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The U.K. this month released new details for a sweeping pandemic response exercise — the largest in its history — to take place over multiple days between September and November 2025.
Exercise Pegasus, the first of its kind in nearly a decade, aims to span all regions and government departments in the U.K., and will involve opening a “resilience academy” to train over 4,000 people from public and private sectors annually in emergency roles, Minister for Intergovernmental Relations Pat McFadden told Parliament on July 8.
The response plan also includes developing a national “vulnerability map” to highlight populations most at risk in a crisis. The tool, which uses data on age, disability, ethnicity and whether the person is receiving care, can share that data instantly across government departments.
Comedian and political commentator Russell Brand, quoting Jon Fleetwood on Substack, pointed out that news on the U.K. government tracking tool comes as, in the U.S., the Department of Defense “prepares AI-driven simulations for pandemics caused by ‘natural or man-made infectious agents,’” while funding researchers who want to “infect humans with aerosolized influenza under the guise of improving disease models.”
Britain’s Exercise Pegasus was developed in response to the July 2024 recommendations made by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, an ongoing public investigation into the handling of the pandemic.
The U.K. is also testing its ability to instantaneously reach its citizens by sending an alert to 87 million cellphones at once. McFadden said it will be the second time the test has been used on a nationwide basis since its launch in 2023.
“These changes will improve our resilience and preparedness and help to safeguard our citizens,” McFadden said in a January 2025 press release announcing the U.K.’s rough proposals.
However, others say the plans are less about safeguarding citizens and more about controlling them.
“The timing has sparked concerns that governments and international agencies may be coordinating future lockdown scenarios under the guise of preparedness, raising the specter of another orchestrated pandemic event,” Fleetwood wrote on Substack.
In May, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer signed an international pandemic treaty, designed to help the World Health Organization (WHO) “co-ordinate the international response to any future pandemics,” according to The Telegraph.
The U.K. is also legally obligated to “develop, strengthen and maintain the core capacities” tied to the WHO because it “failed to reject the 2024 amendments to the International Health Regulations,” said independent journalist James Roguski.
These core capacities include “surveillance,” “rapidly determining the control measures required to prevent domestic and international spread,” and “addressing misinformation and disinformation.”
“Sounds to me like control,” Brand said. “Control of observation and the control to implement the use of medicines. Do you remember last time? How they shamed, how they blamed, how they shot down protests, how they condemned people that were opposed to vaccines?”
The newly enacted amendments allow the WHO “to order global lockdowns, travel restrictions, or any other measures it sees fit to respond to nebulous ‘potential public health risks,’” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a July 18 press release announcing its rejection of the regulations.
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In a video released July 18, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said:
“The new regulations employ extremely broad language that gives the WHO unprecedented power. They require countries to establish systems of risk communications so that the WHO can implement unified public messaging globally. That opens the door to the kind of narrative management and propaganda and censorship that we saw during the COVID pandemic.”
In early 2021, before Kennedy led the HHS, he was deplatformed on numerous social media sites for criticizing regulatory corruption and authoritarian public health policies.
Kennedy described the efforts of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who in 2019 helped organize an exercise of four simulations of a worldwide coronavirus pandemic. At Gates’ direction, Kennedy said, participants primarily focused on planning industry-centric, fearmongering, police-state strategies for managing an imaginary global coronavirus contagion culminating in mass censorship of social media.
The exercise, referred to as Event 201, included representatives from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, various media powerhouses, the Chinese government, a former CIA/National Security Agency director, vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson, the finance and biosecurity industries and Edelman, the world’s leading corporate PR firm.
However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Gates claimed the simulation didn’t occur. Despite videos of the event, he told BBC on April 12, 2020, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”
One segment of Gates’ Event 201 script focused on the manipulation and control of public opinion. The presumption among participants was that such a crisis would provide an opportunity to promote new vaccines and tighten controls by a surveillance and censorship state.
“There is nothing intrinsically wrong with preparedness, or rehearsals,” said Dr. David Bell, a public health physician and biotech consultant. The problem is that, in order to achieve this, governments “have to undermine the basic tenets of democracy such as free speech and movement.”
Related articles in The Defender
- ‘Defining Moment in Human History’: U.S. Rejects WHO’s International Health Regulation Amendments
- Before COVID, Gates Planned Social Media Censorship of Vaccine Safety Advocates With Pharma, CDC, Media, China and CIA
- Trump Orders U.S. to Withdraw From World Health Organization
- ‘We Will Not Comply’ with Pandemic Treaty, 26 Republican Governors Tell WHO
