Covid-19: The Great Reset

By Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret (2020)

World Economic Forum (publisher)

Book Review

This book was very different from what I expected. I assumed former World Economic Forum chief Klaus Schwab would be promoting a Great Reset in which you own nothing, live in a 15-minute city, receive a Universal Basic Income and spend your time taking drugs and playing computer games. I also expected him to advocate for population reduction and total social control.

Instead he mainly uses this book to identify deep rooted Western problems that a Great Reset would hopefully fix. Thus I was really surprised by his call to end “shareholder value” as the primary driver of corporate decision making and an end to the exploitation of gig* workers by guaranteeing them health and unemployment benefits. The book points out that inflation has fallen in all areas except housing, health care and education – services that employees on zero hour contracts have a serious problem accessing in “Anglo-Saxon” societies.

I was also surprised to see him raise the possibility of using MMT (a form of government issued credit similar to Lincoln’s greenbacks) or “permanent quantitative easing” (which in his view amounts to the same thing) to reduce government debt.

The book also raises concerns that the battle against pandemics (which he predicts will increase) will lead to permanent surveillance societies, as well as observing that the offloading of health and education to individuals and markets (as has happened in “Anglo-Saxon” societies) may not be in the best interest of society as a whole. He also notes the unfairness of requiring working class citizens to take on all the risks of COVID exposure as frontline workers (transport, health care, checkouts, security).

Predictably the book contains a number of lies, half truths and glaring inaccuracies:

1. A statement that there is nothing new about quarantines and lockdowns – that they date back at least as far of the plague epidemics of the Middle Ages. Although quarantines are a very old method of coping with infectious disease, health-based lockdowns (in which healthy people are quarantined) are totally unprecedented. Lockdowns have much more to do with social control than health. The first US lockdown occurred in 2013 after the Boston Marathon bombing.

2. A reference to Bill Gates’ longstanding warning about pandemics emerging in highly populated regions where people live in close proximity to animals. In March 2020 when the first Covid lockdowns started, it was widely believed in China that the US government was the source of the coronavirus infecting their people. Chinese farmers had been complaining for years about unidentified drones spraying their pig farms with spine flu.

3. A reference to the quadrupling of zoonotic diseases from tropical rainforests (like Ebola and HIV), ignoring growing evidence infectious agents causing these illnesses (as well as Zika and Lyme’s disease virus) were most likely manufactured in one of America’s 336 global biolabs.

4. A claim that a large majority of the world’s citizens want their governments to support climate change. This is total nonsense. In China (the world’s most populous country), Russia and the continent of Africa, support for climate hysteria is virtually non-existent. In the West, support for the deindustrialization advocated by climate activists is limited to the academic and professional class.

5. A boast that the development RNA and DNA platforms make it possible to develop vaccines faster than ever. The time consuming element in producing vaccines isn’t manufacturing them – it’s the lengthy double blind testing to ensure they are safe.

6. A prediction that “mitigating measures,” such as physical distancing and mask wearing, will continue. I think both Schwab and Malleret know perfectly well these are both instruments of social control, given the total absence of credible research documenting their effectiveness.

*I was very surprised to see the authors refer to a recent film by activist film director Ken Loach on this topic.