV was, "Yes, it transmits person to person, but an infected person doesn't shed progeny virus until after severe symptoms are well developed, by which time the person is usually in a sickbed somewhere." - The lateness of shedding explains why it wasn't easy to find evidence of human-to-human infection outside of healthcare settings. (Nature.)
In the WHO factsheet prior to 2025, under 'Prevention and treatment', there was never detail which suggested how to avoid catching MERS from another person, or how to avoid passing it on. (Links to other Reuters reference articles can be found above by using Ctrl+F for 'MERS' or 'reu'.)
In 2015, Bill Gates was a campaigner for epidemic-readiness, but he did not show that he'd noticed S. Korea's new way to slow the spread of a coronavirus. He became consumed with rescuing the WHO after Donald Trump withdrew its US funding in April 2020. On receiving the new Gates-mediated support, the WHO began to issue more news updates and, in June 2020, it said that 'infected people might not display obvious symptoms'. However, the S. Koreans had made this observation almost six months beforehand: Their first case was a woman from Wuhan showing a high temperature on 19 January 2020. She seemed healthy at the airport but was found to have pneumonia when examined at a hospital (pubmed.) It was decided then to try and test every contact of an infected person, including those who looked healthy.
MERS had "dented" the S. Korean economy in 2015: Smag. In January 2020, it was decided that infected people should be found and quarantined, so that a big lockdown would not become necessary. Keeping people busy and engaged with the logic of the response had good outcomes, e.g. one teenager made a website where people could see if they had been near anyone who had recently shown positive in a test (Chan - no longer playing, reviewed at Grdc, Nature.)
S. Korea and Taiwan are longstanding allies of the USA, but they are not in the habit of deferring blindly to the WHO. S. Korea began a mass production of coronavirus testing kits on January 27, 2020: NYt.
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 S. Korean response was working.
February
It was said on BBC Two in December 2020 that three direct flights from Wuhan had been arriving in the UK every week in the first half of the year, and a constant flow of ski enthusiasts had been returning from Europe, where infection was spreading unchecked. (France decided then to have border checks, to stop skiers from going to Switzerland: bbc.) 
Arrivals from Wuhan were met with health pamphlets in the UK, but it wasn't known how many were bringing the virus. (Scientists subsequently claimed to have traced most infections back to those who were flying from Europe, not from Wuhan.) Quarantine for airport arrivals began on 8th June (bbc.)
Airport heat sensors were not deployed in the UK, and NERVTAG said later in the year (on BBC TV) that thermal screening is not helpful. However, there is a substantial publication which defends the use of thermal screening: S. Koreans used the heat sensors in combination with other equipment, e.g. ear thermometers (abc). Rather than devoting time to academic speculation, the Koreans made the most of every opportunity and, 'somehow', they got results: "Although these thermal cameras cannot detect or diagnose any type of medical condition, the cameras do serve as an effective tool to identify elevated skin temperatures through accurate, non-contact temperature monitoring” (flir.)
Westerners pooh-poohed the heat sensors because their use wasn't likely to detect every case (e.g. Wash, NYti), but would it be sensible to abandon fishing rods because a fisherman won't catch every fish? 
See other examples of the can-do attitude which helped S. Korea keep the case number down: Guar, chpi, Hank.
Compare the following about S. Korea with what we heard about measures at Heathrow, where heat screening was deemed 'pointless', and pamphlets seemed to be the only new provision: icao and chpi. 
Apart from the US president, no leaders censured the Chinese government for having silenced doctors and pushed the illusion that the coronavirus had no human-to-human transmissibility. (Vox: "The fact that the international community has not acknowledged those missteps is also consequential".) The WHO was, arguably, even more reprehensible through being so cooperative with China, thus helping it deceive health authorities in other countries. Only Donald Trump criticized the WHO, and soon his sanction was to be wholly reversed by Joe Biden.
Trump was not entirely consistent either: He praised China as soon as he could (Feb 7): “They’re working really hard and I think they’re doing a very professional job”. It was the South Koreans who were testing 3000 people per day by then. By March 2020, S. Korea had tested 5200 people in every million, while the USA had tested 74 in every million: Smag.
S. Koreans sought to quarantine infected people quickly enough to keep the rest of society safe.* - When Kim Jong Un is your neighbour, you don’t want to obstruct your economy with long lockdowns. Also, locking everybody down would put infected people at home where they cannot be detected (and therefore their contacts would remain undetected.)
*A test of COVID-19 infection was ready within a week and S. Korea began to trace disease contacts by studying the recent movements of people who were showing positive in the test. (The task force looked at the locations of phone and bank card activity, monitored CCTV and held interviews.) A sizable outbreak was contained, but then it was noticed that the R-value was high in the south-eastern city of Daegu: A sect leader there had been running very big indoor gatherings, and almost a thousand new cases were being recorded every day near the end of February (BBC.) "People were dying": Chan (no longer online) or Grdc. It became arduous for the medics, but control was established. Loss of life remained very low for a westernized country with high population density: 422 lives being lost by 7th October 2020.
Taiwan didn't have much initial spread of infection. It showed that an island could be made safe by closing the border and copying S. Korea. For several months, losses were kept to 7 people out of a population of 24 million (found in Google searches.) By 19 December 2021, Taiwan had lost 850 people because of variants getting in: "the Alpha variant was found in many of those linked to the China Airlines cluster" (wiki.)
Donald Trump did praise Taiwan and S. Korea, but he didn’t praise the method that they were using. S. Korea had flattened the infection curve before the following was published on 26 Mar 2020: NPR (see chart below.)
After the WHO was challenged by US government because it had helped China to do a cover-up, it switched from parroting the CCP to composing statements which were based on what the S. Koreans had done. However, it didn't acknowledge S. Korea, and wouldn't it have been more helpful if Tedros Ghebreyesus had said: "Trace, test and treat" rather that just, "test, test, test"?
China soon copied the S. Korean response and began to make some progress, but with very harsh treatment of some citizens.
Just how many dark moves did the CCP make? An April MSN article mentioned that citizens of African descent were being dragged into the streets during the 'response'. Fox news listed four of the reasons why the WHO's integrity was in question: Wholapdog. (Chang - sometimes loses connectivity.)
In July 2019, the British committee called THRCC, which might have acted promptly and assembled a spread-beating pandemic response, had been scrapped by Boris Johnson. He said that THRCC was shut downto, "slow down on things" that might use government resources for 'non-Brexit' purposes: Euron, Telegrap.
Most countries did not intercept the spread of virus in the way that the S. Koreans and Taiwanese did. There was no alarm among the many who thought that the WHO was their health sentinel. When China and the WHO were then in the news for the cover-up, national leaders were detached and slow to draw any conclusions. After promoting China's idea that the virus would mainly be spreading animal-to-human, the WHO had little impact with subsequent, more reliable, information.
He showed little concern for the health risks in January and February, and then he gravely declared a national lockdown on 23 March (govuk). The numbers of deaths had suddenly indicated that infection had been spreading far and wide (although this was denied officially: Raab) and no "herd immunity" had been acquired: video.
March
During his visit to PHE in Colindale on 1st Mar 2020, the words of the Prime Minister suggested that Global Public Health had not convinced him of a serious situation: "It's not, you know, the most serious infection you can get. It's something that the vast majority of people survive very well".
"Yes, exactly", answered a PHE employee, "We've seen some older age groups who have been more seriously affected in China." (See the conversation: Chan - discontinued in June 2023, reviewed at Grdc.)
Two days later, the PM said on TV: "I am shaking hands continuously", after visiting a hospital "where there were actually a few coronavirus patients, and I shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know". (He also forced some handshaking onto scientists on 6 March: video.)
In S. Korea at that time, the pace of the testing program had increased in the city of Daegu, and "a thousand" new cases were being recorded daily. It was, temporarily, not possible to trace all contacts of the infected people, because of the scale of that outbreak. Britain had no known Covid-19 deaths, while S. Korea had 28, and had quarantined thousands.
The UK was not producing a lot of testing kits after developing its own test in January.
The first recorded in the UK death occurred on 28 February (bfpg). Mr Johnson said on 8 March that many people were at risk. On 12 March, "efforts to contain the virus through testing and tracing" were stopped: It was said that testing would only continue at hospitals and care homes, to separate the infected from the healthy. The CMO, Chris Whitty, said that there had always been just one "phase" of containment in a four-part operation: "contain, delay, research, mitigate. ..The contain phase finishes from today", he said. In other words, there never had been an intention to continue slowing viral spread in the way that the S. Koreans were doing so well (youtube at 13:10 mins.)
By 18th March, the cumulative death toll was higher in the UK than it was in S.Korea (beyond 100), and the national lock-down was announced five days later. The rate of mortality kept climbing, and 1,900 had died by the end of March, 15,000 by 18 April, 26,000 by 29 April: bbc.
On 19 March, China announced that it was having "zero local infections", and that it would watch for fourteen days to make sure the outbreak was over: bfpg.
April (mostly)
One Covid-19 death had been recorded in Britain on 28 February, but the cumulative toll had passed thirty-thousand on 5th May (msn - no longer online but see bbc.) It became noticeable that the virus had spread widely in the weeks before lockdown: "The first wave was at the time one of the world's largest outbreaks": wiki. In S. Korea on 1st April, the death toll stood at 165, and there was no general lockdown. People had become accustomed to self-regulation and following advisories posted generously on signage in public places, and received on their phones.
On 18 April, British care-home losses were said on TV to be 50% of the national total (about 7,500/15,000), but were later said to be “25%” (in spite of Sir Kier Starmer's observation that a further 10,000 had died without being diagnosed: UnivM. Similar denialism from an MP was reported in bbc.)
Regardless of the frightening situations in the care homes, a bonus award of £55 million was given to the WHO: RTcom (no longer viewable since the war). That money was sent in spite of reports that the WHO had verbally enhanced China's way-off description of the virus, and used that description to argue against travel restrictions in countries that received flights daily from Wuhan. (Beijing was 'denouncing' countries who wouldn't receive flights: VoA.) The WHO had also delayed a formal declaration of 'international emergency' until 7 days after China had put Wuhan into isolation Reut. (On 22 May 2020, the WHO said it needs another £900 million. China had given it just £24 million extra.)
WHO Health Emergencies Program Executive Director Michael Ryan and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. © REUTERS
British care-homes spoke of empty bank accounts after buying whatever PPE they could get, at inflated prices. Rationing was their only option if residents were also to be fed. Some said that their mortalities were being "air-brushed" out of daily news (bbcA.) Could that £55 million have helped them cope? (cf. On 21 February 2020, the S. Korean government had closed "thousands of kindergartens, nursing homes and community centres": bfpg.)
Googled in April: "UK government's scientific advisers believe that the chances of dying from a coronavirus infection are between 0.5% and 1%", but this meant nothing if you were housed in a care home: Amnest.
By January 2021, British care home fatalities had been: 25 thousand. The Netherlands was reporting fewer deaths for its entire population: statne.
An MSN article (no longer online) describes how the WHO/UN excludes Taiwan from all support, because its UN membership was transferred to the PRC in 1945. Like S. Korea, Taiwan is very westernized through years of friendly contact with the USA. (It even has big-league baseball.) Taiwan closed its border to international visitors on 26 Mar 2020 (Diplo) and, for nearly a year, lost only seven people to Covid-19.
(On 18 October 2020: China is amassing military on the coast facing Taiwan. On 31/03/2021: A BBC correspondent flees China, goes to to Taiwan: BBC.)
The UN's António Guterres was happy in May when Bill Gates had adopted the recuperation of the WHO's finances as his personal cause.
By May 2020, the WHO was back in the saddle because Bill and Melinda Gates had organized very large subsidies: Bill, Mel. Britain could have kept that £55 million after all! By giving the WHO extra money in spite of Trump's decision*, British MPs made it less noticeable that they had done very little apart from waiting to see if the outbreak was likely to overwhelm the hospitals. This is something that Trump was also accused of later. (His line was, more-or-less, 'The WHO hid the pandemic from us so I've cut their money. Now I'm focussing on re-election. It is Fauci's job now, not mine.' NYTi) Even more quietly, the MPs sent £548-million for the WHO's Covax program in 2021, which was directed by Bill Gates' GAVI: HoCL.
*Mr Trump praised China on 7 February but he became angry with the WHO on hearing that it had supported what the CCP did shortly beforehand. The WHO had not told anyone about the following: A 34 year-old Wuhan doctor was officially censured on 3 January for discussing an internal doctors report of a case of SARS in an online chatroom with university colleagues. He was told not to spread rumours and made to sign a gag order, and he died from the disease before 6 February. (The CCP didn't want a new health concern to interfere with mass travel over the Chinese New Year?) See other reasons for Trump's decision to punish the WHO, while preferring not to challenge China: Wholapdog.
"We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice - is that understood?" Underneath in Dr Li's handwriting: "Yes, I do." bbc/world.
Women in S. Korea had leading roles in fighting the spread of the virus in 2020 (seen on Chan which is no longer online, see Grdc), rather than just talking on Zoom for a TV audience. Devi Sridhar and her colleagues at Global Public Health (in Edinburgh) were on Zoom with BBC Breakfast almost every day. Hancock and the MPs never mentioned what S. Korea had been doing: The subject was kept off BBC television until 11 December 2020 in an evening documentary.
Having a dig at his critics? Mr Johnson sends another, this time, worthy contribution abroad, i.e. a "£55 million" package in May 2021: chloe
The ban on discussing South Korea
It was baffling, in the first lockdown, when the Chair of Global Public Health almost never broached the subject of S. Korea's response on family-time BBC television.
From March to 10 December 2020, S. Korea was only mentioned on BBC prime-time television when lists of countries were read out. It seemed that all of the BBC's visitors were added to a WhatsApp group which was telling them to avoid talking about S. Korea or Taiwan ('until a proper study has been made'?} **
On BBC Breakfast in June, Professor Sridhar of GPH did mention S. Korea once, but only in a criticism, after saying that not all governments were treating people well: "We are lucky here in the UK", she said after implying that a cult leader in Daegu was treated harshly by the S. Korean authorities. She didn’t mention that he had preached defiance of social distancing, or that 2700 of his followers had tested positive, rising quickly to 6000. In contrast, a TV Channel 4 documentary, in which Prof. Sridhar featured as an expert, had made it easy to see that the Daegu man was handled politely and even given a chance to apologize in public. (Some heckling was his only punishment for having told his many followers to defy social distancing.) Sridhar spoke a few times in that 13 May 2020 documentary (Chan - no longer available, Grdc) but she never mentioned its content during any of her BBC One appearances. Reports and video of brutal lock-down enforcement had come out of China and Africa, but she chose S. Korea as her 'bad example'. Other GPH academics who also appeared on BBC One, likewise said next-to nothing about S. Korea.
N.B. It was reported on 1 August 2020 that the Daegu man had been embezzling his followers’ money: Teleg. (He escaped prosecution later on the grounds of there being insufficient legislation at the time of his offending.) 
It's not uncommon for politicians to organize silence about certain people or groups of people: Nicola Sturgeon tried to ban use of the words "UK" and "British" in August 2020: No"UK" and banex. In other words, WhatsApp makes surreptitious politics easy to do now?
July onwards
On BBC Breakfast, 21 July 2021 at 10:23, Prof. Devi Sridhar gave a brief summary of pandemic success-stories in east Asia. She did briefly mention S. Korea this time without insinuating that anybody had been treated badly by its government. Her quick summary was, again, not designed to make anybody notice that S. Korea's success story was exemplary: The Atlantic had used the word, “exceptionalism” more than a year previously: Atlantic. BBC TV prides itself on being independent and capable of good analytics but, from 12 March to 10 December 2020, it never let anyone mention that S. Korea and Taiwan were probably the two countries in the World most driven to avoid locking down. They had not been ready to stay at home and watch TV every day when North Korea or the PRC watches them non-stop with a view to overpowering them.
On 31 October 2020, Prof. Sridhar displayed intense annoyance when Boris Johnson announced a second lockdown on 5 November. Officially, the first lockdown had ended on 12 June (a fact not mentioned in the 'Institute for Government' lockdowns timeline: ins4g.) She called his decision, "this rubbish path" and was then replaced by Linda Bauld as the GPH spokesperson on BBC Breakfast.
In an interview after her "rubbish path" outburst, Prof. Sridhar made some reasonable observations: Nstat. However, she had helped the MPs to keep the S. Korean and Taiwanese stories off BBC One for ten months, and she had made a serious false criticism of the way the Daegu sect leader was dealt with.
By comparison with S. Korea, the UK government was not slow to punish thousands of Brits for any pandemic 'misdemeanours'. At least 100,000 large fines were dished out between March and July 2020 (itvx.) A coffee bar near Plymouth lost £42,000 because it allowed people to sit indoors on 5th and 6th November: plym.
The grip on the BBC was released in November:
By November 2020, government control of BBC television was eased, and there was soon a documentary (Lock1) which described South Korea's response in positive ways. Prof. Devi Sridhar had become very critical of Mr Johnson on 31 Oct 2020 (on BBC News) after he'd announced another month of lockdown. She said he was taking us down, "this rubbish path", and she mentioned a few Asian countries which, she said, we should have been copying. (She still didn't say "South Korea", but she was obviously no longer telling Nicola Sturgeon that it's "not helpful to compare" coronavirus responses of different countries, fgoog and Dec20.)
Can things get distorted in secretive WhatsApp chats? Top politicians were seen to form a WhatsApp group that excluded Theresa May. MPs in the group were bad-mouthing her to the point that her assistant left it. He was a man of principle, but one who lost touch with what that group did afterwards (Mirr.) Should major government decisions be influenced by furtive WhatsApp chats? WhatsApp's encryption is unbreakable - nobody can snoop and see what goes on. That's why Mrs May asked Facebook to provide a 'back-door'.
New in 2023, "UK government largely run on WhatsApp": BBC.
54 Days was a post-lockdown BBC product which gave detail of China's cover-up. It revealed that the WHO's directors argued internally in January 2020 but decided to adhere to, "the diplomacy that we use", and not contradict China's description of the novel virus. (M.J. Ryan had pleaded with his peers to give the World a more adequate warning.) - This very detailed documentary was available on iPlayer for only the standard duration. A tiny segment can be seen at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=496317381757468)
The CCP headquarters said that it did not know its Wuhan office was doing a cover-up: BBC, NYT, and PBS. Meanwhile, the WHO had been looking more closely at what the South Koreans did, and was advocating their strategy in piecemeal ways, without acknowledging them. Having caused us to miss the 'golden hour' (the first days/weeks when some control of viral spread might be achieved, before the virus has multiplied much*), the WHO described January to October 2020 as, "a period of preparation when hospitals were being made ready and kits made for testing".
*Viral multiplication can be seen as exponential population growth: see the graph. A video shows how the existence of just one virus can give rise quickly to millions of copies of itself: khan.
10 Feb 2021: Joe Biden to Xi Jinping, tacitly: "I won't blame you, and I will re-fund the WHO. Trump was mistaken."
Above: Joe Biden's letter which restores America's support without considering the enormity of the WHO's backing of China's cover-up in January 2020.
China did more under-reporting in 2023: yah23 
Some conclusions
Two countries which receive migrant workers from Wuhan were able to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 with a trace-and-test strategy. Experience had given them reason to be independent thinkers on health matters, while many other countries continued to assume that the WHO had experts who would guard their interests.
In the UK, we did not lock the country down in a thorough way: The border was kept porous throughout, and no airports had thermal screening. Government was telling people to lock themselves in their homes while lorries kept streaming through the Eurotunnel. With private-sector scientists working flat out here and elsewhere, vaccine would definitely be developed and, presumably, it would help to 'bring things back to normal'. However, an opportunity to protect the economy from lockdowns was wasted (and it was 37 weeks after first locking down before anyone was vaccinated.)
Our early-warning health-threats committee (THRCC) was scrapped in July 2019, to "slow down on things" that didn't contribute to getting Brexit done. One result of that was a stockpile of 'expired' PPE in the country in the first quarter of 2020. Would it have been 'costly to Brexit' if government had given more man-hours to protecting care homes from viral ingression? In September 2019, Parliament had been shut down (now deemed, unlawfully) to prevent a scrutiny of "Brexit stratagems".
Our early-warning health-threats committee (THRCC) was scrapped in July 2019, to "slow down on things" that didn't contribute to getting Brexit done. One result of that was a stockpile of 'expired' PPE in the country in the first quarter of 2020. Would it have been 'costly to Brexit' if government had given more man-hours to protecting care homes from viral ingression? In September 2019, Parliament had been shut down (now deemed, unlawfully) to prevent a scrutiny of "Brexit stratagems".
Until the end of 2020, mention of S. Korea's progress was omitted from the TV discourse which the British public would tend to watch more than usual, i.e. the BBC. All other TV channels were boycotted by MPs, and it was 11 December before BBC television aired a late evening documentary which gave detail of S. Korea's achievements. (The documentary was on BBC iPlayer for a while, but given no extra time there. Likewise with the longer, "54 Days" documentary that followed in January.)
After Chris Whitty claimed that Britain's first COVID-19 tracing team of just under 300 staff was "finished" on 12/03/2020, there never was a robust trace-and-test operation for containing the virus. Mr Johnson had access to a colleague with experience in managing epidemics, but he did not consult with him (watch the second 50 secs. of: video.) That's how government expenditure soon reached £400-billion while businesses floundered in a suspension of their activities for many months. (See 2023 estimates of the cost per person: yaho.)
In hindsight, it's easy to see why governments everywhere should have been interested in the way Taiwan and S. Korea tackled the emergency. They are the two countries that have faced hostile communist neighbours for decades, people who might have found new ways to hurt them if they'd locked their citizens down. By December 2020, they'd proved without any doubt that the trace-and-test strategy was the best tool for containing coronavirus and preserving life. Needless to say, their "bali bali" approach did much less harm to businesses than lockdowns did: cnn.
Beijing has been influencing South Africa for some time now. The pandemic response there in 2020 was not impressive, nobody was screened who went in and out of care homes for the elderly. (The World's first heart transplant took place in SA.)
Zuma in 2022 calls Putin a man of peace: mave.
_____________________________________________
Footnotes/ media comments: recent ones are at the bottom.
When the care homes situation had been reported in 2020, Grant Shapps said on TV: 1. "There was no instruction book", 2. "We didn't know that the disease could be asymptomatic" (his way of saying, 'We didn't know that we were sending virus into the care homes'.) Robert Jenrick had said the same two things in the morning on BBC Breakfast.
However, bear in mind that:
1. South Korea's first official case, confirmed on 20 January 2020, appeared healthy until they could check her more closely at a hospital. They decided then that they'd strive to test all contacts of infected people, whether or not they were showing symptoms.
2. A longstanding definition of a carrier, showing today on nih.com, was: 'A carrier is an individual with no overt disease who harbours infectious organisms'. There was NOTHING NEW about 'asymptomatic cases'.
3. The Koreans closed nursing homes in February 2020. (bfpg.co.uk - see under 'February 21'.)
MPs kept religiously silent about what S. Korea was doing from February to July, pretended that there was no story even when American journalists were praising it loudly in their news media. Our MPs made sure the subject was never broached on BBC TV until after the first lockdown was over. An 'MPs boycott' of all other TV channels ensured that the public would tune to the BBC for pandemic guidance: pmorg and mgove.
Tests are expensive for returning travellers, might be £120: bbc. In April, some Americans payed about $20 for imported ones from South Korea: Med.
Boris was like, "What's all this then?" when he popped into PHE in March, not realizing that South Korea had made millions of testing kits by that date.
Boris parted ways with Trump by running a big lock-down, but the UK death toll is higher per capita than US deaths. (Per million: UK: 914.9, USA: 856.0, S Korea: 10.6)
Some Asian countries had a head start with virus containment because their medics had visited Wuhan and seen the "abnormal practises" there. The medics went home with a determination to do better, but we looked the other way and stuck with the WHO instead.
1) They* cracked down on doctors who spoke of a contagious pneumonia.
3) They tried to stop travel bans in countries receiving flights from Wuhan.
*"They" are China in collaboration with the WHO. Trump stopped WHO subsidy in April but then we gave it a big bonus and kept a deaf ear to what other Asians were doing after they'd visited Wuhan in mid-January: Exp, yah
3) They tried to stop travel bans in countries receiving flights from Wuhan.
*"They" are China in collaboration with the WHO. Trump stopped WHO subsidy in April but then we gave it a big bonus and kept a deaf ear to what other Asians were doing after they'd visited Wuhan in mid-January: Exp, yah
Dec 7. Trump gets praise for his vaccine program and his break with the WHO is explained: Wholapdog.
The WHO published instructions for making a coronavirus test on January 13 but Hancock
1. didn't notice that,
2. ignored WHO advice to "test, test, test" on March 16 and,
3. gave it a £55 million bonus in April.
09/02/2021 - more lockdown is suggested by 'the science': We have put our faith in the assumption that the economic fall-out will be manageable, but we also assumed that something would be done to safeguard people in care homes last winter-spring. (On TV, we'd seen Hancock say that protecting the elderly was a priority.) Our faith/money was in the WHO and that's why we hadn't become aware in time that the Chinese were doing a cover-up: The WHO was an agent of that cover-up but we showed more faith in it by sending it a bonus in April: £55 million. We "follows the science" but didn't stop inward travel of the virus at airports or through the Channel tunnel, and were very late in getting PPE. We had scrapped the committee called THRCC in July 2019, which might have acted sooner and assembled a virus-beating response like the one that's worked in S. Korea....
09/02/21 - Testing to commence at airports: In July 2019, Tories scrapped the committee called THRCC which might have assembled a virus-beating response like the one that's worked in S. Korea. In February 2020, they didn't want to suggest tracking of phones to find and quarantine infected people. That was 'privacy invasion' and would have put their political image at risk.
Not responsible:
1. Scrapping THRCC in July 2019 (to "slow down on things" that weren't useful to Brexit.) THRCC was effectively a pandemic watchdog.
2. Shutting Parliament down in September so that a scrutiny of Brexit stratagems couldn't take place.
3. Dismissing the WHO's suggestion to "test, test, test" on March 16.
4. Skipping all the COBRA meetings at the beginning of 2020 (5 in all.)
5. Preventing accounts of South Korea's test-based response from being shown on the BBC until November 2020. It had flattened the curve before March, was just as effective against a second wave after the UK variant got in at the end of the year.
6. Ignoring all non-communist Asian countries that quickly imposed travel bans and closely monitored airport arrivals. - NERVTAG ruled out thermal screening when it would have detected a percentage of any infected truck drivers who continued to drive in through the Eurotunnel.
7. Acting as a denialist until March 5, e.g. "I'm shaking hands with everybody" and, "This is not the most serious disease!" on March 3.
8. Not helping care homes when coronavirus was getting in and killing residents quickly.
9. Giving a £55 million bonus to the WHO in April after it was shown to have been accessory to the CCP's cover-up.
India descends into a terrible wave of deaths: -- India once called Queen Victoria its 'Empress' and still looks to the UK as a source of progress, particularly in medical matters. But could they read the signs in 2020 with our Health Secretary doing things in a smoke and mirrors way? What he said was sometimes the opposite of what he really had in mind. (e.g. He said in February that protecting the elderly was a priority but he didn't close the care homes to virus ingression in March, as South Korea had done in February.)
How many Brits noticed in 2020 that the Eurotunnel was always open and what that must have meant in terms of containment of coronavirus? Hancock pretended that 'Track and trace' would get the virus contained (as in South Korea) but then he found it very easy to simply lock us down and wait for a vaccine to be developed. Testing stations were established (for obvious reasons) but tracing never took off. (It could only have helped us if he'd started it at the end of January.)
India doesn't have infrastructure that's well-suited to lockdowns and their hope for a widespread vaccination program isn't likely to be fulfilled any time soon. Perhaps, they'd be better off if they'd looked to the South Koreans instead. The Koreans pinned their hope on containing spread rather than simply waiting for a vaccination program. (The MERS outbreak in 2015 had dented their economy so they got busy with test-and-trace as soon as they realized how deadly SARS-Cov-2 can be.)
May 6: in response to John Bercow calling No. 10's action in Jersey "juvenile and down market" -- I'd like his opinion on the decision to do nothing about the pandemic until it had spread right across the country /ignoring that South Korea had done two months of intense spread-prevention already.
G7 preparation was behind the aesthetic destruction of Carbis Bay: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10225887075551298&set=a.1332983292410
7 May 21: Tories have been happy to have Indians making vaccines for export while the majority of Indians can't get one. We see how effective vaccination has been here but could more lives have been saved before it was available?
Care home residents had human rights violated by government after getting vaccination, were practically in solitary confinement for great lengths of time: -- Govt. was making their lives hell until it faced legal action.
Hancock said in February 2020 that caring for the elderly would be a priority, but all that Hancock ever meant was that the elderly would be first to get the vaccine (when hard working scientists could make one available.) Johnson was in hospital when Hancock was doing nothing to protect care homes. 19000 are known to have died before anything was done to make them safe (cf. in South Korea, nursing home were closed on 21 Feb 2020
Cummings knows not to expose the Tories in every way that he could, e.g. What effect did having the Eurotunnel open all the time have? Answer: It meant the UK response was actually very simple: Lock everyone down and wait for a vaccine. Very costly too. Cummings also stays on-side with the Tories by continuing be silent about South Korea's world-beating response and the fact that their first official case, confirmed on January 20, was 'asymptomatic' (although she had a high temperature - showing that NERVTAG was wrong to throw out thermal imaging.)
We might gain better control of variants with responsive, task-force-style containment as practised in South Korea. Their testing and tracing greatly limited their mortality (still below 2000 total) but our top Tories have meticulously ignored it from the start.
Hancock's initial strategy was do nothing unless things got bad. That prevented us from having a task force like the one in S. Korea (less than 2000 dead even with the UK variant in December.)
12/06/21 A lateral flow test can give a false negative, making it profoundly different to the original test which has PCR functionality. But hey, strong on detail hasn't been the John son hallmark in our pandemic response.
Kudos to Susanna Reid today for telling the Shadow Health Secretary that Labour MPs have been comfy back-seat drivers for the last 15 months, not adequately challenging crucial decisions that Hancock and his men have made on the quiet (often in secretive WhatsApp groupings?) He said: "They rolled out the red carpet for the Indian variant" but he is still keeping quiet about the lack of thermal screening at airports. That screening would now be detecting variant carriers who, instead, have been free to walk in at our airports. (Use Ctrl-F)
S. Korea's first case was detected with airport thermal screening (she was otherwise 'asymptomatic') but Hancock and his NERVTAG men ruled against using the screening in the UK in 2020:
With no screening at the Tunnel, there couldn't be any at airports either as that might invite quarrel, e.g. Why would it be OK to protect life in one place but not at the other? Why were we continuing to let coronavirus be brought into the UK in lorries?
NERVTAG decided the matter by saying that thermal screening isn't an effective tool because it cannot catch every case.
Surely, heat sensors could have been used to detect at least some of the variant carriers arriving at our airports? It would definitely have been "saving" some "lives", but Hancock won't broach the subject.
S. Korea has thermal screening at airports which catches a good number of the arrivals who are infected. NERVTAG's men dissed the screening in 2020 because it cannot catch every case. Variant just gets walked through at our ports of entry.
Surely, Hancock would have preferred that every measure was taken to reduce ingression of variants until the majority have had both vaccines? Therefore, why has he persisted with the decision that his NERVTAG men made early in 2020, i.e. No thermal screening at airports?
Labour have been comfy back-seat drivers for the last 15 months, not probing crucial decisions that Hancock has made on the quiet, e.g. No thermal screening at airports which today would catch a percentage of variant carriers before they enter the country.
But not a single hint that thermal screening might add useful data re. variant ingression. There has been an unfounded bias against thermal screening because its rejection served what was desired at the Eurotunnel port.
https://cornishstuff.com/2021/06/18/covid-spike-in-cornwall-not-linked-to-g7-summit/?fbclid=IwAR1_FB89pIEz2U6vLWsDwrJYHqXDvY6XNPtlFeCLOJxEstArdZ5g87bBy7Y
More than once in this pandemic, scientists have expressed opinions/wants (not always their own) as fact, e.g. on March 1st, 2020 at PHE in Colindale: bit.ly/conwho - scroll to Part 2/'March'. (Later, a NERVTAG knighted scientist decided that thermal imaging is fruitless in spite of the fact that South Korea's first confirmed case was detected that way. Our airports still do not screen arrivals and there isn't any other tool that gives immediate indication of high risk (just as there's no substitute for a sniffer dog.) Use Ctrl-F with 'thermal'
Clunky, late-starting response led to extra loss of life and business. Some scientists were bad sources of advice.
19/06 https://www.facebook.com/BBCQuestionTime/ - care worker in tirade against compulsory vaccination.
Now you see that care home residents were extremely vulnerable. They caught the disease from staff as well as from anyone else who entered their buildings, which had none of the tech being used to protect people in S. Korea (e.g. separation of ventilation systems, phone apps that helped doctors do video consultations with patients....)
Nicola and Devi Sridhar used to tweet at each other in 2020 and then she proclaimed: "There's no point in comparing countries". Google still posts a stark reminder that it was South Korea that did the right thing because it had the right scientists.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/matt-hancock-boris-johnson-accepts-apology-125636479.html
When did the smooching begin? 2020? Nurses have toiled in uncomfortable PPE on extended shifts... Vine on BBC Radio 2 this week spoke with parents who had not been encouraged to take sick kids to A&E. One woman said her 5-year-old could have been helped easily if diagnosed in time, but ended up with a stroke and life-changing consequences. Could Hancock have worked harder, much earlier, and kept the hospitals safer?
In South Korea last February, you saw women taking leading roles in fighting the spread of the virus (see Channel 4 video; link in blog). Hancock and his men hung around for more than a month and then ignored everything the S. Koreans had done, then suppressed news of it on BBC TV.
'Lack of any obvious symptoms' is the first thing that South Koreans noticed about their first case in January 2020, detected with thermal screening at an airport. Right away, they decided that all contacts of infected people would be tested, regardless of symptoms. Somehow, the WHO 'announced' the possibility of asymptomatic cases as a new finding several months later, seeking to restore credibility and usurp the leadership shown by South Korea?
A society-protecting innovation, the recent history of which was muted on BBC television during our first big lock-down. The society that took it seriously now has a very low deaths-total of 2,015 in spite of having more people per square mile than we do.
on BBCQT: You saw women taking leading roles in fighting the spread of the virus in South Korea last February (see Chan), rather than just sitting in their homes and talking on zoom like Devi Sridhar. Hancock and his men hung around for more than a month and then ignored everything the S. Koreans had done, then suppressed news of it on BBC television.
Early in 2020, it was decided that the Eurotunnel should be kept open, meaning that the virus could come into the UK that way. NERVTAG advised to risk not having any thermal screening as that would interfere with the lorry drivers. But wasn't it silly to also have no screening at the airports when so many were hurrying back to the UK from skiing holidays? How did they propose to "put a shield" around care homes if they couldn't set up anything at the airports to shield the country?
Would it be fun to speculate which country in the World might the the safest and best-functioning at the moment? Could it be South Korea, never once mentioned by Hancock, and for a reason
To South Koreans, westerners must seem to be going through a form of anti-renaissance, their science and logic thwarted by nonchalant politicians and ignorance spread in digital ways. OK, South Koreans weren't able to develop a vaccine but they did keep their death-rate very low while waiting for one.
Thanks to NERVTAG, our airports have never had any form of live screening. Its argument was that some people will always get past thermal screening, therefore we shouldn't have any.
Taiwan has waited for vaccine but has had a very good system for preventing spread in the meantime. (South Korea and Taiwan have been like brothers in this, both westernized and not waiting for mixed messages from the WHO, which excludes Taiwan in order to appease China.)
Zahawi said yesterday that we must still follow "the guidelines" after the rules are gone. Then, we were shown men in public with shirts off, embracing and jumping around as if there has never been a pandemic. New surges in cases were mentioned. Hancock gave MPs two strict instructions in March 2020: 1) Do not talk to any TV channel but the BBC. 2) Avoid saying, "South Korea" and don't get into dialogue about that country's type of pandemic response. The logic of the S. Korean response was instructive for its citizens: The man-in-the-street quickly grasped what he needed to know about the virus and how to behave in the interest of safety. (You won't see S. Koreans roistering in the streets today while they still keep a close eye on viral spread.) Nobody in the UK had the benefit of such early knowledge of the virus last February: The BBC kept news of the South Korean response off its family-time TV until November. In March 2020, most in the UK could only obey new rules without knowing what the over-all plan was. (Isn't that why nobody asked: "What about the care homes? Shouldn't somebody help them to be safe too?") Therefore, it's not surprising now to see examples of disregard for "guidelines" as soon as there's talk of lifting the "dictats" (Zahawi's playful version of "dictates".) The South Korean people have had complete access to the 'pandemic science' from the start so that people can know instinctively how to act. They have always been encouraged by the government's focus on safeguarding commerce and industry (by avoiding lock-downs as much as possible.) How many shops have closed in your town? Should we be begin a national count?
The nation's brains weren't all immediately sent home to sit on furlough in South Korea. Some became fully engaged in fighting the spread of the virus. With our top brains stuck at home, the response relied heavily on the efforts of smoochy Health Minister Matt Hancock. In S. Korea, anyone could be useful, e.g. that teenager who came up with a surveillance website where anyone could see exactly where the latest cases had been confirmed.
There were women in South Korea in 2020 who were leaders in fighting the spread of coronavirus while our lady scientists merely appeared on zoom interviews with the BBC from their laptops at home (being locked down there.) It would be fair to say that our pandemic decisions were all made by men, the women quite placid in their high-ranking slots: (See the South Korean women here: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus?fbclid=IwAR3ARKwIqBv6ei5HOxwqllcA6DXZe5Zc2z8u10EZZhEBX9Bh7c-127eqlpQ)
Uni of Edinburgh, 20/09/2021
We see Professor Bauld a lot now on BBC Breakfast as we did during our first lockdown in 2020. We also used to see Devi Sridhar, head of GPH in Edinburgh. What's puzzling is how their expertise was obviously not reaching top MPs in the first few months when it might have had some effect. Both professors never mentioned the striking progress that was made quickly in South Korea (Sridhar did mention S. Korea once on the BBC, but only to imply that it used brutal tactics in its response.)
It was the same south of the border: On 1st March, Mr Johnson was filmed receiving a very dubious answer ("it's only hurting old people in China") from a staff member at PHE in Colindale. (See this on the Channel 4 documentary that's still available online: )
bbc article talks about false science
False science put us off guard last January, February and March: 'A virus that had evolved to get into a human's cell and replicate (hence, the covid symptoms as the replicates get into more and more of that human's cells) but the next generation of virions not then being able to get into another human's cell/s and undergo replication.' Call it pseudoscience but the WHO passed it on.
Guardian asks why are we so chilled about covid-19
... Because we sat at home from March 2020 and were spoon fed what the gov wanted us to see on BBC One, where South Korea would never be discussed. (They boycotted other channels so we'd all be watching BBC One)
"worst public health failure"
In order to amplify their position that the lockdown should have been imposed sooner, the MPs (and "22 scientists") are omitting the fact that the WHO had signalled a very low threat to public health in early January 2020. Some countries less distant from Wuhan, who don't bask in the WHO's radiance, knew to get busy straight away, not with locking down but with containing the virus person-by-person.
American reaction to the WHO's detrimental involvement with the CCP was dismissed by Hancock as if Trump had made it up himself. Almost in defiance, we gave the WHO a £55 million bonus before spending anything on our care homes. (We sent another £55 million for a different project in 2021.)
After being called out for pedalling the CCP lies, the WHO then adopted ideas from the South Koreans without acknowledging them or suggesting anybody follow their example. By habitually referring to the WHO (without actually following its guidance much), we conceal the fact that the South Korean method was rejected by us from the start. We chose to do a response that amounted to simply locking down until vaccine-makers would save the day.
The critical MPs are also omitting the fact that countries like South Korea were avoiding locking down as much as possible in order to protect their economy. However, they did quickly close nursing homes and any other facilities in which viral spread might be hard to control. - This was not a 'test-based' decision, just common sense. (Our men say that they had a short supply of coronavirus testing kits and therefore couldn't know that it was reckless to put covid-19 patients into care homes.)
Thanks to NERVTAG scientists, we've never had thermal screening at the Eurotunnel, at airports, or at any other ports of entry. However, anyone entering an NHS covid-19 lab today must pass through the building's front door (even if they work at the back) because that is where the thermal screening is done.
Hancock to work at UN
He's the one who thought it amusing that our modelers "thought it was flu". He made sure we didn't try anything that might ask him to go out on a limb as South Korea was doing, and then made the BBC keep their triumph out of all lockdown TV programming:
Let's not forget that the WHO is a part of the UN and it was its eagerness to please China that caused us to think the threat from Wuhan was low.. (p.s. Would we ever think of letting them put flu patients into care homes? Why coronavirus then?)
The UN withdraws offer of work.
The WHO was sent an extra £55 million shortly after it was discovered that its "no human to human transmission" message was CCP hocus pocus which the WHO had copied from a tweet. Again, in 2021 we sent £55 million, this time for an educational project. But it seems that donations to the WHO don't make the UN feel obliged in any way?
Sridhar reappears, but on Channel 4 this time.
Prof. Sridhar was on BBC Breakfast almost daily during the lockdown but she never mentioned the South Korean response, which had been doing so well since February. In June, she said "We are lucky here in Britain" because some countries were showing brutality in their pandemic responses, and then she gave S. Korea as her example, suggesting that it had treated the Daegu cult leader harshly (patently untrue and it wasn't long before he was discovered to have defrauded his many followers.) In May, she had appeared in the Channel 4 documentary about South Korea and it mentioned no brutality, only a brilliant response program (2709 total deaths today. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus) Her reticence about the achievements of S. Korea whenever she appeared on BBC TV was obviously in line with a hidden policy, because nobody on it was mentioning them. Then, on 31 October she did a 180 and called Boris' second lockdown, "this rubbish path" and said we should be copying "southern Asian countries" (which might explain why Linda Bauld does all the BBC Breakfast zoom chats now.)
Article calls Sridhar "Sturgeon adviser".
Nicola Sturgeon proclaimed that "there's no point in comparing countries". Her adviser, Prof. Devi Sridhar was helping the BBC keep quiet about the South Korean pandemic response... Total S Korean Covid deaths today? 2709.
Sunak's budget.
Why don't the Tories save some money by quitting the WHO (which is a subunit of the UN.) It led us badly astray last January with its "no human-to-human transmission" tweet.
On March 16, it said "test, test, test" but the virus was already well spread by then. Testing for the purpose of virus containment needed to be done first thing, in combination with restriction of travel. The WHO had criticized those who restricted travel and has never retracted that criticism.
The NHS has NEVER put flu patients into care homes but they did it with coronavirus patients - (seems they never communicate openly with overseas health bodies, just assume the WHO is the guiding authority.)
Gates preferred we forgot that the WHO fed us a false account of the outbreak, concocted by the CCP, giving it time to grow. He helped put the WHO back on its pedestal when Trump cut its funding
Bans on care home visits
People in care homes are being subject to isolation worse than during lockdown as care homes cover their backs against being accused of letting infection in. There's some relief on realizing that there is a 'Care minister' who has been petitioned but she never seems to get a mention in the media. Instead, Owen Paterson has provided another load of sleaze noise which helps forget the unnecessarily high number of people lost to covid-19 in the UK. Not forgetting that Hancock drew attention to older people as 'spreaders who would get the vaccine first, when there was one'.
Johnson walks with no mask in a hospital.
"Hancock didn't advise me well last winter but now I know where I'm safe"?
He caught covid in a hospital in March 2020 and spread it around by "shaking hands with everybody!" By that time, South Korea had flattened two flare-ups using the test they'd cut corners to have ready.
WHO chief slams Boris.
How 'ironic'(?) Boris sent the WHO a £55 million bonus after it let us all think it there was no sign of transmission. Two countries which aren't WHO favourites did things differently and triumphed. The WHO ignored them and most of the World has followed suit.
Is there anything more toxic than a 'Health Organization' which parrots CCP tweets (without noticing that what they say is as good as impossible), leading most countries to stand-down because "there's no human-to-human transmission"?
Sturgeon was steered by Devi Sridhar into telling Scots that they shouldn't bother looking at other countries' coronavirus responses. In particular, Devi made sure there was no interest in Taiwan and South Korea - she did the same thing many mornings in 2020 on BBC Breakfast:
'The West' ignored what Taiwan and South Korea had done from the start: Taking the WHO with a pinch of salt, they got a proper testing-and-tracing system together which would let them avoid big lockdowns.
We wouldn't have needed big lockdowns if we'd listened to Taiwan and South Korea two Januaries ago. They weren't influenced by WHO claptrap, got busy and shielded well without vaccine.
The South Korean response that circumvents big lockdowns didn't appeal to our MPs last winter. Their ear was still open to the WHO in spite of the falsity it had advanced on behalf of the CCP. Taiwan and S. Korea have a lot in common and neither is a WHO favourite (both have USAF bases and hostile communist neighbours.) What they did in February was lauded by some Americans but coherence was lacking in American leadership and six weeks were wasted by the CDC (trying to make its own test so that it would be 'Nobel standard'. That test was shelved and is not usable yet.) Countries in 'the West' (aligned with the WHO but not really paying it much attention) simply locked down and waited for vaccine and/or medication but, 'ironically', South Korea was one of the first to develop "antibody treatment" for coronavirus.
Lock downs for the unvaccinated?
Lock down the people in charge who completely ignored the perfectly logical system that's worked so well in Taiwan and South Korea. (By the way, both countries have USAF bases and have benefited from decades of American education. Both have enemy communists on their backs all the time.)
"No doubt we would be in lockdown without vaccination."
But South Korea and Taiwan worked out a system quickly that circumvents major lockdowns without vaccine. The WHO skilfully made it hard to notice what these two independent-minded countries did. Western governments were then also happy to be taking an easier road for themselves, even if it was very costly for their people..
No need to move to covid "plan B".
The last 21 months might have been 'Plan A' but it took only weeks for South Korea and Taiwan to get things under control and circumvent big lockdowns when vaccine was not yet available. (Hancock was "saving lives" but we often were losing 100-times more than S. Korea was, a fact that's never been acknowledged, let alone explained.) The WHO made it hard to notice what those two independent-minded countries did, not popular with the CCP. Western governments who were entrained to the WHO were taking a much slower and easier road for themselves, which was very costly for their people.
The WHO holds a public forum.
The BBC in January 2021 played back a secret recording in which Ryan had been very anxious about the obvious danger he could see in the Wuhan outbreak in its early days. That was in January 2020 and he was obviously brought back into line by his colleagues at some point. Van Kerkhov 'explains' why she favoured adherence to "the diplomacy that we use" with China, rather than challenging that country and sounding a more obvious alarm to the rest of the World.
"No doubt we would be in full-scale lockdown without vaccination."
But South Korea and Taiwan worked out a system quickly that circumvents major lockdowns without vaccine. The WHO skilfully made it hard to notice what these two independent-minded countries did. Western governments were then also happy to be taking an easier road for themselves, even if it was very costly for their people.
PM urges HS2 critics to "wait and see".
That "wait and see" approach cost lives and made a big lock-down unavoidable: There was no 'instruction book' but the South Koreans might have explained their simple system if we'd called them on a Samsung Galaxy? After all, it was their third coronavirus in two decades.
Ministers "not fully prepared" when covid hit?
It's worse than that. They rewarded the WHO shortly after it had facilitated China's cover up and, like the WHO, made no reference to South Korea's proven type of response, making sure very little was heard about it on UK television until after lockdown: They also adopted a 'No screening' policy at border crossings.
Care homes still denying family visits.
In 2020, people were reassured when Messrs.. Hancock and Johnson said that the elderly would get pandemic priority. What they didn't realize was that the elderly were becoming stigmatized as super-spreaders. They would be 'first to get the vaccine' to protect 'the rest of us'. In the meantime, Hancock was watching the effect of lockdown on NHS capability and didn't make any recommendations that would "shield" the care homes from viral ingression until 19,000 had perished.
Raab refusing to accept WHO's advice on face-masks.
They've used the WHO in their game of smoke and mirrors, sending it a bonus of £55 million and the same again in 2021 for a different cause. A 'World' health organization that helped China conceal the danger and slated countries for using travel bans, even after it had accepted that there really was an emergency. Mainly, the WHO's habit of ignoring South Korea was useful to Hancock because he wanted to obstruct news of that country's way of handling a coronavirus (hid it from the British public.)
The WHO says don't use travel bans for Omicron.
It's called Omicron so that people 'won't know where it comes from and then turn hostile toward that country'. WHO micro-managers imposed this formula not long after their "diplomacy" with China had given the initial outbreak more time to spread. They delayed warnings even after the CCP stopped saying that it wasn't killing people. "The virus doesn't seem to go human-to-human" and, "Don't use travel bans because that'll isolate China", said the WHO. (Countries which had closed borders were criticized even after it was admitted that there was an emergency. Now, they have again said, "don't limit travel" and they might be right this time but who listens any more? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiW3eyIyD3U) Are we still happy that Boris sends the WHO a few Pounds from each one of us every year?
#politicssouthwest 'The NHS was already on its knees before the pandemic' - As well as having dissolved our ministerial Health threats committee just months before the outbreak, the PM dodged meetings and there was nothing to slow the virus down until March 23rd:
People in South African care homes in 2020 were exposed to the virus just as badly as here in the UK. If Hancock had sent a warning to UK care homes last Jan/Feb, South Africans would have heard about it and followed suit...
Van-Tam says 'leave the panicking to us'.
"Let us do the panicking"? They were cool as cucumbers in 2020 in spite of 19,000 certified covid-19 care-home deaths between March and June, and a national toll of 71,000 in December when S. Korea had lost fewer than 600.
People in South African care-homes were also completely exposed to the virus with no adjustments in staff and visitor comings and goings.. If Hancock had sent a clear warning to UK care-homes,, South Africans would have heard about it and followed suit...
Omricon hitting South Korea hard. Van-Tam tells us to chill and let him do the panicking. In South Korea, they are anxious because Omicron is proving hard to contain and they have had "34 deaths". Which country seems to get a better sense of when to take things seriously (bearing in mind how often we've had more than 100 deaths daily in the last 22 months)?
Piers Morgan gets reaction after saying friend died needlessly.
Piers was the only TV personality to question the close control that MPs held over the media in 2020, i.e. boycotting everyone but the BBC (which they could keep silent about South Korea's success with this, its third, coronavirus.)
Western figureheads went with the WHO in ignoring the South Korean method for stopping the virus. (Is every level of data privacy so sacrosanct that it automatically justified western politicians' and scientists' silently ignoring South Korea's ability to quickly slow the spread of both MERS and covid-19? How does this square with the fact that service providers can snoop any customer's phone and or internet activity? There's nothing in place to stop them if they lack integrity.)
Re: Tory xmas party:
They might/might not have 'followed the rules' but did they look at any of the science re. the way South Korea handled MERS-CoV and then SARS-CoV-2? Obviously not or they wouldn't have been shaking hands in a hospital as late in the game as March 2020.
03/12/2021
Is it taboo to compare the death toll in South Korea with ours: 3705 vs. 145,000. That equates to 1 in every 463 Brits deceased vs. 1 in every 14,000 South Koreans. Our toll still climbs while S. Korea has been better at maintaining a low infection rate. (It's a well established fact that SARS-CoV-2 kills 1.9% of the people it infects. This figure might vary slightly between population groups.)
Government too accepting of WHO sell-out from the start means few now realize that South Korea (most of the time with no vaccine) has lost 1 person in every 14,000 while the UK has lost 1 in every 463.
Omicron may reduce the gap between infection and infectiousness.
There's a different gap which is increasing because, unlike the South Koreans, we still often lose more than 100 people per day to SARS-CoV-2.
There's been a longstanding effort to prevent an awareness that South Korea (most of the time with no vaccine) has lost 1 person in every 14,000 while the UK has lost 1 in every 463.
(Our toll still climbs while the Koreans have been much better at maintaining a low infection rate.)
More than half Omicron cases in England are in the double jabbed.
Hancock saw jabbing as the simple answer: 'We'll just lock down while the vaccine producers get busy.'
The quick and powerful Korean response was ignored on a pretense of moral superiority (the data privacy 'issue'.) South Koreans have lost 1 in 14,000 since the start of the pandemic. We have lost 1 in 463 (a figure that worsens daily.) Their way works without vaccine. Vaccine is a bonus to them.
Hancock saw jabbing as the simple answer that would free up MP time for other pursuits (affairs, parties, home improvement): 'We'll just lock down while the vaccine producers get busy.'
The quick and powerful Korean response was ignored in the West on a pretense of moral superiority (over the data privacy 'issue'.) South Koreans have lost 1 in 14,000 since the start of the pandemic. (Their method protects them regardless of vaccine availability.) We have lost 1 in 463 (a figure that worsens daily until everyone is vaccinated, by which time a new variant breaks through the vaccine shield.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1467840802512850947 Why has no post been made on the BBC Politics page for Dawn Butler's contribution yesterday? Butler made simple factual statements which obviously rattled the conservatives, and the chairwoman then didn't show her impartiality either. After pointedly saying that she was at the funeral of an MP recently (as if that terror incident had been driven by words from people like Butler?), Nickie Aiken said it's unparliamentary to accuse an MP of "lying". She said that Johnson "got us through this pandemic" and therefore shouldn't be subjected to such unkind accusations.
Would Aiken have been interested in the following question?: 'Is withholding information always less insidious than lying?'
Hancock had a system of media control in 2020 that prevented BBC TV from showing anything that would make South Korea interesting to Brits at home in lockdown. (All other channels were 'boycotted' by Tory MPs.) Hancock's system made it easier to prod the herd in desired directions - quiet and pliable while businesses dried up. It made sure he wouldn't be criticized for 1. Never completely closing national ports of entry or having thermal screening at any. 2. Not going after the virus in the way that South Korea did (with a method that had been successful in 2015 with the MERS coronavirus.)
The WHO was doing the same thing that Hancock was doing: ignoring South Korea and Taiwan (two countries that have always worked together and defied the CCP.) While most patrons of the WHO did the same thing (ignored the way South Korea slowed viral spread very quickly), we were often losing a hundred times more people, and spending massive sums while companies' futures were jeopardized.
WHO says vaccines should work against Omicron.
We still see the BBC giving credence to the WHO and we have twice sent it a £55 million bonus since April 2020. The two countries who best slowed the virus down have been consistently ignored by the WHO. The method they used was developed in response to the MERS coronavirus but the WHO ignored that too - because there was a privacy trade-off: Lives were saved but geographical phone and banking card data was used in the tracking down of disease contacts. (The data was "stripped of personal identifiers".)
Most westerners concurred with the WHO without thinking in any depth about the 'privacy invasion'. Privacy trade-offs are not new and have been written about. (On 07/12/2021, BBC One discussed the 'invasions of privacy' that will be unavoidable as Facebook, now known as 'Meta', will be developing 'the metaverse'.)
With half an ear to the WHO, its member countries' slow responses allowed very many to become infected.
Sturgeon calls Johnson 'corrupt'.
She followed Devi Sridhar's 'guidance' and advised Scots not to look at other countries' pandemic stories. They might have realized what a raw deal they've been getting?:
Joe gave the WHO its money back after it had ignored Taiwan's witness appraisal of the Wuhan crisis, conveyed to the West that the virus wasn't spreading, obscured South Korea's early progress with covid-19, delayed emergency declaration, and continued to criticize countries who'd closed borders (Joe must be getting thumbs-up all over the PRC :)
UK records 11-month record high number of infections.
There's no mention of the 120 who died 'in the last 24 hours'. Our daily deaths add up while South Korea stopped that trend early in 2020: They didn't wait for a vaccine and came up with a genuine way to protect people and their economy. The WHO kept quiet about how well South Korea doing and so did our Matt Hancock, who went as far as making it a banned subject on the only TV service that MPs were allowed to appear on..
12/12/2021. Criticism of Johnson hits all the channels:
He was battling covid when Hancock left the care-homes unprotected.
"he can override Hancock he's the prime minister!"
He's almost certainly had long-lasting effects including 'brain fog' which makes it harder to do decision-making.
"To be fair Hancock was the only health minister in Europe to order enough vaccines initially."
The European response was also badly compromised by their diffidence for the WHO. Some Americans made it clear that the WHO had helped the CCP do a cover-up. Hancock could read about it just as easily as anybody else.
Johnson or Biden? - He gave the WHO a money bonus after it had ignored Taiwan's witness appraisal of the Wuhan crisis, conveyed to the West that the virus wasn't spreading, obscured South Korea's early progress with their testing and tracing, delayed emergency warnings, and continued to criticize countries who'd closed borders (He must be getting thumbs-up all over the PRC.)
The WHO got a £55 million bonus after it had ignored the Taiwanese medic who told the truth about Wuhan. The WHO had suggested that the virus wasn't spreading H2H (had suggested the same thing with MERS) and kept silent about South Korea's early progress with testing and tracing. It made emergency warnings late and then continued to slate countries for closing borders (including S. Korea.) Has anybody at the WHO ever spent a shift in PPE?
One country avoided lockdowns as much as possible and got a head-start in slowing the spread of the virus. The WHO ignored it because of its being mates with Taiwan and not fond of China (and it was dismissing the WHO's pet theory that there was no H2H transmission.) Our government took steps to keep its success off the BBC during Lockdown 1 and still never mentions it now.
Govt now being called 'doom-mongers'.
It was rational scientists who were called "doomsayers" by Johnson in 2020 when they tried to make it known what had been observed in Wuhan. He rewarded the WHO for its hush-hush approach.
So much abandonment of people's businesses while the pandemic response was kept as simple as possible: Almost nothing like what South Korea did was attempted when it would have had an effect, before infection could go widespread:
Keeping the public in the dark about the real decisions that were made last March - That wouldn't have helped people solve their day-to-day difficulties well. e.g. Some small companies must have thought "OK, we can go home for a while. It won't last long" not knowing that Hancock knew full-well that the lockdown would last many months while a vaccine was being developed..... People in care homes had no system to tell them that a 'tsunami' of infection would race through their open doors. People in South Korea, on the other hand, had a much better picture of what was going on and knew instinctively to close "nursing homes" on February 21.
Omicron cases grow by 10,000 as major incident declared in London.
Johnson kept sending an 'it's over' message with his mask-free walks around hospitals. Now we see an over-reaction which is killing off more businesses.
Finder of Omicron describes cases as "extremely mild".
A noisy emergency now does help gloss over certain very costly omissions by the WHO, by Biden, by Johnson and by many other heads of states in 2020:
Dorries removed from Tory MPs WhatsApp group
Their WhatsApp habits are bad for leadership. Gossiping in secret about each other doesn't foster good decision-making: (Use Ctrl-F to find 'WhatsApp')
A comment in facebook, 19/12:
South Korea dealt with the pandemic brilliantly. They are still very proactive about it as the cases rise. They acknowledged that schools were causing spread and they only went back fully in person in November 2021, but have said if numbers expand they will be back to online learning. Mass testing and contact tracing, testing of people before going into hospital, not after. Closing of care homes. Disinfection, warnings to ventilate spaces. Isolation. They treated it for what it was. An airborne virus.
The President of South Korea offered to help the UK with its response but the UK refused. Why would you refuse help from counties very experienced in dealing with viruses?
Johnson becomes Santa Claus?
Jab = Xmas present? He gave the WHO a few presents after they set us off on the wrong track ........The WHO suggested that MERS didn't spread human-to-human, implying that South Korea's testing and tracing response had been a waste of time. Five years later, the WHO supported China's tweet which said the same thing about SARS-CoV-2 (not spreading H2H) and kept silent about South Korea's early progress against this coronavirus. It delayed its international emergency warning and then continued to criticize countries who'd used travel bans to prevent viral spread (including S. Korea.) Has anybody at the WHO ever spent a shift in PPE? Let's have them stop sending UK money to the WHO - two bonuses of £55 million since last April that we know of.
Closing of businesses. If every town has lost at least one, how many are gone now?
Hancock showed no inclination to avoid lockdown by copying South Korea. Instead, he had BBC One and Devi Sridhar keep silent about South Korea until after our first lockdown was lifted.
The WHO has been trying to kill South Korea's coronavirus story for at least six years, ever since that country faced the quick-killing MERS coronavirus in 2015. The WHO's ploy was to publish a statement that MERS-CoV didn't seem to spread human-to-human, implying that South Korea had been wasting its time chasing it down with its new testing-and-tracing method ('the outbreak was over anyway'.) As soon as China, 'by coincidence', said that SARS-CoV-2 didn't show H2H transmission, the WHO chimed in with concurrence and suggested that countries stop using travel bans that would "isolate China economically". For most countries, the WHO succeeded in snuffing their awareness of what they could have done in February 2020 by copying S. Korea. It wasn't until March 16 that the WHO said, "Test, test, test", by which time SARS-CoV-2 had spread everywhere and no testing-and-tracing team on Earth could hope to contain it. In the UK, Health Minister Hancock showed no inclination to avoid lockdown by copying South Korea. Instead, he had BBC One (the only TV channel which MPs didn't boycott) and its regular consultant, Devi Sridhar keep silent about South Korea until after our first lockdown was lifted.
With a test and tracing system that's never been applied on time, the UK has had days with 100 times as many deaths as in South Korea. More recently, with South Korea needing to re-open to a world which never gained control as it did in 2020, it has been losing people a lot more quickly. But the two totals remain strikingly different: 5176 vs. 148,000. (SK has more people per sq. mile.)
Australians might charge the unvaccinated for hospital time.
South Korea is a place you can survive whether you have the vaccine or not. Time wasn't wasted waiting for vaccine and the deaths total there is still strikingly low for a hi-tech country with dense population:
Johnson and Biden take the WHO seriously but the WHO only sees South Korea as a country to be upstaged and ignored (being mates with Taiwan.) We all pay the price.
Western leaders were dismissive of South Korea in 2020 and then learning too little, too late, from its success: The WHO had been discrediting South Korean achievements in disease control since at least 2015. By asserting that MERS didn't spread human-to-human and then backing China's opinion that covid-19 was likewise being caught mainly from animals, the WHO made the Korean testing and tracing seem to be a waste of time. By imposing a travel ban, the Koreans were 'making another decision that wasn't evidence-based!' Koreans were even going as far as 'breaching data privacy without any evidence-based reason for doing so!' Time has shown how fallacious the WHO has been but there's no further scrutiny since Trump withdrew its funding.
"As of 9am on Tuesday (28/12/2021), a further 129,471 lab-confirmed cases were recorded in the UK."
S. Korea reported <4000 today.
Why so different to the UK? S. Korea first established a very effective test-and-trace system and has always had thermal screening at airports (which NERVTAG said doesn't work, although its been compulsory at big NHS test-processing facilities.)
The WHO is part of the UN. In 2015, it began distorting scientific ideas in a way that would make South Korea seem misguided, not making "evidence-based" decisions:
Have they yet realized that a poor grip on virology coupled with hostility for South Korea is what caused us to receive late warnings and scant advice from the WHO? If so, will they keep throwing bonuses of £55 million at it?
In 2012, a WHO publication denied that pneumonia outbreaks were evidence of a virus which spreads human to human. MERS-CoV was said to show 'no H2H transmission' but South Korea saw in 2015 that outbreaks inside four hospitals (caused by one man who visited them) were proof of human-to-human transmission. They got their testing method going again in January 2020, now expanded and synced with phone technology, but the West was kept in the dark. Our leaders seem to have let the WHO off the hook, even sending it bonus cheques now and then.
Will anyone challenge Hancock, Van-Tam etc. for helping the country be duped by a WHO 'theory' which began in 2012? The result of WHO thumb-sucking was millions of animals killed needlessly in 2020 and a fatal delay in response advice. (Two bonuses of £55 million each have been sent to the WHO since April 2020, that we know of.)
The WHO should be shut down for its 2012 'idea' which, repeated in 2020, was used to justify the harmful delay of its emergency warning and the killing of millions of animals as 'spreaders'. (Two bonuses of £55 million each have been sent to the WHO since April 2020, that we know of.)
Van-tam gets a knighthood.
03/01/2022 - 73 deaths in the last 24 hours
South Korea's mortality rate has steadily increased since it re-opened airports in December 2020. The President came to the G7 in Cornwall and seems unlike the Koreans who worked flat out to cut the spread so effectively. Nevertheless, if we have 73 deaths every day (like in the last 24 hrs), it will take 78 days to lose as many people as they have since January 2020.
What's "Sir" Jonathan Van-Tam done that helped us, beyond persuading people to comply with the half-baked response that Hancock chucked together at massive expense? (19,000 had died in care homes by the end of June 2020.)
As an academic, Van-Tam should have been alarmed when the WHO was pushing a 'no H2H' theory which simply wasn't virology, and should have protested at the £55 million bonus it received after holding back knowledge of the effective South Korean response. The WHO did these things to stall western responses and 'protect China from travel bans'.
06/01/2022. Grant Shapps said just now that the economy is "going gang-busters". After mentioning the price at the pump, his Party is "assisting" wherever it can, for example helping people with their heating bills ... The Breakfast interviewer got no chance to probe in a zoom setting and didn't ask what about all the shops that have disappeared from the high street since March 2020? - Were they just collateral of Johnson's Lockdowns? Lockdowns were a measure which S. Korea worked hard to avoid and which they saw as, 'typically CCP'.
When Biden restored US patronage of the WHO, he made it seem to be 'the good guy' (as opp. Trump.) When the WHO had spun a yarn ("there's no H2H") to stall westerners and shun South Korean progress ('to protect China from travel bans'), that was mischief.
Anger at latest China lockdown
It was fear of lockdowns that drove South Koreans to come up with an effective response to covid-19. Having living memories of life under oppression, they are wary of anything that's authoritarian.
In another of its mischievous moves, the WHO concealed how well their testing and tracing beat spread, preferring to highlight the 'authoritarian' way they displayed recent case movements on a website after tracking phones and credit cards. (It was done with names and addresses removed.)
Zahawi and Van-Tam need to admit that the WHO did harm in January 2020 with its notion that there was 'no human-to-human transmission'. The same thing was said in 2012 about MERS-CoV because, 'No H2H' made it seem that travel bans wouldn't achieve anything (and preventing travel bans suited CCP interests, of course.) 'No H2H' also implied that South Korea's testing-and-tracing was a sham, because 'all transmission had been animal-to-human!'. The WHO has never apologized for the mistake, persists in suggesting that countries make travel ban decisions which are "not evidence-based". The WHO has received two £55 million "bonuses" from Whitehall since April 2020 that we know of. (that's one-tenth of a Billion and it was just "bonus".)
Zahawi uses the word, 'endemic'. The use of the word 'endemic' might be optimistic but questionable. It implies that future mutants will be limited to their country of origin. Worth mentioning lest we forget: the WHO mixed up viral and non-viral biology in January 2020 to argue that China shouldn't face travel bans (but Biden sent it a Billion Dollars last year? more?) Van-Tam seems not to have noticed how fallacious the WHO was. It's received two £55 million "bonuses" since April 2020, that we know of.
May 2020 BYOB
They let the WHO fool them into ignoring the method of South Korea (587 lives lost by Dec 14.) An easier time was to be had by spraying money at contractors (70,752 lives lost by Dec 18.)
Scientists believed covid leaked from Wuhan lab - but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’ "Scientists feared debate could hurt international harmony". Were they WHO scientists? The WHO's desire to avoid 'hurting' China led to delays in health warnings: There was a preoccupation with preventing travel bans which the WHO said would "isolate" China economically. In 2012 with MERS, a WHO update had already started pushing a fallacy of 'no human-to-human transmission' (which was disproved by circumstances in South Korea in 2015.) The WHO's intention was easily overlooked, i.e. Only H2H transmission gets these viruses across international borders: Say that there's no sign of H2H transmission and you'll find that countries are slower to impose travel bans. That pleases the CCP. (It has members who infiltrate the WHO as employees?)
Prof Sir Jonathan Van-Tam is leaving his role
It's odd that Van-Tam overlooked something fundamentally out-of-the-ordinary in the news coming from the WHO at the start of the pandemic. He has never commented on the WHO's persistence in suggesting, "no sign of human-to-human transmission". The WHO realized in 2012 that this message would make governments less inclined to have travel restrictions. (If MERS wasn't moving, 'human-to-human' then it wouldn't spread across borders!) China doesn't like travel bans and the WHO has employees who are members of the CCP. Even if Van-Tam 'didn't know the politics', he should have been puzzled by the WHO's idea, which cannot feasibly work for a respiratory virus in the way that was implied (animal-to-human transmission occurs with Rabies but have you ever heard of a rabies epidemic?) Does Van-Tam care about the details any more than the WHO did and why has he shown no concern about the big sums we send (two £55 million bonuses since April 2020, that we know of)? ps. It goes without saying that the WHO's message had a global effect in slowing readiness for what was to come.(https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/306804870493851)
Van-Tam, tacitly: "Forget the economy. Forget about the care-home tragedies (at least 28,000 by the time he entered the scene.) Just hoard as many vaccine doses as we can." Academically? V-T never bothered about the WHO's fallacious "no human-to-human transmission" message (proved wrong for MERS in 2015) which was pushed solely to make travel bans seem unnecessary. (China would 'be hurt' by travel bans and the rest of the World could go to hell.)
Re: Dominic Cummings helping stir the issue of No. 10 parties.
Cummings is a red herring. He's never mentioned the care-home deaths and only once said we should have emulated "Taiwan". Just like all the other Tories (who were forbidden to appear on any TV channel but the BBC), he never says, "South Korea". There's a pattern and it suggests that Cummings is a double agent.
The WHO made it difficult to realize that South Korea did much better by not locking down. The WHO repeated that there was "no human-to-human transmission" (its idea made up for MERS in 2012, disproved by circumstances in 2015) so that countries might not restrict travel. (The WHO was trying to please China this way and the rest of its member countries could go to hell.)
Cummings says Boris was warned about drinks.
Whenever Dominic makes another appearance, two things remain the same: 1. He never gets close to discussing the loss of 28,186 care home residents between 2nd March and 12th June 2020. (Did it never cross his mind that care homes might have needed government consideration while everybody else was being sent home to lockdown? What sort of mind wouldn't it cross?)
2. He has said that Britain should have learned from Taiwan and had travel bans much sooner, but he's never said a word about South Korea (which was in a similar position to the UK: facing a coronavirus that had already been carried in by travellers from Wuhan.)
Why does Cummings keep 1. and 2. out of public discourse? Is he actually doing the Tories a favour by making noise that keeps these bigger questions to one side? He still has something in common with all the MPs involved: They never said "South Korea" on TV in 2020 and they still never mention its exceptional response now.
p.s. Should we continue to send the WHO about half a billion Pounds per year after it issued a misleading update in January 2020 which was a repeat of the one disproved in 2015 about MERS, i.e. "This coronavirus shows no human-to-human transmission". The sole purpose was to dissuade us from subjecting China to a travel ban but it also encouraged MPs to be casual about the health threat to ourselves. ('If there's no human-to-human transmission, then people can't carry it to other countries!')
p.s. Dr David Nabarro who works under the WHO's Director-General was on BBC Breakfast this morning, implying that we don't collaborate with other countries enough about mutants. (Do they ever stop criticizing us?) He was sitting in his home in Geneva where he must obviously have millionaires for neighbours.
Well I hope you feel better for that. But why should it matter that Dr Nabarro has a home in Geneva (where the WHO is based)?
L It suggests how affluent they are, duh. We paid the WHO nearly half a billion in 2018/19. It's anybody's guess what they get from us now, the tax payer. I doubt you've bothered to read the critique of their 'no H2H' idea. Even if top WHO admin clerks like your Nabarro couldn't sense that somebody hadn't understood the difference between a 'zoonotic virus' and any other kind of zoonotic pathogen, circumstances proved the idea wrong in 2015. But they pushed the same impossible notion again because it suggested that travel bans would be unnecessary/pointless. The desire to please commies in China forced a dumbing down of concepts and so many top 'academics' kept quiet. It's appalling. You feel any better?
G I Nabarro and I used to work for the same place. He was very highly regarded and I doubt very, very much he is making anything up.
· L W Yes, I'm sure he makes people happy in a social setting. He has all the assets for that. But I think by now he knows the WHO peddled non-science in order to make it seem that travel bans would be pointless. He knows this was to make China happy and that it delayed countries from starting to protect their citizens effectively. He also knows the WHO acted as though South Korea didn't exist and had no story to tell.
Re. hamsters and other pets to be culled in Hong Kong.
"Animals are regularly catching respiratory coronavirus which often mutates in them so that human-infecting strains are produced". Another distortion of science was the "coronavirus shows no human-to-human transmission" idea, suggested by the WHO for MERS in 2012. That one was proved wrong by circumstances in 2015 but was pushed again in 2020 because it might fool people into thinking that travel bans would be unproductive. ('No H2H' means that people won't spread it when they visit other countries!) - Of course, the WHO's motive was to please the CCP, because travel bans might "cause China to suffer international isolation". The WHO has plied communist-driven hocus pocus but hard-working Brits are sending it half-a-billion Pounds per year, maybe more! WHO aficionados live with the billionaires in Geneva
The WHO pushed bad science at the start of the pandemic ("This coronavirus shows no human-to-human transmission") to fool countries out of using travel bans which might 'hurt China'. The effect was leaders everywhere became casual about the threat to their own people. But we continue to send the WHO half-a-billion Pounds per year, maybe more.
The WHO disseminated some 'bad science' at the start of the pandemic by relaying a message that had come from the CCP in China.
In 2012, the WHO had suggested that MERS was not transmitted human-to-human. However, it must have realized in 2015 that four hospital outbreaks in South Korea were proof that there was H2H transmission: One infected man had travelled from hospital to hospital and then they had the outbreaks.
It seems likely that the CCP soon realized that a declaration of ‘no H2H transmission’ could serve to convince countries that travel bans won't achieve anything: ‘People might carry the disease to another country but they would not infect anybody there!’ When the CCP was using repressive tactics to cover up knowledge of Wuhan's pneumonia outbreak in 2020, it didn't hesitate to say that this new disease showed "no evidence of human-to-human transmission". The WHO did not challenge this, rather crafted its own announcement from China’s tweet. The CCP didn’t want any countries to restrict travel and the WHO obliged by discouraging travel bans in news communications.
The WHO kept silent about news of the South Korean response to covid-19 which should have been held up as an example for the World to learn from. (Looking at the page dedicated to S. Korea on the WHO's website, there is nothing new that relates specifically to that country, just two downloadable files dating from January 2019: who.int/republicofkorea/our-work)
By relaying China’s 'no H2H transmission' message to the World in January 2020, the WHO fooled countries into delaying travel bans and leaders in countries everywhere became casual about the threat to their own people. (Think about it from their point of view: First they hear that China says there’s no H2H transmission, then they get the same message from the WHO.) The WHO also delayed its international emergency declaration for at least a week and didn’t call the disease a ‘pandemic' for several weeks. It continued to say that countries had ‘damaging travel bans' which were “not evidence-based". Should we continue to send the WHO half-a-billion Pounds per year?
24/01/2022
"The WHO. When it speaks, you listen, you scientific guys", said a BBC Morning Live host this morning. Sadly. that's true even though the WHO was more interested in helping China to prevent travel bans in 2020 than it was in making anybody safer. Some Americans noticed what had happened (and the White House acted) but our men ignored them and sent an April bonus of £55 million on top of the half-billion we give the WHO p.a. "Test, test, test", said the WHO on March 16, 2020 but by then it was too late to contain the virus that way. Before March, its intention was, "Delay, delay, delay" and it achieved the delay by suggesting that there was "no human-to-human transmission." The same WHO suggestion had been made in 2012 for MERS and proved wrong by circumstances in 2015 (outbreaks inside four hospitals all traced to one man who'd visited each one.) While peddling the 'no H2H' nonsense, the WHO kept silent about South Korea's frugal and effective response, and it's put nothing new on its website page for South Korea since 01/2019.
______________________________
The following is a response to a suggestion that the 2020 spike in UK care-home deaths was possibly caused by a 'sudden loss of medical services in the first months of lockdown, particularly in cancer treatment.' The excess deaths being referred to occurred during the three month period between March 2nd and June 12th (see amnesty.) Lockdown began on March 23rd and, by June 12, people had begun to demand that government take some responsibility for helping care homes.
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"If, as you say, the posthumous PCR test results were not supported with any other evidence that the virus might have killed anybody, it's strange that, before the results were published, there was a spate of local news flashes about care home deaths "being air-brushed out of the national news", and then there were multiple reports of care homes quickly losing almost all of their residents.
Care-home deaths happened in countries like South Africa as well and they also had no conscious strategy for keeping virus out. Staff came and went as usual from a society that was getting the minimum of pandemic response support. I have first-hand experience of how quickly the virus killed after it was noticeable that somebody was having breathing difficulty. There was no mistaking the situation.
One NHS doctor I saw on TV brought it home when he described how the virus caused the lungs to become filled with fluid quite rapidly, literally drowning the patient, often regardless of intensive care. You may be right to point out that a portion of the care-home excess deaths was due to insufficient cancer treatment. On the other hand, people caught covid-19 when they had to leave care homes for short visits to cancer units at hospitals.
It's doubtful that Nuffield Trust-org is trying to exaggerate what happened: "Despite warnings of the potentially devastating impact of Covid-19 on care homes, the first wave of the pandemic saw an extraordinary number of excess deaths among residents. The scale of mortality in care homes laid bare long-standing problems with care home provision, as well as shortcomings in the response to the pandemic, which we discuss in our accompanying blog."
Boris' partygate?
Hancock adhered to WHO misguidance in January 2020 (more interested in stalling travel bans than keeping deaths to a minimum) and 100% ignored the way that South Korea expanded its method for MERS-CoV containment to that of SARS-CoV-2 (and we still throw half-a-billion Pounds annually at the WHO?)
May 2022. Grant Shapps says it's all (partygate) a trial-by-media. https://www.indy100.com/news/grant-shapps-partygate-defence-boris Grant Shapps wants the media to keep it quiet, just as the inner circle (Johnson, Hancock, Cummings and Sunak) kept BBC television quiet about South Korea during the lockdown of 2020, and boycotted all other channels so that no SK-related questions could get through. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1OJNJ4q-4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8pf_Om88Yg ///
The Irish might get a 'full pandemic inquiry'.
Bear two things in mind: 1. The WHO, assumed to be a global health sentinel, had priorities that didn't help us. Mainly, it was focussed on discouraging travel bans so that China wouldn't become "isolated". It had realized that a simple announcement, i.e. "There's no evidence of human-to-human transmission" would help to prevent such bans. 2. The British government, watched by many countries, was also not focussed on 'saving lives'. Like a war cabinet, it focused on a few 'targets' and any collateral would have to 'take care of itself'. Mainly, the health minister watched how well the NHS was coping after he had locked society down. Care homes weren't thought about and 28,000 extra deaths occurred in them between March and June 2020.
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False impressions were cunningly plied by China and the WHO in early 2020. Hancock, Johnson and Cummings likewise controlled media to limit what the public would see and hear about covid-19 on a daily basis.
The WHO was doing more than one thing at the same time. Some of its actions would suggest that it had the best of intentions, e.g. the publication of a coronavirus test on January 13. However, it was not relaying any information about South Korea's busy test-and-trace system (which had proved itself in 2015 against MERS.)
Matt Hancock also ignored South Korea’s quick response to covid-19 and sent a £55 million bonus to the WHO shortly after it had said that covid-19 showed 'no sign of human-to-human transmissibility'.
China had got this 'no H2H' idea from the WHO in 2012 and realized that it could help prevent travel bans by tweeting the same idea for covid-19. Behind the scenes, China was busily copying South Korea's ideas and applying them in its own ways. (To most outsiders, there was no sign that the ‘no H2H’ idea was conceived by the WHO in 2012, never supported by any data and disproved when four hospitals in South Korea had outbreaks that were traced back to one man who had visited each one.)
The WHO used every opportunity to discourage travel bans because of the way that they might affect China. Now, by resurrecting its "no evidence of human-to-human transmission" message, it could make such bans seem pointless: 'People can travel because they don't transmit these CoV diseases!'
A Taiwanese visitor to Wuhan had seen at a glance that the pneumonia outbreak was highly contagious. Obviously (to any ordinary person), South Korea needed to limit travel while doing covid-19 containment, but the WHO simply didn't talk about South Korea. Hancock organized (through WhatsApp) that the BBC would keep the Korean story off the TV screen until lockdown was over. He didn’t want anybody saying that there was a good alternative to simply locking the whole country down.
Hancock put the focus onto safeguarding the hospitals but 'forgot' about care homes after promising that “putting a shield” around them was a top concern. By waiting until March to act, he’d made certain that locking society down was the only way to take pressure off the NHS. - 'Forget about hunting the virus down with the frugal S. Korean system. Keep that story off the BBC and ban it as a topic of discussion for MPs.'
Adopting a war cabinet stance, enforcing simple directives that left individual concerns out of the picture (e.g. saving the family business), there was ample time for booze breaks. -----------------------
The WHO is a costly source of health news. (The UK now sends it approximately half-a-billion Pounds per year.)
In 2012, the WHO said that MERS showed no human to human transmission and later did not acknowledge that this was proved wrong by events in 2015.
In January 2020, it repeated the 'no H2H' idea for covid-19, disproved across the World by March. It didn't care and still argued against travel bans, for China's sake. The consequences have been grievous.
I know somebody who was posted in a country which had a MERS outbreak and he said it was a quick killer. Obviously, that's why S. Korea took it seriously and worked out a system that might contain it. These basic facts were submerged by the WHO, persisting with its 'no H2H' nonsense. Surely, the Tories knew that Taiwan and S. Korea might be side-lined because of WHO entanglement with China, but no, the Tories stuck with the WHO and minimized travel restrictions as much as possible, probably to keep China happy.
31/01 The whole S. Korea story was withheld from the BBC-watching public in the knowledge that the WHO wouldn't spill the beans either. (MPs boycotted other channels so that the majority would tune to the BBC every day.)
31/01 Theresa May jumps on the Boris-bashing bandwagon:
May was the PM who "didn't understand" or "ignored" the fact that a lawyer in South Africa can build a case entirely through 'plea bargains', exactly as was done during Apartheid: bit.ly/mugTaxi
In 2020, the whole S. Korea story was withheld from the BBC-watching public in the knowledge that the WHO wouldn't spill the beans either. (MPs boycotted other channels so that the majority would tune to the BBC every day.)
03/02
It was posted today that the UK had lost 303 people in the previous 24 hours. If sustained, this rate would give us about 100,000 deceased in 11 months. (compare with 71,000 lost in 11 months in 2020.) But, it's been proposed that the daily figures no longer be provided on-line. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/boris-johnson-covid-daily-updates-scrap-data-live-b980233.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1jkgsoNo_yE3Zp0d4szFpXgrq75QVDBScBQHWJOx8cZglQl4kfDieXlWQ#Echobox=1643814430 Such scrapping of figures will further prevent people from noticing a two-year trend: - Countries who thought the WHO was a watchdog suffered enormous losses, while democratic Asian countries (much wiser to the WHO's pro-China campaign) got control quickly and protected their economies (by avoiding lockdowns as much as possible.)
In 2020, there were days when we were losing 100 times more people than South Korea was. On December 18, our total was 71,000 but S. Korea hadn't yet lost 600. Trends did fluctuate with new variants and the lifting of S. Korea's travel ban (persuaded by Johnson? - the S. Korean PM did come to his G7 in Cornwall), but the big picture still gets no mention among MPs: Why is our total 157k while S. Korea's is 6k? SK has more people per square mile.
04/04 Johnson accused of making incorrect claims about employment figures
Yesterday, the Standard said he claims that COVID deaths are so low now that they need no longer be posted on-line. We had lost 303 in the previous 24 hours, which would amount to 100,000 dying in 11 months if sustained. (We lost 71,000 in 11 months in 2020.) Two days ago, our 24-hour count was 534 and three days ago it was 1,125. When you remember that South Korea lost fewer than 600 people in 11 months in 2020 (and they did no big lockdowns), you start to wonder?
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/boris-johnson-covid-daily-updates-scrap-data-live-b980233.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1jkgsoNo_yE3Zp0d4szFpXgrq75QVDBScBQHWJOx8cZglQl4kfDieXlWQ#Echobox=1643814430
07/04 - responding to a claim that daily deaths are still high because of anti-vaxxers and that they have caused severe damage to the UK economy.
You might consider that S. Korea was focused on saving the economy from the word 'go' and did it by avoiding lockdowns because it had proved in 2015 that test and trace can work... (Where there's a will, there's a way etc.) But BJ stuck with the WHO which had kept its members uninformed about SK, as desired by Chinese elements.
The London Evening Standard is the only paper still posting daily covid deaths:
Only the Standard keeps us up to date about the daily count which still makes South Korea seem a much safer to be. Some days its higher here than ever, e.g. was 1121 on Feb 1 (although a lot depends on your Google search phrasing - today the graph being shown has 534 as the highest daily count this month! I have a PrtScr copy showing 1121.) Let's accept the 534 figure and remember that SK lost that many in 11 months in 2020. But it's still never mentioned or analyzed - shows that 'certain people' at the top took a short cut and made the job simpler for themselves by ignoring/suppressing how SK did things.
09/02. Big Tory donor gives to Labour instead.
January 2020, there were two things to consider: 1. How to prevent deaths. 2. How to protect the economy.
For 1, vaccination was the goal in the long run. No government doubted that. But only a few Asian countries who were not WHO favourites seemed interested in 2.
South Korea showed "exceptionalism" and American journalists got very enthused about its fast-response system. Matt Hancock said that 1 was a big thing for him but he waited until the last week in March before doing anything at all. No. 2 never seemed to cross his mind.
Lots of energy gets wasted by ranting about anti-vaxxers. No energy put into exposing how most national pandemic responses should have begun with an urgent acquisition of face-masks: and we in the UK might have been better off exposing how what the BBC put out daily during lockdown in 2020 was only 'part of the truth' (not "the whole truth and nothing but the truth".)
Did the Covid modellers get it wrong?
S. Korea didn't put modeling in the fore-front. Rather, they upscaled a method they had used to stop MERS-CoV from spreading inside hospitals. Our modelers were somewhat slow to catch on and were simulating a 'flu outbreak' at first - documentation of this is hard to find but Hancock spoke of it on TV. When lockdown was over, a BBC documentary called 'Lockdown 1.0' made some of this very clear but, 'conveniently', is no longer viewable. ('54 Days' gave even more surprising detail which had been suppressed during lockdown, but that too had a short availability on BBC iPlayer.)
Britain seems to have beaten the virus. But have we been smart or just lucky?
Lucky? 160,000 killed while S. Korea used common sense and has lost 6000, most killed by variants after re-opening its border to countries that took ages to get control. Also compare the economic losses please. - no big lockdowns in S. Korea.
Gas price hike was caused by lockdown - less gas was bought therefore suppliers raised price.
A good way to deal with a coronavirus (without locking down) was worked out in 2015 but the story was suppressed by the WHO and then by Matt Hancock.
The following suggests that Matt Hancock was wrong to assume that hospitals wouldn't cope unless there was a national lockdown: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trusting-people-thing-saved-more-190617785.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews
Ghebreyesus to Jinping: "Yes, we respect your rejection of South Korean information, because they always support Taiwan." Biden to Jinping. "I need to make it seem there's a lot of damage to be undone, so I will restore USA support of the WHO." https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10225461168343884&set=a.1332983292410
In March 2020, Hancock predicted that hospitals would only manage their case-load if there was a national lockdown. The well-meaning public showed a cooperative spirit but had no facemasks to wear, so they were sent home where they wouldn't need any.
(Cummings asserted that there was a dearth of PPE in March and Hancock denied this but he didn't send any facemasks to care homes, so perhaps Cummings did not lie.)
A new report says that society would have done much better to avoid lockdown - https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trusting-people-thing-saved-more-190617785.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews
South Korea had closed nursing homes in February. In contrast, our care homes were not brought up to date and some were used to give hospitals somewhere to dump the bedridden.
Once Hancock had everybody indoors and watching a meticulously controlled BBC commentary, he played things by ear, called it "evolution".
Covid lockdown 'prevented only 0.2pc of deaths in first wave'
No big orders for facemasks were made by Health Minister Matt Hancock in January 2020 after he heard about Wuhan overflowing with pneumonia cases. (Dominic Cummings says there were no extra facemasks in the UK, only the normal stock levels for medical staff.) Hancock has always taken the WHO seriously and it had said that there was 'no evidence of human-to-human transmission' of covid-19, which was an echo of what it had said in 2012 about MERS (proved wrong in 2015 by outbreaks in four South Korean hospitals being traced to one man who'd gone from hospital to hospital.) Time went by and Matt realized in March that it would have been wiser to make orders for facemasks much sooner than he did. He covered the mistake by saying that the hospitals would soon be rammed if he didn't send everyone home to lockdown right away. At home, people wouldn't be phased that facemasks were only now starting to appear in shops. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trusting-people-thing-saved-more-190617785.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews
BBC article, 19/02/2022: "What are false flags? And when have they been used?"
Matt Hancock didn't make an order for facemasks in 2020 after he heard about SARS-CoV-2 (at least, that's what Dominic Cummings says.) He'd been listening to the WHO which said there was no evidence of H2H transmission. Without facemasks, people would spread respiratory virus easily at work. He covered his mistake by saying that the hospitals would be swamped if he didn't send everyone home where they wouldn't need facemasks. Was that a false flag and what did it do to the economy? https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trusting-people-thing-saved-more-190617785.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews
When can we have that 'late pandemic response' inquiry we were promised so long ago, and explore some things that Tory MPs have always omitted? Any mention of South Korean expertise was kept off BBC One during the long lockdown of 2020 (all other channels were boycotted by the Ministers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1OJNJ4q-4.) Professor Devi Sridhar, who'd been on BBC Breakfast a lot, persuaded Nicola Sturgeon to say that we could learn nothing from observation of overseas pandemic responses. The BBC never stopped quoting the WHO which had ignored what South Korea achieved with MERS in 2015. Outbreaks in South Korean hospitals proved that MERS-CoV transmits human to human. In 2020, the WHO's message that covid-19 was not showing, "evidence of human-to-human transmission" was an echo of what it had said about MERS in 2012. This time, the groundless 'theorizing' encouraged countries to dawdle and they became significantly late in responding. It was hidden from them how effective South Korea's method was. Next, we sent the WHO a bonus of £55 million in April (and another £55 million early in 2021) on top of the near half-billion it gets.
"SARS-CoV-2 jumped to people from animals in Wuhan wet market"
The same animal-to-human 'train of thought' is evident in a 2012 update made by the WHO regarding MERS-CoV, i.e. "the novel coronavirus cannot be easily transmitted from person to person”. Taking this idea further with SARS-CoV-2 in February 2020, the WHO was implying that all transmission was probably animal-to-human because, "There's no evidence of human-to-human transmission."
The original WHO update was proved wrong in 2015 by MERS outbreaks occurring inside four S. Korean hospitals which were traced to one man who'd visited each hospital after he'd caught the disease in the Middle East (nowhere near any wet markets like those in Wuhan.) But the WHO habitually ignores anything that happens in S. Korea because it's a country that has always supported Taiwan.
The nine covid billionaires (find it with Google) got rich faster thanks to the way so many countries ignored what South Korea did in February 2020. The Koreans paid attention to the immediate dangers, closed the border and ramped up a process they'd invented to stop MERS-CoV from spreading inside hospitals in 2015. Before the disease could 'go viral' in the hospitals, they'd isolated infected people after finding them with with testing and tracing. Instead of urging countries to do likewise with SARS-CoV-2, the WHO provided distraction with its: "There's no evidence of human-to-human transmission" tweet (in other words: "Only people who handle animals in Wuhan are at risk.") The world watched and waited until it probably was too late to hold back the virus in the same way that the Koreans did. The alternative was attractive in its simplicity: "Just lock everyone down and wait for vaccine to be created!" People had no immediate desire to defy government and resist lockdowns that were 'making them safe' (while putting livelihoods under enormous strain.) People in UK care homes became quickly very unsafe. Matt Hancock was probably wrong to assume that a national lockdown would help hospitals significantly (a 0.2% benefit has been estimated): https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trusting-people-thing-saved-more-190617785.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews. If we'd had facemasks at the time, we could have kept calm and carried on almost as normal, as the South Koreans did. On the other hand, a form of 'locking down' that should have been done was the safeguarding of people in care homes. South Korea closed nursing homes in February 2020. (SK had lost a total of 587 people by December 14 while we had lost 70,752 by Dec 18.) No big orders for facemasks were created by Hancock when Wuhan's flood of pneumonia cases were being taken very seriously by non-communist Asians. Dominic Cummings says there were no extra facemasks in the UK when we went into lockdown, only the normal stock levels for medical staff. Hancock always takes the WHO seriously (and was hoping to work for the UN) which had downplayed the danger, with fatal outcomes for many. The "no evidence of H2H" statement was an echo of what the WHO had said about MERS-CoV in 2012, proven wrong in 2015 by outbreaks in three South Korean hospitals being traced to one man who'd gone from hospital to hospital. Time went by and Matt realized late in March that it would have been better to place orders for facemasks in January or earlier. However, he also realized that he could say that the hospitals would soon be filled to capacity if he didn't send everyone home to lockdown right away: Once safely at home, people wouldn't be struck by the fact that facemasks were only then starting to appear in shops.
The beginning of a contrived preoccupation with 'animal-to-human transmission' is evident in a 2012 update made by the WHO. It stated of MERS that, "the novel coronavirus cannot be easily transmitted from person to person”. (How was MERS-CoV infecting so many people? The answer: 'animal-to-human'.) Carrying this 'zoonotic' notion forward with SARS-CoV-2 in January 2020, the WHO was implying that all transmission was probably animal-to-human because "there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission" (a tweet which was supposedly based on 'Chinese intelligence'.) The original WHO update was disproved in 2015 by the occurrence of MERS outbreaks inside four S. Korean hospitals which were traced to one man who'd visited each one. (He'd caught the disease in the Middle East, nowhere near any wet markets like those in Wuhan.) But the WHO habitually ignores anything that happens in S. Korea because it's a country that's always supported Taiwan. p.s. The WHO people were ignoring the fact that an evolution of a 'zoonotic' virus is a one-off genetic event. - All subsequent human infections can be traced ultimately to virus coming from the animal in which the virus' genetic change occurred. All the WHO was interested in was preventing travel bans that might hinder Chinese prosperity. ('If there's no H2H transmission, then people who travel will take the virus with them but they won't pass it to people in the other countries!')
Last year, Sir Nadhim Zahawi said if we didn't hoard vaccines it would be like neglecting to put in some extra tent pegs when we knew there'd be a storm in the night. Somehow, the tent flying off in the wind represented our total loss of immunity if we didn't keep all vaccine for ourselves?
Hancock didn't have facemasks for the man in the street until late in March 2020. He'd let the WHO soothe him with its longstanding lie that coronaviruses don't spread human-to-human.
The WHO was ignoring South Korea in Jan 2020 and all western politicians did likewise, each later saying, "But we are not the only country with huge pandemic problems."
It's been normal to think of an 'abolition' as the ending of a practice which is a stain on society, e.g. slavery and the death penalty. Nevertheless, THRCC was "abolished" in July 2019 in order to "slow down on things" that didn't help top MPs focus on Brexit (https://www.soundhealthandlastingwealth.com/covid-19/boris-johnson-scrapped-pandemic-team-before-coronavirus-hit-uk/).
THRCC would very likely have turned out to be much more on the button about covid-19 than the WHO was (see https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-world-health-organization-aiding-china-s-coronavirus-cover) and would have recognized that the longstanding Asian practice of wearing facemasks in public should have been quickly adopted in the UK. The UK was soon "spraying money" at the pandemic (Kier Starmer's choice of words): The small spend that kept the THRCC together was a tiny drop in the ocean, by comparison. The acquisition of facemasks should have been our first step. If nothing else, they would have had a signalling effect (as armbands do) and helped unify a response, reminding of the need for social distancing and hand-washing. Once the people had masks, a genuine test-and-trace activity could have begun. But the first thing that was done which involved public cooperation was lockdown (on March 23rd.) Dominic Cummings has said it was idiocy that caused us to wait until the end of March for facemasks. (They might not actually have protected anyone very well from covid-19 but it's been worked out that Lockdown helped reduce deaths by perhaps 0.2% - https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trusting-people-thing-saved-more-190617785.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews) The MPs had trusted the WHO with its claim that there was "no evidence of human-to-human transmission" (a WHO update in 2012 had said the same thing about MERS-CoV, proved wrong in 2015 by hospital outbreaks in S. Korea.) WHO personnel (many are Chinese) were only interested in preventing travel bans in 2020 and had never acknowledged the way that South Korea tackles coronaviruses. Most western leaders who invest heavily in the WHO were content that 'the science' suggested covid-19 wasn't spreading. With nothing tangible to give people hope when the outbreak was turning deadly in the UK, Matt Hancock saw lockdown as the only escape route. The news media would be handled (so that South Korea's achievements wouldn't get coverage) and it would be a long time before anyone realized that getting PPE on time might have enabled a response that didn't turn lives upside-down
The 'booster' concept was a powerful political plaything for a government that was deceived and delayed by the WHO:
Defense of facemasks: Asians have been wearing them in public for decades so they must have done some research. People who wear them are also more likely to be the people that take more care of over social distancing and hand-washing, so they help 'signal' to observe caution, if nothing else. Don't forget that NERVTAG scientists were happy to say that thermal screening achieves nothing. The NHS uses the screening, especially at laboratories
Don't forget, Sunak was involved in the decision to blow holes in our economy by locking society down (couldn't avoid lockdown because there was no genuine test-and-trace going on and there were no facemasks for the man-in-the-street.)
~ We've had one of the least life-saving pandemic responses of any technocratic country while spending the most money possible in the process. The PM and Health Minister dismissed "doomsayers" in 2020 while the WHO was feeding them its "no evidence of human-to-human transmission" lie (which first appeared in 2012 regarding MERS-CoV and was never corrected.) There was contempt for non-communist Asians with MERS experience who had worked out a way to contain covid spikes ASAP without locking down. ("We consult with the WHO!" and it was given £55 million as a bonus in April 2020 on top of the half-billion we send it annually. UK care homes couldn't afford PPE at the time.)
Wasn't it another Peppa moment? Any comparison between Brits doing Brexit and Ukrainians defying Russia is an academic one at best. (Is Johnson needing to lead an army against the EU?)
Isn't it beyond ridiculous that Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested the Ukrainians 'have been willing to overlook Partygate (therefore, why can't Brits do the same?') What next? Will he draw a comparison between Ukrainians overlooking Partygate and Boris' overlooking 81 executions on the day he tried to get a deal from Saudi Arabia.
The sequence was:
1. Deny, deny, deny until mid-March 2020.
2. Late March 2020: "Lock 'em all down and wait for the vaccine-makers do what they always do."
3. "Party 'til it's over."
In 2020, we lost 70,752 people by 18 December while South Korea lost 587 by 14 December.
"China has reported fewer than 5000 fatalities throughout the entire pandemic"
Pretending now to be as effective as South Korea has been, China had/has CCP operatives working as WHO staff. They strove to make travel bans seem pointless by again pushing the "no human-to-human transmission" myth. But how easily did our intelligentsia fall for it! (and the WHO still gets its £half-billion per annum.)
27/03/2022
Anthony Fauci just now appeared on BBC 'Sunday Morning' which has no Facebook page. It was notable that Fauci goes nowhere near talking about South Korea or why it has a very small deaths total. (He still suggests a purely natural origin for SARS-CoV-2, not willing to hear that there might have been some basic genetic engineering going on 24/7 in a Chinese lab with cheap staff.)
Nobody mentioned (ever does) that the WHO came up with a "no human-to-human transmission" message in 2012 regarding MERS-CoV, and that China 'came up with the same idea' in 2020 for SARS-CoV-2. The WHO happily broadcasted the idea as one of its first covid-19 observations. (Fauci makes no mention of the coronavirus diseases that weren't called 'SARS'.)
Could it be that Trump was greatly disappointed when he realized that Fauci hadn't woken up to the WHO deceit quickly enough in January 2020 (i.e. that the virus was 'not contagious'?) Could Fauci have prevented the CDC from wasting 6 weeks on trying to make its own test instead of using the one that was available from the WHO?
Now, Fauci makes sure he doesn't upset Biden by ever suggesting that the WHO did, in fact, help China to cause the outside world to greatly underestimate covid-19.
Rt. Hon. Nadhim Zahawi - knighted last year - was on the show after Fauci. His popularity stems from the way he turned pandemic talk into something up-beat and cheery, but he shows no concern for humanity at large: He argued with determination that we should not give spare vaccines to anybody outside the UK. - He created one of his 'famous analogies' to show why we should hang onto every vial.
Why was it so vital that we leave the EU BEFORE taking any steps to become less vulnerable to Russian supply of fuel? We have so many political intelligentsia but none of them warned that Putin might do more of what he did to Crimea and Syria? While the South Koreans had perfected a penny-pincher way to tackle SARS-CoV-2, we were given lockdown and had our money "sprayed" at contractors.
It's said now that MPs "didn't notice" the regular parties at No. 10.
In 2020, we needed them to notice which country was a friend with coronavirus experience, i.e. South Korea.
(It's obvious that when they did get up to date on South Korean science, they prevented the story from being mentioned on BBC TV while families in lockdown might see it. They boycotted all other channels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1OJNJ4q-4)
We needed them to notice that enemy CCP had influence in the WHO and it was defying logic with its "no H2H transmission" message: (The £half-billion that's sent annually to the WHO could be reconsidered?)
We needed MPs to look at securing our national fuel provision before committing all efforts to sorting EU conflicts.
Channel 4 to be privatised
During the 2020 lockdown, it was Channel 4 that gave us a balanced account of the first months of the pandemic. https://channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus. Its mid-evening documentary of May 13 leads us to see that the WHO had misled the world with "no evidence human-to-human transmission" in order to make travel bans seem pointless (to 'protect China's economy'.) To this same end, the WHO had made sure we didn't notice the urgency and simplicity with which South Korea had acted, after restricting travel. MPs then kept silent about Taiwan and South Korea every day on the BBC (and their boycott of all other channels made sure most people watched the BBC) so that they could have an easy time by simply locking the country down and spraying money at contractors. (They still send the WHO a half-billion annually.)
Two BBC documentaries at the end of 2020, called 'Lockdown 1.0' and '54 Days', showed that the WHO had put Western countries off-guard by re-asserting its long-held fabrication that 'zoonotic respiratory coronaviruses do not seem to spread human-to-human' (implying: 'they are caught directly from animals'.) It's notable that Tedros Ghebreyesus didn't say "Test, test, test" until 16 March.
Unfortunately, the BBC programs couldn't be watched on iPlayer for long but a similar report was made beforehand by Channel 4 and is still available: https://channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus.
MPs kept silent every day about the quick responses of Taiwan and South Korea. (MPs boycotted all TV channels but the BBC so that people seeking official pandemic guidance would be drawn to BBC TV and away from any news about South Korea.) They didn't want to be challenged regarding their simple approach which kept people away from work while money was sprayed at contractors (and the WHO still gets a half-billion Sterling annually.)
Deaths occurred because of the PCR centre that issued 43 thousand false-negative results.
"It means the total number of deaths in the UK within 28 days of a positive test now stands at 169,095." Compare with South Korea's total - because their quick response protected their economy as well as it protected people from infection. Those who followed the WHO mostly paid no attention to SK, as desired by Chinese communists (some of which work inside the WHO.) SK battled to keep the same level of protection as the need to resume travel forced open the gates for variants from outside its border. Google it though: Have they lost 10,000 yet?
Nicola Sturgeon accused of 'virtue signalling'.
Sturgeon told Scots not to pay attention to the pandemic stats of other countries. It's fairly obvious that Devi Sridhar would have suggested that attitude. Sridhar was consulted more than once in Channel 4’s documentary about South Korea's exemplary progress which had been ignored by the WHO. (https://channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus) It was unsettling then to see Sridhar never mention SK when she appeared very often on BBC Breakfast, except once when she chose it as her example of a country 'showing mistreatment of people' in its response.
Fines for No. 10 parties.
How did they end up having so much spare time for parties? 1. They did nothing to start with, while South Korea was busy isolating people who tested positive. 2. Then they made people go home to wait for vaccine production. There was little else for them to do.
Sturgeon criticized for attack on Johnson:
Both Sturgeon and Johnson took pains to keep the prowess of the South Korea response out of the limelight. (Both subscribe to the WHO and it has always ignored South Korea - too pally with Taiwan.) Sturgeon was advised by Devi Sridhar to say there was no point in watching the pandemic stats of other countries.
If we keep funding the WHO at £500-million PA, it must be made clear that it failed the World as a health sentinel in January 2020. Based on a false assumption about coronavirus transmission, the WHO denied the obvious to make it seem that travel bans were inappropriate (because the bans would "cause China to become economically isolated".) How many could have been saved if the WHO didn't ignore South Korea which was using its system for MERS containment very effectively against covid-19?
Lets save half-a-billion Pounds and stop funding the WHO. It stalled pandemic responses by suggesting the virus didn't spread human-to-human and it ignored what S. Korea was doing (because S. Korea is a friend to Taiwan) so that Westerners almost never clicked on to the clever system that had worked for MERS-CoV. Hancock et al. took pains to keep knowledge of that system from being mentioned on the BBC throughout the first lockdown.
Partygate distracts us from the real dereliction: Letting the WHO guide us away from travel bans and a quick response, and away from the system that the South Koreans had developed in 2015 (ignored by Ghebreyesus because S. Korea is Taiwan's close ally.)
Waiting for Boris' reaction to fine:
He "shook hands with everybody!" at a hospital on 03/03/2020 (go to 28:53 in https://channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus) and locked most of the national workforce down twenty days later, simply because hospitals might have floundered if PHE was wrong about it being, "(only) some older age groups" that were "more severely affected" in China. - 26:35.
Hancock didn't bother to shield our care homes in spite of what PHE said about "older age groups". It was just hospital logistics that he saw fit to work on. (Not very Hippocratic was he?) Small and medium-sized businesses floundered and now we have the CoLC (https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/finla-coffee-closing-down-citing-6935811) With the Health Secretary as a scientific front man, it was known we'd all 'play the game' and trust their instincts about lockdown?
Chris Whitty said on March 12, 2020 that he'd never intended to do more than one 'phase' of containment:
Weren't we misled into having a lockdown in the first place? Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said on March 12, 2020 that there was never going to be more than one 'phase' of virus containment in the way that South Koreans do it. He spoke quickly and there was no repetition or elaboration: "First of all, we are clearly now stopping the contain phase of this operation, that we've always said from the beginning, there were four stages to this: contain, delay, research, mitigate, and the 'contain' finishes from today." (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus/on-demand/71452-001 - Reverse back to to 34:55 mins.) Whitty's declaration was made with the PM standing next to him, who'd just said briefly and with emotion that loved ones were going to die before their time. "Track and trace" (later called "test and trace") continued to be mentioned in the news as if it was an ongoing activity. Few realized that Korean-style testing and tracing had been stopped permanently. (All further testing was to be done only for diagnosis.) We soon started to lose a lot more people than South Korea did (71,000 vs. 600 in the first eleven months of the pandemic) but Johnson later proposed a knighthood for the man who paved the way for the "simple" lockdown of the national workforce instead of an active containment policy. p.s. The WHO ignores South Korea because it's always supported Taiwan. The WHO didn't come up with the slogan, "Test, test, test" until March 16 and it still never mentions South Korea.
Weren't we misled about having a lockdown in the first place? CMO Chris Whitty ended South Korean-style testing and tracing on March 12, 2020 in favour of doing a simple lockdown instead. (He said that the tracing/containment was only ever meant to be the first phase of a four-phase operation: "contain, delay, research, mitigate".) The UK then lost 70,752 people by December 18 while South Korea lost 587 by December 14.
April 2022: Sunak puts heating into his swimming pool.
The "world-beating" four in February 2020 were Johnson, Hancock, Sunak and Cummings. They ignored the Hippocratic oath when they took no effective steps to safeguard care home residents, never mentioning anywhere that/how South Koreans had stopped MERS-CoV from spreading inside hospitals in 2015.
On 12 March, it was Chris Whitty who announced the end of the 'contain phase' of their 'four-part operation' (details of which remain a mystery.) He was standing next to Johnson who'd just said with emotion that "loved-ones were going to die before their time". What Whitty was saying was that there'd be no more tracing and isolating of disease contacts. (From that day, tests would only be used to confirm infections inside care homes and hospitals.) The plan was now very "simple" (Johnson's word): They'd lock the workforce down and wait for the private sector to provide a vaccine.
Was Chris Whitty a containment denier? He stopped the 'contain phase' of his 'four-part operation' on 12 March 2020, saying it was only ever meant to be 'the first phase', the other three phases being: 'delay, research and mitigate' (regardless of how worrying SARS-CoV-2 turned out to be?) https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus/on-demand/71452-001 - Reverse back to 34:55 mins.) Four days later, the WHO was belatedly saying, "Test, test, test" but we were already on a "simple" (BJ's word) path which included no further tracing of disease contacts.
Too many countries underestimate the effect that the CCP has on what the WHO communicates. Trump realized that but Boris Johnson took a different path and sent the WHO a bonus in April 2020. Countries listening to the WHO were not made to realize that South Korea faced a situation in 2015 which could have made its hospitals non-viable: MERS was a quick killer with a high case fatality rate and the hospitals with outbreaks needed to stop it from spreading. Observable symptoms are not always displayed when a person is carrying a virus. Test-trace-isolate was South Korea's solution to that and it did save the hospitals. (Coronaviruses all have respiratory transmission and the miniaturization of sampling/testing apparatus was key to South Korean success.) It's sheer bunkum when Matt Hancock says that the contamination of British care homes occurred because, 'We didn't know that a virus carrier could be asymptomatic'. (He could start instead by admitting that there was deference to the WHO in 2020 which didn't lead to good decision-making.) The WHO disregards the science that South Koreans do because they have always been Taiwan's best ally against China. Trump was right about this: We should no longer send the WHO half a billion Pounds per year.
01/05 Millions of chickens in Iowa culled to prevent bird flu.
The US has been seeing big culls of domestic fowl now because it's decided somewhere that a positive result in a bird-flu test makes culls unavoidable. What's not generally realized is that no avian flu has caused more than 450 human deaths, between 2003 and 2021 according to the WHO. (Some of the 450 might have had other health issues at the time?)
In 2020, the decision to cull millions of mink was based on opinion, not policy: Some WHO scientists had implied in January that Wuhan's pneumonia was spreading 'animal-to-human'. They said there was no sign of human-to-human spread and the CCP was insisting that the people with pneumonia were only those who'd handled animals in wet markets. When a visiting Taiwanese doctor warned that there certainly was 'human-to-human transmission', the WHO ignored him: Its chairman was doing his best to prevent travel bans because they, "might isolate China economically". As long as there continued to be, "no evidence of human-to-human transmission", he could say that there was no "evidence" that travel bans would slow down the spread of the disease.
A virologist will tell you that a zoonotic virus might come into existence when a mistake occurs during viral replication and the offspring/'replicants' inherit, by chance, the ability to infect humans. Of course, subsequent replicants can then infect humans or a 'dead-end infection' will have occurred, the mutant strain lasting only one generation.
Under pressure to appease the CCP in January 2020 (Maria Van Kerkove called it, "the diplomacy that we use"), the WHO scientists 'forgot' their virology and were leading people to think that a zoonotic virus is one which transmits animal-to-animal and frequently undergoes local mutations, each mutation conferring the ability to transmit animal-to-human, but not human-to-human.
The WHO kept quiet when Denmark culled its mink. (Was it a 'Danish thing'? Remember that giraffe at Copenhagen Zoo, dissected to keep visitors entertained?) The mink cull helped make the WHO's original 'mistake' in January seem less ridiculous, i.e. when it implied that animals would give you the coronavirus, not humans. (The CCP had built its policy from this 'mistake' and locked up doctors who tried to let the truth be known.)
It's no small matter that the WHO fully supported the CCP's "no H2H transmission" fallacy with its own, very similar, tweet. Prior to that, a WHO update in 2012 had suggested that MERS-CoV might not be transmitting human-to-human. Circumstances in South Korea in 2015 proved that there was human-to-human transmission but the WHO seemed not to notice.
There has been persistent omission of useful information, e.g. The WHO never alerted member countries in 2015 that South Koreans had contrived a way to track down virus carriers when they are not displaying symptoms yet. That 'test-and-trace' routine came into existence because of an urgent need to prevent the spread of MERS-CoV inside four hospitals. (See the blog.
Video of March 5th, 2020 clearly shows Whitty warning that most carriers will be asymptomatic at any given time. The video shows Whitty on March 5th. When he appeared on the BBC next to Boris Johnson on March 12, his demeanor was changed, as if he'd decided to man-up and tow the party line. (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus/on-demand/71452-001 - Reverse back to 34:55 mins.)
The PM had just said briefly that loved ones were going to die before their time. Then, Whitty said that 'containment' was 'finished' (that there never was going to be more than one 'phase' of virus containment in the way that South Koreans do it):
"First of all, we are clearly now stopping the contain phase of this operation, that we've always said from the beginning, there were four stages to this: contain, delay, research, mitigate, and the 'contain' finishes from today."
"lockdown-breaking"? The best way to "break lockdown" was to ramp up face-mask availability and have social distancing. But there were no facemasks in March 2020 so we got a lockdown instead.
You can tell the general public has never realized 'test-and-trace' was invented in 2015 when S. Korea had a coronavirus that was spreading inside four hospitals. Koreans didn't muck around saying they 'didn't know' that virus carriers often can't be detected easily. They were determined to come up with new materials and methods, or the hospitals would be ruined. There is no way that Hancock can honestly say, 'We didn't know there were people carrying it without showing symptoms'.
£0.5-billion still goes to the WHO after it ignored the South Korean ingenuity for five years and assisted the CCP with its portrayal of a virus that was only caught when handling animals in wet markets.
On March 12, 2020, Johnson addressed the nation with the words, "Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time". The South Korean leadership would never have said anything like that because they were too busy fighting the spread of the virus with the intention of saving everyone they could. They closed nursing homes in February and, by December 14, had lost 587 people. By December 18, we had lost 70,752 and we have fewer people per square mile.
20/05/2022. If the Ukraine has been so important to the MPs, why is Greenpeace now trying to stop the sale of Russian diesel at our big retailers? "Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco: Stop selling Russian diesel." Just over two years ago, another big matter was withheld from public consumption during our lockdown. i.e. No news from South Korea was allowed on BBC TV until lockdown was over. It was the MPs' only channel. They boycotted all the others and not one of them ever said, "South Korea". The cover-up was perhaps more effective at duping the public than anything the CCP did that year
Our MP's are too mindful of a country's 'G rating'. 21/05/2022
South Korea isn't 'G7' so it's brilliance with respiratory coronaviruses since 2015 was totally side-lined in 2020. Also, the MPs should have considered who might have political influence over the WHO - very keen to make things go in ways that suited China in spite of the massive stipend received from the UK. (£0.5-billion PA.)
Monkeypox gets the WHO back to work. 21/05/2022
Why did the "work" of the WHO not yield good guidance in January 2020? Why did the WHO never acknowledge the work that the South Koreans did with the coronavirus disease that came before covid-19, particularly since they could then improvise in order to minimize lockdowns in 2020?
Tories start talking about raising the income of people who rely on benefits. 21/05/2022
The UK gave £464-million to the WHO in the year spanning 2018/19.
31 million pay tax in the UK.
464/31=14.97.
It's safe to say that every UK tax payer gave more than £30 to the WHO over two years during the pandemic. (A £55-million bonus was sent in 2020 and the same again in 2021, that we know of.)
At its moment in history (January 2020), the WHO fed us a false impression, preferring to serve China's desire for "calm" by delaying warnings and criticizing travel bans (by promoting China's suggestion that there was 'no evidence of human-to-human transmission'.)
Partygate photos emerge. 24/05/2022
Will we get the truth if we ask whether he and his MPs boycotted all non-BBC television channels during the lockdown so that people like Piers Morgan wouldn't get a chance to mention that South Korea was containing the disease without locking down? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8pf_Om88Yg.) The WHO was also ignoring the Korean response, as it had when the Koreans contained the MERS coronavirus in the same way in 2015. Why did the WHO get a £55-million bonus after its delays and diversions had helped China cover-up the threat so that other countries might not restrict travel?
The PM says booze helped win WW2 but is fighting the spread of a disease in any way like warfare? Were the losses in care homes a form of 'collateral'?
Beergate?
Labour quietly accepted Hancock's, 'sit back and wait for a vaccine' approach in place of the more involved test/isolate/trace system that had proved itself in South Korea with MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. That system was ignored outright by the WHO and Whitty said on 12 March, 2020 that the 'contain phase of this operation' was now 'finishing', adding that it was only ever meant to be of short duration. In other words, all became 'simple' and much boredom would follow through the months at No.10, relieved by socials. Labour had their own HQ where they also found that beer helped endure the waiting-game. ......... link to video is at bit.ly/conwho
A Guardian article says we have the 2nd lowest no. of hospital beds per capita in Europe. Is that why Whitty panicked Johnson into a national lockdown?
The UK sends about £500-million to the WHO every year and some nations send more. For covid-19, the WHO delayed warnings, assumed there was little or no human to human spread, and argued that places like Taiwan were wrong to ban travel. Government was complacent but then grew fearful that the hospitals might become crowded. The CFR was 1.7% (it could kill 17 people in a thousand if everybody caught it) but there was maximum economic disruption in the West while the simple logic applied in S. Korea avoided that and saved more lives. (They'd handled the spread of MERS-CoV when the CFR was 37%.)
Relevant links are: csis.org/analysis/timeline-south-koreas-response-covid-19 and https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/south-korea (see 9th fig./chart) Note here that S. Korea has had a scary looking covid spike this year, pushing up their total losses from less than 7,000 in February to about 24,000 today. Our PM invited their President to Cornwall for the G7 in 2021 - and persuaded him to soften border controls as soon as he could?
Chris Whitty formally "finished" Korean-style containment on March 12, 2020. Our destiny was to rely solely on vaccine. Having also dished out vaccine, the S. Koreans have become less driven to do test/isolate/trace this year (2022) and their covid deaths all-time total jumped from under 6000 in January 2022 to over 24,000 this month.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=392089229621130&set=a.336009175229136
Did you watch BBC Question Time this week? The NHS cleaner described the grim things she saw in 2020 while parties were on at No. 10. The Tory supporter then said: "There wasn't a book" (to tell the No. 10 team to take things seriously?)
Even 'without a book', there was a way to ask the South Koreans how they contained the mers coronavirus in 2015: Just have Hancock pick up a phone and ask them!
Before it was axed, THRCC could have garnered the basics about the mers outbreaks inside S. Korean hospitals and written its own book. Some basic planning would then have made all the difference, even if left until early in 2020, e.g. stockpiling facemasks and setting up an information network. That way, there wouldn't be film of Johnson playing the whole thing down in March 2020: https://channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus (go to 26:35 mins)
THRCC was a Tory expenditure. It could have started writing its own instruction book before 2019. Perhaps Johnson was right to trash it then (to "slow down on things" that didn't serve Brexit)? #bbcqt
Dewani was saved from the dogs by a white judge who was a friend of a schoolmate of mine. If it was left to the Tories, he'd be rotting in South African jail now.
Even 'without a book', there was a way to ask the South Koreans how they contained the mers coronavirus in 2015: Just have Hancock pick up a phone and ask them!
Before it was axed, THRCC could have garnered the basics about the mers outbreaks inside S. Korean hospitals and written its own book. Some basic planning would then have made all the difference, even if left until early in 2020, e.g. stockpiling facemasks and setting up an information network. That way, there wouldn't be film of Johnson playing the whole thing down in March 2020: https://channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus (go to 26:35 mins)
THRCC was a Tory expenditure. It could have started writing its own instruction book before 2019. Perhaps Johnson was right to trash it then (to "slow down on things" that didn't serve Brexit)? #bbcqt
Dewani was saved from the dogs by a white judge who was a friend of a schoolmate of mine. If it was left to the Tories, he'd be rotting in South African jail now.
$487-million was an amount given by Whitehall to the WHO last year. It got "$500-million" the year before "for COVAX" and a £55-million "bonus" in April 2020. Biden did similarly because he also disregarded the fact that the WHO had put CCP wants ahead of the common good, helping sustain the illusion of a weakly-contagious, 'animal' virus.
"There wasn't an instruction manual" emerges again in 2022. Do the ex-THRCC members have an excuse for never observing that South Korea came up with a new way to contain a coronavirus in 2015?
There didn't seem to be any real efforts by Hancock in 2020 that might have helped make the expensive lockdown-option avoidable. ... Mr Johnson said two things on March 1 that were true: "Most people seem to recover from this quite well". 2. "It's aged people who seem to be affected most". Why then "finish" the "contain phase (i.e. test-isolate-trace)" on 12 March in preparation for a massive national lockdown on 23 March, while leaving the aged in care homes wide open to infection? The Guardian suggested that the spending cost by September 2020 was "£210 billion". https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/08/uks-public-spending-watchdog-estimates-210bn-coronavirus-bill Who knows what losses through business inactivity have been?
Not mentioned anywhere else:
The journal link is ourw - scroll to the 9th image/map/graph
By deduction: test-isolate-trace was very effective at keeping deaths down in South Korea (much more so than lockdown was in the UK.) After vaccination targets were then reached in South Korea, they slowed down on the test-isolate-trace this year and their deaths total suddenly climbed from below 6,000 on 01/01/2022 to more than 24,000 by 25/05/2022. It reveals that we in the UK would have suffered far fewer human losses with a well-run test-based containment, rather than with just a lockdown.
The journal link is ourw - scroll to the 9th image/map/graph
By deduction: test-isolate-trace was very effective at keeping deaths down in South Korea (much more so than lockdown was in the UK.) After vaccination targets were then reached in South Korea, they slowed down on the test-isolate-trace this year and their deaths total suddenly climbed from below 6,000 on 01/01/2022 to more than 24,000 by 25/05/2022. It reveals that we in the UK would have suffered far fewer human losses with a well-run test-based containment, rather than with just a lockdown.
A new graph which shows indirectly that lockdown was not the effective way (almost 200,000 Brits lost):
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10228527871929557&set=a.1332983292410
Just as we had too many deaths for more than two years after 12 March 2020, i.e. when we "finished the contain phase" (the test-and-trace) "of this operation" (Whitty's words), so South Korea has seen its deaths total quadruple this year after it put an end to its test-and-trace that worked so well. https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10228527871929557&set=a.1332983292410
Ann Widdecombe favoured test and trace, not lockdown.
There's a new spike in covid cases and the ambulances get detained in hospital log-jams. A pity we had our 'contain phase' (Chris Whitty's name for test, trace, isolate) stopped in its tracks on 12 March 2020. Surely something could have been developed from it when you compare SK stats with those of the UK year by year...
A pity we had our 'contain phase' (Chris Whitty's name for test, trace, isolate) stopped in its tracks on 12 March 2020. Surely something could have been developed from it when you compare SK stats with those of the UK year by year.
Jeremy Hunt is in a new video on the Mirror Politics Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 No other Tory MP had said "South Korea" since March 2020.
"Why weren't we copying South Korea?", says Jeremy in this video.
07/07: Johnson resigns
Gove was a faithful snake at least. Video shows him praising BJ "100%" and saying our pandemic response was simply the best. Look at South Korea and it's plain to see that their test-isolate-trace system reduced case numbers like nothing else can. They stopped doing it once everyone was vaccinated and the deaths total multiplied fourfold between January and June this year.
New spikes in UK covid case numbers in July 2022:
Something like this happened in South Korea this year: Thinking that its people had been sufficiently vaccinated and the containment system could be turned off, its all-time covid deaths total shot up from below 6,000 on 01/01/2022 to over 24,000 in June. (Don't forget, it was decided that deaths totals would stop being announced in the UK some time ago.)
Biden turfed the Churchill bust out of the Oval Office.> Johnson built some lavish lodges for Biden at the G7 in Cornwall: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10226152053575583&set=a.1332983292410
16/07/2022
Did you see BJ in the House two days ago bragging again that we got the vaccine first. Yes, by a matter of weeks but we lost many more people (than S. Korea, for example) due to having no TIT (test-isolate-trace) and we continued having very high daily deaths for another year at least, for the same reason. Is it regular that BJ pulled Bill Gates so close for a £400 million deal on a green project in October 2021 while our budget was enduring historic stress and strain? (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-and-bill-gates-launch-400m-partnership-to-boost-green-investment). Bill Gates had a little road-show running in 2015, saying that the WHO doesn't prepare us for epidemics, only monitors them. He didn't notice that the South Koreans developed a new system that contained a respiratory coronavirus inside four hospitals that same year. Neither did the WHO. Gates' dedication to the WHO makes him its second biggest donor. We were the biggest in 2019 but Biden makes the USA donate more now. What was noticed about the WHO while Trump was in office was no trivial matter .....
20/07/2022, BJ attends his last PMQs and says that it was insane that people used portable BBQs during the heatwave:
"No. 10 should have declared a ban on open flames in public a few days ago. Only done it today."
Reply11 h
Boris, asleep at the wheel..............once again
Reply9 h
The last time he dozed off, the long term effect was 200,000 killed by covid-19. His pandemic team preferred the unconditional love that Bill Gates has for the WHO over Donald Trump's condemnation of the way the WHO backed the CCP cover-up. Whitty, Hancock and Johnson must have known that vaccination of the public would slow the infection rate only in a gradual way and that many more people would die because TIT (test, isolate, trace) was "finished" by them on 12 March 2020.
Reply11 h
Boris, asleep at the wheel..............once again
Reply9 h
The last time he dozed off, the long term effect was 200,000 killed by covid-19. His pandemic team preferred the unconditional love that Bill Gates has for the WHO over Donald Trump's condemnation of the way the WHO backed the CCP cover-up. Whitty, Hancock and Johnson must have known that vaccination of the public would slow the infection rate only in a gradual way and that many more people would die because TIT (test, isolate, trace) was "finished" by them on 12 March 2020.
22/07/2022 Rishi Sunak says we were hours away from starting a second lockdown in Dec 2021.
The first lockdown could have been avoided but Whitty announced on 12/03/2020 that "the contain phase finishes from today" ('as we've said it would from the start!') How could they imagine that a need to contain the virus (through test, isolate, trace) would no longer be needed after 12/03/2020? Was Bill Gates involved in this - giving 100% backing to the WHO which had ignored the South Korean system in its entirety since 2015?
There was no commiseration from MPs for those families who lost everything to fires in the heatwave. See the mindless nonsense spoken by lords in the old green and brown Chamber: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0019g5m/politics-uk-22072022 According to these sages, we over-reacted to the 40-plus temperatures and had no need for reminders to drink water or keep out of the direct sun. ('We' all knew that already because of our inherited 'common sense'.)
Presumably, those who lost homes couldn't be better off today if there'd been a single mention of a possibility of fires/fire crews becoming over-burdened? (Those who attended the pre-heatwave COBR meeting had never heard of the fires in Spain, France, Canada, California...?)
Did a similar stupidity prevail over our pandemic response:
23/07/2022. WHO says Monkeypox is serious.
Did Bill Gates have influence during the pandemic? He saved the WHO when Trump pulled its funding and, like that organization, he has never acknowledged that South Korea's test-isolate-trace was the way to contain coronavirus spikes and avoid lockdowns. Perhaps his 2015 attempt to raise global awareness of epidemics kept him too busy to notice that the Koreans stopped the spread of MERS-CoV inside four hospitals that same year. But even now, he supports the WHO 100% and, like them, never mentions S. Korea.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-and-bill-gates-launch-400m-partnership-to-boost-green-investment
25/07/2022: Tories are now slamming China but they still subscribe US$500-million to the WHO after not challenging it for having done everything possible to avoid contradicting China's "no H2H transmission" message. (Tedros then acted as though he had grounds for saying that travel bans were not "evidence-based", but he was merely aiming to help the CCP prevent a limitation of travel over the Chinese New year.) The WHO hasn't been asked to weed out its employees who are CCP and who helped further the covid cover-up in January 2020.
WHO says window for beating Monkeypox is closing.
Quick work by non-communist Asians was containing SARS-CoV-2 in February 2020 but Tedros didn't update the WHO tweet which conveyed that 'humans aren't spreading it (therefore animals must be to blame)'. Tedros waited until 16 March before saying, "Test, test, test" and western countries assumed that the window had already closed for slowing the spread without locking down. (South Korea's early success was not acknowledged. Gates backed the WHO and 'everything Trump did was wrong'.) By 14 December, there were 587 known to be deceased in South Korea where everyone was so well connected on Samsung phones. In the UK by 18 December, it was '70,752' and Johnson's "World-beating app" was texting people if they'd been in a pub which an infected person had visited.
Biden, Bill Gates and Boris made sure Tedros still had a job to go to after the following was discovered:
Taiwan tried to save us from the massive expense of locking down, wanted to warn us to close the border and use Korea-style containment. But Tedros ignored the Taiwanese expert because he wanted people to keep believing that there was "no sign of H2H transmission" (published as a WHO tweet on 14/01/2020) - That let him say that travel bans were not warranted ('people might carry it abroad but they won't spread it!'.) - He wanted to keep the CCP happy during the CNY, when many travel to and from China to celebrate with relatives.
'Follow the advice' for monkey pox.
The WHO had been running an information apartheid since at least 2015 and it meant we didn't learn how to avoid going into lockdown in 2020. It was 2015 when the South Koreans woke up to the fact that a coronavirus outbreak could be diminished by using a NAT (nucleic acid test) to see who was infected, so that they could be isolated, and that various means could be tried to ascertain which people might have had recent contact with the infected. The WHO simply ignored how this approach let the Koreans tackle outbreaks of MERS-CoV in four hospitals not far from Seoul and trace them to one man who'd been traveling in the Middle East. When the Koreans expanded their system to take on the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the WHO ignored that too and instead gave the CCP a platform for saying that this disease showed 'no human-to-human transmission'. (WHO had suggested the same thing about MERS-CoV.) Therefore, it's a bitter pill now when "follow the advice" means "listen to the WHO".
It was a Taiwanese expert who urged Wuhan's medics to admit that, 'Yes, this coronavirus is spreading human-to-human.'
WHO's Tedros Ghebreyesus ignored the expert's email and continued to say that travel bans were not warranted: "Travel restrictions isolate China economically". (Boris Johnson promised to investigate but instead WHO funding from the UK was increased at the soonest opportunity.)
We take it so lightly that Taiwan broke the stalemate that was engineered by the CCP and WHO ("no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission") and that our 'democratic leader' ignored official advice (from SAGE) to "copy South Korea", preferring to force us into lockdown. https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (after 50 secs..)
In terms of tech production, S. Korea beats us hands down but Tory MPs ignored its common-sense response to a respiratory coronavirus in 2015, expanded for the pandemic in 2020. Tory lethargy was exactly what the CCP and WHO wanted.
His 'World-beating' claims and hi-vis workplace stunts helped extinguish an interest in what South Korea achieved so quickly (having quelled MERS-CoV outbreaks in the same way in 2015.)
It was a Taiwanese expert who urged Wuhan's medics to admit that, 'Yes, this coronavirus is spreading human-to-human.'
WHO's Tedros Ghebreyesus ignored the expert's email and continued to say that travel bans were not warranted, were "isolating China economically" (but WHO funding from the UK was increased at the soonest opportunity.)
We take it so lightly that Taiwan broke the CCP-imposed stalemate ("no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission") and that our 'democratic leader' ignored its ally, South Korea, preferring to force us into lockdown.
If Rishi could see serious flaws then why did he agree to a lockdown with furlough when South Korea had a system which didn't thus hurt the economy and was many times more effective at "saving lives"? Was he the one who sent the WHO at least US$550-million extra in 2020/21?
04/08/2022. Thinktank says UK inflation is set to soar.
We needed a thinktank when Whitty gave his approval for turning off coronavirus tracing and throwing us into lockdown instead. As always, no explanation given for big decisions like that. (but at least one top Tory recently admitted that early decisions were wrong: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527
05/08/2022. Antonio Guterres condemns the British Petroleum profit but has never voiced any criticism of his WHO, now getting more money than ever from the USA, Bill Gates and the UK (in that order.) They all united against Donald Trump when he cut the WHO after it broadcast the CCP message that SARS-CoV-2 was "not spreading human-to-human" and then held back on health warnings, rather urging countries not to restrict travel. (Travel bans were "not evidence-based".) Many would be alive now if the WHO had not, for a long time, been ignoring medical findings that came from Asian countries not popular with the CCP, notably Taiwan and South Korea.
B of E man had a curious expression when he blamed everything on Putin. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/will-the-bank-of-england-say-sorry-?fbclid=IwAR2x-tRGd6Xdrw4tEdPsDGBUC4iF1qygvCpcfGD5iELH-Uj2pNl3U-P4UT4) Sending most of the national workforce home in 2020 and paying 80% of their wages didn't do things to the economy? Use link in blog to see an MP admitting that SAGE had advised to avoid locking down by learning from South Korea, but was ignored:
[NB. See a later BBC Panorama expose which makes it very clear that the energy price hikes were not caused by the Ukraine situation. The big companies have done it simply because they can: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001bv5w/panorama-the-energy-crisis-whos-cashing-in]
Boris had us all clapping outside while the NHS were all indoors. He needed noise so nobody might think to ask "Why'd you ignore SAGE advice to copy South Korea?" BBC television wasn't allowed to discuss South Korea until after lockdown and MPs boycotted all other channels until then. Next, noise was created by walking around in a hospital without a facemask on. Then, the rumours of parties slowly became 'Partygate'. All to keep people's attention away from the bread and butter issues which now are all attributed to the Putin.
Biden has raised the US contribution to the WHO above $650-million. The No. 10 team raised the UK amount to near $500 million. Gates gives more than the UK does, almost as much as the US. (Blog link is at Gerry Lloyd)
The WHO led its member countries to imagine there was little urgency. It wanted a slowness in their pandemic responses so that China's economy might not be hurt by travel bans. WHO never communicated about South Korea's way to minimize the use of lockdowns: 'Test, isolate, trace' was the best way long before Tedros Ghebreyesus said: "Test, test, test." (It was Taiwan that first warned the Koreans about the true situation in Wuhan.)
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 > How to say "We messed up massively and the cost was in £hundreds-of-billions" while still beaming with positivity. It was only days after this that Hunt was eliminated from the PM wanna-be list. (e.g. The Guardian reported £210-billion in Sep 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/08/uks-public-spending-watchdog-estimates-210bn-coronavirus-bill)
Taiwan broke the deadlock created by the CCP over whether or not covid-19 was spreading 'human-to-human'. The false 'puzzlement' followed from a very similar fabrication being asserted by the WHO in 2012 for MERS-CoV.
The UK's a different place because Boris Johnson followed the 'WHO science' in 2020, ignoring SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) when it advised to ramp up testing and thus dodge a costly lockdown: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (from 50 secs on.)
For as long as it could, the WHO gave voice to the CCP assertion that covid-19 was only spreading 'animal-to-human', not human-to-human. Did, "Stick with the Americans" amount to helping Bill Gates and Joe Biden make the WHO even wealthier? (They all reside in Geneva, after all.) Since April 2020, the UK's WHO donation has been raised, bonuses sent and $500-million given to 'COVAX'. We have forfeited about a billion US Dollars in all. Bill and Melinda Gates gave $750-million: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-and-bill-gates-launch-400m-partnership-to-boost-green-investment = Just something concrete to show a Gates-Johnson relationship. Gates was too busy lecturing on what he thought he knew about epidemics in 2015 to notice South Korea's new way to contain coronaviruses. He persisted in ignoring South Korea in 2020, preferring to be a hero and save the WHO.
For as long as it could, the WHO gave voice to the CCP assertion that covid-19 was only spreading 'animal-to-human', not human-to-human. Did, "Stick with the Americans" amount to helping Bill Gates and Joe Biden make the WHO even wealthier? (They all reside in Geneva, after all.) Since April 2020, the UK's WHO donation has been raised, bonuses sent and $500-million given to 'COVAX'. We have forfeited about a billion US Dollars in all. Bill and Melinda Gates gave $750-million: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-and-bill-gates-launch-400m-partnership-to-boost-green-investment = Just something concrete to show a Gates-Johnson relationship. Gates was too busy lecturing on what he thought he knew about epidemics in 2015 to notice South Korea's new way to contain coronaviruses. He persisted in ignoring South Korea in 2020, preferring to be a hero and save the WHO.
Donald Trump saw fit to stop funding the WHO after it helped the CCP cover-up the truth about the coronavirus in Wuhan. He didn't want to handle the matter in a measured way because that would probably have embroiled him in details that he had no patience for: He wanted the CDC to take care of covid-19 while he spent his time focussing on the upcoming election campaign.
Bill Gates would have made contact with Boris Johnson straight away because he needed a financial input from the UK to help 'save the WHO'. (We were the WHO's biggest donor in 2018/2019.) Gates has never expressed any interest in South Korea's handling of coronaviruses since 2015, in spite of his attempts that year to warn countries about the dangers of future epidemics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI. He and his wife's uncritical devotion to the WHO led them to give it at least $750-million. They were not likely to praise South Korea when the WHO had never done that. They will have supported Johnson for having ditched our efforts to imitate the South Korean mass testing system.
Bill Gates would have made contact with Boris Johnson straight away because he needed a financial input from the UK to help 'save the WHO'. (We were the WHO's biggest donor in 2018/2019.) Gates has never expressed any interest in South Korea's handling of coronaviruses since 2015, in spite of his attempts that year to warn countries about the dangers of future epidemics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI. He and his wife's uncritical devotion to the WHO led them to give it at least $750-million. They were not likely to praise South Korea when the WHO had never done that. They will have supported Johnson for having ditched our efforts to imitate the South Korean mass testing system.
Furlough made the Tories popular with many voters (who doesn't mind some time off with pay?) but it punched a hole in the economic dam wall. It also made people very tolerant of other peoples' losses?
Tories chucked out the simple system that was slowing the spread of virus in 2020. It was formulated in the country that makes half of the World's most wanted electronics.
It was the effect of lockdown furlough that shook the spreadsheets first? "£210-billion" spent already by September 2020. Was that anything like a normal government spend?
Did you see Jeremy Hunt on 4 July telling how we ignored SAGE in 2020 and thus ended up with the mind-blowing cost of lockdown? He was gone from the PM contenders list very quickly after this: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (after 50 secs.)
It's believed that, by adopting South Korea's test-based containment system, we could have cut the rate of infection very well (not forgetting that the Koreans also did other practical things that helped, e.g. closed nursing homes on 21 Feb 2020.) The WHO shuns information from S. Korea and Taiwan (which are very supportive of each other) and WHO subscribers were kept in the dark about how they worked at a pace to slow down the virus. When Trump cut US funding to the WHO for delaying communications about the pandemic, Bill Gates' reaction to that meant that all criticism of WHO was set aside and knowledge of South Korea's system was still not promoted.
In the first months of this year, South Korea's all-time covid-19 deaths total began to climb at a rate never seen before: quadrupled in under five months (from under 6000 to more than 24,000.) This happened because the containment system was turned off once vaccination targets had been reached by the end of 2021.
A manoeuvre that helps hide certain failings?:
It's not common knowledge that SAGE has become a WHO subunit this year. (British scientists now employed inside a WHO framework won't have their emails snooped? Beijing will see our 'confidential SAGE advice' before No. 10 does.)
- She was part of a cover-up which prevented people from talking about South Korea on BBC One during the lockdown. (MPs boycotted all other channels so that they couldn't be asked about SK.) She did break the rule once but that was only to mention South Korea as one of the countries that did brutal things to enforce lockdowns ("We are lucky here in the UK.") She had been in the Channel 4 documentary that clearly showed how open and friendly things were in SK. The head of the cult that broke social distancing rules there was not mistreated and later was found to have been embezzling his followers' money.
Truss might win the PM contest because the pandemic response which had a mind-blowing furlough expense was organized, in part, by Rishi. Wonder what South Korea spent on a response with no such furlough or closure of businesses? (We'd spent £210-billion by September 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/08/uks-public-spending-watchdog-estimates-210bn-coronavirus-bill)
The above explains why there were no young doctors opposing any of Matt Hancock's ideas in 2020. - Imported doctors didn't care where the No. 10 team was taking us. us.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/twice-as-many-people-died-with-covid-in-uk-this-summer-compared-with-2021?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1EuFjuSj7BUliCtnk9g8teSqdvW9xcFE54lkG_48XTE9mB8ab9I2PemsE#Echobox=1661276326
John's Hopkins Univ. data this year (2022) showed that South Korea's all-time covid-19 deaths total began to climb in January at a rate never seen before: The total had quadrupled in under five months from below 6000 to more than 24,000 by June. It happened because the test-based containment system was no longer being maintained once vaccination targets had been reached by the end of 2021. (We turned our system off on 12/03/2020.) In other words, the benefit of mass vaccination is steady but slow. (South Korea's containment system saved its society while it waited for vaccine.)
Something else which nobody's going to make obvious: SAGE has become a WHO subunit this year. British scientists now employed inside a WHO framework might have their emails snooped: Beijing will see our 'confidential SAGE advice' before No. 10 does.
Everybody in the UK should watch: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (after 50 secs.) .... Links to refs. have been gathered here:
Nobody forced Rishi to weaken the economy with mind-blowing lockdown expense. (£210-billion by the first September. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/08/uks-public-spending-watchdog-estimates-210bn-coronavirus-bill)
Former Health boss Hunt wouldn't have stopped Korean-style test and trace: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (after 50 secs.) - Most UK scientists had no idea what the No.10 team was up to and that's how Hancock got it shut down.
Remember 12 March 2020 when two men stood side-by-side and there were two main messages, but nobody quite grasped that our system for slowing the spread of the virus was being shut down. (It was just the pretence of a 'Test and Trace' system that was still maintained for many months.): 1. Boris, "Loved ones are going to die before their time", 2. Chris Whitty, "The contain phase .... finishes from today." (This was said quickly and embellished with technical verbiage which didn't make a lot of sense: "As we have always said from the beginning, there were four phases to this operation: contain, delay, research, mitigate, and the contain finishes from today.")
Eleven days later we began doing "something simple", i.e. staying at home and waiting for vaccine. We weren't locked down until 23 March because the WHO had (finally) declared a pandemic on 11 March. - Some delay was desired between them saying that and Boris 'making his big decisions'.
Former Health boss Hunt wouldn't have stopped Korean-style test and trace: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (after 50 secs.) - Most UK scientists had no idea what the No.10 team was up to and that's how Hancock got it shut down.
Remember 12 March 2020 when two men stood side-by-side and there were two main messages, but nobody quite grasped that our system for slowing the spread of the virus was being shut down. (It was just the pretence of a 'Test and Trace' system that was still maintained for many months.): 1. Boris, "Loved ones are going to die before their time", 2. Chris Whitty, "The contain phase .... finishes from today." (This was said quickly and embellished with technical verbiage which didn't make a lot of sense: "As we have always said from the beginning, there were four phases to this operation: contain, delay, research, mitigate, and the contain finishes from today.")
Eleven days later we began doing "something simple", i.e. staying at home and waiting for vaccine. We weren't locked down until 23 March because the WHO had (finally) declared a pandemic on 11 March. - Some delay was desired between them saying that and Boris 'making his big decisions'.
At least he's made it clear that gagging was common: The big gag was the one that forced MPs to boycott any TV but the BBC, so that there could be tight control of what the people saw/heard on TV. (South Korea would never be discussed in any detail.)
Other lies: Getting NERVTAG to say that thermal screening doesn't work at airports. 2. getting Chris Whitty to say that "contain" was always meant to be just the first phase of a four-phase operation, when he ended it on 12/03/2020. 3. Saying that a shield was going to be put around the elderly in care homes. The rest was a series of false impressions crafted with gag orders and references to what the WHO was saying, also the dolling out of lucrative honours to people like Van-Tam. . bit_ly/conwho (put dot in place of _)
>> Jeremy Hunt said this on 4 July this year and then suddenly found himself out of the PM contest: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 esp. after the first 50 secs.
See how Gove wormed his way out of explaining the 'boycott' of all Channels but the BBC during the big lockdown of 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1OJNJ4q-4 The boycott was part of a gagging system - protected MPs from facing curiosity over the way the S. Korean pandemic response was being thoroughly ignored once our similar test-and-trace system had been shut down surreptitiously on March 12. bit_ly/conwho (put dot in place of _)
Bill Gates is now working with a top South Korean company (ranked equal to Apple by many) but is also one of the people who ignored what South Korea did with a respiratory coronavirus in 2015 (and again in 2020.) He was traveling and lecturing about a global lack of readiness for epidemics in 2015 and that seemed to make him too busy to notice how South Korea mastered its MERS problem. We could excuse him that time because the WHO seemed careful in all reports to avoid acknowledging that the Koreans developed testing and tracing or that it achieved anything worth mentioning.
It's tragic that Gates became consumed with rescuing the WHO from Trump's simplistic reaction to its duplicities in 2020 because, once again, he didn't pay attention to what South Korea was doing, this time to contain SARS-CoV-2. However, it's become more than tragic since then because Gates seems to have aligned himself totally with WHO behaviour which still never includes praise for South Korea and never recommended that any country try the Korean pandemic response method. (WHO never advised anybody about tracing and only said, "Test, test, test" on 16 March 2020.)
Top-level advice from SAGE was kept private in 2020 so that Boris could easily persuade us to follow his "simple" pandemic plan instead: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (after 50 secs..) Hunt soon got pushed out of the PM contest after he revealed this on 4 July this year. He's not been on TV since then.
By 14/12/2020, South Korean covid casualties totalled 587.
By 18/12/2020, British casualties totalled 70,752. - We'd begun by copying the Koreans but then were switched to lockdown with furlough. The care homes were left to cope with a few advisories and no PPE.
p.s. Remember how the Pound devalued the day we had that surprise Brexit referendum and there was that man on TV beaming with joy because he'd profited instantly? - devaluation makes our goods more 'competitive' (Tory fave word) because their price drops to an outsider.
What a question.
It reveals that we'd had no contact with South Korea, that part of the free-world lying so close to Wuhan. Now we are £trillions down with many High Street shops gone (pubs next.)
Government was not keen to take tips from Koreans, by March was still not aware of what they had been doing. It's the fault of the WHO that nobody realized how deadly MERS-CoV had been, with a CFR of 37% (it was 2% for covid-19) or that the Koreans had created a new way to slow its spread in 2015.
The WHO also didn't pass on Taiwanese observer information about Wuhan's hospitals overflowing in January 2020: Tedros Ghebreyesus preferred to keep saying that travel restrictions had no evidential justification ("there's no sign of H2H transmission") and that such restrictions 'would isolate China economically' (heaven forbid.)
Two years down: Should we fear the way the government wasted time and opportunity? Top-level advice from SAGE was kept private in 2020 so that Boris Johnson could assert a "simple" pandemic plan instead: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (after 50 secs..) Hunt disappeared from the 2022 PM contest after he revealed this on 4 July. He's not been seen on TV since then.
By 14/12/2020, South Korean covid casualties had reached 587.
By 18/12/2020, British casualties had reached 70,752.
- We'd begun by copying the Koreans in a rudimental way but then were switched headlong to lockdown with furlough on March 23. The care homes were left to cope with a few advisories and no PPE.
p.s. Remember how the Pound devalued the day we had that surprise Brexit referendum and there was that man on TV beaming with joy because he'd profited instantly? - devaluation makes our goods more 'competitive' (Tory fave word) because their price drops to an outsider.
Jeremy Hunt made a lot of sense on 4 July: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (esp. the second 50 secs.) Boris kept the science hidden which told him how to avoid lockdown by copying S. Korea. He didn't care much about avoiding lockdown, he just wanted things to be "simple" (his own choice of words on 12 March.) Best of all, he was telling us what to do and nobody could defy him.
It's September 2022 and Bill Gates can finally rest from his pandemic work: Wired. He chucked $750-million at the WHO recently but still never mentions what South Korea achieved, health-wise, in 2020 (as before in 2015.) With all the money the WHO has received these last two years, the world is still assuming it to be a health sentinel and is only vaguely aware of the accurate method that saved Korean lives and protected their economy through the pandemic. (Did Gates also persuade Boris Johnson to put WHO financial needs ahead of domestic ones? - He has shown influence on Johnson's spending of taxpayer money : see
09/09/2022
There is no go for a windfall tax on the collusive energy companies who timed their price hikes to make it seem Putin had caused them. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001bv5w/panorama-the-energy-crisis-whos-cashing-in) Truss says we must fix, "growth" in our minds and the only way to get it is by luring more of these shareholder-feeding giants to the UK. She is also giving us a new start by 'wiping the slate clean', i.e. helping us forget that Boris Johnson began killing small UK businesses (and some larger but vulnerable ones) with his decision to lock down in 2020. Jeremy Hunt recently revealed that Johnson was advised to rather copy South Korea but instead made himself chief of a "simple" system which stopped commerce in its tracks for months on end (except for the few lucky big names.) The taxpayer money given away (e.g. more than a billion USD to the WHO) must be historic.
https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (after 50 secs..) Hunt lost his place in the PM contest after he revealed the above in July this year. It's interesting that Sunak was eliminated after he revealed that gagging techniques were used to stop anyone from suggesting that lockdown was problematic: 'In his Spectator interview, he said the negative impacts of lockdowns on society were "never part" of internal discussions, adding meetings were "literally me around that table, just fighting".' - 'Mr Sunak also said ministers were not given enough information to scrutinise analysis produced by official scientific advisers on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), and internal opposition to certain measures from advisers was not reflected in official minutes of meetings."' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62664537?fbclid=IwAR2TV5axNR7r6gh6gLAiRePLBgELca834C9h_cluDajibR2JypuJ8H82LW0 (The proof of and purpose for media boycotts by MPs was discussed
SAGE advice would have kept us safe from lockdowns if British scientists in general could have seen the advice. That's what former Health Secretary Hunt said a few months ago: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (after 50 secs..) The PM's desire for a "simple" plan deprived us of the accurate system which saved South Korean lives more effectively and kept economic damage to a minimum.
This Nature paper only has one sentence which suggests that the study might have looked at South Korea's remarkable success with containment through testing and tracing: "A study11 of government responses in Asia also suggested that a ‘go hard, go fast’ approach was best." As such, it follows the WHO pattern which has always excluded Taiwan and South Korea (as a close friend of Taiwan) from the picture in spite of the many reports by Americans that showed them to be the first and most effective respondents outside China. British report is at: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus/
Some talk as if we're no longer suffering economic damage from Johnson's decision to lock down and pay 80% of tens of millions of people's salaries for more than half a year.
Now, instead, we hear that Johnson and his men wanted to fight obesity by banning meal-deals and keeping chocolates out of sight. ('Seen many fat people in the London queues?)
Two and a half years ago, an emergency group called SAGE told No. 10 what the best response to SARS-CoV-2 would be. In July this year, Jeremy Hunt took 50 seconds to make it clear that the SAGE advice was kept out of sight and we were put into lockdown instead. https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (i.e. the second 50 secs.)
The WHO became the 'authority' to quote, regardless of the fact that it had made its statements in ways that let China do a cover-up. (WHO avoided contradicting the pretence that there was "no evidence of human-to-human transmission", said the same thing in an indirect way: "Travel bans are not evidence-based" - Ghebreyesus kept saying this for quite some time, even after China gave up the hoax.)
It's been revealed that Sunak had issues with the locking down of the UK: 'he said the negative impacts of lockdowns on society were "never part" of internal discussions, adding meetings were "literally me around that table, just fighting"...... Mr Sunak also said ministers were not given enough information to scrutinise analysis produced by official scientific advisers on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), and internal opposition to certain measures from advisers was not reflected in official minutes of meetings."' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62664537?fbclid=IwAR2TV5axNR7r6gh6gLAiRePLBgELca834C9h_cluDajibR2JypuJ8H82LW0
There's little doubt that PPE was in short supply in the first quarter of 2020. The shortage made lockdown unavoidable (Whitty ended "the contain phase" on March 12 because Korean-style testing and tracing could not be done by people with no facemasks.)
It was Cummings who said that there was no PPE at that time and Hancock denied it vehemently but, in the rush to catch up on things, Johnson was soon said to be, "spraying money" at contractors for PPE. (More than £8-biilion's worth is said to have been discarded as substandard.)
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Am not saying that covid caused our inequalities (although it wasn't the well-off that had to keep working during lockdown, was it? - hourly-paid didn't get a farthing of furlough.) What seems obvious to me is that the enormous blunder of ignoring the disease for more than two months meant that we had a minimum of facemasks in March 2020 and that's what prevented Johnson from following SAGE advise to copy South Korea. As a result, we are trillions worse off now.
>>> There may be truth in the buddy-buddy allegations but the main point is that a great opportunity to avoid the cost of lockdown was lost because Johnson kept skipping COBR meetings and shunned direct advice from our top 'emergency' scientists.. OK, maybe their advice couldn't be followed easily due to a shortage of PPE but that's his/Hancock's fault. It's so obvious in video that he was not being careful. On 3rd March, he caught covid in a hospital and spread it around by "shaking hands with everybody, you'll be glad to know".
Michael J. Ryan's protests were secretly videoed in January 2020 when the WHO was delaying and watering-down its warnings. (This was shown in a BBC documentary at the end of the year.) Maria van Kerkhove persuaded him that there was "diplomacy" to be observed.
Johnson got holidays after subjecting the UK to half-a-trillion in pandemic expenditure. He had been advised by our top emergency scientists to avoid lockdown by copying the South Koreans (who had expanded a method which worked against MERS-CoV in 2015.) https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (esp. the second 50 secs.) OK, there wasn't enough PPE in England to shield a test-and-trace team which would grow bigger until spread of the disease stopped increasing but whose fault is that? Johnson skipped all of the first COBR meetings and it's obvious in video that he was not careful: On 3rd March 2020, he caught covid-19 in a hospital and spread it around by "shaking hands with everybody, you'll be glad to know". Remember Biden did warn us about a "clone of Trump", but Trump didn't have such a grip on the political system.
Baroness Fox (on BBC Question Time) said that lockdown hurt people and killed a friend. Rishi Sunak seemed to lose his PM chances after he revealed that he'd tried in vain to get some sense about negative aspects of lockdown. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62664537?fbclid=IwAR2RSXp5vTGv6qLjsl8Eqs_eZEh8y-a5tU6JAD94uNxTqA4G7x5cDJM58js
Jeremy Hunt didn't mention the PPE shortage of January 2020 when he said that most scientists in the UK would have backed continuation of the test-and-trace system, rather than lockdown: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (esp. the second 50 secs.) How could we "copy South Korea" without PPE? (or could we have made our own facemasks at home? some people did.)
The lockdown began on 23 March and we hadn't been told much about South Korea's alternative approach (it wasn't spoken about on BBC TV while the MPs co-opted it for giving their pandemic guidance.) It's not surprising that we didn't notice an important development there eight months ago.
By the end of 2021, S. Korea had more than 86% vaccinated (many to booster level) but suddenly there was a spike in deaths early this year. Reason? The Koreans had stopped running their test-based containment system, officially turned it off early in February.
Faced with the startling new deaths rate, they turned on the containment system again and waived vaccination pass rules to make sure anybody could be tested in centres: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/skorea-rolls-back-covid-19-vaccine-pass-infections-burden-testing-centres-2022-02-28/. But this spread of Omicron was fast and the all-time deaths total rose four-fold (from below 6000 in January to above 24,000 on 24/05/2022.) Moral of the story: test-based containment keeps deaths down while the power of covid vaccination is less predictable.
Jeremy Hunt didn't mention the PPE shortage of January 2020 when he said that most scientists in the UK would have backed continuation of the test-and-trace system, rather than lockdown: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (esp. the second 50 secs.) How could we "copy South Korea" without PPE? (or could we have made our own facemasks at home? some people did.)
The lockdown began on 23 March and we hadn't been told much about South Korea's alternative approach (it wasn't spoken about on BBC TV while the MPs co-opted it for giving their pandemic guidance.) It's not surprising that we didn't notice an important development there eight months ago.
By the end of 2021, S. Korea had more than 86% vaccinated (many to booster level) but suddenly there was a spike in deaths early this year. Reason? The Koreans had stopped running their test-based containment system, officially turned it off early in February.
Faced with the startling new deaths rate, they turned on the containment system again and waived vaccination pass rules to make sure anybody could be tested in centres: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/skorea-rolls-back-covid-19-vaccine-pass-infections-burden-testing-centres-2022-02-28/. But this spread of Omicron was fast and the all-time deaths total rose four-fold (from below 6000 in January to above 24,000 on 24/05/2022.) Moral of the story: test-based containment keeps deaths down while the power of covid vaccination is less predictable.
His confidence in Canadian pipeline oil and deforestation palm oil giants gave Tories the mindset that a £400-billion lockdown was a sensible alternative to Korea's lockdown-free test-and-trace. We might have had enough facemasks to "copy South Korea" (https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527) if Johnson hadn't shut THRCC down in 2019.
The current crisis was brought on by Johnson's lockdown, on which he spent £400-billion.
We had no facemasks in 2020 because he'd scrapped THRCC to 'save money' for Brexit.
Without facemasks, Johnson couldn't obey SAGE advice to get busy and copy South Korea at the start. Here's the testimony to that: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (esp. the second 50 secs.)
He couldn't have people doing test-and-trace if they had no facemasks to protect themselves. (Don't forget how many bus drivers got infected.)
We had no facemasks in 2020 because he'd scrapped THRCC to 'save money' for Brexit.
Without facemasks, Johnson couldn't obey SAGE advice to get busy and copy South Korea at the start. Here's the testimony to that: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (esp. the second 50 secs.)
He couldn't have people doing test-and-trace if they had no facemasks to protect themselves. (Don't forget how many bus drivers got infected.)
2022 in South Korea has seen a sudden and dramatic increase in covid deaths, quadrupling their pandemic total in under 5 months. (Other governments aren't looking at the Johns Hopkins data because it shows that test-and-trace was by far the best system before the Koreans abandoned it.)
At the end of 2021, the Koreans had vaccinated 86% of the population, many to booster level, and their deaths total was still below 6000. Their famous test-and-trace system was no longer being run because, 'vaccination was shielding them now'.
But they were still keen on surveillance and soon noticed a worrying increase in deaths this year. The increase was exponential and, by 24th May, they'd lost another 18,000 people. (They'd turned their original containment system back on late in February but the spread of Omicron was fast.) See graph and get links at bit.ly/conwho. They learned that the defensive power of vaccination can be slow and unpredictable.
covid deaths in the UK did not climb dramatically this year but we did lose more than 250 daily in the middle of January (which was what the Koreans would lose in 5 to 6 months in 2020.) "Swings and roundabouts" might spring to mind but let's not forget that our total is well above 200,000 now and our lockdown method involved government expenditure estimated at £400-billion.
The Koreans had focussed early on shielding their economy because minor lockdowns had hurt it in 2015 with MERS-CoV. Nobody's yet mentioned what our losses have been in terms of damage to businesses.
At the end of 2021, the Koreans had vaccinated 86% of the population, many to booster level, and their deaths total was still below 6000. Their famous test-and-trace system was no longer being run because, 'vaccination was shielding them now'.
But they were still keen on surveillance and soon noticed a worrying increase in deaths this year. The increase was exponential and, by 24th May, they'd lost another 18,000 people. (They'd turned their original containment system back on late in February but the spread of Omicron was fast.) See graph and get links at bit.ly/conwho. They learned that the defensive power of vaccination can be slow and unpredictable.
covid deaths in the UK did not climb dramatically this year but we did lose more than 250 daily in the middle of January (which was what the Koreans would lose in 5 to 6 months in 2020.) "Swings and roundabouts" might spring to mind but let's not forget that our total is well above 200,000 now and our lockdown method involved government expenditure estimated at £400-billion.
The Koreans had focussed early on shielding their economy because minor lockdowns had hurt it in 2015 with MERS-CoV. Nobody's yet mentioned what our losses have been in terms of damage to businesses.
Middle-class theorists decry her £50-billion spend on the Bank and pensions after keeping silent about Johnson's £400-billion lockdown. They liked the furlough he gave them. SAGE had advised to copy South Korea with its lockdown-free system. Hancock ignored how well Koreans "saved lives" (death toll reached 600 by December 2020 vs. our 71,000.)
- This video somehow didn't get much attention: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=167983237965733. It makes it obvious why we didn't immediately chase down the virus as the South Koreans did (as recommended to No.10 by SAGE): How do you send a team of test-and-trace people out there with no PPE? What's shocking is that Chris Whitty concealed the expired PPE situation when he announced that "contain" was "finishing" on 12 March 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAE8-e5_EKY. He pretended that "contain" was, "from the beginning", meant to be just the first "phase" of a four-phase plan: "contain, delay, research, mitigate" (how odd that was, never explained.) When he said that there'd be no more testing except at hospitals, that made it clear to anyone who was paying close attention. Later, Whitty was knighted because Johnson recommended it. Why give a knighthood to a man who made it certain we would be locking down the national workforce for months on end and be losing a lot more people than South Korea did? The two men who detained him as a prank were sent to prison: https://www.cps.gov.uk/london-south/news/man-sentenced-assaulting-professor-chris-whitty
Much loss followed from Johnson's scrapping THRCC in 2019 so that there would be no distractions from doing Brexit. Jeremy Hunt then revealed that 200 million pieces of PPE were past their 'use by' date in 2020. That made it easy to spurn the SAGE idea of launching a Korea-style test-and-trace team (its operatives would need PPE.) The Party went into cover-up mode instead and told us to lock down ("loved ones are going to die before their time".) Then, it spent more time hiding South Korea's success story than it did worrying about our health and economy.
Sacked MP to be knighted.
Conor Burns remains a candidate for knighthood.
Prof. Jonathan Van-Tam got a knighthood simply for saying, "Don't panic. Leave that to us". (Somehow, he missed that the WHO had fed us a CCP story in January 2020 and didn't mind that we then gave it even more money.) His 'tent analogy' on TV lied that we'd become vulnerable if we gave any surplus vaccine to poor countries.
Chris Witty was knighted for saying on 12 March 2020: "First of all, we are clearly now stopping the contain phase of this operation, that we've always said from the beginning, there were four stages to this: contain, delay, research, mitigate, and the contain finishes from today." - compare with Jeremy Hunt's revelation that PPE stockpiles at the time were past their expiry date and that SAGE had strongly advised to "copy South Korea".
Today with Laura Kuenssberg, Nadhim was quibbling about "40 million Pounds" for a covid information matter but more than that was thrown at the WHO in April 2020 immediately after the exposure of its collusion with the CCP to deprive countries of true intelligence for as long as possible.
Reply1 h
Chris Witty isn’t a politician and we all know that advisors are just a show pony for politicians and their evidence and opinions are invalidated. He seemed traumatised throughout imo
I have nothing positive to say about tory politicians but he is not one
Reply1 h
Devi Sridhar was also very obviously keeping mum about S. Korea every time she appeared on BBC Breakfast, even accused SK of being brutal while neglecting to say China had hurt anybody. Sometimes the scientists were steered by the MPs but that's no excuse, is it?
Reply1 h
it’s a separate conversation I feel - and scientists don’t share the same privilege or position of power nor do i believe that they are an exploitative force equivalent to politicians
Reply1 h
I added Whitty simply to show the quality of Johnson's many recommendations.
Reply1 h
I don’t feel it’s fair on Chris witty - he was a very useful diversion strategy for the government I think. The public loved to laugh at him while they applauded the Tories
Reply1 h
Make no mistake, he made a good sum of money from it all. Sridhar earns big and therefore was careful to make her prattle conform to the limits set by Johnson and Hancock.
Reply1 hEdited
I’m sure he did and exploitation often involves an exchange. I don’t know the man, i don’t have hard evidence, I have no reason other than instinct - but I have always felt protective over him as a scientist and felt it necessary to distance him from a “politician’s identity” - the media abused him and perpetuated a society attack on him and it felt like it served the politicians
Reply1 h
After all, he only shut down the system which might have kept us out of lockdown (which sucked £400-billion out of the public pocket 🙂
Reply57 m
are you saying Chris whitty shut down a system? I don’t think he is that powerful
Reply55 m
I just remembered there was also that NERVTAG scientist who made sure we got no thermal screening at the Eurotunnel and also none at the airports (to be consistent.) But he already had a knighthood so they've found some other way to remunerate him, no doubt. There never was a day when a covid case didn't cross our border as a result.
24 hour ambulance queues continue month after month in 2022
Straight after reading today (10/10/2022) of 24 hour queues at Derriford hospital in Plymouth, here's this video: https://www.facebook.com/jessica.mcmahon1/videos/1117113855847646
As a former NHS man says, "it's not all caused by covid, it's also under-staffing" but the under-staffing can be understood by looking more closely at decisions made in 2020 an 2021.
The new 'norm' for ambulances has been minimally reported for quite some time now. Daily deaths to covid were not well reduced by vaccination in 2020 but test-based containment in non-communist Aian countries nailed it on the head. Test-based containment was stopped by Chris Whitty on 12 March 2020 and it was never restored in a way that made it powerful like the S. Korean system.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2022/10/113_337682.html?utm_source=fa&fbclid=IwAR3B6LaDcU32Kb5N4sL8tZBmFJA36OgQ1zIMeznZkaCapk-DDc3tS60pMSE
Rather than just assuming that food-banks will 'take care of things' for them, their government cleverly keeps the retailer inside the loop (as it did in its world-leading pandemic response.)
Johnson blew £400-billion on lockdown instead of heeding SAGE and "copying S. Korea". Here's the testimony to that: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (in the second 50 secs.)
Rather than just assuming that food-banks will 'take care of things' for them, their government cleverly keeps the retailer inside the loop (as it did in its world-leading pandemic response.)
Johnson blew £400-billion on lockdown instead of heeding SAGE and "copying S. Korea". Here's the testimony to that: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (in the second 50 secs.)
The mastermind of our lockdown wasn't prudent and didn't care whether we understand viruses or not. £400-billion was blown by ignoring SAGE advice to copy S. Korea: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (esp. the second 50 secs.)
Jonson's speech in the USA? "Democratic Koreans had worked out in 2015 how to handle a respiratory coronavirus which was easily spread if an infected person interacted closely with another person. (The WHO insisted repeatedly that MERS was "not easily transmitted between people", still hasn't admitted that it hit people so hard that they stayed at home and didn't interact much, 37% died.) SAGE somehow became aware of the Korean know-how and told No. 10 to adopt it quick, but he kept the advice hidden.**
Koreans were also focussed on keeping interruption of trade and commerce to a minimum and it's almost too good to be true that their system was the best at slowing covid-19 down while making it possible to avoid lockdowns" <<< No, Johnson's drivel won't be anything like that. He probably dumbed them down with a loud mix of emotional clap-trap and details of all the support he threw at the WHO (in spite of Trump's action in that regard.)
**Here's the testimony: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (in the second 50 secs.)
Koreans were also focussed on keeping interruption of trade and commerce to a minimum and it's almost too good to be true that their system was the best at slowing covid-19 down while making it possible to avoid lockdowns" <<< No, Johnson's drivel won't be anything like that. He probably dumbed them down with a loud mix of emotional clap-trap and details of all the support he threw at the WHO (in spite of Trump's action in that regard.)
**Here's the testimony: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (in the second 50 secs.)
It's said that Hunt began trimming the NHS of adequate PPE while he was HS. He was the one who later said that the national PPE stockpile had become expired by the time the virus arrived (first cases found on 29/01/2020): https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=167983237965733 Shouldn't there have been a system for quickly activating PPE production rather than storing "200 million pieces" past their 'use by' date?
In July this year, Hunt revealed that "government" had ignored confidential SAGE advice that the Korean way was best for slowing the virus down and keeping shops open: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (second 50 secs.)
Johnson kept the advise hidden. He realized that 'furlough' would have mass appeal because people would enjoy some paid time at home. His way was "simple": Stop test-and-trace and lock things down, even if that did cause a big spend (estimated at £400-billion): (Essential workers got no furlough. Some got some claps)
Would we be doing business with any other country that behaves like this?
Don't forget that Mr Johnson's decision to ignore what SAGE had told him ended up costing the UK about £400-billion to run a lockdown instead. ~ Link to blog is pinned at Gerry Lloyd
He gave close to a billion Pounds to the WHO during the pandemic and Bill Gates got money out of him too: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-and-bill-gates-launch-400m-partnership-to-boost-green-investment
Gates had set the stage on which the WHO let countries down with its slow and unhelpful reporting of Wuhan's health crisis. He and Melinda Gates had funded 'Event 201' in 2019 which had a preoccupation with 'zoonosis', and that seemed to encourage the WHO to publish what the CCP advised: "There's no evidence of human-to-human transmission", in other words, that the handling of animals was how people caught covid-19 (https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152.)
It was plainly obvious to southern Asian visitors in Wuhan that hospitals were overrun with contagious pneumonia cases, but it was another two months before the WHO declared a pandemic (on March 11.) The CCP's general message was: "Be calm. They're only catching it from animals". It was a distortion of the Event 201 emphasis that animals might become a frequent source of deadly diseases: 'Animal-borne viruses are constantly evolving into human-killers!'
The CCP simplified what the academics were saying into, 'Animals are the source of sickness' and the WHO conveyed this idea successfully to countries like Denmark.
Another CCP take-home was, 'If there's no evidence of human-to-human spread then there's no evidence that travel restrictions will achieve anything' and Tedros Ghebreyesus kept saying the same thing.
It wasn't long before millions of mink were slaughtered almost as though a very similar virus could have evolved at the same time in Denmark too. The CCP began an extermination of people's small pets.
p.s. Also see https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10226152053575583&set=pb.1465860619.-2207520000.&type=3 where Johnson splashed out in a literal sense.
He gave close to a billion Pounds to the WHO during the pandemic and Bill Gates got money out of him too: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-and-bill-gates-launch-400m-partnership-to-boost-green-investment
Gates had set the stage on which the WHO let countries down with its slow and unhelpful reporting of Wuhan's health crisis. He and Melinda Gates had funded 'Event 201' in 2019 which had a preoccupation with 'zoonosis', and that seemed to encourage the WHO to publish what the CCP advised: "There's no evidence of human-to-human transmission", in other words, that the handling of animals was how people caught covid-19 (https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152.)
It was plainly obvious to southern Asian visitors in Wuhan that hospitals were overrun with contagious pneumonia cases, but it was another two months before the WHO declared a pandemic (on March 11.) The CCP's general message was: "Be calm. They're only catching it from animals". It was a distortion of the Event 201 emphasis that animals might become a frequent source of deadly diseases: 'Animal-borne viruses are constantly evolving into human-killers!'
The CCP simplified what the academics were saying into, 'Animals are the source of sickness' and the WHO conveyed this idea successfully to countries like Denmark.
Another CCP take-home was, 'If there's no evidence of human-to-human spread then there's no evidence that travel restrictions will achieve anything' and Tedros Ghebreyesus kept saying the same thing.
It wasn't long before millions of mink were slaughtered almost as though a very similar virus could have evolved at the same time in Denmark too. The CCP began an extermination of people's small pets.
p.s. Also see https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10226152053575583&set=pb.1465860619.-2207520000.&type=3 where Johnson splashed out in a literal sense.
___________________________
Our pandemic response was slow and extremely expensive. We had no facemasks until April 2020 and that's why they couldn't pursue the expansion of testing and tracing as done in S. Korea, as SAGE had recommended. (Operatives would need PPE, obviously.)
Jeremy Hunt made the above very clear in two short videos but his breezy manner this year suggested little regret:
1. The PPE we had was expired: https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/167983237965733/
2. SAGE had made it clear that Korean test-and-trace was the best way to go, avoiding lockdown: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (esp. the second 50 secs.)
None of Johnson's detractors were any the wiser at the start of the pandemic. The WHO had worked carefully for some time in a way that prevented us from noticing danger in coronaviruses. In 2020, Tedros Ghebreyesus didn't want China's economy to be hurt by travel restrictions so he was happy to display China's idea that there was 'no h2h transmission'. If we'd fostered relations with S. Korea and Taiwan (which builds nuclear power stations) and been more wise to what the WHO expects of itself, we could have copied SK just as Jeremy Hunt testifies SAGE advised No. 10 to do: (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 see the second 50 secs.) Trouble was, how do you 'copy SK' if you have no PPE for your test-and-trace operatives to wear?
Response to a list of 'covid mistakes' seen on facebook:
bit.ly/conwho covers quite a few things in the list. However, it follows a different 'if, then', e.g. If we had noticed what democratic South Korea had been doing since 2015, then we'd have known what to do ASAP in 2020. (Yes, Tedros Ghebreyesus chanted "Test, test, test" on March 16, 2020 but South Korea had already got a major outbreak under control by then. The WHO excludes democratic Taiwan and ignored its emailed warnings in January.) If our initial SAGE advice had been respected, then we might still have managed to avoid lockdown. (Johnson said in his final PM Questions that Britain's economic "output" reached a decline not seen in 300 years.) It wasn't until this year that Hunt spilled the beans that SAGE had said "copy South Korea": https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 see the second 50 secs.
Sunak in No. 10.
In his final PMQ's, Mr Johnson said that Britain's "output" was lower during lockdown than it had ever been in the last 300 years.
Also in July this year, Jeremy Hunt revealed that SAGE had made it clear to the Downing Street team that South Korea had the answer and it would keep us out of lockdown. (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 see the second 50 secs.)
Johnson laughed at test-and-trace from the start, called it "legions of imaginary Clouseaus".
Also in July this year, Jeremy Hunt revealed that SAGE had made it clear to the Downing Street team that South Korea had the answer and it would keep us out of lockdown. (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 see the second 50 secs.)
Johnson laughed at test-and-trace from the start, called it "legions of imaginary Clouseaus".
Wuhan locked down again:
Xi-Jinping flexing muscle any way he can?
He had the former President Hu Jintao publicly removed from assembly the other day.
"27 cities", "207.7 million citizens" are enduring the madness which is a way of saying, "Forget about South Korea."?
27/10/2022, Sunak skips latest climate summit.
The head of the UN was quoted today as having "faith in the British people" regarding climate change.
His WHO got a bonus from us in 2020 and more than £500 million extra for its COVAX project.
Johnson didn't mind that the WHO's pandemic commentary had been circumspect, watered down and delayed so that China might not suffer immediate travel restrictions if countries knew the truth. He didn't fancy getting busy and following his SAGE advice anyway, preferred to satirise the test-and-trace method and do "something simple" instead when it became impossible to ignore British scientists any longer. A contented WHO would then be quoted often as source of "the science" that he was "following".
Johnson said at his final PMQs in July that Britain's productive "output" was at its lowest since 1722 because of lockdown (or was his "in 300 years" also a guess?) Sunak had blown £400-billion to fund the workplace abandonment. Also in July this year, Jeremy Hunt had revealed that top advice (from SAGE) to copy S. Korea had been shrugged off (probably with ridicule) at No.10 - see the short video, esp. the second 50 secs: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527
Sunak blew £400-billion because Johnson locked the country down. Top advice (from SAGE) to copy S. Korea had been fobbed off: Omniscient Johnson said at his final PMQs that Britain's "output" was at its lowest since 1722. (Or was, "300 years" also a guess?
There was a nonstop supply of bubbly because "furlough!" was the magic button: The tired millions who suddenly received money-for-nothing weren't likely to query Johnson's choosing a lockdown over South Korea's test-and-trace containment, even if they became aware of the latter. The Korean economy-shielding system wouldn't have sent them any money, either. With furlough keeping people happy and the BBC never giving news of S. Korea's success, Downing Street could just chill and wait for vaccine mainly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0
Guardian: With that sort of income, it's no surprise that he didn't bother attending 'Asian flu' meetings in January and February 2020 or working overtime to get a proper test-and-trace containment running as suggested by SAGE. We could just pay off the debt that a lockdown would bring us. Not his fault that our warehouses were full of expired PPE. He was jolly well getting his place in history as Britain's liberator from European affluence. (p.s. the PM salary is £161,401 PA)
Re: Hancock saying sorry in 'I'm a celebrity...':
Disease is a part of the natural order. When we heard about "the coronavirus disease", it wasn't natural to send everyone home but something persuaded Hancock and Johnson to do just that. (Was the power of TV something they felt compelled to explore?) Our emergency scientists had advised to "copy South Korea" but that didn't happen - see Hunt's two-minute testimony: facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527.
Why'd Hancock and Johnson reject SAGE, go against nature and spend £400-billion on a lockdown which later caused Johnson to say that the country's "output" had dropped lower than at any time "in the last 300 years"? Tell us, Matt, please do!
p.s. covid-19 was showing a case fatality rate of about 2% while that of SARS was 37% in 2015. - The more sickening the coronavirus, the more its victims stayed at home, not spreading it. But who spooked Johnson into translating a 2% CFR into a shutdown of so many systems and companies? Was it the WHO? Other countries who locked down were those who also thought that the CCP-blown WHO cared about them. SAGE was the trustworthy crew but Johnson sent the WHO a £55-million bonus as soon as he could, with much more to follow. @ has the blog's link.
The WHO told its member countries nothing before 2020 about the preparations being made by South Korea for tackling respiratory coronavirus outbreaks. We had an advantage over many of those countries because British SAGE scientists were up to date on things regardless of what the WHO said or didn't say. SAGE advised government to save lives and the economy by 'copying S. Korea': facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527. However, Johnson and Hancock chose to wait and see if there really was a threat to public health: After all, the WHO had tweeted that there was "no evidence of H2H transmission" and Tedros Ghebreyesus was backing that by often saying that any decisions to restrict travel would not be "evidence-based" decisions. The nipping-it-in-the-bud moment went by and big spending ensued because the UK's PPE in storage had expired: facebook.com/watch/?v=167983237965733. No-one could know what the UK lockdown might do to the economy long-term. The WHO got a British bonus in April 2020 with much more to follow. The average Brit gives the WHO four times more than the average American does every two years. Blog link is at @
By the end of 2021, S Korea had lost 6000 people while our total was 205,000. (We have fewer people per sq. mile.) It was only this year that @JeremyHunt said we might have responded in a far superior way to the pandemic (see the second 50 secs of facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) Confidential SAGE advice had told Hancock and his boss to copy the South Koreans but the Downing Street duo avoided meetings and played things down until the only option was lockdown (There was a PPE stockpile but it was mostly expired. @) A priority in April 2020 was to send money to the WHO (which had kept quiet about SK) while care homes had no money for PPE: As tax payers, we still forfeit four times as much as the average American does to keep the WHO comfy in Geneva.
Matt and Boris ignored the advice that SAGE sent them in 2020 and then sent a £55-million bonus to the WHO. The British tax-payer forfeits four-times more than the average American does to keep Ghebreyesus comfy in Geneva. See how the WHO, by always ignoring S. Korea to keep the CCP happy, led us to being years behind on containment of coronavirus:
"Jeremy Hunt says Johnson’s £840-a-roll wallpaper is already peeling off"
BJ made us do lockdown because he thought it might look bad that there was no PPE in the country (the stockpiles having become expired: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=167983237965733), but also because he'd refused to look at the containment system suggested by SAGE at the start. - That fact was made clear by Hunt in July this year although he seemed little troubled about it. (See the second 50 secs of facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527)
"Net migration to UK hits record high of 504,000"
And Boris' determination to get Brexit done at the expense of all other pressing issues meant he ignored the pandemic threat for as long as he could, and then made us do an economy-killing lockdown. He'd refused to look at the way S. Korea avoided lockdown with a good containment system: (See the second 50 secs of facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527)
Matt Hancock gets £400k for being on 'I'm a Celebrity':
Where was Hancock's 'innovative side' in 2020? British scientists in SAGE believed that covid lockdown could be avoided but their advice to the Health Minister was kept hidden and ignored. Next, a £55-million bonus was sent to the WHO and the Downing Street team would say they were, "following the science". (See J. Hunt in the second 50 secs of facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) We forfeit 4-times more than the average American to keep WHO execs comfy in Geneva.
He realized in 2020 that being on TV a lot can be disconnected from what he does behind the scenes. British scientists in SAGE believed that covid lockdown could be avoided but their advice to him was afforded the same respect that the WHO gave to Taiwan's early warning. (See J. Hunt in the second 50 secs of facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) Next, the WHO received a £55-million bonus and he would soon say he was, "following the science". We forfeit 4-times more than the average American does to keep WHO execs comfy in Geneva.
British SAGE scientists believed that covid lockdown might be avoided with a good containment effort but their formal suggestion was afforded the same respect that the WHO gave to Taiwan's early warning. (See J. Hunt in the second 50 secs of facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) Next, the WHO received a £55-million bonus from Downing Street who would soon say he was, "following the science". We forfeit 4-times more than the average American does to keep WHO execs comfy in Geneva.
It's a pity the grammar is bungled because this is a new revelation: "He (Hancock) said Mr Johnson’s attitude was shared by his chief adviser Dominic Cummings who thought covid was 'a distraction from our official withdrawal from the EU next week. That’s all he wants Boris talking about'." (probably should read: 'That's all I want Boris thinking about.')
Cummings tried to put blame on the others later but here it's said he was happy to keep Boris thinking only about Brexit.
[You can see Hancock had little sway over the big decisions. It's interesting that Jeremey Hunt made it clear in July this year that SAGE advice was kept confidential after it had told Boris to copy South Korea. Boris, obviously, ignored it and lockdown was all he wanted, being nice and "simple". See the second 50 secs of facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527.]
There's a short video of Jeremy Hunt from July this year in which he says that, yes, we should have copied South Korea and SAGE told Boris to do just that. (See the second 50 secs of facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527.) However, there is also a 2020 video of Hunt in which he admits that a massive amount of PPE in the UK was past its expired date when we needed it most.
There are written accounts of a paucity of covid tests and it was some time before Lateral Flow tests would be around, which also makes it hard to imagine us 'copying SK'. Could there still be more to this than Hancock seems now to be revealing?
Boris was a pandemic denialist until March 2020, having no PPE stock and then "simpl"ifying our response into a £400-billion lockdown which left care homes unprotected.
Where's the inquiry into China's covid cover-up done with WHO collaboration? The British taxpayer forfeits 4X more than the average American does toward a fixed WHO contribution (before bonuses.)
Johnson was so preoccupied with Brexit that he shut down our 'THRCC' (Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee) which might have kept us abreast of South Korea's know-how in tackling coronaviruses. He ignored SAGE in February 2020 (see https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) and NERVTAG (New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, formed long before the end of 2019) seems to have had no good effect on early decisions (later backed the decision to have no thermal screening.)
And, craftily, NHS Test and Trace was presented in May 2020 as if it was an equivalent of what South Korea had been doing from the start. It was not tracking contacts down, only alerting people if they'd been in pubs, cafés and restaurants where cases had also been. South Korean test and trace was actively going after possible cases with a view to their confinement if they tested positive.
Behind the scenes, Bill Gates had paved the way for a slow and expensive UK pandemic response by ignoring what S. Korea had developed in 2015. Guess who was buddy-buddy with Bill in 2021 and giving more of our money away for one of his pet projects.
In 2015, Bill Gates was 'telling the World' to prepare for future epidemics. He didn't observe that South Korea had made a breakthrough by using nucleic acid testing in the detection of MERS coronavirus infection. Gates, the WHO and Boris Johnson ignored the Koreans again in February 2020 when they were containing SARS-CoV-2 in the same way. (British SAGE scientists had advised Johnson to copy them.)
Gates gave $15-billion to the WHO in 2021 but Johnson was persuaded to throw in some British money for one of his pet green projects: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-and-bill-gates-launch-400m-partnership-to-boost-green-investment
Gates gave $15-billion to the WHO in 2021 but Johnson was persuaded to throw in some British money for one of his pet green projects: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-and-bill-gates-launch-400m-partnership-to-boost-green-investment
WHO execs in 2020 were saying that travel restrictions would achieve nothing except misery for China's economy. 'The virus wasn't seen to be transmitting human to human,' therefore travel restrictions weren't "evidence-based"!
Early in 2020, confidential SAGE advice was rejected by the omniscient at No. 10. - see the second 50 secs of a video from last July: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527
Yesterday, it was reported we lost 50 shops daily last year (on average) and the trend began with the lockdown. Blame the Ukrainian war too but the rate of shop closures was the same in 2021 and worse in 2020, and can we assume that things were handled well before the war? e.g. Why'd Johnson ignore Trump's warning against reliance on Russian fuel supply? (After all, he was happy to take Trump's opinion on Brexit.) As a world leader, couldn't he have challenged other European countries that were getting so much from Russia?
What about windfall tax on fuel giants? The lockdown showed how unlikely that would be: the big names were the ones who had nothing to fear in 2020.
Yesterday, it was reported we lost 50 shops daily last year (on average) and the trend began with the lockdown. Blame the Ukrainian war too but the rate of shop closures was the same in 2021 and worse in 2020, and can we assume that things were handled well before the war? e.g. Why'd Johnson ignore Trump's warning against reliance on Russian fuel supply? (After all, he was happy to take Trump's opinion on Brexit.) As a world leader, couldn't he have challenged other European countries that were getting so much from Russia?
What about windfall tax on fuel giants? The lockdown showed how unlikely that would be: the big names were the ones who had nothing to fear in 2020.
MP reveals what was problematic in the world's vaccine program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5hb_8T5GQs The "wilful blindness" described by Andrew Bridgen was what made it easy for Johnson to deprive us of a good containment system like the one in South Korea*.
As soon as the Korean's stopped testing and tracing at the end of 2021, they suffered an explosion in omicron cases and their national death toll was multiplied by four within 6 months, in spite of a very diligent vaccination program having given nearly 90% 'protection' to the nation.
N.B. "poacher paying the game keeper", i.e. drug regulators had conflict of interest. Starting at 14:00 in the video: "Members of the JCBI have huge financial links to The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, running to billions of Pounds". That Foundation is "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks." - This video suggests a motive for Bill Gates' never mentioning the South Korean virus containment system in his TED talks on epidemics since 2015: Vaccine supply was commercially much more of an opportunity than test-and-trace could provide (so to hell with test and trace.)
Johnson was mixing with Gates in 2020 and together they pulled the WHO back onto its pulpit after Trump had wised up and reacted to its role in helping China do a cover-up. Did they also jointly hatch the scheme that Britain would simply lock down until vaccine was available, regardless of what it did to the economy?
*The 'NHS Test and Trace' which was launched on 28 May 2020 was not one that pursued case contacts to get them tested. It only provided a (very expensive) snooping system that alerted people if they'd been in a public place where a known case had been at the same time. A cheap website run by a teenager in S. Korea achieved that by simply displaying the recent movements of people who'd tested positive. The only difference was people consulted his website rather than receiving text alerts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5hb_8T5GQs
Bill Gates saw profit in vaccines and he gave the WHO money after Donald Trump withdrew funding. It was an ideal opportunity and he got Johnson to also help the WHO with money. With the two men focussing on vaccine supply and having the WHO for access to many countries' health systems, it's no wonder that our South Korean-style test and trace system was shelved on 12 March 2020 (the day after the WHO belatedly declared a pandemic.) It's regrettable because S. Korea was very good at slowing the spread of the virus, having fewer than 600 fatalities by mid-December 2020 when we were up past 70,000 lost.
Bill Gates saw profit in vaccines and he gave the WHO money after Donald Trump withdrew funding. It was an ideal opportunity and he got Johnson to also help the WHO with money. With the two men focussing on vaccine supply and having the WHO for access to many countries' health systems, it's no wonder that our South Korean-style test and trace system was shelved on 12 March 2020 (the day after the WHO belatedly declared a pandemic.) It's regrettable because S. Korea was very good at slowing the spread of the virus, having fewer than 600 fatalities by mid-December 2020 when we were up past 70,000 lost.
It was the totality of Johnson's lockdown which set us onto a difficult future. Not only by stopping most of the economy in its tracks but also because he eliminated a system that would locate infected people and isolate them. Just compare South Korea's covid death toll by the second half of December 2020 with ours: 600 v. 71,000. (Why did Johnson act that way? He and Bill Gates couldn't be bothered with an intricate containment system when so much money would change hands by simply focusing on vaccine supply? )
Sunak + Johnson = £400 billion pandemic spend, because they ignored SAGE: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (the second 50 secs.)
Johnson decided against a test-based containment strategy for the UK before he was asking basic questions at PHE on 1st March. (He'd dodged five COBR meetings by then.)
Had Bill Gates already encouraged him to go only where the money follows? (i.e. to hell with South Korea's mass testing system, just lock the herd down and wait for vaccine?) Is it just a coincidence that the Gates Foundation "is heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks."
Tories couldn't avoid a £400 billion lockdown spend because Johnson wouldn't consider the alternative pandemic response which was a containment system as used in S. Korea. SAGE had advised the latter but Johnson 'knew better' in spite of having dodged five COBR meetings by 23 March (lockdown day.) Had he been on the phone to Bill Gates perhaps, who's always on the lookout for guaranteed profits and had ignored S. Korean ingenuity since 2015? - Vaccine supply is much quicker profit than any test-based containment could be and, "the Gates Foundation is heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks."
Gates and others watch trends and figure out shrewd ways to keep the money rolling in, e.g. Gates immediately saw that the pandemic might bring more wealth because his Foundation "is heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks". He didn't sit back, jumped in to save the WHO from financial failure and persuaded Boris Johnson to focus entirely on vaccine delivery, shunning South Korea's clever way of slowing the virus' spread while avoiding lockdowns.
The mRNA type of vaccine was new when one was developed to work against covid-19. If you read the history behind development of the smallpox vaccine, you can forgive people for becoming concerned when young children are jabbed with any new type of vaccine.
A Mint article (https://www.livemint.com/news/world/covid-death-rates-much-higher-in-unvaccinated-former-who-chief-scientist-11672545400876.html) presents science stories that praise the outcomes of vaccination for Covid-19, one of which (from the univ. of Maryland) says: "Unboosted individuals are 18 times more likely to die if COVID+ compared to those who recently received a bivalent (omicron) booster." However, something that happened in South Korea last year (2022) suggests that a global picture might not be clear-cut: The Koreans had vaccinated approximately 90%, many to booster level, so they stopped doing virus containment by testing and tracing. In less than 5 months, their national covid-19 deaths total climbed from below 6000 to above 24,000. It was the test-and-trace routine that was keeping their death count low, not the vaccine.
Bill Gates and Boris Johnson preferred that we'd have no Korean-style containment system in the UK, preferred that all resources would be channelled toward vaccine production while we waited in lockdown. The Gates Foundation is "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks."
A Mint article (https://www.livemint.com/news/world/covid-death-rates-much-higher-in-unvaccinated-former-who-chief-scientist-11672545400876.html) presents science stories that praise the outcomes of vaccination for Covid-19, one of which (from the univ. of Maryland) says: "Unboosted individuals are 18 times more likely to die if COVID+ compared to those who recently received a bivalent (omicron) booster." However, something that happened in South Korea last year (2022) suggests that a global picture might not be clear-cut: The Koreans had vaccinated approximately 90%, many to booster level, so they stopped doing virus containment by testing and tracing. In less than 5 months, their national covid-19 deaths total climbed from below 6000 to above 24,000. It was the test-and-trace routine that was keeping their death count low, not the vaccine.
Bill Gates and Boris Johnson preferred that we'd have no Korean-style containment system in the UK, preferred that all resources would be channelled toward vaccine production while we waited in lockdown. The Gates Foundation is "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks."
In 2015, Bill Gates was saying that epidemic readiness was lacking worldwide but he didn't observe that S. Korea had a new way to slow the spread of a respiratory coronavirus. He should have mentioned what they'd achieved (not acknowledged by the WHO either) but his nose follows money and there's lots more to be made in vaccine supply?
Bill Gates saw in 2015 that Korean-style test and trace was not the kind of enterprise that the Gates Foundation would invest in. On the other hand, vaccine supply in 2020 would be big money. Johnson cut 'mass testing' short and put us into lockdown instead while we waited for vaccine. govuk
Money grabbers caused Britain's pandemic response to be less effectual than South Korea's was, for example.
To people like Bill Gates, 'test-and-trace' was not something to invest in - Mr Johnson derided it as "legions of imaginary (Inspector) Clouseaus" and it was shelved before Whitty could put it to work en masse. Vaccine supply was the big money and lockdown was the way, 'hopefully', to limit the spread of virus while the vaccine labs got busy. (p.s. Rishi Sunak is said to be heavily invested in Moderna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNw3Gd10ZQ8)
We're such a trusting lot. Craftily, 'NHS Test and Trace' was presented as if it was doing what South Koreans had been doing from the start. However, it was not tracking contacts down. All it did was send you a text message if you'd frequented a place that a known case had also been to. (Launched on 28 May 2020, the 'NHS Test and Trace' did not pursue the contacts of known cases to get them tested. All it did was snoop where everybody went and then told you if you'd been in the same place, e.g. a pub, as frequented by a a known case.) We, conveniently, got the impression that everything possible was being done to "track" down and contain the virus. The phone app was praised as, "World beating" by Boris Johnson. (Cost-wise, that might have been true.)
p.s. A home-made website run by a teenager in South Korea achieved the same thing by simply displaying the recent movements of known cases before they'd been tested. The only difference was that the public consulted his website rather than receiving text alerts.
It's appalling that nobody's set the record straight and that farmed animals have continued to be slaughtered by the million (e.g. super-massive chicken farms in the US where birds had their air cooling systems turned off even though the avian flu has appeared to kill very few people (and were those people already ill before infection?) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct36b8
Johnson dodged all the COBR meetings and ignored our emergency scientists in 2020 when they suggested we avoid lockdown by using S. Korea's containment routine. (See the second 50 seconds of https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) Was he glad of the #Partygate outcome because it let him slip away from the chaos?
This Times article is dated Wed 25/01/2023: "Uk weekly death toll at its highest since Covid lockdown."
It's remarkable that, if you Googled, 'UK covid deaths' on 25/01/2023, you got a chart that showed zero covid deaths since 7 January 2023. That's eighteen days with no covid deaths and it's not happened before, according to the chart.
There is something else worth noting: Covid deaths in the UK in 2022 sometimes were extremely numerous if you consider that South Korea lost only 580 people between the beginning of records in January 2020 and 13 December 2020. Last year on 13 April, we had a daily loss of 212 people. In other words, there were times last year when we were losing as many people in a few days as the Koreans lost in the 11 months before they re-opened ports of entry (in December 2020.) High daily deaths in the UK were also seen very frequently in 2022. It's all down to the mass testing and tracing routine that the Koreans followed but which our top MPs have never spoken of.
It's remarkable that, if you Googled, 'UK covid deaths' on 25/01/2023, you got a chart that showed zero covid deaths since 7 January 2023. That's eighteen days with no covid deaths and it's not happened before, according to the chart.
There is something else worth noting: Covid deaths in the UK in 2022 sometimes were extremely numerous if you consider that South Korea lost only 580 people between the beginning of records in January 2020 and 13 December 2020. Last year on 13 April, we had a daily loss of 212 people. In other words, there were times last year when we were losing as many people in a few days as the Koreans lost in the 11 months before they re-opened ports of entry (in December 2020.) High daily deaths in the UK were also seen very frequently in 2022. It's all down to the mass testing and tracing routine that the Koreans followed but which our top MPs have never spoken of.
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| Chart which is referred to above (click it for full screen): |
Mr Johnson said in 2021 that, as a result of lockdown, Britain's output was the lowest it had been in 300 years. Why had he made no effort to avoid lockdown when another way to reduce infections was already working well in S. Korea? https://msft.it/61805KIL2
Boris was still ignoring this Doctor's message on March 3rd, 2020 by "shaking hands with everybody, you'll be glad to know" in a hospital with covid patients: https://bit.ly/Wenliang
Look at the genetics and realize what they were omitting from the picture - A virus very rarely jumps to a different host species and, if one does, it's explained by a one-off mutation event which happens during the replication of just one virus that's inside a host animal/human at the time. In other words, if a human is unlucky enough to be infected by a newly evolved 'zoonotic' virus that's emerging for the first time from one animal host, that host will be THE ONLY animal that's become a source of the mutant virus. No other animals will become sources of the new virus because it has evolved to infect humans, not animals (unless, even more rare, it retains the ability to infect animals and can now infect both).
Furthermore, there is no proof that the original SARS-CoV-2 didn't emerge during the replication of a virus that was 'already' a human-infecting pathogen. (Zoonosis is often mentioned as though its involvement was a certainty.)
The following story might be something that the WHO also disregards because they'd rather have us believe that the appearance of dangerous mutants is commonplace?: chinas-covid-surge-produced-no-new-variants
 The culling of so many animals was spurred on by the WHO's irresponsible reluctance to assert that the spread of SARS-CoV-2 was human-to-human, not animal-to-human: NBC There was no indication that animals were a 'bridge' (catching the virus from humans and then passing it back to humans) but even isolated small animals in peoples' homes were culled and the WHO said nothing again (as with the Danish culls.) Her action/inaction in 2020 was just like that of Johnson, causing huge numbers to have no protection in care homes and directing public attention away from places that used a containment system very well. Lockdown law breakers shouldn't be in office. (Rishi was fined too.) It didn't worry them when we'd lost 71,000 people by mid-December 2020, a month in which they had seven Downing Street parties. (South Korea's deaths total was still below 600. SAGE had said to copy the SK containment system but Johnson parodied the idea: "legions of imaginary Clouseaus".) Vaccine supply was going to be the big-money mover and that was all they were interested in. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 Lockdown kickstarted the CoLC. SAGE was ignored and the COBR meetings skipped: Testing/tracing would be just, "legions of imaginary Clouseaus". Even the Wuhan doctor who'd been gagged by the CCP was ignored: "I shook hands with everybody" on 03/03/2020. |
Is it a stunt: creating news to 'put the past behind us', e.g. the £37-bn spend on a sham test and trace system sold as an "NHS" thing on 28 May 2020? Sham because it did no pursuit of disease contacts to get them isolated, all it did was tell people if they'd sat in a pub where a carrier was subsequently known to have sat on the same day. Somewhere near half a trillion Pounds was taken from the public pocket under Sunak while Johnson told him what to do.
Lockdown kickstarted the CoLC. SAGE advice was binned and the COBR meetings skipped: Contact tracing would be just, "legions of imaginary Clouseaus" so he decided we'd have none. Even the Wuhan doctor who'd been gagged by the CCP was a doomsayer: "I shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know" on 03/03/2020.
That 'We didn't know there were asymptomatic cases' excuse has been aired again:
If Hancock and Johnson hadn't ignored their SAGE confidential advice in February, they might have realized that South Korea's very first case appeared healthy when she'd been detected on thermal screening at Incheon Airport. The Koreans decided straight away that anyone with raised body temperature should be tested and they began to do testing faster than any place on Earth. (The reason we began to hear the word 'test' so often was because 'asymptomatic' cases were assumed by the Koreans to be the norm, the only sign of infection often being a thermal one.) But SAGE would have made this clear: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - Hancock and Johnson just didn't want to copy South Korea because its response required strong leadership. Commencing on 23rd March, Johnson's "simple" system, i.e. just lock down and wait for vaccine, even ruled that there'd be no thermal screening at our border ports.
The Independent has an article about Johnson's dodgy arithmetic. Who needs arithmetic when bluster does the job? He didn't seem to register the difference between 587 South Koreans and 74,752 Brits in December 2020, just kept partying. (Factor in that S. Korea has 88% more people per sq. mile and you get 239 dying in the UK for every 1 in S. Korea. ~ Lockdown was the better way?)
Thanks to Oakeshott, Hancock's contempt for many people including police is now made known. Some people lost businesses through what he made the police do to them.
Is that, in some way, why the BBC kept a deliberate silence about South Korea's quick and effective virus containment system during lockdown in 2020?
Boris was still denying the virus danger 3 months after that whistle-blower had died in Wuhan. He put SAGE advice into his bottom drawer, skipped the COBR meetings and then casually let us slip into 9 months of restrictions and lockdowns (and partied in December when we'd lost 74,000 people compared to South Korea's 580.) A small company's petty cash was a lot safer than the public funds were when he was on a spending spree. Shouldn't his Lords nominations be on hold until matters have been resolved?
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/?fbclid=IwAR3XCrYe8Led8HpU_OZWRLIYCEbznAPqn9fhWdpS3Lf8vbY-sgMueahgyK0
While the BBC was made to suppress any news of South Korea, the truth unfolded slowly through impartial news articles and a Channel 4 documentary. (The two good BBC documentaries were given no time extension on iPlayer)
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/?fbclid=IwAR3XCrYe8Led8HpU_OZWRLIYCEbznAPqn9fhWdpS3Lf8vbY-sgMueahgyK0
While the BBC was made to suppress any news of South Korea, the truth unfolded slowly through impartial news articles and a Channel 4 documentary. (The two good BBC documentaries were given no time extension on iPlayer)
The ruling Party made sure no non-Beeb journalists could get at tory MPs in 2020, by doing an MP boycott of all channels that weren't BBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1OJNJ4q-4.
BBC Breakfast made sure that no guests chatted about South Korea, which was only mentioned in lists of remote countries, except that time when Devi Sridhar used S. Korea as her example of a country being cruel to its own people (when, in fact, brutal lockdown enforcement stories had come out of Africa and China. S. Korea had avoided big lockdowns.)
BBC Breakfast made sure that no guests chatted about South Korea, which was only mentioned in lists of remote countries, except that time when Devi Sridhar used S. Korea as her example of a country being cruel to its own people (when, in fact, brutal lockdown enforcement stories had come out of Africa and China. S. Korea had avoided big lockdowns.)
"I support this review", but they'll never review the way Hancock and Johnson made the Beeb suppress news of S. Korea's massively superior pandemic response until after lockdown, and then it was screened late when the curiosity had moved to other issues, e.g. partygate. (The two good Beeb documentaries, "Lockdown 1.0" and "54 Days" were given no extra time on iPlayer.) It's almost reminiscent of the way the communists suppressed the Ukraine famine in 1933. They later had that Welsh journalist killed. (Just by coincidence, it was Lineker's comment about 1930's Germany that got him suspended.)
Boris is being questioned, but only about his lies concerning his lockdown parties.
Ask Boris if he read the BBC article about the Wuhan ophthalmologist who was 'rectified' by the CCP for telling other doctors online that a novel pneumonia was making it advisable to wear PPE. If Boris says, "No, but I heard about that", then ask why, a month later, he was "shaking hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know" in a hospital where "there were a few coronavirus patients." The article of 6/2/2020: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51364382. In effect, the PM did nothing until there was proof that it could kill many Brits too:
Ask Boris if he read the BBC article about the Wuhan ophthalmologist who was 'rectified' by the CCP for telling other doctors online that a novel pneumonia was making it advisable to wear PPE. If Boris says, "No, but I heard about that", then ask why, a month later, he was "shaking hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know" in a hospital where "there were a few coronavirus patients." The article of 6/2/2020: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51364382. In effect, the PM did nothing until there was proof that it could kill many Brits too:
More about Lineker: There is some validity in making comparisons with the 1930s, e.g. The Tory's made the BBC keep us in the dark about South Korea's limitation of COVID deaths in 2020 when our necrology was exponential. We had lost 71,000 people by mid-December vs. 590 in S. Korea. Tories also shielded MPs from probing questions by applying a media boycott on any news provider that wasn't BBC. (Use Ctrl+F for 'boycott' in bit.ly/whofibs) In that film 'Mr Jones', we see that the Communist Party in 1933 was determined to keep Ukraine's famine deaths a secret and they later killed Mr Jones in Afghanistan for having exposed them.
google 'Boris Johnson 2020' and you get:
1. He scoffed about virus victims for as long as possible: "It will probably go away" and, "shook hands" in a hospital on 3rd March.
2. rejected SAGE's first advice (ref. Jeremy Hunt: facebook com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) and made sure nobody mentioned South Korea (contact tracers were, "legions of imaginary Clouseaus"),
3. took the route of mass control (just lock 'em down) and held boozy 'thank you' socials when 71,000 had died vs. 590 in S. Korea (which has 88% more people per sq. mile.)
The BBC was Johnson's loudspeaker during the lockdown (all other channels were boycotted) and nobody was given room to talk about South Korea. We'd lost 71,000 by late December before S. Korea had yet to lose 600. Devi Sridhar obeyed the rejection of the Koreans but accused them ludicrously of social oppression in their pandemic response, "we are lucky here in the UK", she said.
The BBC was Johnson's platform. No other channels had access and his MPs never talked about South Korea. We'd lost 70,800 when S. Korea had lost 590. Devi Sridhar kept mum about that too and said S. Korea was brutal: "we are lucky here in the UK".
The whole system has always been a pale shadow of the things they could do in S. Korea. That's partly because big chaebols like the Samsung people got behind a system called RIGHT (Research Investment for Global Health Technology) in 2018. Bill Gates was involved but then turned his back on the Koreans to develop collaboration with the WHO that would streamline vaccine supply (the Gates Foundation is, "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks")
Nothing to learn really. Its "mistakes" were conscious ones. It was acting in China's political interest: ignoring those that China doesn't like (esp. Taiwan and S. Korea.) Ghebreyesus preferred to indirectly back China's "no evidence of human to human" message by saying that there obviously was therefore no "evidence" that travel restrictions would help anything - thus helping prevent poor China from becoming "economically isolated".
p.s. It's fairly easy to calculate that we've chucked a £billion at the WHO since January 2020 but that promised investigation of its role in the initial covid cover-up doesn't get mentioned any more. (We've always given the WHO much more per capita than Americans do, until Gates came along, and that's also suspicious.)
2020: "China is saying that they can't see any human to human spread, therefore go ahead Denmark and kill all those mink. - It obviously comes from animals in Denmark too and the shed workers could not have caught it from each other in the breakroom. It's parallel evolution, not something that gets around on planes, trains etc. p.s. Don't restrict travel! That hurts China and, obviously, is not called for". Blows the mind how well duped people like Biden and Boris were, or were they?
2023: "The genetics now suggests a natural origin, not lab-engineered, therefore we were correct to point the finger in the animals direction, although we have learned from our mistake!"
2023: "The genetics now suggests a natural origin, not lab-engineered, therefore we were correct to point the finger in the animals direction, although we have learned from our mistake!"
The BBC was Johnson's loudspeaker during the lockdown (other channels were boycotted, including ITV talk shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1OJNJ4q-4.) Shielding his MPs from other media journalists helped Johnson conceal his moves and influence what he wanted the public to imagine was happening behind the scenes. It was a way to prevent the public from seeing any discussion of South Korea or the border port situations, especially at the Eurotunnel.
71,000 was our toll in December 2020 when S. Korea had yet to lose 600, but Devi Sridhar (on BBC Breakfast very often) cooperated with the censorship and told no Korean good news (even after she'd been consulted on the Channel 4 documentary: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus.) She ludicrously mentioned S. Korea as a country showing brutality in its pandemic response. "We are lucky here in the UK", she said. (The defiant sect leader she sympathized with was soon found to have been embezzling his followers' money.)
71,000 was our toll in December 2020 when S. Korea had yet to lose 600, but Devi Sridhar (on BBC Breakfast very often) cooperated with the censorship and told no Korean good news (even after she'd been consulted on the Channel 4 documentary: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus.) She ludicrously mentioned S. Korea as a country showing brutality in its pandemic response. "We are lucky here in the UK", she said. (The defiant sect leader she sympathized with was soon found to have been embezzling his followers' money.)
Did Tories elect Truss ahead of Sunak to make it less obvious that their pandemic response had been an all-male opportunity? (£$)
Cummings, Van-Tam, Zahawi, Whitty, Vallance(?) ... are missing from the photo.
Compare it with South Korea where there were female leaders who came across well in Channel 4's documentary: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-country-that-beat-the-virus
(S. Korea consciously prevented profiteering in its response.)
On 30/12, Li Wenliang warned doctors to wear PPE against a fast-spreading sickness that looked like SARS. It was in England before 29/01 but Johnson was "shaking hands with everybody" on 03/03. He stopped mass testing on 12/03 and sent us all home on 23/03. By 27/04, he was at war with an "unexpected and invisible mugger". Eight months later, he decided to get some booze, 'for the morale of his staff'.
"Being truthful is essential" Yes, but the WHO's preference for describing the coronavirus as 'animal-derived' led to a widespread misunderstanding of how it was getting around, and millions of animals were slaughtered in Denmark and China. Tedros Ghebreyesus was keen to say repeatedly, "If there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission then there's no evidence that travel restrictions will achieve anything - Stop hurting China's economy with travel bans that aren't evidence-based!"
Anyone watch BBC 2 last night? Taiwan took the virus seriously and had only 7 deaths in several months. Compare in detail at bit.ly/whofibs. Start by watching Jeremy Hunt: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - esp. the second 50 secs.
The Port of Dover was never mentioned in 2020 until the French closed the Eurotunnel out of fear for the UK's Alpha variant (because it had 40% - 80% higher transmissibility.) Alpha hit South Koreans hard because they'd resumed air travel at exactly the wrong moment: December 2020. From the start, Johnson could keep Dover open because he was shoving us into lockdown rather than doing Test, trace, treat (the Korean way) at full volume with the border well closed.
Contracts, investments and Royal honours..... One way or another, some men found great wealth through Johnson's system (while in South Korea there was a vigilance that deterred profiteering.) Would Boris have been able to scoop millions from his American talks if he hadn't lost the PM job first? (His choice was 'keep the job or get very rich': what would you do?) He knew his lies would make him 'interesting' to Americans and money would follow. (Theresa May had made a million Pounds through talks after he'd taken her job, although she said most of it was given to the Party.)
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10230387777866043&set=a.1332983292410
Contracts, investments and Royal honours..... One way or another, some men found great wealth through Johnson's system (while in South Korea there was a vigilance that deterred profiteering.) Would Boris have been able to scoop millions from his American talks if he hadn't lost the PM job first? (His choice was 'keep the job or get very rich': what would you do?) He knew his lies would make him 'interesting' to Americans and money would follow. (Theresa May had made a million Pounds through talks after he'd taken her job, although she said most of it was given to the Party.)
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10230387777866043&set=a.1332983292410
The opposition leader has been drawing fire:
Starmer said little about Johnson's bare-bones pandemic response until it started to run costs in the ten of billions. Then, he shouted a few things that made sense but followed that by making it seem that Labour backed more time in lockdown. His lack of clarity gave Johnson the chance to seem worried about the economy, was defending it from Starmer.
Responding to "Apps aren't for everyone"
That "World-beating app" was something, wasn't it. It cost £37bn and achieved almost no isolation of Covid cases. The irony is that it was downloaded onto many phones made by Samsung, a company that began funding health defence in South Korea in 2018.
Gates tethered the WHO by organizing donations after Trump had stopped its funds in 2020, then he persuaded governments to focus only on vaccine supply, continuing to ignore South Korea's TTT strategy.
"Members of the JCBI have huge financial links to the The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, running to billions of Pounds". That Foundation is "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks."
"Members of the JCBI have huge financial links to the The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, running to billions of Pounds". That Foundation is "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks."
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Did Johnson's behaviour gives cues for NHS managers to follow? He played a denialist game until 12 March 2020 (the day after the WHO finally declared a pandemic) and then the BBC didn't air any talk of South Korea's TTT response until after lockdown when people were back at work. Other channels couldn't ask MPs why we weren't containing the virus in the same way because there was a special MPs boycott of all media but the BBC.
The "unexpected and invisible mugger" couldn't get past NHS security and that's why most units didn't lose any staff to it? . . . The UK had lost 70,752 by 27/12/2020: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-uk-records-30-501-new-coronavirus-cases-and-316-more-deaths-12173646 Use Ctrl+F to find '70,752' (S. Korea had lost 587 by 14/12/2020.)
The "unexpected and invisible mugger" couldn't get past NHS security and that's why most units didn't lose any staff to it? . . . The UK had lost 70,752 by 27/12/2020: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-uk-records-30-501-new-coronavirus-cases-and-316-more-deaths-12173646 Use Ctrl+F to find '70,752' (S. Korea had lost 587 by 14/12/2020.)
Wet market theories get support but important details are overlooked:
The beginning of a contrived preoccupation with 'animal-to-human transmission' is evident in a 2012 update made by the WHO. It stated of MERS that, "the novel coronavirus cannot be easily transmitted from person to person”. (How was MERS-CoV infecting so many people? The answer: 'animal-to-human'.)
Carrying this 'zoonotic' notion forward with SARS-CoV-2 in January 2020, the WHO was implying that all transmission was probably animal-to-human because "there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission" (https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152)
The 2012 update was disproved in 2015 by the occurrence of MERS outbreaks inside four S. Korean hospitals which were traced to one man who'd visited each one. (He'd caught the disease in the Middle East, nowhere near any wet markets like those in Wuhan.)
But the WHO habitually ignores anything that happens in S. Korea because it's a country that's always supported Taiwan.
p.s. The WHO people have clearly not understood that the evolution of a 'zoonotic' virus is a one-off genetic event. - All human infections can be traced to virus coming from just one animal.
Carrying this 'zoonotic' notion forward with SARS-CoV-2 in January 2020, the WHO was implying that all transmission was probably animal-to-human because "there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission" (https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152)
The 2012 update was disproved in 2015 by the occurrence of MERS outbreaks inside four S. Korean hospitals which were traced to one man who'd visited each one. (He'd caught the disease in the Middle East, nowhere near any wet markets like those in Wuhan.)
But the WHO habitually ignores anything that happens in S. Korea because it's a country that's always supported Taiwan.
p.s. The WHO people have clearly not understood that the evolution of a 'zoonotic' virus is a one-off genetic event. - All human infections can be traced to virus coming from just one animal.
The WHO's behaviour in January 2020 facilitated China's cover up of the threat to public health. The CCP's message was, "Be calm. It seems only that the people who went to the wet market are the ones who got sick from this virus". Whilst the theory of a wet market origin was plausible, it was pushed in a way that caused people to think of animals as the direct source of infection. Then, there was the WHO's, "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission": https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
Simplistic descriptions of 'zoonosis' would contribute to the rumour that the disease was animal-borne, and no clarification was offered by the WHO. (Zoonosis is likely a one-off event occurring in the genome of one virus inside one animal host cell and it will not ordinarily give rise to a variant that spreads from many animals to many people.) Mass culls of small animals soon began but the WHO kept quiet (as it did when house pets became victims of the 'zero Covid' policy in China, e.g. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055831581/health-workers-in-china-are-killing-pets-while-their-owners-are-in-quarantine and https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-60038551
From the start, the WHO sought to appease the CCP by suggesting that any restricting of travel by other countries was "not evidence-based" (If there was no "evidence" that people were spreading it, then why stop them travelling?) China's economy was to be protected from "travel bans" and there would be no resistance to the peak in travel that occurs during the Chinese New Year.
The WHO 'didn't notice' email from Taiwan's top medic who had been to Wuhan. It delayed warnings and didn't recommend South Korea's TTT strategy to any country, therefore economy-starving lockdowns became the order of the day.
How many would not have ended up in hospital if Johnson et al. had acted quickly on South Korean reports (they made sure there were facemasks, closed nursing homes in February), rather than waiting until March 12 when the WHO finally announced a pandemic?
https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1644776053490196480
Bill ignored South Korea's TTT system when it was slowing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. Devi was on the Channel 4 documentary that showed how effective TTT was. However, back on the BBC, Devi never spoke of it and then said that S. Korea's response showed brutality.
Bill ignored South Korea's TTT system when it was slowing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. Devi was on the Channel 4 documentary that showed how effective TTT was. However, back on the BBC, Devi never spoke of it and then said that S. Korea's response showed brutality.
Johnson put the HS2 project ahead of the need to have a good pandemic response (ignored SAGE when they said to copy South Korea, dawdled for weeks and a month. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) The WHO's behaviour facilitated China's cover up of the threat to public health and then Johnson began a series of WHO bonus donations, giving a total near a billion Pounds.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/08/upsetting-china-governments-biggest-taboo-found-hard-way/?fbclid=IwAR046XlD-JaJLy6Tcpwka_iX1K7b_IXga3P502Naa_KOkOjQLk1WA6Rq8bE : Oakeshott and Hancock each had a "Shut up about China" experience because
China = nuke power stations, HS2 contracts etc. (Taiwan makes better power stations.)
Biden wants Irish people to remain proud of Michael J. Ryan, the man who gave up begging fellow WHO execs to let the world know about Covid-19. - The execs were hiding behind "the diplomacy that we use" while making sure they didn't blow China's cover up. (The video of Ryan was in the BBC's "54 Days".)
Biden's response was to make everything Trump did seem wrong. (Trump had reacted by stopping payments to the WHO.) What neither side mentioned was how the WHO had, since 2015, consistently ignored South Korea's experience with respiratory coronaviruses and the TTT strategy they devised to slow the spread (and avoid lockdowns.)
Biden's response was to make everything Trump did seem wrong. (Trump had reacted by stopping payments to the WHO.) What neither side mentioned was how the WHO had, since 2015, consistently ignored South Korea's experience with respiratory coronaviruses and the TTT strategy they devised to slow the spread (and avoid lockdowns.)
Trump saw that the WHO played a disinformation game with the West in order to help China conceal the potency of its pneumonia outbreak. Biden ousted Trump, praised the WHO and put it back on the payroll. Nobody made the point that South Korea's new answer for MERS-CoV in 2015 was working well against SARS-CoV-2, and again it was not recommended by the WHO, never explained by them in a comprehensive way.
SAGE advised Johnson to "copy South Korea" but no other Western countries seemed to get that advice from anybody and Johnson ignored SAGE. (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - esp. the second 50 secs)
Ghebreyesus declared a pandemic on 12 March and said, "test, test, test" on 16 March. (If he'd said, "Test, trace, treat" would that have upset the CCP by acknowledging its 'capitalist' rival?) Johnson had Whitty "finish" the mass testing program on 12 March. He locked the country down 11 days later and so began many months of considerable economic self-harm. Only non-communist parts of southern Asia saved lives (much more effectively) with systems like the one in S. Korea and allowed trade and industry to continue almost as normal.
SAGE advised Johnson to "copy South Korea" but no other Western countries seemed to get that advice from anybody and Johnson ignored SAGE. (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - esp. the second 50 secs)
Ghebreyesus declared a pandemic on 12 March and said, "test, test, test" on 16 March. (If he'd said, "Test, trace, treat" would that have upset the CCP by acknowledging its 'capitalist' rival?) Johnson had Whitty "finish" the mass testing program on 12 March. He locked the country down 11 days later and so began many months of considerable economic self-harm. Only non-communist parts of southern Asia saved lives (much more effectively) with systems like the one in S. Korea and allowed trade and industry to continue almost as normal.
Sunak's pushing maths education again.
With a little mental arithmetic you can guess that 70,753 ÷ 587 is about 120. 120 times better is how well South Koreans were saving lives with their TTT strategy in 2020, i.e. With our lockdown strategy, we had lost 120 times as many people to Covid by mid-December. But there's more: factor in that there are 88% more people per square mile in S. Korea and 120x becomes .... you work it out, 225x? Therefore, how did Johnson quickly calculate that what the Koreans were doing was, "whistling in the dark"?
Also see https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1648333498846003202 - 'Britain gives nearly £400 million to China'. Look carefully through the WHO website and you'll realize that it also receives a basic donation of nearly £500-million. (It's not obvious to see at first but use Ctrl+F for 'Much of the WHO' in bit.ly/whofibs)
The WHO and the CCP pretended that Wuhan's pneumonia outbreak was nothing to worry about. (They didn't want other countries to impose travel restrictions.) CCP deleted genuine info from Chinese websites and made doctors sign gag orders. The WHO provided a tweet that would display: "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission".
What does Downing Street do? It ignores our own SAGE people at the critical moment and sends the WHO a series of bonuses, the first one being £55-miilion in April 2020 when care homes were going into debt to get PPE.
The WHO and the CCP pretended that Wuhan's pneumonia outbreak was nothing to worry about. (They didn't want other countries to impose travel restrictions.) CCP deleted genuine info from Chinese websites and made doctors sign gag orders. The WHO provided a tweet that would display: "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission".
What does Downing Street do? It ignores our own SAGE people at the critical moment and sends the WHO a series of bonuses, the first one being £55-miilion in April 2020 when care homes were going into debt to get PPE.
Did Bill Gates quickly drive a wedge between Johnson and Trump after Trump had cut America's support for the WHO? Gates wanted his Foundation to make money in vaccine supply and he persuaded Johnson to ignore South Korea's TTT strategy so that our resources would only go to the vaccine program? Unlike Trump, Johnson was still happy to keep the WHO ensconced and it would soon be a partner in the great vaccine supply event. ('To hell with Trump's objection to WHO/CCP collusion.') Having ignored his confidential SAGE advice to "copy South Korea" (see https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527), Johnson could speak of the WHO instead and still seem to be "following the science". OK, Johnson never gave TTT a second thought anyway but you do wonder why Gates was over here quite early in 2020, waving his hands in the air all the time and saying, "It's like a war zone".
BBC chairman resigns under a cloud.
The BBC made use of WhatsApp (to 'prepare' guests) in shielding Johnson from questions that would reveal our lack of a 'Test, Trace, Treat' strategy in 2020. (Use Ctrl+F to find 'boycott', 'sridhar' in bit.ly/whofibs) He'd played the denialist until 12 March and put us into lockdown eleven days later.
Why 12 March? That's the day after the WHO declared a pandemic, forcing his hand.. It hadn't mattered what British SAGE people had said to him in their confidential advice long before then: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527
Why 12 March? That's the day after the WHO declared a pandemic, forcing his hand.. It hadn't mattered what British SAGE people had said to him in their confidential advice long before then: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527
3 March 2020 and he "shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know" in a hospital "where there were actually coronavirus patients". (Li Wenliang had warned fellow doctors to use PPE in December 2019.) 11 March 2020 and the WHO declares a pandemic so he goes on TV the next day to say, "loved ones are going to die before their time." He'd scoffed at his confidential SAGE advice which suggested avoiding lockdown by copying South Korea's TTT strategy ASAP.
A beginner's guide:
Tories controlled us in 2020. Fed us illusion to keep us calm. In China, people were just told to be calm.
Tories lazy and preferred lockdown so arranged it that we would not know about TTT.
And made it suddenly seem like there was a threat on 12 March because the shitbag WHO had declared a pandemic the day before.......
It was mind control the whole way with BBC assistance.
Use Ctrl+F to find 'boyco' in bit.ly/whofibs - the BBC was closely controlled in 2020 because so many people would be at home in the daytime, away from their jobs, and it would be 'in their interest' not to worry why was South Korea having such a low death toll when it ordinarily has more travel to and from China and 88% more people per square mile?
South Korean female scientists in February 2020 were all, "Let's contain that virus!".
UK experts every month in lockdown were all, "Let me talk at length on Zoom!"
~~~~~~
Thought provoking. We need government that doesn't deceive the public 'for its own good'. Take the way the Tories ran a puppet show in 2020. They kept the SAGE advice to "copy South Korea" completely hidden and we'd never have heard about it if Jeremy Hunt didn't spill the beans on 4 July last year: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (this excerpt has only had 3500 clicks.) The WHO got away with systematically deceiving us about the obviously dangerous virus and then was referred to constantly as a scientific guru on the BBC, which was under Tory control. By isolating cases and tracking down the spreaders, as the South Koreans started doing in Feb 2020, why shouldn't we also have been counting deaths in the hundreds by December? Instead, we were counting them in the tens of thousands.
Johnson's laid-back approach came at enormous economic expense that still unfolds daily.
The Brexit team sprayed money at the WHO which had been insisting that the coronaviruses transmit animal-to-human, rarely human-to-human. The WHO was 'defending China's interests' when it held back news of South Korea's clever response - that response included the use of travel restrictions, "economically isolating China". 'They wanted people to get coronavirus', like in the old days when there were 'chickenpox parties': Sky, 02/11/2023. 'By coincidence', Boris Johnson was shaking hands with everybody in a hospital on 3rd March and there's film of him making scientists shake his hand on 6 March. He was 'helping spread it for herd immunity's sake'! By 27 April he must have wised up because he called the virus a "mugger". p.s. By 29 April our deaths total was suddenly 26-thousand but Dominic Raab said there was "no surge" - see bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52478085bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52478085 (the total at the end of March had been approx. 1,900.) The WHO had made it seem there was no prior history of controlling a coronavirus. Having read what's on the WHO's website, China said this one was only caught by people in the 'animal market' (it was in fact a fish market) and the WHO tweeted the same message two weeks later: "no clear evidence of H2H transmission". More time went by but Ghebreyesus seemed up to date when he said "Test, test, test" on 18 March. He'd never said "Test, trace and treat" because that was S. Korea's strategy and China isn't fond of a country that has helped Taiwan so many times. (Ghebreyesus also ignored S. Korea when it tackled MERS-CoV the same way in 2015.) Ghebreyesus didn't like "travel bans" - 'How dare those countries act so independently, not caring about China's economy?' Johnson was in no hurry to restrict travel (and lose popularity with the jet set?) and he made sure the airports and Eurotunnel had no thermal screening, not even ear thermometers. He went "shaking hands with everybody" at a hospital on 3 March and there's film of him getting scientists to shake his hand on 6 March. - https://news.sky.com/story/covid-inquiry-civil-servants-wanted-people-to-get-coronavirus-days-before-lockdown-was-announced-12999063?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter&fbclid=IwAR0O3ynVU20VPkEaQ3At-nwkyQ76d13upjdSrrBMiXcanOZ7nQOh5QPLCXk It transpires now that he was keen to 'improve herd immunity', spreading the pathogen by hand when possible. - Remember, they had 'chickenpox parties' in the good old days. 08/10/2023 at the COVID Inquiry. Lord Sedwill explained away the focus on "possible worst case outcomes" but he didn't suggest that "likely outcomes" might have been worth considering. Why'd they all ignore the death of Li Wenliang in early February?: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51364382 - he was a medically alert 34 year-old. In effect, they helped the CCP sustain its cover up until the WHO forced their hand by declaring a pandemic on 11 March, and even then they waited another 12 days before doing their lockdown thing (why wait even one minute?) The WHO had been very effective in snuffing interest in South Korea's TTT which began saving lives in the first week of February (in which "everyone" mattered and nursing homes were closed in February.) Will we still be funding the WHO so grandly for the next decade? (In 2018/2019, the average UK taxpayer gave it more than 4-times what an American taxpayer forfeited - you can do this math after looking at the WHO website, although they have spread the details in strange ways across different pages.) 21/11/2023 We were told to stay home on 23 March and Chris Whitty says it was "a bit late" but that there would have been nothing to gain from locking down "a bit early". Our first two cases were found on 29 January. If we had locked down then, the obvious benefit would have been a restriction of the virus' chance to spread, giving us time to get a TTT task force together like S. Korea had done (It was advised in the PM's confidential SAGE advice at the outset: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - see the second 50 secs.) Whitty played with words on 12 March when he, Johnson and Vallance first said that the outlook was, suddenly, grim (the PM was recently still shaking hands with numbers of people, e.g. with some scientists on 6 March: bit.ly/whofibs.) "The contain phase... finishes from today", said Whitty, "as we've always said that it would", i.e. because it was only the first of a four-phase strategy: "contain, delay, research and mitigate". (Yes, the explanation was mystifying if you noticed it and the four 'phases' were never spoken of again.) NOT BEING DISCUSSED: The Eurotunnel never got thermal screening (explaining why the airports got none, i.e. 'to be consistent'.) Covid testing of inbound drivers only began in April 2021 and was only for those who were spending more than 48 hours in the UK. Try figure out why a 48-hour delay on testing would be helpful! The experimentally large lockdown was run by a PM who gave up Science in school at the age of 15. Just now, BBC Breakfast showed a clip of Chris Whitty dissecting the 'issues around' acting/not acting in the early months of 2020. In January, SAGE advice to copy S. Korea had been shunned and soon it was the WHO that was referenced on TV with regularity. The WHO had ignored South Korea's "bali bali" (quick quick) action just as it had ignored their first use of test-isolate-trace against MERS-CoV in 2015. The photo attached suggests Whitty was quite the kingpin among the MPs, not the mild and quiet person he seemed onscreen.  Patrick Vallance says that Boris quit Science at age 15. Where did he get the notion to tell Cummings that testing and tracing was "whistling in the dark", "legions of imaginary Clouseaus"? Conveniently, the WHO was still ignoring South Koreans who first came up with the bones of a 'TTT' strategy in 2015. Ghebreyesus did say "Test, test, test" on 16 March but he'd never once told member countries about "Test, Trace and Treat": He spurned anything South Korean or Taiwanese out of preference for what the CCP wanted. 24/11/2023 Just now, Jeremy Hunt said, "I think it was right" to have a furlough system and save jobs in 2020. Why'd he wait until 4 July 2022 to speak up about the right way to respond to a coronavirus? https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - see the second 50 secs. (bit.ly/whofibs) https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ex-tory-mp-invites-discredited-31528637?123=&fbclid=IwAR10EgffX6j3VEmmWzY4dYJEYsA3pLOiv0yF6ibjRNGyDsCrrsgciJ3WaG0 One thing Andrew Bridgen exposed was the relationship between the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation and the medical regulation authority in the UK. The Foundation is, "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks" and was keen to see a vaccine rolled out ASAP in 2020. Also on Youtube: "Members of the JCVI have huge financial links to The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, running to billions of Pounds". Vaccine supply was guaranteed earnings and Gates was happy to see Britain committing everything in that direction. He had posed as an epidemics guru in 2015 but didn't speak of South Korea's progress with 'testing and tracing' that year (when MERS-CoV was spreading inside four of its hospitals.) More 'TTT' in 2020 was not going to be the giant investment opportunity and Gates wanted nothing that might diminish enthusiasm for the vaccine program in the UK. Jeremy Hunt testified in 2022 that "government" didn't heed its initial SAGE advice which had said, in so many words, 'copy S. Korea': https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (watch the second 50 seconds.) More is at Mongoose McQueen 29/11/2023 Gove's been handling Covid spin since 2020. See his excuse for the MP's enjoying a boycott of all reporters who didn't work for the BBC that year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1OJNJ4q-4 It was a move which stopped anybody from saying what Jeremey Hunt said in 2022: "Why weren't we copying the South Koreans?" (see the second 50 seconds of: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 ) More's at Mongoose McQueen  Andrew Bridgen let it be known that "Members of the JCVI have huge financial links to the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, running to billions of Pounds". If true, it explains why Gates was here in 2020 and hobnobbing with No. 10. Gates persistently ignored everything South Korea achieved with MERS-CoV in 2015, just as the WHO did. He made no comment about the TTT strategy which evolved from that in 2020 (which SAGE said should we should emulate - see the second 50 seconds of: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 ) Gates was keen to see the vaccine supply rolling ASAP, a test-and-tracing strategy might slow things down so just quash the idea?  Today it's Dame Jenny Harries. Will anyone ask Jenny Harries why NHS Test and Trace cost £37-billion but, in spite of its name, it had no powers to make people get tested or isolated? Her system spent magnificently because it traced the movements of potentially everybody and then sent text messages to those who'd been in a public place at the same time/after a Covid case was visiting it. Her system was not doing what TTT did in S. Korea, not by a long chalk. - The Koreans tracked infected people down and isolated them. (A teenager there had provided case location information on a website he'd created - it didn't cost £37-billion 😃 ) p.s. Regardless of what Harries says now, the WHO said, "Test, test, test" far too late (on 16 March) and never advised countries, rich or poor, to copy South Korea's Test, Trace and Treat strategy: bit.ly/whofibs 30/11/2023 "We didn't know we were putting asymptomatic cases into care homes"? The South Koreans saw straight away that they should test every potential case because their first one, at Incheon Airport on 19 January (confirmed the next day at a hospital), had no visible sign of being ill: They'd only examined her because of her temperature reading. Not only did Hancock pretend he'd 'never heard of such asymptomatic cases', he also had NERVTAG build an argument against using thermal screening at the Eurotunnel and airports. (That way, nobody could later say, "Why didn't you further monitor those arrivals who had high body temperature?") Hancock is keeping the following out of focus: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - Jeremy Hunt saying in 2022 (in the second 50 secs.) that British scientists would have favoured "copying South Korea" if they'd only known that such advice was coming from SAGE. It was rejected and kept confidential by Matt and Boris. bit.ly/conwho 06/12/2023 - Johnson to be questioned If he "got the big decisions right" then why had we lost 71,000 people by mid-December 2020 when S. Korea hadn't yet lost 600? (they have 88% more people in the average square mile.) "We got the vaccine first" by a small margin but data from S. Korea for the first 6 months of 2022 showed that their TTT strategy was what kept deaths down - the positive effect of vaccine provision was slow to develop and they had a super-massive spike in deaths as soon as they stopped TTT on the assumption that an 86% vaccine rollout was now protecting the people. bit.ly/conwho "I didn't twig", but he's keeping quiet about the certain fact that the WHO had helped China prevent many countries from 'twigging'. He defied Trump's sanction on the WHO (after it helped the CCP to make the virus seem unremarkable) by sending extra money as soon as he could. We taxpayers still give four-times more to the WHO than the US taxpayer does (because there are four-times as many taxpayers in the US.) bit.ly/conwho  11/12/2023 Sunak must have seen that Johnson (who quit Science at school, age 15) was scoffing at the test and trace story coming from non-communist East Asian countries 'because they are third-world and repressive'. Sunak didn't care either way and lost vast sums to online fraudsters. 14/12/2023 A "conspiracy of silence" among Tory and Labour MPs was mentioned by MSP Angela Constance (on #bbcqt last night), but not the one in which they all have ignored how expensive the pandemic was made for us. Expensive because No. 10 shunned the technique used in 'repressive, third world' South Korea*, even though SAGE had said straight away to copy it (Jeremey Hunt attested to this in 2022: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 <video is under 2 mins long.) Devi Sridhar's narrative on the BBC through 2020 showed her compliance with a rejection of Taiwanese and South Korean communications**. She excluded truthful mention of S. Korea whenever she was on BBC TV (but not when she was in Channel 4's revealing documentary), breaking the silence just once to suggest that the sect leader whose massive indoor gatherings caused the big outbreak in Daegu was treated harshly by government. "We are lucky here in the UK", she said. (Use Ctrl+F in bit.ly/whofibs to find 'Devi'.) *The UN waited until July 2021 to admit that S. Korea has a 'developed economy': https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1002230.html.**Taiwan could get no meaningful response from the WHO's 'IHR focal point' regarding the new SARS-like cases in Wuhan: https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-viBOuw?typeid=158 (Likewise, China responded only by sharing a press release.) The WHO ignored a warning on 31 December that Taiwanese doctors had colleagues in Wuhan who were falling ill, providing strong evidence of H2H infection: https://www.france24.com/en/20200409-us-criticizes-who-for-ignoring-taiwan-virus-warnings  20/12/2023 A new doctors' strike has begun today.
Johnson let the NHS have insufficient PPE for emergencies, pretended to start a test-and-trace program which Whitty then said "finishes from today" on 12 March 2020. (Did anyone ever see somebody who had a role in "the contain phase" and actually did trace the contacts of someone who'd tested positive for the virus? Whitty lied and now enjoys top honours.)  Truss' resignation Honours are bestowed and 7 of the 11 recipients are Tories. (30/12/2023) They put Truss in before Sunak to break up a pattern: At least three years in which Brexit and the pandemic response were run by male MPs - In contrast, S. Korea had some clever women in positions of health leadership (and no big lockdown.)  The WHO's Jan '20 tweet proclaims that, with no discernible "evidence" to the contrary, it was safe to assume the novel virus wasn't spreading person-to-person. (WHO had posted such an assumption for MERS-CoV on their website without statistical backing.) Rejecting his confidential SAGE advice, B. Johnson then sent money to the WHO (in defiance of Trump) while saying he was 'following the science' (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - see after 50 secs.) http://bit.ly/conwho WHO acted in big brother ways when they stubbornly excluded evidence of human-to-human spread of MERS-CoV, even in 2015 when S. Korea had decided to stop it from spreading inside hospitals. In their January 2020 tweet, WHO proclaimed that, with no discernible "evidence" to the contrary, it was safe to assume that the novel coronavirus wasn't spreading person-to-person. (Their assumption rested on their skewed description of MERS-CoV, still viewable on their website today.) Rejecting his confidential SAGE advice (to copy S. Korea), B. Johnson began sending money to the WHO (in defiance of Trump) while saying he was 'following the science' (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - see after 50 secs.) http://bit.ly/conwho .jpg) Floods in the first week of January 2024 https://www.facebook.com/martin.plaut/posts/pfbid02xZRG8kYkkHQSVRwjF5rT1nrqLrvcdPbHFhD4PMhHhRFitCjf1wTWqPw5f8kPxdQLl [^Click here^] Remember the last time there were severe floods in January? Johnson, "ignored pleas to visit parts of the country devastated by floods in the New Year.." after he'd had Xmas in the Caribbean. He also bunked out of five COBR meetings and ignored SAGE advice to copy SK's clever Covid response (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - after the first 50 secs) 05/01/2024 Johnson slams Met Police for investigating the IDF Johnson slams the Met now but it was the Met who backed his pandemic response by fining people heavily for breaches of the rules while giving MPs insignificant small fines for their breaches.  Mr Johnson saw that lockdown would T-bone the economy. Treacherous under pressure, Pat Vallance said Johnson couldn't even grasp how a lockdown "can flatten infection rate". (Even a child would find it easy: 'If we all stay at home, we won't catch germs'?) It was too late for Johnson to do a U-turn and obey his confidential SAGE advice which was aimed at averting lockdowns wherever possible: bit.ly/whofibs  "Stop the boats"?
"Slow the virus", said SAGE but was Rishi shown that confidential advice? https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527. Anyway, his hedge fund profit was fed by vaccine sales. The faster the virus, the more secure the demand for vaccine, so "Ignore South Korea!" bit.ly/whofibs 19/01/2024 Sturgeon tells the inquiry she deleted all her WhatsApp messages She told Scots that there was no point looking at pandemic responses in other countries. She used to tweet a lot with Devi Sridhar who also never praised the S. Korean response even after she'd appeared in the Channel 4 report about its TTT strategy. bit.ly/whofibs The story that's slipping out of sight? Johnson's neglect of SAGE advice led to the loss of many retail faces: bit.ly/conwho When Johnson and Hancock said "following the science" in 2020, they had begun quoting the WHO quite frequently. They made sure nobody asked why Americans were angry with the WHO : bit.ly/whofibs  Their fibs (and the furlough) crafted acceptance of a response which shunned S. Korea's TTT so that all focus would be on vaccine supply - in which Sunak's hedge fund was invested.  Nicola Sturgeon message said Johnson was a '@?+*!ng clown' She and Devi Sridhar had somehow worked out that nothing could have been learned from any other country's pandemic response. In that, they were helping the Tories cover their tracks: bit.ly/whofibs (Tories didn't want to try stop virus coming in through the Eurotunnel.)  Aha! Paula Vennells says, "We had no evidence of that" just as the WHO said there was, "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" ... but then Westminster sent the WHO about £1bn to help it through the pandemic: bit.ly/whofibs  She's a Gates' mate. Gates (like Johnson) wanted no South Korean TTT in the UK, he just wanted to see a lucrative supply of vaccine. That's why Whitty "finished" the UK's mass testing with tracing (did he really do any?) on 12 March 2020.  .jpg)   Sturgeon was guided by Devi Sridhar who was helping No. 10 to keep the BBC quiet about the good pandemic strategy in S. Korea.  29/01/2024 Michael Gove says the union of England/Wales/NI with Scotland has been strengthened by 14 years of Conservative leadership. In 2020, he suggested that a Scotch egg was a substantial meal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1OJNJ4q-4 (The media boycott queried by Piers was one of the tools used by Tories to keep the BBC-watching public unaware of South Korea's progress: bit.ly/whofibs) #Tory #Gove #BorisJohnson https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/george-freeman-conservative-minister-mortgage_uk_65b7db20e4b01c5c3a37a20b?d_id=7237450&ncid_tag=fcbklnkukhpmg00000001&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=uk_main&fbclid=IwAR03jU4MNbF7UPWUWPWM7kzP9NJ3NRALH1ja_MLT5z72Sr2f2b4bYuUe-hI
What a coincidence. Freeman said on BBC Question Time last year that "a hundred and twenty thousand people" had died worldwide from Covid-19: bit.ly/whofibs (use Ctrl+F to find freeman).  31/01/2024. Nicola Sturgeon gets tearful at the Covid inquiry. She might have been BoJo's opponent but was like him in more ways than one - Use Ctrl+F in http://bit.ly/whofibs (e.g. she said there was nothing to be learned from other countries' pandemic responses.)   Inspired by: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=872464057963221&set=gm.1719353825141066&idorvanity=1101084560301332 I would thank Andrew Bridgen... See https://twitter.com/.../status/1753483707862905016/photo/1  Remember, Johnson did say he would "f%$k business". What better way than an eight month lockdown after telling S. Korea "no thanks" when it was offering to help get TTT running in other countries: https://eastasiaforum.org/2021/03/11/k-quarantine-exporting-south-koreas-covid-19-management-strategy/ (published on the day the WHO declared a pandemic.) bit.ly/whofibs A paper written in Taiwan last month explains why the country's 'containment' of the coronavirus was ended in March 2022: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0929664623003455 Another source of information reveals that a huge surge in cases soon followed the end of 'containment', catapulting the cases total from 24,033 on 2 April 2022 to beyond 10-million before the end of February 2023: https://covid19.mohw.gov.tw/en/sp-timeline0-206.html People had received their Covid vaccines but it was too soon to rely on that alone for protection. The same thing happened in South Korea after testing and tracing was abandoned in January 2022, officially shelved in February: Their human losses jumped from below 6,000 to above 24,000 in less than 5 months.  Video: StefanovicJuniorDoctors "Management of the economy"? BoJo rejected early SAGE advice which was based on S. Korea's experience of MERS, including the expense of lockdowns. - Take it from Jeremy Hunt in July 2022: facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 Johnson dallied for "weeks and months" and then, "had no tool" because he'd squandered the chance to get control of viral spread. (Testing and tracing "is whistling in the dark" he wrote, "legions of imaginary Clouseaus".) Many were happy to get the furlough but surely they knew who was going to have to pay for it? 13/03/2024: Wales' Mark Drakeford is drilled by the Inquiry I remember his antipathy for Johnson ("He's horrible") after he bullied the French into re-opening the Eurotunnel in spite of the UK variant.. But what of those countries who didn't lock down because they found that trace-and-test was very effective? " "Evidence-based analysis" shows that lockdown was not the correct approach for COVID-19 (or for the Spanish Flu and other pandemics that have occurred), because its negative effect on public health could have caused 20-times more people to die than would have because of viral infection: USAgov. (This conclusion was drawn in 2022 after a systematic 'scan' of at least 230-thousand scientific papers on COVID-19 was done to find the authors who were most likely to have provided appropriate information.) The Inquiry hasn't asked anybody why the SAGE advice to 'copy South Korea' was ignored at the start. (Sturgeon said after consulting with Devi Sridhar that there was no point looking at the Covid response of any other country.) In fact, the Inquiry gave Johnson the opportunity to tell another lie this year: "I had no other tool (but lockdown)". Grant Shapps said in May 2022 that partygate was all just trial-by-media and the journalists should be quiet: indy100.com/news/grant-shapps-partygate-defence-boris.
The S. Korean response can be traced back to their handling of MERS-CoV in 2015, but Shapps and Jenrick argued that there was "no instruction book" for slowing the virus down. They also said "we didn't know about asymptomatic cases" when asked to explain how carriers were moved from NHS hospitals into care homes. (A quite old definition of a carrier on nih.com is, 'A carrier is an individual with no overt disease who harbours infectious organisms.' - The first officially detected Covid-19 case outside of China was noticed on thermal screening at Incheon Airport in January 2020. She had seemed healthy so the S. Koreans decided that they'd strive to test every contact of a known case, whether or not they showed symptoms. They closed nursing homes in February.)
 Gates ignored South Korea's CoV response in 2015 and again in 2020. He didn't want countries bothering with trace and test strategies because there was no great profit in it for him. Simple vaccine supply was where the money would come from. 29/03/2024 Video from BBC Newsnight: https://www.facebook.com/TheLondonEconomic/videos/7628023537209630 The presumption behind the "£400bn" lady's summary is, "There was no other tool", which was a totally dishonest thing for Johnson to say this year. Just watch Jeremy Hunt tell the truth in 2022, the second 50 secs of this clip is sufficient: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - "Why weren't we copying South Korea?" and, "I think that's something we should be thinking about" The WHO had been pushing its "zoonotic" misunderstandings since 2012 and the US saw their game in 2020, but BoJo chose them as his frame of reference (sent them somewhere near £1bn through the weeks and months) after ignoring our own SAGE people: Mongoose McQueen It can't be ignored that Johnson came clean at his final PMQs when he said that Britain's output had reached a "300 years" low - he said it just to spite Starmer for asking for a longer second lockdown, otherwise he'd probably have held that fact back as well. You can trace the 'reason' for Johnson's rejection of his initial SAGE advice in 2020 to the fact that vaccine supply would provide a much easier route to profit than a trace-and-test strategy ever could? (The hedge fund that Rishi had created was receiving pay from Morderna: Why save people and protect the economy with TTT when you could just sit in lockdown and wait for vaccine profit?) Koreans consciously avoided profit-making in their Covid-19 response.) There's that "weeks and months" again. It was how Johnson described the time he did virtually nothing after rejecting advice from SAGE to save lives and keep businesses safe from lockdowns by imitating Taiwan and S. Korea. Here's the video testimony: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (see the second 50 secs)  20.03.2024: Matt Hancock used to say he was too busy "saving lives" to talk to reporters and now Rishi says he "saved the economy" with his furlough paperwork. Too bad that Trace-and-test was rejected outright by a PM who quit school science at age 15. It would have kept things normal enough without a lockdown. S. Korea was even offering any country help to set the system up. (NHS Test and Trace, launched 28.05.2020, didn't visit suspected cases, only sent them sms and they could avoid testing by staying away from the venue where the system said they might have crossed paths with a carrier.)  ... Add to that (the above) the fact that the so-called "NHS Test and Trace" did not imitate S. Korea or Taiwan and did not hold back the virus spread, mainly because it had no power to make anyone get tested (unless they wanted to return to the venue that it had warned them, by text message, was contaminated when they first visited it: If they did return to the pub, restaurant, café, they could be asked there for proof of a recent negative Covid-19 test result before being admitted.) Calling it, 'NHS Test and Trace' was a ruse to make Brits think government had 'resumed' going after the virus in the way that Taiwan, S. Korea, Indonesia and others had done from the start. The MPs knew that few people would notice the difference because so few had ever really grasped what 'Trace, test and treat' was in the first place.   Why'd they spend £37bn on a "NHS Test and Trace" system which had no power to make people get tested? 1. to make us think that they 'invest' in the NHS. 2. to make us think Britain had a proper trace and test system like the ones in S. Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia etc, WHERE THEY AVOIDED LOCKDOWNS. bit.ly/conwho (use Ctrl+F) Why'd they make our pandemic response so restrictive and costly? More than one reason but did it also serve to conceal the impact that Brexit was having on businesses small and large? Add Ukraine to the mix and nobody knows for sure what damage can be blamed on Brexit.  Now earning upward of £91k and it doesn't bother her that the WHO still misleads with its website description of MERS-CoV or that it helped China give most countries a false sense of security in January/February 2020, while Taiwan and S. Korea were busy saving lives and avoiding lockdown. Cameron said he thought we should remain and then set the ball rolling that guaranteed a withdrawal. facebook.com/MonMcq  Another £1bn was pledged to Moderna this year, 'to get us ready for the next pandemic': bit.ly/whofibs (S. Korea, with much fewer deaths and no general lockdown, actively guarded against profiteering from the pandemic.)  Boris and Rishi made us rely on a few big retailers in 2020 after ignoring SAGE advice to keep life as normal as possible by copying S. Korea. Boris had quit school science at age 15, says Patrick Vallance.  Will any Tory leader revisit the issue of the WHO pretending that MERS-CoV couldn't transmit human-to-human and then backing China for saying the same thing about SARS-CoV-2? Bill Gates had us sending more than half-a-billion extra Pounds to the WHO, beginning with a £55-million 'bonus' in April 2020. bit.ly/conwho (WHO had also ignored warnings from Taiwan and didn't hint at copying S. Korea until 18.03.2020 when, out of the blue, Tedros said: "tracing every contact must be the backbone of the response in every country". NHS Test and Trace did some expensive tracing activity in June but its text messages had little persuasive power and not many of the traced 'contacts' travelled the miles to get tested.)  In 2015, the WHO reiterated its idea that MERS-CoV could not spread human-to-human but added that it might do so "when there is close contact". In 2016, Nature published a review of MERS and its 4th key point says that MERS progeny virus is not shed by people until late in the virus life cycle, well after harsh symptoms have developed and most people are confined to beds or in hospital. That explained why the spread of the virus between people was restricted but the WHO never updated its website information, kept implying that 'these coronaviruses' don't tend to spread human-to-human. bit.ly/conwho See the video snippet where Hunt said in 2022 that "government" had shunned good advice from SAGE which told them to copy South Korea.: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 He's smiling all the way as though it was not an act of neglect which wasted the country's opportunity to avoid lockdowns. Johnson said this year that there was "no other tool" that he knew of: Somebody's lying and tens of thousands of businesses which are gone today from the high street might otherwise have survived, while the big names that were allowed to stay open made hay while the sun shone for them (thinking giant leaps in Tesco profit and see https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10232493003969676&set=a.4137699722864) At the outset: The WHO deceived us under the pretext of protecting China's economy from "travel bans". However, Johnson ignored Trump's clumsy reaction to that and made the WHO his reference point as though it was a reliable authority. The WHO still gets almost $half-a-billion from British taxpayers bi-annually (four times the amount that an American taxpayer forfeits) and it received a known £555-million extra from us during the pandemic: bit.ly/conwho  Is the Rwanda plan there to show us how 'innovative' the Tories are? Compare with 2020 when Johnson showed zero imagination and simply waited for the WHO to make the pandemic 'official', by which time it definitely was too late to follow his SAGE advice which had pointed out that Taiwan and S. Korea were doing fine (they never imposed comprehensive lockdowns.): https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 The biggest recent example of it (media manipulation) was the total absence of any news of S. Korea and Taiwan on BBC One during the big lockdown of 2020. The MPs protected themselves from any questions about those countries by running a special media boycott of all other channels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8pf_Om88Yg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1OJNJ4q-4 Our 'Test and Trace' didn't persuade any helpful numbers of people to drive to test centres (one person per car) just because a text message had told them there was possibly some coronavirus in the Dog and Duck last time they were there. All they did was stay away from that pub because they'd be asked there for proof of a negative test result if they did return. The new restrictions on smoking:  Hancock in the London marathon, 21/04/2024: https://www.thenational.scot/news/24267761.bbc-chris-packhams-hilarious-response-matt-hancocks-appearance/ Here's how Hancock and Johnson managed Scotland during the lockdown. They made sure Devi Sridhar would be able to zoom on BBC Breakfast almost daily under the understanding that she never engaged in talking about S. Korea (she was a consultant expert on the Channel 4 documentary about SK's response on 12 May.) The London MPs had BBC television well under control after 'boycotting' all other channels. Next thing, Sridhar would tell Sturgeon to proclaim that there was no point in being interested in the pandemic strategies that other countries followed for containing the virus. Sturgeon did as our MPs did, very little while she waited things out. Mongoose McQueen Sridhar broke the silence on S. Korea once by suggesting that its fraudulent Daegu sect leader was treated cruelly after campaigning against social distancing. "We are lucky here in the UK", she said. But then she showed animosity toward Johnson's decision to lock down again on 5 November. She called his approach a "rubbish path" on the News and was immediately replaced on BBC Breakfast by Linda Bauld. In response to a reminder that Michelle Mone got a £200-million PPE deal in 2020, later followed by a royal title and the package that comes with it: It was 28 May 2020 that 'NHS Test and Trace' was launched and began monitoring people who had the app when they visited pubs, cafés and restaurants. Some got messages to say they'd been in a place where the virus had been brought in and possibly made them a Covid contact. After that they could go and get tested or just avoid that café for a while. Of course, the system did other things too, e.g. running PCR tests for hospitals and the general public, and the cost climbed to £29.5-billion, (not "£37-billion", says the Fullfact website) but it was sold on the promise of preventing further lockdowns and that objective was not achieved. (Did its name make people think that Mr Johnson had made sure we were still doing what Taiwan and S. Korea had been doing since January?) bit.ly/conwho. At least it proved that Tories 'invest in the NHS'. https://goodlawproject.org/government-ordered-to-disclose-sunaks-hedge-fund-emails/ .... "Why save people (and protect the economy) with a trace-and-test strategy when you could just sit in lockdown and wait for vaccine profit?" - Johnson had shunned SAGE advice which said that locking down might be avoided to a large degree if South Korea was imitated. Rishi had jumped in with furlough which would make lockdown palatable to most of the people with salaried jobs. Hunt recently claimed that furlough was "the right thing to do" in spite of the fact that he was the one who revealed what Johnson had done: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527. Penny Mordaunt's now talking about "plastic patriots". https://twitter.com/RickParkin/status/1783955130850718173 < Click here and see a fake jogging session exposed. Always taking us for fools, his draconian lockdown ruined businesses and couldn't prevent an excessive number of infections. Find the 'video' link (red) in bit.ly/whofibs: Hunt says Johnson (who quit science as a 15-year old) spurned the advice from SAGE (the scientists chosen to safeguard our national interest) which said S. Korea and Taiwan had the answer.  I'd say the Tories most prominent in 2020/21 were masters of mass control and that was their priority, to bend the will of the people. While other sectors might feel a need to tell 'white lies' sometimes so that people 'stay calm' and behave as they want them to, the colour of our politics during the health crisis led to a high death toll. The following comes from a paper which doesn't even analyse how well things went in the Asian countries that took trace-and-test seriously....................: "The UK failed to act quickly in response to the emergence of COVID-19. There was no clear policy approach at the start of the pandemic, with initial contract tracing abandoned in mid-March and a significant delay before population-wide distancing strategies were introduced. Delays continued throughout 2020." https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/covid-19/what-the-bma-is-doing/the-public-health-response-by-uk-governments-to-covid-19#:~:text=The%20UK%20failed%20to%20act,Delays%20continued%20throughout%202020. p.s. It's a laugh that they say "initial contact tracing". Possibly they were also fooled into thinking that NHS Test and Trace which began 28/05/2020 was something like what the Asians did. - All it did was provide advisory text messages which most people took with a pinch of salt. Johnson was given the correct advice by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. That's top British science people but he saw fit to swiftly dismissed their serious contribution, even though he quit school science at the age of 15:: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 < it's less than 2 minutes long and the second half contains the testimony. The testimony shows he lied again this year when he said: "There was no other tool that I know of". - The Inquiry did not challenge him on his "no tool" claim. It was the Inquiry which gave him the opportunity to spin this extra big porky. He cared very little for people: The recommended S. Korean strategy was saving lives at least 100x better than our lockdown was. At times S Korea, was losing one person in the same time that we took to lose >200. As soon as S. Korea (and Taiwan) decided to stop tracing-and-testing in 2022, they had a nasty surprise because their deaths rocketed. S. Korea had its deaths total multiplied by four in the first 5 months of 2022. That's because they hadn't realized just how much infection was still being held back by Trace-and-test activity and they'd assumed their vaccine program had made it redundant. Vaccination is not the quick way to slow down a spike in cases, its effect on society is gradual. That's exactly what China and the WHO had achieved together: many people like yourself thinking it was a 'brand new thing'. No, it was the fourth major coronavirus outbreak in a row and S. Korea had worked out a response in 2015. The WHO favours China which hates S. Korea and it kept the S. Korea story quiet while it pushed the idea that 'these are things that you catch from animals." School-science-quitting Johnson rejected the early advice from SAGE - people who are colossally more qualified than himself, unless you think Jeremy Hunt is lying? (see it yourself: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) The rejection of the PM's confidential advice prevented us from copying S. Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and others who kept deaths down in the hundreds when we had them in the tens of thousands, AND they didn't screw their economies with lockdown. By the way, it was Patrick Vallance who let it slip that Johnson quit science when he was 15. Re. "in hindsight, many countries would.have gone down a different direction". Our govt was ready to go down the best route which was demonstrated by S. Korea in 2015. It was Boris Johnson who shut that option down and steered us into one of the worst achieving responses anywhere. Possibly (as a rule, Tories avoid explaining their decisions), he did it because govt had failed to keep a supply of fresh PPE (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=167983237965733). Couldn't they have dropped their 'clean and elegant image' rule for just a moment and made some use of the 'expired' facemasks, considering the seriousness of the situation? (Instead they decided to give themselves an easy time in lockdown so they could strategize and do contracts/money-spinning with tips and guidance from Bill Gates.) Tories later defending him (his parties) pretended he locked down late because he was 'worried about the businesses'. One small point, he and Whitty shut down trace-and-test in March instead of expanding it. (Did they really get "the contain phase" going at all? No test-and-trace people were ever interviewed or shown working on TV.) - You can't just let the virus run free if you're going to try and avoid a lockdown. Even small children can understand this. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0929664623003455 Between March 2020 and July 2021, more than 100,000 big fines were issued to people who failed the rules imposed by Matt Hancock for lockdown and at airports. Nobody in government suggested any sort of amnesty, e.g. for the coffee shop owners who didn't close for the second lockdown on November 6 and 7 and were hit with a total punishment of £42,000 (only a month before Rishi, Boris and others attended parties and, after an inquiry, got £50 fines.)   Re. Cummings to oust the Tories: He should have broadcast what the Tories were concealing in 2020, i.e. they had been told how to protect the economy and save a lot more lives but they preferred to wait a while and then lock down big time: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 Cummings and his boss saved a few people? Was that because Hancock "finished" what he called "the contain phase" on 12 March, the day after the WHO called it a pandemic? Were people safer after tracing-and-testing was "finished"? Did Hancock really do any at all? We never saw any people doing it.  11/05/2024 Sunak's pushing 'science' now, a subject which Johnson gave up at the age of 15. He and Johnson rejected the advice, 'copy S. Korea' from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, and used draconian lockdowns instead. Were we so apathetic about being locked down because we got Stockholm syndrome: the captive coming to identify with their captors? facebook.com/MonMcq "When I introduced the furlough scheme" it was because Boris had ignored the SAGE advice that S. Korea knew what to do. He said their trace-and-test was, "whistling in the dark", meanwhile hoping that 'herd immunity' would make "it ... probably go away" They made the pandemic response about as costly as it could be by ignoring the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies when it said "copy South Korea". Hunt himself is the only tory to admit this - find the red 'video' link in bit.ly/whofibs One of the biggest elephants in the room is the expenditure of hundreds of billions and ruination of untold longstanding small businesses with lockdowns spanning 12 months when Johnson had been advised by our Sci Advisory Group for Emergencies to learn quick from SK and Taiwan, i.e. avoid lockdown.
(While he was keen to promote herd immunity by "shaking hands with everybody", he called Korean trace-and-test "whistling in the dark". He quit science at school aged 15.) 25/05/2024. Last night on BBC Newsnight, 70 Tories have synchronously stood down from Parliament.
They get together in WhatsApp groups and make such decisions. Some decisions shouldn't be made that way. You could see in the pandemic that WhatsApp helped them work together, fooling us into accepting draconian lockdown without a whimper, even when reality was clearly being denied. (e.g. Dominic Raab denied that there was a "sudden surge" when the UK deaths total raced from 1900 on 1 April 2020 to 26,097 on 29 April: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52478085) Was Starmer "the canary" who kept mum at the most critical moment? He never challenged Johnson for sitting on the good advice that SAGE sent him in 2020: South Korea was nipping it in the bud by using a nucleic acid test in a new way. Even Hunt has said it: "government" was wrong, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 < see the second 50 secs. More at bit.ly/whofibs  ~~ 71,000 dead but there were 7 parties in Downing Street. ~~ On 27 December 2020, our deaths total passed 70,752 while in S. Korea they hadn't yet lost 600. SAGE had told Boris (and Rishi, obviously) to copy the S. Koreans but Johnson wrote to Cummings that a trace-and-test approach would be, "whistling in the dark". He was keen on the idea of herd immunity, however, and went around "shaking hands with everybody" (in the spirit of those 'smallpox parties' of the eighteenth century.)  30 May 2024: Sunak's proposed military call-up for young people is discussed on BBC Question time. Wes Streeting said recently on BBC QT that young people have already made sacrifices, comparable with military service, to facilitate the lockdowns which were, "for a good reason". If we had not been deprived of a genuine attempt at a trace-and-test strategy (like those of Taiwan and S. Korea) as suggested to Johnson by our SAGE early in 2020, we might have had only limited and targeted lockdowns, not the lethal and business-ruining blunt instrument kind. Jeremy Hunt attested to this fact on 4 July 2022: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13480329/BORIS-JOHNSON-liberal-hit-job-political-Trump-victory-likely.html Look who's going to say, "I told you so" when the Capitol stormers get to celebrate Trump's victory? Boris quit science at school, aged 15, but cleverly saw he could scorn the trace-and-test strategy used by democratic Asian states, "whistling in the dark", "legions of imaginary Clouseau's". Don't forget that when Trump made noise because WHO/CCP had collaborated to pretend there was no human-to-human virus threat, Boris immediately sent the WHO a £55-million "bonus" (in April 2020 when some UK care homes couldn't afford PPE.) Soon, more than £half-a-billion was sent for the WHO to build COVAX in partnership with the EU. Mr Hunt's the only MP who eventually admitted Johnson was wrong to ignore the early 2020 advice from SAGE. It tried to explain to the school-science dodger that the methodical strategy which S. Korea (and Taiwan) had rolled out was working well.  Our 'democracy'? Voting for Tories opened the door to draconian lockdown but nobody's using that fact against the Tories now, and many influential people (e.g. Wes Streeting) argue that lockdown was a good measure. - Many enjoyed the time-off with furlough that, somehow, will get paid for (and failed businesses restored?); and we don't have scientific assessment like the big one done in the USA which concluded that lockdowns kill more people incidentally than they save from a fatal virus infection (bit.ly/conwho). On 4 July 2022, it was shown that Jeremy Hunt voluntarily attested to the fact that our very well qualified Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies was ignored outright by Johnson (who quit Science at 15) and his chums: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527. SAGE knew that there was a way to avoid lockdowns or at least keep them localized and short-lived. Patrick Vallance, now a very rich 'Sir', stated in an interview that it was Johnson's "democratic" right to ignore scientific advice. How absurd that, by democratically ignoring a certified group of top-level experts, Johnson could simply wait for the WHO to actually 'declare' a pandemic (on 11/03/2020) and then make us sit at home for the good part of 12 months. The Inquiry last year, let him tell his biggest lie ever: "I didn't know what other tool (apart from draconian lockdown) I had". BBC election debate of 06.06.2024 Kudos to Carla Denyer for saying that certain people got rich in the pandemic milieu. Sadly, no-one mentioned that 12 months of productivity and growth were dashed because Johnson shrugged off SAGE advice which said hold back the virus with a genuine trace-and-test strategy. (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) Penny fought well and Tories have a lady PM every now and then, but no woman was seen or heard in the first months of the pandemic. Some smart ladies had key roles in S. Korea where they'd lost 587 people by 14/12/2020, vs. our 70,752 lost by 27/12/2020. http://Bit.ly/whofibs  There was a generous number of sometimes ruinous fines that British people received after breaking the rules that Johnson and Hancock had set up: bit.ly/whofibs (use Ctrl+F to find key words.) In contrast, South Koreans kept busy chasing down the virus with trace-and-test, and they didn't have time for ramping up some 'pandemic legislation'. They didn't even have the power to punish that sect leader who preached disobedience to social distancing, because there was no law in place at the time of his offences. (see BBC)   Hancock destroyed Andrew Bridgen's political standing in January 2023 by labelling him "antisemitic". Andrew had, for some time, argued that the eagerness to get people vaccinated for Covid-19 had put the health of some at risk, because it was a new type of vaccine and normal precautionary steps were being omitted. This was all the more concerning because the Gates Foundation had worrying levels of influence in the British JCVI*, he said, and vaccine supply can obviously be financially very rewarding. Our pandemic response as a whole had become totally dependent on vaccine supply because Johnson and Whitty had "finished" our alleged trace-and-test program on 12 March 2020, the day after the WHO belatedly declared a pandemic. bit.ly/whofibs *"Members of the JCVI have huge financial links to The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, running to billions of Pounds" (Also see: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969)  An article in Politico https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969 reveals the levels of power that Bill Gates and some of his mates achieved in 2020. They organized to control the pandemic responses of as many countries as they could. What's significant about that is Gates showed no interest in Trace-and-test (first used by S. Koreans in 2015 against MERS) - it just wouldn't be big scale money in his eyes. Click on the Politico link and you'll see he even chatted with the King. No wonder Chris Whitty was made to "finish" our trace-and-test ambitions after they had hardly begun (he implied there was trace-and-test activity in the UK until "the next phase, 'delay'" began on 12 March.) The Politico article provides a way to understand what actually took place in the UK - Bill Gates was here early in 2020 and, no doubt, he told/agreed with our Tories that Trace-and-test wasn't much use. 'Rather see if it comes to anything first and then you can lockdown if necessary. I'll be organizing the vaccine worldwide.' Below is a comment with regard to Matt Hancock's being sued at the moment for libel. .... Hancock destroyed Andrew Bridgen's political standing in January 2023 by labelling him "antisemitic". Andrew had, for some time, argued that the eagerness to get people vaccinated for Covid-19 had put the health of some at risk, because it was a new type of vaccine and normal precautionary steps were being omitted. This was all the more concerning because the Gates Foundation had worrying levels of influence in the British JCVI* (Andrew said) and vaccine supply is obviously a good investment opportunity during a pandemic. Our pandemic response as a whole had become totally dependent on vaccine supply because Johnson and Whitty had "finished" our alleged trace-and-test program (Whitty called it, "the contain phase") on 12 March 2020, the day after the WHO belatedly declared a pandemic. bit.ly/whofibs *"Members of the JCVI have huge financial links to The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, running to billions of Pounds". Gates' power during the pandemic was strongly enhanced with WHO assistance - They obviously persuaded our Tories to scrap Korean-style trace-and-test and only go with the big vaccine roll-out plans.  Isn't it more than inconsistent that the people who placed COVID-19 cases inside care homes received no punishment, but a man who arrived at Heathrow in July 2021 without having paid in advance for a PCR test got an FPN of £4,500? (bit.ly/whofibs - thousands of Brits were getting heavy fines under the new 'legislation'.) Matt Hancock later argued that 'we' didn't know there was such a thing as 'asymptomatic' cases, but S. Korea's first case had no visible symptom, just a raised body temperature, which was why they embarked on a containment strategy based on nucleic acid testing of ALL disease contacts. If the S. Korean story hadn't been suppressed in detail by the Tories, there'd have been no confusion about moving cases into care homes. (Tories also had a 'knighted scientist' argue that thermal screening at airports was unreliable and, therefore, not advisable.) p.s.: The people fighting the spread of Covid-19 in S. Korea didn't have time on their hands to create new laws, therefore they couldn't later punish the Daegu sect leader who preached defiance of social distancing, but there were fewer than 600 dead in S. Korea at the time that our count was 70,752, i.e. 27/12/2020. Johnson and Sunak pretended in 2020 that Taiwan wasn't the leader in a world survey of healthcare systems. Gates was their man because Gates new the "simple", profitable way: 'Just lock down and wait for vaccine. Take your time and control the BBC.' Scots in care homes weren't inhaling gas, they were inhaling virus, as in England's care homes. Nicola said, 'Pay no attention to other countries Covid stats'. We didn't know that Taiwan was leader in a world survey of healthcare systems. Taiwan, being an island, was even more successful with its containment strategy than S. Korea was. (Case numbers soared when they stopped tracing and testing in 2022. - People were vaccinated but that didn't protect them well.) 23/06/2024. Jenrick says, "Get Boris on the campaign trail" Johnson was advised by SAGE to copy South Korea in January 2020 - very short video: facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 Once a science-quitting schoolboy, he didn't fancy it ("it's whistling in the dark") and he played the herd immunity game ("shaking hands with everybody") until 11 March. 11 March was the day that the WHO, belatedly, admitted it was a pandemic. His big lie in 2023?: "I didn't know what other tool I had" and so we had lockdowns spanning 12 months. Why bother with a lockdown-beating trace-and-test strategy when Penny's good friend, Bill Gates, had made it so "simple": Just sit around and wait for vaccine supply!  First Brexit, then three lockdowns spanning 12 months. Barely a soul seemed to notice that Boris and his top MPs boycotted all media channels but the BBC in 2020. What for? They didn't want journalists asking why there was to be no urgent trace-and-test campaign, just a month and weeks of denialism followed by a business-ruining lockdown. bit.ly/whofibs (Ctrl+F can be used to find 'boycot') The delay tactics pleased people like Gates because the interest in vaccination would be very strong when people finally saw an up-to-date picture of the virus' spread. Who'd be bothered with trace-and-test then? A very cunning stroke: call the NHS' new system in June, "Test and Trace". Nobody ever gambled with the UK's future like the Boris bunch did. Few noticed that they boycotted all media channels but the BBC in 2020 because they didn't want journalists asking why there'd be no urgent trace-and-test campaign. After UK cases were confirmed on 29 January, there was a month and 3 weeks of denialism ("shaking hands") followed by the first of three business-ruining lockdowns. bit.ly/whofibs (Ctrl+F can be used to find 'boycot') The initial delay tactics suited people like Bill Gates because the demand for vaccine would grow very strong once it was then realized how much the virus had been spreading. Who'd be thinking about trace-and-test then? A very cunning stroke: Call the NHS' new system in June, "Test and Trace" when it had no power to make people get tested (unless they wanted to return to the pub, café or restaurant where their 'Test and Trace' message said they might have become infected.)2 July 2024 - Johnson reappears to support the election campaign In 2020, he behaved almost exactly as Xi Jinping was doing but with different verbiage: "Keep 'em calm, lock 'em down. Those phone-making S. Koreans talk a lot of fluff. (Who cares if Taiwan makes most of the world's microchips and has a health care system ranked No. 1 in the world for two years running?)"  18/07/2024. Biden has Covid-19 again He (Biden) reversed Trump's action against the WHO over its pandemic delay tactics that supported the CCP's cover-up. The UK's Covid Inquiry has yet to acknowledge that countries who did as S. Korea and Taiwan did, keeping case numbers low with a committed trace-and-test strategy, fared vastly better than we did until they quit the strategy in 2022 (in the belief that their people then had sufficient protection through vaccination.) A BBC Breakfast World Covid summary, given on a chart some time after that, excluded the data/success of those countries in the same way that they'd excluded it since early 2020 (Use Ctrl+F to find 'boycott' in bit.ly/conwho) Dicovery Channel has a new show about Johnson BoJo ignored the UK's emergency scientists (SAGE) at the start, then kept quoting the foreign crew (the WHO). Hunt said so in 2022: facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (skip the first 50 secs.) They all bent the truth daily to keep us compliant.  On Sky News, 03/08/2024, Robert Jenrick MP tells young people that it is in their interest to be Conservatives.
Is 'being a Conservative' in the country's interest, Mr Jenrick? The Covid-19 Inquiry hasn't asked anybody why the SAGE advice to 'copy South Korea' was ignored at the start of 2020, and scoffed at by Johnson ("whistling in the dark!", he called it.). In fact, the Inquiry gave Johnson the opportunity to tell another lie in Dec 2023: "I had no other tool" (other than Draconian lockdown). Grant Shapps said in May 2022 that Partygate was all just trial-by-media and the journalists should be quiet: indy100.com/news/grant-shapps-partygate-defence-boris. The success of the trace-and-test response used in S. Korea (and in Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam ...) can be traced to S. Korea's handling of MERS-CoV in 2015, but Shapps and Jenrick argued that there was "no instruction book" (nothing out there telling them how to strive for containment). Schapps and Jenrick also said "we didn't know about asymptomatic cases" when explaining how carriers were moved from NHS hospitals into care homes. (A longstanding definition of a carrier, visible today on nih.com, was: 'A carrier is an individual with no overt disease who harbours infectious organisms.' - The first official Covid-19 case outside of China was detected on thermal screening at Incheon Airport on 19 January 2020. She appeared healthy so the S. Koreans soon decided that they'd strive to test every contact of a known case, whether or not they showed symptoms. They closed nursing homes in February 2020.) More at bit.ly/conwho 13/08/2024- Johnson attacks Starmer for his "stupid" way of talking about the WhatsApp-based street rioters. "Reflect on the stupidity of Starmer", says Johnson. Rather reflect on the effects of delaying the pandemic response after rejecting the urgent method of friendly Asian states who managed to keep lockdowns at bay: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (skip the first 50 secs) 14/08/2024 - Peter Stefanovic attempts a pre-emptive strike on the Tory practice of blaming public sector pay awards whenever an inflation hike is announced. Tory hubris made sure our emergency scientists were ignored when they advised Johnson confidentially to get busy and copy Taiwan and South Korea (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527). That story was well and truly snuffed on the BBC until the end of 2020, and practically nobody in the UK ever noticed what happened when Taiwan/S. Korea halted their containment routines in early 2022: A super-sized spike in deaths occurred in both countries, because the vaccine wasn't protecting people as well as we've always assumed it does. Has anybody tried to tally what the combined cost of lockdowns, contracts and business failures is? -- guaranteed because Chris Whitty "finished" our "contain phase" on 12 March 2020 (did we really do any trace-and-test? No people were ever on TV who said they were trace-and-test operatives) and Johnson simply waited until 23 March to do anything (where was Hancock that day?) The WHO declared a pandemic on 11 March; Johnson adopted that as his cue to 'do something'. bit.ly/conwho After discouraging the use of travel restrictions in 2020 (calling them "travel bans" which would "economically isolate China") and holding back its health warnings (giving the CCP time to delete online information, to silence doctors and to "calm" people down), the WHO began a micromanagement of the way people spoke about countries who had the most COVID-19 cases, e.g. India's variant had to be called 'omicron' ('to prevent a prejudicial attitude'.) Do we now see another opportunity for the WHO to show its control of verbiage (e.g. 'the virus formerly known as monkeypox')? p.s. WHO execs didn't mention the need for "the tracing of every contact" until 18 March 2020, and they were ignored by most countries: Even if Taiwan was doing well with trace-and-test, it was too late for those countries who had relied on the WHO to guide them. They opted to 'play it safe' and, simply, lock down. Bit.ly/whofibs Tories snuffed the option to "copy South Korea" in 2020 (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - skip the first 50 secs). Consequently, there were 3 lockdowns spanning 12 months..... bit.ly/conwho They could have begun tackling the spread of coronavirus in late January 2020 (rather than late March), to a level where we'd have kept lockdowns to a minimum, but BoJo scorned the method of the people who provide us with Samsung devices "Bring back Boris Johnson"? The same Boris Johnson who sat on crucial advice from SAGE in 2020? (see https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - skip the first 50 secs.) He scoffed at the people who provide our Samsung devices and all sorts of appliances, and partied at the year's end when our death toll was 71,000 (S. Korea's was 600.) Boris was helping Bill Gates by making sure we had a vaccine-only pandemic response, no genuine trace-and-test effort (which he called, "whistling in the dark") and no proper closing of the national border (the Eurotunnel was busy throughout.) He needed to make it seem that red-listing of countries was a top-notch protective measure, hence the giant fines for people who didn't take it seriously. bit.ly/conwho (use Ctrl+F to find 'fines, exce) 28/08/2024: Jeremy Hunt says Rachel Reeves's account of "£22bn black hole" is spurious and a political stunt, not borne of a true concern for the UK's economy. In July 2022, Hunt said, "Why weren't we copying South Korea (in the first half of 2020)?" and he explained that "government" had kept the SAGE advice hidden so that scientists in the general population wouldn't become aware that the trace-and-test system was rejected immediately by Boris & Co.. (SAGE had hoped Boris would keep lockdowns at bay by copying Taiwan and S. Korea: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) We never actually saw any "track and trace" staff on TV before 12 March, did we? (the day Chris Whitty said, "the contain phase finishes from today".) Jeremy changed his tune after Sunak appointed him Chancellor. Then, he only said that Rishi did "the right thing" by setting up furlough so that the lucky ones could sit at home for almost a year.  Boris the blamer (says Starmer is letting channel-crossers die). He persuaded Z to keep fighting and reject talks, even when the Pope had said there's no shame in talking with so many lives at stake. People died because his pandemic response excluded a genuine containment system (remember Taiwan and S. Korea?) to make way for a Draconian vaccine-only/lockdown-heavy "approach". Johnson cut fire services in London before Grenfell, including call centre staff In June 2020, he hired a large hall full of call-handlers, through a company called Sitel Inc., to take "Track and Trace" calls. It was almost eerie because the dozens of call handlers sat in silence, nobody calling them, and then they each were sent to 'work from home'. It was linked to the launch of 'NHS Test and Trace' (said to cost £38bn) which didn't do any real trace-and-test, was a charade to give the impression that government had begun to "copy South Korea". (That idea had been "finished" by Chris Whitty on 12 March: see Hunt's testimony: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - skip the first 50 secs.) Since more than a decade ago, the WHO has claimed that people became infected with MERS-CoV by means of camel-to-human transmission in almost every case (later conceding that 'perhaps some human-to-human infection might happen where there is close contact'. bit.ly/whofibs.) WHO ignored a Nature review paper in 2016 which explains that the spread of MERS would have been moderate, not because it couldn't transmit human-to-human, but simply because patients' bodies were shedding progeny virus only after the symptoms of infection were full-blown, by which time patients were bedridden/ in hospitals. The WHO's habit of casting everything in terms of 'zoonosis' (while not defining that concept well or consistently) had consequence by giving false expectations concerning any novel respiratory coronavirus: 'Don't worry, this one's only being caught by contact with animals in the seafood market!' Bill Gates handled the WHO's financial problems in 2020, and all he wanted to see was lucrative vaccine production, no 'containment' strategies like the ones in Taiwan and S. Korea. (politico.com) Did ya watch Panorama last night? HS2 was devouring billions of Pounds wastefully, but Johnson voting to keep it because he didn't want the fail on his CV? Tories are frustrated because "we could see" that a Rwanda-type plan worked for Australia.
Remember when top journalists and our top level emergency scientists could see that S. Korea's trace-and-test strategy would help is avoid lockdowns? £161-million so far for the multi-facetted Covid Inquiry /gravy train? That's at least half-a-million winter fuel payments. The baroness never mentions that we might have avoided lockdowns if Johnson hadn't sat on his initial SAGE advice (so that nobody else could see it): facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (after the first 50 secs.) Johnson says, "There was no other tool that I know of" and the Inquiry simply moves on to another phase, spends more to gather "everyone's story". 26/09/24 On BBC Question Time, Nadhim Zahawi tells Labour how to handle refugees.  30/06 Jenrick's wife caught giving advice to Russian oligarchs after their assets were seized post Ukraine invasion. Jenrick and Shapps both said on the same day, one on morning TV, the other in the afternoon, that Tories couldn't be judged for letting Covid cases be shipped into care homes. They both said: 1. There wasn't an instruction book (in spite of S. Korea's method developed in 2015 for the previous respiratory coronavirus). 2. We didn't know about 'asymptomatic cases'. (It was common knowledge since the Eighties that 'carriers' are people who carry a virus without suffering its symptoms.) It suited Sunak that Johnson kept the SAGE advice hidden which said "copy S. Korea": facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 Sunak had created a hedge fund which received dividend from Moderna. Why bother with trace-and-test when you can just sit in lockdown and wait for vaccine? Reaction to Jenrick at the 2024 Tory Conference: Jenrick reckons Tories failed at three things, the economy, the NHS and (I forget what the third thing was.) He forgot to say that 12 months of Draconian lockdowns had all sorts of undesirable outcomes. -- Before COVID-19, there wasn't much doubt about the power of vaccination, but something happened in Taiwan and South Korea which showed the Covid vaccine wasn't quick in protecting people. Both countries stopped their containment strategies (i.e. no lockdown, just trace-and-test) at the end of 2021, by which time their deaths totals were much smaller than those of most western countries. In the months that followed, both countries saw a massive surge in cases, even though most people had been vaccinated (many had already had boosters.) The total pandemic death toll in S. Korea was quadrupled in the first 5 months of 2022. The spike was worse in Taiwan (but they didn't publicize the matter much.) 'Trace, test and treat' had been protecting their societies well. It takes time for Covid vaccination to give a population much protection. ... bit.ly/whofibs That's a laugh. Tens of thousands of scientists let Johnson put them into lockdown (with furlough, of course) while he ignored the excellent, practical science that S. Korea and Taiwan had put into action: facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (after the first 50 secs.) bit.ly/whofibs
"In 2022, it was estimated that 2.8 million people worked in scientific and technical roles in the UK, representing 8.5% of the workforce.14 Dec 2023" Johnson likened his pandemic response to a war with an "invisible mugger", but it was the Taiwanese and South Koreans who kept calm and carried on, not eager to lock their economies down when both face hostile neighbour states. Tories paid months of furlough to 2.8 million people in the scientific sector for doing no science at all, while the science that Taiwan and South Korea had put into action was rejected as "whistling in the dark". Facebook.com/MonMcq The way to corner the 2019 coronavirus was to copy South Korea's method for extracting it from society, without locking down. Instead, it was given plenty of time to flourish and adapt? Johnson likened his pandemic response (beginning on 23/03/2020) to a war with an "invisible mugger", but it was the Taiwanese and South Koreans who'd kept calm and carried on, not eager to lock their economies down while they face hostile neighbour states. Lockdowns have been studied in detail by Americans, and they've concluded that lockdowns do more harm than good. Facebook.com/MonMcq  Remember that Dominic Cummings wanted to shield Johnson from 'distraction' caused by the novel virus. Months went by and he sent him an email on 26 April 2020... "skim through" a list of reasons for abandoning plans to contain the virus in the way that the South Koreans had been doing. They'd had practice with MERS-CoV and they had a strong motive to keep people busy. - Their persistent enemy on the north side might see some advantage over them if they all simply locked down (likewise, in Taiwan.) Anyway, Johnson replied that to hope we'd ever have a good trace-and-test operation was, "whistling in the dark" and that the people who'd do it were, "legions of imaginary Clouseaus with no plans to hire them". In January, he'd already ignored his SAGE advice to copy S. Korea (says Hunt: facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 - after the first 50 secs.), and now he urged Cummings to persuade Hancock to give up the idea altogether. Lockdown had made the job simple for the MPs. They signed some contracts and then twiddled their thumbs. The tracing wing of NHS Test and Trace was going to be an advisory service only, with no way to make people get tested if they were thought to have become disease carriers. (A week later, photos of Matt and his mistress appeared in the papers.) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/25/pm-said-test-and-trace-would-be-like-whistling-in-the-dark-says-cummings https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/dominic-cummings-boris-johnson-matt-hancock-test-trace-plan-whistling-dark/ and bit.ly/conwho  All kinds of UK politicians seem to be attracted to the Trump campaign, Farage using other-peoples' money to fly over there (as did Truss.)
Trump doesn't take on a problem in a serious way. For example in 2020, journalists were showing that the WHO had failed to warn anyone about COVID-19 when it knew that a quick response would be a better one. WHO helped China push a scientific fallacy which had been invented for MERS-CoV (by the WHO): that "these viruses cannot transmit easily human-to-human". (SARS-Cov-2 was, "just another coronavirus which people catch only if they handle animals".) Tedros Ghebreyesus campaigned against "travel bans" because they, "isolate China economically", but he gave no advice about the worldwide effects of lockdowns.
Trump didn't want the detail, he simply stopped the WHO's funding and got on with his next election campaign. Next thing, Biden exonerated the WHO completely and boosted its biannual paycheck. Facebook.com/MonMcq Another issue, of significance in Britain, is that vaccine supply was given so much priority that it was used as an excuse to only pretend that trace-and-test was being done. That 'whistling in the dark' technique from Taiwan and S. Korea just wouldn't please investors like vaccine supply was guaranteed to (with Gates driving it forward.) Gates must have been aware of South Korea's new strategy for a respiratory coronavirus in 2015, but he's always kept silent about it. It wasn't ever likely to move money like vaccine supply does, and he knew that the S. Koreans avoid profiteering in the health sector? Gates didn't want countries putting resources into the sort of trace-and-test responses which worked so well in Taiwan and South Korea. He and three mates cornered the World's market for vaccine. That's where the big money was. Johnson's launching a new attack on our membership of the ECHR: https://conservativepost.co.uk/its-time-for-a-referendum-on-echr-that-blocks-britains-control-over-illegal-immigration-says-boris/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGRkR5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHebRjxwOiZQoUbtuCPp1w-T_EtZWOdug_zncfUv525N6ih7d5YHiRP_wkg_aem_-TlWVhvhxJMOm-yTUn6zGw
At the same time, Robert Jenrick's been saying that Tories wouldn't have given "£320-million" to Rwanda, up front, if they'd known that the ECHR will make court cases out of all the deportations that they try to do. He says he has the anwer now: Let Tories first get the UK get free from the ECHR, then the Rwanda plan will work. The Tories are innocent, he says (they made an innocent mistake with the £320m), but that means they didn't notice Theresa May ranting about how the ECHR blocks deportations, years ago (before she was even made Home Secretary.) See bit.ly/MayVid Kemi concedes that Tories, "forgot the Party's principles" when they partied seven times in December 2020. That's all she says about that year. Never mind that there was only a pretense at containing the virus as Taiwan and S. Korea were doing. (SAGE was ignored while the WHO received big sums from Downing Street). Never mind that opting for big lockdowns over a trace-and-test strategy was going to change Britain forever (with a £trillion in debt?) and it was something which the friendly Asian states avoided, especially with the PRC and N. Korea looking for weakness at all times. bit.ly/conwho The man who neglected direct SAGE advice to copy South Korea in January/February 2020 (see facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) did so on the basis that he had more important things to do, i.e. get Brexit 'done'. Consequently, we drifted with other countries toward Draconian lockdowns which he recently wrote cost "trillions" (while blaming it all on 'suspicious lab activities in Wuhan'.) When you add in the strangulation of high street retail and folding of many small business, isn't the cost of his pandemic response also an elephant which nobody sees (because they enjoyed getting furlough?) bit.ly/conwho Kemi says Partygate was "overblown" In an ITVx program about Heathrow: "more than 100,000 fines" had been issued to Brits in 2020/21. A café near Plymouth paid £42,000 (and folded) for being open 2 days when the second lockdown began (on 5th November.) But there were 7 Downing Street parties in December, for which the average fine was £50 (and Rishi got one.) bit.ly/whofibs Farage and Boris were the agitators in our Brexit adventure. Now, who's going to fix what it's done to people's businesses? Trump is fixin' to put big tariffs on the trade we do with the USA. He backed Boris and said, yes, break with the EU, but is anyone sensing a brave new trading future through Brexit? We'd surely have got a cheaper and more effective COVID response with a PM who wasn't saying to his Health Minister, "You keep an eye on it. It'll probably go away", subordinating everything to his Brexit agenda until the WHO, finally, declared a pandemic on 11 March? Facebook.com/MonMcq 19/11/2024 Farmers facing inheritance tax while having no cash to pay it, therefore needing to sell property. Tories covered their tracks well with a crafty set of illusions. One was the £29.5bn structure they built, called 'NHS Test and Trace'. Obviously, people would think it was doing what S. Korea and Taiwan did earlier in 2020? No. The main difference is that the trace-and-test procedure used by the democratic Asians relied on being able to get people tested. Our system had no power to make anyone get tested. All it did was send a text if they might have become a 'contact' when they were in a pub or restaurant (supermarkets were exempt), and to suggest that they drive some distance to a test centre (which most people didn't do. It was only a requirement if they wanted to return to the pub/eatery in question.) Therefore. the NHS system did trace some probable COVID-19 cases, but it put none of them into isolation, because it couldn't go and test them. As far as 'containing' the virus was concerned, it was a show-piece of deception. See more about the ways the Tories pulled the wool over our eyes: bit.ly/conwho As for the current issue of taxing British farming into oblivion? Starmer saw all these things and did nothing. In fact, he called for longer lockdowns.  West Bridgford Wire News were still providing the UK's COVID-19 stats in April 2022. Comparing the same seven days in April 2021 and in April 2022, ten times as many people died in the seven days in April 2022. This suggested that vaccine wasn't at all reliable in protecting the 3% of the population who were likely to be killed by the virus.
Losing 1,636 British lives in seven days in April 2022 was no small matter. (Even the 168 in seven days in 2021 amounted to 8736 per year.) South Korea had lost only 580 people between January and 13 December 2020 (nearly 11 months.) Had the UK lockdowns, which spanned 12 months, achieved anything apart from slaughtering our economic equilibrium? (American academics have shown emprically that lockdowns kill a lot more people than they save.)
Taiwan and S. Korea were shutting down their trace-and-test activities at the end of 2021. They both saw a giant surge in deaths as soon as 'containment' was stopped. They too might have wondered if the vaccine was protecting anybody very well. bit.ly/conwho (use Ctrl+F to find 09/2022) The Inquiry is effecting a cover-up of the key mistake made by Johnson in January 2020. SAGE (our top emergency people) advised him copy Taiwan and S. Korea. He simply put the advice in the bottom drawer and then made sure no MP ever mentioned those countries during our lockdowns. (See the second 50 secs of https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) bit.ly/conwho NHS was swamped in 2020 because Johnson et al. had ignored what SAGE told them, i.e. that they could keep case numbers low by imitating Taiwan and S. Korea (both countries had a need to avoid lockdowns because of grim adversaries on their northern frontiers.) Biden pardoned the WHO in January 2021, and increased its subsidy as though there had been no delays or deception in January 2020. It was the WHO which had been pushing the fallacy that respiratory coronaviruses didn't transmit human-to-human, an idea which appealed to the CCP. South Korea and Taiwan weren't interested in what the WHO said or didn't say. Lockdowns wouldn't be wise with China and North Korea always watching them: bit.ly/whofibs Catriona Taylor There's no doubt that vaccine rollout captured the imagination of Bill Gates and three other big profit makers (https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969), and Gates had ignored how Taiwan and South Korea kept case numbers down to avoid using lockdowns. (Big lockdowns wouldn't have improved their national security, with North Korea and China always watching them.) bit.ly/conwho 03 Dec 2024 Yoon seemed a bystander to the excellent pandemic response run by better parts of the government. He came to see Boris at the 2021 G7 in Carbis Bay (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10231615687963028&set=pb.1465860619.-2207520000&type=3). Johnson, otherwise, never said a word about the importance of avoiding lockdown in SK and Taiwan (important because NK and China watches everything closely.) bit.ly/conwho SAGE advised No. 10 to copy South Korea and avoid the hardship that lockdowns inflict. Bill Gates came to London and he had wrangled $18bn to get the WHO delivering vaccine: "Why screw around with trace-and-test? There's no money in it." It's how we came to lose 209,000 people while blowing a giant hole in our economy (with general lockdowns spanning a year.) facebook.com/MonMcq Our pandemic response amounted to locking down and waiting for vaccine. Sunak refused to say that his hedge fund drew profit from Moderna, and then he pledged a large sum for Moderna to make ready for 'the next pandemic'. This one's revealing. From the man who came through it all with a big bank balance and a new mansion to pimp, giving it gold wallpaper and a swimming pool ('once that wretched council is beaten'.) bit.ly/whofibs is improved when opportunity permits - start by watching Jeremy Hunt: facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (esp. after the first 50 secs.) Johnson had Bill Gates (Penny Mordaunt's sweet "friend") here ASAP in 2020 - He'd wrangled $18-billion for the WHO to get vaccine rolling. "Why screw around with trace-and-test strategy? Vaccine is where the money is, not 'containment'. Just lock 'em down when the case numbers start to hit the roof."?  17/12/2024 Starmer says WASPI women can't be recompensed because it would hurt the tax-payer too much. Labour's claim of a "£20bn black hole" seems modest. Remember, Sunak lost that amount to COVID fraud alone: https://news.sky.com/story/21bn-of-taxpayer-money-lost-in-fraud-by-government-since-pandemic-began-says-spending-watchdog-12845271 He spent vastly bigger sums on furlough, and businesses being killed off by lockdown must have created cost for the government? Labour never breathed a word about countries who managed to avoid lockdown. Starmer even called for longer lockdowns.  See Gates calling himself a health expert on 12/Apr/2020: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-52233966, while encouraging our government to put all focus onto vaccine supply, nothing onto the prevention system that he'd been aware of since 2015. Why was 'trace-and-test' ignored by the majority of governments in 2020? It's easy to imagine why Bill Gates never mentioned the South Korean method for containing a coronavirus in his monologs about virus epidemics (which began in 2015): Vaccine supply was, commercially, the great opportunity, not 'TTT'. The three health industry moguls who collaborated with Gates (see politico) wouldn't have have been drawn to investing in COVID-19 testing equipment when the demand for vaccine was, so obviously, going to run into billions of units. Furthermore, people were attaching stigma to the tracing practices seen in S. Korea, whereas nothing was going to impede the World's vaccine rollout. Johnson was in contact with Gates in 2020 when he was working hard to get the WHO sufficiently funded (after Trump had reacted to its role in helping China do a cover-up.) Did they also, jointly, decide that Britain would simply have lockdowns until vaccine was available, regardless of what lockdowns did to the economy? - from bit.ly/conwho The UK's pandemic response excluded the containment method used in S. Korea and Taiwan, which helped them avoid locking down (Johnson's talk of 'Track and trace' can be shown to be pure gas, and 'NHS Test and Trace', launched 5 months late, couldn't force anyone to obey its text messages.) Gates and three health industry moguls had simply ignored the clever Koreans, and the WHO had persistently played their story down. 'Trace-and-test' was nowhere nearly as investible as vaccine would be, with billions of doses to be delivered ASAP. (Furthermore, people had attached stigma to the way that tracing involved access to personal data, whereas nobody could challenge the vaccine rollout.) Thus, we sat through almost a year's worth of lockdowns, and saw labels disappear from the high street. Facebook.com/MonMcq Look at the five years leading up to 2020. Bill Gates doing his monolog TED talks and ignoring how S. Korea tackled MERS-CoV in its hospitals. The WHO insisting that MERS was something you only caught by handling camels, and already 'protecting' China from travel restrictions. Come 2020 and the WHO, with Gates behind them in every way, agreed that China saw no human to human transmission, and travel bans were therefore "not evidence-based". OK, this just slowed down our response, but it also made sure we got no genuine trace-and-test teams. We waffled until March and then locked the whole Kingdom down. "After all", thought Gates, "governments don't like the sound of the 'tracing', with its access to personal data. They'd much prefer to let us push the vaccine, three shots per person, so they can get on with other matters". bit.ly/whofibs So many caught it in the West because the heads of state were taking tips from the WHO (which they'd been giving money every year.) S. Korea and Taiwan knew that the WHO tends to look after China first, so they got busy with their own innovation.. ~~~ Look at the five years leading up to 2020: Gates had warned us about epidemics with his TED talk in 2015, but he ignored how South Korea tackled MERS-CoV inside hospitals that same year. The WHO kept insisting that MERS was something you only caught from camels, and that China shouldn't be inconvenienced by S. Korean travel restrictions. Come 2020 and the WHO, with Gates behind them in every way, agreed that China probably wouldn't be seeing human to human spread of the novel CoV, and Taiwan's travel ban was, therefore, "not evidence-based". This slowed our response, but it also made sure we got no genuine trace-and-test teams. After hearing about the COVID-19 cover-up, Trump cut the WHO's funding, but Bill Gates quickly wrangled $18-bn for it to work on vaccine supply. In the UK, our leader "shook hands with everybody" until mid-March, and then locked the Kingdom right down. "After all", thought Gates, "governments are uneasy about that 'tracing', with its invasion of personal data. They'd rather spend on vaccine, three shots per person, and then get on with other matters". bit.ly/whofibs Furlough cost somewhere near half-a-trillion Pounds, and lockdowns killed droves of businesses and jobs, and the Inquiry is spending big while letting the PM say, "There was no other tool that I know of". Furthermore, China is to blame for making sending the message that there was no risk to public health, but it was the WHO's ideas that it was working from, and the WHO held back the useful information even when China had stopped doing its cover-up. Whofibs.blogspot.com (And we are still one of the WHO's biggest funders.) The WHO made sure nobody took lessons from Taiwan in 2020. In 2015, there was a new way to slow the spread of a respiratory coronavirus. and Gates should have mentioned what was achieved (not acknowledged by the WHO either), but his nose follows money and there's lots more to be made in vaccine supply.
p.s. See J. Hunt MP testifying in 2022 that our own SAGE had told No. 10 to be, "copying the South Koreans (Taiwan's best friends)": https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527
Also see how the WHO had been playing carelessly with concepts, so that people would think that a coronavirus tends to transmit, 'animal-to-human’.
In 2019, we were giving the WHO more than the USA did. (whofibs.blogspot.com)  Not long ago, Johnson wrote that China had caused countries to lose "trillions" by covering up what it knew in January 2020. He won't mention that the WHO made sure nobody took tips from Taiwan, which was one step ahead of China. What he'll never drone on about is the fact that there was a new way to slow the spread of a respiratory coronavirus in 2015, and Bill Gates (the self-proclaimed "health expert") should have mentioned it. (The WHO didn't signpost it either. Gates' nose follows money and there's lots more to be made in vaccine supply.) Furthermore, see Jeremy Hunt MP testifying in 2022 that our own SAGE had told No. 10 to be, "copying South Korea" (Taiwan's best friend): https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 Also see how the WHO had been clipping concepts, so that people would think that a coronavirus normally "transmits between animals and people". It's where China got the idea to say there was no human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2. In 2019, we were giving the WHO more than the USA did, and Johnson doubled our donation in 2020, adding an extra half-billion so that the WHO could create COVAX in collaboration with the EU. whofibs.blogspot.com Vaccine supply attracted people who wanted vast wealth. That's why it was done in a way that eclipsed the Trace-and-test approach (which was nowhere near as investible.) Following the example set by Bill Gates, government simply made sure that the success of trace-and-test was never spoken of on their chosen TV channel until the lockdown was over. Our government knew that some people here were more aware, so they took serious steps: 1. boycotted all journalists who weren't BBC TV people, and 2. controlled BBC daily reports closely, almost certainly schooling guests inside WhatsApp groups before letting them go live on TV. Johnson and Hancock also pretended that they were, in fact, copying South Korea, by having i. "The Contain phase". ii. "Track and trace", and then iii. "NHS Test and Trace" (Launched on 28 May, it couldn't make anyone get into a car and visit a distant testing venue, one person per car. Its text messages to 'contacts' had no effect on case numbers.) MORE TO THE POINT: Oxfam reported that nine people had become billionaires in 2021 by involvement in vaccine supply.  On BBC Question Time, 17/Jan/2025:
"We must stop foreign influence in our politics", but it's OK that the WHO ignored early news of Wuhan from a Taiwanese expert, backed China's opinion that there was no H2H transmission (gave China that idea in the first place, (...more is at http://whofibs.blogspot.com), letting us drift toward lockdown, which "was a disaster for the NHS". Indifference at the top in the first, "weeks and months"? The following old article showed it clearly - Trained people were available and ready to act, but Johnson was laughing off trace-and-test - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/06/uk-missed-coronavirus-contact-tracing-opportunity-experts-say Look at the five years leading up to 2020. Bill Gates had done his monolog TED talks and ignored how S. Korea tackled MERS-CoV in its hospitals. The WHO was insisting that MERS was something you only catch by handling camels, and was already 'protecting' China from travel restrictions. Come 2020, the WHO, with Gates behind them in every way, was happy to see that China claimed there was no human to human transmission of the latest coronavirus, said that travel bans were therefore "not evidence-based". OK, this just slowed down our response, but it also made sure we got no genuine trace-and-test teams. Johnson waffled until March and then locked the whole Kingdom down. "After all", thought Gates, "governments don't like the sound of the 'tracing' with its access to personal data. They'd much prefer to let us push the vaccine, three shots per person, so that Brexiteers can get on with other matters". Considering what it must have cost to cover 80% of the salary of tens of millions of Brits for more than 7 months, debt from furlough is what's put us in the doldrums. No. 10 acted as though the trace-and-test response had been given a fair try, but there's proof that was not the case. (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) whofibs.blogspot.com Johnson has since blamed China for causing expense in the "trillions" to countries across the world, but it was the WHO's ideas that had made it obvious how to do a cover-up. “America leaving the WHO is a mistake. When it comes to pandemics, no one is safe until everyone is safe”. That sounds like Tedros quoting South Korea's slogan which he never mouthed in the first ten weeks of 2020 🙂 It's easy to imagine that the CCP has access to surplus biology graduates which it could pay to run a lab that does genetic engineering around-the-clock. At the very least, the lab might get results that can go into journals, contributing to the commie quest for supremacy (biggest bridges etc.) There will also be CCP who find biological warfare interesting. As such, did western leaders play right into their hands by remaining aloof to S. Korea and Taiwan in 2020? https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 WHO in 2020 was all about protecting China's economy from countries using travel restrictions, when there was 'no evidence' that restricting travel would help. (Remember the 'infamous tweet'? "No clear evidence of H2H transmission"?) Everything WHO said was worded and timed in a way that obscured the fact that S. Korea and Taiwan had managed to avoid locking down. Apart from making them vulnerable to N. Korea and China, respectively, lockdowns hurt economies on a massive scale. A reply No, I just quoted the WHO statement to start off the comment. Vaccine was important but what they (WHO and Bill Gates etc.) did was make sure most countries didn't bother to try trace-and-test. The WHO cleverly avoided making it known that S. Korea and Taiwan were doing well (and not locking down!) The vaccine money men wanted the whole opportunity for themselves. Gates never made conversation about trace-and-test or, if he did, he probably just said it wouldn't work because people wouldn't like the invasion of data privacy. Partygate was in no way 'overblown' if you study the fines. MPs got £50 fines for attending any of seven parties in December, after a café lost £42,000 for breaking the 'sitting inside' rule on 5 and 6 November (when lockdown no. 2 began.) All Gates knew in 2020 was that the Taiwanese and S. Koreans were doing something which didn't promise him much profit. "Just tell politicians that contact tracing might hurt them politically, because of its aggressive invasion of data privacy", thought Gates. whofibs.blogspot.com ameri24 suggests Gates is worth $100-bn but he borrowed $5-bn from USAID for his vaccine organization, 'GAVI'. Kemi Badenoch said that Partygate was overblown, not really a serious matter. Let's remember that a café near Plymouth was stripped of £42,000 for seating people on 6 and 7 November 2020 (the first two days of the second lockdown.) The café had endured 7.5 months of Lockdown, and had seen Devi Sridhar call the second one, "this rubbish path". A few weeks later, MPs had 7 parties in Downing Street, and their punishment was just £50 each. whofibs.blogspot.com  The UK Covid Inquiry was told by Matt Hancock on 30/Nov/2023 that his efforts to ramp up COVID testing, were 'actively worked against' by No. 10. (https://inews.co.uk/news/uk-politics-live-hancock-covid-inquiry-2784209?) 'Well that's Hancock for you', but Dominic Cummings received the following in an email from Boris Johnson in May 2020: "The whole track and trace thing feels like whistling in the dark. Legions of imaginary Clouseaus and no plan to hire them" (https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/dominic-cummings-boris-johnson-matt-hancock-test-trace-plan-whistling-dark/). It's significant that Chris Whitty had stopped "the Contain phase" on 12 March (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAE8-e5_EKY at 13:10 mins, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/covid-19-government-announces-moving-out-of-contain-phase-and-into-delay#:~: ), meaning that a tracing team of "just under 300 staff" was told to down tools permanently (https://rehis.com/news/uk-missed-coronavirus-contact-tracing-opportunity-experts-say-in-the-guardian-news-article/?). Therefore, when Johnson said the "track and trace thing feels like whistling in the dark", he must have been referring to the trace-and-test that was still going on in S. Korea, Taiwan etc. In other words, he had always been against trying to contain the virus. He was in agreement with Bill Gates: Just lock people down and wait for vaccine. It was quite a wait though, wasn’t it? The first jabs were done on 8 December, and a vast sum had been borrowed to furlough salaried folk since 23rd March. And we still blame everything on post-pandemic policies. By the way, Hancock also told the Inquiry that he wanted to lock down on about 2nd March, not on 23rd. - So which is it? He wanted to get testing at a level where we would, in effect, be copying Taiwan and S. Korea (where lockdown was anathema and their communist neighbors would be watching with interest), or he wanted to do both: spend big on tracing and testing AND make commerce and industry endure lockdowns? whofibs.blogspot.com  '£121 to shake the hand of the millionaire ex-PM.' He duped people into shaking his hand on 3rd and 6th March 2020, two months after Li Wenliang had warned medical colleagues to use PPE against the novel pneumonia which reminded him of SARS. BBC had made this clear on 6 February after Li had died: bbcli. It's become obvious that Johnson secretly never intended to copy S. Korea (or Taiwan), only to create an illusion that we had a comparable strategy. He recently laid all blame on China for the delays of information which cost "the trillions of economic damage" (faceb.) He's never admitted that the WHO was the source of ideas from which China argued that SARS-CoV-2 was only being caught by handling animals (Guard). 
In April 2020, Bill Gates was in the UK, calling himself a "health expert" and developing his plans to monopolize global vaccine supply. He made sure nobody paid attention to the 'containment' strategy in Taiwan and S. Korea. (whose 'privacy invasion' was to be avoided, wasn't it?) As a result, economies were hammered by lockdowns (7.5 months of it before we got our first jab.) A stupendous national debt was established and thousands of businesses were ruined, because N0. 10 scorned the democratic Asians who always need to keep an eye on self-preservation (not wanting lockdowns with China and North Korea watching them.)  05/03/2025: "There wasn't any science", said Nick Robinson to Sunak this morning on BBC Breakfast, not realizing that SAGE had advised Johnson to copy S. Korea (and Taiwan) because that country had a good method which had worked well in containing MERS-CoV. Sunak and Johnson fell in with Bill Gates in 2020, because he was hell bent on monopolizing vaccine supply, to hell with everything else. Last year, the IFS accused Tories and Labour of conspiring to conceal the true scale of the national debt which was run up to do lockdowns with furlough. Starmer is blaming anything but the pandemic response which he supported, he even said the lockdowns should have been longer. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/02/economy/global-debt-crisis/index.html Boris wasn't entangled with some dubious men of wealth? See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=023nN-tvADs&t=29s "Democracy is not for sale" but was our way of responding to virus outbreaks already claimed by Bill Gates in 2019? Sir Kier Starmer called the cost of sickness benefits, "devastating", but what's actually been devastating is the sheer scale of borrowing done in 2020 to finance the SAGE-defying pandemic response.
Evidence of Bill Gates' influence over Matt Hancock has emerged recently, which you can see in the poster (3rd image in the blog: whofibs.blogspot.com) There's also been clear evidence that other Tories were matey with Gates in 2019, when he was on a mission to make a big noise in the sphere of infectious diseases. ~ He could see that vaccine supply was a very solid business opportunity.
There's a short video of Jeremy Hunt, saying in 2022 that SAGE had told "government", i.e. Health Minister Hancock, to get busy and do what S. Korea, Taiwan and a few others were doing. Gates, on the other hand, had completely ignored what S. Korea achieved with MERS-CoV in 2015, the year of his long TED talk about future diseases. In 2020, Gates didn't want governments committing resources to trace-and-test strategies: He wanted all public funds to go to vaccine. All he needed to do was whisper in the right ears that 'contact tracing' was a hot potato, stigmatized, because it involved surveillance of people's locational data. "It's a political risk, isn't it? But if you just lock them all down, borrow vast sums and pay them a good furlough, you'll be home free." See https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/02/economy/global-debt-crisis/index.html - Conservatives and Labour are accused of conspiring to play down just how much debt arose from the pandemic response (and now the US is banning those vaccines.)  The WHO wrote poor science in the years leading up to the pandemic. Its website still says that 'zoonotic' viruses will bring about situations in which lots of animals are infecting lots of people, and sometimes vice-versa. Bill Gates gained control of the WHO informally when it needed money after Trump ended US membership. Gates never payed attention to South Korea in 2015 when it beat MERS-CoV with its trace-and-test strategy. In 2020, he persuaded governments that all public finances should go only to vaccine distribution. "To hell with containment", he thought. "It's like a war zone", said Gates on BBC Breakfast. He'd come to see Matt Hancock again, this time to talk about an actual vaccine rollout. Judging by the cost of closing the country's businesses for nearly nine month in 2020 and furnishing the well-paid with 80% furlough, "£22-billion" sounds like a small piece of the pie, avoiding public outrage if they knew the true extent of borrowing in 2020? See the CNN article linked inside bit.ly/conwho Tedros Ghebreyesus, Bill Gates, Joe Biden... see them all shaking the top-commie's hand.
Why doesn't Bill Gates want people to know what happened in Taiwan and S. Korea at the start of 2022?
Use Ctrl+F to find "A 2024 paper" in whofibs.blogspot.com
(Clue: When the democratic Asian states stopped using trace-and-test to restrict the spread of coronavirus, they discovered that vaccine was providing barely a whiff of the protection we all assumed it would give.) Now you see why Trump encouraged Boris to do Brexit ("The EU charges us 40%. It's pathetic"), even if it meant closing down an essential health system (THRCC) which would have responded properly (like South Korea) to the coronavirus. bit.ly/whofibs  08/04/2025 Bill Gates is being promoted on BBC One in a short video about inspirational people. Try post the following blog link in a comment on the BBC News page and you'll find that you can no longer access that page: Whofibs.blogspot.com It explains why Gates steered MPs away from copying S. Korea and Taiwan. BBC Television helped the MPs by keeping the East Asian trace-and-test story off the screen until December 2020, when the first big lockdown was over. He let Gates develop his thinking... 1. Make a pretence of slowing the spread of the virus: Have a "contain phase" lasting a few weeks. (Add further phases to build a sense of structure: "delay, research and mitigate" phases). 2. just wait for Bill to organise vaccine globally, and pay furlough to the well-employed (appreciative types.) Use credit to cover expenses and pay the billionaires. Whofibs.blogspot.com  The WHO made no comment when Denmark culled millions of mink, and then kept quiet while the CCP was killing people's pets (while they were at work.) WHO had set the stage by insisting that people almost always caught MERS-CoV "directly" from animals (camels.) A review in Nature, 2016, had provided the correct explanation of the limited mobility of MERS. WHO never once mentioned any actual data of animals dying from COVID-19, they just continued to peddle their assumption that small mammals would be carriers...
See more detail of what they did in bit.ly/whofibs Billionaire Trump didn't like what the WHO did in 2020, but he had no patience for dealing with the consequences in a sensible way. Billionaire Gates jumped in and turned the whole thing into a profitable vaccine supply venture, which caused nine other people to become billionaires... Mongoose McQueen (Since 2017, Gates had been targeting MPs, particularly Matt Hancock, to build relationships that gave him control in our health sector.) 02/05/2025 Nigel Farage doing well in local elections.
Might Farage have run a better pandemic response, not one driven by a certain billionaire who was chummy with Matt Hancock in 2019, had a financial hold on the WHO in 2020, called himself a "health expert" and cashed in on vaccine deals? (talked about "infection control" with Hancock but didn't ever discuss the S. Korean/Taiwanese approach.) Whofibs.blogspot.com It seems unlikely the Inquiry will tell you about the unnatural influence of a certain billionaire who met quite often with Matt Hancock in 2019. He didn't want governments to copy what Taiwan and South Korea were doing, rather preferred that they only spent big on vaccines. He seized the day when Trump quit the WHO, raised $18-bn for it to support his control of global vaccine supply. It's why so many countries had long lockdowns and lost many more people than the East Asians did (until 2022 when they stopped using trace-and-test). Use your Google and you'll find that almost 9 million British jobs were being furloughed in May 2020. If those jobs were only paying £1000 per month, that meant government would have been spending £7,200,000,000 that month. Of course, many people were earning twice that much, some even more, therefore quite a few would have been receiving the full £2,500 per month. Furlough lasted through to September 2021. Read in the CNN article (linked in the blog) that Tories and Labour were accused recently of conspiring to hide the true debt. With it standing at about £2.8-trillion, it seems that the money spent on furlough explains at least half that amount.... Whofibs.blogspot.com  Starmer, like Johnson, is dismissive of how well S. Korea, Taiwan and a few other states managed to avoid lockdowns, coming through with their economies unshaken, and with better human survival. If anything, Trump hadn't realized just how skewed the WHO's rhetoric on respiratory coronaviruses had been, making CCP happy with unsupported generalisations that animal-to-human transmission was the only significant risk. Gates also saw how to exploit the yarn-spinning. Nothing was allowed to hinder the man who had decided that trading in vaccines is a virtue, as long as it's on a big-business scale. Meanwhile in the UK, there's no vaccine program for bacterial meningitis, which recently caused a student to lose both arms and legs (story was on msn news yesterday - MSN/sky) Boris said that, like a booster rocket, he launched the UK to new economic strata. Didn't he actually trigger economic crisis by sticking us into a year's worth of lockdowns, stopping trace-and-test on 12 Mar 2020 so that Bill Gates' vaccine supply system had no competition for public funds?  The MPs forget how well S. Korea, Taiwan and others in East Asia managed to keep lockdowns to a minimum, coming through with better human and economic survival. Gates knew how to exploit the urge to dumb-down and lock-down: Dissuade leaders from using trace-and-test, just push vaccination to the hilt. If anything, Trump doesn't realize that the WHO's five-year rhetoric about respiratory coronaviruses had been making CCP happy, with unsupported generalising that 'animal-to-human transmission' was the only significant risk.  29/05/2025 Further to the Truss/Farage comparison which Sir Keir Starmer has made... he signed a treaty last week which lets the WHO call lockdowns on us in the future. (Wasn't £1.5-trillion borrowed to make furlough possible? Our debt is beyond £2.5-trillion.)
While last night's BBC Newsnight said that the right to free speech has less legal protection in the UK than it does in the US, there was obviously no mention of the official silence which has followed the promise that China's pandemic cover-up, 'justified' in WHO rhetoric and delays, would be chased up. MPs promised to challenge China at a later stage, but that was the end of it. Our lockdowns were Draconian in the full sense, small companies were fined into insolvency. The alternative strategy which democratic Asian states followed was excluded from BBC programmes for more than nine months after we were herded to our homes on 23/03/2020.
IN YEARS BEFORE THE PANDEMIC, WE GAVE MORE TO THE WHO THAN EVEN THE USA DID. (Only the Gates Foundation and Germany ever gave them more than we did.) Instead of acting on the betrayal of our trust in the WHO, we are obviously still sending them generous funding, while cutting foreign aid this year. Does the Labour spending spree keep minds off the national debt (£2.8-trillion), the bulk of which was accrued to run furlough? (see CNN article linked in the blog, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/02/economy/global-debt-crisis/index.html) Sir Starmer's signed a treaty which assumes that the WHO will know when it's best to call more lockdowns. In 2020, its Director-General criticized East Asian countries who applied travel restrictions with a view to avoiding lockdowns. His logic ran as follows 'If there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission, then there's no evidence that travel bans will make any difference, so it's unscientific to hurt China with travel bans!' WHO had been plying the "no human2human transmission" idea since they said MERS-CoV was caught, in the majority of cases, by contact with camels (and they ignored the sensible description of MERS in a Nature review article in 2016.) Ghebreyesus was still speaking against the use of travel restrictions in December 2021. Being so eager to 'protect China's economy', he never spoke about the extreme damage done to economies by lockdowns. We obviously are still a top WHO donor, once again giving it more than the USA does.  More than one top Tory had been "friends with" Bill Gates for more than a year, and they let his opinions guide them in 2020. It suited him that they did very little between 23 March and 11 December (the day that some people got their first jabs), while he organized his global vaccine supply scheme. (Follow the Politico hyperlink in whofibs.blogspot.com) He didn't want them copying technically advanced countries like S. Korea and Taiwan, because their trace-and-test approach didn't promise him easy profit. @MonMcq A risky summary: The main plot in 2020? Gates was worming his way among our MPs as far back as 2017. He was getting chummy with Matt Hancock in 2019, they talked about, "infection control", i.e. thinking about a slick vaccine supply scheme for 'the next outbreak'. But oops, why were Americans so amazed by S. Korea's pandemic response? Gates wanted governments to channel all their money to his scheme only. So he whispered in ears that the S. Koreans were known to be "aggressive" in accessing personal data... Hey presto, talking about S. Korea was taboo for the rest of the pandemic. MPs approve the Assisted dying bill: 20.06.2020 They all backed lockdown over copying South Korea, and then suppressed the news of how well those East Asians were doing throughout 2020. Our deaths in December 2020? 71,000. In South Korea? 600. 22/06/25 Kemi says we're all being taken for mugs by Kier, but don't forget who told you to "stay at home" while they borrowed a trillion or two to dish up furlough for those with good jobs. They sent more of your money to the WHO, not caring that it had backed China's cover-up after providing CCP with the phoney premise that, 'CoV's don't spread H2H'. 01/07/2025 Sir Starmer's mistake has been to help the Tories conceal the gigantic debt they ran up, e.g. for making furlough in 2020. (see 'Conspiracy of silence' in https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/02/economy/global-debt-crisis/index.html ) The way they handled the pandemic brought Britain's output to a "300 years" low (quoting Mr Johnson.) Jeremy Hunt revealed that they'd been advised to avoid lockdown by copying S. Korea. 02/07/ He was very pally with Bill Gates in 2019, the man who had plans for large-scale vaccine schemes, and no interest in trace-and-test containment... whofibs.blogspot.com 12/07/2025 What if a billionaire says that he's a health expert and, in 2020, he persuades g8 countries to do nothing but wait for vaccines? For months on end, their businesses have no activity, many are closed down, and then he bewails the fact that Trump cuts USAID money for GAVI which Biden had approved for further vaccine research. He says his GAVI has saved millions of children, but he didn't try to stop the vaccination of kids for COVID-19 when its CFR was 2 to 3% overall and younger people weren't likely to die if their immune systems were healthy. Should that billionaire keep appearing in little BBC videos as though he's a shining star, a victim of misinformation?  https://uk.news.yahoo.com/covid-vaccines-children-uptake-uk-150404858.html The CFR of Covid-19 was said to be between 2 and 3%, but the younger you were, the least likely you'd die after being infected. Without looking it up, were any healthy children under 15 years of age made very ill by SARS-CoV-2? Therefore, any aggressive drive to get kids vaccinated is only 'justified' by the possibility that one might carry the virus to an adult who then dies. A similar logic was mouthed by Boris Johnson about "refusenicks" in 2020.  See that Gates had persuasion with Matt Hancock in 2019. He never said a word in 2020 about staying out of lockdown by copying S. Korea and Taiwan. He wanted all public moneys to go to vaccine, in which he had huge financial interest.... whofibs.blogspot.com It's how we came to lose 650,055 businesses in less than 2 years. Gates' GAVI and COVAX influence caused many countries to lock down in 2020 instead of copying S. Korea/Taiwan. Many countries are now much poorer as a result, and debt everywhere is sky high (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/02/economy/global-debt-crisis/index.html) Will the World still need humans? "Uh, not for most things." (The world's billions will be watching TV most of the time, because food production, for example, will be a "solved problem".) https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1QPrwZ89aJ/ Remember that this man was 'educating' Matt Hancock in 2019 (see the tweet of January that year.) His GAVI and COVAX influence caused many countries to lock down in 2020 instead of copying S. Korea and Taiwan. Many places are now substantially poorer as a result, and debt everywhere is sky high: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/02/economy/global-debt-crisis/index.html In the UK, 650,055 businesses died in 2020/21 thanks to the lockdowns. whofibs.blogspot.com explains how Gates helped the WHO propagate their opinion that respiratory coronaviruses are mostly caught "directly" from animals, 'therefore tracing human contagion won't help much: Just vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate.' The UK is the biggest donor toward Bill Gates' COVAX scheme since he created it in April 2020. That man believed that he was saving the world with COVID-19 vaccines (three doses per person, and they still caught it.) See the poster below in full screen mode:  Starmer didn't try to stop Johnson from giving £548-million to COVAX in 2020, an organization directed by GAVI, which was Bill Gates 'philanthropic' system for pushing COVID-19 vaccine onto all people, everywhere. Care homes couldn't afford PPE at the time, and their human losses were being "airbrushed" out of the daily news. This year, the US government clawed back $2.6-billion from GAVI which Gates had solicited from the Biden administration. Of course, Gates was happy to see Britain's trace-and-test team being sent home on 12 March 2020. He wanted no funds going to anything that wasn't vaccine. Did anyone see Jack Rankin MP just now, oozing so much indifference to the suffering in Gaza that he then said "revy" instead of "very"? He reckons that Conservative "principles" are what's going to pull things in the right direction. As an aside and in reference to his suggestion that people must realize the value of "growth", did Tory "principles" make it sensible to wait 37 weeks for vaccine after locking down, ignoring the best British advice they could get at the start: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 (VSV - very short video). Did funding furlough not generate the biggest national debt ever seen in peacetime? (£2.6-trillion not long ago. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/02/economy/global-debt-crisis/index.html) Tories only pretended to be running a genuine trace-and-test effort beyond 12 March 2020, which explains why Mr Johnson became so ferocious about anyone who didn't run along and get a jab in December.  Kemi Badenoch said the Lockdown parties were not really a big deal?
Doctors in China who'd heard from Li Wenliang were donning PPE at the end of December 2019, but Boris Johnson was deliberately shaking hands with people on 1, 3 and 6 March 2020. - His motive? To play down the risk and delay announcements for as long as possible, because he anticipated a long wait (40 weeks) before vaccine would be available, and he had no intention of scaling up a genuine trace-and-test containment system. "Just lock 'em down", said Gates.
04 Aug. 2025 Plymouth Live says more big name shops are set to close soon (regardless of millions spent by the largely Tory council on a city centre 'facelift') What's slipped past most people: 650,055 UK businesses were folded in 2020/21. (In 2019, it had been alarming that 85,000 "jobs" in retail were lost in a year.) Was locking down really such a good idea, all things considered? There was no logical reason to kill the mink in 2020. (The Danes were assuming that the virus transmitted animal-to-human when there was no evidence of that. - It was an idea which the WHO had been pushing since MERS-CoV 'seemed' not to transmit human-to-human.) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/30/denmarks-covid-mass-mink-cull-no-legal-justification-report and there was that giraffe they used for a public dissection. 12/08/2025 Frankly, she (Nicola Sturgeon) left the care homes unprotected and said there was nothing to learn from other countries responses to COVID (although she would have been told that by Devi Sridhar.) Mongoose McQueen has the whofibs url. (whofibs.blogspot.com) Reply No it was BJ who held the meetings and all leaders were attending and following his lead! Then he cancelled the testing! Then they gave billions to cronies for non existent or useless Test and trace and PPE! Reply Yes, he led the way but NS enjoyed that 'laid-back' approach he developed. Why make special efforts if London wasn't?. By the way, somehow it's never been noticed how involved Bill Gates was in our pandemic decisions. The covid vaccine billionaires worked under his umbrella. How much did the pandemic hurt British business long-term?
At the end of last year, a BBC article announced the number of businesses closing down as: "25,000 .. highest in 30 years".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68140635?fbclid=IwY2xjawM8avFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHiCG3GgnRN-drsfmoRLjkT71blfkJ75mk_CiW7P3NZBTyn02e1mxO5a9cmbJ_aem_2SpOfR2g0iB5-1ay8H0wXQ
The article doesn't let anyone know that the number of "business deaths" in 2020/21 was 650,055, according to the quarterly figures on an ONS page (not including December 2021):: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/bankruptorpermanentlyclosedbusinessesduringthecovid19pandemic (just add the numbers, Sunak-style.)
Skilful selectivity by BBC news in 2020 kept people from realizing how different things were in certain friendly East Asian states who were able to avoid lockdowns and prevent infections much more effectively. Did Mr Johnson assume that South Korea and Taiwan had set themselves on a path to ruin when they chose to avoid lockdowns and work hard at containing SARS-CoV-2 instead? If he didn't assume that, then why did he ignore his initial SAGE advice which told him to 'copy them' (see video https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527), and then wait until mid-March to start 'delaying' the virus with lockdowns instead? Also, why then say to the COVID Inquiry that there was "no other tool that I knew of"? Did putting the economy through lockdowns spanning a year have no effect on our national security? Roundly ignored since December 2021, the ONS published quarterly figures which showed that 650,o55 businesses were dissolved in less than two years (hyperlink's in the blog). BBC furthered the concealment of that unpleasant fact by saying that 25,000 failing businesses in 2024 represented the worst of such situations "in thirty years". Let's ban lockdowns and scrap the treaty which Sir Starmer has signed which lets the WHO decide when to use them. She (Michelle Mone) was a sign of the times. In S. Korea, they had an explicit policy that no companies would make profit on anything that helped them control SARS-CoV-2, but Johnson preferred Bill Gates' approach: lockdowns and lucrative contracts. It's slipped past people how much influence Bill Gates had on the Tories even before 2020, guiding them to favour systems which promise easy profit for contractors. In 2019, there was his Event 201 conference at Johns Hopkins University, led by the WHO's Michael J. Ryan. In a speech, Ryan called on delegates to imagine a "SARS-like virus, germinating quietly among pig farms in Brazil before spreading to every country in the World". His colorful rhetoric did imply an amount of human-to-human contagion (once the virus had 'quietly germinated' among pigs), but it didn't really break ranks with the WHO's unvetted description of MERS-CoV since 2012: "spreading animal-to-human, not human-to-human unless there is close contact". By talking this way in 2019, they were formulating how they'd tell most countries to act when another respiratory coronavirus did appear, but Taiwan is not included by WHO, and South Korea wasn't that interested in WHO verbiage. Quoting Aseem Malhotra (https://www.facebook.com/reel/1682699315751886):
"They (the WHO and British MPs) said that lockdowns are not the right step forward, so why did they change their view?" Simple answer, Bill Gates had been mixing with Matt Hancock all through 2019, and his influence in England goes further back than that. The fact that Johns Hopkins is mentioned so often in the debate about COVID vaccine safety suggests that Bill Gates was heavily involved. It's no coincidence that Britain dumped its own SAGE advice on the day that the WHO declared a pandemic: PHE's virus tracing team was stood down because the trace-and-test operation was "finished". (Chris Whitty announced it all very quickly the next day in an otherwise long TV appearance, alongside the prime minister and Patrick Vallance, a man who would belittle the PM for trying to avoid lockdown.) Gates didn't want Korean-style activities to be getting government funding. He wanted countries to think only, "vaccine, vaccine, vaccine". p.s. his second home is Johns Hopkins and he currently has them eerily excited about research on 'Disease X'. He loves the place so much because Johns Hopkins was a philanthropist!  BBC said in 2024 that 25,000 British businesses had "gone bust" in the preceding year, and that the figure was a "30-year high" (i.e. "the highest number since 1993".) bbc.co.uk/news/business-68140635? BUT.....
ONS showed how many businesses were "permanently closed" between the first quarter of 2020 and 6/12/2021, and the total was 650,055 (although you must summate the quarterly figures yourself.) https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/bankruptorpermanentlyclosedbusinessesduringthecovid19pandemic
Have you ever heard BBC mention that the national debt was slightly over £1-trillion in March 2010, but it was £2.5-trillion by March 2023?
Might it be a 'coalition' of men who 'guide' the BBC? (Ever popular with the Tories, how much input did Bill Gates have?) I'd like to add that I met a man at a temp job who told me neither he nor his wife got jabbed, and they believe they didn't get the bug or were able to manage without much trouble. I know for a fact that COVID did kill people just as described by NHS nurses and doctors. I remember an American expert saying, "If you're vulnerable to this thing, it's going to find you". The question is, did the vaccine really keep any such people alive? By the time vaccine was available (8 December in the UK), were any such people still alive? Labour's dilemma is that they can't own up and let us know that 3 lockdowns, together spanning a year, really did bring "Britain's output to its lowest on 300 years" (as Boris said in 2021.) Starmer liked Lockdowns so much, he's signed the treaty that makes the WHO the lockdown-caller of the future. The IFS in 2024 says clearly in a CCN report that Labour and Tories conspire to play down the true state of the nation's finances, and the only "tool" they have now is to keep raising taxes.   It was Bill Gates' quest to become the world's vaccine king that made sure the MPs didn't keep the UK's trace-and-test operation together after 12.03.2020, if we really did have such a team at all.  Watch it: facebook/reel/ Response to an abusive devotee of Bill Gates' saintly innocence: You've obviously skipped over the part where his years of nosing around in Britain's health governance meant he could persuade Vallance/Whiity/Johnson to turn our pandemic response into a very long wait, 37 weeks from the start of lockdown, for vaccine. He'd ignored the South Korean method for MERS-Cov in 2015 - it was never going to spin money like vaccine does. He's not, and never will be, a "health expert". https://facebook.com/reel/1372736903851017/ The last time Mr Johnson spoke to the Covid Inquiry, he said that there was "no other tool that I know of", as though he didn't realise that Taiwan and S. Korea (both with high population density) managed to keep cases at low numbers without using lockdowns. Isn't it tempting to wonder if Matt Hancock didn't stop hospitals from shipping COVID cases into care homes because it would be convenient 'proof' that 'lockdown was the right approach' if those care homes were quickly overrun with infection? Who'd challenge them for ignoring SAGE when it had said, two months beforehand, to get busy copying S. Korea? https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 The last time Mr Johnson spoke to the Covid Inquiry, he said that there was "no other tool that I know of", as though he didn't realise that Taiwan and S. Korea managed to keep cases at low numbers without using economy-damaging lockdowns. Isn't it tempting to wonder if Hancock didn't stop hospitals from shipping COVID cases into care homes because it would be convenient 'proof' that 'lockdown was an essential tool' if the care homes quickly filled up with cases? What was Gates' subliminal message? "Don't bother with tracing and testing to contain the virus. Just lock them down and wait for the vaccine. It's a big opportunity with easy profit." "Trace-and-test is just whistling in the dark", wrote Mr Johnson in April 2020. Talking 'contempt', did they ship hospital patients to care homes "in good faith" or was it, conveniently, a way to show that the virus was a killer which justified locking everything down? Mr Johnson was also contemptuous of the authority which had been set up for exactly the situation he was facing... He hid the advice which SAGE had sent him, because it told him to copy South Korea and thus avoid big lockdowns.  Not able to distinguish Johnson's "great plan" in 2020 from a genuine response which protects the economy while keeping viral spread to a minimum, Labour are still wasting money on the WHO while Bill Gates, its funding manager in 2020, is the force behind the quest to "prepare for disease x".  Johnson's "great plan" which was enforced late in March 2020 brought on the worst financial state ever seen in the UK (apart from the US debt accrued during WW2). His thinking was Draconian and simplistic... pleasing to people like Bill Gates because it put all focus onto waiting for the vaccine. (There were soon nine covid vaccine billionaires while a million UK businesses were folded across 2020/22.) Johnson ridiculed South Korea's trace-and-test method ("legions of imaginary Clouseaus") and made the BBC keep the success of their prevention strategy out of its daily conversations in 2020. By 2023, thanks to the use of furlough when your "only tool" is lockdown, the national debt had risen by 150% of what it was when Tories took over, and we can barely meet the interest payments.  11 Dec 2025 This report allays fears about possible harm done by the vaccine, but it also suggests that the vaccine didn't have much effect on human survival, because the vaccinated (in France) were only slightly more likely to be alive after the fourth year of the study. - See under Main Results: 0.2% fewer people had died (of anything) in the vaccinated group vs. in the control group. (Was there 0.2% more death in the unvaccinated group simply because people who got themselves vaccinated were generally more careful about self-preservation?) N.B. the control group was a lot smaller, about a quarter of the size of the vaccinated group.
Perhaps more important: vaccinated patients who were inside hospitals had a three-quarters smaller chance of dying with COVID-19. It's possible that France was quite a safe place to be, because they took the virus very seriously (e.g. they closed the Eurotunnel against the UK variant until Boris Johnson insisted that they reopen it), but it was more difficult to make hospitals safe. This probably explains why the study revealed a vaccine effect in the hospital environment, but not everywhere else. It's good to read that the COVID m-RNA vaccine seems to have done no harm. However, there's been a global silence about what happened in S. Korea and Taiwan when both countries decided to end their trace-and-test operations after vaccination targets had been reached: The deaths rates took off like rockets because the vaccine wasn't as effective as people imagined it would be.Something scandalous from Daily Mail this week: 15 Dec 2025 Rishi was given a very easy time of it on Monday by the Inquiry guy. He had half his sentences completed for him, like a good little boy being helped along by a benevolent teacher. (Obviously, it's Boris who’s set to be 'the bad boy'.) Across 2020/21, 650k UK businesses decided to fold when they saw that lockdowns were going to make them unviable. Another 345,000 folded in 2022. (ONS figures are shown in the blog.) Big pharma had twenty-six members of SAGE dancing to their pandemic interest in 2020, it was revealed this week: https://mol.im/a/15359403 As a result, the MPs stopped trying to copy South Korea, and followed Vallance’s “simple” plan instead. Once they'd shut down the PHE's trace-and-test team on 12/03/2020, they spent a lot of time adjusting the story that families would see on BBC One. All other news channels were boycotted by the MPs. 18 Dec 2025 Mone was not alone in taking us for a ride.
Sunak had established a hedge fund to receive profit shares from Moderna but he refused to talk about it. We assume that their vaccine had much helpful impact. We'll never really know because the virus had already peaked in the eight months before any vaccine was ready. (Mone bought a flat in Florida. Sunak bought a heated indoor swimming pool.)
  This sort of talk is a convenient way to make vaccines and their billionaires seem to be a core necessity in life. Anyone who doesn't agree with the totally-vaccine method for handling epidemics is branded "anti-vax" (worse than lunatic.) It's because right-wing, Brexit fixated MPs ignored their own experts' advice to copy South Korea in 2020. (Four years later, Boris Johnson said that lockdown was the only tool for handling the pandemic.) Yesterday, another big retail name was said to be doomed (River Island.) The key to the whole thing? Governments realised they could make the pandemic as expensive as they liked by simply borrowing enormously and furnishing furloughs. Using lockdown, they knew that businesses would fold in their hundreds of thousands, but society would simply have to adapt afterwards. Daily items would quickly cost a lot more but they could blame a variety of problems, e.g. Russia, and indulge long arguments about the possibility that a sudden Brexit was a double-edged sword. 31/12/2025 A Tory shadow MP has been doing legal work for a pal of Putin. bbcnews and skyNews Don't forget what Hunt revealed: The Tories rejected SAGE when it said to copy South Korea: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527 Yes, we could have dodged lockdowns and saved 200x more lives, not caused a million businesses to throw in the towel, and not borrowed a trillion to fund furlough. p.s. Why'd they scrap the trace-and-test approach? Everything suggests it was a multinational decision made through Davos association. It resulted in at least nine people becoming vaccine billionaires. 29/01/2026 We heard Mr Starmer just now in China, saying that a big deal he's got going with them for "billions" of Pounds involves Astra Zeneca. That might be good news but the downside is that China loved lockdowns and so did Starmer. Remember also that the CCP was keen to keep people "calm" in January 2020 by telling them that the coronavirus did not transmit human-to-human. It was an idea which the WHO had pushed for MERS-CoV since 2012. The WHO backed the CCP, adding that the use of travel restrictions would hurt China's economy. As a result, countries weren't quick to realize what South Korea and Taiwan were doing: avoiding lockdowns by holding back the human-to-human spread of SARS-CoV-2 with a trace-and-test strategy. WHO enthusiasts (most of the World's countries) hummed and ha'd for a couple of months and, in the UK, it was decided that trace-and-test should be scrapped when it had only just begun, because lockdown was what we really needed while waiting 38 weeks for the vaccine to be developed.   Boris de Pfeffel Johnson made it clear. His 'great plan' for the pandemic brought Britain's output to its lowest in "three hundred years". We heard Starmer just now in China, saying that a big deal he's got going with them for "billions" of Pounds involves Astra Zeneca. That might be good news but the downside is that China loved lockdowns and so did Starmer. Remember also that the CCP was keen to keep people "calm" in January 2020 by telling them that the coronavirus did not transmit human-to-human. It was an idea which the WHO had pushed for MERS-CoV since 2012. The WHO backed the CCP, adding that the use of travel restrictions would hurt China's economy. As a result, countries weren't quick to realize what South Korea and Taiwan were doing: avoiding lockdowns by holding back the human-to-human spread of SARS-CoV-2 with a trace-and-test strategy. WHO enthusiasts (most of the World's countries) hummed and ha'd for a couple of months and, in the UK, it was decided that trace-and-test should be scrapped when it had only just begun, because lockdown was what we really needed while waiting 38 weeks for the vaccine to be developed. The virus killed 2 or 3 percent of the people it infected, but Johnson called it an "unexpected mugger" and scrapped PHE's trace-and-test team, assuming that lockdowns would 'delay' the virus while we waited 37 weeks for the vaccine to become available. He said himself that Britain's output dropped to a "300 years" low, but didn't mention the hundreds of thousands of businesses which shut down because they could see they wouldn't survive, or the enormous amount borrowed to dole out furlough. Junior doctor strikes dwouldn't have happened if the original SAGE advice hadn't been put in a bottom drawer. Quickly copying South Korea was likely to make lockdowns avoidable. This respiratory coronavirus killed 2 or 3 percent of the people who caught it (the previous one had a CFR of 57% in first reports.) Trump's pandemic response was crap. He damned the WHO, said the Chinese "are doing a very good job", fixed nothing and got busy with his second election campaign, which flopped on him because hadn't worked out how to beat the system yet. People will be shocked when/if they ever realize just how much the economy was going to suffer when Tories sat on the original advice they received from SAGE in 2020, regarding the way to prepare for COVID-19. Johnson's message was that we had "fantastic" systems for the surveillance and containment of the disease, and that people should carry on with their daily pursuits as normal, just as in South Korea. Then, on 12 March, the U-turn was total but very skilfully concealed with a system of gaslighting, and a boycott of any journalists who didn't work for the BBC (not forgetting the frequent cosplay by Johnson, in all kinds of heroic guises.) By ditching the SAGE advice and simply imposing Draconian lockdowns, they caused up to a million businesses to throw in the towel between 2020 and 2022, and the cost of furlough raised the national debt by 150% of what it was when they took the reigns. (Also, the public was fooled by the creation of an NHS system with a name that suggested it was resuming the trace-and-test approach: It cost 29.5-billion but it couldn't force anyone who might be a carrier to get tested.) It's a scream that we have to endure Tory opinions today as though they did a good job last time. Johnson sees the Epstein revelation as a good time to turn his back on Gates? It doesn't take a lot of investigation to find that Gates was "friends" with a few Tories in the years leading up to the pandemic. In 2019, Matt Hancock posted a photo of himself with Gates on X, and they conferred about "infection control" several times that year. It's pretty obvious that Gates was pleased when our attempt to tackle COVID without locking down was scrapped on 12 March 2020. He didn't want to see us spending another penny on containment by trace-and-test, because he wanted funding in all WHO member states to be allocated only to vaccine supply.  Watching some South Koreans clean up in the Olympic women's short track relay speed skating, I was reminded how tragic it was that Boris Johnson and his colleagues played down how effective they are at team work and innovation. Not a single MP in either party ever said, "South Korea" on BBC TV in 2020/21/22, and it stayed that way. (Johnson made a quip about "South Korea" once in 2020, but he wasn't talking about the pandemic.) Former health secretary, Jeremy Hunt spilled the beans in July 2022: "Why weren't we copying South Korea and thus protecting ourselves from an excessive use of lockdowns?" The lockdowns killed enormous numbers of businesses and kicked-started the 'cost of living crisis', but Starmer and Reeves also prefer that we don't really see it that way. - They are obviously still funding the WHO, something which the UK has habitually done much more generously than even the USA did (Biden raised the amount for a while.) Articles not read yet: 'Britain is governed by WhatsApp': https://www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/what-to-listen-to/helen-lewis-has-left-the-chat-radio-4-bbc-whatsapp/?utm_content=telegraph&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1KQK44c3uBJ4ntf8P6zI3kdOb6hK_cUbPzwn878tAG8wNotk2liCJPGY4_aem_AXb3Zc0t-cDIJPjFdtfKxWeyIpmcD5ce1vCVDx9mO0-b4wOQulNRdxoiQ1nQt5Xif0lSNUg2mj0xx2PL0KTtJAgu#Echobox=1713350323-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51185836 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-52573137 https://bylinetimes.com/2023/12/20/covid-cronyism-and-mone-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-byline-times-full-story-of-the-ppe-cash-carousel/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2sceGOdii1su1nyzSZ9MYp2bq-2WDvtad_MlECp6N2BAK1Ej36XOlLOEM#Echobox=1703588414 https://news.sky.com/story/covid-inquiry-boris-johnson-denies-he-was-manipulated-or-pushed-into-first-lockdown-12999568?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter&fbclid=IwAR0XmSjOYeVFW62FFsdoDVPIbKP1bj65bxldH_wDU9nfz7WpAYc7amxMuRw https://unherd.com/newsroom/boris-johnson-is-still-in-denial-about-lockdowns/ https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/comparing-covid-19-with-previous-pandemics#1981present:-HIV
hospital outbreaks
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1306742
camel to human
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24896817/
transmission of mers
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893921002842
p to p of mers
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1308724 offspring virions https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23106710/ the capsid |
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