The Pandemic’s Most Inconsequential Man.

My latest for UnHerd 👍

** UnHerd have very generously published an edited version of this piece last Tuesday. You can find it 👉 here 👈. **

This week, Klaus Schwab announced that he is stepping down as Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF). In a message posted on its website, the WEF explained that Schwab, 87, would be resigning with immediate effect and would be replaced by Vice Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe as Chairman ad interim, without giving a reason for this sudden change in leadership. Enigmatic as this is, we might have expected no less from Schwab, the mechanical engineer and professor of economics who has steered the WEF since he founded it in 1971 as a talking shop for all sorts of Very Important People—political leaders, businessmen, philanthropists, intellectuals, Bono etc.—involved in policy-making and governance around the globe. The Forum is hosted every year in snowy Davos, Switzerland, and has come to be the target of a certain kind of populist, ‘anti-globalist’ anger. For many, ‘Davos’ (often used metonymically) now stands for a high-handed, technocratic style of policy and ‘Davos man’ for its glossy, plutocratic proponents.¹

Ernst Stavro Schwab or just Klaus?

This anger reached its zenith during the COVID-19 pandemic when bafflement and outrage drove some to identify the omnipresent WEF as the liberticidal public health policies’ puppet-master. And both the organisation and its CEO, with his penchant for sinister book titles like ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and ‘The Great Reset’ (both, apparently, rather boring reads), his tendency to be photographed in Emperor Palpatine’s robes (a Lithuanian university’s graduation outfit, it turns out), and his sibilant Swiss-german accent (seems a little harsh to hold this against him), were well-placed to play the role.

The particular theories are too numerous (and vague) to list but the gist is that Schwab and the WEF somehow ‘dictated’ the global response to the pandemic, or even ‘pre-planned’ the pandemic itself. The evidence given for these—from, amongst others, one Robert F. Kennedy Jr., current Secretary of Health and Human Services in the USA—includes Event 201, a three-and-a-half hour tabletop exercise co-hosted in October 2019 by the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), simulating the outbreak of a novel coronavirus.

While there are some eerie similarities between the scenario that Event 201 describes and the subsequent pandemic, the exercise does not actually demonstrate what the anti-WEFers claim—indeed, it may even demonstrate the complete opposite. For starters, pandemic exercises are a well-established (and largely useless) practice in the global health security community and coronaviruses were known to pose an epidemic threat (think of SARS-1), so neither Event 201’s occurrence nor its focus are especially suspicious. Most damningly, however, are its recommendations.

Written in the airy corporate-speak so typical of WEFery, they make no reference to the havoc-wreaking pandemic measures later imputed to Schwab and the WEF. On the contrary, they can even be read as recommending the opposite of what was done: “Countries, international organisations, and global transportation companies should work together to maintain travel and trade during severe pandemics”. In this way, far from illustrating Schwab and the WEF’s omnipotence, Event 201 showcases their irrelevance to what actually happened.

This is not to say that WEF had no role in shaping the COVID-19 debacle but that, as far as I can see, it played exactly the role that you would expect an elite forum to play: that of a networking space for influential people. In his pandemic memoir, Jeremy Farrar, the Wellcome Trust’s ex-director and an ex-member of SAGE, describes how January 2020’s Davos meet catalysed Moderna’s mRNA vaccine development programme and helped instil a sense of urgency in some public health leaders. This is not entirely trivial but it is also not the puppet-mastery described above. Ultimately, far, far more consequential were the domestic decisions made by our states and our willingness—eagerness even—to comply with them. Perversely, in focussing their anger on some fantasy-version of Schwab and his WEF, critics of the lockdown-till-vaccine policy absolve its real perpetrators: their governments, their co-citizens, and themselves.

So, let us mark the departure of the pandemic’s most inconsequential man by dispensing with this convenient fiction. WEF did not lock us down. Our state did and we accepted. WEF did not abandon our grandparents to die alone or let our children, friends, and siblings go crazy under house arrest. Our state did and, again, we accepted. And finally, the WEF did not dissolve parliament or abolish our civil liberties. Our parliamentarians did that to themselves and we did not question them. In COVID’s wake, it is time for us to reckon with the harm that we did, you and I.

1. It was subsequently reported that the WEF is launching a probe into Schwab’s role as God Emperor of all Evil and SCAMdemic Puppeteer…. errr, oh wait no, into a whistleblower reports of petty corruption by Schwab and his family. Politico explains:

The whistleblower letter — allegedly sent by current and former staff — accuses Schwab of financial misconduct, including misuse of WEF funds and inappropriate treatment of employees, the WSJ reported Tuesday. His wife, Hilde Schwab, is also accused of using WEF resources for personal travel. Schwab has strongly denied all the claims, the WSJ reported.

Some mastermind, eh?