At a deeper level perhaps, but I doubt it's common knowledge among the elite that catastrophe is likely or imminent. I say that because they probably don't pay attention to such. In their wishful thinking, they have excised all such science from their cosmology of 'how the solar system/universe works'. In its place they believe a fraudulent version in which 'man-made CO2' might, decades from now, 'overheat the planet'. In the meantime, it provides a cash cow, and they act as if they assume their gravy train will last for eternity. Ironically, in their actions, they bring on the very things that make catastrophe - and thus their own failure to survive it - more likely.
(At the very top, however, I expect that whoever this 'Consortium' is has a solid grasp of the kinds of scenarios we consider likely.)
I know this goes against the 'alternative' viewpoint that Communist China is 'in bed with the globalists', including the US Establishment,
so the following take on 'what Covid is cover for' assumes fundamental, competing interests between Washington and Beijing. What if 'The Covid' is primarily a cover for geo-economic warfare, a symptom of the "rude and painful awakening" that the Cs suggested in 2014 - in answering a question about China's rise - awaited "the USA and its allies"? The whole 'lockdown/reset' seems to be - at least in part - a desperate attempt to block China from (actually) 'resetting the rules' by launching a massive, centralizing grab for resources and power, with which to challenge China and maintain 'unipolar hegemony'.
The Anglo-Zionist-American elite would perhaps have done this earlier, and in a less brusque and shocking manner, but they apparently realized too late that China has, all this time, only been pretending to 'globalize/westernize' along the Western central banking cartel's model. In fact, and especially since Xi Jinping became president in 2012, China is 'diverging from the program' with its massive foreign investment programs and its insistence on getting its way in the South China Sea, MidEast energy networks, increased voting rights at international institutions, trade, etc.
To the victor the spoils and all that. Whatever is to come at the environmental and cosmic levels, at the socio-economic level China is currently supplanting the USA as 'no. 1', and even though it takes time to be realized, this is a world-changing event that upends half a millennium of European/Western 'might makes right'. Might will still make right, but technological parity in both conventional and nuclear weapons means 'war' is today channeled primarily into economics and information/ideology. Countries can no longer be forced through 'gunboat diplomacy' and the threat of nuclear annihilation; they must instead be persuaded to enter into this or that alliance or market.
China is very good at persuasion. The Western powers are so terrible at it, they can't even fake it well while backstabbing their target countries with proxy armies. And thus, I suspect, the main - or 'pressing' - motivation for a fake pandemic-as-cover-for-'great reset'. China is one country under one flag (plus an enormous diaspora). 'The West' is far less cohesive, as much as NATO, the EU and other institutions attempted to glue it all together. The US can only remain the center of unipolar hegemony as long as it prevents its 'allies' falling into China's orbit. Covid-19 is one last desperate attempt to 'keep them bound'.
Or so I think!
