How the WHO used Hollywood in their COVID Cover-Up
QUARANTUNES - And Why I Resisted
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.
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.”
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.
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.
WM
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.
“We have yet to speak to someone not willing to participate.”
I can’t quite decide if that’s hilarious in its pomposity or chilling. Either way the only response is brief and impolite.
Even if justice is not served in this life, it certainly will be in the next, where the punishment is eternal.