by Iain Davis
For the official fact checker Full Fact a statement from the organisers [10] that they did not make any predictions, despite the fact that they clearly made many, was enough for them to establish the fact that Event 201 was a coincidence of the "nothing to see here" variety. This is because fact checkers, like Full Fact, are GPPP PR agents whose roll is to defend the approved single version of the truth.
That being said, Event 201 was by no means the first simulation or exercise to model a global pandemic. It was the last in a long line that preceded the pseudopandemic, eventually one of them would occur close to a real world event. In terms of timing, or even scenario design, simple coincidence was at least plausible, if unlikely.
However, the event organisers (including the WEF and BMGF) named their training simulation based upon the estimated 200 annual epidemic events globally, with each of these theoretically capable of becoming pandemics. Hence 200 epidemic events leading to 1 pandemic - Event 201. The naming convention for Event 201 was founded in the idea that the next epidemic event would be a global pandemic.
The next epidemic event, after Event 201, was the pseudopandemic. This was a truly incredible coincidence. Barely plausible in fact.
Equally, with that many claimed epidemic events allegedly occurring every year, the scope for future global responses to public health emergencies is practically boundless. Any one of them can be picked at any time to be declared as Pandemic II by the WHO. This is the new normal UKHSA, among others around the world, envisage.
The gathered participants and organisers of Event 201 were able to predict, in considerable detail, not only the policy response of governments but also the reports from the world's "free and independent media." Many of the phrases we became familiar with, such as "new normal," were used in Event 201. It accurately predicted the public and social media response, our behaviour, the nature of public debates and the form of the popularised infodemic.
They used simulations of news reports which, had you stumbled across them unknowingly, you would assume were real news broadcasts aired during the pseudopandemic. Their predictions regarding Trusted News cartel reports of the pseudopandemic were unerringly accurate. You could believe that this indicates the amazing power of their modelling, or you might think it suggests foreknowledge and media control.
The Event 201 players were presented with background information on the nature of the real world threat necessitating the training. Dr Mike Ryan, the Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, read a script which stated:
"Without question epidemic threats have become a global strategic concern. I don't think we have ever been in a situation where we have had to respond to so many health emergencies at once. This is a new normal. I don't expect the frequency of these epidemics to reduce and, in fact, vulnerabilities all over the world in developing and developed countries have increased, not decreased.. Mainly through human behaviour, economic development population density and many others. The scenario you will be presented with this morning could easily become one shared reality one day. I fully expect we will be confronted with a fast moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen... The nature of a pandemic is that many countries will be affected at the same time. This is particularly true of a respiratory pathogen, as they are often spread by asymptomatic persons. They spread fast. In 2009 the pandemic virus reached all continents in less than nine weeks."
This narrative, delivered by Ryan, was not based upon any evidence but it did lay out the central themes of the pseudopandemic. A fast moving respiratory disease spread by the asymptomatic was the fundamental pseudopandemic story which drove the global policy response. We might ask who wrote this script and why Dr Ryan agreed to read it to the gathered thought leaders.
As socio-economic development in India, China, Kenya and nearly every other country around the world clearly demonstrated, the world was not facing an increasing number of health emergencies. Globally, health outcomes had improved, not deteriorated, throughout the latter half of the 20th and into the first decade of the 21st century. Shared knowledge (human behaviour), economic development and population growth had helped us to achieve these improvements. Yet Ryan identified these factors as the primary cause of alleged health threats which did not exist as he described.
Clearly the 2009 pandemic did not happen, despite the assertion from the Executive Director of the WHO. It is a story and there is no objective reason to believe it. Ryan's presentation described a potential threat, but that neither transpired in 2009 nor materialised in 2020. This was the nature of the pseudopandemic that was named as Event 201 one month before the first cases were discovered and five months before the WHO would formerly declare it.
It seems Ryan's statement may have been based upon the report by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (formed by the WHO and the World Bank) called A World At Risk [11] (AWAR). Published in September 2019, a few weeks before Event 201, this identified what it classed as disease amplifiers of which the leading two were population growth and climate change. Given that the report was led by population control zealot Gro Harlem Brundtland, this was no surprise.
The AWAR report claimed that 1483 such events occurred between 2011 and 2018. This appears to be Event 201's alleged 200 annual epidemic events. Among these "events" were SARS, MERS, Ebola and Marburg virus but the vast majority comprised of quite normal illnesses, such as flu, measles and adenovirus.
If every disease which commonly ails humanity is labelled as an epidemic event, then there is virtually no limit to how many epidemics and pandemics you can declare. This spurious claim enabled Ryan to list an ever expanding number of global health emergencies while completely ignoring the undoubted improvements in global public health.
The AWAR report suggested some progress indicators to assess how close we were all getting to global health governance. By September 2020 they wished to see completion of the following:
"The United Nations (including WHO) conducts at least two system-wide training and simulation exercises, including one for covering the deliberate release of a lethal respiratory pathogen... the United Nations convenes a high-level dialogue with health, security and foreign affairs officials to determine how the world can address the threat of a lethal respiratory pathogen pandemic"
Much of the pseudopandemic was a simulation based upon the fabricated scale of a threat. The global coordination of the policy response was a system-wide training opportunity covering an allegedly lethal respiratory pathogen. The pseudopandemic was an exact fit for the WHO's and the World Bank's training objectives and met their progress indicators perfectly. If the "Wuhan Flu" story sticks and the world then needs to respond to the "deliberate release of a lethal respiratory pathogen" then all of the AWAR boxes will have been ticked.
Another 2019 exercise with many parallels to the pseudopandemic was Crimson Contagion [12]. This US exercise conducted in 2019 by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) envisaged an influenza pandemic that began in China. Like Event 201 this exercise involved all levels of government, private industry partners, and nongovernmental organizations (the GPPP.)
In May 2018 the John Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS), who partnered with the WEF and the BMGF to run Event 201, ran the Clade-X exercise [13] which simulated the release of a viral bioweapon by a terrorist group. It involved the HHS, DHS, CIA, the CDC and leading political figures. Despite the prevailing epidemiological advice that mass quarantine would be counterproductive, Clade-X envisaged the use of presidential executive orders to create a system of federal quarantines (lockdowns).
It modelled the use of the national guard and the US Marshals Service to potentially use force to maintain the quarantine (medical martial law.) Many of those infected were envisioned to have mild illness but were still contagious and needed to be contained. They were, to all intents and purposes, asymptomatic carriers.
One of the scenario designers for the Clade-X exercise was Thomas Inglesby, who had risen to become director of the JHCHS for Event 201. Ingelsby worked on Clade X with fellow JHCHS faculty member Tara O'Toole [14]. Coincidentally both Ingelsby and O'Toole ran another exercise that occurred just before a major global event that would mirror their scenario.
The Dark Winter exercise [15] held at Andrews US Air-force Base in June 2001, occurred a few months before the 9/11 attacks. An often overlooked supposed component of the 9/11 attacks, initially reported to be part of the same alleged al Qaeda offensive [16], were the anthrax attacks that began just one week after 9/11. Twenty two people were infected and five died.
The attacks were not conducted by al Qaeda who did not obtain the anthrax spores from the Iraqi government, as widely reported at the time. Though he protested his innocence, the man eventually accused of the crime was Bruce E. Ivins who was a top anthrax researcher at the US government's biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick. Unfortunately, he allegedly committed suicide the night before he was due to be charged.
The Dark Winter scenario closely paralleled the original media reports of the anthrax attacks. It suggested that a weaponised form of smallpox was released by bad state actors and in particular Iraq. Further, it envisaged that Osama Bin Laden was involved. The scenario read:
"Any well-funded terrorist organization that had access to these one or more of these scientists and cultures of smallpox virus would have the capability to launch this attack."
What is notable is that the scenario designed by, among others, Inglesby and O'Toole, corresponded to the initial erroneous reporting of the subsequent anthrax attacks. It did not match the reality, as subsequent FBI investigations would reveal.
Nearly two decades later, with Event 201, Inglesby would once again be a major contributor to a scenario that precisely matched the subsequent Trusted News cartel reporting of a major geopolitical event but not the reality. Inglesby seems to be among those able to predict how an event will be inaccurately reported by the free and independent media.
Dark Winter pictured the possible use of forced inoculation, state and national lockdowns (quarantines), travel restrictions, contact tracing, social distancing and ultimately the imposition of Martial Rule. It imagined:
"Prohibition of free assembly, national travel ban, quarantine of certain areas, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus [ie, arrest without due process], and/or military trials in the event that the court system becomes dysfunctional."
In their training simulations the JHCHS use a fictitious global media outlet called the Global News Network (GNN) to predict media reports. In style and presentation they appear to be a facsimile of CNN. Both Dark Winter and Event 201 were concerned with dangerous disinformation and misinformation as defined by Inglesby and others.
In Event 201 the fictitious GNN heard from social media and communication experts, one being the fictional character Kevin McAleese. This character reported:
"To me it is clear countries need to make strong efforts to manage both dis' and misinformation. We know social media companies are working around the clock to combat these disinformation campaigns. The task of identifying every bad actor is immense and experts agree that new disinformation campaigns are being generated every day. This is a huge problem that is going to keep us from ending the pandemic and might even lead to the fall of governments... If the solution means controlling and reducing access to information I think it's the right choice."
We need to ask what the purpose of these training events are. They do not appear to be designed to give the trainees a realistic world view. They seem designed to either guide them towards a set of desired policies or justify the policies they already intend to implement.
The information presented as "fact based" fiction by Kevin was dezinformatsiya. It was deliberately misleading and was clearly intended to influence. The gathered thought leaders were being told that people who asked questions were "bad," that questions constituted a threat to government itself and in order to protect allegedly democratic governments the freedom of speech and expression they are supposedly based upon should be destroyed.
If anything typified the pseudopandemic it was the creation of fake narratives, justifying planned policies to achieve predetermined objectives. Another notable element has been the insistence that people should not think critically but instead should trust whatever the State franchise and officially approved media tell them. Reaffirming these pillars of the subsequent pseudopandemic appears to have been common to Event 201, Dark Winter, Crimson Contagion, Clade-X and the many other similar training events that the GPPP engaged in over the years.
During the pseudopandemic a truly independent news media was trying to report the scientific evidence and statistical data, often directly from official State franchise sources. People who were interested in this data, scientific and medical evidence had no option but to access it either through news media reports or their own independent research. There was no alternative because the Trusted News cartel consistently obfuscated, spun, distorted or simply ignored any information which questioned the official scenario.
Not only have these training exercises frequently been based upon literal fake news and questionable scientific assumptions, they have invariably concluded that the only way to combat a pandemic is the increased centralisation of compartmentalised, authoritarian power. Wherever we look the answer is always the same. The stakeholder partners must have more power, governance must be centralised and dissent must be crushed.
For example, in 2007 Exercise Winter Willow [17] modelled the UK's response to an influenza pandemic. Run by the Cabinet Office and the Health Protection Agency (later subsumed by the Department of Health), it involved some 5000 participants. Winter Willow highlighted the need for uniform messaging and one of the recommendations that sprang from it was to work more closely with the mainstream media:
"The Department of Health and the Cabinet Office will continue to work with media representatives to assist in developing a better public understanding of pandemic risk and.. will develop protocols for the effective sharing of national communication messages"
Winter Willow contributed towards the eventual formation of SAGE which centralised scientific authority during the pseudopandemic. The report stated:
"A science colloquium was held in April.. endorsed by the Department of Health Scientific Advisory Group (SAG).. Work is underway to clarify the role of both the SAG and the UK National Influenza Pandemic Committee during a pandemic flu outbreak."
In 2016 the UK State franchise ran Exercise Cygnus. The scenario was prepared by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London (ICL). It simulated a flu outbreak and was a Command Post Exercise (CPX) designed to test the UK’s pandemic preparedness. Nearly a thousand key officials took part from central and local government departments, the NHS, public health bodies from across UK, as well as local emergency response planners.
Some of the Cygnus Report [18] recommendations were implemented during the pseudopandemic. For example, it recommended legislative easements. The pseudopandemic saw the easing of legislation around the death registration process. Health care providers were freed from the need to make ongoing care assessments and the rules on hospital discharge were loosened. The procedures for inquests, post-mortems and cremations were also relaxed.
Cygnus recommended working with stakeholder partners (pharmaceutical corporations) to develop vaccines and antiviral treatments. It also suggested developing the "surge" capacity which saw UKHSA surge into COVID 19 hotspots. It suggested messaging should be centrally coordinated and all "stakeholders" should be involved. It identified a lack of trust as a potential problem and recognised that "confused" messaging could lead some to think there was some sort of conspiracy.
Exercise Cygnus also highlighted a number of deficiencies [19]. It identified inadequate numbers of critical and acute care beds, which the State franchise then reduced further duri
ng the pseudopandemic; it warned that whole sections of the NHS may have to be shut, which is exactly what the State franchise did; it highlighted that the most vulnerable could be denied care, just as they were, and that the health service would have to be set on a war footing just to be able to cope.
These were warnings not policy suggestions. Yet this all came to pass a few years later.
The consequences of not addressing these shortcomings were increased mortality not less. The State franchise adoption of some of the Cygnus recommendations and failure to address Gygnus alarms appears to have been the UK pseudopandemic policy.
The UK State franchise seemingly cherry picked the elements of Cygnus that would allow it maximum latitude, especially in terms of monitoring and reporting mortality. It took up the recommendation to focus upon messaging and information control and to work with stakeholder partners on vaccine development, but ignored everything else. At the same time, it exacerbated hospital and care shortages, further eroded equipment supply chains, crippled every aspect of the health service other than the COVID 19 response and exposed the most vulnerable to the maximum possible risk.
It is as if it used Cygnus as a template to forward its agenda by causing as much systemic chaos as it could. The policy outline of the pseudopandemic response seems to have been set in 2016. The scenario modelled by Ferguson and ICL differed from the pseudopandemic only by virtue of the 2016 model being based upon influenza while the 2020 model was based upon a coronavirus.
That both Cygnus and the pseudopandemic were modelled by Ferguson and ICL and were essentially identical, that both models were largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), and that the BMGF were also advising the UK state franchise on how to respond to the pseudopandemic while simultaneously acting as a major driver for mass vaccination, as highlighted by Cygnus, is an incalculable coincidence.
