Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

Earlier this month the White House published its new “Pandemic Preparedness” targets.

They are far from alone in covering this. Back in March, Sky News was asking: “Next pandemic is around the corner,’ expert warns – but would lockdown ever happen again?”

On April 3rd, the Financial Times asked something similar: “The next pandemic is coming. Will we be ready?”

Less than an hour ago, the Daily Mail invited us inside “the world’s deadliest cave that could cause the next pandemic”.

Just two days ago a professional panic spreader wrote for CNN:

The next pandemic threat demands action now!!!

OK, I added the exclamation points, but they are very much implied in the original text.

So, while Iran and Israel rattle their sabres on the front pages, I thought we should take a look at the quieter back pages to see what we can learn, and help us predict how “the next pandemic” will unfold.

WHAT IS “THE NEXT PANDEMIC”?

I mean…I feel like that’s fairly self-explanatory.

Seriously though, it’s the one they’ve been predicting from pretty much the moment Covid started. First it was going to be monkey pox – sorry MPox – but that fizzled.

Of course by “pandemic”, we really mean “psy-op”, because nothing about the next pandemic will be any more real than the last pandemic. Hell, given the leaps forward in AI technology, it could be considerably less real next time.

We don’t know any of the details yet, but there’s enough vague coverage to tease out some guesstimates.

WHAT DISEASE WILL THEY USE?

Probably the most important question. We already mentioned monkey pox, but that doesn’t look likely anymore.

Right now they are mostly talking about “disease X” – a term which caused a little panic in certain sections when it first appeared on the scene – but that isn’t some top secret gain of function super disease, it’s literally a place holder name.

And it’s a placeholder name which does its job, for the time being.

After all, they don’t really need an actual name yet, any more than they need an actual disease, they just need the idea of a disease to hold over people’s heads while they construct the legislative rules of their health-based tyranny.

Indeed, the vagueness “Disease X” provides is helpful, as it keeps the legislation vague too.

That said, they will likely want and/or need to produce an actual disease at some point.

When that time comes around, it will almost certainly be another respiratory disease, because they are easy to “fake” using pre-existing endemic diseases and their uniform symptoms.

The prime candidate is bird flu, which has been slow-boiling in the news for two years now and has recently got a big uptick in coverage due to it allegedly passing to people from cows.

The UN reports “pandemic experts” are “concerned over avian influenza spread to humans”. Just yesterday, Jeremy Farrar of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that “[the] threat Of Bird Flu spreading to Humans is a great concern”

Prompting gleefully sensationalist headlines like this from the Daily Star:

New pandemic ‘expected’ as human-to-human bird flu of ‘great concern’ to WHO

Bird flu is a convenient pick because it enables them to push their health tyranny and their food transition at the same time. They can claim that dairy, beef, chicken and eggs have become “dangerous” as an excuse to ration them or at least force scarcity while they drive the prices up.

They will then push the idea that veganism and/or lab grown meat “prevents pandemics”. Something they’ve been claiming since at least 2021.

The Daily Mail reported just a few hours ago:

H5N1 strain of bird flu is found in MILK for first time in ‘very high concentrations,’ World Health Organization warns

The downside to bird flu is that it’s hard to work the climate change angle into the narrative, so maybe they’ll go with something else.

WHEN WILL IT HAPPEN?

Probably not until the winter, I would guess January 2025 at the earliest, for two reasons:

1. They need it to be flu season so they can co-opt normal seasonal deaths into their “pandemic” narrative.
2. I think they’ll want to wait until after the “big election year” is over so there are fresh governments in place.

That second point is not just a hunch, but based on the article from Sky I mentioned above. It asks “would lockdown ever happen again?”, and an “expert” answers [emphasis added]:

…if another lockdown was needed, the current Tory government would either have to minimise scandals over their own rule-breaking – or change hands completely to keep the public on board. If we had a new government, people would be far more likely to have faith in them because they would be less likely to say, ‘it’s the same bunch as before – why should we do it again?’

Which I think is correct.

That would also explain the raft of sudden political resignations – including Covid stars Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern – which swept the world in Covid’s wake. They were aware then, and are still aware now, their players were spent and they needed a fresh roster before coming back for the second leg.

So, elections first – with all the nonsense that entails – then maybe the “next pandemic”.

HOW WILL IT BE DIFFERENT FROM “COVID”?

Any future pandemic psy-op will be unlikely to follow the covid pattern beat-for-beat, for one thing the Covid narrative spent itself before achieving everything it was meant to achieve.

You can bet the farm that, in the four years since, there have been working groups and researchers poring over the pandemic data to figure out what went wrong and how they can fix it next time.

There seem to be three recurring themes.

1. Vaccines not lockdowns There will be a focus on securing vaccines rather than lockdowns. Indeed, part of the whole “aw shucks lockdowns were damaging who’d have thunk it” rigmarole is about setting up the dynamic that “next time” we need to do anything we can to avoid lockdowns.

Lockdowns will become a threat rather than a fact.

“We HAVE to mandate vaccines, because the economy can’t afford another lockdown.”

“Take the vaccine, you don’t want to have another lockdown do you?”

So there will be more testing, more masks and more vaccine mandates…and/or quarantine camps for the unvaccinated. And if they DO have lockdowns, they will be entirely blamed on the “anti-vaxxers”, of course.

2. Speed speed speed The main failing of the Covid narrative was that it ran out of steam. By the time the vaccines rolled out in early 2021 the pandemic fatigue was already setting in. And by the time the third boosters and fourth waves were in the headlines nobody really cared.

The propaganda blitzkrieg of early 2020 was arguably the greatest and most wide-reaching misinformation campaign of all time – and it was almost overwhelmingly effective. But it slowed, stalled, stopped and staled.

Next time, they know now, they need to be faster. Bill Gates said as much at the 2022 Munich Security Conference. They need to get the disease out the deaths up and vaccines in before people even realise what happened.

Hence the “100 day vaccines” plan. As the ever-reliably-hysterical Devi Shridar writes for the Guardian:

most governments are working towards the 100-day challenge: that is, how to contain a virus spreading while a scientific response, such as a vaccine, diagnostic or treatment, can be approved, manufactured and delivered to the public.

The “100 Day Mission” is the brainchild of CEPI, the Gates and WHO-backed NGO. Its main aim is to make it possible to produce new vaccines for previously unknown pathogens in 100 days.

In the US, the target is 130 days from pathogen discovery to nation-wide vaccine coverage.

It should go without saying that real, reliable, “safe and effective” vaccines cannot be produced in 100 days. Whatever they make, sell and force you to inject in that time…it won’t be a vaccine

3. Free Speech is Dangerous. The slow development of the narrative post-2020 may have hindered the health tyranny agenda, but it was the independent media that really hurt it. The impromptu network of dissident experts, independent researchers and social media movements spread “misinformation” faster than the powers-that-be could fact-check it.

We have seen perpetual messaging about the dangers of “misinformaion and disinformation” since then, including prominently at the most recent DAVOS summit earlier this year, where it was labelled one of the “three greatest dangers” facing the planet.

Last week, a UK Parliamentary Committee published “recommendations” headlined:

Government should learn lessons from pandemic to improve communications and counter misinformation

Only a few days ago, Gordon Brown was quoted in the news “warning” that:

“fake news’ risks preparations for next pandemic”

Which heavily implies they will move to counter this “fake news” before the “next pandemic” begins.

WILDCARD PREDICTION: The multipolar angle. Whatever form the “next pandemic” takes, they will likely avoid the monolithic messaging of 2020, where total global conformity to “the message” was one of the real telltale signs of deception. Next time prepare for countries like India, China and Russia to forge their own pandemic strategy – focusing on some new treatment or technology that the West refuses to endorse.

There are no sources to back this one, yet. It’s just a gut feeling.

*

So what am I officially predicting for the “next pandemic”?

1. It will won’t be launched until after the major elections this year, because they want new politic faces untarnished by Covid
2. It will likely be bird flu or some other respiratory disease, launched in the winter to hijack the real flu season again
3. The chosen disease will fit into one or more pre-existing agenda – either impacting food or originating from some forced “climate change” connection or both
4. They will move faster, producing “vaccines” in 100 days to stop people getting wise to the deception as they did with Covid
5. They will try and avoid lockdowns, but use them as a threat to enforce vaccine mandates more rigorously
6. They will clamp down harder on “mis- and dis-information” before launching the new narrative.
7. The next pandemic will have a multipolarity angle to establish a fake binary

That’s how I see it. Feel free to bookmark this post for future reference.

Even if I’ve guessed the details wrong here, there’s no question they are planning to roll out another pandemic at some point in near future. A covid sequel that learns from past mistakes.

While, in some ways, it will likely be worse than Covid was – the good news is that this time we can be ready for it.

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

A San Diego County official has branded the city the “new epicenter” for illegal immigration and claimed that Border Patrol has become “the ‘Uber’ for migrants” entering the county.

“San Diego is the new epicenter for migrants and illegal immigration,” San Diego District 5 Supervisor Jim Desmond posted on the social media platform X on April 25.

“The surge in illegal crossings has propelled San Diego to the unfortunate position of leading all nine southern border sectors in April, a trend unseen since the 1990s.”

On Wednesday alone, Border Patrol apprehended 2,000 illegal immigrants within the San Diego sector, according to Mr. Desmond. Among them were 206 Chinese nationals, he said.

Since Oct. 1st, there have been nearly 215,000 apprehensions representing individuals from 75 different countries in the San Diego sector, Mr. Desmond wrote in the post.

“Moreover, the closure of the processing center has led to over 30,000 migrant drop-offs in the past two months alone, with projections of more than 1,000 drop-offs expected today,” he continued.

“This doesn’t account for the frequent occurrences of boats washing ashore, averaging three to four incidents weekly. ”

Mr. Desmond appeared to be referencing the $6 million Migrant Welcome Center that shut down in San Diego in February due to a lack of funding.

The District 5 supervisor went on to state that human smugglers have identified California—and in particular the San Diego border sector—as “the path of least resistance” for illegal immigrants.

“Border Patrol has inadvertently become the ‘Uber’ for migrants entering San Diego County, and the County is the travel agent,” he concluded.

Illegal immigrants ‘Just Walking Across the Border’

Speaking to Newsnation later on April 25, Mr. Desmond claimed that people are “just walking across the border” and Border Patrol agents “are not empowered to stop them.”

“All they’re doing is processing them once they ... walk across the border,” he told the publication.

The Epoch Times has reached out to San Diego Border Patrol for further comment.

Mr. Desmond’s comments come after he and other San Diego County leaders called on the state and federal governments to bolster security at the border and remove sanctuary city policies amid the ongoing immigration crisis.

Speaking at a press conference alongside several mayors on April 15 near Carlsbad State Beach, Mr. Desmond said more than 125,000 illegal immigrants have entered since September, of which more than 25,000 had been released onto the streets in the past two months.

The county official stressed those figures did not include known “gotaways,” those known to have entered the country illegally while evading Border Patrol.

He further blamed California’s sanctuary city policies for prohibiting law enforcement agencies from working with Immigration Customs and Enforcement to hand over illegal immigrants, even if they are identified as suspects in crimes other than entering the United States illegally.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, on April 17, 2024. (Travis Gillmore/The Epoch Times)

Newsom Praises Biden’s Border Efforts

Mr. Desmond criticized the state for providing “free health care to illegal immigrants,” along with “free legal defense to those here illegally seeking asylum ... no matter what crime they commit.”

He and other Republican county officials, including Carlsbad Mayor Keith Blackburn, Vista Mayor John Franklin, and San Marcos Mayor Rebecca Jones, called upon the state of California and the federal government to do more to address the influx of illegal immigrants while calling for harsher penalties on human smugglers.

“We need to make major changes for the safety of our people, the safety of all of San Diego County,” Mr. Desmond said. “We need the state and federal officials to bring more resources, whether it’s more Coast Guard or National Guard ... We’ve got to come together and allow law enforcement to communicate with ICE. We need to be able to deport criminals out of the country.”

In contrast, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has defended the state’s response to the ongoing immigration crisis while praising the Biden administration for providing millions in federal grants to address the issue.

“Let’s be clear: President Biden is doing all he can to fund border security and humanitarian efforts while Republicans in Congress are choosing border chaos for political gain,” he said in an April 12 statement.

The Democrat went on to accuse congressional Republicans of trying to “undermine opportunities to advance border security” and modernize the immigration system for political gain.

“The Newsom Administration is working in partnership with the Biden-Harris Administration and California Congressional leaders, along with state and local officials, to advocate for federal funding for communities as they support the federal government with a safe and orderly process, further enhancing border security,” the governor said.

Via SchiffGold.com,

The solution to a problem shouldn’t make the problem worse.

But apparently, California’s policy makers missed that memo.

On April 1st, the state instituted a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers, the highest in the US. With California’s absurdly high cost of living, the policy appeared to make life more manageable for low-income residents. Unfortunately, as the adage goes, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” California’s new minimum wage is poised to hurt the same fast-food workers it aims to help.

The Economic Problem of a Minimum Wage

The counterproductivity of a minimum wage is demonstrated by a simple analysis of the labor market. Companies “purchase” labor from workers through a wage. The more value a worker adds to a company, the more they will be paid. If employers are allowed to set wages freely, and the labor market is competitive, workers can expect to be paid close to their value added to the company.

A minimum wage hijacks this process. If a worker is worth $15 an hour to an employer, but a $20 minimum wage is introduced, the company will no longer hire the worker, and both parties are harmed. A $20 wage floor means that workers must at least add that much value to the company. For many laborers, this means saying goodbye to their industry and hello to unemployment.

The Effects of California’s Minimum Wage

The ripple effects of California’s $20 minimum wage have proved these dismal predictions all too true. Several chains, including Pizza Hut and Starbucks, have laid off workers in response to the wage increase. Michaela Mendelsohn, the CEO of El Pollo Loco, claimed the company would have to reduce employee hours due to increased labor costs. McDonald’s employees are likewise seeing their hours substantially reduced. In the tight margins of the fast-food industry, where even a small increase in the price of labor can destabilize a production chain, the effects of the wage hike have been exacerbated.

Fast-food workers are particularly susceptible to layoffs because of the rise of automation within the industry. Automation creates a simple alternative for companies struggling to meet the wage requirement. Many fast-food restaurants have already implemented mobile ordering stations, and if labor costs continue to rise, the incentive to further automate will increase. Restaurants around the world have already introduced machines to replace waiters, cashiers, and cooks.

A higher wage also increases the risk of hiring new, untested workers. In service industries, such as fast food, it can be difficult to distinguish the productivity of individual workers. It can take a while to find the weak link at the root of a location’s unproductivity, and this delay equals lost revenue. While an untested applicant may potentially boost productivity, a heightened minimum wage increases the risk of giving that worker a chance.

Proponents of the new minimum wage argue that food chains will absorb the wage increase by raising prices. Some companies, such as Chipotle and Jack in the Box, have already raised their California prices in response to the new policy. However, this is not a concrete solution. Any price increase will necessarily decrease consumer demand, which could harm profits further. A step too far and the workers’ already dire plight will be exacerbated.

If California’s economic and political conditions continue to worsen, many franchises might simply leave the state. While California has a massive potential market, if labor costs become prohibitively high, chains could simply focus their resources on more economically-friendly states. Leading the way are MOD Pizza and Starbucks, who respectively closed five and seven of their California locations in April.

The Minimum Wage: A Cure that Exacerbates the Sickness

The ethos of the minimum wage is to support the poor and lessen wealth inequality. Social class discrepancy is not a trivial issue, as a lack of generational wealth constrains the opportunities of millions of Americans. Children of parents without college degrees are more likely to not obtain a degree themselves, and less educated workers are on average less productive than their educated counterparts. However, the minimum wage increases inequality by cutting off anyone who falls below a mandated productivity threshold. This means removing many of the underprivileged from the workforce altogether, causing families already hampered by societal constraints to see their opportunities shrink even further. It’s like a hospital diverting its care from its sickest patients to pamper the healthy.

Interventionist policies usually sound good. Politicians love to swoon about how their measures will reduce inequality and to paint opponents as money-grubbers who don’t care about assisting the poor. The cold reality is that when the government institutes a sweeping economic reform, there will always be unintended consequences. In the case of the minimum wage, the “cure” exacerbates the sickness.