The COVID-19 pandemic was a public health emergency, not a sinister plot to control people's lives

Context

During a three-day International COVID-19 summit, Christine Anderson, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), made several unfounded claims about COVID-19. The event, which took place from May 2-4 at the European Parliament in Brussels, consisted of various anti-lockdown and anti-vax speakers. Anderson, who has been a member of the Alternative for Germany (AFD) party since 2013, asserted that the World Economic Forum (WEF) orchestrated the pandemic, which "never had anything to do with public health;" instead, it aimed to control people's lives and make them part of a "mindless malleable mass."

In Fact

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2), an illness that spreads through close contact, causes coronavirus. The novel virus was first identified in China in December 2019 before spreading to over 100 countries in the following months, and on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic. According to the WHO, over 600 million people lost their lives due to COVID-19, and the current confirmed cases are more than 700 million worldwide. In December 2020, the U.K. became the first country to launch a trialed and tested COVID-19 vaccine, and today, more than 70 percent of the world's population has received at least one dose. A modeling study by the Imperial College of London shows that vaccinations prevented 19.8 million COVID-19 deaths in the first year of its launch.

There is no evidence that the World Economic Forum planned the COVID-19 pandemic. Such narratives are associated with the Great Reset Conspiracy, an unsubstantiated belief, drawn from antisemitic tropes, that a "secret group of manipulators" designed the pandemic and used it to launch radical policies, including lockdowns and vaccines. Proponents of such conspiracies claim Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, is the architect behind such nefarious plans.

The conspiracy rose to prominence after the launch of the Great Reset Initiative in June 2020: a recovery effort by the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles, and Schwab. The initiative aimed to address the disastrous consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic through economic reforms and policies. In an article titled "Now is the time for a Great Reset," Schwab explained the urgency behind the "Great Reset of capitalism." The BBC found that the conspiracy received over eight million interactions on Facebook between June 2020 and May 2021.

Logically Facts has previously debunked several articles linking public interventions, including traffic schemes, lockdowns, and vaccines, to the Great Reset Conspiracy theory.

The Verdict

There's no evidence that the pandemic was staged to control the world and dismantle people's freedoms and lives, thus we have rated the claim as false.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a lot of potentially dangerous misinformation. For reliable advice on COVID-19, including symptoms, prevention, and available treatment, please refer to the World Health Organization or your national healthcare authority.