Intro Good afternoon, my name is Paul Schreyer, I
am a freelance journalist, author and co-editor of Multipolar
magazine, and I would like to talk today about
a current issue, the Corona pandemic.
The title of the presentation is: Pandemic Planning Games - Preparing for a New Era?
However, I don't want to talk about the current situation,
about the current corona crisis, but about what happened before.
And a lot of interesting things happened there.
Keyword: pandemic planning games.
The situation we are currently experiencing, i.e. fear of a virus
and, based on this, very severe restrictions on freedom: this is
precisely the situation that has been rehearsed very often and very
intensively in various simulation games over the past few years.
Now this is not speculation, this is well
documented, this is well documented and the evidence
I would like to present here today.
Yes, the second part of the title: Preparing for a new era?
Many people have the impression that a new era, a new age is
now beginning with this crisis, and that this is not a good era.
An era in which democracy is being dismantled, in which freedoms are being dismantled, damaged, destroyed.
With this lecture, I would like to contribute to this and help to
perhaps broaden the view somewhat and also gain a more historical perspective.
I'll say a few words about the table of contents, which is what I want to talk about today.
So I'll actually start back in the 1990s with the war on
terror, then I'll present various simulation games, then I'll come to the
Lock Step scenario, a very interesting scenario from 2010, then I'll present
again some more recent simulation games that have taken place during the
Trump presidency, and then I'll come to the last point - what
happened on the stock markets in September 2019.
This is a very interesting point from my point of view, a very important point,
which I have not yet included in the book I have written on this subject.
That is, for those who have already read my book - this
point may contain information that may also be new to them.
Yes, a new era begins!
What era has come to an end,
what era are we looking back on?
This is, of course, the Cold War
era, which actually ended back in 1990.
What was that age?
To briefly remind you again:
It was, of course, the confrontation of two major power blocs.
The Soviet Union on one side, the USA on the other and more generally
speaking: The West on one side and the East faced each other and both
were highly armed with nuclear weapons and both threatened each other with total annihilation.
That was the global situation from 1945 to 1990.
It was a situation characterized by
great fear, great insecurity, great oppression.
Many people were afraid that nuclear war might
break out - that was quite real.
Mankind was several times on the verge of an outbreak
of nuclear war, in 1962 in the missile crisis.
Also in the 80's there was again a quite dicey situation, where
only with a lot of luck such a nuclear war could be
avoided actually then or did not break out actually from luck.
That's how it has to be said today.
So basically, if you put it in the larger historical context, it was a
very crazy time, this Cold War. The threat so massive and so existential!
This period came to an end in 1990, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A great sigh of relief was felt all over the world.
The Soviet Union disintegrated.
There was glasnost and perestroika.
This already began in the 1980s, in the second half
of the 1980s, when reforms were initiated in the Eastern
Bloc and people there were given more freedom.
And this feeling of greater freedom, this feeling of breathing a sigh of
relief, that a fear has ceased, that a pressure has been taken off
people, that has basically been the attitude to life from 1990 onwards, internationally.
Not everywhere in the world, of course, but in many parts, especially in
the Eastern Bloc, but also overall in the world. You could say that.
But this time has not only provided joy everywhere.
There were also groups, influential groups, that had problems with this.
For example, the military and the entire defense complex, because for
them, of course, the enemy broke away in this situation.
They no longer had an enemy.
The Soviet Union disintegrated, and
how could one now justify
maintaining such huge military expenditures?
Here in the picture an American aircraft carrier.
You can say that is par excellence the symbol of the security state,
of the military apparatus, of the exercise of power everywhere in the world.
These weapons systems are needed to exercise power all over the world.
How could this be justified from then on?
I have found a nice quote from exactly this time,
namely from the year 1991, from Colin Powell, who was
the top military officer in the USA at that time
and thus also the top military advisor to the President.
He later became foreign minister.
And he said in a newspaper interview in 1991,
a bit with a sarcastic undertone, but already serious:
I'm running out of devils, I'm running out of villains, I'm left with Castro and Kim Il Sung.
Castro was then the president of Cuba and Kim Il Sung was the president of North Korea.
So some of the very few remaining communist states
in the world, but of course they could not
seriously serve as enemies for the USA.
These countries were far too insignificant and militarily far too weak for that.
So after 1990, how could the U.S. still seriously say we need a strong military?
How should they do that?
And it was precisely in this context, precisely in this
questioning, that the fight against terror began in the 1990s.
There really was a turning point in time, which is also symbolized in terms
of personnel by the transition from President Bush, the elder, to President Clinton.
(IMAGE)
Bush - pictured here on the left - is still a representative of the Cold War, a real cold warrior who was still
head of the CIA in the 1970s - and this transition from Bush to Clinton has also provided a lot of hope.
So Clinton was a hopeful. He was not considered a hawk, not at all.
He was considered a modern, cosmopolitan person.
He was inaugurated in January 1993, and just a few weeks later
a very large terrorist attack occurred on the World Trade Center.
At that time, the Twin Towers were still standing.
This is, after all, the time before 9/11, and this bombing in the underground parking garage of the
World Trade Center - (PICTURE) here a picture from the time in February 1993 - was quite massive.
At the time, the largest terrorist attack in U.S. history!
700 injured, so the underground garage completely devastated.
The intention was to bring down the
towers, which ultimately succeeded only in 2001.
Those behind this attack, this bombing, are said to have been Islamists.
Immediately thereafter, the following year, Clinton released a national security strategy.
That's not so unusual at first; basically, almost every president does that, and he used
it to give his guideline as to where he wants to set his priorities.
I will bring a short quote from it, because it is interesting.
Clinton said, "The Cold War may be over, but the
need for American leadership abroad remains as strong as ever.
I am concerned about building a new public
consensus to sustain our active engagement abroad.
That's a little bit of coach speak.
So we may know this - active engagement abroad means nothing other than military operations or wars abroad.
That's just a beautiful word for it.
But the interesting point here is that Clinton is saying we need to
build a consensus, or he would like to build a public consensus, for
continuing to be able to deploy our military anywhere in the world.
That is, at that time, this consensus did not exist.
At the time, as I said, there were great debates.
People have said: We want a peace dividend now! That was the cue.
We want all this money that has now flowed into
armaments for decades - it should now flow to us!
We want to build our own economy, we want our society
to benefit and this defense budget should be cut back.
And it was also scaled back in the '90s because the public pressure was just so great.
That was 94.
Now we come to the next year 1995.
In March 95 - (PICTURE)
this is a picture of Joe Biden - who is now president of the USA.
At that time, it already had an important function.
He was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee 25 years ago.
And he has introduced a bill here - this is that record - in the Senate.
This law was intended to give more powers to the president in the event of
a major terrorist attack and to give more powers to the government in general.
This law met very gossen resistance at that time.
If you look at the press archives during that
time - I did, how was this discussed at
the time - you see that quite influential civil
rights groups immediately went to the barricades and said:
This is going too far.
We don't want special powers for the president, for the government.
It's all supposed to be democratically controlled.
We do not want this law!
Great resistance!
A few weeks later, in April 95, there was again a
major terrorist attack on the government building in Oklahoma, and this
attack, too, was at that time - this was all before
9/11 - the largest and deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history.
This attack killed 170 people, about 1000 injured ...
(IMAGE) As you can see, the damage is immense!
A car bomb with two tons of explosives,
gigantic damage - and public attention for the
topic of terrorism skyrocketed with this attack and
stayed there for a very, very long time.
This attack on the building in Oklahoma was really a landmark, a watershed,
a very decisive moment for the issue of terrorism, danger from terrorism, to
be taken completely new, much more seriously, to be perceived completely differently.
Yes, then on this wave, I would say, on this wave of the
terror threat was further - yes, mood was created, you can say.
(IMAGE) This is a newspaper article from 1997.
But it is not written by journalists.
It's written by politicians, namely former CIA Director James Woolsey and a very senior Pentagon official.
The title of the article is: How to defend against the enemy in the shadows.
The first sentence of the article refers directly
to the major attacks I just mentioned.
Thus, it is said, the destruction of the government building in Oklahoma City and the
bombing of the World Trade Center in New York have shocked America, have shocked Americans.
But - and here comes the big point - these tragedies would have been
much worse if nuclear, biological or chemical weapons had been used in the process!
In the further course of the article, the authors then state that
the danger of chemical and biological weapons in the hands of terrorists
would be very real, would be a very great danger, and that
very great efforts would have to be made to guard against it.
This article is just one example from this media campaign.
During this time, a lot has been published in this way, in this direction.
Let me bring you another example, also from the same year.
Then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen declared at a press conference,
at the top of the agenda: chemical and biological weapons
are a likely component of future warfare!" he claimed.
He uses this claim to justify putting a billion dollars
more into the defense budget over the next five years.
So you see, from the very beginning it was a question of a
lot of money, of very large budgets, which were justified by this.
William Cohen has also made a remarkable press appearance this year,
it can be said. He has appeared on breakfast television.
So not now kind of on the stage of the Pentagon, but
in a program where you're not actually exposed to politics that much.
There he was sitting on breakfast television, holding up a packet of sugar
to the camera, and he said, if Saddam Hussein were to spray this
amount-well, the amount that this packet of sugar contains-of anthrax, anthrax, over a
city like Washington, at least half of the residents would be dead.
Just one breath and they will probably die in five days.
The presenters of the breakfast television were speechless, and this television report made
big waves in the press because it was so drastic, this example.
It's quite clear, you can't really call this statement anything other than fear mongering.
That is quite blatant fear mongering.
People are persuaded that their lives are in immediate danger.
Yes, that has been the mood that has been built up
more and more in the second half of the 90s.
That is one side - the threat of
a new danger is explained, is discussed.
On the other hand, exactly this danger, these weapons, on
these weapons you build at the same time itself.
That is very interesting.
I didn't know that before either, but only found it during the research here.
In 1997, several quite controversial weapons projects went forward in the United States.
The CIA had a project called Clear Vision. A bacterial bomb was developed there.
The DIA, which is the Pentagon's military intelligence agency, had a Project Jefferson.
A genetically modified anthrax variant was developed as a bioweapon.
And this research happened completely in secret.
There was no parliamentary control or anything. No one knew that at the time!
This became public in a New York Times article in September 2001.
In response, the Pentagon called a press conference
and said it was purely defensive research.
Of course, that's pretty much bullshit - if you're building a bioweapon, that's not defensive research.
During this time, this man also gained weight: Colonel Robert Kadlec, a bioweapons expert.
He was the U.S. bioweapons inspector in Iraq during the 1991 Iraq War and
one of the leading bioweapons experts, as I said, in the United States.
In a strategy paper, in an internal Pentagon strategy paper, he wrote
on this subject in 1998 - this is a very remarkable quote
that was brought to my attention by my colleague Dirk Pohlmann, which
is really very important and which I will now read out briefly.
If biological weapons are used under the cover
of a spatially limited or naturally occurring disease,
their use can be credibly denied.
(...) The potential to trigger severe economic
losses and subsequent political instability, combined with
the ability to credibly deny use, exceeds
the capabilities of any other known weapon.
This is 98.
And the context in which these sentences are written, in the paper, is that Robert Kadlec
warns that enemies of the United States could use such weapons. Exactly in such a context.
But if you read the paper thoroughly, you'll notice that the phrase
that you can credibly deny the use comes up again and again
in several places - and that also makes you a bit wary.
During this time, an institution was also founded that still
plays a very important role in this subject area today.
It's now called the Center for health
security, based at John Hopkins University.
You may have heard the name before.
In the context of the Corona crisis, this institution has played a big role
because that's where all the Corona numbers, from the beginning since spring 2020, are
presented compiled in a dashboard and used by the media all over the world.
This institute was founded in 1998.
At that time, under a different name, Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies i.e., Civilian Biodefense Studies.
So that still had a military accent.
Later, the emphasis is placed more on health in the external presentation.
But it was really about the same thing.
This center has organized some very important and essential simulation games on this topic.
exercises, disaster exercises, which I would like to discuss in a little more detail below.
That went off 1999.
So the institute just existed for a year, founded with
money from a rich billionaire foundation, the Sloan Foundation, that's
money from the former head of the General Motors corporation.
He's long dead, but his foundation
trustees have poured many, many millions
into this Bioterra playground.
In 1999, there was a first conference.
This has been a very big event.
Many hundreds of participants from ten countries gathered in
Arlington, just outside the nation's capital, for a national
symposium on public health and responses to bioterrorism.
How do you deal with it when there
is an attack somewhere, what can you do,
how do we have to coordinate?
As part of this conference, this is here
February 99 (PICTURE/PLAcard)-here again is the organizer Johns
Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies in collaboration
with the Department of Health and Human Services
and various scientific associations.
Within the framework of this large conference, such an exercise also took place for the first time.
An exercise that tested that terrorists would release a
smallpox agent in the U.S. and a smallpox epidemic
would break out in the U.S. with quite a
lot of casualties - and how to respond.
You have to imagine the business game like this:
People sit around the conference table for a few hours and play roles.
They play different state functions and then talk to each other, just
as they would have to talk to each other in a crisis.
How they would then do a conference
call in reality to coordinate responses.
You then act out this kind of conference -
who says what, who has to decide what, where
do conflicts arise, where do problems arise.
In the final report of this exercise we find the following sentences:
- How far can police go to quarantine patients?
- We need a consensus on how to proceed with vaccinations.
- Should martial law have been imposed?
- We need to control the message that goes out
to the public, and how can we control that message?
All these questions were discussed in 1999 and these are questions
that, of course, remind us very much of the present.
Also speaking at the symposium was Richard Clarke,
then a senior counterterrorism advisor to the U.S.
government, just one year fresh in office.
He said, "For the first time, the Department of Health and
Human Services is part of the U.S. National Security Council.
So there's really this path that's been taken, that
these health issues have been turned into military issues.
That same year, 1999, the Pentagon
continued to conduct research on bioweapons.
There was the so-called Project Bacchus.
There was an anthrax factory
built in the Nevada desert
and the goal was this.
The Pentagon has told its staff, that is, this department to do this:
Develops a small anthrax factory, but only with
materials that are freely available on the market.
This has also succeeded after a few months.
That also came out several years later.
The Pentagon has developed this anthrax production with commercially
available materials, was therefore in a position - if
you think badly now - was in a position
to carry out such an attack itself, in order
to be able to say afterwards, but terrorists have
done that, because all components are freely available on
the market - that's how dangerous it is.
So this potential, this ability has
been developed at this time.
This took place at a military base in Nevada.
(IMAGE) This is now the entire military base.
In the past, nuclear weapons tests took place
there, and in the 1990s, bioweapons research of
this kind was carried out there, far away
from civilization, I would say.
Okay, it then continued in rapid steps.
The very next year, in 2000, there
was the second major symposium by the
same organizer, again on this topic.
The only difference - they didn't test a
smallpox outbreak now, but a plague outbreak.
But again bioterror! These documents that I show them now
(PICTURE), this is an original website from the year 2000.
You can still find it in the
Internet archive and the quotes I'm showing
them now, those are all open documents.
You can find them on the Internet.
These are not secrets now.
Now, no whistleblower or anything has published that.
This is all open material.
I want to quote you a few
words from the documents of this exercise
from the year 2000, it says:
The sight of armed military
presence in American cities provokes
protests against the curtailment of
civil liberties (...)
The question is how and to what extent we enforce these things.
How much force do you use
to keep people in their homes?
So those are the things that
were discussed very specifically by high-level
stakeholders in these exercises, 20 years
ago, as I said.
At that time in the USA -
many will remember - there was also
a very important presidential election.
President Bush, the younger,
came into office in
January 2001. (IMAGE).
Here beside him is Dick Cheney, his vice president,
who has had great influence in this administration.
Just a few months after the inauguration of
these two gentlemen, there was already the third
major bioterror exercise in a very short time.
It was called Dark Winter.
Another smallpox exercise, and this colorful
page (PICTURE) is also an original
website of this center from 2001.
Back then, websites looked a bit
more colorful, a bit messier.
This is really from the original internet archive.
Here it is also directly stated from whom the money comes.
Sponsored by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
& The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
This has been done quite openly.
Yes, and this exercise has been professionalized.
The previous exercises have taken place in
hotels, in the conference room, quite simply.
This exercise took place on a military base.
Andrews Air Force Base is a large military base just
outside the nation's capital, Washington, and so that's been scaled
up another notch, the whole thing. Dark Winter, that also
has a bit of the feel of a Hollywood movie.
So it almost has something like a marketing, you
can almost say for this whole issue, publicity-wise.
This has all been made public as well.
There was also written about it at that time.
Now this has not been done in dark back rooms.
You have to realize that, this is really
meant for the public, in fact. Let's take
a look at who actually participated.
This is also from the original documents of the exercise.
If you look into these names a little bit,
or if you look into American politics a little
bit during that time, a lot of names will
sound familiar, these are very influential people.
For example, we have the role of the
CIA director, has been played by James Woolsey.
But he was really CIA director a few years before.
Or, let's see, the governor of Oklahoma, the state that had that
terrible attack, we had that earlier - Frank Keating. He was actually
governor of Oklahoma at the time of the exercise, too.
So he wasn't just playing it now, he was actually doing it.
And similarly, the other functions
are occupied by senior people.
You can really say they have rehearsed a
state of emergency here at the highest level.
Now this was not middle management of government agencies.
That was a very high level
at which these things were discussed!
What also stands out when you look at these
exercise documents is the role of the press.
Because press was present during these exercises.
They were built into the planning
games, they played along, and they
were not small journalists either, but
nationally known journalists.
For example, we find Judith Miller of the New York
Times, a very well-known journalist in this major newspaper, or
television reporters from the major networks NBC CBS.
They were there.
(IMAGE)
So that's also a photo from the exercise directly and they basically went through a fake press conference.
So the politicians have been playing -
we have this emergency now, there's a
smallpox exercise now, there's a smallpox attack
on the United States now - and
the reporters then do a press conference,
ask questions.
Politicians are already practicing how the press will react
and what they will then say to the press.
This was also practiced, in great detail
and at a very high level.
Okay, then lessons were learned, that's
part of such an exercise, that's
what it's actually for, and the
results were such that you said:
We are ill-prepared for a bioweapons attack,
do not have enough vaccines - and
forcible restrictions on citizens are probably the
only tools available if there is not
enough vaccine yet.
So, we need to restrict civil rights.
This is now the year 2001.
This is where, again, Robert Kadlec, who
we had earlier, who wrote this strategy
paper for the Pentagon, who said that
you could use a bioweapon in the
shadow of a real disease and then
you could credibly deny that.
This Robert Kadlec is here participating in
this exercise as a bioweapons expert.
(IMAGE)
This recording you see here is a television report from a fictional news station.
You have to imagine people
sitting there doing this exercise.
Then there's a big TV screen and fictitious news
items are played, but they've been specially pre-produced.
That's when the expert Robert Kadlec shows up and says, "The
problem is we don't have enough vaccine and that means it
could be a very dark winter in America - It means
this could be a very dark winter in America.
And that is, after all, the title of the exercise Dark Winter.
And if we look now at what happened to
Robert Kadlec later - now in the Corona crisis
in 2020 - one of the most important advisers
to the U.S. government (BILD), standing here in the
middle at the lectern, next to him Mike Pence,
Vice President under President Trump.
In the meantime, Joe Biden has been declared president of
the United States, and just a few days after the
major American television networks declared him president, he said that
America is facing a very dark winter.
The same words, that is, the exact same words.
You can think that this is a
coincidence - of course, I can't prove
that this is related to the exercise.
But the suspicion is very close that
this language has also been taken over
from this old preliminary planning. At least
it is the same.
Back to the year 2001.
The documents for the exercise stated, "Americans
can no longer take for granted basic
civil rights such as the right to
assemble or the freedom to travel.
Yes, so that was the third exercise in a very short time on this topic.
That was quite strong in the public and only
a few ... this is now in June 2001.
Then we go into September now, there
are the attacks of 9/11 and the
whole issue of terrorism is pushed up
a whole level again.
Now the world public is really quite present,
the terrorist threat is the topic, which directs
and shapes the entire political discussion for years.
September 2001, then October 2001, a
month later, anthrax letters show up.
Letters containing this fine, white powder
of anthrax are sent, are mailed.
To these two politicians Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.
Tom Daschle was Senate Majority Leader at the time
and Patrick Leahy was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
What united these two politicians at that
time was that they were both opposed
to the legislative changes that were to
be passed after September 11, 2001 -
keyword Patriot Act, i.e. restrictions on civil
rights, expansion of power for the government,
expansion of competencies for the secret services
- all these legislative measures that were
introduced at that time.
They sided with civil
rights and said:
We cannot let this expansion pass as a blanket statement.
We have to discuss this on a case-by-case
basis, we have to weigh it up carefully.
In this situation, the two received anthrax letters,
the authorship of which is actually disputed to
this day, it must be said.
In the beginning, it was said - this is coming from bin Laden, this is coming from al Qaeda, this is coming from Iraq.
None of this could be substantiated.
In the end, the letters were said to have come
from a confused scientist in America's own bioweapons research.
This, too, could not really be substantiated.
Quite a few different stories are circulating in the room.
In fact, these attacks have not been solved to date.
But the fact is that after these two
politicians received these threatening letters - and here
you have to realize briefly: If they send
a letter with a poisonous powder to such
a politician, then it is clear that they
do not kill the politician with it, because
these politicians do not open their mail themselves.
Of course, they have employees who do that.
I.e.
, whoever did it, did not want to kill
them, then he would have found other ways and
means, but he wanted to threaten them.
He wanted to send them a signal! Here is a red line.
Whoever is the author of these
letters, these two politicians should be
threatened and put in fear.
And, however they stood by that, I don't
know, but the fact is, immediately after they
got those letters, they gave up their opposition
and the laws were passed that way.
These anthrax letters were then used to justify something very interesting.
In November 2001, again very shortly afterwards,
a new international organization was established on
the initiative of the U.S. government.
It was called the
Global Health Security Initiative!
And the reason given was that they said:
These anthrax letters - that was the big world issue at
the time - they can strike anywhere. Every government is threatened.
Iraq or Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden could
ship this highly toxic powder to any of them.
We have to join forces now, internationally
all states, and act together against this.
Then they created this initiative.
The participating states are signaled here by the flags at the bottom (points to graphic slide).
So that's Canada, European Union, France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, Mexico, United Kingdom, United States, and WHO
is also there as a technical advisor.
November 2001 founded.
This group is basically the G8, i.e. the most
influential industrialized countries of the West, supplemented by Mexico
and the European Union as an extra actor.
From then on, they met regularly
at a very high level.
Either the health ministers of the
states personally or very senior deputies
of them and have been talking
about this bioterrorism issue and coordinating.
Just one year later, another very important step has been taken,
2002.
Indeed, it has been found that there are great similarities
in contingency planning for bio-terror and for pandemic influenza.
I.e.
From 2002 onwards, they always rehearsed and prepared for both.
So you didn't necessarily need a terrorist attack as
a danger, but you said: Well, a virus like
that can also spread just like that!
And that's just as dangerous, too, and we
have to prepare for that as well.
This whole issue of pandemic preparedness,
in English it's called Pandemic
Preparedness, i.e., alert for pandemics.
This began at the international level through
this institution in the year 2002.
A technical working group on pandemic influenza was then
formed, led by the United States and England.
And then exercises began that were
no longer just in the U.S.,
but were internationally coordinated.
The first of these exercises was
in 2003, the Global Mercury exercise.
This is a graphic from the exercise materials.
I got these from the RKI website.
And there you see the teammates in this graphic.
So here are the direct players:
European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
Mexico, UK, USA, WHO, Canada -
these are the players.
And above there is a director and an
exercise planner who have written the script for
the exercise, and below there is just playing!
Germany also participated, represented
by the RKI.
It has been a very elaborate exercise over several days.
Many hundreds of people were involved
and just played it out.
There were quite a few of this type of exercise during this time.
The Atlantic Storm exercise was very important in 2005.
In the center at the lectern here, Madeleine
Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State - played
the role of President in this exercise!
In the documentation of this exercise we can read:
How should national leaders determine border closure or quarantine?
If measures are taken to restrict movement, how
long would they need to be maintained?
How would they be coordinated internationally and how
would the decision be made to repeal them?
So basically exactly the kind of issues that are being
discussed all over the world right now in 2020 have
already been discussed very seriously and at a very high
level with each other at this exercise.
Let me show you who participated.
Among them, two politicians from France and Germany:
Bernard Kouchner, left, and Werner Hoyer, right.
Bernard Kouchner was the former French Minister of Health.
Later, he became foreign minister, that is, part of the government.
And at the time the exercise took place, he was being
talked about as the next candidate for director of WHO.
So, at the time, quite an important person in this field.
To his right...oh yes, and he played
the role of the French president.
To the right of him Werner Hoyer, is an FDP
politician, who was Minister of State in the Foreign Office,
and played the role of the German Chancellor.
They sat there at a table from all these countries and played this out.
And these are people who
have actually held government responsibility.
Yes, the Werner Hoyer said after the exercise, "For someone
who has been working in security and defense for many
years, this was quite a surprising and breathtaking exercise.
I think things like this are only aware of a very small minority of politicians in Europe.
Okay, I've introduced you to quite a few of these exercises now.
You may recognize the parallels. You can see the pattern of what this is all about.
I want to draw my big interim conclusion:
Of course, what was it all about?
Of course, it was about a health emergency.
It was about decision-making problems, about competencies:
Who gets to decide
what, who has supremacy?
But it was not just about these things.
It also involved a state of emergency, the abrogation of fundamental
rights, mass vaccination and authoritarian politics without the participation of parliaments.
These points were also the focus of all the exercises.
I find that very remarkable, because that is not logically necessary.
If they rehearse a pandemic or a terrorist attack, the response to
it, they don't automatically have to rehearse a repeal of fundamental rights.
That's not automatically included there.
But it was done in such a way that
an observer can get the impression that these exercises
may have been a camouflage to test a political
state of emergency, to play through how one actually
acts when something like this happens.
At least that is my personal impression.
Yes, then soon came the financial crisis in 2007/2008 and the issue of
pandemic drills took a bit of a back seat on the international stage.
In 2009, just as the financial crisis was breaking through on the global
economy, the swine flu pandemic came around the corner - say i
and in the spring of 2009, when the swine flu story
was just getting started and nobody really knew what was going
to happen, this gentleman commented on it (image is projected).
This is Jacques Attali, not everyone knows him either - but he is very well known in France.
He is a presidential advisor.
He was a very important advisor to President François Mitterrand for a long time - he prepared the G8 meetings
for Mitterrand as a so-called Sherpa, that is, someone who was very close to power for a long time.
A thought leader of the elites in France and also someone
who, for example, as I learned from the Frankfurter Allgemeine, has
helped presidents - the current President Emmanuel Macron - rise.
He says of himself that he discovered Macron.
And that is also relatively credible when you look at
how well Jacques Attali is networked in the French elites.
He said at the beginning of 2009, in a media article in the press
- you can still access that today - on the subject of swine flu:
History teaches us that humanity develops significantly only when
it is truly afraid (...) The onset of the
pandemic could trigger one of these structuring fears.
(...) Then we will be able to lay the foundations for a genuine world
government much more quickly than would have been possible on economic grounds alone.
I won't comment on it at all, these
are simply his statements from that time.
I find this very remarkable!
Usually, such statements are labeled conspiracy
theory, but this is real.
This is a real statement from a man who has great influence.
And he voiced that in 2009.
Around this time, a year later, in 2010,
a study was published in the U.S. that
also goes a bit in this direction:
The so-called Lock Step scenario is a part of this study.
I'll introduce it briefly so you know a little bit about what it's all about.
The study itself is
this (overlaid slide).
This is the title: Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.
That sounds a bit boring.
Bureaucratic title, unspectacular.
You don't expect to hear any
big news at first glance.
The study was developed with money from
the Rockefeller Foundation, below is the logo.
The Rockefeller Foundation is one of the most powerful and wealthiest foundations in the world.
The name goes back to the founder.
David Rockefeller was actually also the richest man in the world a hundred years ago.
Today, the foundation still has great influence in many areas.
And this study from 2010 has basically, has taken the
topic of business games to a whole new level.
You no longer just kind of said what happens when this happens,
when that happens, but you developed global, four global future scenarios:
In what directions might the world develop
in the next few years, generally speaking.
Four directions have been defined.
And one of these possibilities that was sketched out there,
simply to look a bit outside the box, as they
say in management circles, to look a bit beyond the
end of one's nose - one of these directions was
called Lock Step, and Lock Step means lockstep.
In this scenario, written 10 years ago, the following things occur,ie: -
an influenza pandemic spreads throughout the world and causes global panic.
China is becoming a role model in the panic with its restrictive approach.
Mandatory masks are being introduced everywhere, all over the world.
Authoritarian Control is exercised and remains in place after the pandemic ends.
Citizens willingly give up their freedom and widespread
resistance emerges only after more than ten years.
This is the scenario from the year 2010.
That's very strange to read that now in 2020
and that's the reality that we're experiencing right now.
If you read the study, you will find the formulations that
the goal is: to trigger a new strategic debate among decision-makers.
We don't know, or I don't know, who talked to whom
about that scenario at the time, in what circles that circulated.
You can't say that, I don't have data on that, but that exists, the
study is callable and it's been funded with money from a very powerful foundation.
So you can already assume that the study was read
at the time by a few people who have influence.
Yes, this whole issue of emergency drill, pandemic drill picked up new steam as of 2017.
What was 2017?
There was a new president in the USA: Donald Trump.
And I'm putting this in context because that context seems very obvious to me.
So January 2017, Trump is inaugurated - here's a picture in
the Oval Office in the White House, in the middle the
President's desk, on the left Barack Obama, outgoing President, so Donald
Trump shows the Oval Office for the first time.
Yes, and everyone will still remember.
There was a real shock in the media all over the world.
Trump is president, how can that be, nobody predicted it, everybody
thought it was impossible that something like this could happen, that
such an outsider - such blatant statements, who doesn't care at
all about what the mainstream says - that someone like this
would become president, so it sent shockwaves around the globe.
There are these big international conferences that take place every
year in Davos in January, the Munich Security Conference in
February, and in 2017 there was nothing else to talk
about at these conferences but the new U.S. president.
What does this mean now for the world system, for world trade, for
the financial system, for international diplomacy? Can it even go on like this?
At the Munich Security Conference in February 2017, John McCain appeared and
he said, "I refuse to accept the demise of our world order.
John McCain was alive then.
This has been one of the military hawks and hardliners in
the U.S. with great influence in international diplomacy, and his speech
was very well received at this conference where military and diplomats
of the Western world, NATO, meet every year.
And if you look again at the documents, look at the articles from this time
of the conference, then it becomes clear that at that time really a lot was
on the line and in these elite circles people were very worried whether NATO can
continue to exist in this form at all, whether it will fall apart now, whether
it will fall apart because of Trump ... whether it will all fly apart.
And it is in this context that this very sentence has fallen.
McCain says, "I refuse to accept the demise of our world order.
And he had a huge applause from the colleagues from the Western world.
The next day at the same conference, Bill Gates appears and also
gives a speech and he says, we ignore the link between health
security and international security at our own peril, and he says: A
bioweapons attack will come and it is only a matter of time.
We have to be prepared for that.
We need to prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war.
And immediately after that, it really kicks
off again with these international pandemic exercises.
The exercise restarts.
We are now in 2017, in May 2017, in Berlin, for the first
time in history, a meeting of the G20 health ministers is taking place.
So G20 is the 20 richest, most powerful industrialized countries
in the world, so China and India and Brazil are
also there, and all the European industrialized countries as well.
And for the first time, the health ministers met here
specifically to face this bioterror threat - this pandemic threat
- together, to prepare - and there was a big
pandemic exercise, in Berlin, in May 2017.
We see here in the front row all the
ministers of health [ Speaker points to a picture].
Here Hermann Gröhe, was then the predecessor of Jens Spahn, German Minister of Health.
Next to him are his colleagues from China, the USA,
Brazil, Canada, Australia - all sitting next to each other.
And a pandemic scenario plays out on the screen in front of them:
What happens when a new virus spreads, and what can we do together?
The virus back then was not called SARS, it was called Mountain
Associated Respiratory Syndrome (MARS) . So this is now a fictional virus
that apparently came from the mountains according to the script.
Yes, and if you look at that, if you look at that picture again, then maybe
it becomes a little bit clear why today - now in the crisis, all countries, or
most countries, are proceeding in a very coordinated way, and the same thing is happening everywhere.
Yes, because all these responsible people have received the same input
in the time before, before the crisis, and have been taught
the same recipes that then have to be implemented.
They've already been synchronized by all this exercise stuff.
At least that is how it appears.
We remain in 2017, are now in August 2017.
And Herrmann Gröhe, the health minister, is introducing an advisory panel this month.
An international advisory body that is to advise German
health policy with a view to global health policy
- in other words, Germany is to make a
global health policy - is to lead the way.
And these gentlemen and ladies are supposed to advise the government on this [group photo fades in]. There, of course, catches the eye right in the middle, we all know him:
Christian Drosten is thus a member of this advisory body.
To his left, Ilona Kickbusch, an academic from Germany, who has also
done a lot of research on this topic of pandemic danger, etc.
Which played a role in a WHO.
Then here: Jörg Hacker.
This is the former president of the RKI (Robert Koch Institute). Here is a lady from Africa, WHO Regional Director of Africa.
But from my point of view, the gentlemen on the far left and right are decisive.
Because they're in a whole different league when you look at it.
We have Jeremy Farrar from the Wellcome Trust on the left.
This is a British foundation that has raised over 25 billion. Dollars available.
This is an incredibly influential foundation in the health policy field.
So in terms of money volume, they are more
influential than the Rockerfeller Foundation, than George Soros' foundation.
So they have more money, and he's
extremely well connected in international health policy.
On the far right, that's Christopher Elias of the Gates Foundation.
And the Gates Foundation is even bigger, they
don't have 25 billion, they have 50 billion.
And are even better networked, and thus play a leading role in
the world in international health policy, one can certainly say without exaggeration.
These two gentlemen are advisors to the German government as of 2017,
at the same table as Christian Drosten and the Minister of Health.
Maybe you should have heard it before.
Okay, let's move on to next year.
In 2018, there will be another major bio-terror exercise in the US.
This is not an international exercise this time.
Seated here around this conference table in Washington
are individuals representing the National Security Council.
So people - politicians, officials, important people with high functions.
They're playing, they're the National Security Council now, and there's
a bio-terrorist attack now, and they have to respond.
It's interesting from a number of perspectives.
We see here in the middle a video feed from a TV station.
And this is a pre-recorded television show.
The two women who are talking to each other are well-known television presenters in the USA.
If this were in Germany, it would be as if Sandra Maischberger and Maybrit
Illner were conferring with each other about the bioterrorist attack, and the people there
were [ Speaker points to the superimposed photo] then react to it.
There was an effort to make it as realistic as possible, so that
the people sitting at the table really feel that this is real now.
With great effort has been made.
Okay, this exercise was about a fictitious, high-ranking, elite
sect developing a nasty virus in a bio lab
in Zurich, which they then circulated around the world.
A pandemic emerges, and the goal of this cult is
said to have been to reduce the world's population.
So it's quite a demonic target.
That has been the scenario of this exercise Clade X,
again organized by the Center for Health Security, who have
planned all these other exercises the years before.
Joining them on the right is Tom Daschle.
We had this one earlier: one of the recipients of the anthrax letters.
In the meantime, he has been a lobbyist for health care companies.
And here he just participated in the exercise.
To his left is Tara O'Toole, who is a bio-security expert
who has written a lot of scripts for these exercises.
So for example for the exercise Dark Winter she wrote the script.
She is also sitting at the table here.
She later played an important role in the government and
yes, is a key person in this whole scene actually.
So now we are already very close to the present.
And before I tell you about the final exercise, Event 201 -
in October 2019, I want to open up a whole other can
of worms again because I think it belongs in this context.
In the context of asking yourself the question:
Why did this whole Corona pandemic start in January 2020?
Of course, you can say, yes,
then the virus just shows up.
If we stay in the official statement, and that's where this just took its course.
It just happened as fate would have it.
If we now assume that it did not happen
so fatefully, but that this was directed by some
circles, as a mind game, then it is perhaps
not uninteresting to realize what happened in September 2019.
There was a very big quake on the stock markets.
I had noticed almost nothing of it, I had noticed
it at that time only at the edge, as a
small message, but had not followed up and only now,
for this lecture, I had a closer look at it.
As I said at the beginning, I don't have this topic in my book yet either.
To give them an idea of what really
happened, I'll just show them a short newspaper
report that sums it up quite well.
It is an article from the time.
This is published in October 2019, and it says: Short circuit in the financial system.
The U.S. Federal Reserve wants to use billions of dollars to prevent a total default on the money market.
How critical is the situation?
Let me read you the most important info from
the article so you understand what was going on:
The crisis came overnight.
Banks were in danger of running out of money.
Central bankers pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the
money market merely to prevent the worst from happening.
This all sounds like the height of the global financial crisis eleven years
ago - but it actually describes the Monday before last. So September 2019.
There, an important part of the world financial system was on
the verge of collapse, and the public noticed next to nothing.
On the night of September 17, a certain interest rate (...) shot up without warning:
the rate that applies to banks that want to borrow in the short term.
Normally, banks there are supplied with cash
for about two percent interest (...)
But suddenly cash cost ten percent there.
(...) The last time central bankers had to intervene in the repo market ─ that is the
name of this financial center ─ was after the demise of the investment bank Lehman Brothers 2008.
At the time, the investment bank's imbalance triggered a state of emergency in this part
of the financial system, which almost led to the collapse of the global economy.
I found that very interesting and I still find that very interesting
and I tried to check that out, to look at the numbers.
Went to the Federal Reserve website, which is the Federal Reserve.
And there you can find the following graphic.
For those not familiar with finance and numbers, don't be alarmed, this chart
is not magic. Not as complicated as it looks at first glance.
Let me briefly try to explain them:
The chart shows the 'balance sheet', the central bank's total assets.
This could be translated like this:
The chart shows how much money the Federal Reserve contributes to the U.S. economy.
So, how much government bonds does it buy up, how much corporate bonds does it buy up as well.
This means that the central bank creates money and puts it on the market to compensate
for the fact that banks no longer lend money to themselves because they have lost confidence.
This is what happens.
You could also call that a bit simplified
as the fever curve of the U.S. economy.
In fact, it is.
Let's start on the left.
In 2008, before the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve had
total assets of about one trillion, or $1,000 billion.
That doubled in a few weeks, in the fall 2008.
Yes, why doubled?
Because the banks have stopped lending money to each other.
The trust was gone.
And that's where the central bank has to step in, because otherwise the system will collapse.
This is what happened.
What's interesting is that that wasn't scaled back, but the
level stayed the same over the next few years.
In 2010, 2011 it was increased. 12,13,14, it was further increased.
Then there was a plateau phase from 2015 to the end of 2017.
With a very high plateau phase, four trillion, four times the pre-crisis value.
If you look at it with the distance of today, then you see;
this bubble was gigantic.
We realize that you can't sustain such a big bubble forever.
At some point, you have to deflate it or it will burst.
And that's exactly what the Federal Reserve tried to do at the end of 2017.
She has decided to slowly and purposefully release air from this bubble continuously.
Selling assets and thus deleting money from the system again.
And that went well for two years.
From the end of 2017 to the end
of 2019 ─ and we zoom in on
that ─ there you go again.
How continuously, i.e. month after month, does the central bank try to deflate the bubble?
And the markets played along. The investors have accepted that.
And something happened in September 2019.
I don't know what, I can't tell you.
But the fact is: confidence in this financial market,
in the 'repo market' collapsed in September 2019.
And that meant, and that led to, the central bank having to totally change course.
What she did for two years, she had to completely reverse.
She had to buy in again.
So that has been a shock to this bank.
And you can see, this rise here, it has nothing to do with Corona at all.
That's January 2020, which is the rise in the shadow of Corona in March.
But this, October, November, December 2019 has
nothing to do with the Corona crisis.
But it is the same movement, which later only intensified.
If you look at this now ... Oh no ...
Before that, I would like to show you a report from January 2020, ─
that is, even before Corona became the big media topic ─ from January 16.
The Handelsblatt journalist Norbert Häring wrote an article
about this increase. And in it he writes:
The FED justified its intervention - unconvincingly - with a temporary
miscalculation of its own (...). Under no circumstances should one conclude
that the banks no longer trust each other, he said.
The alleged miscalculation is apparently quite persistent.
Four months later, the emergency loans (...) still exist in
unbridled amounts, and there is no end in sight.
The names of the recipients of the loans are kept secret by
the FED so that they do not get a reputation for indigence.
(...) Perhaps the financial market boom fueled by central
banks is in its final phase before collapse.
Let me put this in a broader temporal context.
I have chosen a graphic
of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet going back not just 10 years, but 100 years.
That's how long this bank has been around.
(Min. 57.45 Graphic is faded in) This is this curve.
That's basically where you see how much of the U.S. economy the Federal Reserve is involved in.
And we see, this is 2008 here, the financial crisis.
The last time there was such a scale was during the Great Depression of 1930.
Values until World War 2 were slowly reduced after the World War.
This is the level, the severity, at which we are moving with the financial crisis
of 2008 and also with the crisis that broke out anew in September 2019.
That's the dimension we're in there, fiscal policy-wise.
In October 2019, the next exercise took place: 'Event 201'.
This is the place, the hotel, where this exercise took place.
(Image of the hotel will pop up)
That's an upscale Manhattan hotel on 5th Avenue we're looking at.
That's Central Park over there.
Yeah, and if you go down the street here a little bit, a couple of blocks, is Trump Tower.
So this is the most expensive street in Manhattan right here.
And this hotel was opened in 1930, in the middle of
the economic crisis, with the money of big Wall Street banks.
And the architecture of this attic is based on the Palace
Chapel of Versailles, so this baroque splendor of Louis XIV.
The Wall Street bankers who financed it wanted to live in this
splendor. They saw themselves a little bit on that level, too.
Yes, the hotel is still there today.
And there, right there in New York, this exercise took
place, 'Event 201,' where a coronavirus pandemic was actually rehearsed.
I want to say briefly who is sitting at the table here, that
you get an idea of the people who have rehearsed here, then:
This is the presenter from the Center for Health Security
Next to him sits the Christopher Elias.
We had him earlier, he is from the
Bill Gates Foundation and has been an advisor
to the Federal Government, as we learned earlier.
To his right is the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
This is the head of China's disease control agency.
They also participated in this exercise.
This is the vice chairman of Johnson & Johnson,
the world's largest pharmaceutical company by market capitalization.
That's the former vice president of the CIA,
she sat on that panel as well.
And the gentleman in front here is the president of the Edelmann PR agency.
This is the largest PR agency in the world.
At this conference, at this exercise, as
I said, a coronavirus pandemic was played
out, also with public relations in mind.
What this means in the documents for this exercise is
that governments will need to work with media companies to
research and develop more adept approaches to combating misinformation.
This requires developing the ability to flood the
media with fast, accurate and consistent information.
(...) For their part, media companies should commit to ensuring
that official messages are given priority and that false messages
are suppressed, including through the use of technology.
And that's basically what's happening right now.
Here is another picture at this conference;
we see here the organizer, this is the director
of the Center for Health Security, Anita Cicero.
She is an attorney, she worked for
a large law firm as a pharmaceutical
lobbyist before she worked for this institute.
She had three hundred lawyers under her, and
her interlocutors included members of the European Commission,
included politicians from the U.S. Senate, to whom
she brought the interests of the pharmaceutical industry
before she then became vice director of this
center and helped organize exercises like this.
What I find very interesting is the presentation on the
top left of the picture, where you can see how
this crisis, which has been fictitiously acted out, is illustrated.
So you can see a graph here, the case numbers, how they develop.
You can see which countries are affected and how badly, you can
see how stock market prices are developing at the same time, how
many deaths there are, projected over the next few months.
That is exactly the kind of presentation that we
are being presented in the Corona Crisis by Johns
Hopkins University, who have gone through this exercise, and
that we are also being presented, mediated by that
institution, in all the media.
Just this kind of graphical representation of the
numbers, that's exactly what our reality is now.
And the proposed restrictions of Min1:02:26 ) social media
and so on, and that YouTube and Google and
the big corporations should be restricting that.
Also, what was pre-planned here is now a reality at
the moment, and I think all of this information taken
together is an important background to form an opinion about
what actually just happened here at the moment.
Thank you for your attention.