Yesterday, Klaus Schwab announced his decision to step down as Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF). In a message posted on its website, the WEF explained that 87-year-old Schwab would be resigning with immediate effect, to be replaced in the interim by Vice Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. No particular reason was given for the sudden change in leadership.

We should have expected no less from Schwab, the mechanical engineer and economics professor who has steered the WEF since its foundation in 1971 as a talking shop for global policymakers. The Forum is hosted every year in Davos, Switzerland, and has become a lightning rod for a certain kind of populist, anti-globalist anger. For many, the metonym of Davos now stands for a high-handed, technocratic style of policy and “Davos man” for its glossy, plutocratic proponents.

This anger reached its zenith during the Covid-19 pandemic, when bafflement and outrage drove some to identify the omnipresent WEF as puppet-master of liberticidal public health policies. And both the organisation and its CEO — with his penchant for sinister book titles like The Great Reset and his tendency to be photographed in Emperor Palpatine’s robes (a Lithuanian university’s graduation outfit, it turns out) — were well-placed to play the role.

The gist of these theories is that Schwab and the WEF somehow “dictated” the global response to Covid, or even “pre-planned” [sic] the pandemic itself. The evidence given for these — from, among others, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr — includes Event 201, a three-and-a-half-hour tabletop exercise co-hosted in October 2019 by the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, simulating the outbreak of a novel coronavirus.

While there are some eerie similarities between the scenario described by Event 201 and the subsequent pandemic, the exercise does not actually demonstrate what the anti-WEFers claim. In fact, it may even demonstrate the complete opposite. For a start, pandemic exercises are a well-established — and largely useless — practice in the global health security community, and coronaviruses were known to pose an epidemic threat (for example, SARS-1). Neither Event 201’s occurrence nor its focus are therefore especially suspicious.

More damning, however, are its recommendations. Written in the airy corporate-speak so typical of the Davos set, they make no reference to the havoc-wreaking pandemic measures later imputed to Schwab and the WEF. On the contrary, they can even be read as recommending the opposite of what was done: “Countries, international organisations, and global transportation companies should work together to maintain travel and trade during severe pandemics.” In this way, far from illustrating Schwab and the WEF’s omnipotence, Event 201 showcases their irrelevance to what actually happened.

This is not to say that WEF had no role in shaping the Covid-19 debacle, but instead that it played exactly the role that you would expect an elite forum to play: that of a networking opportunity for influential people. In his 2021 pandemic memoir, ex-SAGE member Jeremy Farrar described how January 2020’s Davos meeting catalysed Moderna’s mRNA vaccine development programme and helped instil a sense of urgency in public health leaders. While not entirely trivial, it hardly constitutes puppet-mastery. Far more consequential were domestic decisions made by our states and our willingness — eagerness, even — to comply with them. Perversely, in focusing their anger on a fantasy-version of Schwab, critics of the lockdown-till-vaccine policy absolve its real perpetrators: governments and their citizens.

Really, Schwab was the pandemic’s most inconsequential man; and his departure should allow us to dispense with these convenient fictions. WEF did not lock us down: our state did and far too many of us accepted. WEF did not abandon our grandparents to die alone, or let our friends, and families go crazy under house arrest. Our state did, just as our parliamentarians chipped away at our civil liberties. In Covid’s wake, it is time for us to reckon with the harm that these people did, not Klaus Schwab.

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