The schoolmarms at PolitiFact want you to know that evil scientists are not actually engineering “Disease X” in an effort to stage Plandemic 2.0. Yes, untold hundreds or even thousands of virologists may be tinkering with virus genomes to enhance them for human hosts; and yes, still more of them may be plotting their response to this (entirely hypothetical!) “Disease X” once it begins infecting humans. But, nobody is engineering a specific pathogen for the direct purpose of imposing another public health hygiene dictatorship on the world.
Whether you find that comforting depends on whether you think the manifold distributed nuclear-grade idiocy of our global technocratic class is likely to be a greater or a lesser threat than hypothetical genocidal scientists scheming deviously in a lab somewhere. I have seen enough to make up my own mind. One of these threats, after all, has already declared a global pandemic and magnified the harm caused by their lacklustre pathogen via lockdowns and the coerced vaccination of billions; the other remains confined to imaginary science fiction scenarios and (strangely) the pandemicists’ own fever-dream tabletop exercises. I guess it is not deranged right-wing conspiracising when our betters contemplate bioterrorism scenarios for fundraising purposes, but should you take their own fantasies at all seriously, that is a step too far.
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The World Economic Forum like to flirt with their critics by cultivating a self-aggrandising Bond-villain rhetoric with just enough plausible deniability for the fact-checkers. Accordingly, they held a monumentally dumb panel discussion yesterday on “Preparing for Disease X.” Naturally, none of our preparers had any significant epidemiological qualifications. The discussion was chaired by a pinched humourless woman named Nancy Brown, who is CEO of that eminent pandemic preparedness centre known as the American Heart Association. Over the course 50 minutes she spoke with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (who is at least an immunologist), Brazilian Health Minister and social scientist Nísia Trinidade, AstraZeneca chairman Michel Demaré, and healthcare executives Roy Jakobs and Preetha Reddy.
These are the people eagerly plotting all the public-private partnerships, developmental pathways, strategic collaborations, equity initiatives, data sharing projects and viral surveillance programmes that will be necessary to stage the next virological circus, and for this episode of eugyppius-watches-so-you-don’t-have-to, I’ve let their vague and platitudinous verbiage wash over my brain for the past hour.
The panel opens with the definite article-challenged ramblings of Shyam Bishen, a former Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation functionary who presently heads the WEF Centre for Health and Healthcare.
He stands awkwardly to the left of the stage, sporting a plaid tie and clinging for dear life to his wireless microphone:
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We have a catchy title, but what’s behind it, is basically how do we prepare for next emergency? How do we prepare our health system overall for next pandemic? We all know very well there will be viruses, there will be pathogens, there will be outbreaks. The idea is how do we prepare to contain those. How do we prepare outbreaks from becoming full-blown pandemics?
How indeed. Bishen and his crack team of pandemic preventers have been doing a lot of fundraising and self-promotion preventive work. For example, they have put together an “initiative” called the “Partnership for Health Systems Sustainability and Resilience.” This is not just about pandemics, Bishen tells us. It is also about climate change, it is about an alleged “increasing number of diseases” and it is about “vaccine equity.” It would surely be about even more things if Bishen only had more time to speak.
Eventually he shuts up and the faintly cross-eyed Brown picks up her own microphone. By some obscure regulation, 10% of all the words uttered by everybody at every WEF event must be spent on mutual congratulation, and so Brown first wants us to know that she has the “highest regard” for Bishen’s Centre.
