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Following my earlier thoughts about Event 201, in response to your comment, I had a dig around & came across what appears to be a promotional video released by the organisers.
For reasons that may resonate with points you made yourself, about how this ‘pandemic’ has been handled, I found the video interesting & thought to share it.
If you can force yourself through 10 minutes of painful viewing, perhaps it offers some clues to the disaster that was 2020:
YouTube (11m 45s) – Centre for Health Security: Event 201 Pandemic Exercise: Highlights Reel
“The dumbing down” of society is a trope that has often been rolled out, usually in relation to us Plebs, but what struck me watching this video was the idea of “the dumbing down” at the managerial level.
Watching the participants in the video put me in mind of people on a work’s training ‘do’ who, in the main, just wished they didn’t have to be there & were silently wondering what nibbles would be on offer during break time or if expenses covered the hotel mini bar, hoping they’d be allowed to go paint balling next year instead.
Barely able to look at one another in case they were asked to volunteer an opinion, let alone pretend to listen to what others had to say, a bit of hamming it up for the camera & some desperate attempts to string together some trendy buzzwords, gleaned during motivational brainstorming sessions in their respective offices beforehand.
It seemed almost impossible to imagine such a roomful could come up with a coherent thought between them if it hadn’t been suggested by someone who sounded vaguely ‘grown up’ and had a swanky PowerPoint presentation to hand, with lots of pictures & colourful graphs.
If that’s indicative of the calibre of people chosen & entrusted with managing a global crisis, it’s not hard to imagine that they would sign off on any slick & glossy brochure of action points, lobb(i)ed at them by the likes of competing profiteers & the ‘behind closed doors’ groups who stage managed such a dire bunch of talking heads to parade in front of the cameras.
It felt like watching a cross between “The Office” and “Independence Day”, more ‘low’ than ‘highlights’ and, whilst not quite as slick as the WEF’s ‘look at how happy you’ll be when you’ve got fk all & we own Everything’, equally dispiriting.
Clark,
I’ve not dug into this any further than the clip of his interview.
To me, it’s just another voice in the choir, talking about stuff I don’t really understand & cannot predict.What did seem unusual, was that he would seem to be about as pro vaccine as you can get, if his CV is as presented & he’s not gone senile (hard to tell with academics & doctors).
I really haven’t got an opinion on the veracity one way or another. As I’ve mentioned before, this stuff is so far above my pay grade or ability to confirm or deny that he may as well be talking Dutch.
What prompted me to share it was just how ‘dire’ it sounded and, as with anything, folk can pass it over or not, as they see fit.
If there’s any truth to it, it’s useful to know.
If it’s all a load of bogwash, thank the gods!Josh, I’ve got twelve seconds into the Event 201 video before encountering major cognitive dissonance:
– “It began in healthy looking pigs…”
No. They look like overcrowded, traumatised pigs with minimal natural diversity, in a barren, squalid and essentially industrial setting. If I was one of them, I wouldn’t be feeling healthy.
I’ll keep watching. Meanwhile, Geert Vanden Bossche’s letter. Reading it with “beginner’s mind”, who would you say it’s written for? Who’s his intended audience, and what response is it intended to evoke? Crucially, is it written for his peers, and if not, why not?
Two minutes fifteen seconds in; I feel like we’ve asked for a tool to help change a fuse, and someone has helpfully offered a lawnmower.
I did an “exercise” like this in my first year of uni. Much lower budget though. “Someone’s developed a quark bomb the size of a briefcase, a hundred times more powerful than an H bomb. It has fallen into hands unknown, but they’re making demands. We all take roles; government, business leaders etc. What should be done?” Got bored and skived off to smoke weed with my friends.
Oh dear. Now they’re all talking about problems with money.
And herein lies the problem. Everyone – governments, businesses, populations – all human behaviour is enslaved to money, yet it’s the one thing in all of this that has no existence beyond human imagination.
Overall, well done John Hopkins Uni; not bad, considering. They pitched a pretty good scenario at the talking heads, who in turn correctly identified that organisation being dependent upon money is a major problem.
Thankfully, actual events are turning out much less bad than that. The world is on course for about four or five million deaths after eighteen months rather the than sixty-five million of the scenario. You can see what’s happened here at Worldometers, click the “logarithmic” buttons on the “Daily New Cases” and “Daily Deaths” graphs near the top of the page to get the “Total Cases” and “Total Deaths” graphs. Infection didn’t continue to increase exponentially, which would be a straight rising line on these graphs (note the increments on the vertical axis); in the second half of April 2020 the Total Cases lane starts to bend towards levelling off, and at about the start of May the Total Deaths line clearly turns a corner.
Societal behaviour achieved this.
Bloody ‘ell!
I only read through that letter as a courtesy to yourself & the 2 (!) comments asking my opinion, but I think I would have been happier to have paid no more attention to this fella than simply having watched the short video I posted earlier.
I know that probably sounds ignorant, but I am a little further removed from the immediacy of all this than yourselves and quite enjoy not being on the Corona merri-go-round, wherever possible. This thread is the only time I’ve bothered having the conversation & that’s turned into a great long saga!
Clarke – “who would you say it’s written for? Who’s his intended audience,”
GVB – “As a scientist I do not usually appeal to any platform of this kind…(this letter being) an exception”
I only followed the link left by ET so I don’t know what “platform of this kind” he’s referring to or who that specific audience might be.
Clarke – “Crucially, is it written for his peers, and if not, why not?”
Absolutely not written for his professional peers, I think he’s quite clear about that.
GVB – “For those who are not experts in this field, I am attaching below a more accessible and comprehensible version of the science”
It’s obviously written for the likes of everyday folk (like me!) & people in policy/decision making positions?….I feel like I’m taking a comprehension test 🙂
He’s also quite clear about the more science’y stuff you’re looking for. A paper to be published later, but a summary on LinkedIn (which could possibly be more technical) & analysis having been sent to the WHO which would, no doubt, be more in depth.
GVB – “I am completing my scientific manuscript, the publication of which is, unfortunately, likely to come too late”
GVB – “…a summary of my findings…on LinkedIn”
GVB – “I provided international health organizations, including the WHO, with my analysis….based on scientifically informed insights”
Clarke – “and what response is it intended to evoke?”
Well, I only just skimmed through the “more accessible” bit (it’s late & I can’t be arsed with it all just now). But when I saw the words “bioweapon of mass destruction”, the first response that sprang to mind was “sh!t meself!!” :-)))
But, I think Bossche put it a bit more intelligently, as follows:
GVB – “So, there is not one second left for gears to be switched and to replace the current killer vaccines by life-saving vaccines.”
The fact that he’d “urged (The international health organisations) to consider (his) concerns and to initiate a debate” seemed quite reasonable, given what’s on his mind.
Overall, I think I’ll side with you on this one and, personally, I’ll just write him off as a crack pot for the time being, until I hear otherwise or come across corroborating reports from sources I’m more familiar with.
The alternative is that this is going to be a flippin’ lonely planet, even if he’s only half right. Ignorance/cognitive dissonance can be bliss sometimes :-)))
Sorry, let me be more serious for a moment. Scientists spend their entire careers exploring various possibilities & arguing the toss over what is & what isn’t, so I’m not heading for the hills just yet.
I’ve not seen anyone else I’m familiar with going on about this and, as I’m sure you’ll be the first to agree, there’s a lot of hysterical rubbish out there.
Admittedly, apart from Craig’s site, I only trawl through the online once a week, for a couple of days, and I wasn’t due to have a browse till tomorrow so maybe there’s a conversation being had that I haven’t yet read.
But to be honest, after a stupid number of hours spent churning out a ridiculous volume of “spittle-flecked” “blather” over the past few days, I’m inclined to extend my absence from the digital world a few more days, CM blog included.
Beach, coffee shops, bicycle rides & general pottering are calling me. Hopefully when I next click on, Bossche will have calmed down a bit.@josh R
I have enjoyed your contributions. Don’t stay away too long and enjoy your pottering.Josh, yes, it’s written for non-specialists – at the start, but then it gets too specialised for such an audience, and he directs us to a lot more material on his own website.
Remember that non-specialists includes the majority of politicians, and he specifically addresses it to them. It starts out superficially plausible with its analogy to antibiotic resistance, but rapidly escalates to over their heads making specialised claims about which parts of the human immune system do what in which order.
So how would politicians respond? By turning to their scientific advisers, of course, who would turn to the leaders in immunology at the universities. So he should have presented all this in the scientific / immunology literature in the first place, because that’s the regular forum for issues like this to be debated and tested. And it isn’t like he hasn’t had time; talk of developing vaccines for a mass immunisation programme started over a year ago, and nothing Bossche mentions is a development since then. So he should have been writing letters and presenting papers to the major scientific / immunology journals warning of this potential catastrophe for over a year.
Instead he’s presenting directly to the public right as the vaccination programme is scaling up.
I think he’s hoping for money; either a bribe to shut up (which could come from governments or the pharmaceutical industry), or some of the action in the form of his company / companies getting contracts in development and manufacturing. Note that his background is veterinarian, and he warns about animal reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2. Maybe he’s hoping to vaccinate all the mink farms.
Seen this before, in fact it’s a pattern. His background is actual scientific work, but most of his career development has been business, developing companies. An academic he is not. He and his argument remind me a lot of the UK’s very own Mike Yeadon, and more broadly he falls into the ‘professor’ Patrick Holford category, a pill salesman who progressed to pill manufacturer, who went on to buy himself an honorary professorship and used it to boost his company’s pill sales.
Sorry to be so heavy about this but we’ve all been touched by fear, death and protracted lockdown over here, and I don’t mean from the media, it’s personal. Two at my Quaker meeting have died (I’m an atheist attender), a friend employed at a care home recovered but his colleague died, a couple of close friends in their 70s had it, one was almost symptomless but the other needed oxygen support in hospital for a while, etc., I can’t even remember all the various incidents over the last year. And I’d choose your two months of early lockdown over our five months or more of late ones, no question.
What I found interesting about the event 201 video was how despite running such an exercise none of the lessons were applied. That is presumably because there is no overall structure to run such an emergency which can overrule individual nations. For example the WHO is a very cautious body that is beholden to the donors and dare not upset them. They also cannot take any decisions or any advice against what is perceived as economic interest. Also it seems that in this exercise everyone seems to be turning to private big pharma to come up with the goods.
The only way this pandemic could be dealt with effectively is through a coordinated effort following simple well tried measures, stop spread by limiting people’s movement inside countries from infected areas, and internationally, testing and tracing and strict isolation of all suspects and take adequate contact precautions. It would involve governements everywhere to commandeer resources and hand over the actual clinical decisions to public health officials and other experts, not to sit down pontificating with mathematical models.
This is what I wrote to my MP in March last year:“The government is proposing to give businesses and self employed and those on zero hour contract support during this crisis which is highly commendable. Would it not be possible to give this help a positive twist so that the recipients are actually involved and committed? This can be done by way of requisitioning both workers and premises. Of course details need to be worked out, but currently the majority of the nation seems to be asked to sit at home helplessly whilst a minority are bearing the burden in carrying out essential services. The government and local councils can use this to for example do the following:
- Requisition resources to organise transport safely for NHS and other essential workers.
- Requisition resources to help the food industry to arrange and expand home food deliveries.
- Organise locally a system of volunteers to ensure that the vulnerable are cared for.
- Organise queues at places such as supermarkets.
I am sure there are other activities but this is just a blueprint.”
This sort of requisitioning is done during wars and essential for cohesiveness and support for all. Instead the government relying on market capitalist principles can only try and sort the problem by market means, with the inexperienced private sector being handed over the bulk of the contracts and action.
Things getting a little fraught in Ireland. It’s bizarre. What difference does it make what nationality people are if your purpose is to reduce the risk of importing the virus.
“There are further fears about an impact on the Common Travel Area, given it has been proposed that the Isle of Man be included in the list of high-risk countries.”
Despite its fairly comprehensive border closure and quarantine rules the IOM is battling an outbreak thought to be linked to ferry staff, having had no cases from May 2020 to end of December 2020.
ET, I’ve been watching the graphs for the Isle of Man. I see there were eight cases on 29 March, but that was a sporadic day in a falling curve; the average is falling decisively, and I’m hoping it’ll be back to zero within days.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/isle-of-man/
Yeah Clark, things are improving and hopefully we’ll have zero cases soon.
Here is the IOM’s own dashboard.Worth noting the 2011 and 2012 spike in excess deaths at care homes, especially in relation to the so called “Liverpool Care Pathway” (which appears to have functioned as a little more than a tool of the eugenics crowd.) I did hear anecdotal accounts of elderly patients “changing” their will shortly before an untimely death.
For care homes themselves, changes to funding and an assortment of rule changes served to cause night time staff to be less numerous and therefore more overworked with far fewer supervised toilet visits, causing them to force draconian restriction of fluids in order to minimise bed wetting, in turn causing droves of elders to die from nothing more than dehydration. But there too, the rules for reporting and declaring deaths were finessed and/or changed, such deaths often explained as ‘overheating’ and ‘flu’. Meanwhile Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards or DoLS could be used to deny access between family and patients (from both directions) on the say so of private medical staff or friendly magistrates, which in certain circumstances could even result in an individual indefinitely detained without trial or any kind of transparent process. It all sounds wild doesn’t it?
However, far less wild than many of the provisions within the Emergency Coronavirus Bill 2020, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill 2020 and the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill 2021. The former we should note, once again, substantially altered the process for the reporting of deaths and cause of death.
