What Was Event 201?
And what is it? And who is running it?
I had questions about Event 201. I’d heard about it, heard it characterized unfavourably. But I’d never until today actually explored its website to discover what Event 201 has to say about and for itself. So let’s listen to Event 201 in its own words:
<< Event 201
<< The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences.
<< In recent years, the world has seen a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to approximately 200 events annually. These events are increasing, and they are disruptive to health, economies, and society. Managing these events already strains global capacity, even absent a pandemic threat. Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,” would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.>>
Bill and Melinda Gates and Johns Hopkins “Center for Health Security” – and what has health got to do with security? – and the World Economic Forum, hosted a sort of table top war game whose purpose was to “diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences” of “a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences” whose inevitability was announced, as sheer crazy luck and co-incidence would have it, in October of 2019, mere weeks before The Virus, exactly as predicted – that’s how good The Science is! – began its global war on humanity in December of 2019.
These were the organizers: Klaus Schwab’s group of the most powerful world leaders in politics and industry who heed Schwab’s call to Davos in Switzerland every year to listen to Schwab’s hand-picked experts lecture them on how they should manage the world; Bill Gates, the richest man in the world and his wife who had made their fabulous fortune by investing Bill’s billions from his Microsoft software empire into vaccines despite having not even an undergraduate degree in medical science; Johns Hopkins University, perhaps the premier research university in the world on genetics and related science; and the World Health Organization, the one authority which has the legal power to take over every one of the 192 member governments, pretty much every government on earth of any importance, by unilaterally declaring a global Pandemic.
There had been 200 epidemic “events” every year which the world-wide media had heard nothing about, so these organizers declared, and it was only a matter of time that one of them (perhaps ebola? Perhaps SARS?) would sweep the world and provide the long-awaited moment of the declaration of War on Viruses with which to galvanize, regiment and discipline the hitherto feckless people of the world into One Authority animated by Pure Science. The banner of Pandemic would be raised over 192 governments and The Science would become their Commander in Chief.
The hour was late. Planning and publicity were needed. Hence the table-top game planning the War on Viruses. What was the Event 201 scenario? It was a tabletop exercise, a war game so to speak, so what was the fictional scenario of this game?
<< The Event 201 Scenario
<< Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms. [“community”, people actually touching one another. EEW! THAT’S your problem right there, Bubba!]
<< The disease starts in pig farms in Brazil, quietly and slowly at first, but then it starts to spread more rapidly in healthcare settings. When it starts to spread efficiently from person to person in the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods of some of the megacities in South America, the epidemic explodes. It is first exported by air travel to Portugal, the United States, and China and then to many other countries. Although at first some countries are able to control it, it continues to spread and be reintroduced, and eventually no country can maintain control.
<< There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year. There is a fictional antiviral drug that can help the sick but not significantly limit spread of the disease.
<< Since the whole human population is susceptible, during the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week. And as the cases and deaths accumulate, the economic and societal consequences become increasingly severe.
<< The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease. >>
The prophetic power of The Science! Gob-smacking! The scenario posited a disease that would spread from animals among the dense populations of “megacities” full of third world poor people. It spreads by the unfortunate development of global airline travel (these Johns Hopkins guys must be big fans of “12 Monkeys”). And Bill Gates’s vaccine, the sole and only way to War this Virus down, won’t be available for a whole year, during which tens of millions of densely packed poor people will die. But along will come The Vaccine to Save the Day, and after everybody in the world has been jabbed by the miracle vaccine the Virus will settle down to be a childhood disease like measles which everybody in the world from then on will pay to get their kids jabbed for. Which, by a gob-smacking miracle, is exactly what happened! Kinda.
Except for that part about diminishing “large-scale economic and societal consequences”. The global lockdowns, “social distancing”, confining massive swaths of productive people to house arrest, isolated in front of their computer screens, that was the recipe the Event 201 players cooked up. Large scale consequences? These dictates, followed by every member government on earth as a matter of legal obligation, far from diminishing catastrophe made global economic and societal catastrophe inevitable.
And as for helping to actually stop people from dying, what did the war gamers have in mind? ”There is a fictional antiviral drug that can help the sick but not significantly limit spread of the disease.”? This is a fictional scenario of course so everything is fictional, right? But when it came to the reality so miraculously and so co-incidentally and so exactly prefigured by this Fictional Scenario, there was a real, non-fictional drug, namely Ivermectin, which has been known and used for decades all over the globe except in the USA and Canada to successfully treat respiratory diseases. But in the event Ivermectin was derided as fictional by the US CDC, very much in accord with the Event 201 “fictional” scenario cooked up in New York City, USA, just a train ride and a stroll from the United Nations [not in Beijing and not in Moscow].
Oh! And wouldn’t it blow your mind? The real, absolutely not fictional and not described in obscure patented-in-the-USA computer codes very similar to the patents which described the original SARS (believe the Science on this!), the absolutely novel and real SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, was at first said to have naturally mutated and migrated from, guess what, BATS! Isn’t that an AMAZING co-incidence?
So this was a fictional scenario that really was played out in October of 2019 in New York City just a subway ride from the UN. Who were the players of this game? Can we not suppose that these players were representative of the powers that honchoed the actual response to the actual Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC, pronounced “Fake”) which [not-really-a] Doctor Tedros, Bill Gates’s good friend, former dictator and head of the World Health Organization, declared in February of 2020?
From the Event 201 website:
<< Players
<< The following prominent individuals from global business, government, and public health were exercise players tasked with leading the policy response to a fictional outbreak scenario in the Event 201 pandemic tabletop exercise: [numeration mine]
1. Latoya D. Abbott is the Senior Director of Global Occupational Health Services for Marriott International. She has over 20 years of experience as a nurse practitioner, educator, and senior leader. She has worked in a multitude of settings both as a nurse practitioner and as an administrator, including occupational health clinics, long-term care facilities, and critical care units. She has taught as an Associate Professor of Nursing for graduate-level students at Howard University, where she was nominated for the Professor of the Year award, and she has precepted nurse practitioner students from Marymount University and South University. Most recently, Dr. Abbott served as an advisor to students pursuing their doctorates of nursing practice at Capella University.
2. Sofia Borges is the UN Foundation’s Senior Vice President and Head of the New York office. In this role, she serves as chief liaison with United Nations leadership and the diplomatic community, working to identify new opportunities for building and deepening partnerships with a range of stakeholders, as well as overseeing initiatives with the private sector and managing engagement with other organizations. As a member of the UN Foundation leadership team, she also provides overall guidance and participates in the development of long-term strategy for the Foundation.
3. Mr.[Brad] Connett joined Henry Schein, Inc. in 1997, and currently serves as President of Henry Schein's U.S. Medical Group, one of the nation's leading providers of products and services to physician offices, urgent care clinics, retail clinics, freestanding emergency rooms, Integrated Delivery Networks, Ambulatory Surgery Centers, and other alternate care sites. He is a Member of the Company's Executive Management Committee.
4. Dr. Chris Elias is President of the Global Development Program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He leads the foundation’s efforts to accelerate the delivery of proven healthcare products and solutions to those who need them most—especially women and children. Focusing on appropriate and sustainable strategies with the potential to improve the health of hundreds of millions of people in underserved communities, the Global Development program focuses on 5 program areas: family planning; maternal, newborn, and child health; nutrition; polio; and vaccine delivery.
5. Timothy Evans joined McGill University in September 2019 as the Inaugural Director and Associate Dean of the School of Population and Global Health (SPGH) in the Faculty of Medicine and Associate Vice-Principal (Global Policy and Innovation). He joined McGill after a 6-year tenure as the Senior Director of the Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice at the World Bank Group.
6. Professor George F. Gao is the Director-General, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention; a Professor in the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; President of the Chinese Society of Biotechnology; and President of the Asian Federation of Biotechnology (AFOB).
Dr. Gao obtained his DPhil degree from Oxford University, UK, and did his postdoc work in both Oxford University and Harvard University, with a brief stay in Calgary University. His research interests include enveloped viruses and molecular immunology. His group research is mainly focused on the enveloped virus entry and release, especially influenza virus interspecies transmission (host jump), structure-based drug-design, and structural immunology. He is also interested in virus ecology, especially the relationship between influenza virus and migratory birds or live poultry markets and the bat-derived virus ecology and molecular biology.
7. Avril Haines is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University; a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; a member of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service; and a principal at WestExec Advisors.
During the last administration, Dr. Haines served as Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor. She also served as the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council.
8. Jane Halton, AO, PSM, FAICD, FIPPA, is a member of the board of the ANZ Bank, Clayton Utz, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and the US Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation. She is chairman of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, COTA, and Vault Systems. Her 33-year career in the Australian public service included nearly 15 years as Secretary of the Department of Finance and Secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing.
9. Matthew Harrington is the global chief operating officer at Edelman, an industry-leading communications firm that partners with businesses and organizations to evolve, promote, and protect their brands and reputations. In concert with his overseeing global operations, Mr. Harrington advises leaders of some of the world’s largest and most complex companies on corporate positioning, reputation management, crisis communications, merger and acquisition, and IPOs. His articles on trust and executive leadership have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and other leading business publications.
10. Martin Knuchel is Senior Director and Head of Crisis, Emergency & Business Continuity Management, for Lufthansa Group Airlines. He is responsible for strategic development of crisis and emergency procedures, emergency field organization and care organization procedures for the Lufthansa Group. His responsibilities entail planning and coordinating the interface work with communication, ground operations, security, safety and training, as well as planning and executing emergency exercises for the group’s crisis teams. He also serves as the pandemic coordinator for the airline. He has been with Swiss International Air Lines since 2002, serving in positions of increasing responsibility.
11. Eduardo Martinez is President of the UPS Foundation and UPS Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer. The UPS Foundation leads the global citizenship programs and initiatives for UPS, and, as President, Dr. Martinez is responsible for the operations and management of its global philanthropic, employee engagement, and corporate relations programs, which invests in more than 4,300 organizations and communities across 170 countries. In addition, Dr. Martinez also serves as the UPS Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, with responsibilities for the advancement of diversity and inclusion programs that empower more than 440,000 UPS employees worldwide.
12. RADM Stephen C. Redd is the Deputy Director for Public Health Service and Implementation Science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. Redd currently oversees the Center for Preparedness and Response; the Center for Global Health; the Center for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Support; and the Office of Minority Health and Health Equity. In his deputy director role, he focused on the adoption of implementation science principles at CDC. In collaboration with multiple groups, he is working to understand how public health can most effectively address social determinants of health in various sectors.
Dr. Redd became Director for CDC’s Center for Preparedness and Response while CDC responded to the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak, when he helped to ensure that congressional stakeholders were kept up-to-date on the evolving outbreak. He worked across the agency to prepare for the possibility of additional Ebola cases in the United States. Since then, he has engaged in the agency’s responses to the Zika virus and multiple hurricanes.
13. Hasti Taghi serves in a chief of staff capacity at a major media company. She also leads strategic initiatives for the office, including partnerships with the World Economic Forum.
Ms. Taghi has held various roles in hospital administration at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, Texas. She worked in corporate and executive communications, patient experience, and as the leader of the board member relations program. She began her career as a news reporter working for the CBS affiliate in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and the NBC affiliate in Houston, Texas.
14. Adrian Thomas serves as, Vice President Global Public Health, at Johnson & Johnson. He is responsible for global public health programs and strategy addressing Global Health Security threats and pandemic preparedness including antimicrobial resistance (AMR), Multi Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDRTB), Ebola, Dengue Fever, HIV vaccines amongst others. Adrian is a physician with a special interest in the fields of disease area strategy, public health, market access, and pharmaceutical policy. He has held numerous roles in market access including Global Head of Market Access for Janssen & Global Head of Access for Medical Devices, for Johnson & Johnson, as well as roles in risk management and drug safety, including Global Head of Benefit Risk Management and Chief Safety Officer for Janssen.
15. Lavan Thiru joined the Monetary Authority of Singapore in June 2006 and is currently its Chief Representative in the New York Representative Office. He assumed this role in November 2016. Previously, he was the head of the Financial Products and Investment Solutions Division, part of the Financial Markets Development Department of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. In that role, he oversaw the development of Singapore financial markets. He was also responsible for developing initiatives related to infrastructure and trade finance. >>
Let me summarize briefly these players’ backgrounds and connections as listed. All are globally connected of course and all trace back to the USA:
Medical delivery corporations: 1. Senior Director of Global Occupational Health Services for Marriott International], 3. President of Henry Schein's U.S. Medical Group, 14. Vice President Global Public Health, at Johnson & Johnson.
UN, WEF, WHO, CDC: 2. UN Foundation’s Senior Vice President and Head of the New York office, 6. Director-General, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention [but see university affiliation], 12. Deputy Director for Public Health Service and Implementation Science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 13. "chief of staff capacity at a major media company” [?] "including partnerships with the World Economic Forum”.
Global Banking: 8. ANZ Bank, Clayton Utz, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and the US Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, 15. Monetary Authority of Singapore… Chief Representative in the New York Representative Office.
Global communications and transportation: 9. global chief operating officer at Edelman, an industry-leading communications firm, 10. Senior Director and Head of Crisis, Emergency & Business Continuity Management, for Lufthansa Group Airlines, 11. President of the UPS Foundation and UPS Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer. 13. "She began her career as a news reporter working for the CBS affiliate in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and the NBC affiliate in Houston, Texas.” [Wow. Fresh out of Idaho Falls, Idaho. Is she Daddy Warbucks's favourite niece?]
Universities: 1. "taught as an Associate Professor of Nursing for graduate-level students at Howard University”, 5. "joined McGill University [Canada] in September 2019 as the Inaugural Director and Associate Dean of the School of Population and Global Health”, 6. " obtained his DPhil degree from Oxford University, UK, and did his postdoc work in both Oxford University and Harvard University, with a brief stay in Calgary University. [Not China]”, 7. "Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University; a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory”,
Gates Foundation: 4. " President of the Global Development Program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."
CIA and NSC: 7. "During the last administration, Dr. Haines served as Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor. She also served as the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council.”
So just to recap, only one of these players is a part of the Chinese government, Dr Gao, "6. Professor George F. Gao is the Director-General, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention” and he turns out to have come out of Oxford, Harvard and Calgary University. So you’ll excuse me for thinking the Chinese government is not running this show.
Event 201, a pandemic exercise to illustrate preparedness efforts
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/event201/]
The Event 201 scenario [http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/event201/scenario.html]
[Event 201 Players
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/event201/players/index.html]