The COVID response was an epic disaster that should have inspired humility and rethinking on public health, but instead, our leaders care only for power and money at any cost. The next step would be to see if there are any places where matters went rather well, and Sweden comes first to mind. The educational losses were non-existent because they didn’t close schools. In general, life went on as normal and with very good results.
One might suppose the Swedish way would be vindicated. Sadly, our leaders care nothing for evidence, apparently. Their concern is for power and money at any cost. As a result, we are witnessing a concerted effort not only to double down on errors the next time but make them even worse.
Leveraging his privileged place at the New York Times, Gates is agitating once again for a Global Health Emergency Corps, ensconced at the World Health Organization and managed by the same people who created the pandemic response this time around. In other words, it would be the core of the global government pushing more lockdowns for the world—lockdowns to wait for another round of vaccines.
If you can believe it, he has learned nothing from the last mess that he created. Indeed, he is completely shameless about it. In his view, the only problem is that we didn’t lock down fast enough, get vaccines out fast enough, and conduct enough research ahead of time to craft the perfect vaccine. And yes, this necessarily requires gain-of-function research.
In other words, in Gates’s view, we need to have research continue to fiddle around in labs with tricks that anticipate pathogens of the future, thus again raising the risk of lab leaks that then necessitate fixes that can only be produced and distributed by the pharmaceutical companies in which he has such heavy investments.
As a result, we have this hellish loop in play: gain-of-function research to anticipate the next pathogen by creating it and thus risking a lab leak that releases the pathogen that then has to be fixed by the vaccines themselves but the world has to lock down until they can be put into billions of arms.
And keep in mind that Gates isn’t just another guy writing an op-ed. He is the de facto owner of the World Health Organization himself, so his push for a permanent pandemic bureaucracy carries a lot of weight. His dream bureaucracy would override national sovereignty to make sure that never again would there be another Sweden.
“It’s difficult for any one country to stop a disease from spreading on its own,” he writes “Many of the most meaningful actions require coordination from the highest levels of government.”
The model is always the same and it is taken from the world of computer science. There is a clean hard drive, analogized to the human body or whole societies. They are working fine but then an exogenous threat comes along in the form of malware. In order to defeat it, we need software that is updated. You clearly should not turn on your computer until you can get the hard drive cleaned up.
I’m serious here: Gates’s understanding of viruses is no more sophisticated than that. He has learned absolutely nothing in years. He is still repeating the ridiculous lines from his TED Talks from years ago.
In reality, this has nothing to do with biological viruses, which we evolved to manage through the immune system, a concept that is entirely lost on him. He finds it inconceivable that the best strategy for healthy people is to meet the virus and train the immune system.
