On 12 March 2020, the MPs shut down the effort to contain coronavirus using the trace-and-test method as developed by S. Korea. The next step was to wait 38 weeks in lockdown before the first vaccine doses were injected on 11 December. Self-acclaimed "health expert" Bill Gates had global control of things, and he’d preferred there was no public cash going to Korean style containment in any country. Nine or more well-connected individuals became vaccine billionaires that year.

Mr Gates met several times with Matt Hancock in 2019. They'd talk about "infection control", and Gates had ideas for a global vaccine supply scheme (see Politico.) It's small wonder that there was just a week or two of "Track and trace" in 2020 before "the Contain Phase" was "finished" on 12 March (watch youtube at 13:10 mins.) Lockdown was announced eleven days later, because Gates had wanted no Korean style strategies competing for funds from governments.

Background facts:
(At least one online reference for each point can be found in the main text)

In 2015, Bill Gates said that, while the WHO does monitor disease outbreaks, it is “not funded” to help countries get ready for them (see his TED talk, at 02:59.) In 2017, the UK's MHRA was "awarded over £980,000 for collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization" (Govuk.) Gates had 'scientific conversations' with Matt Hancock at least three times in 2019.

Gates proposed that countries weren't able to do a serious amount of "infection control", but he said nothing in 2015 when South Korea found a new way to contain Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. They used a nucleic acid test (NAT) to detect which people in four hospitals should be housed in special wards, and they traced the paths of infection back to a man who had carried MERS-CoV, known to kill up to 56% of the people it infected, from hospital to hospital.

The Gates Foundation made a contribution in 2018 when ‘chaebols’ in S. Korea gave funding for RIGHT: Research Investment for Global Health Technology. Korean private money supported a ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ strategy in 2020 for fighting the spread of SARS-CoV-2. However, Gates was busy raising money for the WHO at the time, after Donald Trump had cancelled his country’s membership. Boris Johnson pledged £548-million for the WHO to set up ‘COVAX’ in collaboration with the EU, after sending WHO a ‘bonus’ of £55-million directly in April, showing solidarity against Trump.

~

One of the WHO’s website factsheets says that a “zoonotic” virus, “is transmitted between animals and people”. It claims that people usually caught MERS 'directly' from camels, not from other people. It doesn't attempt to explain the fact that MERS-CoV transmitted between people frequently in S. Korea, in places where there were no animals (e.g. inside those four hospitals.)

Seventeen-thousand people were locked down during S. Korea's response to MERS. (Thirty-six died: bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51836898.) Making no reference to the effectiveness of S. Korea’s trace-and-test approach, WHO spokesmen continued to say only that MERS-CoV spreads by “direct” transmission, i.e. from camel to human in most cases. It wasn’t until 2015 that WHO said some human-to-human transmission might occur: One of their spokesmen mentioned an effort to trace human disease contacts in Hong Kong (see, “MERS infects 10” below*.)

For more than a decade, the UN/WHO had rarely made any commentary about S. Korea, because that country's longstanding alliance with Taiwan displeases the CCP (and WHO has 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 2021 that the UN announced that S. Korea has a “developed economy”, as though companies like Samsung, LG and Kia could have been built in an under-developed place.

~

S. Korean businesses incurred losses through the MERS lockdowns in 2015, and it was hoped that an expanded ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ strategy would make lockdowns avoidable in 2020, even if SARS-CoV-2 was spreading rapidly. (The city of Daegu did lock down voluntarily 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 travel (a key component of containment strategy) would be hurting China’s economy. The WHO was still advising against the use of travel restrictions at the end of 2021, and they never did promote ‘Trace, Test and Treat’ explicitly to any of their 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 then, “Tracing must be the backbone of the response in every country” were said by WHO only in the second half of March 2020. It’s obvious that they'd 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.

~

Bill Gates was never heard saying, ‘virus containment’, ‘nucleic acid test’, or ‘contact tracing’. He was only interested in ‘vaccine supply’ as an enormous business opportunity**. His long-winded 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 Dec. 2020, while there had been 587 in S. Korea by 14 Dec. 2020 (where there are 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 country's Containment strategy was terminated in 2022. Fearing that China might be encouraged 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. Likewise in S. Korea, the deaths rate began climbing 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 still more people were dying: Fewer than 6,000 S. Koreans had died at the start of January 2022, but the total was 24,000 before the end of May.

Use Ctrl+F to find key words, e.g. 'the fines’, 9 million jobs, CNN, copying South Korea, high street, 2% and 3%, fines, video, 300 years, billionaires, refuseniks, good effect, whistling, boycott, health expert, commercially, restaurant, the cover-up, Biden, hypothetical, 27 December, 09/2022, from Taiwan, Nature, Johns Hopkins, Event 201, equilibrium, JCVI, the plod, thermal, screening, Sridhar, Spanish, then and now, NERVTAG, Omicron, THRCC, vaccination began, LSHTM, stayed away, slow down on. (Tip: highlight a word, press Ctrl+F, hit Enter)

* 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." He doesn't say anything about S. Korea's extensive use of such tracing, or that they had managed to prevent the spread of MERS-CoV inside hospitals.

** politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969

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June 2025:  It's being assumed that lockdown, supported by 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, even Japan... managed to avoid long lockdowns, coming through with vastly better human and economic survival. In the UK, providing furlough to so many people for the better part of a year must have involved government borrowing at a historically enormous level: CNN.

Bill Gates knew how to exploit the tendency to dumb-down and lock-down. He could simply whisper in certain ears that contact tracing is, politically, a hot potato?: "You'll be messing with their data privacy! What might that do to your chances in the next election?"

By doing this, Sir Starmer is glossing over the WHO's role in China's pandemic cover-up, and he's ensured their continued backing by the UK. Even before the pandemic, the UK man in the street was paying the WHO four-times the amount forfeited by an American taxpayer, because UK was giving a higher total (and America has many more tax payers.) Biden tried to change that by ramping the US contribution from ca. $400-million to almost $800-million, but Trump's brought it back to $zero. We've fallen in with the Gates side of the argument. He made sure all our money went to a vaccine scheme, none to be available for a genuine trace-and-test program. Why? See the Politico article. Remember that Sir Chris Whitty "finished" Britain's "contain phase", "as we've always said (we would), from the beginning", on 12 March 2020.

  The private sector in S. Korea was urged by government to make no profit from products which helped the country respond to COVID-19. In the UK, MPs took steps to have news of the Korean 'Trace, test and treat' strategy excluded for nine months from BBC television. MPs appeared only on BBC TV and were shielded by a boycott of all non-BBC journalists (gove and pmorg) so that nobody could ask why Britain's trace-and-test effort was "finished" on 12 March 2020. Ignoring early confidential advice received from Britain's own Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (video - see the second 50 secs), the MPs began to reference WHO verbiage with regularity, and they sent it money while Bill Gates was raising "$18-billion" for it to survive the withdrawal of US support: bbc, guar. 

  Gates was only telling governments to adopt a strategy of mass vaccination: politico. He never mentioned that lockdowns might be avoided (while waiting until December for vaccine) with the help of trace-and-test activity. Nine or more insiders became vaccine billionaires: oxfam.

"Old friends" reunited in 2023.
Gates was being encouraged, since before 2017, to participate in Britain's health governance. He said nothing when Chris Whitty "finished" the effort to trace and contain SARS-CoV-2 on 12 March: youtu (at 13:10 mins). It didn't bother him that a wait of 38 weeks was to be endured in lockdown: There was no money in trace-and-test that he could control. After rescuing the WHO from the impact of Trump's cuts, he had access to its services for his global vaccine supply scheme: Politico.

Ref. HInews

  In April 2020, Gates referred to himself as a "health expert" on BBC Breakfast: bbc/g (in his opening sentence.) He went on to criticize the quality of pandemic responses in different countries, but he didn't mention the success being reported in democratic East Asian states which didn't lock down. He'd professed an unstoppable interest in matters of global "infection control", but he obviously didn't share the enthusiasm which numerous reporters were showing for Trace, Test and Treat in S. Korea*: See BBCsk, dated 12.03.2020.

            *2015 was when the S. Koreans first confirmed that a trace-and-test operation can slow the spread of a respiratory coronavirus. Come 2020, they and the Taiwanese didn't plan to be vulnerable in lockdowns while the PRC and North Korea were, as always, watching them.

  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 allocating funds for containment efforts. As a matter of 'principle', he would never be drawn into conversation about any sort of data surveillance 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: Guarga.)

The above tweet of January 2019 is at: x.comHancock.

 Together with the poster below, it shows that Gates and Hancock met on at least three occasions in 2019. “Infection control” was something that they talked about. Gates had procured formal collaboration with Britain's MHRA in December 2017: govuk.

  In April 2020, Gates was obviously excited on BBC Breakfast, keeping his hands raised constantly and fluttering his fingers. "It's like a war zone!", he said more than once (because there weren't many cars on the roads.) He and Hancock would have been making plans for vaccine supply: Politico.

Above: Gates was again cultivating influence in Britain's health governance
in 2019, meeting with Matt Hancock on at least three occasions.

  Gates and some smaller partner companies gained control of the provision of vaccine globally: Politico. His access to a few top Tories helped him influence what sort of pandemic response would be followed in the UK. He didn’t want to see some of Britain's (or any other country's) resources supporting trace-and-test as S. Korea was doing it, but he accepted that there were efforts to make Brits think that they were being protected that way. (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.)

  In most countries, mass vaccination became the only target pursued by their governments. There had been no early prompts from the WHO to consider what was being done in progressive East Asian countries. Economies were to be badly shaken: There were almost 38 weeks of Draconian restrictions, with substantial police enforcement, before Brits first received jabs. Governments borrowed on massive scales (CNN), and thousands of businesses didn't survive. (It's reported in the 2024 CNN article that Britain's two big political parties are accused of concealing the size of the national debt.)

  See a short video of one MP (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 supported by every British scientist if they'd been able to see the SAGE advice. 

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  No genuine (East Asian style) trace-and-test occurred in the UK after 12 March 2020, and very little was done before that date: PHE said it had 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 a comparable task force in the UK would not have been impossible to assemble: The REHIS article mentions that a big number of trained council staff were never deployed.

  It's made obvious in the 2024 article by the CNN that the UK government borrowed on a historic scale to provide 80% furlough to many salaried people for the duration of the lockdowns. Ministers could, instead, have borrowed very much less to fund a well supported trace-and-test operation, slowing the spread of COVID-19 and making lockdowns much less likely: "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."

Update of 29 Dec 2024: America is seeing an 18% surge in homelessness which, says the BBC, is partly driven by the ending of pandemic financial support. If American people experienced lockdowns like the UK did, they might be interested in the way that Bill Gates helped countries to ignore S. Korea's 'trace-and-test' method. 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 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 (one person per car) 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 happy to comply with a Draconian lockdown at unknown national cost, if they'd known that the MPs had rejected SAGE recommendation of a 'bali bali' ('quick, quick') strategy which was doing well in S. Korea and Taiwan since two months before (Hunt_video)?

In truth, the UK public were 'fed a rhetoric' to make it seem that government was copying South Korea. Boris Johnson said on 3rd March that Britain was "extremely well prepared" with "fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease": sprep. On 28 May, "NHS Test and Trace" was launched, but its surveillance activity 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 choose to. Johnson had urged people to get the NHS', "World-beating app!" but that was scrapped before 18 June: Reco. More than 40,000 Brits had died by 12 May: Guar (Was it even 400 in S. Korea by then?)

He was shown by Politico to have used his leverage of the WHO to gain control 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 allocating resources to Korean style trace-and-test strategies... All the money had to go to his vaccine supply scheme. Hancock cast a politically-devastating slur at Andrew Bridgen (who is currently still suing him for it) because Andrew had drawn attention to consequences of the cosy relationship between our vaccine authority (the JCVI) and the Melisa and Bill Gates Foundation.

  A BBC report from 12 March 2020 rings true in important ways, looking back: BBCsk. It was published on the day all eyes were watching Boris Johnson, Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty on BBC One. (WHO had declared a pandemic the day before.) If people had read BBCsk before the three men appeared on screen, they would have been dumfounded when Chris Whitty said, "and the Contain (phase) finishes from today": youtu (at 13:10 mins.), confirmed at Govuk.

The WHO had not published balanced descriptions of respiratory coronaviruses. Their narrative contradicted a key point in a Nature review paper in 2016: nature.com/articles/nrmicro.2016.81. The paper had provided the proper explanation for the fact that the spread of MERS-CoV was moderate and localized: 'Delay' in the shedding of virus (by a MERS patient) explained why outbreaks did not become epidemic in scale.

Since 2012, the WHO had said that the people who caught MERS were those who worked with camels. The coronavirus, they said, "cannot" transmit easily human-to-human: Reu1. It was in 2015 that the WHO first mentioned the possibility of some human-to-human transmission, "where there is close contact": Reut.

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 began to shed progeny virus from his/her own body, that patient was already suffering harsh symptoms and was usually withdrawn from societal contacts.

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 (by remaining active.)

The WHO has still not included the above information in its website revisions. In 2019, WHO were still letting people think that a respiratory coronavirus doesn't readily transmit human to human, and that a 'zoonotic' virus is one which, "is transmitted between animals and people" (see the fifth 'Key fact' at factsheet. There was habitual mention of 'zoonosis' at their meetings, but no adequate description of that concept as it applies to respiratory coronaviruses. WHO communications led to a false anticipation of any novel coronavirus: "Don't worry about this one. It'll also be transmitting directly from animals to humans, not human-to-human, in the Huanan seafood market this time" (see in bbcw above, "We hope you can calm down and reflect on your behaviour".)

  There was a Gates-funded conference just months before the first outbreak of SARS-CoV-2: 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".

Bill Gates never spoke, in or before 2020, about the trace-and-test method for achieving the containment of a coronavirus. Nevertheless, it was quite well known in the UK 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 by the CCP and Kim Jong Un, who are always keen to see those countries struggling.

It was said that Event 201 in 2019 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.) However, there was no mention of the public/private partnerships which were agreed in S. Korea after the MERS outbreaks of 2015. Gates et al. were making it seem that countries should now only be ready for a novel, 'zoonotic' virus which will spread, "between animals and people" (factsheet.) In other words, the "next outbreak" (the title of his tedtalk) would be similar to the last one: mainly affecting people who handled animals. ("Don't sweat the details", thought Gates, "Just talk as though vaccination is the only appropriate tool when responding to outbreaks of novel viruses".)

  It was the third month of 2020 before WHO suggested aspects of S. Korea's strategy to its global audience, without mentioning S. Korea. WHO slogans were, "Test, test, test" on 16 March, and, "Tracing must be the backbone of the response in every country" on 18 March (see Guac, rehis, yaho and Alje.) By then, most countries were not giving the WHO their full attention. At best, one or two had trialled trace-and-test procedure in ways which couldn't achieve a lot.

Note: The above article is no longer displaying online

  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". WHO played down the value of finding human contacts, by continuing to insist that most people caught the virus directly from camels (see MERS infects 10.)

  After a revision in 2022, the MERS factsheet on the WHO website still says that a "zoonotic" coronavirus, "is transmitted between animals and people" (see copy below.) MERS is still characterized as an 'animal disease' which, in most cases, only infects people when they handle camels.

^ The fifth Key fact in the MERS factsheet ^

  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 appears for the first time. 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 is that the WHO was wrong to write as though such animal-to-human cases were the norm, and characteristic of MERS in every country.

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  Recap: 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), or that infected people were usually struck with respiratory symptoms within 5 days: CDC.
  The WHO's factsheet still says now (2025) that MERS infects people by "direct" transmission from infected camels, and that some people housed in close contact might infect each other. 

  Similar observations are worded 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: 

  It's problematic to suggest that almost every human case of MERS was due to "direct" transmission from an infected camel. That would be very unusual when the case fatality rate of a respiratory disease was so high. The New England Journal of Medicine reported a CFR of 56% in 2013: nemj. If every case had been caused by contact with a camel, then the following statement would have been true: "If 100 people handled infected camels, 56 of them soon died". Does it sound true?

  The CFR for COVID-19 was reported by the WHO to be 3.4% in 2022 (WoM), and some agencies 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 none ever suggested a value above 10% for COVID-19 (see NIH under, 'Results'.) 

 Another problem:  The WHO's factsheet states that camel-to-human transmission of MERS occurred in "the Middle East, Africa and South Asia" (factsheet). But surely, the spread of MERS to camels in different deserts, separated in some cases by 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, in effect, telling the WHO that another 'typical coronavirus' situation was emerging in Wuhan. 'Once again, they couldn't see any evidence that the virus was spreading human to human': bbcw, bfpg - see 31 Dec, tweet. The WHO implied that the spread of SARS-CoV-2 was as they'd described it for MERS-CoV in 2012: It was 'safe to assume' that the virus would only be transmitting animal-to-animal and, occasionally, animal-to-human.

N.B. They never said explicitly that SARS-CoV-2 killed animals or, if it did, what the numbers of animal fatalities were.  

See the tweet

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  Penny Mordaunt works in the tobacco industry now (2025): bbc/article. She was "good friends" with Bill Gates in 2020, and his influence with our Health Minister (both men rejected the better way that Taiwan and S. Korea were doing "infection control") can be traced to the frequency of meetings they had in 2019. (How many were also held online?)

____________

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Note:  The definition of 'zoonotic virus' on the MERS factsheet ("is transmitted between animals and people") differs from another definition on another part of the WHO website, as shown below:

 

  The alternative definition (above) is 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 offspring virions (known as 'progeny virions') has, due to mutation during the replication phase, given rise to human-infecting progeny. 

It's a description 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. 

  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 doesn't make that idea seem unusual. 

  [A correct definition of a zoonotic coronavirus would tell you: (1) that it infects humans and, (2) that it is a mutant strain which is descended from a solitary virion which could only infect an animal.]

  There is nothing in the WHO's MERS factsheet which indicates knowledge of the fourth "Key Point" in the Nature review of 2016, 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". It explains why the spread of MERS among humans was not epidemic in scale: MERS symptoms caused an infected person to become inactive/bedridden, before progeny virus was being shed from the body. (In S. Korea, most people who'd caught MERS soon found themselves in sanitary wards which had measures to prevent the infection of 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 because it indicates that infected people tend to die before they come into contact with many other people (and, as described above, delayed shedding of virus by carriers of MERS-CoV also reduced the frequency of infective contact.) 

  In sharp contrast, there were reports of CFRs between 2% and 4.2% for SARS-CoV-2 (ijid.)

Recap:  As per the 2016 Nature review of research papers on MERS, virus is shed quite late in the progression of an infection. Harsh symptoms will have slowed the patient right down before any virions are shed from 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.) 

  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 also seen in some MERS carriers, 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 is 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 have 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 virus. People were kept safe in 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" was not relevant, and their emphasis on "direct transmission" was not based on sufficient collection of data. Their insistence that multiple animal-to-human transmission events were taking place ('because there were almost no human-to-human infections') had prevented them from noticing the actual reason for MERS case numbers being consequential, but not epidemic.

infects10

  When attempting to describe the origin of a typical zoonotic coronavirus, some like to say that the virus has 'jumped', from being animal-infecting to being human-infecting. After the 'jump' in host-specificity occurs, the mutated variant spreads human-to-human. (The remaining, unmutated, virus continues to infect animals.) The zoonotic mutant doesn't simply spread, "between animals and people".

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 about 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.) S. Korea had seen significant economic consequences of localized lockdowns in 2015, not to be repeated in 2020.

2020 in the UK:

  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 (see after the first 50 secs.) The expert advice was kept confidential, and Mr Hunt feels that all scientists would have backed it if they'd only 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.

___________________________________________________________________________

  Nine or more people saw that they could make a lot of money from the global demand for vaccine, while UK businesses closed down because the first lockdown lasted nearly 38 weeks:

Oxfam

  SAGE had advised No. 10 to copy S. Korea and Taiwan, to keep the number of deaths low and avoid the hardship that lockdowns inflict. Bill Gates had raised $18-bn for the WHO to organize vaccine supply, so 'why even bother to mention trace-and-test'? (He said nothing about virus containment in a long-distance interview either: bfast.) 

  Critical of governments in general (not praising any in particular), Gates said that a quick supply of facemasks and vaccine was what they had failed to provide (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, and damage to businesses: CNN.

Gates didn't want lots of countries using trace-and-test to contain 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 because there had been "aggressive" access to some personal 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.

  In April 2020 (bbc/news), it's likely that Gates and our MPs had already agreed in online meetings that "the Contain Phase" (see below) 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 $18-billion.' (HInews, politico.)

  Gates is worth $100-bn but he borrowed $5-bn from USAID for his vaccine organization, 'GAVI', which fronts as evidence of his epic 'philanthropy': Amer24.

  Below: Melinda Gates also campaigned on behalf of the WHO after Trump cut its US backing in 2020: Reut20

  Discovered in 2025:

  In March 2020, the WHO was caught dodging conversation about Taiwan: bbcT. After that, most world leaders followed suit, and stone-walled the containment approach which was proving so effective (jfma).

  UK leaders knew that they were not correctly following the procedure which could make lockdowns avoidable (or, at least, make them shorter and smaller in scale), so they injected narrative to make it seem that there was, in fact, a "Track and trace" system, working behind the scenes.

  The imaginary operation which they would mention quite often (sometimes calling it "test and trace") had been referred to as, "the Contain phase" by Chris Whitty on 12 March. He announced then 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 in them, but it was left to any 'traced' people to decide whether or not to pursue a PCR test at a distant NHS facility.

  Mr Johnson was busy with Brexit and he preferred a monetized approach in which he would be "king" of a pandemic "war" cabinet, simply arranging contracts (see Glaw.) After ignoring SAGE when it recommended a Korean style strategy (a tracing team of "just under 300 staff" was said by a PHE boss to have been 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).

30 Nov 2023: 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:

See Indep.

"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 that it would tell them what their choices were in a health emergency. At the moment that it was essential to get busy, the WHO gave no clear guidance for copying Taiwan or S. Korea. It wasn't until 18 March that WHO suggested the use of contract tracing: “Tracing every contact must be the backbone of the response in every country”: Guac, rehis, yaho and Alje.

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  On 17 April 2020, it was reported that contact tracing was due to begin "again" in the UK: theGu. Public Health England had said, before 6 April, 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.

  The alleged "Delay phase" had also not been mentioned by anybody on BBC TV, neither were the "Research" and "Mitigate" phases. ("Contain, delay, research and mitigate" was said only by Matt Hancock once in a Parliamentary debate, and then by Chris Whitty just before he said, "and the contain phase finishes from today": Yout at 13:10 mins.)

  The 17 April "tracing again" announcement in The Guardian 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 scanning of the Test and Trace phone app in shops, supermarkets or on public transport.) In hindsight, the 17 April article shows that Boris Johnson lied to the UK Covid Inquiry in December 2023 when he said, "I didn't know what other tool I had". He obviously did know very well that Taiwan and S. Korea were following a trace-and-test strategy, because PHE says it tried to do likewise during the, "Contain phase". Also see yaho.)

  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 importance as a supplier of microchips to the World. In 1945, the People's Republic of China was given the Taiwan's place in the UN, and then it 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 by WHO.

  Trace-and-test would probably have made it possible to slow the spread of Covid-19 sufficiently to keep life normal enough in the UK, 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?

Sir Patrick Vallance said that Mr Johnson failed
to fully absorb concepts central to covid.

From: yaho1, updated on 2 April 2020.

  Between 29 January (when two COVID-19 cases from China were detected in the UK) and 23 March (the day that the UK was locked down) there was no expressed plan of action from No. 10.

________________________________________________________________________________

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' activities. There was a strong desire to resume a normal lifestyle, and the invasion of the Ukraine meant that China might be making 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 sharp increase in new infections occurred as soon as 'Containment' was ended. (The end was announced formally in April 2022.) Taiwan's 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 cases inside less than eleven months, because the containment process 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.)

Visit the interactive chart at MinHW

A similar, sharp increase in COVID-19 cases began in S. Korea when 'Trace, test and treat' was being abandoned at the end of 2021. TTT strategy 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 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.)

____________________________________________________________________________

There was no discussion of the probable effects of lockdowns on UK businesses (the first one being almost 38 weeks long.) Vaccine was first issued on 8 December, and Downing Street partied.

In the UK, the pandemic was to hit the economy hard. Mr Johnson had ignored the advice he got directly from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE, see video.) He didn't want the inconvenience of thermal screening or COVID-19 testing at airports or the Eurotunnel (where lorry drivers were already slowed down by Brexit rigmarole.) He 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 said to 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)*. Hancock said that he hadn't wanted to break up the "national unity" by having "region-specific" lockdowns.

*Strangely, he'd forgotten that no "restrictions" were in place before the lockdown decisions were made? (yah1)

Most people saw Johnson announcing lockdown on 23 March, but Matt Hancock claimed that he'd declared it on 16 March: Fullf.

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 activity was even more effective in Taiwan, because of its island geography and societal vigilance.) Democratic Asians weren't to become bewildered by destructive lockdowns.

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 must have been referring to the trace-and-test going on in the East Asian countries, because such tracing had already been "finished" in the UK by Chris Whitty on 12 March: youtube at 13:10 mins. (Johnson had been standing next to Sir Whitty when he said, "We are clearly now stopping the contain phase of this operation", Govuk.)

To keep the public believing in Mr Johnson's narrative ("We've done what can be done to contain this disease": yout), it was announced on 17 April that contact tracing would begin again soon: theGu. A large-scale PCR test-processing program was launched on 28 May, and given the name, "NHS Test and Trace". It would consume resources heavily (£29.5-bn spent, see fullfac) and 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 the tracing system sent text messages to warn individuals if they'd been in a pub, café or restaurant when a COVID-19 case had also been there, it had no way to make anyone 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 said was probably contaminated when they were there previously.)

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, S. Korea and Taiwan couldn't afford to drop their guard and have big lockdowns, so they worked hard 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 vaccine profit was said to have benefited a hedge fund which Mr Sunak helped to establish: Gurd.)

26 Jan 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 in 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). In 2020, Mr Johnson didn't follow the confidential SAGE advice which recommended S. Korea's strategy for containing the coronavirus. In May, Dominic Cummings (his Chief Adviser) asked him to "skim through" a list of reasons for giving up on trace-and-test, and Johnson wrote straight 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 (politico.) He made no mention of the countries which were running a containment strategy and avoiding lockdown. He had big influence in the WHO by then (HInews), which had waited until 18 March before saying that contact tracing was essential in every country.

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 weren't interested in its warnings, remaining aloof to its lockdown-free response (jfma. Also see bbct.) Saying that his colleagues and the experts had let him down, Mr Johnson was keeping things "simple", with a lockdown.

Not many people in the UK knew what 'trace-and-test' was exactly, and no journalists seemed to notice what happened next: For more than eight months, the MPs prevented BBC television from reporting about S. Korea, Taiwan or Indonesia in its magazine-style morning and evening programmes. Furthermore, a boycott was applied so that no other media channels could query MPs on the matter of avoiding lockdowns, or why S. Korea and Taiwan were fairing so well: gove and pmorg.

MPs quoted the WHO, but it had not been promoting trace-and-test strategy in explicit ways. Tedros Ghebreyesus was being very vocal about protecting China's economy from travel restrictions, but he never suggested ways for countries to protect their own economies from lockdowns. He was reticent about events in Taiwan and S. Korea because the first thing that they had done was restrict travel.

  The WHO had given people a skewed impression of what novel respiratory coronaviruses might do. When the MERS factsheet definition said/says simply that a zoonotic virus "is transmitted between animals and people", that became a premise for the culling of people's pets. (The CCP did this, often while the animals' owners were at work.) The Danes had killed millions of mink after reading the same flawed definition of zoonosis? (Their culls had no legal or evidence-based justification: Guam.) Regrettably, Johnson found the WHO useful in a gaslighting narrative. He 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 was "good friends" with Bill Gates? Gates was now directing the WHO informally, and he had made it so "simple": Just sit around and wait (until 8 December) for vaccine supply! (HInews)

  How convenient that a top MP was "friends with" Bill Gates - He had the WHO at his beck and call because he'd organized $18-bn 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. the two women who were caught going to a rural spot for some fresh air and exercise. Why send police to the countryside, where catching a respiratory disease is least likely to occur? Why to beaches and parks? Was it a mind-bending exercise, instilling fear and compliance into the population as a whole? Surely, people were far more likely to catch it inside supermarkets, where police didn't go?

  On Friday 5 Jan. 2024, a program rerun on ITV showed a man getting a £4,500 fine at Heathrow, because he was avoiding 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, Mr Johnson had made sure that there was no thermal screening at any border port. He 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. He'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. 

N.B. South Korea's first case was spotted on thermal screening at Incheon Airport on 19 January 2020. Without that airport screening, it might have been quite some time before WHO officials admitted 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 had 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 (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 man was ardently against making such payment, "to the Tories". Two police had marched over with power to 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 5th November. 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 subsequently 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

  Finla café was ruined by its enormous fines: plym. A few weeks later, "BoJo and his pals got a £50 fine" when there had been no human needs driving them to breach the rules with dance parties. They must not have known about the Plympton case? (Rishi Sunak also got a fine: bbc.) 

  Compare the British situation with a report about "full cafés" in S. Korea, seven months previously on 18 April: bloom. 

Tories were quick to engage denialism.

  In contradiction of what could be seen in the recent 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.

Of note:  The people fighting 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 13/Dec/2020 (Reuters), while the UK's count reached 70,752 on 27/Dec/2020 (Skyy.)

  An "evidence-based analysis" argues that lockdown was not the correct approach for COVID-19 (or 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. 

The above conclusion was drawn in 2022 after completion of a scan of at least 230-thousand scientific papers concerning the pandemic. (Relevant papers were found by first detecting which authors were most likely to have studied lockdowns.) News articles still appear which describe bad consequences of the British lockdowns, e.g. Telg.

The image above is from a 2022 video clip 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 Mr Johnson 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 he received a dividend of hedge fund profit which came from sales of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine: Goodl and Gurd. Would it explain why he said nothing when 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. 

December 2024: Concealment of Sunak's finances 'highly unusual'.

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  Matt Hancock said, in so many words: "You can't condemn us for failing to warn the NHS about the danger in moving patients from hospitals to care homes. We didn't know there could be asymptomatic cases." As Health Secretary, surely he knew that the first infected person to be found outside of China, detected on 19/Jan/2020 in thermal screening at Incheon Airport, was observed to be healthy in appearance. It was only nucleic acid testing that revealed she was infected with SARS-CoV-2, therefore she was a typical, 'asymptomatic' case. Furthermore, a pre-pandemic definition of a carrier shows that there was nothing new about, 'asymptomatic cases' (see below, underlined in red): 

Video: "How Boris led the UK to one of its worst ever public health disasters": facebok

On 31 December 2019, China did tell the WHO about Wuhan's pneumonia cases. However, not mentioned in the video, the Chinese said that, "only those who came into contact with infected animals could catch the virus": bbcw (Also in bfpg > '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. Subsequently 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 has insisted that MERS-CoV was being transmitted predominantly animal-to-human, not human-to-human. In 2016, a better understanding of the disease dynamics of MERS was provided in Nature (see the 4th Key Point): Most people who caught the disease were ill, staying at home or in hospital, well 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 today still says, 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 factsheet. The WHO's 'animal-to-human' bias was not corrected in the 2022 revision of the factsheet (which still doesn't mention that 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.

See factsht

Some large health organizations matched what the WHO was saying, e.g. "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 there might be no problem: There was "no clear evidence that COVID-19 could transmit human-to-human", and Tedros Ghebreyesus was saying that outbreaks could be beaten without travel restrictions: reu. Then, the homespun theory of 'herd immunity' was 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 was soon seen that relying on 'herd immunity' to take care of things had been 'whistling in the dark' (a phrase which Boris Johnson soon used to deride the idea that trace-and-test activity could help in the UK: 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 talk about S. Korea or Taiwan, whose warnings they must have heard about. It was Jeremy Hunt who broke form eventually (on 4 July 2022) and said, "Why weren't we copying South Korea?": video.

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". Their virus containment method was not properly described in the media, and it wasn't made clear that they had learned from the 2015 response to MERS 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. leaving out descriptions of the lessons learned in 2015 with NAT technology (and leaving out the fact that MERS had a very high CFR.) The general statement that S. Korea was one of the "Asian states" which "were more ready to resort to... lockdowns and other Draconian measures" (see figure below) was vilely inaccurate. 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, the UK had lost 71,000 people when S. Korea had yet to lose 600 (a country with 88% more people in the average square mile.)

from sprep

On 28 May 2020, 'NHS Test and Trace' began to observe the daily movements of Britons' phones if they downloaded the "World-beating app" (as urged to do by Boris Johnson on TV.) The new system 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 had been there. However, it was very late in the game to begin curbing the spread of virus in this way. Although very costly*, the NHS tracing system couldn't achieve anything if people 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 when a text message suggested that they'd had 'possible contact' with an infected person somewhere.

*parliament.uk, Fullfact

Between 27 March and 29 April 2020, the total number of COVID 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. On 1 April, the cumulative deaths total had already reached 2,352: Gov1a. By 12 May, the number had climbed past 40,000: Gua2.

Below, from the report of 27 March (bbc-), see '759' under, 'Summary':

Hearing nothing about S. Korea from the WHO before January 2020, UK scientists had not become familiar with using a nucleic acid test to identify which people 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.)

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.)

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. 

Contradicting what Mr Johnson said, PHE was soon saying that there had been "just under 300 staff" in its national trace-and-test operation, an operation which was to be "finished" on 12 March ("as we've always said, from the beginning", quoting Chris Whitty). Much greater numbers of "contact tracing experts employed by councils had been excluded from operations": Guac. (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 included 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 locking down, by expanding its Trace, Test and Treat strategy. 

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 UK scientists were coming to different conclusions, not realizing how different things were in Taiwan and S. Korea. Only an inner circle was aware that Mr Johnson had been advised confidentially to, "copy South Korea". (This was revealed by Jeremy Hunt in July 2022: see the second half of a 2 minute video.)

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.

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 on 18 March 2020 that the WHO first 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 was working well in non-communist Asian states: bloom, jfma. The number of cases and deaths in the UK by 12 May showed that the opportunity to contain by copying S. Korea, Taiwan or Indonesia had been missed: Gua2.

In a BBC documentary at the end of 2020, WHO executive Maria Van Kerkhove mentioned, "the diplomacy that we use" when asked why the WHO had not blown 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 (factsht). That wording suited the CCP well (and it also suited people in Denmark who wanted to destroy the mink fur industry: Guam)

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. He'd already decided, by 3rd February 2020, that travel restrictions were "not needed to beat China virus": reu. 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 made no comment about anybody'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. (Also see jfma re. Taiwan: The threat from China had made it risky to do anything which might disrupt the country's military readiness. It was felt that even the Containment strategy should be terminated after Russia attacked the Ukraine.) 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 Government's decision to sit on the advice that SAGE had sent confidentially (see Hunt) led, within months, to a £400-billion spend on keeping salaried workers on furlough. Countless 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 for the WHO to collaborate with the EU/France and create 'COVAX' (wikip, govcov). Bill Gates had already raised $82-billion for similar purposes (see HInews), but Boris Johnson also helped him get finance for his new green investment project: govdotuk.

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' wrote of this 'tradition' in the book in 1989: 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, to set the scene: khan.

The first big outbreak of a novel respiratory coronavirus occurred in 2003.

Five years of activism by Bill Gates began with his TED talk in 2015. His alarmism engendered a poor grasp of the actual nature of respiratory coronaviruses, in part because S. Korea's innovative response to MERS-CoV was given no recognition.

With seemingly technical verbiage, the WHO's website had 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.) A tweet from the WHO on 14/01/2020, still on X today, reported that China believed there was, "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus". The head of the WHO, Tedros Ghebreyesus, showed immediate concurrence, by saying that decisions to restrict travel in certain countries were, "not evidence-based" and were doing unnecessary damage to China's economy: Reu.

China's suggestion was consistent with a 'Key fact' which had been displayed on a WHO website page about MERS. It still says that a "zoonotic virus ... is transmitted between animals and people": factsheet,

(Another 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 definition 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 page mentions the 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.

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?

On 14 Jan. 2020, the WHO 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 had no human-to-human infectivity: Sky. 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.

PublishTime：2020-04-11. (pasted below)

US officials also showed no interest in the Taiwanese expert's warnings (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.)

It was very unlikely that COVID-19 was spreading only to people who had contact with animals.

There is information which shows 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 just one, solitary virion. During the 'replication phase' of that 'virus particle', an error in the RNA copying process brings about genetic recombination which, by chance, causes the progeny virions to be to infectious to humans. In other words, the one-off replication error changes the RNA coding which determines the host-specificity of the progeny virions, in a way which gives them human infectivity. The probability of this happening more than once is extremely low, therefore it wouldn't be normal to seek evidence that it'll become a recurring threat to World health. (It's much more likely that an existing zoonotic coronavirus might give rise, by mutation, to other version/s 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') can involve more than one instance of animal-to-human transmission, while human-to-animal and human-to-human spread of rabies is unheard of in modern times. In contrast, the spread of recent 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/'normal' coronavirus particle. Any subsequent, novel 'zoonotic' coronaviruses might simply be mutated versions of the original one which was formed with the crucial zoonotic mutation.)

In December 2019, it should not have been proposed that a novel respiratory coronavirus would probably be infecting humans only/mainly by animal-to-human transmission, causing outbreaks among people by spreading from many animals to many humans. In that scenario, such outbreak could only be explained by a high frequency of both animal-to-animal transmission and animal-to-human transmission (because it was asserted that there was 'no human-to-human transmission'.)

The WHO should, to be scientific and responsible, make it known that a novel respiratory coronavirus 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 replication) imparts human-infectivity to the 'progeny' virions of an animal-infecting virion, 2. those progeny virus are shed from the host animal's body, and they infect the first humans that are encountered (which is why those virions are called, 'zoonotic'.) 3. After that, there will be human-to-human propagation of the descendant 'generations' of virions.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  South Korea lost nearly 600 people to COVID-19 in 2020, while the UK lost 71,000 (and there are 88% more people per square mile in S. Korea.) However, news of the TTT strategy (e.g.  Atlan, Schwak, Penn and Csis) was not included on BBC television during the long UK lockdowns. The BBC had provided a website report on 12 March which justified a sustained interest in S. Korea's response: BBC, but the story wasn't aired on television until December, at night: Lock1.

The MPs had control of BBC One during the lockdowns, 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.

  Boris Johnson couldn't say that he was leading the way with his 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 S. Korea's 'Trace, Test and Treat' had been doing since February. The overwhelming limitation of the NHS system, apart from starting so late in the response, was that it couldn't force people to get tested if they were traced 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 was exporting the strategy to any interested countries before the WHO had declared a pandemic: Schw (published on 11 March 2020.) It's not likely that S. Korea would not have offered the know-how to the UK. - President Yoon attended the G7 summit in Cornwall in 2021 (an event at which Johnson showed off his swimming skills.)

  *'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 a 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, achieving very cheaply, more than what the "£29.5bn" NHS system could provide (the latter provided no site for people to consult and see where UK cases had been detected.) See parliament.uk.

  The SAGE advice which recommended "copying South Korea" (Jeremy Hunt's words in the two-minute video) was kept confidential by Mr Johnson, who was deferring all sorts of things under the banner of "getting Brexit done". (It suited him to do nothing for as long as possible, and he simply waited for the WHO to declare a pandemic on 11 March: NLM. It's almost certain that Bill Gates had reassured him that his 'strategy' need only be a program of vaccine provision.) He 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 when it took steps to make the virus seem unremarkable, the BBC kept such reports to a minimum. When the BBC did make two long documentaries which explored the cover-up in detail, they were aired only at the end of 2020, at times when maybe 10% of the populace watches the BBC (Lock1 and 54days were aired after 8 PM in December 2020 and January 2021, respectively. The two 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.)
  The WHO began to receive extra money from Downing Street in April 2020. The RT.com article which reported a £55-million bonus payment, 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 (when it might have been better to approach Trump and help him see why a measured reaction could be more helpful in the long run.) 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. (The funding is detailed below: Use Ctrl+F to find 'WHO's extra'.)

  It was likely that countries would underestimate the initial threat to public health (and to economies, if there was not a quick response), because what the WHO had been saying about 'zoonotic' coronaviruses since 2012 seemed to fit with what China was saying in December 2019: 

1) Since 2012, the WHO didn't make reference to obvious and documented proofs of human-to-human transmission of MERS-CoV (nejm.)

2) The WHO mentioned the word 'zoonosis' more often than was necessary, and thus created the impression that populations of animals could, in effect, become 'pools' of a respiratory coronavirus which would infect many humans (while also still infecting more animals.) This WHO 'science' diverged from the conventional view of how zoonosis happens, i.e. A solitary, animal-infecting virion gives rise, by chance (when a one-off mutation occurs during the replication phase), to human-infecting progeny, those progeny being the first virions of a novel, human-infecting strain.

See Gua3 - a very good summary in hindsight, considering that its publication date was two days before the UK was put into lockdown.

  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" (factsht). It must be explained 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) will be human-infecting, and their subsequent replications will provide more virions that infect humans.

  Zoonosis is seen to occur in one evolutionary direction: The animal-infecting coronavirus gives rise to a human-infecting coronavirus, not vice-versa. The result of such mutation is not, ordinarily, a species-jumping coronavirus which infects 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 emerges because of 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), making a central theme of 'zoonosis' seemed to be justified by the WHO's insistence 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 wasn't easily spread among people.

  It's a well established fact that the case fatality rate of COVID-19 was low. Commonly, it was said to be between 1% and 3%  (e.g. see wikim).

Strikingly different, for MERS the CFR was between 37% (wik) and 56% (nejm). Such high mortality for an outbreak of a respiratory disease would not normally lead anyone to suggest that human-to-human transmission of the virus was rare.

  For many people, the symptoms of COVID-19 were not noticed very soon after infection. (wik1 says it could take 14 days for symptoms to become problematic.) Consequently, there were infected people who adhered to their daily activities while progeny virus was emanating 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;  CDC says, "Most patients develop symptoms approximately 5 days after an exposure to an infected person or camel") and a high proportion were likely to become hospitalized.

  It's not been mentioned by the WHO that MERS patients first shed virus from their own bodies only after symptoms were well developed: 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.
  In 2020, infected people sometimes didn't realize that they had COVID-19 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 escalate as did the numbers of COVID-19 patients: 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.) It wasn't some intrinsic quality of the MERS-CoV that explained an apparent 'scarcity' of human-to-human infection: It did spread human-to-human, but progeny virus wasn't shed from patients' bodies until they were already in sick-beds. 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 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 handful of reports of infected animals corroborated by independent, reputable scientists? In the UK, most of the good scientists were detained in lockdowns.)

  The suggestion that animals catch COVID-19 from other animals, or even from humans, came from occasional reports of field testing. The results of those occasional 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 good public spectacle.] The decision to cull all of Denmark's mink 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. Homes were invaded for this purpose while people were at work: NPR. (See an ugly reminder that Hong Kong is controlled by the CCP now: Reut.)

  When attempting to describe how a novel zoonotic coronavirus comes into existence, some prefer to say that a virus has 'jumped' from being animal-infecting to being human-infecting. After the 'jump' in host-specificity occurs, the mutated coronavirus spreads human-to-human, it doesn't simply spread "between animals and people".

N.B. Some, temporary continuation of animal-infectivity has been reported 'after a zoonosis occurred' (mentioned in Wikipedia) but that would not be surprising: While a novel, human-infecting coronavirus appears because of error during the replication of just one animal-infecting virion, other animal-infecting virions, identical to that one, will be replicating without any error. - Therefore, their progeny viruses will be identical to them, i.e. infectious to the animals.

More about the narrative which the WHO disseminated:

  On their page about MERS (see factsht), the WHO's definition of zoonosis is 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 where rabid people couldn't be confined.) 

On a different WHO factsheet entitled, 'Zoonoses' (see figure below), Rabies is included simply because it can infect humans (see the fourth 'key fact' in: Whofa.) The Rabies virus infects many species of warm-blooded vertebrates (Wikipedia says it can also infect reptiles), and people have been infected by it for at least 4,000 years. In many 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 finding and biting 'the right species' before it dies.) 

Thought: The Rabies virus is described by the WHO under the same banner ('zoonotic') as respiratory coronaviruses, without drawing attention to how different the two types are. As far as we know, the rabies virus might not have changed at all in thousands of years. Coronaviruses mutate so often that we see 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 takes place when the pathogen is multiplying itself. Unlike a cellular pathogen, a virus cannot replicate without making direct use of organelles inside the living cells of its host. 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 have replication errors much more frequently, causing them to mutate so often that new variants evolve within months or weeks. (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, in such a way that its 'progeny' are able to infect 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 a big diversity of 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 the same air that animals are breathing. The emergence of respiratory coronaviruses that could infect many vertebrate animal species is also unlikely because only a few species of vertebrate animals 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.

  A conclusion: Inexact use of the word 'zoonotic' by the WHO led people to expect that a novel respiratory coronavirus would be, "transmitted between animals and people". In 2015, South Koreans made use of a nucleic acid test to enable systematic contact tracing, so that outbreaks of MERS-CoV inside hospitals could be contained. However, WHO spokesmen continued to say only that MERS is caught from animals in the majority of cases. (It's still written that way at: factsht.) See more under, 'The Cover-up' below.

  Response to COVID-19 was stalled widely because the WHO held back warnings that it was spreading rapidly. Tedros Ghebreyesus immediately revealed that he supported China's, "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" message when he said that the use of travel restrictions was not "evidence-based". The logic he offered was: 'If you cannot prove that people are transmitting it to each other, then you should not try to limit their travel to/from China'. His campaign against travel restrictions was still evident at the end of 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 not ever promoted in clear terms by WHO. Even when WHO said on 18 March 2020 that, "tracing must be the backbone of every response", S. Korea and Taiwan were still not mentioned. 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.

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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

However, as suggested in the text above the poster, a more accurate description would be gained by striving to include more of the genetics. Perhaps there will, one day, be a convention which decides on a definition which poses the least risk to people through the way it influences the decisions of their leaders.

Conclusions:

THE WHO'S WEBSITE PAGE FOR MERS-CoV (WHICH WAS UPDATED IN 2022) STILL DESCRIBES A ZOONOTIC VIRUS AS ONE WHICH, "IS TRANSMITTED BETWEEN ANIMALS AND PEOPLE". VITALLY IMPORTANT, CORONAVIRUS-SPECIFIC DETAIL IS MISSING, AND CONSISTENCY WITH KNOWLEDGE OF THE GENETICS IS NOT OBSERVED.

GIVEN THE WAY THAT THE WHO HAS WRITTEN ABOUT NOVEL CORONAVIRUSES SINCE 2012, IT'S NO SURPRISE THAT CHINESE OFFICIALS IN DECEMBER 2019 COULD SAY, "only those who came into contact with infected animals could catch the virus". NOTHING IN THE WHO WEBSITE WOULD HAVE WARNED THEM TO BE VIGILANT FOR HUMAN-TO-HUMAN INFECTION, OR TOLD THEM THAT SOUTH KOREA HAD A GOOD CONTAINMENT METHOD SINCE 2015.

~~~~~~~

Waiting until 11 March for the WHO to declare a pandemic, the MPs had ignored what Britain's own experts said was probably the best way to keep the virus' spread to a minimum, and there were consequences that make for unhappy reading today: Mirror2023.

12 March was the day that Mr Johnson's hand-shaking habit (to help build herd immunity?) had stopped, and a threat to public health was announced by him on TV. Chris Whitty, standing next to him, said that the UK's trace-and-test effort (which he called "the contain phase") was being finished, "as we've always said (it would), from the beginning": youtube at 13:10 mins.

Also on 12 March, there was a BBC report online about the previous seven weeks in South Korea, where nobody had waited for the WHO to provide a truthful report: 12/Mar/2020. Most people in the UK wouldn't have seen that article, and important news of S. Korea (and Taiwan) was never spoken of by the MPs on BBC TV.

  Lockdown in the UK was clearly in the pipeline, but there was to be an unexplained pause of 11 days first. Was there an 11-day pause to 'space things out a bit', to make it less obvious that Johnson had delayed our response because he was waiting for the WHO to make the declaration? While a 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" but "we are ready for that"? 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.)

  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.) The word, 'bluster' appeared again, in a review of an independent TV channel's documentary which was screened in May: 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 at the Dec 2023 Inquiry: yahoo. S. Korea had been making good progress without lockdowns for almost 2 months. Mr Johnson is a journalist, and he must have noticed early reports of their success (e.g. guar and Atlan). He must also have known that PHE had a contact tracing team of "just under 300 staff", copying South Korea until "mid-March": Rehis. Instead of expanding the PHE operation, he had Chris Whitty saying on 12 March that "the Contain phase" was only ever meant to be a short part of a four-phase plan of activities. (The next phase, "Delay" was about to begin, because "the Contain finishes from today", see 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 ongoing containment activity in East Asian countries, because the UK had stopped trace-and-testing a month before (yout at 13:10 mins.)

  Ruling party MPs used BBC Television as their platform for giving pandemic guidance. It was plain to see that Asian containment strategies were never going to be mentioned by them, and MPs were shielded from the journalists of other channels who might query the matter: PMorg, Gomb. 

Observations formerly known as, 'INTRODUCTION'

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  What Jeremy Hunt MP said on 4 July 2022 suggests that Boris 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 international news reports have given substance to Mr Hunt's opinion (see bloom), and 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 vaccine provision had made most people safe by then. 86% of S. Koreans had been vaccinated: Reute.)

  For descriptions of the Korean '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. There'd been a new Korean policy to share health expertise since 2010. (Many relevant publications by Juliette Schwak can be found with Google.) 

  S. Korea had enough control of the disease to keep shops open in April 2020: bloom.

________________________________________________

The first known case of COVID-19 in England was detected on 29 January 2020. The WHO declared a "public health emergency of international concern" the next day (bfpg.) There was a confirmed UK death almost a month later 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 glum on 12 March: youtu. The WHO had declared a "pandemic" the day before: NLM. Eleven days later, Mr Johnson said, "I must give the British people a very simple instruction. You must stay at home": govuk. Four days after that, 759 Brits had died, 181 being the latest number dying in a day, and 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*, Mr Johnson described the virus energetically as, "an unexpected and invisible mugger": Guar (also see: Gif.) In spite of reports that cases and deaths in the UK had multiplied alarmingly since the end of March, he said that the British people had already, "wrestled .. the assailant .. to the floor" with their "good sense", "forbearance", "altruism" and "spirit of community". He called on people to "press home the advantage" and continue to "turn the tide" by obeying lockdown restrictions: Mirr. Also see: Guard. Two days later, the BBC reported a cumulative deaths total of 26,097: BBC29/4.                 *The 27 March figure of 759 to date was already bigger than the number of people that S. Korea was going to lose by the end of the year.

<<< Officially reported on 12 May, the UK deaths total had climbed past 40,000 (Guar), and a second wave was detected in Autumn (Sky, Wiki.) The cumulative total was 70,752 by 27 December: Skyy (use Ctrl+F to find '70,752'.) In contrast, South Korea had lost 580 people by 13 December: Reuters.

Johnson and Gates sensed that South Korea's TTT strategy wouldn't create the path to profit that vaccine supply guaranteed. 'Rather just lock the people down, give furlough to most of the workers, and focus on the big money-maker'?

Chris Whitty has since told the UK COVID Inquiry that locking down on 23 March 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.) The activities of a trace-and-test team (which most people had never heard of before), "finishes from today", he said.

In REHIS, it's said that the British team of "just under 300 staff" had traced "3,500 people". The PHE boss did not confirm Whitty's insistence that there had "always" been a plan to move from, 'Contain' to 'Delay' in the middle of March. The REHIS article makes it known that the government's decision to stop testing-and-tracing on 12 March was actually based on the following opinion: "Once virus infection numbers have tipped, manual contact tracing is unworkable". Even if the opinion was rooted in experience, it wasn't a valid reply, because the UK's deaths total reached '759' fifteen days later on 27 March (bbc-), and 759 is not a number that indicates a "tipped" situation. (Also note that Dominic Raab MP denied that any surge could be seen in a cumulative deaths figure of 26,097 on 29th April: bbc+).

With no further trace-and-test/'contain' activity in the UK from 12 March onward, there was nobody searching for infected people and isolating them, to stop them spreading the virus. Whitty's words, "as we've always said, from the beginning" implied that it could, at some stage, have made sense to limit 'the contain phase' to just a few weeks. His announcement was displayed formally at govuk: "The government has announced that we are moving out of the contain phase and into delay", but nobody ever explained why "contain" would be halted so soon, or what was meant by, "delay". The two other phases, "research and mitigate", also remain a mystery, and were never spoken of again on TV.

Whitty said that, while there would be no more trace-and-test activity, testing would continue at hospitals. However, a shortage of materials was soon reported when it emerged that hospital patients had been transferred into care homes without being tested: bloo, nurst, nuffi. The excuse given 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 carried 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.

It almost seems that "the approach" at Downing Street (before the WHO came clean and declared a pandemic) was as follows: 'It might save lives if we try the methodical way that South Koreans contain the virus (as SAGE advised us to do) but we don't have much PPE, and wouldn'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 at home. Vaccine supply will follow: It's being organized by Bill Gates and his friends in our JCVI' (politico.)

Such cold-blooded calculations weren't confirmed at that time, but it was then shown that Health Minister Hancock wrote as follows in a text message: "The plod have got their marching orders", meaning that he'd told the police to start enforcing lockdown rules: yaho. (Also see: Guar.)

18 July 2023: Some of the direct consequences of waiting passively for a declaration from the WHO have been reported: Mirro23.

No such stories came out of South Korea, where Taiwan's warnings had been believed from the start. At one stage, Johnson suggested that our human losses were caused by neglect of procedure at care homes: Guardn.

"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, Boris only said that a complacency toward lockdown rules might cause economic harm, urging people to 'stay the course', Guard.

Was his Brexit-driven attitude toward businesses something that hurt them in 2020? See DaiPol

A recap:

On 30 December 2019, Li Wenliang told fellow doctors online that he was seeing evidence of a contagious respiratory disease which reminded him of SARS. He suggested they consider using PPE more at work, as they had done before. The CCP was snooping, and soon visited Li to make him sign a gag order. The BBC told his story six weeks later (6 Feb) but, a month after that, Boris Johnson said after visiting a hospital: "..there were actually a few coronavirus patients ... and I shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know": Gif.

A 2023 report: bit.ly/Wenliang

Also on 3rd March 2020, Chris Whitty said that any locking down of British cities was unlikely, "not a part of the battle plan": Reut. (Daegu in South Korea had recently opted to lock down for a while, after a spate of cases had been caused by very large assemblies of a religious sect.)

If it hadn't been important to set up a substantial trace-and-test operation ASAP, 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 can be seen at Chan. - this was turned off in June 2023. (There is a review at Grdc) Key points are included below, e.g. under 'March' in Part 2.) On the same day, he expressed optimism about the UK's economic outlook: "there is always the potential for an economic downside" to a "mass epidemic" but "we are ready for that": reut2. He never once mentioned that a trace-and-test operation 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.

But was there method in the madness? It's been said that Johnson's Chief Advisor, Dominic Cummings, never wanted news of the virus to be a 'distraction' to his boss: He wanted Johnson to talk about nothing but Brexit: itvhan.

Copying the South Koreans would have been a serious undertaking, and 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, possibly, to struggle with over-crowding. 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 trace-and-test approach had begun to penetrate the media blockade, 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", he wrote (Lbc and GuarC). (N.B. By saying "feels", he must have been referring to trace-and-test operations in East Asian countries, because trace-and-test in the UK had been "finished" by Chris Whitty on 12 March: yout at 13:10 mins.)

The Chief Medical Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, might have advised Johnson to forget about pursuing Korean-style containment. Later, he was telling journalists that Johnson was slow to understand the basic concepts in favour of lockdown, and that he had quit science at school when he was fifteen years old: Guar.

Patrick Vallance described Mr Johnson's hope, to avoid lockdown, as a failure to fully "absorb concepts central to covid". Had Vallance fully understood the motivation behind the Korean style alternative? Mr Johnson went on to put him forward for a knighthood.

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 let it slip 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 (youtube at 0:20. The written transcript is at govuk.) No commitment to an obvious 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 2020: "You keep an eye on it. It will probably go away": itvHan. A month after that, "Bash on" was all Hancock could get when he tried to tell Johnson that it was probably too late to avoid "going down" (into lockdown) by methodically containing the virus.

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 a method which was proving worthwhile in Taiwan and S. Korea. 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 of anyone involved in a "contain phase", i.e. people who actually traced and tested the contacts of known British COVID-19 carriers. (In April, an alleged team was mentioned which had "just under 300 staff", 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 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 saw a massive spread of Omicron when they stopped doing 'trace, test and treat' at the end of 2021. (Likewise in Taiwan.)

  On 24 April 2020, it was written as follows in Bloomberg: "Dropping widespread testing (in the UK) 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."

Mr Johnson expressed 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 exporting 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. It had held back the truth, to delay lockdowns which would affect China's economy.

  Idle use of the word, 'zoonotic' (e.g. at Event 201 in October 2019) had made it seem that 'zoonosis' is a process which can make any number of animals likely to be carrying coronavirus.

The genetics of zoonosis doesn't sit with rhetoric which came from the WHO.
  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) implies that, because MERS-CoV is considered to be zoonotic, it was correct to think that it, “is transmitted between animals and people”. There is only basic advice, in the lower half of the factsheet, for preventing the coronavirus from spreading human-to-human.

  Saying that a zoonotic virus, "is transmitted between animals and people" might be sufficient for conversing about Rabies virus, but it does not provide adequate comprehension of respiratory coronaviruses:

  It's essential to keep in mind the mechanics of a mutation which causes an animal-infecting coronavirus to give rise to zoonotic progeny (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 its 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 zoonotic progeny 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.

  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 (this code being generated by chance 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, gain 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, animal-to-animal, animal-to-human and human-to-animal: The social activities 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 (virion) 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 virions are created. Abundant replication of each of the progeny virions will also occur subsequently, so the total number of mutant virions becomes ever massive. (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 virus, leading to the infection of multiple humans (or vice-versa): The evolutionary event is a one-off 'launch' of a novel, human-infecting coronavirus, emerging first from one host animal and then propagating human-to-human. (If the novel zoonotic coronavirus can 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, but '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.

________________________________________

Why keep silent about China?

   Our first-ever lockdown began on 23 Mar 2020, but nobody on BBC One mentioned that China was preparing to lift its restrictions two days later, so that international travel could peak each side of the Chinese New Year: Reut (also see: Reutr and voa.) 

  At the end of January 2021, Mr Johnson was still in no hurry to close the UK's border: BBC, LonLB, Huff. (How could he close airports while keeping the Eurotunnel open? 'It wouldn't look consistent'?)

3 Feb 2021

  In its Lockdown 1.0 documentary of December 2020, the BBC said that our 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 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. If Beijing really did stop outbound flights, then why did it "denounce" 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.)

  British health advisers rarely uttered the words, "South Korea" on BBC TV in 2020; MPs never did. The WHO was also not mentioning that country (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, after it declared a pandemic on 11 March, the WHO was often referred to by MPs on BBC TV, along with the phrase, "we're 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.

Comparisons which weren't made on BBC One in 2020:

  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.

  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.

 (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 parties occurred at Downing Street that month: 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 peaks having been caused by new variants, such as the UK variant in January.

  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.

>> The rate of infection (incident rate) began to climb markedly in S. Korea in February 2022, because the TTT strategy had been neglected recently, and then stopped by government on the assumption that it had become surplus-to-requirements: It was assumed that the public had been made safe by fulfilment of vaccination targets. - 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 private bank card data, making it politically a hot-potato'? 'Keep them feeling safe in lockdown, give furlough to the monthly-paid workers, and focus on the big money-maker: COVID-19 vaccine supply'? (politico, oxfam.)

Almost 9 million jobs were being furloughed in May 2020 (see figure below.) If, just for example, those jobs were paying £1000 per month, that would mean that government would have been doling out £7,200,000,000 that month. Of course, many people were earning more, 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 CNN article that Tories and Labour were accused recently of conspiring to hide the true expense of furlough and other aspects of supporting lockdown. With the national debt standing at about £2.8-trillion in May 2025, it seems that the money spent on furlough explains at least half that amount.

N.B. It's come to light that the well-respected Nature journal reported in 2016 that MERS patients didn't shed virus from their bodies until after the onset of 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'd been no basis for the WHO to say, time and again, that the virus had very little human-to-human transmissibility, or to deduce that nearly all human cases were caused by contact with animals.

  In 2015, Bill Gates posed as a medical expert concerning epidemics: see Gatestube (also see bbc/news of April 2020.) However, he didn't talk about the success of South Korea's trace and test approach when it became key to containing MERS. The WHO also didn't talk about trace-and-test in S. Korea and Taiwan, because the WHO keeps China happy by showing little interest in those countries. (Taiwan is excluded from the UN because China has veto powers. South Korea 'embarrasses' the UN with its long history of supporting Taiwan. Both democratic countries have US education systems and US military bases.)

  Gates had probably seen straight away that 'trace-and-test' wouldn't yield impressive opportunities for profit. (The Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is, "heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry stocks" - quoting Andrew Bridgen, beginning at 14:00 mins.) Supply of vaccine, on the other hand, was about to become very investible in 2020. (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.) 'Somebody' saw to it that normal vaccine safety checks didn't slow the rollout in the UK, quoting Bridgen: "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's had financial interest through hedge funding: Goodl (2023), Gurd (2020) and: video. Was Mr Sunak 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 abovementioned containment strategy. None of them ever commented on the control achieved in S. Korea after its initial big SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks. On 23 March, 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 began on 8 December.

First seen in October 2023, this photo of Penny Mordaunt MP and Gates 

suggests that he did bring his dumbing (monetizing) influence to the 

UK: "It's too late to try South Korea's trace-and-test approach. It's an animal 

virus or whatever, and vaccine supply is where the money is"?

~~~~~~

The original blog intro, updated May 2025:

All factual statements below are backed with hyperlinks (to references) in other parts of this blog.

  MERS-CoV had 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 sought so that the infected people could be put 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 caught the disease 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 as almost asymptomatic.)

  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 didn't appear to be a rapid spread, and no travel restrictions were applied. A wide range of 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 (the fourth Key Point in Nature.)

  On 13 January 2020, a Taiwanese expert on a fact-finding mission in Wuhan persuaded medics there that they had clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19, something which the CCP, backed by the WHO, had said there was no sign of. The wife of one patient had caught the disease, but she had not been to the seafood market which 'all' of the other patients had visited: yah. 

  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/suspected COVID-19 hotspots, and a task force would strive to test all contacts.

  'COVID-19' was spreading quickly because its symptoms did not develop quickly: It could easily be more than a week after infection that a person felt unwell. A CFR of below 3% was frequently 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 isolating 17,000 people during the MERS outbreak had made it clear that big lockdowns now would hurt the economy in a big way.) They needed daily life to be normal as possible, given the constant hostility across their northern border.

  The WHO showed only a momentary interest in South 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 confer much with a country that has angered the CCP by always supporting Taiwan.

  In 2012, a WHO update had said that MERS, "cannot be easily transmitted from person to person" (Reu1.) It was said that a person becomes infected through contact with an animal, not from human contact. (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's believed that most viruses are evolved to infect just one host species. (The rabies virus is a well-known exception that can infect many mammalian species, including humans.**) The WHO's insistence that MERS-CoV was frequently 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 little or no testing of animals was possible 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'. (Use Crtl+F to find, 'the genetics' above.)

  **The WHO makes a point of classifying Rabies as one of the 'zoonotic' viruses, but it is not a respiratory virus: One rabid animal infects another by biting it, and many 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 South 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 Jan 2020, the WHO tweeted China's proposal in its own way. There was "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus". Tedros Ghebreyesus then said that, by deduction, there was, 'no evidence' that supported the limitation of 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 by the WHO in the same way that they'd described MERS-CoV. Supposedly, people were sharing the same air inside buildings in Wuhan, but they were 'not catching SARS-CoV-2 from each other'. Ghebreyesus revealed immediately that he backed the CCP's story 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 that defied common sense. It suggested that respiratory coronaviruses are normally animal-borne but, through evolution, one could appear which infects both animals and people, and after infecting a human, it would not 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 many animal/human interactions take place often enough to cause many such human infections: It was implied that animal-to-human transmission could explain the sizeable human outbreak in Wuhan, but droves of animal-to-human transmissions won't happen if the animal is mammalian. (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 and, 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 him, 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.

Tedros Ghebreyesus was sticking to his 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 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 webiste 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 contain SARS-CoV-2 in the way that Taiwan and South Korea had done. Britain's Chief Medical Officer had already shut down Britain's mass testing on 12 March: "the contain phase of this operation finishes from today".

  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'. WHO member countries were still kept in the dark about the good progress made in East Asian countries which followed the Korean model, where human survival was better, and economies were not T-boned by big lockdowns.

~~~~~

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. 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 broached again. Instead, there's been ongoing resistance to any criticism of China: Oake and Hanc.

At a PHE meeting on 1 March 2020, Mr Johnson said that he expected the virus to spread "a bit more" in the UK, and that 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". (Johnson was accused of being a clone of Trump, but Trump came under much closer scrutiny for his pandemic denialism: Guard.)

Journalists who'd wanted to bring up-to-date information from democratic Asian states were ignored by the WHO, see: Nation (3 April, see the 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 governmental blinkering continued for the whole year, because 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 rather-simplistic 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 the 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 total we were giving was comparable, but the US has more than four times as many tax-payers.)
Johnson, Gates, the WHO and the CCP continued to keep silent about South Korea. That country had a death toll of 587 on 14/Dec/2020, thirteen days before Britain's toll was 70,752.

  Britain's alleged trace-and-test effort, called "the contain phase" by Chris Whitty, was stopped on 12 March 2020 (youtube at 13:10 mins) and the UK was put into lockdown eleven days later. Care homes for the aged soon reported a grim shortage of PPE: nurst, grdn, nuffi, bloo. 

South 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. Shortage of PPE might have made it difficult to establish sufficient trace-and-test efforts, but former Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, expressed in 2022 that we 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 (when 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, South 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 would favour 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 revealed that our existing PPE stockpile had become expired: JHchan4.  

  Analyses of 2020 mortality figures: sky1, sky2. Official figures to June 2022: govuk.

After ignoring SAGE when it told them the best way forward, they let things drift until
lockdown seemed unavoidable. Then began a borrowing spree never known before - CNN.
(Did furlough double the national debt or was it worse than that?)

  Foreign journalists were heaping praise onto S. Korea, where there was congenial cooperation between government and the public, e.g. 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.

  It was on 12 March that Boris Johnson said, "many more families are going to lose loved ones before before their time", as though he hadn't noticed when the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January. The WHO was silent about South Korea's "bali bali" (quick quick) response (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.

  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. (NHS Test and Trace simply sent text messages, advising people to get tested if they'd attended a pub, café or restaurant where a known case was discovered to have 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 Johnson was vast: parliament.uk  (A fact-checking group says £29.5-billion was the amount "actually spent" on NHS Test and Trace: Fullfact.)

   Facemasks were in short supply in Britain 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 trace-and-test 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.)

  However, any similarity between 'NHS Test and Trace' and the democratic East Asians' containment activity was in name only: The NHS system sent text messages to potential disease contacts, so that they might then get themselves tested, but it could not oblige them to do so. [You received a text message 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 message if you wanted to. You only had to stay away from that place until you could prove to its staff that you'd since got a negative test result. Supermarkets didn't participate in the 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, and they would 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 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 (anonymously), 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', and to rely on it, 'feels like 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 roll-out began on 8 December.) He wasn't interested in Taiwan/South Korea's focus on "prevention" of infection, even if that was key to avoiding comprehensive lockdowns. 

  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 raising both of his hands and quivering his fingers. (He also had his hands high on BBC News: bbc/news). Such a 'war-zone situation' wasn't conducive to a methodical Korean 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.) This was an opportunity of guaranteed magnitude.

  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 (not, "just under 300 staff" which were sent home on 12 March: Gurdn) if they'd only known about the idea.

  Scientists (and businessmen) would not have opted for a "simple" lockdown if they'd known how South Korea had avoided that (after having learned from 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, the key part of his press conference moment was brief and easily missed. It was puzzling how anyone could have decided, at the beginning of an epidemic, that they would stop trying to contain the disease on a specified date in the near future, but Whitty made sure that aspect was quickly skimmed over.

  Nobody doubted that delivering a vaccine was an essential goal, but there would have been only minor lockdowns while waiting for that if there'd been a trace-and-test strategy. If they'd paid attention to what S. Koreans were doing, nobody would not have forgotten to look after the care homes (would not have applied measures 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 for the eight months of the first lockdown? (and why make MPs boycott the journalists working for all other media companies? Also see: Eustice.) Was Korean-style containment rejected simply because there was a very limited stockpile of PPE in the UK, meaning that trace-and-test teams wouldn't have been able to work safely? - 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/Apr/2020 says that the WHO did praise S. Korea for its pandemic response: yaho1.

However, the praise wasn't followed by WHO recommendations that told any countries to 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. The one-off praise from the WHO is exaggerated in the yaho1 article: S. Korea was not "held up as a beacon" in any obvious way. 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. Ghebreyesus wasn't seen to say, "South Korea" in any televised announcements shown in the UK.

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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.) Ghebreyesus had conveyed immediate support for the "no clear evidence" idea by saying that countries shouldn't be enforcing travel restrictions. In his opinion, there was no "evidence" that "travel bans" would achieve anything, because a virus that didn't transmit human-to-human would not spread across national borders!

  After the SAGE advice to copy S. Korea was ignored, it wasn't long before the WHO was being quoted frequently on the BBC, and it received a £55-million bonus in April: RT.com - the Russia Times reference cannot be opened today, and Google searches are not finding other reports. However, there's ample evidence on the WHO's website of large sums given to the WHO at the expense of the UK tax-payer. (Use Ctrl+F to find 'WHO's extra' below.) In line with what Ghebreyesus advocated 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). Johnson also never stopped dragging his heels regarding closing of the UK border (and that must have pleased Ghebreyesus!): BBC. 

3 Feb 2021

  By 16 March 2020, the WHO had stopped pretending that the coronavirus might be non-contagious among people, and its Director-General said, "Test, test, test": bbc, youtu. He also started using the word, "isolate" but he was not yet ready to say "trace" for another two days: Saying "trace" might have revealed that 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? (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 falter 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. 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, 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.)

No. 10 actively worked against the Health Secretary

Several testimonies indicate that Mr Johnson did not like the sound of 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. On 26 Apr 2020, he had written this to his top adviser, Dominic Cummings. Relying on a 'test-and-trace' strategy, "feels like whistling in the dark", he wrote (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" on 26 April, he must have been referring to the constant trace-and-test activity in East Asian countries, since trace-and-test had been "finished" in the UK on 12 March: yout at 13:10 mins.)

What Cummings said revealed that two stages were originally intended for the trace-and-test operation 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 trace-and-test 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.

Johnson's choice of words, "legions of imaginary Clouseaus", suggests that he had never taken trace-and-test seriously. (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, mung bean munching eco freaks". Also see: Carbis Bay.)

By 2023, it was suspicious that Mr Johnson had still had never openly spoken on TV 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, when he gave his less than logical excuse for, "finishing the contain phase".) In December 2023, Johnson said in front of the National Covid Inquiry: "There was no other tool (apart from lockdown) that I know of": yahoo.

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 the UK 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.

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20/09/2022 - the UK's mortality is still 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.)

21 April 2021

21 April 2022

Most of South Korea's Covid deaths occurred in 2022

  During the UK lockdown which became officially enforceable on 26 March 2020 (the first of three: 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 S. Korea 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. However, the country's highest rate of deaths was about to ensue.

  The increase in cases was noticed before 1 January 2022. and it continued month on month (see the figure below.) The cumulative deaths total rose from below 6000 on 1st January 2022, to above 24,000 on 24th May: Ourw (see the graph under the ninth question/heading, also pasted below) This 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 for a coronavirus has on society can be slow and changeable.

By January 2022, more than 86% of S. Koreans had been vaccinated, but the cumulative deaths total began to climb steeply. That was 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 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:

From https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/

_______________________________________________

 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 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 (because there are so many American taxpayers.) 

  Subsequently, the 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 the table updated for 2022/23.)

Click/tap above to see full-screen. Then click in the upper-right corner to return here.
(On a phone, tap upper-right in the black boundary to return)

  A page which appears to show the funding provided by the 'UK and NI' (whoB) has a table which suggests a contribution of, "$135.13-million". That is less than one third of the UK's total contribution as shown in the 2020/21 table on the USA page (pasted above). The legend below the 'UK and NI' table (pasted below/right) has the following: "UK was 4th overall WHO donor and the number one Core Voluntary Contributions Account (CVCA) contributor in 2020-2021, with more than US$ 135 million". In other words, that table is not showing total contributions. (It has not been updated since 2022. It still gives the impression that the UK's contribution is, comparatively, quite small.)

  Changes to the 'UK and NI' page were made in April 2024, and it no longer mentions a much bigger amount further down on the page. Previously, it said that "Boris Johnson" had pledged a sum which "includes .. £500 million" for "COVAX advance Market Commitment".

  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' guided 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, the "£500 million" from Boris Johnson for "COVAX" has been removed from the website altogether*, and anyone looking at the 'UK and NI' page still only sees, "4th overall" donor and "$135 million" in its table. 

  *There remains other online evidence of Johnson's pledge for COVAX: "£548m to the global Covax initiative, making the UK the largest single donor": see govcov. Also, 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.)

 

  The WHO's table on its 'USA' page revealed that America's fixed contribution was also increased by Joe Biden in the 2020/21 cycle, up from the "$450 million" mentioned by Trump in May 2020: Reut.

Currently, the 'totals' table (who1) shows that the US was giving $1,284-million for 2022/23. There's no way to know what Joe Biden was providing for 2024/25, and Donald Trump withdrew 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 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. Below is the 'USA' page's table updated for 2022/23:

  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 countries if he'd 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 seemed so interested in epidemics, Gates ignored S. Korea's new method because his interest was restricted to the business of vaccine supply. He's also said nothing about Korea's full-blown 'TTT' strategy in 2020. 

  The WHO didn't mention anything significant about S. Korea on its website between 2019 and 2023. Its recently updated website pages still say that MERS-CoV was transmitting between camels and people, not between people and people 'unless there is close contact'. This fallacious description might have given the CCP the idea to say that people only caught SARS-CoV-2 by contact with animals? (factsht.)

See factsht

  To be more helpful in 2015, Bill 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 partners came to control the World's COVID response: Politico.

A "wilful blindness", as described by Andrew Bridgen (see bridvid), explains the way Johnson deprived us of a good virus containment system (like the one in Taiwan and S. Korea.)**

[As soon as the 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]

"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, 'TTT' was not. Gates and his three 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 practices in S. Korea (because of the data surveillance), whereas nothing was going to impede the World's vaccine rollout.

Matt Hancock 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 Gates and Hancock decide that Britain would simply have lockdowns until vaccine was available, regardless of what lockdowns did 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 the same time.

govuk

  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 crippling of countless businesses through forced suspension of high-street trading. He sent £548-million for the WHO to collaborate with the EU and create 'COVAX' (wikip, govcov). He even helped Bill Gates get financial input for a new green investment project: govdotuk.

p.s. See Carbis_Bay where Johnson splashed out in a literal sense.

~~~~~~~

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 there was always meant to be just a 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 would, he said, 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. 

  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 on, 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 delay 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 government personalities (nor 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?

  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 done since 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?) 

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. 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), "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 controlling reports about 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, there was a report about the silencing of a doctor who was one of eight accused of "spreading rumours"(Nyti, bbc.) CCP 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. 

  On 3rd February, another report also showed that China's suppression of genuine news about Wuhan was already well established: Forpol:

  Medics had set up a warning system in 2022 for sharing information with analysts in Beijing, but local officials who had 'political aversion to sharing bad news' prevented the system from being used: NYT. After Beijing did decide that there was a problem in Wuhan, CCP obstructed medical data at hospitals, and interfered with procedures. 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.

  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 a claims that MERS doesn't usually spread human-to-human. Then, we saw an unsolicited 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, the 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: 

  Rather than pointing out what might be achieved, in future, thanks to the Koreans' 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 for the observed limitation in the human-to-human spread of MERS.) 

 *S. Korea hadn't suggested a restriction on travel. - 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. The relevance? - Tedros Ghebreyesus would repeatedly criticize countries for using "travel bans" in 2020 and in 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; everyone only gets the impression that it was a disease which died out because it "cannot" spread easily human-to-human (bmj.)

  There are CCP members employed in the WHO 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 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 not known. 

Skip to where this blog began by reading Part 2 now.

S. Korea then and now.

  South Koreans make some of the best tech, e.g. Mr 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 37% percent of the people it infected, nemj reported 56%.) 

  By February 2020, S. Korea was using the same strategy beyond hospitals and on a much bigger scale, and SAGE told Downing Street to copy them (video.) Before long, the politicians 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.)

  By December 2021, S. Korea had lost one person in every 14,860 to Covid-19 (i.e. 52 million/3500) but the UK had lost one in every 460. The Koreans could wait for vaccine to become available, without doing a big lockdown (bma.) As soon as travel restrictions were relaxed to allow citizens back into S. Korea in December 2020, the 'UK variant' got through airport screening , and the national deaths total was soon doubled. However, the 'bali bali' approach got the spread under control again.

  There was a surprising development in 2022: 

  An unexpected demonstration of the power of S. Korea's TTT occurred when that strategy was no longer being adhered to. With vaccination targets being reached by the end of 2021, it was thought that trace-and-test activity was surplus to requirements. (TTT was officially stopped early in February 2022.*) The national deaths total was still below 6000 on 1 Jan 2022, but then it began to climb sharply, 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 the multiplication of deaths happened because infected people were no longer being traced and isolated.

    *FinT, Jtime and Tele report S. Korea's official reasons for having stopped trace-and-test. Later in February, Reute explains that TTT was again in place, and that the vaccine pass rule was waived so that unvaccinated people could also visit testing centres.

By January 2022, more than 86% of S. Koreans had been vaccinated. It was assumed that trace-and-test had become dispensable. The national COVID-19 deaths total began to climb steeply as soon as TTT was no longer being done. (The data are from a Johns-Hopkins study.)

Recap:

  On 28 Feb 2022, it was said that S. Korean mass tracing-and-testing was soon to be resumed because of the unexpected deluge of cases: reut. The national requirement for a vaccine pass was lifted so that unvaccinated people could visit testing centres.

  The Omicron variant was able to spread quickly and, having stopped containing it for a while, the nation saw the cumulative deaths total quadrupled in just five months. Conclusion: The containment of cases was still essential because the protection given by vaccination was far below expectation.

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 screening at a South Korean airport, and the cumulative deaths total was quickly doubled. However,  the virus was back under control by 27 January 2021 - The hyperlink to that Korea Times article is lost, but see 26 Jan 2021. Key facts can also be seen at 11Feb2021. (They were still struggling to stop clusters of infection at "religious education" facilities.)  Ourworld (and csis) shows how committed and methodical their response was from the start.

There was experience to look back to, but the WHO had ignored it since 2015.

  Two previous coronavirus diseases, SARS and MERS, hadn't become a concern world-wide. The WHO stated in 2012 that MERS-CoV, "cannot be easily transmitted from person to person": rtrs. However, through tracing and testing, South Koreans determined that it was just one man who'd carried MERS into four hospitals in 2015: NYtimes.

From wik - see CFR in table

  When people were 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 the CFRs of COVID-19: wik. (The NEJM reported a CFR of 56%. The WHO still has, "35%".) 

  In 2016, a proper understanding of the alleged 'minimal 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 virions (progeny viruses), therefore their social contacts were greatly reduced by the time that they could be infectious to other people.

  There were complaints in S. Korea about the economic impact of locking 17,000 people down during the 2015 response to MERS. The response "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 they could: It wasn't long before they realized that there was a large outbreak in Daegu.

  By the middle of March 2020,  Trace, Test and Treat was proving to be the best response for SARS-CoV-2: Science  (dated 17 Mar 2020.)

Privacy invasion

  The 'privacy invasion' done in S. Korea to enhance the detection of disease contacts was met with muted 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 that were endured in the past, before democracy: bma. 

  The 'privacy invasion', which the S. Koreans carefully weighed and legislated after coping with MERS, was no excuse 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. 

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 was to be seen before it could be believed. In the end, he took action because the WHO made it official on 11 March: There was a 'pandemic', so he couldn't keep up appearances any longer (had pushed 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 interfere with goods transport. (Drivers showing high body temperature would be halted for testing, and then would have to wait for test results. Where would their trucks be kept?) The policy was extended to airports, for consistency? However, the NHS made thermal screening compulsory at test processing facilities, and hospitals later followed suit: DigiH.

  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 she was unwell apart from her elevated body temperature: csis. As such, she was typically, 'asymptomatic'.

  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 in 2020 and 2021. 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.)

  After 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. Soon it was realized that trace-and-test was still key to preventing death: The cumulative deaths total had jumped from below 6,000 on 01 Jan 2022 to more than 24,000 on 25 May 2022: facebook (sourced from: ourworldindata- see the graph under the ninth question, also pasted below.)

Click/tap above to see full-screen. Then click in the upper-right corner to return here.
(On a phone, tap upper-right in the black boundary to return)

  A certainty: We in the UK would have seen far fewer human losses if methodical trace-and-test containment had been sustained, and the 5,000 trained tracing staff in councils had been deployed: Guardt.

  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/ - but 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 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 calling 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.) 

Oxfam

  Rather than urging countries to do trace-and-test, the WHO provided distraction with its: "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" tweet. In effect, it was supporting 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 destroyed 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 spare 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), because its negative effect on public health could have caused 20-times more people to die (than would have died by viral infection): USAgov. This conclusion was drawn 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, clearly, 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 could have been saved by following a trace-and-test strategy, but the WHO didn't hint at it until 18 March, and then 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 glaringly obvious that it should have been said it six weeks previously. 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 8 months of lockdown that was to follow. It was said in September 2020 that £210-billion had already been spent through the decision to keep people at home: Guardi. Many 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-pleasing delays at the start was promised, but has never materialized. 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 outbreaks inside 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 realized 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 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 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 tended to misdescribe 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 05 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. 

  For as long as they could, WHO executives kept incoming warnings at an arm's length. (Emails were easy to ignore: yah1, yah2, bbct.) Then, on 11 March, their Director-General was criticizing World leaders for 'sleeping on the job':

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: 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 disruption that lockdowns would bring about. (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. 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 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. S. 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 they responded to SARS-CoV-2

  Instead of trying to catch up with Taiwan/S. Korea and limit the spread of 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, government made sure that S. Korea's TTT strategy was not mentioned for eight months on BBC television. 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 it a bonus donation of £55 million: Rtcom (no longer viewable.) In the year spanning 2018/19, the UK had given the WHO £464 million. The WHO website in 2022 showed only the 2020/21 figure: "$487-million". (It was not shown on the 'UK page', but could be seen in a table on the USA funding page. N.B. Today, the table is showing figures for 2022/23.) China was said to give much less: £40-million: reut,

Trump in May 2020 (reut)

 (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 table, there's nothing remarkable about, "tens of millions of Dollars".) 

oake

  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 long-term response and, In 2021, it seemed to get 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.

  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/Sep/2021.

  Once it had issued vaccine to 86% of its population, 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, as a matter of great importance: 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 hadn't been providing a proper understanding of respiratory coronaviruses.

  Five years before the outbreaks in Wuhan began, 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 requires some effort to show how unlikely it was. 

  In a textbook description of zoonosis, a coronavirus is making copies of itself (replicating) inside an animal cell, but an error occurs in the RNA duplication process which, while making the genome of the progeny virions different to that of the 'parent', makes them able to infect humans. Those first progeny virions get inside a human and themselves undergo replication, so it would be expected that more virions 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, 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 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 handled the same host animal inside which the novel virus had evolved (unless it had spread to other host animals), i.e. those people were each infected by the mutant virions in the animal's exhaled breath and/or saliva. However, if there are so many people showing symptoms that they could not all have handled that one particular animal, then it would be required that:

1. the first-generation of the novel virus can infect both humans and animals. In other words: i) The novel virus '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.

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 replications, their progeny can go on to infect more humans. (Human-to-human infection will persist because every descendant of the first mutants 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, MERS virus was 'naturally' 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) and the pandemic guidance they received from the First Minister (Nicola Sturgeon) in 2020 was advised by Prof. Devi Sridhar (Chair of Global  Public Health.) It's notable that Mrs Sturgeon said that there was no purpose in following the pandemic stories of other countries: fgoog and Dec20. Also see: TheHe. 

  Everything suggests that Prof. Sridhar was persuaded by London MPs to keep Mrs Sturgeon from saying anything about the pandemic response of S. Korea or Taiwan. Prof Sridhar had appeared more than once in Channel 4's documentary about S. Korea's COVID response (aired in May 2020: Chan - no longer playing but see Grdc), but she didn't bring anything from that documentary when talking on the BBC many times. 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 S. Korean pandemic news. She almost never said "South Korea" in her many BBC Breakfast appearances, except once when she claimed 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 the anyone 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.

The Guardian article about Channel 4's documentary of the 4 May 2020, which has disappeared without a trace from 4's website after more than three years 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 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.)

  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, and there was a complaint by the Labour Party that government wasn't keeping an eye on those who'd returned 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 case to start an outbreak. Red-listing could stigmatize poor countries while affluent countries were not challenged for hoarding vaccine: Convers.

  No MPs asked why we never used thermal screening at airports or the Eurotunnel. South Korea had detected its first case that way, and such screening was shown to be working very well at a Chinese airport in the BBC documentary, 54days. (It '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.

  The short answer: 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 late in 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 name a single person who was involved. PHE 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.

  Our leaders were very quick to forgive the WHO for peddling a "no H2H transmission" story, as might please the CCP. The WHO received a bonus of £55 million from the UK in April 2020 (RT reported it but is now blocked online), and a £548m contribution was provided when the WHO was working with the EU to establish COVAX: govcov, wikip. (Nobody has calculated how many times less costly the South Korean response was, compared to the 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.) BBC Television didn't discuss such countries in any detail for another five months. Then they 'caught up' by airing a documentary on 19 Nov 2020 at 8 pm: Lock1. It confirmed observations made in the Channel 4 production.

A second BBC documentary (54days) on 26 Jan 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 way forward for tackling 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.

   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 South Korean 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:

The large spike in the graph 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 major crisis was being mishandled. He alerted South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam to the danger (people from Hong Kong and Macau were in the visiting team with him), and he sent an email to the WHO headquarters: yah. His associates wanted to prevent the spread of this disease in their own countries but, when they 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 it (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 success had with 'trace-and-test' method 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 replicate 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

  Cumulative deaths in S. Korea vs. those in the UK were  2,000 vs. 129,000 respectively in June 2021. 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 its communications. 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. The UK continued to send close to half-a-billion USD biannually, plus 'bonuses' and a special "£500-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. It's not known what Biden was sending when Trump took the USA out 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.) 

  While 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/expertise. (The Jeremy Hunt video from July 2022 makes it obvious now what had happened: video)

There was detailed manipulation of public perception. '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 well done. (e.g. Grdc and Atlantic.) Nobody on BBC family-time TV discussed the trace-and-test strategy, but one regular BBC 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'd received instruction to avoid mentioning Taiwan, South Korea and any other of the Asian states who had the same containment strategy: See 'April' below in Part 2.

  As desired by the MPs, few Brits became aware of the dichotomy which had developed in 2020, i.e. between: 1. Non-communist Asian states immediately slowing the spread of the virus to a level at which most people could live normal lives, and 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 (and waiting eight months for Gates to 
  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: Supermarkets and transport services* weren't included in the NHS' tracing 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 PCR test centre involved a significant car trip for most people, one person per car, so it's almost certain that very few of the people traced bothered to get a PCR test done.

    *It was reported that many bus drivers caught the virus: Longov, BBCb.

  

No Korean-style trace-and-test was done in the UK after 12 Mar 2020, and very little occurred before that date. (PHE said that it had a temporary 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 seem vulnerable to North Korea.

  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, e.g. Western Bridgford Wire reported 168 deaths in the week up to 21/Apr/2021 (see wbridg.) Furthermore, there wasn't stability after vaccination began: Western Bridgford Wire reported 1,636 deaths in the week up to 21/Apr/2022 (see wbridg2.) - In spite of the long-awaited provision of vaccine, mortality had climbed ten-fold at least once between April 2021 and April 2022.

  In September 2021 alone, the UK saw daily losses that would amount to 61,000 in a year. (S. Korea had lost 6000 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": none of them admitted openly that S. Korea showed expertise in slowing the spread of a respiratory coronavirus. The UK public was never included in 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 planning in the UK (or lack thereof) was being made by a few men at the top, no women, while S. Korea had women in key positions. (Two of them were consulted several times in Channel 4's documentary, 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, and isolating all who tested positive? (We worked with the French to build Concorde in the 1960s.) Instead, we were told, very quickly, by Chris Whitty on 12 Mar 2020 (youtube at 13:10 mins) that "the Contain phase finishes from today". Containment of the disease with the help 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.

Transparency was seen to be lacking

  There was a constant sense during lockdown that many important matters 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 that 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/Mar/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 the questions were, in fact, 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 population 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 future votes excluded the containment option because of its negative association with breaches of data privacy (forgetting that we have vaccines at all because Edward Jenner made use of his own children for testing his ideas: 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 is 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.)

  While the British public was assumed to be 'averse to observation of their daily phone locations, whatever the reason', we could have had '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 until the end of May, when NHS Test and Trace began monitoring which people went into cafés or pubs. The value of that was very limited (surveillance at supermarkets would have provided knowledge of a much bigger cross-section of society), and, even if it told someone that they'd probably 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 person 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 03/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 and the scientists they preferred had an ivory tower quality

It was at a hospital on 3/Mar/2020 that he
did this. He did it again on 6 March: Ledby

  There was no sign that our PM was alarmed when SARS-CoV-2 was detected in England on 29/Jan/2020 (BFPG, Grdc.) On 3 March, he announced 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 hadn't noticed that the S. Koreans had adapted a NAT (nucleic acid test) for making swift detection of coronavirus possible. (It took 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. 

   Of note: Having taken the chance of infecting several people by shaking their hands 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."

Click/tap above to see full-screen. Then click in the upper-right corner to return here.
(On a phone, tap upper-right in the black boundary to return)

  The PM skipped five COBR meetings, and it had not impressed him that some non-communist Asian states had brought viral spread 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 later 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)

  'Just tell everyone to go home and lock down',  

  'Forget that the WHO backed China's idea that only animals could give you the virus. Forget that the WHO delayed announcements so that China had time to do its cover-up, so that there might be fewer countries restricting travel. Just send the WHO a bonus so that it seems we're working in tandem with 'the World experts'.'  

  'Pretend 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 always had to 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: South Koreans were right to think that lockdowns are totalitarian, typical of the CCP. That opinion 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, is phone and bank card location data 'private' in a strictly legal sense? How often is it 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 Johnson was like at the beginning of 2020 (Teleg), but there are important questions that he didn't draw attention to.

1. He 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 only ever closed briefly, by the French when they feared the UK variant in December 2020: TheStan) 2. Why, like all of the people he talks about, does Cummings still never mention South Korea, a country that's comparable with the UK? 

3. Until now, we never heard 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 had gleaned from the WHO's description of MERS: that a novel respiratory coronavirus might 'not transmit human-to-human'. 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.) 

  It was plainly obvious that the, "they're only getting it from animals" idea was backed by the WHO: The Chinese would have got the idea from the WHO's way of describing MERS since 2012.* Denmark soon killed millions of small mammals while the handful of infected mink shed operatives could easily have caught COVID-19 from outside of the workplace, or from a colleague in their break-room. (The cull had no legal justification: Guam.) The WHO had, for eight years, favoured the 'animal-to-human' interpretation of MERS outbreaks in humans, suggesting that reports which confirmed human-to-human transmission only applied to a minority of new cases inside hospitals "where there is a close contact". (Also 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: MERS-CoV is shed from an infected person after symptoms are full-blown and the person has usually 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 rare event. When it happens, at least one human is infected by newly mutated progeny virus after it has been shed from an animal. When that mutant virus goes through its own replication phase inside the human, its progeny virions are shed (from the human) and other humans will likely becomes infected. If circumstances favour the survival of this novel zoonotic strain, more and more people will be infected by an exploding number of virions.

  It wasn't natural to imagine that such a rare 'evolutionary event' occurred 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 while their progeny would 'not transmit human-to-human'. 

👿 'It's not contagious.' 👿 'Don't close borders.'

  When Wuhan saw the first outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 at the end of 2019, the CCP demanded that people "be stable" 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 exchanged the words, "Only those who have contact with animals can catch it" for, "There's no sign 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 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 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. Even when the CCP could no longer conceal the fact that the coronavirus was spreading fast, the WHO delayed an 'emergency' warning to member countries for another week, and it didn't refer to the outbreak as a "pandemic" until six weeks after that: pubmed. The WHO director-general continued to criticize travel restrictions when it was so obvious that places like Taiwan and South Korea had fared well by limiting travel while methodically containing cases: Reut1.

  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 it 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 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 the WHO's priority. They chose to, "work with China behind the scenes" instead. (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 the country which had acted most effectively, i.e. Taiwan: bbct, JFMA (and they continued to play down news of its Containment response.)

💧 Taiwan had very few deaths in 2020/21. 💧 In March 2022, 'Containment' was ended and mortality began to increase exponentially.

  "Overall, 823 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including a total of nine deaths, were reported to Taiwan CDC in 2020" (NLMtai.) Today, Taiwan's 'Timeline COVID-19' chart shows that the country's cumulative number of cases began to increase at a new and extraordinary rate in April 2022: The figure climbed from 24,033 cases on 2 April 2022, to 115,883 on 30 April, and then more than ten-million cases were counted between 30 April 2022 and the end of March 2023. The daily totals are still higher (in March 2023) than they ever were before April 2022: MinHW (its chart is pasted below.) 

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 provided the conditions for the explosive surge in cases which began in April, represented by the green area in the chart above. (Also find 'Most of South Korea's'.)

____________________________

  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.)

More about thermal screening.

  In the UK, NERVTAG followed the WHO's lead by supporting the decision that there would be no thermal screening at 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. NERVTAG) on Covid-19 revealed the group was 'fully aware' that the case in Thailand 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 detected its first official case with airport thermal screening. (Ear thermometers were effective in some countries.) Having arrived on a short flight from China, she was the first sign of a pandemic risk.

  Quarantine for arrivals at British airports only began on 8th June 2020 (bbc), and 50 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 infectious: A 2016 Nature review reported that a person can be infected with a 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: Holding back a lorry driver if he displayed 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 coronavirus 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 it only detected 9% of infected people: Lshtm.)

  MPs and their 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 and queried 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. The 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 to be kept 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, and he didn't mention that it would have been worthwhile if travel had been better restricted in January, and/or if we'd had a serious trace-and-test program straight away (not a team of "just under 300 staff" for a week or two: Rehis.)

 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 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 will 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 such issues 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 heaped onto S. Korea initially (yaho) after thermal screening had helped enormously by giving the first proof that the virus had crossed an international border.
  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.

  South 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 become available in the near future, and it would quickly(?) slow the rate of infection. The whole point of the TTT approach (which Johnson scoffed at in an email to D. Cummings) was to slow the spread of coronavirus sufficiently while waiting for vaccine: JFMA (2024.)

  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 7.5 months before vaccine could be issued.)

Bill Gates had been schooling Mat since at least January 2019, leading 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. 

3 Feb 2021

The NHS' tracing service was only an advisory one, anyway: Potentially diseased contacts were not visited and persuaded to submit to testing. They just received text messages that told them which pub, café or restaurant that they'd recently visited was probably 'contaminated' at the time (and would require proof of a 'negative' test result if they wanted to visit again.)

  Testing of inward-bound Eurotunnel drivers was announced for the first time on 28 Mar 2021, to begin on 6 Apr 2021, for any drivers who visited the UK for longer than 48 hours. The decision to do this seemed to be 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 quickly applied border controls and were receiving fewer arrivals at airports. Even if airport screening only detected of 50% of cases (for example), that would still help. The screening, of course, was accessory to trace-and-test activity, which would be continually putting COVID cases where they wouldn't infect other people, "nipping it in the bud", 54 days.
  S. Koreans had realized in 2015 that an RNA test for confirming the presence of a coronavirus was an innovation with great potential. Their pandemic strategy was not concealed from the public: All might understand and contribute where they could, 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.) 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 could return from overseas. 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 come to think was 'the big picture'. It was preferred that most people didn't realize that the Eurotunnel was being kept open, or that there was no thermal screening anywhere on the country's border. The PM had no enthusiasm for virus containment through trace-and-test, 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 for 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. In contrast, 'Test and Trace' was said a lot to give the impression that we were 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 (not inside a supermarket or on a bus. 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, but the coronavirus got into care homes. (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 caught from animals (in a seafood market) and assuming that there was nothing to learn from non-communist Asians)*, our PM said on 03 Mar  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 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 be in lockdown. The residents were already 'at home', with care staff coming and going daily. Would protecting 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 countries 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, in June, when she implied that its response included maltreatment of a 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 more than twice as a consultant in Channel 4's documentary about the S. Korean response, in which there was no criticism, only praise: Chan 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 the situation 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?) 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 (also see 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.) 

Click/tap above to see full-screen. Then click in the upper-right corner to return here.
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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 after 23 March 2020. There was also the MPs boycott of all TV channels but the BBC (morgan, gmb), which didn't cover 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/Apr/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. Johnson never talked about this.

Part 1: The BFPG timeline.

  The BFPG  time-line, which became available online in May 2020, 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 some reports had been simplified. It had been said, "South Korea didn't lock down", but South Koreans did lock down certain sectors 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.) 

   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. (The PM also shut down Parliament, unlawfully, in September, also to give priority to his Brexit worries: guar, polhom.)

  Anyone in China who knew anything about a coronavirus was 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 forced to sign gag orders. Aligning with the CCP, our well-funded source of health information, the WHO, cast no doubt onto the proposal that this coronavirus was not transmitting between humans: tweet. 

  Diagnostic criteria were being imposed by CCP officials which made it impossible for a complete record of infections to be made: Expr. See a formal American chronology at: crsrep.

  By 20 January, China had stopped pushing the 'no evidence of H2H transmission' hoax: 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 death tolls climbed rapidly in Europe and America. Experts from Taiwan and other Asian countries 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, but made the mistake of trusting the WHO to warn other countries. (The WHO read their email but that's where it ended.)
  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 prohibited from making appearances on non-BBC TV channels, and they never made reference to what was happening in South Korea or Taiwan: video.

  There are BFPG time-line entries which give justification for the criticism made of China and the WHO (criticism which was voiced mainly by Americans.) 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."

Analysis of  some BFPG entries reveals that China did play down the threat to 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. (Also see: bbcw.) China contacts the WHO and informs them of ‘cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology’ detected in Wuhan."

  Bearing the above two entries in mind, it's then reported that China claimed that 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." 

- In other words, we are expected to believe that the only death, in the first month or more, was of an old man who was 'obviously ill before he became infected with the novel virus'. 

  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 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.

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.   14 January was the day that the WHO published its 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.)

Above is from NPR

  Reminder: The WHO did eventually declare an emergency on 30 January but, four days later, its Director-General was again implying 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*. The 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.

  China's under-reporting has been written about several times, e.g. yahoo, teleg. 

"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.

Go to Atlan

  Americans said that their response to COVID-19 had been 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, also some mammalian species of animal?): see bfpg under 'December 31st 2019' (and Atlan.)

  On January 14, 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 (SARS-CoV-1, 2002 and MERS-CoV, 2012) were, and it ignored email from Taiwan's top medic on the matter. (He'd seen the Wuhan crisis for himself: yaho and bbct.)

  "It's deadly stuff", said Mr Trump on 7 February, but the American CDC was then said to have made the situation worse by deciding to make 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 (yah, Chan or 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, even when WHO observers in Wuhan were witnessing the loss of life. (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 eight 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 story was little known until it was finally 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 were still talking about the pandemic daily, but only on the BBC, because there was a boycott of 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. (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 about S. Korea in May, but such material was not seen or heard on television when most were watching it. (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  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.)

  February 2021: It's been said that the US' pandemic response became dysfunctional in late April 2020, that Mr Trump had become a denialist and 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 proper 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 it, from animals: bfpg (look at 31st December), Chan, Grdc. The WHO provided an internet 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 WHO ignored email from a Taiwanese medic: yaho, Time, bbct and Teleg.

+ 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, which would prevent 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 the 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 assertion had come persistently from the WHO since 2012 about the MERS coronavirus. Their website has described MERS that way ever since: rtrs. 

  The MERS factsheet on the WHO website helps the CCP's December 2019 announcements seem consistent with 'previous findings': Once again, a respiratory coronavirus is 'seen' to be transmitting, "between animals and people"(factsht, see the fifth Key fact.)

  According to the CCP and WHO in January 2020 (and by a stretch of the imagination), a species of animal was shedding a coronavirus, and then it infected people "directly": It was said that the majority of human cases had not been infected by transmission from other humans, i.e. not infected "indirectly".

  Such a proposal/theory suggested that a 'pool' of animal-infecting coronavirus particles was 'residing' within members of a population of mammalian animals, and one of the virus particles gave rise (by chance mutational error) to progeny virions which could infect both animals and humans. Furthermore, it was proposed that subsequent descendants of the zoonotic progeny 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 the living cells of its primary host species. (It has no secondary host in its 'life cycle'.) 

  Even if the body of a virus-infected animal could shed many zoonotic progeny virions (after zoonotic mutation has taken place, causing 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 descendant progeny of zoonotic virions do not show human-to-human transmission, the immediate human contacts of an animal carrying 'first generation' zoonotic virions 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 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 have genetic code for animal transmissibility, and be able to spread back into the animal host population. That could give it access to more human hosts if they handle infected animals. However, animal-animal interactions are nowhere nearly as frequent as human-to-human interactions (primates and colonial bats being typical exceptions.) The relative scarcity of animal-to-animal interactions reduces the likelihood that animals will infect each other with zoonotic respiratory viruses. Even if a newly zoonotic respiratory coronavirus could, like the unmutated original strain, spread from 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 Nature (2016), it was reported that MERS-CoV virions are 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 'post-symptoms' shedding of progeny virus is the obvious explanation for limitation in the human-to-human spread of MERS outside of health-care settings: People took themselves 'off the street' and into bed before they were shedding progeny virus. If someone at the WHO had read the 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 human-to-human spread of such a novel virus if the symptoms are mild in some people, not severe enough to prevent them from remaining active in society. 

  Where a significant section of society experiences mild symptoms after infection by a novel virus, the shedding of progeny virus from their bodies will result in spread of infection regardless of when it is shed. 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 likely to feel well enough to be out and about), but it was 56% for MERS-CoV in 2013 (nemj, many were dying and very few were active in society.)

  The WHO seemed to forget that the evolution of the first 'zoonotic' coronavirus was a rare, one-off genetic event. (It's possible that any other zoonotic coronaviruses were genetic variants of the first one.) Error during the replication of a single virus particle (a virion that's shaken off its protein coat) gave rise to genetically-altered progeny which had gained, by chance, a viable change in their host-specificity (conferring human infectivity when the change is 'zoonotic'.) All subsequent human infections could have been 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), while not sharing knowledge of new system for preventing 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.

See factsht

  There is another way to show just how unlikely a 'no H2H 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, etc. (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 been produced.. 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 infected people don't shed progeny virus until after severe symptoms are being felt, by which time they are usually in a sickbed somewhere.": The lateness of shedding explains why it wasn't easy to show human-to-human infection outside of healthcare settings. (Nature.)  

  In the WHO factsheet (updated 5 Aug 2022), under 'Prevention and treatment', there has never been 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 loud campaigner for epidemic-readiness, but he did not show that he'd noticed S. Korea's new way to slow the spread of MERS-CoV. He became consumed with rescuing the WHO after Donald Trump withdrew its US subsidy 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 clear 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 any 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 a person 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 informative, worth learning from. 

  See Guardian and Standard re. the last flights that evacuated Brits from Wuhan.

February

  BBC Two said 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 unnoticed. (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's not known how many were bringing the virus. (Biologists 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 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 isn't certain 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 for touting 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, more reprehensible through being so cooperative with China, thus helping it deceive health authorities in other countries. Only Donald Trump criticized the WHO, and then his sanction was 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, S. Korea had tested 5200 people in every million, while the USA had tested 74 in every million: Smag.

  S. Koreans sought to find and isolate 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 a long lockdown. 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 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 COVID-19 test. (The task force by 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 infection was out of control 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 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 many months, their losses were just 7 people out of a population of 24 million (found in Google searches.) N.B. By 31/Dec/2021, Taiwan had lost 850 but that was due, in part, to variants getting in after travel bans were lifted. (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.)

Click/tap above to see full-screen. Then click in the upper-right corner to return here.
(On a phone, tap upper-right in the black boundary to return)

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.)

  When 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 South 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"? 

  WHO narrative never openly corrected its 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 were needed. 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" had been proved correct: bbcw. 

  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 had been scrapped, by Boris Johnson, which might have acted promptly and assembled a spread-beating pandemic response. THRCC was dissolved to, "slow down on things" that might use government resources for 'non-Brexit' purposes: Euron, Telegrap.

  Most countries did not intercept the virus problem in the way that the S. Koreans and Taiwanese did. There was no alarm among the majority who thought the WHO was their health sentinel. When China and the WHO were then in the news for the cover-up, many national leaders were detached and slow to draw any conclusions. (Mr Johnson saw no danger, and skipped five COBR meetings: snake, bmj, heatwave.)

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.

  Little belief in the health threat was conveyed by Boris Johnson in January and February, and then initiated an historic national  lockdown on 23 March (govuk). The numbers of deaths had suddenly indicated that infection had been spreading far and wide (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 the 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 March 12, "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, five weeks later 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 then 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). This 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.) It 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, because 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! When our MPs gave the WHO extra money in spite of Trump's decision*, they 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)

  *Mr Trump praised China on 7 February but he became angry with the WHO on hearing that it had supported what the CCP did shortlybeforehand. The WHO had not told anyone about the following: A 34 year-old Wuhan doctor was officially censured on 3 January for trying to report a deadly pneumonia outbreak that others had also seen in December. He was told, "Don't spread rumours", and then he died. (The CCP didn't want mass travel over the Chinese New Year to be affected by a new health issue?) 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 (see Chan or 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 One almost every day. Hancock and his men never mentioned what S. Korea had been doing, and they kept that subject off BBC television for the duration of lockdowns.

Having a dig at his critics? Mr Johnson sends another, this time, worthy contribution abroad, as 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.

  BBC prime-time television only mentioned S. Korea when reading out lists of countries. This was the case even when international comparisons were being made. It seems 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.) Sridhar spoke a few times in that 13 May 2020 documentary (Chan or 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 01/Aug/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.) 

** WhatsApp grouping is not new to government. It had subversive impact while Theresa May was PM: Mirr. (Also see: Expr)

  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. (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.

  On 31 October 2020, Prof. Sridhar showed intense annoyance when Boris Johnson announced a second lockdown, commencing 5 November. 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 eight 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 is released: 

  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 became 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 that she said we should rather 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.)

  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 eight months on the BBC. 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': thetim.

  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 gossipy 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 follow "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: NYT, PBS and BBC. 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 lose the 'golden hour' (the first days/weeks when a level of 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. It's all Trump's mistake." 

 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. Recent experiences 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 7.5 months of lockdown 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".

   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 : 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 was given no extra time there. Likewise with the longer, "54 Days" documentary that followed in January.) 

  We never had a robust trace-and-test system for virus containment which could handle the emergence of new variants. Mr Johnson had easy 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 reached £400-billion in 2020, while businesses floundered in a total stoppage 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 conscientious strategy 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. 
2) They tweeted that the virus was "transmitted between animals and people", but not from person to person.
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.

-------------------------------------------------------

"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.

___________________

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?

Reut

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. 

$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.

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

1 July 2022: Ann Widdecombe says Tory party must pull itself together.

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."
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Boris, asleep at the wheel..............once again
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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.

China warns of consequences if Pelosi visits Taiwan

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.

02/08/2022 Johnson has holiday during final weeks.

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. 

Rishi Sunak says government he was in 'wasn't working'

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.

Bank of England says whole crisis can be blamed on Putin.

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. 

Much dust has settled since 2020 and it's clear that No. 10 joined with Gates and Biden in putting the WHO back on its pedestal. The WHO had ignored South Korea's example and Gates did the same thing. Johnson saw that his life could be made much simpler by tagging along with the big guys.... 

 Hilarious nonsense

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  Hunt does seem amused but it's 100% verification: https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (from 50 secs on.) You can bet that busy-body Bill Gates made contact with Johnson as soon as Trump cut the WHO (- hence the turnaround on March 12.) - We were the biggest WHO contributor in 2019.

• (More derision.... "Let me guess: A system that dishes out furlough must be a good one?")

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.

Liz Truss says that Trump said a lot of things that turned out to be true.

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.

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.)

So out of all the Countries in the World,the UK would suddenly plump for South-Korea's template,and everything would have been just fine. Brighton Pier burnt down years ago,and the Fortune-Teller has gone with it!!.

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  Gerry Lloyd

  Jon Doe There is a reason that the UK is not alone for being so slow at the start. The WHO had been 'editing' things very carefully so that awareness of SK was kept to a minimum. UK was different in that its top advisory group was ignored.

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  Gerry Lloyd

  Jon Doe This tweet had a big impact and made people chill: https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
• • Tests on water in Italy,in October-2019,already showed signs of covid-19. The workforces from the leather goods,and weaving factories there,come and go from China all the time. So the flag up from WHO,wasn't just slow,it was pathetic.

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    Gerry Lloyd

    Jon Doe Tedros Ghebreyesus was carefully maintaining the "No H2H" impression for as long as he could. Reason being, he likes kowtowing to the CCP and, "if there's no H2H, then people won't spread it when they travel, therefore I can impress China by criticizing countries who make unscientific restrictions on travel."

  Devi Sridhar has warned belief in conspiracy theories has increased in the aftermath of the covid pandemic.
• 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.

Labour surges as Tory fears grow over Truss’s tax cut agenda  

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)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/it-s-time-to-lift-the-medical-student-cap?fbclid=IwAR1hs3zud6p1Uh4-E7Gt7dWUpDUpziOe_dhta_0SECr2RKYLdmnxD76HFuM

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: 

Remember 12 March 2020 when two things were said and nobody realized how important it was because the men spoke quickly and it all seemed 'scientific': 1. Boris: "Loved ones are going to die before their time", 2. Chris Whitty: "The contain phase .... 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 21 March because the WHO had (finally) declared a pandemic on 11 March. - Some distance was desired between that event and Boris' knee-jerk reaction to it.

WHOFIBS.BLOGSPOT.COM

Four hospitals not far from Seoul had outbreaks of MERS respiratory coronavirus in 2015 after a man visited them who had been traveling in the Middle East. A test for the virus' RNA was used, staff and patients needing only to provide buccal...

Four hospitals not far from Seoul had outbreaks of MERS respiratory coronavirus in 2015 after a man visited them who had been traveling in the Middle East. A test for the virus' RNA was used, staff and patients needing only to provide buccal...

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  G d please get off the internet for your own health

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  M B You have the titles but have enjoyed furlough, therefore certain facts are bad for your health? "John's Hopkins Univ. data this year 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.)"

Sunak says the scientists had too much power in 2020.

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'.

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.) 

Lord sugar says jail Boris and Gove for Brexit bus lies.

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 and Samsung work together.

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.)

Boris has more ideas for the people to try.

  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.

BBC question of May 2020: "How scared should be be?"

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

What scientists have learned from covid lockdowns

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/

Reversal of Johnson's plan to outlaw 'meal deals' and keep chocolate 'hidden from children' in shops might upset health campaigners.

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.)

Kent brewery hailed as Brexit ‘export champion’ has one EU customer left

>> So the UK went from a market of 27 countries to a free trade agreement with us here in Oz and with the UK economy 5.2%, or £31 billion, smaller than it would have been had the UK stayed in the EU. Brilliant! 

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• >> It got worse because there was a 2-month drag before Johnson took the coronavirus seriously. He caught it in a hospital, passed it around by "shaking hands with everybody" and ignored SAGE advise to get busy using the Korean strategy. Lockdown was a nice "simple" way that appealed to him and there were no PPE stockpiles, so lockdown it was. He was right about one thing. People eagerly obeyed him and ran home to live on furlough, they still keep quiet and will keep voting Tory. https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527 (i.e. the second 50 secs.) .... The initial SAGE advice was kept out of sight and we were put into lockdown instead. The WHO became the 'authority' to quote, regardless of the fact that it had made statements which served to facilitate China's cover-up (avoided contradiction of CCP pretence that there was "no evidence of human-to-human" spread, said the same thing indirectly: "travel bans are not evidence-based".) 

  
  

  >> ...... “If the economy is 5% smaller than it would otherwise have been then we are all 5% poorer. It also means that taxes have to rise to fund the same quality of public services that we had before,” says Springford. I don't think Boris going around shaking hands had much to do with it.
• >> 'was merely adding that lockdown could have been avoided if we'd had a better PM. A lot of us do prefer not having a border that's wide open to anybody. I think it boils down to that. Lockdown delivered us a serious blow. There was little readiness to 'look to South Korea' because the WHO had successfully blind-sided its member countries regarding South Korean progress since 2015. Either way, our PM was mad to ignore SAGE, it's that simple. (Cost of lockdown crossed into the trillions zone, not "billions" as you suggest.) Maybe you also got furlough?

Average Polish family soon to be better off than Brits.

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. 

Rees-Mogg has ties with Canadian pipeline giants and Palm oil deforestation.

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.) 

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.

Liz Truss gets non-stop criticism.

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.) 

Why are nurses still quitting the NHS? (see Devon Live) They see now that Johnson ignored SAGE when it suggested copy South Korea. They saw the comfy middle class chilling on furlough while his 'system' amplified their burden by scrapping virus containment when it was most needed. Jeremy Hunt made it perfectly clear why the slack response followed by a lockdown generated a taxpayer bill of £400-billion (https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/videos/1392415111237527, esp. the second 50 secs.) 

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• Brian W

  Giving £37 billion to Dido Harding for a system that never worked and was much more expensive than the European system didn't help and still nobody knows how she spent that much money.
• 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.) 

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.)

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)

Mikey 

Plandemic of Event201 many are ignorant of.

Only alleged respiratory pandemic that could make other respiratory illnesses disappear, and still the penny doesn't drop with many.

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• Gerry      Seems at first glance to fit well with the WHO's habit of making animals seem potentially a frequent source of disease 'by evolution' (an idea which appeals to CCP 'intellectuals'.) You wonder how many people lost pets in China because of CCP 'suspicions'. There was no scientific basis for the Denmark mink culls - it was initiated by the same type of scare-mongering coming from people who are given good money on the assumption that they are scientific. OK, now I just saw that the Gates are heavily involved - see the blog under 'Much of the WHO's extra funding came from the UK.'

Re: Hong Kong demonstrator dragged into Chinese embassy and beaten.

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.

___________________________

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".

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. 

Matt Hancock paid £45k for an SAS reality show.

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.

Matt Hancock says he couldn't get anyone to take covid seriously before the second week of March 2020.

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.

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'.

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

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.

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.

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."

Will elderly billionaires become immortal?

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."

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?

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 

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.

 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

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. 

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 

bird-flu-expert-calls-for-work-to-start-on-vaccine-with-risk-to-humans-increasing

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.) 

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.)

Sturgeon resigns and rejects Johnson at the same time.

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.

How did a £70bn “hole” become a £30bn “surplus”?

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.

"BBC Chiefs say it’s ‘wrong to expose Boris Johnson’s lies because it undermines trust in democracy’"

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?

Johnson wants to nominate his Dad for a knighthood.

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 8 months of lockdown (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)

BBC showing bias by punishing Gary Lineker

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.)

"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: 

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". 

Govt scraps Covid updates as cases surge, 2023

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")

The World Health Organisation has learnt from its mistakes during Covid-19. Whether it can make the necessary changes, however, is up to us

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.)

New genetic data from the Wuhan wet market appeared to tip the balance slightly in favour of the argument that the virus had a natural, rather than laboratory, origin.

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!"

A new critique of "British Public Broadcasters" which assumes that lockdown was the correct response, only criticizes the timing of its enforcement.

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.)

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

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."

"Conspiracy of silence" among NHS Trusts means most NHS employers recorded not a SINGLE Covid death among their workers during the first two waves

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.)

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.

 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.

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.)

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.

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"?

Top Tory says UK should not “pull the shutters down” on China

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 Trump-Johnson party turned sour

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

Johnson caught not wearing a seat-belt.

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.

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?

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.)

Boris Johnson's legacy is going up in smoke.

Did anyone notice his unwavering support for the WHO? He sent it a £55-million 'bonus' in April 2020 while our care homes were in debt for PPE. (Conveniently, the Russia TV page detailing that and other donations is now blocked.)
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

Bridgen joined hard-right Reclaim Party after being lent MILLIONS by party’s backer

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

Has anybody examined, was his lockdown done in a legal way? Of course, most will keep mum who received money-for-nothing furlough, but that's what "no tool" Johnson knew in the first place when he scoffed at the obvious strategy recommended to him by SAGE (see the second 50 secs of facebook.com/watch/?v=1392415111237527) Don't forget, he wrote to Dominic Cummings in April 2020 that Test, Trace and Treat was "whistling in the dark", "legions of imaginary Clouseaus" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/25/pm-said-test-and-trace-would-be-like-whistling-in-the-dark-says-cummings He quit school science at the age of 15 but could see straight through South Korea's nonsense?

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.)

Korean TTT was scoffed at because it wasn't the big gravy train that vaccine supply was guaranteed to provide.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/29/uk-ministers-asked-to-explain-fourth-delay-to-covid-wine-cellar-report?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1Dx-kWhL_cFcTaQinm63HX6XPF_ZKiOsIoQZxkCnNotKdMXXJuvuiKjrM#Echobox=1703860314

They had seven parties in Downing Street in December 2020. The year's death toll had reached 71,000 but fewer than 600 had died in S. Korea (which has 88% more people per square mile.) Of course, those who thought the world of Johnson's furlough project won't find that puzzling. Mongoose McQueen

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

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.

Remember how people were fined for inconsequential breaches of lockdown measures? e.g. fined for going to rural places for some fresh air and exercise. Recently on ITV 1, a series rerun showed a man getting a £4500 fine at Heathrow in 2021, for avoiding PCR tests. ("More than 100,000 fines have been issued since March 2020":: https://www.itv.com/watch/heathrow-britains-busiest-airport/2a3168/2a3168a0049)
While there were plenty of Covid-related fines at airports and elsewhere, Mr Johnson had made sure that there was no thermal screening at any border ports. He didn't want the legal headaches that might follow from trying to control people who were arriving in the UK with the most easily detected sign of Covid, a raised body temperature. (South Korea's first case was spotted on thermal screening at Incheon Airport. Without that screening, it would have been some time before there was 'official' confirmation that Covid-19 was spreading across borders. bit.ly/whofibs)
Having seen it all now on ITV 1+1.... the man who got the fine had neglected to arrange PCR testing which was a requirement because he'd visited a red-listed country. Government had made travellers pay £170 for their tests, 'to lessen the burden on the NHS'. He was ardently against making such payment, "to the Tories". Two police had marched over with power to issue fines of up to £10,000. (Did any other freedom-loving country inflict fines on that scale?)

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.)

Top warning today is that youngsters aren't keen to become lorry drivers any more and it will have serious impact on supply of goods. // Sturgeon and Devi Sridhar 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 and stop virus coming in through the Eurotunnel, so the only response they'd try was a lockdown.)

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

Mordaunt adulates Sunak: https://twitter.com/i/status/1750488054656065954

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.

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.)

1 Feb 2024 Yesterday, the BBC summed up how the British pandemic responses measured up against each other and against those of other countries. As always, they left out the best response in the world, judging by how much infection was faced at the start: South Korea's 'TTT'. (Devi Sridhar was obeying the BBC ban on talking about SK whenever she appeared on BBC Breakfast during lockdown. 'By coincidence', her chum Sturgeon said it in black and white: "There's no point looking at the pandemic strategies of other countries".)

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.

https://westenglandbylines.co.uk/opinion/the-hester-scandal-a-gaslight-too-far/?fbclid=IwAR0TF2hSLCKypsoQOeOLR4L6cuDYzfFpj26MSCVOk9Qo5QM85_I_MHOhXXk

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.)

https://www.facebook.com/ledbydonkeys/videos/1061935135107289

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': http://bit.ly/whofibs (S. Korea, with much fewer deaths and no general lockdown, actively guarded against profiteering from the pandemic.)

The Johnsons quite like China. It made its pandemic response even worse than the British lockdown and cared less for what that did to businesses. Of course, the negative effect of our lockdown on businesses conveniently masked what Brexit has done to them? Too bad for all the animals that were slaughtered because farmers couldn't get them to market. The WHO got more than £500-million extra taxpayer Pounds and it treated animals like dirt, accused them of transmitting MERS to people (in the "Middle East, Africa and southern Asia" all at the same time!) and then allowed the Danes to kill millions of mink without suggesting they first check whether humans can pass Covid-19 to them and also catch it from them..... (and they didn't tell the CCP to stop killing people's small pets either.)

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

sunak-under-pressure-to-grant-amnesty-to-unpaid-carers-fined

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.)

S. Korea, not far from Wuhan, took the difficult decision to prevent companies from making money on activities/products that helped it to contain the coronavirus. Our politicians simply quashed the stories of Taiwan and S. Korea. They fell in with Gates who, with three of his big-money buddies and control of the WHO, steered most countries on a 'simple' path: Lock down and wait for vaccine. The WHO was vulnerable because Trump had cut its funding, but also compromised by prolonged influence from the CCP.
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

"Research is too important to let politics get in the way"

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"

Also see: https://news.sky.com/story/johnson-denies-mocking-public-with-claim-they-avidly-craved-lockdown-rules-13229975

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)

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=885780653740129&set=a.582212050763659

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

Nurse fired for saying, "scamdemic"

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

Why is the Cabinet Office still trying to keep Rishi Sunak’s investments under wraps?

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)

Similar people (to Musk) caused most countries to abandon their chance to copy Taiwan and S. Korea in 2020. The trace-and-test strategy just wasn't a money spinner of anywhere near the same proportion that vaccine was, so it was cast aside by Gates and the WHO, and at least nine other people became billionaires overnight: whofibs.blogspot.com UK leaders knew that they were rejecting the way to make lockdowns avoidable, so they injected narrative to make it seem that Britain did have a "test and trace" operation.

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).

Click/tap to see full screen. (Then click in the top-right corner to return here)

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 eight 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.

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

9.1B: Nature of the Virion - Biology LibreTexts