On the World Economic Forum, "Preparing for Disease X," and the insufferable self-interested platitudinous jargon-laden fantasies of the globalised public-private idiots who aspire to run our lives

Yet another WEF panel discussion in which six tiresome uninspired people say stupid impenetrable things for 50 minutes.

The schoolmarms at PolitiFact want you to know that evil scientists are not actually engineering “Disease X” in an effort to stage Plandemic 2.0. Yes, untold hundreds or even thousands of virologists may be tinkering with virus genomes to enhance them for human hosts; and yes, still more of them may be plotting their response to this (entirely hypothetical!) “Disease X” once it begins infecting humans. But, nobody is engineering a specific pathogen for the direct purpose of imposing another public health hygiene dictatorship on the world.

Whether you find that comforting depends on whether you think the manifold distributed nuclear-grade idiocy of our global technocratic class is likely to be a greater or a lesser threat than hypothetical genocidal scientists scheming deviously in a lab somewhere. I have seen enough to make up my own mind. One of these threats, after all, has already declared a global pandemic and magnified the harm caused by their lacklustre pathogen via lockdowns and the coerced vaccination of billions; the other remains confined to imaginary science fiction scenarios and (strangely) the pandemicists’ own fever-dream tabletop exercises. I guess it is not deranged right-wing conspiracising when our betters contemplate bioterrorism scenarios for fundraising purposes, but should you take their own fantasies at all seriously, that is a step too far.

The World Economic Forum like to flirt with their critics by cultivating a self-aggrandising Bond-villain rhetoric with just enough plausible deniability for the fact-checkers. Accordingly, they held a monumentally dumb panel discussion yesterday on “Preparing for Disease X.” Naturally, none of our preparers had any significant epidemiological qualifications. The discussion was chaired by a pinched humourless woman named Nancy Brown, who is CEO of that eminent pandemic preparedness centre known as the American Heart Association. Over the course 50 minutes she spoke with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (who is at least an immunologist), Brazilian Health Minister and social scientist Nísia Trinidade, AstraZeneca chairman Michel Demaré, and healthcare executives Roy Jakobs and Preetha Reddy.

These are the people eagerly plotting all the public-private partnerships, developmental pathways, strategic collaborations, equity initiatives, data sharing projects and viral surveillance programmes that will be necessary to stage the next virological circus, and for this episode of eugyppius-watches-so-you-don’t-have-to, I’ve let their vague and platitudinous verbiage wash over my brain for the past hour.