Event 201

 Event 201(disaster planning exercise,  mid-level deep event)

Event cuddly virus toy give-away to attendees
Date	18 October 2019
Location	New York,  USA
Participants	Anita Cicero, Tom Inglesby, Tim Evans, George Gao, Avril Haines, Jane Halton, Matthew Harrington, Martin Knuchel, Eduardo Martinez, Stephen Redd
Perpetrators	Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Website	http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/
Interest of	Edelman, Jane Halton, Operation Dark Winter
Interests	pandemics
Description	A Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security/World Economic Forum/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored 3.5 hour "tabletop" exercise about a global coronavirus pandemic that killed 65 million people. Held October 2019.

Event 201 was a 3.5 hour "tabletop" exercise about a global coronavirus pandemic, held in front of an audience on 18 October 2019. The 15 (or so?) "exercise players" were described as "prominent individuals from global business, government, and public health" and included Avril Haines. News.com.au termed it a "creepy coincidence".

Own words

“The policy crisis for the board to consider in this meeting is this. How should national leaders, businesses and international organizations balance the risk of worsening disease that would be caused by the continued movement of people around the world against the risks of profound economic consequence of travel and trade bans?”
 (18 October 2019) 

On 24 January 2020 the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security issued a "Statement about nCoV and our pandemic exercise" that clarified that "We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people. 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."

Participants

The event was introduced by Anita Cicero and chaired by Tom Inglesby. The official website listed 15 "players", although a couple more appear to be seated in the photo (left). "Participants included representatives from NBCUniversal, UPS [Eduardo Martinez], and Johnson & Johnson [Adrian Thomas]."

Content

The event was introduced by a video featuring "Mike Ryan, the executive director at who and the head of who is emergency program". The conjectured pandemic was "a SARS-like virus, germinating quietly among pig farms in Brazil before spreading to every country in the world." The site reported that "the immune-resistant virus (nicknamed CAPS) was crippling trade and travel, sending the global economy into freefall."

Topics discussed during the event included:

• Roles of governments and social media in Controlling the narrative about the virus
• Challenging "conspiracy theories" that it "pharmaceutical companies or the UN have released this for their own benefit"
• Internet censorship and public unrest
• Pioritising drug use, redirecting antiretroviral drugs away from HIV patients
• Maximising use of existing medical supplies such as drugs and facemasks
• The impact on the economy and on the virus of travel and trade bans
• Global coordination of efforts to mitigate the virus
• Relationships between government and big business
• Bailouts of governments and "too big to fail" businesses
• Allaying public concerns about vaccines
• Building an international coalition

The following quotes are drawn from a * Machine-generated Transcript of the event:

"Conspiracy theories"

“[M]y team has been monitoring the public response. And on various social media channels and cable networks, there's been some conspiracy theories that are around about the potential that pharmaceutical companies or the UN have released this for their own benefit... if conspiracy theories like this come up already, so we are on the edge of hysterical reactions.”
 (18 October 2019) 

“My team has been monitoring the public response. And on various social media channels and cable networks, there's been some conspiracy theories that are around about the potential that pharmaceutical companies or the UN have released this for their own benefit. So as we move forward, obviously, trust in pharmaceuticals and government is very important at this moment. And so as we move forward with developing the right scenarios, we have to make sure that the public communication is a major part of that because of these conspiracy theories.”
 (18 October 2019) 

Internet censorship

“Some governments have taken control of national access to the internet. Others are censoring websites and social media content, and a small number have shut down internet access completely to prevent the spread of misinformation. Penalties have been put in place for spreading harmful falsehoods, including arrests. Other countries have taken a more moderate approach and have focused on promoting fact checking efforts and working with traditional media outlets. Yet these approaches are limited in scope. Social media companies report that they're doing all they can to limit the use of their platforms for nefarious or misleading purposes. But this is a technically difficult problem and false misleading or half true information is difficult to sort without limiting potentially true messages. The bottom line is that members of the public no longer know who to trust. Both the misinformation and the measures to control it have led to a crisis of confidence”
 (18 October 2019) 

"Soft power"

“It's important that the UN and WHO remain very clear, but when they challenge governments directly, they often get into this issue of sovereignty. And so I think it's really important not to have that as the only response. I think it's really critical to think about soft power influence, which is other influentials, who can call up the head of state, or powerful constituencies within those countries. We've seen this in the context of mobilizing religious leaders in the context of polio, or specific business leaders where you can soften perhaps a very hard line from government through less more stealthy entry points, rather than trying to punish them through the International Health Regulations or something like that.”
 (18 October 2019) 

Lockdowns

“it shouldn't be controversial to suggest our response should prioritize both lives and livelihoods. Absolutely. We need to save lives. We all know someone who's been affected by cats. But we literally cannot afford a heavy handed response that suffocates our economy. pragmatism is a wise choice. I mean, what exactly are the risks and benefits of slowing air travel of staying home from work, closing schools, disrupting supply chains, interfering with our reliable channels of communication and news? Sure, some of these steps can help slow caps but often only most - 3:00 - Generally and with serious costs, when this is all over some families, some cities will have suffered more from our interventions, then from CAPS.”
 (18 October 2019) 

Social unrest

“The world saw large scale protests and in some places riots, people were angry about the lack of access to health care and medicine, as well as government's inability to protect them from the disease. This led to violent crackdowns in some countries and even martial law. political upheaval became the rule across the globe. Public lost trust and their respective administrations, several governments fell, while others were desperately striving to hold on to power. This spurred further crackdowns, attempt to control media messaging originally aimed only at health related misinformation became used increasingly to quash political dissent.”
 (18 October 2019) 

Predecessors

Event 201 was the 4th in a series of such exercises, of which the first, Dark Winter, occurred in June 2001.

Reporting

As of March 2020, Wikipedia reported that "The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences."

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
COVID-19/Timeline	“the next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus . . . or a super contagious and deadly strain of the flu. [...] Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10-15 years.”	Bill Gates	17 February 2017
ID2020	“At the ID2020 Alliance summit last September [2019] in New York, it was decided that the “Rising to the Good ID Challenge” program would be launched in 2020.”	Pepe Escobar	2020

 

Sponsor

Event	Description
Open Philanthropy	Grant maker funneling deep state money among other things to pandemic planning. Financed Event 201.

 

Known Participants

21 of the 34 of the participants already have pages here:

Participant	Description
Latoya Abbott	Event 201 participant; her innovative methods increased vaccine uptake in hospital workers
Sofia Borges	Possibly Australian/Timorese dual national. Important in the UN system working with implementation of the Agenda 2030. Attended Event 201.
Anita Cicero	Big pharma lobbyist, public health planner and participant in Event 201
Brad Connett	Large vaccine pharma company executive, Event 201 participant
Chris Elias	Doctor and Bill Gates protege, A Spreading Plague, Event 201
Tim Evans	Close to a number of Foundations, World Bank, WHO. Participated in at least two pandemic planning exercises in 2019: Event 201 and A Spreading Plague
George Gao	Chinese virologist and immunologist who participated in the notorious Event 201 and the 2021 Monkeypox Tabletop Exercise
Avril Haines	"The proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing". Possible central figure in several major psy-ops, including Russiagate and COVID-19.
Jane Halton	Former leader of the murderous People Smuggling Taskforce, event 201 participant
Matthew Harrington	PR-executive
Martin Knuchel	Took part in Event 201 as crisis manager for Lufthansa
Randall Larsen	Military/Homeland Security WMD expert.
Eduardo Martinez	Attended the notorious 2019 Event 201 pandemic planning exercise, representing the global logistics sector
Ryan Morhard	Works for Ginkgo Bioworks "building a platform to enable customers to program cells as easily as we can program computers"
Stephen Redd	Event 201 participant with interest in Anthrax and Ebola
Mike Ryan	WHO exec with close ties to the pharma industry. Participated in Event 201.
Matthew Shearer	Spooky US Navy officer who moved to biosecurity. He was an integral part of developing and implementing the Clade X and Event 201 pandemic exercises.
Hasti Taghi	Vice-president and chief of staff of NBCUniversal. Event 201 participant.
Lavan Thiru	Event 201 "player". Took part as representative of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. His boss Tharman Shanmugaratnam is a member of the World Economic Forum's Board of Trustees.
Adrian Thomas	Pharma executive who attended Event 201 Covid dry-run.
Eric Toner	Project director and principal designer of the influential pandemic exercises Clade X and Event 201, which reflected many of his ideas on the subject.

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:All Roads Lead to Dark Winter	report	1 April 2020	Whitney Webb

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