Governors that implemented strict coronavirus restrictions did so in part because they followed flawed prediction modeling forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an institution controlled and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to investigative reporter Jordan Schachtel.
The IMHE warned states early on during the pandemic that hospitals would soon be overrun if they did not issue stay-at-home orders to “flatten the curve.”
The IMHE’s prediction claimed a massive COVID-19 surge, similar to what Italy experienced in the early days of the pandemic, would cause hospitals to run out of ventilators, personal protective equipment, and other resources needed to fight the virus, Schachtel noted.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has recently come under bipartisan criticism for covering-up his state’s nursing home death toll, was one of the government officials who relied on the IMHE models.
They are the reason he demanded thousands of ventilators from the federal government, even though his state’s hospitals needed very few of the surplus machines.
“There’s only one model that we look at that has the number of projected deaths which is the IHME model which is funded by the Gates Foundation,” Cuomo said on April 9.
According to the Gates Foundation-funded IHME model, 16,000 New Yorkers are expected to die from coronavirus.
Gov. Cuomo: “That would mean that NY is only 16% roughly of the number of deaths … What that does say to the rest of the nation is – this is not just New York.” pic.twitter.com/zorNl8asyA
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 1, 2020
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who implemented some of the strictest coronavirus restrictions in the country, also cited IHME models on several occasions — as did the Pennsylvania Health Department and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.
Schachtel noted that federal officials, including Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, also relied on the IMHE models, which makes sense considering both Fauci and Birx have financial ties to the Gates network.
But the IMHE’s predictions never came true, Schachtel contended.
“Hospital capacity was never threatened. Most states that had created ‘surge capacity’ pop-up health care centers never even used these facilities. IHME, for its part, regularly ‘adjusts’ its models, and has never acknowledged their routine failures to forecast outcomes,” he wrote.
Gates was also a vocal proponent of lockdown orders.
He even claimed China, which released the coronavirus into the rest of the world, “did a lot of things right at the beginning” by locking down their cities quickly.
And when asked how he’d respond to charges that China hid COVID-19 from the world and then lied about the virus’s seriousness repeatedly, Gates said that these charges are just a “distraction.”
“Like any country where a virus first shows up, they can look back and see where they missed some things,” Gates said of the Chinese Communist Party. “I think there’s a lot of incorrect and unfair things said.”
Schachtel suggested Gates’s “complete incompetence and reckless forecasting” was intentional.
“The buck does indeed stop with the elected leaders who made the fateful decisions to send sick COVID patients into nursing homes, lock down their states, and mask up their citizens in perpetuity,” he wrote. “But the bad data they used almost exclusively came from the Gates network.”
