Former SAGE member Jeremy Farrar, one of the most influential pro-lockdown advisors in the United Kingdom and considered by some to be akin to the UK’s Anthony Fauci, has been given a major promotion to become Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization, one of the most powerful positions at the WHO alongside its director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Farrar is currently director of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s most influential nonprofits and largest investors in vaccines, with countless billions in offshore funding and close ties to the Gates Foundation.
Farrar is the second former SAGE member who has been rewarded by the WHO with a major promotion for advising the UK Government to enact lockdowns that were as long and strict as possible in 2020, the first being 40-year British Communist Party member Susan Michie, a behavioural psychologist with no background in epidemiology or infectious disease who earlier this year was promoted to lead the WHO’s nudge unit.
Shortly after Xi Jinping enacted the strictest lockdown in history in Wuhan, China, and long before that lockdown produced any results, Farrar echoed his new boss, Tedros, in praising China for “setting a new standard for outbreak response.”
Like Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, one of the three most influential officials behind lockdowns in the United States, Farrar later wrote a book going into tremendous depth about his scorched-earth crusade to convince the UK Government to enact lockdowns that were as long and strict as possible:
Social distancing measures should be mandatory, not optional. A prime minister cannot ask people to lock down if they feel like it… that is not the way these sorts of public health measures work.
Farrar recalls his glee when he first managed to convince Boris Johnson’s Government to enact a lockdown in the UK.
The new restrictions meant people would be unable to leave home except for one of four reasons: to travel to and from work if work could not be done from home; to exercise once a day; to buy food and medicines; and to seek medical care. Shops selling non-essential goods would shut and gatherings of more than two people who did not live together would be banned. People were warned to keep two metres away from people they did not live with. Weddings, parties, religious services would stop, but funerals could still go ahead. SAGE, like so many other working groups around the world, switched to using Zoom.”
Yet, just like Deborah Birx, despite spending hundreds of pages describing his maneuvers to convince the UK Government to prolong and tighten restrictions, Farrar never gives any clear indication as to why he felt this was justifiable, necessary, or what the endpoint was supposed to be. And, just like Birx and his Italian counterpart Roberto Speranza, this is all despite readily admitting that lockdown had no precedent in public health in the modern Western world prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan.
Deciding to close an economy is unbelievably tough, Other than during wars, Western economies had never had a lockdown since the Middle Ages, to my knowledge; this is just not something governments do.
Mainstream reports about Farrar tend to focus on his role in the “cover-up” of the lab-leak theory in February 2020. To be sure, Farrar was one of several counterparts around the world who recalled secretly discussing the possibility of a lab leak with Fauci and others in early 2020:
By the second week of January, I was beginning to realise the scale of what was happening… In those weeks, I became exhausted and scared. I felt as if I was living a different person’s life. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets… In the last week of January 2020, I saw email chatter from scientists in the US suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect human cells. These were credible scientists proposing an incredible, and terrifying, possibility of either an accidental leak from a laboratory or a deliberate release… This issue needed urgent attention from scientists—but it was also the territory of the security and intelligence services… The next day, I contacted Tony Fauci about the rumours over the origins of the virus … Depending on what the experts thought, Tony added, the FBI and MI5 would need to be told… Patrick Vallance informed the intelligence agencies of the suspicions; Eddie [Holmes] did the same in Australia. Tony Fauci copied in Francis Collins, who heads the US National Institutes of Health.
Yet the idea that these actions by Farrar and his counterparts represent a “cover-up” is belied by the fact that they immediately reported the possibility of a lab leak to all the major Western intelligence services—exactly the opposite of what one would do in a cover-up. In light of evidence that the lab leak theory is biologically impossible and may be being used as a controlled opposition narrative to justify the biosecurity state, Farrar’s informing intelligence agencies of the possibility of a lab leak may be better viewed as setting off a false alarm among national security officials to get them to buy into lockdowns.
Just weeks after informing intelligence services of the possibility of a lab leak, Farrar’s counterparts published a paper claiming to show the virus came from the Wuhan wet market, setting off the false dichotomy between the lab-leak theory and the wet market theory which, absurdly, continues to this day despite overwhelming evidence that COVID began spreading undetected all over the world by fall 2019 at the latest.
Ultimately, the lockdowns that Farrar worked so hard for failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and led to the excess deaths of tens of thousands of young people in the United Kingdom and every other country in which they were tried. Yet few can say they did more to successfully bring totalitarianism to the UK than Jeremy Farrar. Perhaps for this reason, the WHO has gone out of its way to take Farrar under its wing and make sure he gets his due.
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