An investigation by RCR’s Maryanne Demasi has uncovered internal emails revealing the shockingly sinister planning behind pandemic preparedness at the 2016 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, with senior US health officials included in the discussions.
In January 2016, then-NIH Director Francis Collins emailed US official Anthony Fauci ahead of the meeting, flagging one session as a “potential land mine”. The session, “Vaccine Innovation for Pandemic Preparedness”, brought together GSK, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. Pharmaceutical executives were clear: they would only commit to rapid vaccine development for every future outbreak if governments resolved who would pay and how liability would be handled.
In another session chaired by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and attended by billionaire Bill Gates, the group coined the term “Germ Games” for large-scale pandemic simulations modelled on military war games. The idea was to persuade G20 leaders to invest in preparedness. Kim suggested tapping US Department of Defense expertise and called on the NIH, World Bank, Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust to develop the concept together, saying he would “find funds for this”.
Collins told Fauci it would be “hard to stop this effort now”. Fauci replied that the US already ran “bioterror attack” simulations through Health and Human Services, Defense and Homeland Security departments. “This may not be ‘exactly’ what Gates, Farrar and Kim were referring to,” Fauci wrote, “but it would be pretty close”. A year later, Collins returned to Davos for a pilot pandemic simulation organised by the World Bank and the Gates Foundation.
The same approach was later reflected in Event 201, the October 2019 “fictional coronavirus pandemic” simulation held by Johns Hopkins, the WEF and the Gates Foundation. By 2018, Collins had invited Kim to the NIH for a closed-door roundtable with Fauci and nearly every institute director to discuss pandemic preparedness, so-called airborne threats and deeper collaboration between the NIH and the World Bank.
The emails show how, from 2016 onwards, pandemic preparedness was increasingly shaped by military planning concepts and biodefence thinking, approaches that would become central to the Covid-19 response.
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