Exercise Pegasus 2025— the U.K.’s largest pandemic response exercise in history
The U.K. released new details for a sweeping pandemic response exercise — the largest in its history — to take place over multiple days between September and November 2025.
Exercise Pegasus aims to span all regions and government departments in the U.K., and will involve opening a “resilience academy” to train over 4,000 people from public and private sectors annually in emergency roles.
Exercise Pegasus Core Objectives
The objectives for Exercise Pegasus set specific elements where there is a reasonable prospect of useful learning rather than assessing the totality of pandemic arrangements. The objectives as agreed are:
- Exercise decision making processes for measures to contain, control or mitigate the impact of a pandemic including how relevant priority lessons from previous civil emergency exercises and outbreaks of disease have been embedded.
- Explore the impact of inequalities, and their consideration within pandemic decision making.
- Investigate likely impacts of HMG decisions on the health and care system, local responders, communities, businesses, civil society and the general public.
- Examine processes for the scaling up of relevant capabilities that would be needed as part of a central government pandemic response.
- Investigate the effectiveness of coordination, including the exchange of information, between different tiers in a UK wide response.
- Test the strategic response to disinformation and misinformation.
- Enable and support local exercising of selected capabilities and response issues.
- Identify and report on relevant areas of learning to improve future pandemic preparedness.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/pandemic-preparedness-exercise-pegasus/
Exercise Pegasus looks like Event 201, that occurred on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise included representatives from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, various media powerhouses, the Chinese government, a former CIA/National Security Agency director, vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson, the finance and biosecurity industries and Edelman, the world’s leading corporate PR firm. Few months later Covid 19 “plandemic” took over the world.
https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exercises/event-201-pandemic-tabletop-exercise
Meanwhile The British Ministry of the Interior quietly has signed a major contract worth £7.5 million over 4 years to purchase special equipment designed to store bodies in the event of large-scale disasters and mass casualties.
It includes three levels of rapidly deployable morgues.
- Soft shell: temporary tents for the storage of at least 100 corpses, ready within 24 hours.
- Hard shell: refrigerated morgues of the ISO-container type for 150 corpses, ready in 3 days.
- Temporary buildings: large-scale cooling units for 450 corpses, ready in 5 days. In total, the system is designed for simultaneous processing of up to 700 corpses and is ready to work within a few days after the crisis,” the publication says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM0TgVjzbaQ
Just remind you, that in In May 2025, at the 78th World Health Assembly, Member States adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement.
Currently, Member States, including Canada, U.K. are continuing negotiations on a pathogen access and benefit sharing annex. This will be an integral part of the WHO Pandemic Agreement.
The objectives of the annex are to:
- facilitate rapid and timely access to pathogens that have the potential to become a pandemic
- support rapid and equitable access to benefits, including vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics
Another planned ‘pandemic’ just around the corner? Time will tell. Hopefully, people have learned from the previous one, same as did the organizers.
DB
