Anon has a theory that the plan was to switch to Small Pox and Gates was out in front with the Small Pox narrative being a terror attach. The MSM was following suit when they got wind of the Small Pox found at Merck so they ran with the story, not knowing that they had sabotaged the operation by associating the a very hard to come by pathogen with the grand daddy of pharmaceuticals (publisher of the Merck Dictionary the bible of pharmaceuticals). That throws the narrative into chaos since now the word is out that small pox is suppose to only be at two labs (not Merck) and with how the the lab leak in Wuhan just will not go away, people will start suggesting Merck or one of the labs lost control of small pox, not some terrorist. So at the very least they need to by time so people forget where small pox has the ability to come from. This resulted in the the scramble to resurrect the covid narrative that has been dyeing a slow death by a thousand cuts. They already tried the variant tactic six months ago and only got the delta to kind of stick, so now they are trying again but this time with renewed vigor since last week scientist were baffled as to why Africa didn't die off from covid with their very low 5% vax rate and now they need give the perception that Africa is a cesspool of covid. Only problem is that their new variant so far is only in the vaxed, which sounds a lot like a pandemic of the vaxed.
It would appear that they are making mistakes. Getting knocked off your game does that, if it happens enough, panic sets in.