Two books emerged last week, and they are remarkably similar. Both are about pandemics or, to be more specific, the next pandemic. That’s right, one that has not taken place yet but about which we must all live in mortal fear and into which governments must pour endless resources and for which we must be prepared to sacrifice our freedoms to prevent. Both books, naturally, reflect on the recent Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ and both claim to have the solution to keeping us all alive in the face of the onslaught of viruses yet to be imagined.
Are these books written by doctors, epidemiologists, scientists or statisticians? No, they have another feature in common, they are both written by people, one completely unqualified to speak with authority on medical matters and the other who is barely qualified to do so. The first is, of course, our old friend Bill ‘jabber’ Gates and the other is the pandemic diva, Devi Sridhar. Bill, as we know designs computer software for a living and turns over quite a profit. That despite the fact that he does not make very good software and only seems to have been successful because he has managed to dominate the market and also because the alternatives to his software are even worse. Devi is Professor of Global Public Health at The University of Edinburgh. While she did originally qualify in biology she has since studied and is qualified in medical anthropology, which is hard to define but which is not epidemiology.
Bill’s book is How to prevent the next pandemic and Devi’s book is Preventable. If only the books themselves could have been prevented. I admit to having read neither of these books and have no intention of doing so or of spending my hard earned pension on either. But I have read reviews and it seems there is a theme through both books. Both Bill and Devi had been warning us that a pandemic was on the way which is why they now get so much air-time. I frequently stand at bus stops and ‘predict’ that another bus will come along and eventually I am right. And surely enough a pandemic came along in the shape of a novel virus from China—precisely what both had pointed to—and that was just what Bill and Devi needed to ramp up their profiles and assault us regularly in and on the mainstream media.
For one reason or another Bill Gates has never been out of the public eye. If he’s not amassing a vast fortune at our expense, the philandering philanthropist is setting up a foundation (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), getting up to no good with female employees, and then finding himself ‘Melinda-less’ in the process. He badly needed a pandemic to restore his bona fides in the public square. Devi, on the other hand, was unknown outside a small circle of people with mutual interests until the pandemic set her on the road to stardom. She was on a group which advised SAGE and part of the Scottish government’s team advising on Covid-19 strategy. Then she was barely off our screens or out of the pages of The Guardian exhorting ever greater restrictions in the face of a virus which seemed not to be anywhere as near as lethal as predicted.
Our pandemic partners have something else in common. They just can’t let go and, having regained the attention of the world in Gate’s case and obtaining it in Sridhar’s they have written books to tell us. There does not appear, from the reviews, to be much divergence in their views. As expected, Bill Gates wants to build more vaccine factories and to keep jabbing us all forever. He is also a strong advocate of masks. I am sure that in neither case is there any mention of vaccine harms and the absolute lack of evidence for masks. It is not so clear what Devi Sridhar’s positive message is but there seems to be plenty on how we must not forget the messages from the recent pandemic. She points to who she considers poor leaders such as Boris Johnson (but not Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland) and who she considers good leaders such as Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand (but not Anders Tegnell in Sweden) despite the fact that Scotland did not fare any better than England, New Zealand was unable in the end to contain the spread of Covid-19 and that Sweden, where they did not panic, did very well in terms of the pandemic. Unlike the UK (including Scotland) and New Zealand, Sweden did not ruin its economy in the process.
Without reading either book I am sure that neither takes stock of how Covid-19 was a bit of a disappointment for the doom mongers with a pandemic mean age at death higher than the mean age of death pre-pandemic. As Scottish comedian Leo Kearse joked, during the pandemic in Scotland, people were living longer. I believe that both books do mention the harms associated with the measures taken during the pandemic, but it is an odd response then to say, as I know both books do, that we should have locked down sooner, harder and for longer. These people may have insight, but they are somewhat lacking in humility.
Bill Gates is the kind of person who simply won’t go away, unless his shady past and association with Jeffrey Epstein lead the establishment to hang him out to desiccate. I had never heard of Devi Sridhar before the pandemic, and I can only hope we hear less of her in future. In Professor Mark Woolhouse’s (a genuine epidemiologist) humble book The Year The World Went Mad which I have read and in which he confesses to and apologises for his part in advising and supporting the initial lockdown he does not once mention his professorial colleague, Devi Sridhar, from the same department at The University of Edinburgh. I consider that fact very telling.
Lead Correspondent | David Clews is the Lead Correspondent for UNN, with over 20 years of political/campaigning experience and a wealth of social media and communication skills David gets to the heart of what is really important to the real people of the UK.
Keep up to date with all of David & UN’s work by linking up with us on our Social Media Channels by Clicking Here Now: https://unitynewsnetwork.co.uk/our-social-media-links/
