The top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation, says European Commission president
By Kevin Stocklin
Global organizations are working to build a permanent, globally-controlled state of readiness for the coming of the heralded “Disease X.”
Speaking at a World Economic Forum (WEF) seminar called “Preparing for Disease X,” World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that in 2018 his organization “needed to have a placeholder for the disease we don’t know.
“And that was when we gave the name Disease X,” he said on Jan. 17. “We were preparing for Covid-like diseases, and you may even call Covid the first Disease X.”
Since then, global organizations such as the WHO, the WEF, the World Bank, the G7, and the G20 have been working to build a global infrastructure to fight the next pandemic, in whatever form it takes.
The ‘100 Days Mission’
To cope with the spread of such viruses, the Norway-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was created at the WEF’s 2017 Davos summit as a self-described “global partnership between public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organizations.”
In 2022, CEPI partnered with McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy, to produce its “100 Days Mission” for accelerating vaccine production.
According to this report, it took between 326 and 706 days “from the day the COVID-19 sequence was made available until emergency use authorization by a stringent regulatory authority or issuance of an Emergency Use Listing by the World Health Organization.”
CEPI’s plan would make vaccines available within 100 days, during which time “non-pharmaceutical interventions” would be employed to slow the disease’s spread.
During COVID-19, non-pharmaceutical interventions included testing, contact tracing, social distancing, surveillance, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and bans on gathering for family events or church services.
In the 100-day plan, scientists would accelerate the timeline by leveraging technology from existing vaccines, “combining different trial phases into one trial to accelerate enrollment,” and “deploying platform trials, such as “WHO’s Solidarity,” in which hundreds of hospitals in dozens of countries collaborate to assess the vaccine’s risks and benefits.
Then, companies and government agencies would rapidly manufacture the first batch of experimental vaccines for human use.
Before Disease X arrives, the global community must establish rapid response platforms and build vaccine libraries, CEPI states.
Once X arrives, the focus would switch from prototype vaccines to rapid production of “pathogen-specific” treatments. From there, officials would distribute the vaccine to populations and evaluate its effects.
The report’s authors state that “we acknowledge that enabling the 100-day aspiration would come with a number of risks which would need to be extensively evaluated in advance of a pandemic, and the goal should be pursued only if the right safeguards … are put in place.”
A facility based at Porton Down in the UK is being set up to support the 100 Day Mission, called the Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre. It’s a high-security installation formerly known for producing chemical weapons and it will employ more than 200 scientists.
In addition to developing vaccines against threats like the H5N1 avian influenza virus, the Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre will also work on pharmaceuticals for Lassa Fever, Nipah, and Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever, a tick-borne virus. Many of these diseases are on the WHO’s list of pathogens that could cause a future pandemic.
Centralizing Authority
In addition to injecting a myriad of new vaccines into populations, another major area of planning for Disease X is the drive to centralize the response to pandemics within the WHO.
Currently circulating among the WHO’s 194 member nations is the so-called “zero draft” of the WHO Pandemic Accord and amendments to the existing International Health Regulations, which the organization hopes will be signed in May.
The focus of the accord and amendments is to centralize coordination of supply chains under the WHO’s direction, to share information about diseases and treatments among members, to ensure “equity” of health care among all nations, and to create a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach” to pandemic response within member countries.
The WEF, the WHO, and other global leaders are worried that, in a time of crisis, people can be misled by incorrect ideas.
“The top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Davos attendees.
Following that mantra, the WEF released its Global Risks Report 2024, in which the organization surveyed 1,490 global risk experts, who agreed that misinformation is a “most severe global risk.”
“One of the big things we’re seeing this year that wasn’t there last time is the risk of misinformation and disinformation,” Gayle Markovitz, WEF’s lead editor, stated on a Radio Davos interview with the authors of the report.
“We thought the internet would democratize information and bring transparency to the world, but pretty much the opposite has happened,” Peter Giger, chief risk officer at Zurich insurance and one of the report’s authors, said.
“People basically live in their bubbles and don’t even recognize what’s happening outside.”
The WHO also considers misinformation a threat that must be “tackled.”
Its draft accord states that member nations will “conduct regular social listening and analysis to identify the prevalence and profiles of misinformation.”
Mistrusting ’the Science’
This global effort to control narratives comes at a time when many people distrust what has become known as “the science,” as well as official narratives about what’s good for them. During COVID-19, people were misled regarding information about the efficacy of masks and the benefits of closing schools, while many refused to take the vaccines that were offered.
They were assured, falsely, that the “safe and effective” Covid vaccines would prevent the spread of the virus, and many people were forced to choose by the Biden administration between keeping their job or taking the vaccine, regardless of their risks from the virus. Children in states such as California were forced to take the vaccine in order to attend school, despite the near-zero risk of serious illness from COVID-19 for children.
The economic, physical, and psychological harm from lockdowns as well as business and school closures, is still being felt, long after officials abandoned those policies.
Poorly-constructed models from organizations such as the Imperial College of London dramatically inflated the number of projected deaths from COVID-19, sparking terror through compliant populations.
In Canada, truck drivers who protested the government’s Covid restrictions had their bank accounts and credit cards frozen and their insurance suspended in what proved to be an effective collaboration between government and private companies.
Sweden’s lead public health official Dr. Anders Tegnell described this period as “a world gone mad.”
Today, numerous scientists are now charging that the mainstream media and academic publishers are ignoring or censoring reports that criticize lockdowns, while publicizing reports that praise lockdowns and suggest they should be a standard component of pandemic response.
Doctors are also feeling the pressure to get on board. In August 2022, California passed a law to punish doctors who spread “misinformation” that was critical of Covid vaccines. The law was blocked by a federal judge in January 2023, as an infringement on the freedom of speech.
Physician Meryl Nass, an outspoken critic of efforts like the WHO pandemic accord, says her license to practice medicine in her home state of Maine was suspended as the result of her disobeying state Covid mandates.
She describes the efforts by global and local health officials to assume authority in the name of fighting diseases as “a soft coup.”
“They have to maintain control of the narrative; they will not be able to succeed without that,” Dr. Nass told The Epoch Times. “And one part of controlling the narrative was controlling the doctor narrative, the medical narrative.”
Silencing Dissent
Nonetheless, the WEF warns that if misinformation and disinformation are not brought under control, censorship could become the norm.
“In response to mis- and dis-information, governments could be increasingly empowered to control information based on what they determine to be ‘true,’” the WEF report states.
“Freedoms relating to the internet, press, and access to wider sources of information that are already in decline risk descending into broader repression of information flows across a wider set of countries.”
To underscore this point, plaintiffs in the case of Missouri v. Biden, currently under appeal before the Supreme Court, allege that the Biden administration pressured social media companies to censor posts that went against the government narrative about Covid origins, vaccines, and political issues.
A district court judge ruled in September 2023 that the plaintiffs were correct and that the Biden administration’s efforts to censor Americans was “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” and that the Biden administration has “blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
While the WEF’s report characterized censorship as a risk and a concern, some governments and corporations appear to view it as a remedy. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have faced numerous allegations of pandemic-related, as well as political, censorship.
In early January, the SEC green-lighted a proposal from Apple shareholders demanding that Apple clarify its policies for removing conservative and religious apps from its platform, amid allegations that the company’s actions stem from upset left-leaning employees or have been made at the request of the Chinese Communist Party.
Also noting that 3 billion people will be voting in elections worldwide this year, the WEF risk report states that “the widespread use of misinformation and disinformation, and tools to disseminate it, may undermine the legitimacy of newly elected governments [and the] resulting unrest could range from violent protests and hate crimes to civil confrontation and terrorism.”
