Winston Marshall

How the WHO used Hollywood in their COVID Cover-Up

Winston Marshall — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:17:36 GMT

Was there anything more icky than those COVID-era celebrity selfie videos. Toe-curling carousels of cringe. Mark Ruffalo and co’s glitchy videos proving the old adage that, even in a global pandemic, there is nothing so bad it can’t get worse.

Mark Ruffalo singing “Imagine” in 2020

Six years on, they have resurfaced. “25 celebrities sing “Imagine” in isolation, creating a moving montage” is doing the rounds this week, as former-NIAID director Anthony Fauci faces a Senate grilling. Of course it was not just the self-made videos that were so enraging. Late night shows, mainstream news and infinite social media posts parroted the same lines from the CDC and the World Health Organisation.

But this was not a spontaneous movement.

Back then, I was behind the curtain. I saw how it unfolded. I can tell you – it was not organic. Some of it was centrally coordinated by the WHO themselves. From the very start a deliberate, high-profile campaign of positive publicity intended to win favour was under way.

“We have yet to speak to someone not willing to participate.”

The sentence hangs bold and centred in the middle of the WHO letter I received along with my band Mumford & Sons in March, 2020. The world was scrambling to make sense of the enveloping plague. And our overlords were on the front foot.

“In these unprecedented times the music industry is pulling together to instigate a global initiative with the primary aim of raising awareness and funds for The World Health Organisation (WHO) COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.”

My “invitation” to support the WHO in March, 2020

Hang on a second, I thought. Wasn’t the WHO responsible for preventing the pandemic? And even if it is not their fault, I reasoned at that early stage, shouldn’t there at least be an investigation before we start whitewashing their name? Or indeed giving them more money? Their request for us to perform as part of their “QUARANTUNES” home concert series had the pong of reputation laundering.

“There’s a big one off gig being announced tomorrow for WHO by global citizen (lady gaga has done most of the booking) [sic]” the accompanying email read.

Wait, we have to make a decision right now, on the spot? Was I really alone in thinking something else was going on here?

In this email exchange with a publicist (who I won’t name) representing the WHO, I was told Lady Gaga’s gig would be streamed as “a one off on April 18th and in a windowed broadcast in various places starting in the USA on TV and then Bbc day after…[sic]”. And it gets creepier… “WHO wanted a sustained approach to messaging which is where the idea for a series came in.”

Reading it back now, the behaviour of the WHO is less surprising than that of so many artists who went along with it without hesitation. “A sustained approach to messaging…”. Knowing what we do today about the lab-leak cover-up, the lies about social distancing, masks, quarantining, vaccines and much else, these words are deeply sinister. But even then it should have faced more resistance.

We were told the videos were to be stripped back but include “key WHO messaging on what people should be doing right now”. They might as well have said explicitly that this was WHO propaganda, and I bet artists would have signed up just as willingly.

It brought me no pleasure to push back, alone. Such requests are deliberately framed so that to oppose them puts you on the back foot. You don’t want to support people suffering in the pandemic? I faced similar issues when BLM came up – clever wordplay means that to oppose an explicitly Marxist anti-Western organisation is framed as you being against black lives. And again with the anti-Israel BDS activists as I described in the Jewish Chronicle.

The WHO and Global Citizen initiative “One World: Together At Home” virtual benefit concert raised $55.1 million for the WHO COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. According to the WHO website, that money was used, amongst other things, for “combating COVID-19 misinformation.”

Take that in - the WHO created a propaganda machine of pop stars to raise money from ordinary people to fund a censorship program to be used on ordinary people. Well, presumably not the “misinformation” they themselves were spreading.

Now let’s take for the sake of argument that a lot of the money was used for good. And I suspect some good was done with the money. Such activity did not have to be done through the WHO. There were countless charities and organisations pulling together at that time.

I’m proud to say I stood my ground. I did not participate in the concert, and I feel vindicated by time. It also seems clearer that the behaviour of the WHO was not as benign as so many took it to be. But it is worth considering why so many artists went along with the folly.

I imagine many of them did in fact have good intentions. They may not have considered where they might have been misled or indeed were misleading others. But it is also the case that many have thought carefully about their support for “the experts”, the institutions, the blue-stack progressive media. And they wholeheartedly supported it.

What is less forgivable is the shame they heap on dissenters like Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Nicki Minaj. Nor the censorial attitude to their fellow artists who bucked the trend – you will recall Neil Young’s crusade against Joe Rogan. Nor the blue-tick peer pressure to follow the crowd.

Today my feelings about the pandemic are an uneasy combination of wishing to forget and a tremendous sense of injustice. Who has been held to account? The WHO? The CCP? Those at the Wuhan Lab? … No one? Worse still, former President Biden actually pre-emptively pardoned Anthony Fauci in January, 2025. A pardon backdated to 2014 when Fauci first funded the Wuhan Lab through EcoHealth Alliance.

Dr. Anthony Fauci waits for the start of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on July 29, 2026. Alex Wroblewski / AFP/Getty Images

Fauci’s long-overdue Senate hearing by Sen. Rand Paul on COVID origins, gain-of-function funding and pandemic guidance saw him plead the Fifth Amendment one hundred and eleven times. In one sitting.

Even better, Paul has now released Fauci’s 1,100-page pandemic diaries (late 2019–2022), recovered by RFK Jr.’s HHS team from government servers after an eight-month search.

It appeared “America’s Doctor” Fauci was quite enjoying the attention back in 2020 – “It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world.” And countless puff pieces like this in The New Yorker. I wonder if he is enjoying the limelight this week.

As for the artists who supported the regime, if any of them have, on reflection, come round, I suspect it would be easier for them just to ignore that it ever happened. And the WHO’s coordinated charm offensive – don’t let them memory-hole it.

What I’m Reading Today

Some subscribers have requested I share what I'm reading, so I'm going to start doing just that! This week I'm coming to the end of Winston Churchill’s ‘A History Of The English Speaking Peoples: Volume 1 - The Birth of Britain’. Quite apart from just how staggering the great man in leading our country from Nazi peril, that he was such a prolific writer is often forgotten. And I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to read pro-English history without all the put-downs and self-flagellation of modern historians. I wonder how many MPs today even have a cursory knowledge of our proud British history.

WM.

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The Odyssey Is An Anti-Woke Masterpiece

Winston Marshall — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:04:36 GMT

Hate-watching is a peculiar pleasure. Given the hype and promotion surrounding Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I thought — perfect. I will watch and wallow in everything that’s wrong with Hollywood and the world. “Achilles is trans?” I muttered to myself in indignation, ordering my $15 popcorn. “The lead actress said what feminist drivel about Homer?” Nolan’s gone woke, I had decided as I took my seat, stewing in silent rage. I bet Zeus is a disabled environmentalist wearing a keffiyeh.

Like the Trojans, I had been fooled. Not only is the film not woke, it is fully anti-woke.

Take trans actress Ellen Page. Rumour had her playing hero Achilles. In fact she plays the minor role of Sinon, a character who’s been deceived and deceives others only to end up in Hades. A perfect analogy for the trans cult.

Ellen Page as Sinon

Nolan is no fool. He knew full well the symbolism of casting a gender-dysphoric woman in the role. Of course he did. Ellen Page puts all her might into appearing male, but fails to transcend the appearance of a lost child. Exactly as her character Sinon is not chosen by fate to be a warrior but tries his best to appear as one. The real question is — does five-foot-one Page know she is being used like this by the director as she heaves her oversized armour?

That is not the only meta-game Nolan plays. Perhaps even more controversy whirls around the casting of Helen of Troy.

“So, Homer, how do you feel about the screen time given to these women considering how little you spent with them?… Like, ‘Hmm? Remember us?’” — Lupita Nyong’o, actress portraying Helen of Troy.

Lupita Nyong’o, of Mexican-Kenyan heritage, made her jab at the patriarchy by going after Homer in a press junket for the film. How dare he not give women more time, she sneered. A painfully shallow understanding of Homer and the classical world, and a cringeworthy exhibition of her progressive ideology. But herein lies Nolan’s genius again. Bear with me…

“I agree that she [Nyong’o] is beautiful, but casting a Black woman to play a White woman in a foundational work of European literature is no more right than casting a White man to play Shaka Zulu!” — Elon Musk

Unlike Musk, to me the controversy is not that she is black, but rather that she is not that beautiful. Certainly not “the most beautiful woman in the world”. As far as unrivalled beauty can be objective, Halle Berry or Sydney Sweeney might have been good proxies. I recall Jesus’ depiction in Ben-Hur, the director opting not to show His face. Nolan’s meta choice here is on par. In fact, in Nolan’s adaptation it is made quite clear that the Trojan War is not inspired by Helen. Her kidnapping is just the pretext.

Lupita Nyong’o as Helen

Owing to the film there is now a public debate about the face that launched a thousand ships. Just as Agamemnon’s troops would undoubtedly have debated at some point in their 10-year-long war.

Beauty, terrible beauty! A deathless goddess — so she strikes our eyes!

Not only is she not that beautiful, the actress’s personality is, on the surface, ugly. These bitter feminist outbursts certainly are. Perfect symbolism for a character whom Homer leaves ambiguous as to whether she was willingly or unwillingly kidnapped to Troy. If unwilling, she is the picture of innocence and the war is just. If willing, she is a villain and the war is an unjust tragedy. Nolan’s choice sits very comfortably with the grand moral of the story (for you to see when you watch the film).

Casting a not-that-attractive woman (inside and out) to play Helen also ridicules the woke inversion of hierarchies. Woke ideology divides people by various lines of arbitrary identity and re-orders them into new hierarchies, with those preferred by the woke at the top and labelled “oppressed”, and those least desirable placed at the bottom and labelled “oppressors”. Nolan’s casting of Helen shows just how preposterous such inversions are. Beauty hierarchies exist, and beautiful people are not oppressors.

Over the last decade politically motivated casting in Hollywood has ruined cinema. Not because audiences care what race the actors are, but because audiences don’t want to be lectured by elites, whether it’s D.C. or Hollywood. And of course the race-swapping has only gone one way. Nolan turns this on its head by using woke identitarianism to portray profound non-woke truths.

The Odyssey’s meta-games ridicule wokeism, but also seem to have exposed some of the puritanical anti-woke crowd, like Musk. While the woke want every film to be a Noah’s Ark of ethnic diversity (if not a complete eradication of white people), the anti-woke are showing some inconsistencies in their own thinking.

Musk complains that Helen is not white, but not that Matt Damon playing Odysseus is not ethnically Greek. I am yet to hear anyone complain that the film is not in the original archaic Greek language. If we are able to suspend disbelief just enough to have the ancient Greek characters speaking modern English, portrayed by Anglo-Irish Americans as they battle a giant Cyclops, why the big fuss if one or two soldiers appear to be Asian?

The film has the false veneer of being politically correct, whilst actually being a classic return-of-the-king/loyal-wife hero’s journey. Nolan’s Trojan horse has fooled a lot of people. Not least woke audiences who may think this is a victory for diversity when hiding within is a masterpiece in storytelling and a portrayal of traditional male and female archetypes. This film is as good as cinema gets. Watch it.

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[New Survey Link] I want to hear from you!

Winston Marshall — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:23:43 GMT

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I want to hear from you!

Winston Marshall — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:20:45 GMT

I want the show to keep getting better, to keep asking better questions, to keep finding fascinating guests, and to keep producing the kind of conversations you won’t find anywhere else.

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Is Islam compatible with the West? Join me live in London!

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