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The term “plandemic” refers to a set of videos released in May that describe a hidden agenda behind COVID-19, alleging that the sickness itself is a bioweapon that was spread to get as many people as possible vaccinated with drugs that cause medical harm. Much of the videos’ claims have been debunked as false, misleading or inaccurate — or, more plainly, as conspiracy theories.
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A 2019 Hopkins exercise explored effects of a coronavirus pandemic. It’s falsely been linked to conspiracy theories.
By Hallie Miller Baltimore Sun | Oct 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM
The virus started in pigs — hypothetically — spreading silently within herds and then to farmers.
It manifested as a mild flu in some and developed into a severe respiratory illness in others, with cases leading to pneumonia. Infections fanned out worldwide with densely populated and impoverished areas faring especially poorly. After 18 months, 65 million people had died in the mock exercise. Economies buckled and some countries banned travel. Global gross domestic product plummeted 11%. Scarce medical resources needed rationing.
This was the scenario presented by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security a year ago to a group of global business leaders, government officials and public health professionals gathered in New York City for an event meant to prepare top executives and officials for a deadly pandemic and explore how to prop up the economy.
Two months later, a real novel coronavirus emerged and began spreading around the world. Since then, some have falsely linked the event to a broader conspiracy theory about COVID-19′s origins, saying the event’s planners knew there would be a pandemic before the first case emerged in Wuhan, China — and might have even caused it to enrich themselves or assert control over the population.
Participants of “Event 201,” co-organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum, included representatives from the United Nations and other agencies as well as executives from Johnson & Johnson, UPS, Marriott and other companies.
Organizers dubbed the October 2019 exercise Event 201 because the World Health Organization responds to about 200 epidemic events each year — but, as a YouTube video released by Hopkins states, “we need to prepare for the event that becomes a pandemic.”
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The name provides further justification for anonymous web users who believe the organizers influenced or even caused what happened later.
“The people behind this plandemic need to be arrested starting with megalomaniac front man Bill Gates,” one YouTuber commented on a Hopkins video that provides a sweeping overview of the exercise.
“So the conference was in October of 2019 …and by December the world gets this coronavirus pandemic… oh ok… what an amazing coincidence!” wrote another. “Anyone else feels we are being played?”
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Planners opted to base the exercise around a coronavirus pandemic due to the prevalence over the last two decades of such contagions as SARS and MERS, for which no vaccine exists.
“The exercise was in no way predicting the pandemic; we did not know it was coming, specifically,” Watson said. “We spent an enormous amount of time thinking about what the realistic policy problems and situations are that would occur in a severe pandemic, so it makes sense that in a real-life scenario, those problems are coming up.”
Despite the resemblances of Event 201 to COVID-19, much of today’s pandemic was not reflected in the mock exercise. The players made no mention of non-pharmaceutical intervention tools, such as social distancing, mask wearing or hand washing. It also did not address what could happen if state leaders took vastly different approaches, or what might happen if lawmakers in the same country or jurisdiction disagreed on protocol and methodology.
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Still, once the coronavirus outbreak ramped up in January, Hopkins released a statement responding to some of the questions about Event 201, making clear that the exercise did not forecast the facts on the ground.
“We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people,” the statement read. “Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.”
In fact, COVID-19 has not been nearly as virulent as the Event 201 virus. It took nine months for deaths to cross the 1 million mark, according to Hopkins’ Coronavirus Resource Center.
Hallie Miller is a business and health reporter at The Baltimore Sun. She joined the audience engagement team in 2018 after graduating from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she served as an editor for The Diamondback. She is a Maryland native but is always looking for story ideas.
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