Senator Johnson argues that COVID-19 was planned by an elite group of individuals

Ron Johnson, a Republican Senator from Wisconsin, believes that the coronavirus that killed millions of people worldwide was a virus planned by a group of elite individuals.

Many hypotheses have emerged about how and when the virus that unleashed the global pandemic originated, but the Republican senator put forward the most recent one during an interview on national television.

Johnson spoke with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo and claimed that COVID-19 was intentionally planned by a group of influential people seeking to "take total control of our lives."

"We are going down a very dangerous path. But it is a path that is being laid out and planned by an elite group of people that want to take total control over our lives, and that's what they're doing bit by bit," he said during the interview.

Johnson associated the alleged COVID plot with Event 21, a high-level pandemic exercise organized by the Johns Hopkins Center in conjunction with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Event 21

Event 21 was a meeting held on October 18, 2019, in New York, just weeks before the first COVID-19 cases were reported in China.

The meeting discussed how public-private partnerships would come together in the event of a severe pandemic to mitigate the economic and social impacts and avoid the "catastrophic" consequences that could arise from a global pandemic.

According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security website, a simulation exercise was carried out during the meeting based on scenarios associated with "a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible pandemic."

"15 global business, government, and public health leaders were players in the simulation exercise that highlighted unresolved real-world policy and economic issues that could be solved with sufficient political will, financial investment, and attention now and in the future," the page notes.