The Great Reset, page 8
The medical journal reported:
Last year, Devi Sridhar and Rajaie Batniji reported that the Foundation gave most of its grants to organizations in high-income countries….
Their study shows even more robustly that the grants made by the Foundation do not reflect the burden of disease endured by those in deepest poverty. In an accompanying Comment, Robert Black and colleagues discuss the alarmingly poor correlation between the Foundation’s funding and childhood disease priorities.
The concern expressed to us by many scientists who have long worked in low-income settings is that important health programs are being distorted by large grants from the Gates Foundation….
There is also a serious anxiety about the transparency of the Foundation’s operation…. The first guiding principle of the Foundation is that it is “driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family.” An annual letter from Bill Gates summarizes those passions, referring to newspaper articles, books, and chance events that have shaped the Foundation’s strategy. For such a large and influential investor in global health, is such a whimsical governance principle good enough?87
Gates quite literally rules media, academia, government officials around the world, and the WHO.
How Did They Know?
A May 2010 future-scenario planning report on pandemics from the Rockefeller Foundation is chilling reading post–COVID-19. You would almost get the idea that the response to COVID-19 was foreseen ahead of time. More than ten years in advance of the actual pandemic, this report laid out an almost-exact blueprint of how governments would react, with details including the impacts of viral lockdowns and mask mandates.
The 2010 Rockefeller document was titled Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, and the section on future pandemics was headed “Lock Step.” It laid out the following hypothetical scenario: “In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain—originating from wild geese—was extremely virulent and deadly.”
The 2010 Rockefeller report envisioned “a world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.”88
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Business Network produced the 2010 scenarios report to “to consider the roles of philanthropy and technology in future scenarios,” according to television station WUSA 9 in Washington, D.C.89
According to the hypothetical scenario in the Rockefeller report, “The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.”
The report’s authors presciently forecasted that “during the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems—from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty—leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.”
The 2010 Rockefeller report accurately foresaw the battle over civil liberties from the COVID lockdowns. It also accurately noted that “the presence of so many top-down rules and norms greatly inhibited entrepreneurial activity.”
The Rockefeller report even predicted how readily large sections of the population would submit to being locked down. “Citizens willingly gave up some of their sovereignty—and their privacy—to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability. Citizens were more tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight, and national leaders had more latitude to impose order in the ways they saw fit. In developed countries, this heightened oversight took many forms: biometric IDs for all citizens, for example, and tighter regulation of key industries whose stability was deemed vital to national interests,” the 2010 report noted.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s planning report also noted how China would be lauded for flexing authoritarian government viral policies: “A few countries did fare better—China in particular. The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery.”
The report criticized the U.S. response to the hypothetical virus as weak and ineffective in comparison. “The United States’s initial policy of ‘strongly discouraging’ citizens from flying proved deadly in its leniency, accelerating the spread of the virus not just within the U.S. but across borders,” it stated.
The planning report also predicted “technology trends” familiar to us: “Scanners using advanced functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology [will] become the norm at airports and other public areas to detect abnormal behavior that may indicate ‘antisocial intent.’ ”90
In July of 2020, USA Today noted that the 2010 Rockefeller report included parts “eerily reminiscent of the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic.”91 But the media worked overtime to downplay the Rockefeller future-scenario report.
Fearing how lockdown opponents might utilize the Rockefeller report, WUSA 9 pleaded that “the document showcases what could possibly happen as a result of a pandemic. However, it’s not some kind of plan, or even necessarily a prediction, for the current pandemic.” The WUSA 9 report did admit that the 2010 Rockefeller “scenario does describe events that play out similarly to what we’ve seen in the real world.”92
More Pandemic Scenarios
In the case of the World Economic Forum, the idea of exploiting any real or imagined crisis to impose their ideological vision on the world goes back at least to 2014.
As technology journalist Tim Hinchliffe reported at The Sociable, “Between 2014 and 2017, the WEF called to reshape, restart, reboot, and reset the global order every single year, each aimed at solving various ‘crises.’ ”
Hinchliffe lays out the timeline:
2014: WEF publishes meeting agenda entitled “The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business.”
2015: WEF publishes article in collaboration with VOX EU called “We need to press restart on the global economy.”
2016: WEF holds panel called “How to reboot the global economy.”
2017: WEF publishes article saying, “Our world needs a reset in how we operate.”93
In 2018, the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security engaged in a pandemic exercise similar to the 2010 Rockefeller event.
On May 15, 2018, just two years before the world was plunged into COVID-19 lockdowns, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the WEF hosted the “Clade X” pandemic event.94 The Clade X exercise simulated a real-time virus outbreak, complete with mock video newscasts of anchors warning of the theoretical pandemic.
The Clade X event featured panels with government officials who warned that the world was not prepared to deal with the simulated global pandemic.
At the close of the Clade X simulation, the WEF concluded, “In the end, the outcome was tragic: the most catastrophic pandemic in history with hundreds of millions of deaths, economic collapse and societal upheaval.”95
In addition, a third major pandemic exercise, “Event 201,” which took place in October 2019, was conducted as part of a joint effort sponsored by the World Economic Forum, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security just before COVID-19 began to spread in Wuhan China. Event 201 portrayed a hypothetical coronavirus pandemic that would kill 65 million people, necessitating a global coordinated response between governments, international organizations, and global business concerns.96
CHAPTER 3 How the COVID-19 Response Accelerated the Great Reset
“One of the great lessons of the past five centuries in Europe and America is this: acute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state. It’s always been the case and there is no reason why it should be different with the COVID-19 pandemic.” That quotation is from Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret’s book COVID-19: The Great Reset, published in 2020.1
That was the year that governments worldwide invented new ways to punish their citizens with tyrannical lockdowns, curfews, shelter-in-place orders, mask regulations, vaccination passports, and other mandates that were not even in the playbook of the public health bureaucracy before COVID. A global viral pandemic was just the ticket to end the old order of things and bring about a “new normal.” When the pandemic hit, the forces behind the Great Reset were poised to never let a crisis go to waste, and these forces were in place to accelerate the radical transformation of society they had long sought.
“Waiting for Just the Right Moment to Pounce”
“I am not one for melodramatic comparisons, but in seriousness, in what kind of country do people wake up and find that in the middle of the night a minister passed a law, without warning or Parliamentary approval, that bans them going to the pub with people they don’t live with?” asked human rights lawyer Adam Wagner.2
The answer to that question? A country and a world in which a Great Reset was planned and waiting for just the right moment to pounce. COVID-19 lockdowns and fear moved the Great Reset a long way toward its planners’ goal.
Waking Up to the Great Reset
COVID-19 lockdowns happened almost overnight and remained in place for months, with constantly moving goalposts for when they could be lifted. It was nothing short of the suspension of democracy. In place of government by elected legislators, it was a complete deferral to the expertise of a credentialed class to formulate far-reaching policies at a whim.
Public health bureaucrats, whose names no one had even known before, were now wielding massive state powers to enforce quarantine, isolation, and mask mandates; restrictions on weddings, funerals, barbeques, and playgrounds; and even rules for how long you were permitted to leave your house, and for what purpose.
And what if you violated any of the edicts of these unelected health bureaucrats? Your friends, neighbors, or even family members could turn you into the authorities. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, in fact, encouraged citizens to report violators of the COVID stay-at-home orders with the slogan, “Snitches get rewards.”3
Progressive activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sounded the alarm over how coronavirus restrictions were being manipulated to transform the world into tyranny. “Governments love pandemics the same way that they love wars because it gives them power, it gives them, it gives them control, and it gives them the capacity to impose obedience on human beings; and today we have an inflection of new technologies that give governments the capacity to impose controls on populations that have never been imagined before in human history!” Kennedy said. “The biosecurity agenda that people like Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and Davos and all of these people who are running now the global economy—they have understood for years that they have a power that no totalitarian government has ever had available to it, which is the biosecurity [state],” Kennedy explained.5 Recall that the annual meeting at Davos, which is attended by the leaders of the world’s most powerful countries, is a meeting of the World Economic Forum, founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, author of The Great Reset.
Never Let a “Crisis Go to Waste”
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that—it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” —Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s chief of staff in 20084
“Letting Lab Coats Run the World”
The United States is entering into a new phase where “The Danger of Letting Lab Coats Run the World” is palpable. That was the headline of a piece by Bill Dunne at American Thinker. “It should be clear by now that most of the world’s leaders were stampeded over the lockdown cliff like so many lemmings. What caused the stampede is even more remarkable: a tiny coterie of obscure, soft-spoken epidemiologists in white lab coats playing with numbers…. The aim was to cause panic,” he wrote. “We were plunged into the grandest of experiments in authoritarian paternalism, whereby we plebeians—i.e., those without government jobs—are deemed incompetent to judge if it’s safe to take a dip in the ocean or a walk in the woods. We can, though, crowd into a Walmart or the local supermarket.”6
French president Emmanuel Macron warned citizens to stay confined to their homes and urged, “We must all limit the number of people with who[m] we’re in contact with every single day. Scientists say so.”7
Scientists say so. As C. S. Lewis warned, “I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in.”8 And tyrannies came in—fast—with COVID.
The World Economic Forum went full throttle on the Great Reset. They didn’t want to let a crisis go to waste. UN leaders, globalists, power-hungry public health bureaucrats, and blue-state governors saw the greatest opportunity in a lifetime to expand the power of the state.
Ending Freedom
“In the sweep of history, intellectuals have specialized in conjuring rationales for why freedom needs to be ended in favor of top-state statist forms of social planning. There were religious reasons, genetic reasons, end-of-history reasons, security reasons, and a hundred more.
“Every age has generated some fashionable and overriding reason why people cannot be free. Public health is the reason of the moment.” —Jeffrey A. Tucker of the Brownstone Institute, author of Liberty or Lockdown9
In fact, as COVID-19 came on the scene and the world copied China, tried-and-true public health guidelines for pandemics were jettisoned. Renowned epidemiologist Donald Henderson, who oversaw the ten-year international effort to rid the world of smallpox and is credited with launching global childhood-vaccination programs, wrote in 2006 on the best way to deal with a viral pandemic. Henderson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.10
“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” Henderson wrote in a 2006 Biosecurity and Bioterrorism paper titled “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza.11
But the world wholly ignored that experience. World leaders, public health bureaucracies, governors, mayors, academia, and the media fell all over themselves during COVID-19 to instill the maximum anxiety and fear possible with dire scare scenarios of mass deaths.
“The New Western Normal”
“The pandemic state of emergency did indeed shatter the consensus about individual freedom. Across the developed world, the liberal privileging of individual freedom has been replaced by a de facto acceptance that state power absolutely must be ordered to the common good, up to and including coercive measures where necessary…. The new Western normal is one of authoritarian regimes now visibly reluctant to relinquish their grip on a state of emergency.” —Mary Harrington, editor at the British magazine UnHerd 12
With hysterical virus models peddling Spanish flu–scale doom on the world and videos out of China purporting to show people dropping dead in the street, the forces of statism moved quickly to frighten people everywhere and shut down the world.
“In early 2020, the public turned to the advice of scientific authorities when confronted with an apparent viral outbreak. Soon after, most nations followed the advice of prominent scientists and implemented restrictions commonly referred to as ‘lockdowns,’ ” attorney Michael P. Senger, writing about “China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign” for the Tablet, explained.13
Made in China
“While the policies varied by jurisdiction, in general they involved restrictions on gatherings and movements and the closure of schools, businesses, and public places, inspired by those imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Hubei Province,” Senger wrote.14
“In February 2020, a team from Imperial College London led by physicist Neil Ferguson ran a computer model that played an outsized role in justifying lockdowns in most countries. Imperial forecast that by Oct 2020, 2.2 million people in the U.S. would die as a result of COVID, and recommended months of lockdowns. The model predicted the United States could incur up to one million deaths even with ‘enhanced social distancing.’ ”15
“I Forget to Be Scared”
“Masks are very simply symbolic. All they are is a sign: ‘You are in a dangerous time, you need to listen to us.’ If I don’t see people wearing masks, I forget to be scared. And that’s why they want people wearing masks, and it just could not be clearer.” —Alex Berenson on Tucker Carlson Tonight, July 16, 202116
Senger noted that enacting lockdowns for a virus was unheard of. “Indeed, to our knowledge, no scientist ever publicly supported imposing lockdowns until Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, personally authorized the ‘unprecedented lockdown of Wuhan and other cities beginning on Jan. 23, [2020],’ ” Senger wrote.17
An editorial the British Medical Journal published in March 2021 echoed Senger’s analysis. “In March [2020], at a time when the behavior and lethality of this infection was largely unknown, and in the justifiable panic following camera footage of people falling dead in the streets of Wuhan, the WHO’s pandemic response plan, updated as recently as October 2019 was torn up,” wrote Dr. Anne McCloskey.
