WEF and the COVIDcrisis Totalitarianism

Did the WEF-trained Young Global Leader network promote more severe COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions?

Voiceover:

The US Government continues to promote uptake the genetic COVID-19 vaccine “boosters” despite the documented poor effectiveness, clear lack of safety, and rapid deterioration of immune response to yield “negative efficacy”. However, corporate media, the “medical freedom movement” and public attention has largely shifted to other topics. The one related domain which continues to attract considerable public but almost no corporate media interest can be broadly summarized as “post-mortem analysis”. Essentially, the ongoing autopsy of the role of various:

• individuals- examples include Fauci, Collins, Daszak, Baric, Gates, Schwab

• transnational bodies- UN, WHO

• governments- USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, European Union, China/CCP

• specific government agencies- US FDA, CDC, NIAID, DoD/DTRA, DARPA, CIA, State Department, USAID, ECDC, EMA

• corporatist organizations- Pfizer, Moderna, Eco Health Alliance, BBC/Trusted News Initiative, World Economic Forum, Bank of International Settlements

• and others- scientists, physicians, hospital chains, physician organizations, investors, central national banks

in structuring, promoting, managing, planning and profiting from both the development and deployment of SARS-CoV-2 as well as the non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions which characterize the amazingly radical and dysfunctional global response to the introduction, transmission, and spread of a somewhat novel, relatively non-lethal sarbeco- coronavirus into the human population.

But how were these responses, globally harmonized propaganda, censorship and overt psychological warfare so globally coordinated and synchronized? In other words, who were the “puppet masters” who coordinated the COVIDcrisis?

In an ongoing quest to comprehend COVIDcrisis-related questions of who did what, to whom, why, what agendas were served, and which individuals and organizations profited from these activities, discussions concerning the global harmonization of both national policies and propaganda often focus on the World Economic Forum as a major actor. The World Economic Forum, or WEF, was historically organized with strong input from the US CIA, but has been developed over decades into an organization which seeks to position itself as the central organizer (and potentially manager) of a future globalized government. The WEF currently functions like a trade union or organization primarily representing the interests of the (approximately) thousand largest corporations in the world.

Other organizations often mentioned as major players in planning, organizing, and implementing COVIDcrisis policies include the Gates Foundation and its namesake, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the CIA and its web of global relationships with both US (NSA, DIA, DHS) and US-allied (Five Eyes Alliance) associates. A strong case can be made that the CIA and its extended global “intelligence” partner network represent the most powerful organization in the 21st century. The WEF, with its UN treaty, “Young Leaders” training/infiltration operation and deep connections with the CCP and governmental leadership in virtually every other major nation in the world is certainly a strong candidate for second place.

You can find out more about the WEF and its “Young Leaders Program” at the Malone Institute website by following this link. The most comprehensive spreadsheet summary of WEF-trained “Young Global Leaders” currently available can be found at that URL.

Although many, including ourselves (Drs. Jill and Robert Malone) have now spent years trying to track down answers to the four “Ws” (who, what, where, why) of the COVIDcrisis, in most cases we are left with informed speculation and hypotheses based on various “artifacts”. A somewhat frustrating forensic attempt to piece together some version of the story using documents obtained (often by Freedom of Information requests by others), books written by key participants, various sources of data (life insurance claims, “official” government databases), interviews, and sworn testimony. But while such data can be useful in identifying specific individuals who are close to key events and decisions as well as their actions, it is not so useful for identifying and documenting organizations that were directly or indirectly coordinating these individual activities.

In October of 2022, the peer reviewed academic journal “Cureus” published a largely overlooked study which sought to address the role and impact of the World Economic Forum “Young Leader” training program on COVIDcrisis policies. The academic study was summarized and published in an article titled

“Is the Network of World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders Associated With COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention Severity?”

Rainer J Klementar¹ and Harald Walach ^{2, 3}

1. Department of Radiation Oncology, Leopoldina Hospital Schweinfurt, Schweinfurt, DEU

2. Research and Development, Change Health Science Institute, Berlin, DEU

3. Next Society Institute, Kazimieras Simonavicius University, Vilnius, LTU

A PDF of the complete article can be accessed at the Malone Institute website here.

The significance of the article and underlying research extends beyond the work itself, because this pioneering study demonstrates a methodology which can be used to statistically test a wide range of “conspiracy theories” (otherwise known as hypotheses) which seek to identify and validate relationships between public policy actions and influential networks of individuals or organizations that appear to have operationalized a cause-effect relationship to those policy actions.

The authors of this study ask a specific and clearly worded research question: “Is the number and the gravitas of YGLs <RM:Young Global Leaders> in a country associated with the country’s NPI <RM: Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions> in the first phases of the pandemic in 2020?”

Jumping straight to the punchline, the authors frame the issue to be investigated:

Background

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has spawned a global network of elites called Young Global Leaders (YGLs) with significant influence on large corporations, politics, academia, and media. This article scrutinizes the idea that through this network, the WEF had a significant influence on the scale and scope of the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented in response to the COVID-19 crisis. We tested for associations between the country-level distribution of YGLs and the intensity and duration of the implemented NPIs summarized by the Government Response Severity Index (GRSI).

Personally, I am fascinated by the fact that there is a metric identified as the “Government Response Severity Index” which has been used to basically quantitate the force of totalitarian measures implemented by governments on their citizens during the COVIDcrisis! This metric is otherwise known as the COVID-19 “Stringency Index”, and summary data from “Our World in Data” can be found here with example data from selected countries in the figure below. For those who want more details, you can find the academic, peer reviewed publication which defines this metric here, under the title “A global panel database of pandemic policies (Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker)”.

Materials and methods

The number and category of YGLs per country was extracted from the WEF website. We also extracted the maximum and median GRSI values for three time periods: (i) the beginning of the first wave of the pandemic (March 1, 2020, to April 30, 2020), (ii) the height of the second wave in Europe (December 1, 2020, to January 31, 2021), and (iii) the approximate first year (March 1, 2020, to January 31, 2021). Being a precondition for causality, any association between the total or category-specific number of YGLs and the GRSI values in each time period was evaluated using Spearman’s ρ correlation coefficients and polynomial regression, respectively.

Results

There was a highly significant positive correlation between the total number of YGLs in a country and the median (ρ = 0.36, p = 2.5×10^-7) and maximum (ρ = 0.34, p = 1.6×10^-6) GRSI during the second wave of the pandemic, but not during the first wave. The total number of YGLs was also a significant predictor of higher median GRSI during the second wave of the pandemic in the best-fitting (four-degree) polynomial regression model (p<0.01); additional significant and positive predictor in this model was a country’s location within Europe or South America, respectively (p<0.01). Investigating an influence-weighted number of YGLs in business, politics, and civic society separately yielded no significant associations with NPI severity for any of the three time periods.

Conclusions

As there were significant correlations during the second, but not the first wave of the pandemic, we conclude that the WEF might not have been the origin of but rather an echo-chamber or amplifier for certain opinions and strategies that were formed and implemented during or before the first months of the COVID-19 crisis. Future qualitative studies may reveal putative causal mechanisms underlying our observed correlations.

For those interested in the WEF and its role in both global government planning and specifically the COVIDcrisis, the succinct, well written and well-referenced introduction for this paper should be required reading.

The declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020 [1], was a cataclysmic event. The more visible problem is the death of countless people that has been associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, the causative agent of COVID-19. A second, perhaps even more important, part was the response to the pandemic by governments, starting with closures of borders, mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, and business closures and ending with strict curfews. A case can be made that a lot of the secondary problems stem from these political responses, usually called non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) [2,3]. Business closures have affected small businesses that often went out of business, if countries had no relief program in place. Lockdowns and stay-at-home orders have affected poor people more than affluent ones, as in some countries going out for work or buying food is important for sustenance and livelihoods [2]. Although the general idea behind government-mandated NPIs was to “flatten the curve,” and hence to avoid COVID-19 deaths, the collateral damage associated with them might tragically have caused hundreds of thousands secondary deaths [4]. In addition, NPIs were not associated with a reduction of COVID-19 related deaths in several modeling studies [5-7], although Hale et al. found a significant global association between the stringency of NPIs and deaths measured after 28 days [8].

This very mixed picture has given rise to various ideas and theories as to why governments stuck to NPIs, although many of these have been found to be ineffective or irrelevant quite early on. Some people find sinister motives behind this situation and have come up with the idea that rich elites have attempted a silent takeover of countries and democracies to foster the benefit of big corporations [9]. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is often mentioned as one of the putative forces. The WEF can be conceptualized as a think tank situated in-between the fields of business, politics, academia, and media, and it has also been identified as a transnational space for the formation of a global capitalist or technocratic elite [10-12]. The WEF may hence be counted among the “transnational policy networks” that exert “disproportionate influence over policy design and implementation on issues of global importance” [13]. This is exemplified by an 2017 interview with its founder, Professor Klaus Schwab, who correspondingly said: "What we are very proud of, is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders" [14]. Schwab also published a COVID-19-related book entitled “The Great Reset” in 2020 [15]. On first sight, this book could be seen as a description of potential opportunities rather than a sinister plan, in line with the general tendency of the WEF to have a positive outlook and to benefit the world, to “make the world a better place”, improving living and working conditions by marrying economic growth with ecologic and social sustainability [12,16,17]. Yet, an in-depth analysis shows that in its essence the “Great Reset” also contains normative ideas, the implementation of which would transform our liberal democracies into top-down managed societies with the new normative primacy of “health” as the absolute value, conceived for individuals, economy, politics, and the planet [18]. In addition, Schwab could have anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic because together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the WEF hosted a major pandemic simulation exercise called “Event 201” on October 18, 2019, just a few months before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic [19].

According to some authors [20], it is difficult to test and challenge a “conspiracy theory” of the kind that the WEF is one of the causative players if not in the pandemic itself then in the rolling out of NPIs worldwide; however, deHaven-Smith pointed out that “political conspiracies in high office do, in fact, happen” ([21], p. 6), so it should be possibly to objectively define and test the above theory about the WEF. We attempt here to approach the question empirically. Even though the WEF might be an important hub in the global discursive landscape, an active role in promoting NPIs might stem from a well-meaning intent because a majority and some important opinion leaders in the scientific community believe in the effectiveness of NPIs [22].

Our study starts from the assumption that if the WEF does play a role, it would do so by its generic and unique placement as a worldwide network of high-profile organizations and their representatives. There are various channels of influence. One is through the 1,000 biggest corporations that are members of the WEF and fund it [16]. Another is through the approximately 1,250 Young Global Leaders (YGLs) who, since 2016, have undergone the YGL training and are thus assumed to act as ambassadors of the WEF values and ideas. These YGLs are distributed across countries and have various roles, from administrative-political to economic and public service ones. For instance, in Germany, former chancellor Angela Merkel, former secretary of health Jens Spahn, and current foreign secretary Annalena Baerbock have undergone the WEF YGL training [23], as has France’s president Macron. If the WEF plays a role at all, then there should be an association between the influence level of YGLs and/or their number in a country and the NPI response.

A balanced, objective and detailed data analysis follows, and for that I refer readers to the source publication. However, I believe that the conclusion is worth including here (below). Suffice to say, based on this analysis and findings, I am personally comfortable concluding that there is strong evidence that the WEF young leaders program trainees who have been strategically placed into positions of power and influence across the world bear significant responsibility for the harsher, more totalitarian “public health” measures implemented by governments all across the “free” world during the COVIDcrisis. And that this finding supports the clear and compelling need to specifically identify (and in the USA, to register) WEF Young Global Leader trainee/graduates who act to influence US and EU government policies as foreign agents.

Conclusions

Restating our research question “Is the number and the gravitas of YGLs in a country associated with the country’s NPI in the first phases of the pandemic in 2020?” we conclude that there was an association between the number of YGLs in a country and a country’s strength of NPIs during the second phase of the pandemic, but not during the first. This speaks in favor of the hypothesis that the WEF operates as an amplifier network or an echo-chamber for certain opinions that might either be presented to the network or that might arise within it and be then transported through it. More qualitative studies should be undertaken to identify putative causal mechanisms underlying our observed correlations.

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