Today’s panel discussion on “Disease X” — an unknown and hypothetical future pandemic — at the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum didn’t make for easy viewing. It revealed worrying signs of the acceleration of technocratic tendencies in pandemic preparedness, which have only consolidated since Covid.
The panel began with a statement by Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization, which ironically attempted to clarify “misinformation” about the panel itself, believed to be the number one global threat by the WEF’s Global Risks Report 2024. As Tedros stated, we should not be worried about the mysterious term Disease X, which is simply a placeholder to help plan for future biological threats.
Before the panel this week, social media fears abounded that Disease X would be used as an excuse to reintroduce more lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Yet despite Tedros going on to advocate, rightly, for strengthening primacy healthcare, education and supporting communities to help prepare for Disease X, he did not address these fears, nor the reasons why people might be distrustful of the panelists.
This year’s Davos theme centred on rebuilding trust, but the pandemic panel failed to mention the mistakes made during the Covid period. Curiously, the only reference to lockdown was made in passing by Preetha Reddy, a health executive from India, who recommended that the pandemic response could learn more from the army. “At any time, anything can happen and we don’t know what side it can come from,” she stated.
Unfortunately, the focus on Disease X is indicative of a broader phenomenon: the rise of our new biomedical security state, best represented by the technocratic governance structures that drove emergency laws on lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, quarantines, school closures and censorship.
This is interwoven into the semantic origins of Disease X, which was christened in the WHO R&D Blueprint in 2017 to assist prioritising research and development particularly for vaccines, treatments and tests. It has since become a core driving force for the proliferation of public-private partnerships (PPP) in the global pandemic preparedness industry.
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