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The Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security, in partnership with the World Health Organisation (“WHO”) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted ‘Catastrophic Contagion’, a pandemic tabletop exercise in Brussels, Belgium, on 23 October 2022.

Remember Event 201? Within the last 20 years, at least four pandemic tabletop exercises have taken place such as Dark Winter, Atlantic Storm, Clade X and most famously Event 201.

This latest exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set “in the near future.”

Participants grappled with how to respond to an epidemic located in one part of the world that then spread rapidly, becoming a pandemic with a higher fatality rate than Covid-19 and disproportionately affecting children and young people. [emphasis our own]

Centre for Health Security, Catastrophic Contagion

The 2025 virus is called Severe Epidemic Enterovirus Respiratory Syndrome.  The acronym is SEERS.

According to the website, the only other video relating to Catastrophic Contagion published by the Centre for Health Security is one titled ‘The Value of Exercises’, watch HERE.  Both videos, although they are uploaded to YouTube, are “unlisted” which means they do show when a search is made for them on YouTube. “Only those who know the link can view it.”

In the lessons learned section of the Catastrophic Contagion exercise it states:

Leaders must prepare now to make difficult, critically important decisions with limited information in the early days of the next pandemic in order to increase the chances that a dangerous outbreak can be contained at the source.

To successfully contain such an outbreak, decisive and bold action would need to be taken in the face of incomplete data, high scientific uncertainty, and potential political resistance.

… preparing in advance to react effectively, and practicing through both high-level tabletop and operational exercises should start now.

These are not purely public health and scientific decisions; they will be made by leaders in the context of political, economic, and social realities that can be anticipated and considered in advance. [emphasis our own]

Not “if” there is another pandemic but, by implication, “when” the next pandemic occurs. In fact, why wait for the next pandemic? Why not start operational exercises now?

And “potential political resistance”?!

It then goes on to highlight globalisation and censorship of information they deem “misinformation”:

Countries should establish a global network of professional public health leaders who can work together to improve epidemic preparedness and response and strive for consensus on scientific issues in advance of the next major outbreak.

Countries should prioritise efforts to increase trust in government and public health; improve public health communication efforts; increase the resiliency of populations to misleading information; and reduce the spread of harmful misinformation.

Countries need to collaborate to anticipate that threat and prepare to combat it with their own laws and procedures. [emphasis our own]

So, what are they proposing?  Changing national laws to suit the global plan?

And of course, WHO has done such a fantastic job during the Covid era it must play a bigger role the next time:

WHO member states should strengthen international systems for sharing and allocating scarce public health resources. Groundbreaking global collaborations, such as the ACT-Accelerator and COVAX, were launched during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, public health leaders still lack confidence in current approaches to fairly allocate medical countermeasures during a future pandemic. we need to build up manufacturing, distribution, and administration capacities around the world, paying particular attention to countries with poor infrastructure. This should happen now …

It concludes: “It is clear from Catastrophic Contagion that even after the terrible impact of Covid-19, more preparedness work needs to be done, new decisions need to be made, and additional resources committed. We need to expand the limits of our ability to respond.”

What is the main lesson we should be taking from the Catastrophic Contagion exercise? Simply put, they are coming after the children.

Participants Past and Present

Catastrophic Contagion: Participants consisted of 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India and Germany, as well as Bill Gates:

1. Anita Cicero (see 2 below)
2. Awa Marie Coll Seck
3. Bill Gates
4. Donald Kaberuka
5. Johanna Hanefeld
6. K. Vijay Raghavan
7. Luis Gomes Sambo
8. Mike Ryan (WHO)
9. Mark Dybul
10. Muhammad Ali Pate
11. Poh Lian Lim (COVAX)
12. Tolbert Geewleh Nyenswah
13. Tom Frieden (Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations)
14. Tom Inglesby (see 18 below)

Event 201: 15 global business, government, and public health leaders were players in the simulation exercise.  Additionally, there was the “Exercise Team”:

1. Andrea Lapp
2. Anita Cicero (see 1 above)
3. Caitlin Rivers
4. Carol Miller
5. Crystal Watson
6. Diane Meyer
7. Eric Toner
8. Jackie Fox
9. Jeffrey French (for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)
10. Julia Cizek
11. Margaret Miller
12. Matthew Shearer
13. Matthew Watson
14. Randy Larsen
15. Richard Bruns
16. Ryan Morhard
17. Tara Kirk Sell
18. Tom Inglesby (see 14 above)

The image below gives more information about Event 201’s Exercise Team members.

In a Twitter thread and the same again in an article, ThreadsIrish compared the participants of Event 201 to those of Catastrophic Contagion while also noting any World Economic Forum connections:

17. There can be no denying the WEF connections, they are everywhere.

What is interesting however is that this time there is no mention of the WEF as being a sponsor unlike in Event 201. This is evident by comparing the two banners from Event 201 & Catastrophic Contagion. pic.twitter.com/mJfU5cEOCN

— Threads 🧵 Irish (@ThreadsIrish) December 19, 2022