We have seen this movie before

Interesting.  From Der Spiegel 2010: Reconstruction of the Swine Flu Mass Hysteria of 2009 The great hysteria pandemic attempt by the WHO and the governing classes that failed.  It appears that this was originally reported in Der Spiegel in 2010 and was then republished on August 2, 2020.  

Clearly it is an indictment of the WHO bureaucracy and how they responded to a new swine flu virus in 2009.  

It wasn’t until several weeks later that a laboratory in Canada tested a mucosal smear taken from the boy. The results made him famous. Edgar didn’t have an ordinary flu, but had been infected with a new kind of pathogen, the swine flu virus. Edgar went down in history as niño cero, “boy zero,” the first person to fall ill with the new plague.

The Mexican boy’s infection was mild, like an overwhelming majority of the millions of cases that would occur worldwide in the coming months. The new virus would probably have attracted far less attention if it hadn’t been for modern molecular medicine, with its genetic analyses, antibody tests and reference laboratories. The swine flu would have conquered the world, and no doctor would have noticed.

But the world did notice, largely because of high-tech medicine and the vaccine industry. From Ebola to SARS to the avian flu, epidemiologists, the media, doctors and the pharmaceutical lobby have systematically attuned the world to grim catastrophic scenarios and the dangers of new, menacing infectious diseases.

None of these diseases receives more attention than influenza. Researchers in more than 130 laboratories in 102 countries are constantly on the lookout for new flu pathogens. Entire careers and institutions, and a lot of money, depend on the outcomes of their work. “Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur,” says flu expert Tom Jefferson, from an international health nonprofit called the Cochrane Collaboration. “And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.”

Now turned up, the machinery was set into motion. Researchers got to work examining the molecular structure of the virus. The pharmaceutical industry started to develop vaccines. Government agencies laid out disaster plans. There was only one thing that everyone was ignoring: The new pathogen was, in fact, relatively harmless.

How did all this happen?

Der Spiegel's answer is primarily - Incentives.  Der Spiegel provides a month by month timeline of actions taken the summer of 2009 which led to the declaration of a global H1N1 pandemic, the mass slaughter of pigs in many countries and numerous other economic disasters.  In the event, H1N1 proved pretty mild with relatively few global deaths from the influenza.  The recommended WHO interventions were massively damaging to many country's economies with little indication of effectiveness or even need.

Der Spiegel hypothesizes that WHO needed the pandemic to justify its existence, exacerbated by some personnel issues where key decision-makers, based on past experience, were predisposed to find a pandemic.  

The weekly magazine even more strongly makes the case that the whole process was inappropriately and self-servingly driven by the financial interests of pharma companies.  

An interesting context to our issues today where "experts" have beclowned themselves with bad advice, departures from evidentiary norms, contradictory positions, policies which are seen to be ineffective, and edicts from which they exempt themselves, etc.  

People make mistakes.  It is the exempting of individuals in positions of authority and benefitting institutions from the consequences of their failures, failure which typically exact costs and tragedies on those least able to absorb them, which badly damages societal trust.