In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.
For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.
Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.
None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”
The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.
When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.
In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.
Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”
Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival. “The U.S. Is Losing at Influence Warfare,” warned a December 2016 article in the defense industry journal, Defense One. The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect U.S. citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security. According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America’s adversaries enjoyed a “significant advantage” as the result of “legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not.”
The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. “The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, … by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that … If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access … I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time.”
The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.
Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.
Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought. The government’s lead counter-disinformation agency, the GEC, declared that its mission entailed “seeking out and engaging the best talent within the technology sector.” To that end, the government started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars.
At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together. With the D.C.-Silicon Valley fusion, the federal bureaucracies could rely on informal social connections to push their agenda inside the tech companies.
In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force for the express purpose of monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to “discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.
At around the same time, Hamilton 68 blew up. Publicly, Twitter’s algorithms turned the Russian-influence-exposing “dashboard” into a major news story. Behind the scenes, Twitter executives quickly figured out that it was a scam. When Twitter reverse-engineered the secret list, it found, according to the journalist Matt Taibbi, that “instead of tracking how Russia influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.” The discovery prompted Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to suggest in an October 2017 email that the company take action to expose the hoax and “call this out on the bullshit it is.”
In the end, neither Roth nor anyone else said a word. Instead, they let a purveyor of industrial-grade bullshit—the old-fashioned term for disinformation —continue dumping its contents directly into the news stream.
It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”
This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.”
Even trenchant critics of the phenomenon—including Taibbi and the Columbia Journalism Review ’s Jeff Gerth, who recently published a dissection of the press’s role in promoting false Trump-Russia collusion claims—have focused on the media’s failures, a framing largely shared by conservative publications, which treat disinformation as an issue of partisan censorship bias. But while there’s no question that the media has utterly disgraced itself, it’s also a convenient fall guy—by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.
It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.
The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.
What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.
The first phase of the information war was marked by distinctively human displays of incompetence and brute-force intimidation. But the next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.
Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.
If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.
I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly : The Origins of Contemporary “Disinformation”
II. Trump’s Election: “It’s Facebook’s Fault”
III. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?
IV. The Internet : From Darling to Demon
V. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!
VI. Why the Post-9/11 “War on Terror” Never Ended
VII. The Rise of “Domestic Extremists”
X. Hunter’s Laptops : The Exception to the Rule
Appendix: The Disinfo Dictionary
Have insider information on the counter-disinformation complex? Email jacobsiegel@protonmail.com or contact him or contact him on Twitter @jacob__siegel.
The foundations of the current information war were laid in response to a sequence of events that took place in 2014. First Russia tried to suppress the U.S.-backed Euromaidan movement in Ukraine; a few months later Russia invaded Crimea; and several months after that the Islamic State captured the city of Mosul in northern Iraq and declared it the capital of a new caliphate. In three separate conflicts, an enemy or rival power of the United States was seen to have successfully used not just military might but also social media messaging campaigns designed to confuse and demoralize its enemies—a combination known as “hybrid warfare.” These conflicts convinced U.S. and NATO security officials that the power of social media to shape public perceptions had evolved to the point where it could decide the outcome of modern wars—outcomes that might be counter to those the United States wanted. They concluded that the state had to acquire the means to take control over digital communications so that they could present reality as they wanted it to be, and prevent reality from becoming anything else.
Technically, hybrid warfare refers to an approach that combines military and non-military means—overt and covert operations mixed with cyberwarfare and influence operations—to both confuse and weaken a target while avoiding direct, full-scale conventional war. In practice, it is notoriously vague. “The term now covers every type of discernible Russian activity, from propaganda to conventional warfare, and most that exists in between,” wrote Russia analyst Michael Kofman in March 2016.
Over the past decade, Russia has indeed repeatedly employed tactics associated with hybrid warfare, including a push to target Western audiences with messaging on channels like RT and Sputnik News and with cyber operations such as the use of “troll” accounts. But this was not new even in 2014, and it was something the United States, as well as every other major power, engaged in as well. As early as 2011, the United States was building its own “troll armies ” online by developing software to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”
“If you torture hybrid warfare long enough, it will tell you anything,” Kofman had admonished, which is precisely what began happening a few months later when Trump critics popularized the idea that a hidden Russian hand was the puppeteer of political developments inside the United States.
The leading voice promoting that claim was a former FBI officer and counterterrorism analyst named Clint Watts. In an article from August 2016, “How Russia Dominates Your Twitter Feed to Promote Lies (And, Trump, Too),” Watts and his co-author, Andrew Weisburd, described how Russia had revived its Cold War-era “Active Measures” campaign, using propaganda and disinformation to influence foreign audiences. As a result, according to the article, Trump voters and Russian propagandists were promoting the same stories on social media that were intended to make America look weak and incompetent. The authors made the extraordinary claim that the “melding of Russian-friendly accounts and Trumpkins has been going on for some time.” If that was true, it meant that anyone expressing support for Donald Trump might be an agent of the Russian government, whether or not the person intended to play that role. It meant that the people they called “Trumpkins,” who made up half the country, were attacking America from within. It meant that politics was now war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy.
Watts made his name as a counterterrorism analyst by studying the social media strategies used by ISIS, but with articles like this, he became the media’s go-to expert on Russian trolls and Kremlin disinformation campaigns. It seems he also had powerful backers.
In his book The Assault on Intelligence, retired CIA chief Michael Hayden called Watts “the one man, who more than any other was trying to ring the alarm more than two years before the 2016 elections.”
Hayden credited Watts in his book with teaching him the power of social media: “Watts pointed out to me that Twitter makes falsehoods seem more believable through sheer repetition and volume. He labeled it a kind of ‘computational propaganda.’ Twitter in turn drives mainstream media.”
A false story algorithmically amplified by Twitter and disseminated by the media—it’s no coincidence that this perfectly describes the “bullshit” spread on Twitter about Russian influence operations: In 2017, it was Watts who came up with the idea for the Hamilton 68 dashboard and helped spearhead the initiative.
No one thought Trump was a normal politician. Being an ogre, Trump horrified millions of Americans who felt a personal betrayal in the possibility that he would occupy the same office held by George Washington and Abe Lincoln. Trump also threatened the business interests of the most powerful sectors of society. It was the latter offense, rather than his putative racism or flagrant un-presidentialness, that sent the ruling class into a state of apoplexy.
Given his focus in office on lowering the corporate tax rate, it’s easy to forget that Republican officials and the party’s donor class saw Trump as a dangerous radical who threatened their business ties with China, their access to cheap imported labor, and the lucrative business of constant war. But, indeed, that is how they saw him, as reflected in the unprecedented response to Trump’s candidacy recorded by The Wall Street Journal in September 2016: “No chief executive at the nation’s 100 largest companies had donated to Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign through August, a sharp reversal from 2012, when nearly a third of the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies supported GOP nominee Mitt Romney.”
The phenomenon was not unique to Trump. Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist candidate in 2016, was also seen as a dangerous threat by the ruling class. But whereas the Democrats successfully sabotaged Sanders, Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, which meant that he had to be dealt with by other means.
Two days after Trump took office, a smirking Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that it was “really dumb” of the new president to get on the bad side of the security agencies that were supposed to work for him: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.”
Trump had used sites like Twitter to bypass his party’s elites and connect directly with his supporters. Therefore, to cripple the new president and ensure that no one like him could ever come to power again, the intel agencies had to break the independence of the social media platforms. Conveniently, it was the same lesson that many intelligence and defense officials had drawn from the ISIS and Russian campaigns of 2014—namely, that social media was too powerful to be left outside of state control—only applied to domestic politics, which meant the agencies would now have help from politicians who stood to benefit from the effort.
Immediately after the election, Hillary Clinton started blaming Facebook for her loss. Until this point, Facebook and Twitter had tried to remain above the political fray, fearful of jeopardizing potential profits by alienating either party. But now a profound change occurred, as the operation behind the Clinton campaign reoriented itself not simply to reform the social media platforms, but to conquer them. The lesson they took from Trump’s victory was that Facebook and Twitter—more than Michigan and Florida—were the critical battlegrounds where political contests were won or lost. “Many of us are beginning to talk about what a big problem this is,” Clinton’s chief digital strategist Teddy Goff told Politico the week after the election, referring to Facebook’s alleged role in boosting Russian disinformation that helped Trump. “Both from the campaign and from the administration, and just sort of broader Obama orbit…this is one of the things we would like to take on post-election,” Goff said.
The press repeated that message so often that it gave the political strategy the appearance of objective validity:
“Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook”; New York Magazine , Nov. 9, 2016.
“Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence”; The New York Times , Nov. 12, 2016.
“Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”; The Washington Post, Nov. 24, 2016.
“Disinformation, Not Fake News, Got Trump Elected, and It Is Not Stopping”; The Intercept , Dec. 6, 2016.
And on it went in countless articles that dominated the news cycle for the next two years.
At first, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the charge that fake news posted on his platform had influenced the outcome of the election as “pretty crazy .” But Zuckerberg faced an intense pressure campaign in which every sector of the American ruling class, including his own employees, blamed him for putting a Putin agent in the White House, effectively accusing him of high treason. The final straw came a few weeks after the election when Obama himself “publicly denounced the spread of fake news on Facebook.” Two days later , Zuckerberg folded: “Facebook announces new push against fake news after Obama comments.”
The false yet foundational claim that Russia hacked the 2016 election provided a justification—just like the claims about weapons of mass destruction that triggered the Iraq War—to plunge America into a wartime state of exception. With the normal rules of constitutional democracy suspended, a coterie of party operatives and security officials then installed a vast, largely invisible new architecture of social control on the backend of the internet’s biggest platforms.
Though there was never a public order given, the U.S. government began enforcing martial law online.
Adam Maida
The American doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare famously calls for “winning hearts and minds.” The idea is that victory against insurgent groups depends on gaining the support of the local population, which cannot be accomplished by brute force alone. In places like Vietnam and Iraq, support was secured through a combination of nation-building and appealing to locals by providing them with goods they were presumed to value: money and jobs, for instance, or stability.
Because cultural values vary and what is prized by an Afghan villager may appear worthless to a Swedish accountant, successful counterinsurgents must learn what makes the native population tick. To win over a mind, first you have to get inside it to understand its wants and fears. When that fails, there is another approach in the modern military arsenal to take its place: counterterrorism. Where counterinsurgency tries to win local support, counterterrorism tries to hunt down and kill designated enemies.
Despite the apparent tension in their contrasting approaches, the two strategies have often been used in tandem. Both rely on extensive surveillance networks to gather intelligence on their targets, whether that is figuring out where to dig wells or locating terrorists in order to kill them. But the counterinsurgent in particular imagines that if he can learn enough about a population, it will be possible to reengineer its society. Obtaining answers is just a matter of using the right resources: a combination of surveillance tools and social scientific methods, the joint output of which feeds into all-powerful centralized databases that are believed to contain the totality of the war.
I have observed, reflecting on my experiences as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, how, “data analytics tools at the fingertips of anyone with access to an operations center or situation room seemed to promise the imminent convergence of map and territory,” but ended up becoming a trap as “U.S. forces could measure thousands of different things that we couldn’t understand.” We tried to cover for that deficit by acquiring even more data. If only we could gather enough information and harmonize it with the correct algorithms, we believed, the database would divine the future.
Not only is that framework foundational in modern American counterinsurgency doctrine, but also it was part of the original impetus for building the internet. The Pentagon built the proto-internet known as ARPANET in 1969 because it needed a decentralized communications infrastructure that could survive nuclear war—but that was not the only goal. The internet, writes Yasha Levine in his history of the subject, Surveillance Valley, was also “an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. Some even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft.”
In the days of the internet “freedom agenda,” the popular mythology of Silicon Valley depicted it as a laboratory of freaks, self-starters, free thinkers, and libertarian tinkerers who just wanted to make cool things without the government slowing them down. The alternative history, outlined in Levine’s book, highlights that the internet “always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war.” There is truth in both versions, but after 2001 the distinction disappeared.
As Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism , at the start of the war on terror “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism.”
In Afghanistan, the military had to employ costly drones and “Human Terrain Teams” staffed with adventurous academics to survey the local population and extract their relevant sociological data. But with Americans spending hours a day voluntarily feeding their every thought directly into data monopolies connected to the defense sector, it must have seemed trivially easy for anyone with control of the databases to manipulate the sentiments of the population at home.
More than a decade ago, the Pentagon began funding the development of a host of tools for detecting and countering terrorist messaging on social media. Some were part of a broader “memetic warfare ” initiative inside the military that included proposals to weaponize memes to “defeat an enemy ideology and win over the masses of undecided noncombatants.” But most of the programs, launched in response to the rise of ISIS and the jihadist group’s adept use of social media, focused on scaling up automated means of detecting and censoring terrorist messaging online. Those efforts culminated in January 2016 with the State Department’s announcement that it would be opening the aforementioned Global Engagement Center, headed by Michael Lumpkin. Just a few months later, President Obama put the GEC in charge of the new war against disinformation. On the same day that the GEC was announced , Obama and “various high-ranking members of the national security establishment met with representatives from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other Internet powerhouses to discuss how the United States can fight ISIS messaging via social media.”
In the wake of the populist upheavals of 2016, leading figures in America’s ruling party seized upon the feedback loop of surveillance and control refined through the war on terror as a method for maintaining power inside the United States. Weapons created to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda were turned against Americans who entertained incorrect thoughts about the president or vaccine boosters or gender pronouns or the war in Ukraine.
Former State Department official Mike Benz, who now runs an organization called the Foundation for Freedom Online that bills itself as a digital free-speech watchdog, describes how a company called Graphika, which is “essentially a U.S. Department of Defense-funded censorship consortium” that was created to fight terrorists, was repurposed to censor political speech in America. The company, “initially funded to help do social media counterinsurgency work effectively in conflict zones for the U.S. military,” was then “redeployed domestically both on Covid censorship and political censorship,” Benz told an interviewer . “Graphika was deployed to monitor social media discourse about Covid and Covid origins, Covid conspiracies, or Covid sorts of issues.”
The fight against ISIS morphed into the fight against Trump and “Russian collusion,” which morphed into the fight against disinformation. But those were just branding changes; the underlying technological infrastructure and ruling-class philosophy, which claimed the right to remake the world based on a religious sense of expertise, remained unchanged. The human art of politics, which would have required real negotiation and compromise with Trump supporters, was abandoned in favor of a specious science of top-down social engineering that aimed to produce a totally administered society.
For the American ruling class, COIN replaced politics as the proper means of dealing with the natives.
Once upon a time, the internet was going to save the world. The first dot-com boom in the 1990s popularized the idea of the internet as a technology for maximizing human potential and spreading democracy. The Clinton administration’s 1997 “A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce” put forth the vision: “The Internet is a medium that has tremendous potential for promoting individual freedom and individual empowerment” and “[t]herefore, where possible, the individual should be left in control of the way in which he or she uses this medium.” The smart people in the West mocked the naive efforts in other parts of the world to control the flow of information. In 2000, President Clinton scoffed that China’s internet crackdown was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” The hype continued through the Bush administration, when internet companies were seen as crucial partners in the state’s mass surveillance program and its plan to bring democracy to the Middle East.
But the hype really went into overdrive when President Obama was elected through a “big data”-driven campaign that prioritized social media outreach. There appeared to be a genuine philosophical alignment between Obama’s political style as the “Hope” and ”Change” president whose guiding principle in foreign policy was “Don’t do dumb shit” and the internet search company whose original motto was “Do no evil.” There were also deep personal ties connecting the two powers, with 252 cases over the course of Obama’s presidency of people moving between jobs at the White House and Google. From 2009 to 2015, White House and Google employees were meeting, on average, more than once a week.
As Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton led the government’s “Internet freedom” agenda, which aimed to “promote online communications as a tool for opening up closed societies.” In a speech from 2010, Clinton issued a warning about the spread of digital censorship in authoritarian regimes: “A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said. “And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.”
It is a supreme irony that the very people who a decade ago led the freedom agenda for other countries have since pushed the United States to implement one of the largest and most powerful censorship machines in existence under the guise of fighting disinformation.
Or perhaps irony is not the right word to capture the difference between the freedom-loving Clinton of a decade ago and the pro-censorship activist of today, but it gets at what appears to be the about-face done by a class of people who were public standard-bearers for radically different ideas barely 10 years earlier. These people—politicians, first and foremost—saw (and presented) internet freedom as a positive force for humanity when it empowered them and served their interests, but as something demonic when it broke down those hierarchies of power and benefited their opponents. That’s how to bridge the gap between the Hillary Clinton of 2013 and the Clinton of 2023: Both see the internet as an immensely powerful tool for driving political processes and effecting regime change.
Which is why, in the Clinton and Obama worlds, the rise of Donald Trump looked like a profound betrayal—because, as they saw it, Silicon Valley could have stopped it but didn’t. As heads of the government’s internet policy, they had helped the tech companies build their fortunes on mass surveillance and evangelized the internet as a beacon of freedom and progress while turning a blind eye to their flagrant violations of antitrust statutes. In return, the tech companies had done the unthinkable—not because they had allowed Russia to “hack the election,” which was a desperate accusation thrown out to mask the stench of failure, but because they refused to intervene to prevent Donald Trump from winning.
In his book Who Owns the Future? , tech pioneer Jaron Lanier writes, “The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of ultra-secret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this information to concentrate money and power.” Because digital economies produce ever-greater concentrations of data and power, the inevitable happened: The tech companies got too powerful.
What could the leaders of the ruling party do? They had two options. They could use the government’s regulatory power to counter-attack: Break up the data monopolies and restructure the social contract underwriting the internet so that individuals retained ownership of their data instead of having it ripped off every time they clicked into a public commons. Or, they could preserve the tech companies’ power while forcing them to drop the pretense of neutrality and instead line up behind the ruling party—a tempting prospect, given what they could do with all that power.
They chose option B.
Declaring the platforms guilty of electing Trump—a candidate every bit as loathsome to the highly educated elites in Silicon Valley as he was to the highly educated elites in New York and D.C.—provided the club that the media and the political class used to beat the tech companies into becoming more powerful and more obedient.
If one imagines that the American ruling class faced a problem—Donald Trump appeared to threaten their institutional survival—then the Russia investigation didn’t just provide the means to unite the various branches of that class, in and out of government, against a common foe. It also gave them the ultimate form of leverage over the most powerful non-aligned sector of society: the tech industry. The coordination necessary to carry out the Russian collusion frame-up was the vehicle, fusing (1) the political goals of the Democratic Party, (2) the institutional agenda of the intelligence and security agencies, and (3) the narrative power and moral fervor of the media with (4) the tech companies’ surveillance architecture.
The secret FISA warrant that allowed U.S. security agencies to begin spying on the Trump campaign was based on the Steele dossier, a partisan hatchet job paid for by Hillary Clinton’s team that consisted of provably false reports alleging a working relationship between Donald Trump and the Russian government. While a powerful short-term weapon against Trump, the dossier was also obvious bullshit, which suggested it might eventually become a liability.
Disinformation solved that problem while placing a nuclear-grade weapon in the arsenal of the anti-Trump resistance. In the beginning, disinformation had been only one among a half-dozen talking points coming from the anti-Trump camp. It won out over the others because it was capable of explaining anything and everything yet simultaneously remained so ambiguous it could not be disproved. Defensively, it provided a means to attack and discredit anyone who questioned the dossier or the larger claim that Trump colluded with Russia.
All the old McCarthyite tricks were new again. The Washington Post aggressively trumpeted the claim that disinformation swung the 2016 election, a crusade that began within days of Trump’s victory, with the article “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” (The lead expert quoted in the article: Clint Watts.)
A steady flow of leaks from intelligence officials to national security reporters had already established the false narrative that there was credible evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. When Trump won in spite of those reports, the senior officials responsible for spreading them, most notably CIA chief John Brennan, doubled down on their claims. Two weeks before Trump took office, the Obama administration released a declassified version of an intelligence community assessment, known as an ICA, on “Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections,” which asserted that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
The ICA was presented as the objective, nonpolitical consensus reached by multiple intelligence agencies. In the Columbia Journalism Review , Jeff Gerth writes that the assessment received “massive, and largely uncritical coverage” in the press. But, in fact, the ICA was just the opposite: a selectively curated political document that deliberately omitted contrary evidence to create the impression that the collusion narrative was not a widely disputed rumor, but an objective fact.
A classified report by the House Intelligence Committee on the creation of the ICA detailed just how unusual and nakedly political it was. “It wasn’t 17 agencies, and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” a senior intelligence official who read a draft version of the House report told the journalist Paul Sperry . “It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan handpicked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.” An Obama appointee, Brennan had broken with precedent by weighing in on politics while serving as CIA director. That set the stage for his post-government career as an MSNBC analyst and “resistance” figure who made headlines by accusing Trump of treason.
Mike Pompeo, who succeeded Brennan at the CIA, said that as the agency’s director, he learned that “senior analysts who had been working on Russia for nearly their entire careers were made bystanders” when the ICA was being written. According to Sperry, Brennan “excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a ‘wild card.’” (Brennan was also the one who overrode the objections of other agencies to include the Steele dossier as part of the official assessment.)
Despite its irregularities, the ICA worked as intended: Trump began his presidency under a cloud of suspicion that he was never able to dispel. Just as Schumer promised, the intelligence officials wasted no time in taking their revenge.
And not only revenge, but also forward-planning action. The claim that Russia hacked the 2016 vote allowed federal agencies to implement the new public-private censorship machinery under the pretext of ensuring “election integrity.” People who expressed true and constitutionally protected opinions about the 2016 election (and later about issues like COVID-19 and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan) were labeled un-American, racists, conspiracists, and stooges of Vladimir Putin and systematically removed from the digital public square to prevent their ideas from spreading disinformation. By an extremely conservative estimate based on public reporting, there have been tens of millions of such cases of censorship since Trump’s election.
And here’s the climax of this particular entry: On Jan. 6, 2017—the same day that Brennan’s ICA report lent institutional backing to the false claim that Putin helped Trump—Jeh Johnson, the outgoing Obama-appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that, in response to Russian electoral interference, he had designated U.S. election systems as “critical national infrastructure.” The move placed the property of 8,000 election jurisdictions across the country under the control of the DHS. It was a coup that Johnson had been attempting to pull off since the summer of 2016, but that, as he explained in a later speech , was blocked by local stakeholders who told him “that running elections in this country was the sovereign and exclusive responsibility of the states, and they did not want federal intrusion, a federal takeover, or federal regulation of that process.” So Johnson found a work-around by unilaterally rushing the measure through in his last days in office.
It’s clear now why Johnson was in such a rush: Within a few years, all of the claims used to justify the extraordinary federal seizure of the country’s electoral system would fall apart. In July 2019 the Mueller report concluded that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russian government—the same conclusion reached by the inspector general’s report into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, released later that year. Finally, on Jan. 9, 2023, The Washington Post quietly published an addendum in its cybersecurity newsletter about New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics study . Its conclusion: “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters.”
But by then it didn’t matter. In the final two weeks of the Obama administration, the new counter-disinformation apparatus scored one of its most significant victories: the power to directly oversee federal elections that would have profound consequences for the 2020 contest between Trump and Joe Biden.
Clint Watts, who headed up the Hamilton 68 initiative, and Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general, CIA chief, and NSA director who championed Watts, are both veterans of the U.S. counterterrorism establishment. Hayden ranks among the most senior intelligence officers the United States has ever produced and was a principal architect of the post-9/11 mass surveillance system. Indeed, an astounding percentage of the key figures in the counter-disinformation complex cut their teeth in the worlds of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency warfare.
Michael Lumpkin, who headed the GEC, the State Department agency that served as the first command center in the war against disinformation, is a former Navy SEAL with a counterterrorism background. The GEC itself grew out of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications before being repurposed to fight disinformation.
Twitter had the chance to stop the Hamilton 68 hoax before it got out of hand, yet chose not to. Why? The answer can be seen in the emails sent by a Twitter executive named Emily Horne, who advised against calling out the scam. Twitter had a smoking gun showing that the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the neoliberal think tank behind the Hamilton 68 initiative, was guilty of exactly the charge it made against others: peddling disinformation that inflamed domestic political divisions and undermined the legitimacy of democratic institutions. But that had to be weighed against other factors, Horne suggested, such as the need to stay on the good side of a powerful organization. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote in February 2018.
The ASD was lucky to have someone like Horne on the inside of Twitter. Then again, maybe it wasn’t luck. Horne had previously worked at the State Department, handling the “digital media and think tank outreach” portfolio. According to her LinkedIn , she “worked closely with foreign policy reporters covering [ISIS] … and executed communications plans relating to Counter-[ISIS] Coalition activities.” Put another way, she had a background in counterterrorism operations similar to Watts’ but with more of an emphasis on spinning the press and civil society groups. From there she became the director for strategic communications for Obama’s National Security Council, only leaving to join Twitter in June 2017. Sharpen the focus on that timeline, and here’s what it shows: Horne joined Twitter one month before the launch of ASD, just in time to advocate for protecting a group run by the kind of power brokers who held the keys to her professional future.
It is no coincidence that the war against disinformation began at the very moment the Global War on Terror (GWOT) finally appeared to be coming to an end. Over two decades, the GWOT fulfilled President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the rise of a military-industrial complex with “unwarranted influence.” It evolved into a self-interested, self-justifying industry that employed thousands of people in and out of government who operated without clear oversight or strategic utility. It might have been possible for the U.S. security establishment to declare victory and move from a permanent war footing to a peacetime posture, but as one former White House national security official explained to me, that was unlikely. “If you work in counterterrorism,” the former official said, “there’s no incentive to ever say that you’re winning, kicking their ass, and they’re a bunch of losers. It’s all about hyping a threat.” He described “huge incentives to inflate the threat” that have been internalized in the culture of the U.S. defense establishment and are “of a nature that they don’t require one to be particularly craven or intellectually dishonest.”
“This huge machinery was built around the war on terror,” the official said. “A massive infrastructure that includes the intelligence world, all the elements of DoD, including the combatant commands, CIA and FBI and all the other agencies. And then there are all the private contractors and the demand in think tanks. I mean, there are billions and billions of dollars at stake.”
The seamless transition from the war on terror to the war on disinformation was thus, in large measure, simply a matter of professional self-preservation. But it was not enough to sustain the previous system; to survive, it needed to continually raise the threat level.
In the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush promised to drain the swamps of radicalism in the Middle East. Only by making the region safe for democracy, Bush said, could he ensure that it would stop producing violent jihadists like Osama bin Laden.
Today, to keep America safe, it is no longer enough to invade the Middle East and bring its people democracy. According to the Biden White House and the army of disinformation experts, the threat is now coming from within. A network of right-wing domestic extremists, QAnon fanatics, and white nationalists is supported by a far larger population of some 70 million Trump voters whose political sympathies amount to a fifth column within the United States. But how did these people get radicalized into accepting the bitter and destructive white jihad of Trumpist ideology? Through the internet, of course, where the tech companies, by refusing to “do more” to combat the scourge of hate speech and fake news, allowed toxic disinformation to poison users’ minds.
After 9/11, the threat of terrorism was used to justify measures like the Patriot Act that suspended constitutional rights and placed millions of Americans under a shadow of mass surveillance. Those policies were once controversial but have come to be accepted as the natural prerogatives of state power. As journalist Glenn Greenwald observed, George W. Bush’s “‘with-us-or-with-the-terrorists’ directive provoked a fair amount of outrage at the time but is now the prevailing mentality within U.S. liberalism and the broader Democratic Party.”
The war on terror was a dismal failure that ended with the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan. It also became deeply unpopular with the public. Why, then, would Americans choose to empower the leaders and sages of that war to be the stewards of an even more expansive war against disinformation? It is possible to venture a guess: Americans did not choose them. Americans are no longer presumed to have the right to choose their own leaders or to question decisions made in the name of national security. Anyone who says otherwise can be labeled a domestic extremist.
A few weeks after Trump supporters rioted in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier wrote an article for The New York Times advocating for the United States to wage a “comprehensive counterinsurgency program” against its own citizens.
Counterinsurgency, as Grenier would know, is not a limited, surgical operation but a broad effort conducted across an entire society that inevitably involves collateral destruction. Targeting only the most violent extremists who attacked law enforcement officers at the Capitol would not be enough to defeat the insurgency. Victory would require winning the hearts and minds of the natives—in this case, the Christian dead-enders and rural populists radicalized by their grievances into embracing the Bin Laden-like cult of MAGA. Lucky for the government, there is a cadre of experts who are available to deal with this difficult problem: people like Grenier, who now works as a consultant in the private-sector counterterrorism industry, where he has been employed since leaving the CIA.
Of course there are violent extremists in America, as there have always been. However, if anything, the problem is less severe now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when political violence was more common. Exaggerated claims about a new breed of domestic extremism so dangerous it cannot be handled through existing laws, including domestic terrorism statutes, is itself a product of the U.S.-led information war, which has effaced the difference between speech and action.
“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots. They start with words,” Clint Watts proclaimed in 2017 when he testified before Congress . “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations.” Watts is a career veteran of military and government service who seems to share the belief, common among his colleagues, that once the internet entered its populist stage and threatened entrenched hierarchies, it became a grave danger to civilization. But this was a fearful response, informed by beliefs widely, and no doubt sincerely, shared in the Beltway that mistook an equally sincere populist backlash termed “the revolt of the public” by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri for an act of war. The standard Watts and others introduced, which quickly became the elite consensus, treats tweets and memes—the primary weapons of disinformation—as acts of war.
Using the hazy category of disinformation allowed security experts to conflate racist memes with mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Buffalo and with violent protests like the one that took place at the Capitol. It was a rubric for catastrophizing speech and maintaining a permanent state of fear and emergency. And it received the full backing of the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and President Biden, all of whom, notes Glenn Greenwald, have declared that “the gravest menace to American national security” is not Russia, ISIS, China, Iran, or North Korea, but “‘domestic extremists’ in general—and far-right white supremacist groups in particular.”
The Biden administration has steadily expanded domestic terrorism and counter-extremism programs. In February 2021, DHS officials announced that they had received additional funding to boost department-wide efforts at “preventing domestic terrorism,” including an initiative to counter the spread of disinformation online, which uses an approach seemingly borrowed from the Soviet handbook, called “attitudinal inoculation.”
Adam Maida
In November 2018, Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy published a study titled “The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis.” The scope of the paper is comprehensive, but its authors are especially focused on the centrality of philanthropically funded nonprofit organizations and their relationship to the media. The Shorenstein Center is a key node in the complex the paper describes, giving the authors’ observations an insider’s perspective.
“In this landscape analysis, it became apparent that a number of key advocates swooping in to save journalism are not corporations or platforms or the U.S. government, but rather foundations and philanthropists who fear the loss of a free press and the underpinning of a healthy society. ... With none of the authoritative players—the government and platforms who push the content—stepping up to solve the problem quickly enough, the onus has fallen on a collective effort by newsrooms, universities, and foundations to flag what is authentic and what is not.”
To save journalism, to save democracy itself, Americans should count on the foundations and philanthropists—people like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Open Society Foundations’ George Soros, and internet entrepreneur and Democratic Party fundraiser Reid Hoffman. In other words, Americans were being asked to rely on private billionaires who were pumping billions of dollars into civic organizations—through which they would influence the American political process.
There is no reason to question the motivations of the staffers at these NGOs, most of whom were no doubt perfectly sincere in the conviction that their work was restoring the “underpinning of a healthy society.” But certain observations can be made about the nature of that work. First, it placed them in a position below the billionaire philanthropists but above hundreds of millions of Americans whom they would guide and instruct as a new information clerisy by separating truth from falsehood, as wheat from chaff. Second, this mandate, and the enormous funding behind it, opened up thousands of new jobs for information regulators at a moment when traditional journalism was collapsing. Third, the first two points placed the immediate self-interest of the NGO staffers perfectly in line with the imperatives of the American ruling party and security state. In effect, a concept taken from the worlds of espionage and warfare—disinformation—was seeded into academic and nonprofit spaces, where it ballooned into a pseudoscience that was used as an instrument of partisan warfare.
Virtually overnight, the “whole of society” national mobilization to defeat disinformation that Obama initiated led to the creation and credentialing of a whole new class of experts and regulators.
The modern “fact-checking” industry , for instance, which impersonates a well-established scientific field, is in reality a nakedly partisan cadre of compliance officers for the Democratic Party. Its leading organization, the International Fact-Checking Network, was established in 2015 by the Poynter Institute, a central hub in the counter-disinformation complex.
Everywhere one looks now, there is a disinformation expert. They are found at every major media publication, in every branch of government, and in academic departments, crowding each other out on cable news programs, and of course staffing the NGOs. There is enough money coming from the counter-disinformation mobilization to both fund new organizations and convince established ones like the Anti-Defamation League to parrot the new slogans and get in on the action.
How is it that so many people could suddenly become experts in a field—“disinformation”—that not 1 in 10,000 of them could have defined in 2014? Because expertise in disinformation involves ideological orientation, not technical knowledge. For proof, look no further than the arc traced by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who pivoted from being failed podcast hosts to joining the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Such initiatives flourished in the years after Trump and Brexit.
But it went beyond celebrities. According to former State Department official Mike Benz, “To create a ‘whole of society’ consensus on the censorship of political opinions online that were ‘casting doubt’ ahead of the 2020 election, DHS organized ‘disinformation’ conferences to bring together tech companies , civil society groups , and news media to all build consensus—with DHS prodding (which is meaningful: many partners receive government funds through grants or contracts, or fear government regulatory or retaliatory threats)—on expanding social media censorship policies.”
A DHS memo, first made public by journalist Lee Fang, describes a DHS official’s comment “during an internal strategy discussion, that the agency should use third-party nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
It is not unusual that a government agency would want to work with private corporations and civil society groups, but in this case the result was to break the independence of organizations that should have been critically investigating the government’s efforts. The institutions that claim to act as watchdogs on government power rented themselves out as vehicles for manufacturing consensus.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the fields that have been most aggressive in cheerleading the war against disinformation and calling for greater censorship—counterterrorism, journalism, epidemiology—share a public record of spectacular failure in recent years. The new information regulators failed to win over vaccine skeptics, convince MAGA diehards that the 2020 election was legitimate, or prevent the public from inquiring into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they tried desperately to do.
But they succeeded in galvanizing a wildly lucrative whole-of-society effort, providing thousands of new careers and a renewed mandate of heaven to the institutionalists who saw populism as the end of civilization.
By 2020, the counter-disinformation machine had grown into one of the most powerful forces in American society. Then the COVID-19 pandemic dumped jet fuel into its engine. In addition to fighting foreign threats and deterring domestic extremists, censoring “deadly disinformation” became an urgent need. To take just one example, Google’s censorship , which applied to its subsidiary sites like YouTube, called for “removing information that is problematic” and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”—a category that at different points in the constantly evolving narrative would have included wearing masks, implementing travel bans, saying that the virus is highly contagious, and suggesting it might have come from a laboratory.
President Biden publicly accused social media companies of “killing people” by not censoring enough vaccine disinformation. Using its new powers and direct channels inside the tech companies, the White House began sending lists of people it wanted banned, such as journalist Alex Berenson. Berenson was kicked off Twitter after tweeting that mRNA vaccines don’t “stop infection. Or transmission.” As it turned out, that was a true statement. The health authorities at the time were either misinformed or lying about the vaccines’ ability to prevent the spread of the virus. In fact, despite claims from the health authorities and political officials, the people in charge of the vaccine knew this all along. In the record of a meeting in December 2020, Food and Drug Administration adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated , “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.”
Dystopian in principle, the response to the pandemic was also totalitarian in practice . In the United States, the DHS produced a video in 2021 encouraging “children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge US government narratives on Covid-19.”
“Due to both the pandemic and the disinformation about the election, there are increasing numbers of what extremism experts call ‘vulnerable individuals’ who could be radicalized,” warned Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Reduction, on the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riots.
Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum and capo di tutti capi of the global expert class, saw the pandemic as an opportunity to implement a “Great Reset” that could advance the cause of planetary information control: “The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise.”
The laptops are real. The FBI has known this since 2019, when it first took possession of them. When the New York Post attempted to report on them, dozens of the most senior national security officials in the United States lied to the public, claiming the laptops were likely part of a Russian “disinformation” plot. Twitter, Facebook, and Google, operating as fully integrated branches of the state security infrastructure, carried out the government’s censorship orders based on that lie. The press swallowed the lie and cheered on the censorship.
The story of the laptops has been framed as many things, but the most fundamental truth about it is that it was the successful culmination of the yearslong effort to create a shadow regulatory bureaucracy built specifically to prevent a repeat of Trump’s 2016 victory.
It may be impossible to know exactly what effect the ban on reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptops had on the 2020 vote, but the story was clearly seen as threatening enough to warrant an openly authoritarian attack on the independence of the press. The damage to the country’s underlying social fabric, in which paranoia and conspiracy have been normalized, is incalculable. As recently as February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the scandal as the “half-fake laptop story” and as “an embarrassment,” months after even the Bidens had been forced to acknowledge that the story is authentic.
While the laptop is the best-known case of the ruling party’s intervention in the Trump-Biden race, its brazenness was an exception. The vast majority of the interference in the election was invisible to the public and took place through censorship mechanisms carried out under the auspices of “election integrity.” The legal framework for this had been put in place shortly after Trump took office, when the outgoing DHS chief Jeh Johnson passed an 11th-hour rule—over the vehement objections of local stakeholders—declaring election systems to be critical national infrastructure, thereby placing them under the supervision of the agency. Many observers had expected that the act would be repealed by Johnson’s successor, Trump-appointed John Kelly, but curiously it was left in place.
In 2018, Congress created a new agency inside of the DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that was tasked with defending America’s infrastructure—now including its election systems—from foreign attacks. In 2019, the DHS added another agency, the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch, which was focused on countering foreign disinformation. As if by design, the two roles merged. Russian hacking and other malign foreign-information attacks were said to threaten U.S. elections. But, of course, none of the officials in charge of these departments could say with certainty whether a particular claim was foreign disinformation, simply wrong, or merely inconvenient. Nina Jankowicz, the pick to lead the DHS’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, lamented the problem in her book How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict. “What makes this information war so difficult to win,” she wrote, “is not just the online tools that amplify and target its messages or the adversary that is sending them; it’s the fact that those messages are often unwittingly delivered not by trolls or bots, but by authentic local voices.”
The latitude inherent in the concept of disinformation enabled the claim that preventing electoral sabotage required censoring Americans’ political views, lest an idea be shared in public that was originally planted by foreign agents.
In January 2021, CISA “transitioned its Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM [ed. note: an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation ],” according to an August 2022 report from the DHS’s Office of Inspector General. After the pretense of fighting a foreign threat fell away, what was left was the core mission to enforce a narrative monopoly over truth.
The new domestic-focused task force was staffed by 15 employees dedicated to finding “all types of disinformation”—but specifically that which related to “elections and critical infrastructure”—and being “responsive to current events,” a euphemism for promoting the official line of divisive issues, as was the case with the “COVID-19 Disinformation Toolkit” released to “raise awareness related to the pandemic.”
Kept a secret from the public, the switch was “plotted on DHS’s own livestreams and internal documents,” according to Mike Benz. “DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that ‘domestic disinformation’ was now a greater ‘cyber threat to elections’ than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.”
Just like that, without any public announcements or black helicopters flying in formation to herald the change, America had its own ministry of truth.
Together they operated an industrial-scale censorship machine in which the government and NGOs sent tickets to the tech companies that flagged objectionable content they wanted scrubbed. That structure allowed the DHS to outsource its work to the Election Integrity Project (EIP), a consortium of four groups: the Stanford Internet Observatory; private anti-disinformation company Graphika (which had formerly been employed by the Defense Department against groups like ISIS in the war on terror); Washington University’s Center for an Informed Public; and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. Founded in 2020 in partnership with the DHS, the EIP served as the government’s “deputized domestic disinformation flagger,” according to congressional testimony from journalist Michael Shellenberger, who notes that the EIP claims it classified more than 20 million unique “misinformation incidents” between Aug. 15 and Dec. 12, 2020. As EIP head Alex Stamos explained, this was a work-around for the problem that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations.”
Looking at the censorship figures that the DHS’s own partners reported for the 2020 election cycle in their internal audits, the Foundation for Freedom Online summarized the scope of the censorship campaign in seven bullet points:
22 million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
859 million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation,” often in real-time;
<1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes, an effort DHS partners openly plotted and bragged that tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.
In February 2021, a long article in Time magazine by journalist Molly Ball celebrated the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Biden’s victory, wrote Ball, was the result of a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” that drew together “a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election” in an “extraordinary shadow effort.” Among the many accomplishments of the heroic conspirators, Ball notes, they “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” It is an incredible article, like an entry from the crime blotter that somehow got slipped into the society pages, a paean to the saviors of democracy that describes in detail how they dismembered it.
Not so long ago, talk of a “deep state” was enough to mark a person as a dangerous conspiracy theorist to be summarily flagged for monitoring and censorship. But language and attitudes evolve, and today the term has been cheekily reappropriated by supporters of the deep state. For instance, a new book, American Resistance , by neoliberal national security analyst David Rothkopf, is subtitled The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation .
The deep state refers to the power wielded by unelected government functionaries and their paragovernmental adjuncts who have administrative power to override the official, legal procedures of a government. But a ruling class describes a social group whose members are bound together by something deeper than institutional position: their shared values and instincts. While the term is often used loosely and sometimes as a pejorative rather than a descriptive label, in fact the American ruling class can be simply and straightforwardly defined.
Two criteria define membership in the ruling class. First, as Michael Lind has written , it is made up of people who belong to a “homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta.” America has always had regional elites; what is unique about the present is the consolidation of a single, national ruling class.
Second, to be a member of the ruling class is to believe that only other members of your class can be allowed to lead the country. That is to say, members of the ruling class refuse to submit to the authority of anyone outside the group, whom they disqualify from eligibility by casting them as in some way illegitimate.
Faced with an external threat in the form of Trumpism, the natural cohesion and self-organizing dynamics of the social class were fortified by new top-down structures of coordination that were the goal and the result of Obama’s national mobilization. In the run-up to the 2020 election, according to reporting by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein for The Intercept, “tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives … to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.”
Historian Angelo Codevilla , who popularized the concept of an American “ruling class” in a 2010 essay and then became its primary chronicler, saw the new, national aristocracy as an outgrowth of the opaque power acquired by the U.S. security agencies. “The bipartisan ruling class that grew in the Cold War, who imagined themselves and who managed to be regarded as entitled by expertise to conduct America’s business of war and peace, protected its status against a public from which it continued to diverge by translating the commonsense business of war and peace into a private, pseudo-technical language impenetrable to the uninitiated,” he wrote in his 2014 book, To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations .
What do the members of the ruling class believe? They believe, I argue , “in informational and management solutions to existential problems” and in their “own providential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures.” As a class, their highest principle is that they alone can wield power. If any other group were to rule, all progress and hope would be lost, and the dark forces of fascism and barbarism would at once sweep back over the earth. While technically an opposition party is still permitted to exist in the United States, the last time it attempted to govern nationally, it was subjected to a yearslong coup. In effect, any challenge to the authority of the ruling party, which represents the interests of the ruling class, is depicted as an existential threat to civilization.
An admirably direct articulation of this outlook was provided recently by famous atheist Sam Harris. Throughout the 2010s, Harris’ higher-level rationalism made him a star on YouTube, where thousands of videos showcased him “owning” and “pwning” religious opponents in debates. Then Trump arrived. Harris, like so many others who saw in the former president a threat to all that was good in the world, abandoned his principled commitment to the truth and became a defender of propaganda.
In a podcast appearance last year, Harris acknowledged the politically motivated censorship of reporting related to Hunter Biden’s laptops and admitted “a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.” But, echoing Ball, he declared this a good thing.
“I don’t care what’s in the Hunter Biden laptop. … Hunter Biden could have had corpses of children in his basement, and I would not have cared,” Harris told his interviewers. He could overlook the murdered children because an even greater danger lurked in the possibility of Trump’s reelection, which Harris compared to “an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.”
With an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, even the most principled rationalists might end up asking for safety over truth. But an asteroid has been falling toward Earth every week for years now. The pattern in these cases is that the ruling class justifies taking liberties with the law to save the planet but ends up violating the Constitution to hide the truth and protect itself.
The public’s glimpses into the early stages of the transformation of America from democracy to digital leviathan are the result of lawsuits and FOIAs—information that had to be pried from the security state—and one lucky fluke. If Elon Musk had not decided to purchase Twitter, many of the crucial details in the history of American politics in the Trump era would have remained secret, possibly forever.
But the system reflected in those disclosures may well be on its way out. It is already possible to see how the kind of mass censorship practiced by the EIP, which requires considerable human labor and leaves behind plenty of evidence, could be replaced by artificial intelligence programs that use the information about targets accumulated in behavioral surveillance dossiers to manage their perceptions. The ultimate goal would be to recalibrate people’s experiences online through subtle manipulations of what they see in their search results and on their feed. The aim of such a scenario might be to prevent censor-worthy material from being produced in the first place.
In fact, that sounds rather similar to what Google is already doing in Germany , where the company recently unveiled a new campaign to expand its “prebunking” initiative “that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation,” according to the Associated Press. The announcement closely followed Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ appearance on a German podcast, during which he called for using artificial intelligence to combat “conspiracy theories” and “political polarization.” Meta has its own prebunking program. In a statement to the website Just The News, Mike Benz called prebunking “a form of narrative censorship integrated into social media algorithms to stop citizens from forming specific social and political belief systems” and compared it to the “pre-crime” featured in dystopian science-fiction movie Minority Report .
Meanwhile, the military is developing weaponized AI technology to dominate the information space. According to USASpending.gov , an official government website, the two largest contracts related to disinformation came from the Department of Defense to fund technologies for automatically detecting and defending against large-scale disinformation attacks. The first, for $11.9 million, was awarded in June 2020 to PAR Government Systems Corporation, a defense contractor in upstate New York. The second, issued in July 2020 for $10.9 million, went to a company called SRI International.
SRI International was originally connected to Stanford University before splitting off in the 1970s, a relevant detail considering that the Stanford Internet Observatory, an institution still directly connected to the school, led 2020’s EIP, which might well have been the largest mass censorship event in world history—a capstone of sorts to the record of pre-AI censorship.
Then there is the work going on at the National Science Foundation, a government agency that funds research in universities and private institutions. The NSF has its own program called the Convergence Accelerator Track F, which is helping to incubate a dozen automated disinformation-detection technologies explicitly designed to monitor issues like “vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism.”
“One of the most disturbing aspects” of the program, according to Benz, “is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad.”
In March, the NSF’s chief information officer, Dorothy Aronson, announced that the agency was “building a set of use cases” to explore how it could employ ChatGPT, the AI language model capable of a reasonable simulation of human speech, to further automate the production and dissemination of state propaganda.
The first great battles of the information war are over. They were waged by a class of journalists, retired generals, spies, Democratic Party bosses, party apparatchiks, and counterterrorism experts against the remnant of the American people who refused to submit to their authority.
Future battles fought through AI technologies will be harder to see.
Less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times published an important article titled “The First Amendment in the age of disinformation.” The essay’s author, Times staff writer and Yale Law School graduate Emily Bazelon, argued that the United States was “in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation” that she compares to the “catastrophic” health effects of the novel coronavirus. She quotes from a book by Yale philosopher Jason Stanley and linguist David Beaver: “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.”
So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself—specifically, that there’s too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. This view may be jarring to people who are still attached to the American heritage of liberty and self-government, but it has become the official policy of the country’s ruling party and much of the American intelligentsia.
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator , strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”
To a ruling class that had already grown tired of democracy’s demand that freedom be granted to its subjects, disinformation provided a regulatory framework to replace the U.S. Constitution. By aiming at the impossible, the elimination of all error and deviation from party orthodoxy, the ruling class ensures that it will always be able to point to a looming threat from extremists—a threat that justifies its own iron grip on power.
A siren song calls on those of us alive at the dawn of the digital age to submit to the authority of machines that promise to optimize our lives and make us safer. Faced with the apocalyptic threat of the “infodemic,” we are led to believe that only superintelligent algorithms can protect us from the crushingly inhuman scale of the digital information assault. The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony , on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.
Most sane people believe that the burden of proving safety should lie on the party conducting a questionable action, rather than their victim. For example, if a criminal shot someone, the prosecution would not be required to prove that the victim’s sudden death after the gunshot wound was not just a spontaneous coincidence, a result of extreme stress from the situation, or due to a pre-existing medical condition.
Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has been able to establish a special type of privilege within the legal system which has made it very difficult to demonstrate that vaccines (along with many other pharmaceuticals) can ever be at fault for anything. Because of this, we recently had a flood of experimental vaccines mandated upon the population, which were never tested for safety (despite many serious concerns with their design), whose (likely fraudulent) clinical trial data was never made accessible to the public.
We then had, as far as I know, the most aggressive propaganda campaign in history, and I watched the majority of my colleagues lose the ability to recognize any problems related to the vaccines. Instead, they developed an almost surreal religious devotion to the coming salvation of the vaccines becoming available.
Once the vaccines entered the market, a variety of red flags began going off indicating that these vaccines were killing people, and rather than address these concerns, the government—in concert with the media—chose to deny any of this was occurring. Instead they mandated the vaccines upon the entire population. I was understandably worried that the vaccines would cause problems and tried to do my part to head this off in 2020, but I did not expect anything on the scale of what we have encountered since then.
I personally became involved in all of this because soon after the vaccines entered the market, I began to have many friends and patients reach out to ask me if the vaccine could kill as someone they knew had had a tragic sudden death after vaccination. Once the magnitude of the problem dawned on me, I realized that even though my available options were limited, I could at least do my best to document each case sent my way so that someone would bear witness to what had happened. Otherwise, the dead had no voice. Beyond knowing I had a duty to compile this list however, I was not sure what to do with it. Later after someone kindly helped launch this Substack, I decided to post it, it ended up being seen by a lot of people…and that is how I ended up writing here.
Because of how long it took to verify each case, I realized that I had to end it a year in (at which point I knew of 45 individuals who had either critical or fatal injuries of a similar nature in close proximity to vaccination). Since that time, I still continue to hear reports I periodically document and discuss.
For example, a good friend is a nurse in a cardiac unit and has told me many of the patients she sees now with heart failure are much younger than they were a few years ago. I previously advised her against getting the vaccine due to her history of rheumatic fever (a condition where the immune system attacks and damages part of the heart). This was because I had noticed both COVID-19 and especially its vaccine seemed to cause inflammatory flares at previous sites of injuries or inflammation (Lyme is also known for doing this). The vaccine also has a remarkably high rate of exacerbating pre-existing autoimmune conditions—such as the 24.2% rate found in a recent Israeli survey which is comparable to what a few colleagues have observed, and I suspect exacerbation of preexisting inflammation within the circulatory system, like what this study of 566 patients found, is a key mechanism behind vaccine deaths.
A month ago, the nurse informed me that she had decided to vaccinate and had subsequently developed a heart condition. Additionally, she shared that the same had also happened to her mother following vaccination and that her sibling's partner is suffering longterm complication from a large stroke that immediately followed receiving a booster.
Looking back on it, the thing I found the most disappointing about my own documentation project was that once it went viral, it should have triggered the drug regulators evaluating the vaccines to take preventative action. Instead, due to the meticulously planned campaign of mass censorship that we all found ourselves in, more red flags than I can count were ignored by the “very rigorous” vaccination surveillance systems that were allegedly ensuring there were no safety issues with these vaccines.
Because of the immense power behind the medical-industrial complex, those debating this program have been stuck fighting an uphill battle. However, despite the immense degree of corruption, withholding of critical data, and censorship, these vaccines are dangerous enough that more and more evidence is nonetheless emerging of their danger, and the public is beginning to recognize it (e.g., consider how resistant the public has been to get COVID boosters). The previous article here discusses polling that shows this appears to be happening:
We Now Have A Clear Estimate Of The Rate Of Vaccine Injuries
Throughout my entire life, I’ve always found that trying to argue against Big Business is like fighting with one or both hands tied behind your back because large industries can always co-opt and buy out every authoritative source on the subject, and then censor any inconvenient facts that still persist. This is an immensely challenging situation.
Immediately after it was published, I was informed by a reader that possibly the most important dataset over the last two years was released today. For those interested, much of the context for today’s article can be found in the article above.
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One of the depressing realizations one gains from studying the evidence-based literature is discovering how many issues exist within it and how difficult it is to know which data sources can be trusted. One of my favorite authors, Dr. Malcom Kendrick, devoted a book to addressing this subject and shared a pertinent anecdote for today’s events:
“In truth, the figures on vaccine damage are exceedingly difficult to analyse, because causality is very difficult to prove on a case by case basis. However, when it comes to negative findings I always like to go to Germany. It has been demonstrated many times that the Germans are the most likely to report negative findings accurately. Yes I know, terrible racial stereotyping, but a fact is a fact. What do the Germans have to say on the matter?
“Between 1978 and 1993 approx. 13,500 cases of undesired effects resulting from medications for vaccinations was reported to the Paul Ehrlich-Institute [PEI]…the majority was reported by the pharmaceutical industry. In 40% [5,400] of these cases the complications were severe, 10% [1,350] pertained to fatalities on account of effects.”
Additionally, as I learned from Kendrick, since early 2001, the federal infection protection law has mandated that specific severe vaccine injuries be immediately reported directly to the PEI (Germany’s equivalent of the FDA for vaccines and biologics). The German’s list of reportable injuries is much broader than what I have seen acknowledged by many other countries (e.g., those which are possible to receive compensation for within the United States) and includes the previously discussed complications of DPT along with many of the reactions typically associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. However, while that historical trend exists, Germany has not been one of the best countries for reporting COVID vaccine injuries (which I suspect is due to the political direction their government has moved in).
(The above graph illustrates why many of my German friends are not happy with their government)
Because of their tradition of reporting adverse reactions to vaccination, Germans (or at least some of them) have been more resistant to toeing the party line on concealing the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines than citizens of many other countries (my friends there are enraged by the egregious concealment of critical safety data by the German government). In turn, some of the most critical vaccine data available comes from the German people as many of them have retained their intellectual integrity throughout the pandemic.
For instance, although autopsies should always be conducted on those who died suspiciously after vaccination, due to the global climate of intimidation against conducting any type of research that challenges the COVID vaccine program, it is rarely done. Instead, almost every autopsy has been performed by a few brave pathologists in Germany, and I have tried to detail the pathologist’s work throughout my postings (e.g., see here).
Some of the most important contributions of these autopsies include:
The most definitive study on this subject was recently completed. It examined 35 individuals who died within 20 days of vaccination, and after a lengthy examination excluded 10 who had a potential cause of death other than vaccination. Of the remaining 25, most had causes of death that frequently been linked to vaccination, and of those, 5 were found to have myocarditis potentially linked to the vaccine, and in 3 cases the vaccine was determined to be the definitive cause of their myocarditis and death. These results are very important for convicting the vaccines if it can also be proven that a large number of unexpected deaths are occurring following vaccination.
Every group needs to have some type of ideology to unite behind. Presently, one of the fixations within the Western world is on more and more data being the solution to everything. In turn, there are many concerns with this approach (e.g., it dehumanizes people, its “necessity” is used to justify violating citizen’s right to privacy while collecting it and it is being used to build an infrastructure that controls every aspect of our lives).
Although data is often claimed to be our salvation, and I will admit sometimes is quite helpful, in many other cases, it fails abysmally to address our problems. A major reason for this failure is that no one wants to critically analyze data this is gathered if that data suggests we should stop supporting an entrenched financial interest.
I am most aware of this in healthcare, as I know of numerous systems which were designed to analyze electronic medical records and either identify which pharmaceutical worked best for a condition, or if a pharmaceutical (or vaccine) was unsafe. Not surprisingly, all of these systems were never adopted, and the endless data we collect in healthcare (e.g., all the diagnostic coding data which medical insurance providers provide as a condition of reimbursement to healthcare providers) is rarely utilized to improve the public good. However, while prevailing biases frequently produces flawed analyses of data, data itself does not lie and has immense potential to expose dangerous health care practices if people are willing to look at it.
The largest insurance provider in Germany, BKK, provides coverage to approximately 10.9 million Germans. A board member, Andreas Schöfbeck, observed some very concerning signs in their data, and unlike everyone else, had the courage to disclose it in a letter to the German government (e.g. he addressed the PEI), after which, he was dismissed from his position. The BKK dataset (discussed by Jessica Rose) was the one which showed 2.05% of vaccine recipients subsequently sought medical care with a healthcare provider (others estimated it demonstrated 3.5% were struggling with persistent vaccine side effects).
This concerning safety signal prompted one German Political Party, the AFD (a controversial right wing party that has gained appeal through opposing the mandates) to file the German equivalent of FOIA for the rest of the insurance data (note: a few friends in Germany who are lifelong liberals joined AFD told me they believe “conservative” is a more appropriate label for AFD). Recently AFD obtained AOK Sachsen-Anhalt’s data, which once analyzed, demonstrated that many of the conditions we associate with COVID-19 injuries noticeably increased when the vaccination campaign initiated. According to this interview and Google translate, the conditions which rose five-fold or more were:
AFD also submitted a FOIA request to KBV, the association which represents all physicians who receive insurance in Germany and thus the largest insurance dataset available. The official response to their FOIA request reads as follows (this was my attempted translation):
”Dear Mr. Sichert,
With an e-mail dated October 27th, 2022 you have submitted an application to the KBV after the Freedom of Information Act (IFG) on access to data of the diagnostic codes by law health-insured patients.
You have asked for the following data packages to be sent by email:
Package 1: Filtering of all insured persons who will have an ICD coding in 2021 had vaccine side effects. You have applied for the codes T88.1, T88.0, U12.9 and Y59.9 apply.
Package 2: You request the transmission of a list of the frequency of all ICD codes of the insured persons from package 1 for the period 2016 to 2021, if proportionately available also for 2022, by quarter. The data query should after your request with V and G.
Package 3: You request the transmission of a listing of the frequency of all ICD codes of all insured persons - without the number of insured persons from package 1 - for the period from 2016 to 2021, if proportionately available also for 2022 quarters. The data query should be done with V and G.
The KBV corresponds to your application and includes a tabular overview as an attachment with the desired information about the frequency of at.
The abbreviations used in the table have the following meaning:
nw= number of patients with “vaccination side effects” (defined according to requested Filtering 1 in 2021)
onws= patient numbers "without vaccination side effects" (defined according to requested Filtering 2 in 2021)Quarters of the reporting period are set as YYYYQ (e.g. 20214=Q4 2021).
The small font size in the printout is again unavoidable, since we want to make it easier to compare wanted to show all quarters of the two comparison groups on one sheet (the pdf document). However, like last time, it can be enlarged.
Today, the AFD hosted a press conference to unveil the data of those 72 million patients (the 90% of Germans with statutory health insurance) AFD had obtained from KBV. This data summarizes the number of times all ICD-10 (an international standard) diagnostic codes were used by German healthcare providers for these patients (outside of hospitals) from the first quarter of 2016 to the first quarter of 2022.
Tom Lausen is a data activist who had previously revealed the PEI and the RKI (the German equivalent of the CDC) were concealing concerning vaccine safety data and was allowed to analyze both BKK and AOK’s data. For this presentation, Lausen was able to provide a preliminary summary of the KBV data a few days after it was released:
A rough translation of this presentation can be found here (additionally YouTube now will translate the subtitles). If this video is deleted it can also be found here.
A few of the points emphasized in this presentation include:
For this press conference, a presentation was put together detailing Lausen’s preliminary findings and the correspondences with the regulatory agencies, all of which can be found here. To the best of my ability, I translated and slightly modified the key portions of the presentation so that they could be accessible to English speakers, but I am certain more will be translated in the upcoming days.
All of the KBV data can be reviewed with a simple search tool here, although it does not seem to work for certain ICD-10 codes. Due to the importance of this data, for data preservation purposes, I am also providing a copy of the raw data the AFD received:
Germany Total Icd 10 Code Submissions 2016 2022 1.87MB ∙ PDF File
This PDF file was supplied in a manner that makes the data quite difficult to analyze. Fortunately, one of my readers was able to move the above file into an easily sortable spreadsheet and thereby address some of the challenges with the PDF:
German Data Sortable Sheet 3.06MB ∙ XLSX File
Finally, the above sheet was sorted by that reader into a smart spreadsheet which allows you to easily observe which codes had the greatest increase in 2021-2022 (e.g. to sort them or create graphs). For those of you who are data inclined, you will likely want to create this sheet yourself, but for everyone else this is an excellent reference to start with). They were also able to use a script to put about one third of the names for the ICD-10 codes, but since there are fifteen thousand of them, it wasn’t practical for us to manually add in the rest and you will frequently need to directly look up the codes themselves (if a group wants to add the other codes in, I will be happy to repost that).
When Lausen presented the data, for each time period (e.g., 2016 quarter 1), he chose to add two different values together (code_20161 and nocode_20161). As best as I can tell from reviewing the FOIA request and the provided data, these categories represent those who also received a vaccine injury code and those who did not (as a result the majority of Germans belong to the “nocode” category).
I believe Lausen’s rationale for presenting the data in this manner was that a large number of vaccine injuries will go unreported and many vaccine injured patients are thus within the “nocode” category. Conversely, the total number of medical conditions observed in the country is not dependent upon accurate recognition of vaccine injuries.
Separating the patients by (the somewhat inaccurately classified) vaccine injury status is nonetheless a helpful means for evaluating vaccine injuries (I saw a variety of interesting trends in my preliminary examination). However, for the reasons outlined in this article, for the initial spreadsheet presented below, those result are combined.
Additionally, some of the extreme outliers exist because new ICD-10 codes are added each year and thus did not exist prior to 2021/2022. Finally, some of the codes you would expect to have large changes may not show in this dataset if they are codes typically used in a hospital setting as this dataset does not include hospital code submissions.
Kbv Data Sorted Into Accessible Excel Sheet - 9.46MB ∙ XLSX File
In the coming days, I know many will use this data to verify our work identifying which codes in 2021-2022 had the greatest increase (you can also do that piece by piece with the already available tool), and then cross reference those to the increases reported in VAERS or other datasets. There is an immense amount to be ascertained here, and I believe it represents the credible evidence we have been looking for since the start of the pandemic to have an objective metric for quantifying the impact of vaccine injury. However, it is also critical we determine which of the observed trends are not due to artifacts within the data.
This is probably the most important graph of Lausen’s presentation. We have all heard stories of individuals dying suddenly after vaccination (I’ve even read a report of an individual who appeared to be in good health making a thump in another room and being found dead shortly after by their spouse).
This issue was recently brought to the public’s attention with Died Suddenly, a documentary that effectively brought attention to this issue, but also had factual errors which were counterproductive for persuading the public that this issue is real. However, while some of the proof that Died Suddenly provided to assert the existence of the sudden death phenomenon could not stand up to outside scrutiny, the same cannot be said of the KBV data.
Additionally, one way that individuals have analyzed the unusual changes in health following the vaccination campaigns has been to assess how far they fall outside of the expected range of variation (this was also done for the final spreadsheet). I did a quick calculation for the above graph and found that 2021’s increase from 2016-2020 was 37.7σ, while 2022’s was 41.0σ. This is quite a big deal (the rarity of an event happening by chance increases exponentially as the σ increases). For context, a 7σ event has a 1/390,632,286,180 chance of spontaneously occurring (it is thought to occur once in a billion years), a 10σ event happens spontaneously once every 5.249e+020 years, and a 25σ event happens by chance every 1.309e+135 years (I was not able to find a reference on the probabilities for the even higher σ events observed here).
Given these numbers, it is very difficult to argue that these events were not caused by something. In this regard, we are also quite fortunate that while the vaccines were rushed to the market over a period of time far too short to establish safety, that process still took a year. Because of this lag, it is possible to refute the reflexively cited counterargument that these changes were due to COVID-19 or the lockdowns, as these only occurred in 2020 (the only possible exception I can think of is that Delta emerged near the end of 2020, but the spike started well before Delta became prevalent in Europe later in 2021).
This is a similar graph to the previous one, but include sudden cardiac death, which as many of you know also “unexpectedly” increased. Many authoritative sources have argued Lausen made a mistake to correlate vaccine injuries with the spike in sudden death because very few vaccines were given at the start of 2021 and thus if a correlation was there, it should have been not emerged until the second quarter.
For context, this was the rate of COVID vaccination in Germany:
As you can see, many vaccines were given in the first quarter of 2021.
COVID-19 is not the only vaccination regularly received. For example in Germany in 2019, it was estimated that 39% of those 65 and older received an influenza vaccination. However, unlike previous vaccines, the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccine caused far more people to require medical care for a vaccine side effect.
Given that Germany has a longstanding practice of evaluating vaccine injuries, this graph makes a very important point. An actual increase in vaccine injuries is occurring and it is not a result of a bias leading to over-reporting; it is a result of the vaccines being dangerous and patients needing medical care for the injuries.
Additionally, an outside team which looked at this data concluded approximately 5% of vaccine recipients subsequently required medical care, which is in line with the 7.7% discovered in V-Safe’s data and required a court order to be released as the CDC understandably did not wish to disclose this information. Note: I believe this discrepancy could be partially explained by the undercounting of vaccine codes highlighted in this article.
The general correlation between these two datasets is important. V-safe monitored 10 million vaccine recipients for a few specific things and was arguably the best surveillance system in place for tracking the side effects of these vaccines as it had a large but defined sample who were provided an easy way to report the chosen side effects. Since one of its key metrics matches the KBV data, this argues that at least some of the KBV data is valid.
Note: I am not sure if this specific dataset is referring to the total number of patients who sought care or the total number of times codes were submitted for vaccine injuries (which would mean a smaller number in total were injured).
Given that there are thousands of ICD codes that I could search the database for (many other increases, such as those of certain cancers, were highlighted in Lausen’s presentation), I had to put some thought into which of those many increases would be the best to show for this article (there were a lot of compelling candidates).
Previously, I proposed a model for the unusual fibrous clots observed in Died Suddenly that revolved around spike proteins causing protein misfolding. In support of this model, I highlighted an observed increase of an extremely rare protein misfolding disease which continues to be reported in VAERS.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease typically develop over years and occurs in approximately one in a million people annually, making its occurrence immediately after vaccination rare to the point that suggests causation (and as Jessica Rose noted, new reports are continuing to arrive in VAERS). The increase I proposed was a key point of contention for those who did not agree with my misfolded clot hypothesis, so I was eager to see if a current dataset could evaluate what was occurring.
This increase is also quite large, and for all practical purposes impossible to have occurred by chance (although I will mention the authors who published the original case series linking COVID vaccination to 26 cases of CJD also determined that Delta appeared to have an increased capacity to trigger protein misfolding but I do not believe that can explain the above trend).
Since this article was published, one reader has now attempted to present a longer analysis of this data which shows multiple interesting trends (e.g., many of the side effects commonly attributed to COVID vaccination appeared to have increased) along with raising additional questions about this data. It is my hope others will also do so!
Finally, the presentation on the KBV data proposes a fatality rate for the COVID vaccines. This chart was compiled by Lausen from the officially reported adverse events to the vaccines and likely are significantly undercounting the vaccine fatality rate.
Following the AFD’s press conference, the leading medical research institute in Germany, ZI, acted as a third party to present a rebuttal of how AFD interpreted KBV’s data. I did not agree with their argument (that there results were an artifact of AFD also requesting for everyone who specifically died in 2021), but did note that their response acknowledged the authenticity of this data.
The primary argument presented by ZI was that since the FOIA request selected for all patients who were vaccine injured in 2021-2022, the rise in deaths observed in 2021-2022 was simply due to the fact anyone who was vaccinated in 2021-2022 could not have died prior to 2021-2022 and thus the increase in deaths observed in 2021-2022 compared to what occurred prior to this time was due to the cohort effect.
On the surface this seems like a credible way to dismiss anyone who would make such an elementary mistake and believe in this data. However, the German authorities have a long track record of attempting to cover up evidence of COVID vaccine harm (in addition to the points discussed above, the German government has been perpetually delaying releasing the death statistics for 2021), so these arguments require a critical evaluation. In turn, there is a few major issue with it:
First, the “nocode” group should not suffer from the cohort effect and it was this group that comprised the majority of the increase in sudden deaths (review the wording of the FOIA request shown above). If the “code” group were to be removed (which potentially suffers from the cohort effect), an almost identical trend would still be present. Lausen presented his data by merging the code and nocode groups together which invalidated this counterargument, and I cannot see how a “cohort effect” is present in the combined data unless KBV failed to fulfill the FIOA in the manner that was requested (Lausen also subsequently provided an interview addressing the government criticisms of his analysis).
An outside analyst also looked at this data and demonstrated that other fatal conditions (which should be vulnerable to same the cohort effect ZI is asserting) did not have the same 2021 spike:
Second, the large σ found for many, (but by no means all) non-fatal conditions in the dataset indicates that something besides artifacts relating to time of death is causing the changes observed. I acknowledge that it is very possible some of the discrepancies present are due to not yet identified artifacts within the data, but at this point in time I have not been able to identify them. I believe that since KBV was focused on debunking the rise in sudden death codes, they did not focus on the rise in other codes for conditions associated with COVID vaccine injuries that were also observed. However, while this was not their focus, this point must nonetheless be considered since it does negate their counterargument.
Additionally, The death argument ZI made was also inconsistent with the death codes in question nonetheless being reported prior to 2021, which they attributed to “coding errors or unaddressed billing fraud.” To some extent this is hand-waving that many others have contested (and something any type of auditing algorithm should have caught years before), but I do not believe it is as important as the first two points.
Conversely, the strongest argument ZI put forward to establish that a cohort effect was occurring for the reported deaths was this spreadsheet. I have not yet been able to discern how the data in it was derived as it does not match the other things I looked at, so I cannot comment on if this is correct (an independent analyst arrived at the same conclusion I did). This spreadsheet is the one source of data that could refute AFD’s argument so I would greatly appreciate any additional thoughts on this one). However, I must also note that if this data is actually correct, it still does not negate the non-fatal complications of vaccination being observed.
A German rebuttal of ZI’s arguments was posted here. AFD also discussed the above rebuttal in a thread here stating:
"Hello all. The death-numbers that we have published are being hotly debated right now. Now the Central Institute for the KBV has joined in has said that the data we presented were quite easy to explain: 'The data is only for people who have accessed a medical service in 2021 and only such people had been billed and therefore would be in the data and everything in the years before are statistical runaways. There are also different causes of death that were significantly higher in the years before such as I46.9 (heart attack without successful reanimation). ' All together 104 000 people have been coded as deaths in the years 2016-2020 of whom the Central Institute of the KBV now says that they were billed medical services in 2021. Now we have a question: If this is really true, we demand an explanation from the Central Institute of the KBV how 104 000 persons that have died in the years 2016-2020 have been billed medical services in 2021.” [Translated courtesy of a reader]
The following was also written in the tweet: “Allegedly, the figures from the KBV are only for patients with health insurance, for whom services were billed in 2021. However, the causes of death were coded for 104,000 patients in previous years. Do we have a data scandal or a billing scandal?”
This table also refutes ZI’s argument that only those who were able to see a doctor and thus were alive in 2021 comprised the cohort of the insurance data.
Many of the German commentators I saw online were also skeptical of the official rebuttals to this data. I was recently sent a detailed summary of the events after the press conference which demonstrated that the rationale for debunking the data changed as time went forward. As best as I can tell, no clear reason was presented for why Lausen’s analysis was flawed given. Instead it was insinuated either that Lausen incorrectly filtered the data (my team and others however arrived at the same results Lausen did) or that there was a data transmission error from the KBV (which is possible but would have had to have been deliberate or inconceivable incompetence).
KBV also issued an astonishing statement refuting AFD’s presentation:
The KBV board clarifies: Based on the billing data transmitted by the KBV to the AfD or. ICD-10 codes cannot be used to establish causal relationships between COVID-19 vaccinations and deaths. From the KBV's point of view, the increase in deaths shown in quarters I-IV 2021 and quarter I 2022 is largely pandemic-related mortality. This once again illustrates the importance of COVID 19 vaccination as an effective measure to prevent serious forms of progress up to deaths. Without the vaccination, mortality would probably have been much higher.
This statement also cited the previously referenced ZI letter and another one which noted:
The codes in this database do not include codes entered on death certificates and thus cannot be assigned as the cause of death [however all of these codes cannot be entered unless the patient died; also as the statement above shows KBV is admitting an increase in deaths did occur].
The codes in this database cannot be correlated with vaccination status because many people received the COVID vaccines in settings that did not result in codes being submitted and coding for COVID vaccination has not yet been included in the dataset due to special regulations [I agree with this point, but it fails to refute this dataset since Lausen chose to combine the code and nocode groups; instead, it simply argues that vaccine injuries are underreported in this dataset].
This database was not created for the purpose of conducting medical research and therefore no conclusion can be drawn from it [I don’t believe this is a valid argument; a lot can be inferred from it and it is the best available database we have, so until the government chooses to make a better database available, it is “the evidence.” Additionally, this is a very similar argument to what is said for VAERS, but unlike VAERS there is not an over or underreporting issue present with this dataset].
I do not believe any of the above points refute the sudden increases in submitted billing codes (hypothesized to correlate with vaccine injuries) that occurred a year after the pandemic started at the exact same time the vaccination campaign began. However, I also believe some type of not yet identified artifact could account for at least some of what was observed and I have spent the last week revising this article to account for the additional information I come across. If anyone can provider a stronger refutation of the data presented here (preferably, at the pinned comment), I would greatly appreciate it. We need to help each other stay honest and I will gladly retract this article if a critical mistake was made.
Note: An independent analyst who reviewed the entire dataset found that it showed many other signs of being plausible.
Given the extremely concerning implications of the German data, it is not surprising that governments around the world and healthcare systems or insurance providers have been reluctant to release their own data. It is my sincere hope that this release will open the flood gates to additional disclosures and I am in complete agreement with the conclusion of this presentation:
I wish we had an American political party stating the same. There are signs of hope however; today Ron DeSantis did something incredible and requested a grand jury against Pfizer and Moderna, an essential step a few leaders in our movement have been working to lay the groundwork for over the last two years. I am also hopeful that this grand jury will compel the state of Florida to release similar data that can be used to assess the safety of these vaccines.
I strongly encourage those of you who who are able to begin looking through the KBV dataset and identifying important trends that can be correlated to other observations we have made over the last two years. I believe there are many excellent articles that could be written on them. I sincerely thank all of you for your continued support!
My primary goal is to draw attention to this data so numerous independent parties can objectively analyze it and independently verify if the trends it shows correlate to “controversial” increases observed in other datasets like VAERS. This data is extremely important as it is the only access we have ever been given to observe the changes in illness that follow the COVID vaccination campaigns. I also suspect the most important use of this data **will be to establish causality for specific vaccine injuries.
**This matters because typically when someone suffers a pharmaceutical injury, it is not acknowledged by the the government and the courts because “there is no evidence the product is associated with that injury,” and as you might expect, the pharmaceutical industry work tirelessly to make sure the evidence that could implicate their product never emerges.
At this point I’ve lost track of how many sad instances I’ve seen where this happened to a medically injured patient (in some cases to the point the gaslighted victim gives up and ends their lives), so I greatly support having an independent means to assess causality for vaccine injuries. Those injured by the COVID-19 vaccines are profoundly suffering and they really need help (on the bright side however, recently Senator Johnson and shortly after Governor DeSantis gave a voice to these victims).
Postscript: It appears a similar rise in unexplained deaths is occurring in Canada.
In this article, I will discuss the observations of unethical and criminal activity that have been repeatedly made by whistleblowers in the pharmaceutical industry. The focus will be on insider disclosures of the toxic corporate culture at Pfizer and the company’s habitual tendency to conduct illegal activity in order to maximize pharmaceutical sales. In many cases, this misconduct has lead to disastrous consequences (e.g., for participants in its experimental trials or for the public at large their drugs were marketed to), and in each case, Pfizer has done everything it can to conceal its illegal activity.
In the first part of this series, I discussed the profound challenges a whistleblower faces when they break the code of silence held by the pharmaceutical industry. Nonetheless, a few people have been willing to make that sacrifice, and there is so much to learn from each of them. If you have not yet read it, I would highly recommend reading it first.
The Forgotten Side of Medicine -- What Can We Learn From the Pfizer Whistleblowers?
Because that code of silence has been in place for decades, the public is relatively unaware of what goes on within the industry. When insiders provide a window into that dark world, it is both shocking and difficult to believe. I had been working on this series for a while and felt that this was the time to release it because it helps create the context for both what Jordan Walker confided to Project Veritas about Pfizer and his surreal breakdown once he realized what he had done.
In this series, I chose to focus on Peter Rost, a pharmaceutical executive who, through a very odd set of circumstances, became a Pfizer Vice President (Pfizer typically never lets outsiders assume that role). Once appointed, he found himself in the very odd position of having to dig up as much dirt on Pfizer as possible to avoid getting fired. Rost witnessed the Pfizer company cruelly abusing his Pharmacia coworkers and to a lesser extent Pfizer’s own employees (detailed in part 1); therefore, he was not opposed to unearthing information that incriminated Pfizer. Best of all, because Rost had been stripped of his work responsibilities, he had plenty of time to investigate his employer.
Rost’s talent was recognized by his sales-focused industry, and many of his superiors held him in high regard. Unfortunately for Pfizer, as detailed in part 1, Rost was not comfortable being complicit in criminal activity, so when he encountered it, he would choose to take action against it (thereby putting himself in conflict with the ethos of his industry).
In a previous job, Rost had reported Wyeth (another large pharmaceutical company) for tax evasion, and as fate would have it, that lawsuit became publicized shortly after Rost had managed to put himself in a position where Pfizer could not fire him. Nonetheless, Pfizer did all that they could against Rost, including providing much of the incriminating information they had collected on him to Wyeth.
Due to the previous lawsuit against Wyeth, Rost was able to obtain a copy of all documentation on him that Pfizer and Pharmacia had sent to his previous employer to Wyeth (which began occurring once they were made aware of his lawsuit against Wyeth). From these documents, Rost learned that Pfizer and Pharmacia had hired private investigators to dig up as much dirt as possible on him to prove that he was a security risk, and then they had forwarded these documents to Wyeth:
I had never seen anything like this before and I was truly shocked and appalled. I had gone from company high performer to security threat in a matter of days. This was something I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams. Pharmacia was a company that I had trusted—the fact that I had found illegal marketing and sales methods in my department didn’t mean that I stopped trusting the entire corporation. But now, I felt as if I had been in a beautiful candlelit room, only to have a lightning flash suddenly reveal cracks, mold, and cob- webs. I just couldn't believe what I saw, and even worse, they had sent all this to Wyeth. All the loyalty I had felt to the company, all the respect I had had for executives in the organization vanished. And I was left with the ugly truth: I couldn’t trust anyone. To even try to talk to them and reason with them was futile.
But it got worse. As I flipped through the pages, I found more notes that Pharmacia’s lawyer had written after I had spoken with him. The most sensitive parts were blocked out by a fat black marker, but what remained was astonishing in itself. According to his conclusions, I had no choices; I was out of a job with no likelihood of employment in the industry; I had every incentive to fight Pfizer, and he also claimed that I already hated them. This was news to me: I hardly knew Pfizer, but I certainly was reevaluating what I thought of Pharmacia after reading this. Then came the whopper—the notes implied that I might put a gun to my head so my family could get my life insurance.
All of a sudden I realized what a mistake I had made, trying to get help from a Pharmacia lawyer. I recalled that during our conversation he had suggested for me to contact the Employee Assistance Program. Perhaps this attitude shouldn’t have been surprising; Pharmacia’s lawyer clearly thought that anyone who tried to resolve potential criminal acts within the company and keep his job was a mental case [_Rost also highlighted that a common tactic utilized by the Soviet Union against political dissidents was to diagnose them as being psychotic and then forcefully confine them to asylums_].
Fortunately, Pfizer failed to realize the mess they were in, because they had never dealt with someone who knew how to fight back:
In the next round of documents Pharmacia delivered to Wyeth a few weeks later, I saw Ronald’s reaction first-hand. His first mail to Pharmacia’s chief legal officer asked, “What the heck is this all about?”? Pharmacia responded that I seemed to believe that by not offering me a job, Pfizer was unlawfully retaliating against me. Then Pharmacia’s general counsel wrote, “I haven't done the research, but the theory seems dubious.”
This was very interesting. Pharmacia’s most senior legal officer admitted that he hadn't checked the legal implications of the actions they had taken against me. They clearly didn’t think I was al that important. While this is always a sobering realization, it also showed me how unprepared they were for dealing with an employee who actually knew some of his rights.
In short, a wonderful confluence of circumstances arose, which positioned Rost to do something no one else to my knowledge has ever done.
Since he needed to ensure his job security, Rost decided that the best use of his time at work was to dig up as much dirt on Pfizer as possible:
I went on an info hunt, and it didn’t take long until I found my next surprise. Back in 2001, thirty Nigerian families had sued Pfizer in federal court, saying the company conducted an unethical clinical trial of an antibiotic [as the sole treatment for meningitis] on their children. The suit referred to a letter from the hospital saying the study had been approved by the ethics committee, and the suit claimed that Pfizer had backdated the letter.
Moreover, a Pfizer infectious disease specialist [discussed later in the article] had repeatedly told Pfizer management that the company was violating international law and medical ethics standards. He was subsequently dismissed and later settled with the company, according to other newspaper reports. Clearly, the fact that Pfizer was accused of backdating one letter and that I might have received another one was significant. And so was the fact that they had fired one alleged whistleblower already.
One of the many red flags raised here is Pfizer’s tendency to repeat the same criminal activity (Rost uncovered this series of events shortly after receiving a legal letter which he was almost certain was backdated).
Note: The quotations in this section and the next one comprise what is arguably the most important parts of the article.
Given that I didn’t have much to do anymore I had ample time to seek out Pfizer's weaknesses. As I searched the corporate intranet, I found exactly what I needed. Pfizer had done an exhaustive employee survey in 2001, and it was clear from the first page that CEO Hank McKinnell was proud about the fact that 88 percent of Pfizer’s employees had responded. There was lots of wonderful information about what Pfizer employees thought of the company; the highest ranked statement was, “I like working for Pfizer.” A whopping 89 percent of the employees agreed with this sentence.
The second most favorable result was generated by the statement, “I am proud to work for Pfizer,” a full 88 percent agreed with this. Only a contrarian might wonder why 12 percent weren't proud to work at Pfizer, or what those employees might have known about the company. At the time this survey was taken, 12 percent was equivalent to 6,000 employees.
But those weren't the numbers I was interested in. There was a different table in the survey that showed the lowest-ranked statements, and here things started to get interesting. The two most unfavorable ratings were given to the statements, “The right people get promoted,” and “People are promoted for the right reasons.” Only 36 percent and 42 percent agreed with these statements.
Soon I also discovered some data that didn’t rank at the bottom, but still was a major red flag to anyone that cares about corporate ethics. Some 30 percent of Pfizer’s employees, or about 15,000 persons at the time, didn’t agree with the statement, “Senior management demonstrates honest, ethical behavior.” And 34 percent didn’t agree with, “I have confidence and trust in senior management.” But the real surprise was that 49 percent didn’t agree with the statement, “Management is willing to give up short-term gain to do the right thing.” What was going on in Pfizer’s executive suite?
Note: Pfizer subsequently tried to bury these embarrassing results. The 2004 survey removed the embarrassing questions and the 2001 survey was wiped from the server after Rost discovered it. As this article will show, Pfizer has a tendency to make inconvenient documents disappear.
It wasn't hard to make the connection with the rumors I had heard before the acquisition. Pfizer had a stellar public reputation, but what Pharmacia employees had been told by their Pfizer counter- parts was something very different. This was a company managed by a group of people who had grown up together, partied together, and some of them had also allegedly spent time together between the sheets. What we heard was amazing—almost unbelievable.
I set out to find the truth. First I spoke to someone I knew well, an HR manager who had left Pfizer quite recently. He had spent many years working at Pfizer and believed the rumors were true—a group within Pfizer’s management had been in and out of bed with each other for a number of years. In one instance a senior person allegedly dated a direct report while he was married. Soon after, that direct report turned and dated a guy reporting to her. And then this guy dated several women in his department.
The problem with this alleged situation was that it could create tensions if someone thought someone else received a favorable treatment because of sexual favors. Real or imagined, this is a situation that can’t be tolerated by any management, since senior executives need to lead by example and can’t be effective if they aren't respected, which, clearly, certain Pfizer executives were not.
I actually knew someone who had worked with the woman in one of these alleged relationships. We met over lunch and I asked him to confirm if the stories were true. He claimed that not only were the stories true, he had personally observed the woman and her subordinate touch and make loving gestures. He also said that their behavior had been embarrassing to other people who were in the same room as these two.
He explained how they'd had to make special arrangements when the female executive was dating her boss, whenever his wife appeared at corporate functions.
I realized that if any of this were true, it could cause a public meltdown of Pfizer’s management team, much like the recent scandal at Boeing that had forced the CEO’s resignation. I also sensed that if Pfizer knew that I knew, they might just handle me more carefully.
After Rost alerted Pfizer to these issues, he succeeded in further raising their alarm, and their legal team immediately moved to investigate them. In the process, he learned even more about Pfizer’s leadership structure:
Before the meeting ended I repeatedly asked them to hire an independent law firm that could shield the identities of the people who had given me this information. In response, they made it clear that was not “how they operated.” They also discussed, and half laughed, about the impossibility of approaching the managers that were allegedly involved in these affairs. It was clear to me that they didn’t think they could confront members of senior management. I wondered if they would have been so cautious if this had been, for example, a district manager having an affair with a sales rep or someone else further down in the power structure.
In Rost’s continued quest to investigate wrongdoings, he found evidence that executives from Pharmacia’s Japan division had been cooking the books to inflate their sales numbers by reassigning sales from the next year to the previous one, in order to inflate their sales numbers to obtain a bonus. They also paid off wholesalers to go along with them. As he continued to look further into it, he also found evidence that this practice was also occurring in Pharmacia’s European markets.
This deceptive method is known as channel stuffing (“selling” more to the distribution channels than they can sell) and it inevitably unravels itself, since that increase keeps on needing to pull from more and more revenue in subsequent years to sustain itself.
Since channel stuffing constitutes investor fraud (as it provides incorrect data used to determine stock prices), the government will frequently prosecute it. Channel stuffing caused Enron’s downfall (the CEO was criminally sentenced but died shortly before his sentencing). In 2004, another pharmaceutical company, Bristol-Myers Squibb, was fined 150 million dollars for doing this. Similarly, another lawsuit involving channel stuffing eventually resulted in a 750 million dollar fine for ArthroCare, a surgical medical device manufacturer (along with prison sentences for its CEO and CFO).
I believe this prioritization of legal prosecution has developed because the wealthy write our laws, and the government is more incentivized to protect the interests of the rich (as opposed to those of the general public who are harmed by bad drugs). Similarly, my friends in the financial industry have seen that the most truthful information you can ever get from a pharmaceutical company is in its financial reports to investors.
Given the penalties for channel stuffing, this report also was of great concern to Pfizer, and gave Rost even more leverage over them. This was especially the case once Pfizer failed to appropriately address the issues, which in return gave Rost the grounds to open a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission( SEC) investigation.
Because Pfizer could not fire Rost, they tried to make things uncomfortable for him. He soon was reduced to having one employee (a secretary), isolated from everyone while at work, and left with nothing to do except show up at his office. They also repeatedly moved his office, until he pointed out that this constituted illegal harassment of a whistleblower. Since Rost was not allowed to do any work for Pfizer, he used that free time to research Pfizer’s internal workings, motivated also by their unconscionable abuse of their employees.
As Rost began bringing more improper and even illegal activity to Pfizer’s attention, he also noted this his emails would disappear, and incriminating documents he’d located would disappear. Eventually, Pfizer cut his access to his email without stating who had done it. Similarly, his communications (email and phone) were constantly monitored (despite this being against company policy), and Pfizer’s operators were instructed to prevent anyone from reaching him over the phone (although a sympathetic employee in the PR department sometimes would put them through).
To evaluate exactly how Pfizer was treating him behind his back, Rost would periodically utilize contacts in the industry to probe their behavior:
I spoke to the recruiter later in the day and I asked her where she had called and what the operator had said. The recruiter told me she had called Pfizer in New York, they had asked what her name was and the reason she wanted to talk to me, as well as some other questions.
“This happens al the time,” she said.
“Does this happen with al the pharmaceutical companies?” I asked.
“No, only with Pfizer. No one else does this.”
I asked her why she thought Pfizer did this, and she responded that based on the questions she had received she thought they recorded the information.
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is considered to be one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, and is also a frequent repository for fraudulent studies used to push some of the best selling pharmaceutical products onto the market (e.g., the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine or the COVID vaccine). In 2004, four years after her retirement (and a year into Rost’s purgatory), the chief editor of the NEJM, Marcia Angell M.D., published an excellent exposé of the issues within the drug industry, and the medical journals' complicity in this enterprise.
One of the quotes Dr. Angell is best known for is:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”
_Note: More quotes from Dr. Angell can be found here._
On a whim, Rost decided to pen a review on Amazon, strongly endorsing Dr. Angell’s book, and within it openly declared that he was a Pfizer executive (it’s worth reading). This quickly got the attention of a journalist from USA Today who quoted Rost’s review in an article on the subject:
"It's really hard to find new drugs, and it's getting harder and harder," Rost, representing himself, not Pfizer, said in an interview. "There is a lot of low-hanging fruit out there that has been picked off. It is very, very difficult to really find a breakthrough." Instead, Rost says, drugmakers focus on tweaking existing drugs to make money, not to advance science.
_Note: As discussed in the previous article, in recent decades the inability to produce breakthrough drugs has been a major challenge for the industry (most of the new drugs are redundant unneeded “Me-too” drugs). I believe this dearth was a key motivation for why the mRNA technology was pushed through, as there is an almost limitless number of proprietary drugs that could be made with it._
For decades, America has been known for having the worst ratio between healthcare expenditures and healthcare quality in the world (i.e., many places that spend far less than us have much better healthcare outcomes for their populace). Most tragically, this ratio only continues to worsen as we move forward in time (presently about 20% of all spending in the United States goes to healthcare).
Because there is so much money involved, I would argue that the systemic corruption within our healthcare system is almost inevitable. There is the tendency towards monopolization to protect its industry from competition In turn, the debacle we’ve witnessed throughout COVID-19 represented the inevitable progression of this industry’s greed.
It should, thus, come as no surprise that the drug industry charges as much for medications as it believes it can get away with. The cost of the same drugs varies widely from country to country, and as you might guess, the worst price-gouging occurs within the United States. Many people who struggle to afford their medications in the U.S. have noticed that these medications are much cheaper on the other side of the U.S. border (e.g., a Canadian pharmacy).
This observation has given rise to the practice of “drug reimportation” where drugs made in the United States that were exported for sale are bought in the international market and then imported back to the United States, and sold for a much lower price than they typically cost domestically. If you believe in capitalism and the free-market, drug reimportation should be allowed to correct market imbalances created by price gouging. However, if your business goal is to maintain a monopoly (and pay off the government to enforce it), drug reimportation is a huge problem, as it cuts into a lot of the profits made by ripping off the American public.
At this point, I have watched decades of failed attempts to reform the out-of-control costs in the healthcare system. In each case, because the legislators responsible for writing those laws (in one way or another) are bought out, no one was willing to tackle the real sources of price gouging in our healthcare marketplace, and each of those attempts failed. I would argue that this is why healthcare spending continues to rise in the United States.
As luck would have it for Rost, at the time he penned his review, the hot political issue was allowing drug reimportation (which the pharmaceutical was trying to torpedo by arguing that it somehow threatened consumer safety). Since Rost was a pharmaceutical executive willing to speak out against these practices (something virtually unheard of due to the consequences of doing so), and he knew a lot about the subject (e.g., Europe had had no issues with drug reimportation), he rapidly attracted the attention of the press and politicians who were trying to advance this issue.
I have to admit that my lawyer was not happy about al this. His job was to protect my legal case, which he told me was excellent. The fact that I was speaking up made me vulnerable and could have ruined the whole case. He was surely right that I took a big risk, but I felt that it was more important that I got the message out. And after a few months, Jon even said that I was doing a pretty good job. “Who knows,” he admitted. “You might actually achieve some change.”
Before long, Rost was called before congress to testify on the reimported drug issue. This was a nightmare for Pfizer (as their business depended upon inflated American drug prices), and in their panic, Pfizer managed to make things even worse for themselves through their crude attempts to discredit Rost and prevent him from communicating with the public. Before long, Rost’s message was heard throughout America.
But journalists and news anchors were still very surprised that I didn’t get fired [Rost could not publicly disclose his whistleblower status at the time]. It was as if everyone had forgotten that we live in a democracy with freedom of speech and other basic rights.
The biggest surprise, however, wasn't the flood of e-mails, or that many employees were upset about what I had said. The biggest surprise was that so many actually agreed with my comments. In fact, about 40 percent of the e-mails I received were supportive. I imagine it took a lot more guts to write a positive e-mail than to send a critical message and copy a superior. In truth, I wished my supporters hadn’t written, since I assumed that Pfizer was reading my e-mail.
Even a retiree wrote and agreed with me, “I applaud your efforts to encourage a more constructive approach to pharmaceutical importation. As a recent retiree from Pfizer, I am worried that by being short- sighted, Pfizer is doing something that is not its own best interest.”
_Note: Alex Berenson who wrote for the New York Times when Rost went public played a critical role in bringing Rost’s story to America. I suspect one of the reasons Berenson later became a critic of the COVID-19 response was because his career began in a bygone era when liberal journalists could still criticize the pharmaceutical industry and Bernson made a point to do just that during his time at the NYT._
Ultimately, Rost became too hot for anyone at Pfizer to handle, eventually leading to a situation where:
I never heard from either one of them [his assigned supervisors] again. To the best of my knowledge, I became the only Pfizer employee without a boss.
Pfizer nonetheless continued to harass Rost (e.g., they sent lawyers to monitor him at presentations he gave), while Rost continued to find creative ways to cause headaches for Pfizer (many are detailed within his book). One of the most impressive results he achieved was a group of doctors (unhappy with how Pfizer was treating Rost) independently deciding to ban Pfizer sales reps from their practices.
Pfizer is a very sales-oriented company and these events shook them up. Their worst nightmare would be a national boycott of their products.
Although Rost was able to make the issue of drug reimportation a nationwide issue, it ultimately failed to be legalized because the “safety concerns could not be addressed.” While this result was expected, there were three interesting things I took away from all of it.
The first was how the issue was squashed (this should sound familiar to all of you):
By the end of December 2004, the Department of Health and Human Services came out with their report on drug importation. The report admitted that it would be possible to safely import drugs on a large scale, but claimed that establishing such a system wouldn't be cost effective.' The report also concluded that such a system would harm pharmaceutical companies’ research and development efforts.
The report was required by the new Medicare law, and had been developed by a thirteen-member panel led by U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona. Not surprisingly, the panel consisted of many rep- resentatives from several government agencies that oppose prescrip- tion drug reimportation.
They [and later Pfizer] used a study by the London School of Economics, which claimed that national health systems within the EU realized minimal savings from parallel- traded products. There was just one thing both the HHS report and the Pfizer letter forgot to mention. This “study” had been funded by the drug industry.
The second was the FDA’s promises to develop a “safe” way to import and reimport pharmaceuticals which two decades later still has not happened.
The final one was that some congressmen who had supported Rost at the time were still in the government twenty years later (e.g., Bernie Sanders), at which point, they chose to switch sides and stand behind Pfizer and their COVID-19 vaccine. Somewhat analogously, although many of my friends love Bernie Sanders, I have always been suspicious of him, because I know of cases where parents of vaccine-injured children tried to raise this issue with him and he shut them down instead of listening (Sanders has built a reputation as an advocate for disenfranchised groups that no one else will listen to).
The only other whistleblower I know of who was a pharmaceutical executive was John Virapen, so I will include him even though he was not involved with Pfizer. Virapen began life as a colonial subject of the British Empire (which translated to a childhood of abuse, discrimination, and poverty), in British Guyana, and eventually became a pharmaceutical sales rep. He excelled at what he was doing and eventually became an Eli Lilly executive in Sweden, who played the pivotal role in getting Prozac approved globally. Like Rost, he was backstabbed by the industry. Specifically, Eli Lilly fired Virapen after he won the approval, something he believed was due to Eli Lilly, like Pfizer being an old boys’ network that did not want an outsider of color like him in the management (Rost’s story likewise shows a similar old boys’ network existing at Pfizer).
Virapen experienced a great deal of guilt for what he was complicit in, and like Rost after he was fired, found himself in circumstances where he could speak out against the industry. In his memoir, he shared the routine criminal activity he engaged in (e.g., he had to make bribes to get Prozac approved in Sweden). He resorted to blackmail, such as photographing physicians with Eli-Lilly-provided prostitutes, to pressure them to conform to Eli Lilly’s sales requirements.
Note: a more detailed version of Virapen’s story can be found here. If Youtube pulls the above video, it can also be found here.
Although to my knowledge, no other executive has come forward, the pharmaceutical industry has many other whistleblowers including former Pfizer employees. For example, in the previously mentioned illegal Pfizer experiment in Nigeria, 11 of the 200 children with meningitis who were studied died [most of whom should not have with proper care], and later the highly toxic antibiotic they tested was subsequently pulled from the market.
One of the doctors at Pfizer’s research center tried to warn them about the trial but was ignored and eventually fired despite being a whistleblower (all of the events and the whistleblower lawsuit are summarized here and here). In addition to the trial being conducted in a reprehensible way (and was thought to have inspired the Constant Gardener), evidence also emerged that Pfizer bribed the Nigerian government to conduct the trial, and falsified documentation to appease the regulatory authorities.
Pfizer is also notorious for being greedy enough with their sales practices to be repeatedly fined for their criminal conduct (sadly this is not a complete list of Pfizer’s criminal settlements):
The 2.3 billion dollar settlement was for Bextra. Bextra was Pfizer’s version of Vioxx, and, like Vioxx, was aggressively promoted for off-label uses, and eventually was pulled from the market for causing too many fatal heart attacks and strokes (Bextra was pulled in 2005, Vioxx in 2004).
The whistleblower who helped initiate the lawsuit, John Kopchinski, was a sales rep who was recruited by Pfizer’s CEO during his early 1990s acquisition of veterans. In early 2003, Kopchinski raised concerns over Bextra, and instead of being listened to, was summarily dismissed from the company and left jobless. A few excerpts from his story mirror the experiences of many other Pfizer whistleblowers:
“Particularly in pharma, it’s no secret that it’s an industry that can blackball former employees,” Kelton [Kopchinski’s attorney] said, “so the reward is important both to encourage people to step forward and to recognize that their contributions are huge.”
[Less than a year after being hired by Pfizer], Kopchinski was selling the epilepsy drug Neurontin when a previous whistleblower’s suit was unveiled against [Pfizer] over similar illegal promotion tactics that led to stiff penalties and a form of corporate probation [Pfizer has been repeatedly forced to sign a corporate integrity agreements with the U.S. government].
At the time, [Kopchinski] was told by managers that the Neurontin suit would be in the news and any physicians who asked questions should be told it was just complaints from a disgruntled former employee, Kopchinski said. Ironically, after filing the Bextra suit, “I was the disgruntled former employee,” he said. [
In both the Bextra case (detailed here) and the Neurontin case (detailed here), Pfizer followed a fairly similar pattern. They aggressively pushed their sales reps to prescribe as many drugs as possible (and provided bonuses for doing so), and they used an elaborate scheme of bribes to incentivize doctors to prescribe these drugs. Most of the uses Pfizer made up for the drugs had nothing to do with the drug’s intended use, and in many cases, these reckless uses were quite dangerous to patients.
Note: Another drug in the same class as Bextra, Celebrex, was also aggressively promoted by Pfizer (and sold by reps like James Reidy). Instead of being pulled from the market, it received a black box warning from the FDA. Later in 2016, Pfizer was forced to pay 406 million dollars to shareholders because of the losses they incurred from Pfizer concealing the harms of Bextra and Celebrex.
Most of the pharmaceutical employees who worked on the retail end of the business have come forward with similar stories of their sales culture. The below video, although not from Pfizer, gives one of my favorite windows into this world (I hope you liked the ending I added to it):
This circa 2000 clip shows how Pharma sales reps are trained behind the scenes. Like Pfizer, GSK aggressively and illegally promotes drugs (like this one) and has received billions in fines. I can't even imagine how much wilder the industry has become since this was filmed.
Jamie Reidy was one of the many veterans picked up in Pfizer’s recruitment drive for ex-military in the early 1990s, and his story mirrored what other former Pfizer representatives have told me—they were an ideal demographic because Pfizer wanted a pool of candidates who would follow corporate’s sales scripts and not deviate from them. Reidy eventually published his experiences within a comical memoir released while Rost was making waves in the national press (Rost likewise helped Reidy on the national PR front). Reidy’s self-deprecating memoir was later adapted into a popular romantic comedy, Love and Other Drugs, so his story is one of the better-known peeks inside Pfizer (it also resulted in him immediately being fired by the new pharmaceutical company employing him).
Since Pfizer established their dominance in the market through the success of their sales division, I was quite interested to hear Reidy’s perspective on the the nuts and bolts of the operation.
Pfizer being Pfizer, however, it didn’t have to resort to trolling college campuses; Pfizer could pick and choose its sales force from candidates who got their start at other companies.
Pfizer’s approach was built around utilizing algorithms their marketing research team had developed, which identified the most effective scripts for each stage of the sales process (from opening the encounter through closing the deal). Pfizer essentially practiced evidence-based sales and had the results to validate their model. Many of these scripts are quite interesting to read through. Each illustrates how each pharmaceutical company would twist the data to support their drug, and how much of a doctor’s education and comprehension of the drugs they prescribed resulted from what the sales reps primed them to focus on (note: so much of human behavior is explained by what people have been primed to focus on).
Pfizer’s model thus required inspiring zealotry and standardization in its salesforce (as Rost detailed in the first half of this series, Pfizer reps were well known for this tactic):
From Day One, people told us how great we were. “Pat yourselves on the back,” our first speaker said, “because you are the cream of the crop.” I had already noticed that our class did not lack confidence, and the knowing grins on people’s faces confirmed my perception.
“Any drug rep from any company will tell you that he left initial training thinking that his drugs were the best in the industry, such was the power of pharmaceutical brainwashing [I wonder if this also applies to Jordan Walker’s department]. Pfizer reps departed training with a “Pass me the Kool-Aid” conviction that not “only were our drugs the best in the industry, but also that our company was the best in the world. Doctors and competing reps alike routinely commented on a “Pfizer attitude,” a tangible vibe suggesting we were intrinsically better than any other salespeople. Interestingly, army trainees emerge from boot camp with a similar sense of indestructibility, an unshakable belief that there could not be a more prepared soldier on earth. The key to creating this self-confidence [bravado] in both arenas was the same: an endless repetition of messages and tasks [Note: Pfizer would also frequently tell reps in service about how wonderful Pfizer was].”
“The brainwashing was not limited to our view of ourselves, however. Rather, the Pfizer training staff instilled within us indelibly negative impressions of our competitors, creating a hatred for people we had yet to compete against, let alone meet”
“They lied. They cheated. Their women dressed slutty. They bought physicians’ love with extravagant dinners and golf at Pebble Beach, instead of earning it through ethical practices. (I later learned that every company told its reps that they did things the “right way,” while the other companies cheated.) ”
Although Pfizer had been repeatedly fined for criminal sales activity, I didn’t see anything within Reidy’s memoir that was clearly illegal. Much to the disdain of the sales reps, although headquarters was always pushing the reps to sell more, headquarters was also shutting down any plan reps implemented which was potentially illegal (bribes to prescribe or promoting a drug for uses it was not approved for—known as off-label marketing).
The only cases I found in his book where the sales reps employed external incentives to influence a physician to prescribe their drug was through utilizing their sex appeal (and sometimes seducing either the physician or their staff). However, unlike monetary bribes, this is nearly impossible to outlaw so it has never been made illegal.
At the time Viagra came out, because no reasonable treatments for erectile dysfunction existed, everyone was clamoring for it (to the point that Viagra samples were regularly stolen). Not surprisingly, it was soon sought out by individuals beyond those it had been approved for (old men with poor circulation impeding erections). As a result, some off-label marketing to women and younger men for increased sexual performance did eventually occur (even though Pfizer at the start told its reps not to do this, because the accelerated approval of the then-novel drug put them in a precarious position with the FDA).
In summary, I do not believe Reidy provided any concrete proof of illegal activity within Pfizer, so he is not technically a whistleblower. However, he did provide an invaluable window into the corporate culture of Pfizer which also helps put their behavior into context.
Note: Ever since its approval, a variety of side effects (including heart attacks, strokes, blindness, hearing loss, or melanoma) have been attributed to Viagra. As Reidy detailed, many of these were known from the start by Pfizer. Many lawsuits have been thus filed for these injuries. Unfortunately, the legal system rarely supports these types of lawsuits, so Pfizer (along with subsequent manufacturers of similar drugs) have been able to dodge most of them and settle the rest.
I mention this story last because it is potentially the most important one in this series (and resulted in him being named whistleblower of the year in 2012). Jones initially worked at Pennsylvania’s Office of the Inspector General (PA’s OIG) for 5 years (1986-1991), retired to be closer to his family, and then returned 11 years later in 2002, once his situation changed.
When he returned, he was assigned to investigate PA’s chief pharmacist, who Jones found was managing an unregistered bank account into which Johnson and Johnson (J&J) was essentially depositing illegal bribes. Additionally, some of that money was then transferred to the Director of Texas’s Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. In return for these funds, state officials traveled across the country to promote switching large numbers of patients to J&J’s new antipsychotic medication (which cost ten times as much as other similar drugs, and frequently created significant side effects).
Jones reported the case to his boss, and was told to drop the case as it was “too political” to touch. Since Jones did not comply, he was taken off the case. Then in 2003, he found out that J&J’s bribery lobbying was successful and everyone in PA would soon be switched to J&J’s drugs, regardless of their medical needs or background. Given that many of the people subject to this edict cannot oppose it (e.g., prisoners with mental illnesses or the many children who are pushed into the state mental health system), there were significant ethical issues with allowing it to proceed, which led to Jones deciding to risk his livelihood to stop it.
Note: I know a few people in foster care who were forcefully medicated with psychiatric drugs and had terrible experiences from them. To appreciate the full human cost of this greedy industry’s initiative to push their dangerous anti-psychotics on children, please read this article.
Jones filed a first amendment suit to protect himself, reported what was happening to the New York Times, and then was fired. Jones then filed suit against PA and set off a series of lawsuits (some of which were pursued by state Attorney Generals) and J&J ultimately had to pay billions of dollars in fines for their conduct. PA’s state Pharmacist was also convicted, but I feel his ultimate punishment was relatively minor. His conviction, however, is important to the current story because he was convicted of taking bribes from J&J and Pfizer.
Like Pfizer and J&J, AstraZeneca has also been fined billions for off-label-marketing, bribing physicians to prescribe their drugs, and was involved in the initiative to bribe state officials to push these medications on mental health patients. This bribery was not exclusive to the United States either; these three companies are currently being tried in court for bribing terrorists within the Iraqi government to coerce their Ministry of Health into using their products, and a few years ago, AstraZeneca was fined for bribing state health care providers in Russia and China to push their products.I hold the opinion that once the corruption of this industry is understood (which will probably always exist because of how much money there is to be made in medicine), the best path forward is to prohibit mandating of their products. If a product is safe and effective, it will sell itself and does not need to be forced on people.Unfortunately, the systemic fraud within this industry regularly brings bad pharmaceuticals to market that are neither safe nor effective.
As the examples with the state psychiatric programs show, this is a longstanding issue. It is my hope that bringing the public’s attention to the unjustifiable COVID-19 vaccine mandates can help bring about critical changes for medical autonomy that are needed throughout medicine.
Note: Since Moderna is a much newer company, an equivalent track record does not exist for them. I also believe this accounts for why they had a much less elaborate system in place to gaslight the participants in their clinical trials compared to the other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.
Pfizer eventually got fed up with Rost humiliating them on national television. He was fired and entered a protracted legal battle with Pfizer that eventually concluded in 2013 with an undisclosed settlement. At the time this happened, Pfizer made a point to widely publicize his termination in the national media. In Rost’s own words:
There is no question in my mind that Pfizer's [illegal] termination of whistleblowers [highlighted through this article] sends chilling signals to honest employees within the company. The media campaign they unleashed when they fired me served the same purpose. Pfizer’s outrage was apparent.
I hope that this article has made the case that Pfizer has a culture of corruption and a sociopathic leadership that has absolutely no problem with harming people or breaking the law to drive up sales. Assuming you accept that premise, I would argue that that means Pfizer was probably the worst party that could have been given a blank check by the government for the purpose of forcing an extremely dangerous experimental vaccine gene therapy onto the American people. Just think—if Pfizer already was that bad with government oversight--how bad do you think they would be once the government actively conspired to conceal their criminal activity and the harms of their product?
Similarly, if we consider the plight of many of the recent whistleblowers like Brook, the degree to which the government has chosen to ignore their claims is truly incredible. Similarly, nine months ago I covered an investigation by one of the less corrupt agencies of the government into HHS’s COVID-19 response, where they essentially concluded corruption trumped sound scientific policy (because employees in each department confided this in private interviews).
One of the most interesting things I discovered in it was just how hostile the U.S. Health and Human Services department (HHS,e.g., the CDC, NIH, and FDA) was to whistleblowers. None of the typically required safeguards existed to support employees blowing the whistle, and when queried, officials in each department could not cite a specific reason for why they had never gotten around to creating those safeguards.
Additionally, most of the employees felt that their leadership was already aware of the issues (and to some extent complicit in them), and they feared retaliation if they complained. Not surprisingly, between 2010-2021, there were zero cases where misconduct was officially reported by an employee of the HHS, and when asked, officials in each department interpreted this as a sign that no problems requiring reporting existed.
Sadly, corruption is not unique to the pharmaceutical industry, and many of the experiences shared by the brave whistleblowers in this series are mirrored by those outside of the medical industry. As you might expect, Pfizer and many of the other pharmaceutical companies involved in the COVID-19 vaccines (along with many defense contractors and other members of the medical industrial complex), have lobbied aggressively to restrict the ability of whistleblowers to uncover and correct their misdeeds. For example, consider what they did at the end of 2021, a year after their vaccines had entered the market.
As I look at how things have transpired decade by decade, it never ceases to amaze me how much more corrupt our government (and media) have become in a relatively short period of time. At the same time though, I believe Team Humanity still wins, because the internet has made it impossible to prevent the general public from becoming aware of these misdeeds.
As I end this series, I would like to share one of Rost’s concluding remarks which, like many other things he has shared, is just as true now as it was twenty years ago:
I didn’t always think this way. I didn’t want to become a whistleblower. I didn’t want to write this book. But in the end, I had to; I just couldn’t let the crooks win. The fact that you have just read this book means—to me—that I have won my fight against an overpowering opponent.
I for one, decades later, am profoundly grateful for the odd quirks of fate that led Rost to speak out against Pfizer.
I hope this article has provided some valuable context to fully appreciate Jordan Walker’s previous remarks to Project Veritas and his new ones today:
What goes on inside Pfizer and the pharmaceutical industry is surreal, and I hope the window opened for you by these whistleblowers will allow you to draw your own conclusions about Pfizer’s culture and what really goes on behind the scenes. I admit I avoided discussing much of what jumped out to me from their testimonies (and those of whistleblowers from other pharmaceutical companies) since this series was already pushing the limit of how much people will read.
I thank each of you for the time you took to read this article and those who shared the series with the audience that needed to hear it.
Postscript: I meant to include this but completely forgot to. One of my colleagues occasionally saw a patient who was a vaccine sales rep for Pfizer that would actively boast about how often their entire family was vaccinated. In the middle of the vaccine roll-out, that patient showed up asking for a medical exemption from their vaccine.
This is a third talk in a series that began with Relationship Based Medicine , continued with Beware of Doctors Bearing Gifts and concludes with this talk, which could called History of a Medical Psychosis, Medical Neoliberalism, Evident versus Evidence Based Medicine, A Lutheran Moment, or Does Objectivity Come from using Chance to Control Bias or Bias to Control Chance?
It is the most important talk I have ever given.
The first lecture was delivered to clinicians in New York with a Q and A afterwards.
The second was delivered to the public in Lethbridge Alberta, thanks to Jennifer Williams and Dan Johnson but owing to tech difficulties at the venue (See In Memory of Dexter Johnson), it was difficult to record the Q and A with the public. Suffice to say though between the technical difficuties, the lecture and the Q and A, we were all there for the better part of 3 hours and the discussion was great.
This third lecture was delivered to Aaron Kesselheim’s PORTAL group – Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law. There are two versions. The History of a Medical Psychosis was recorded by Bill James the day before in case of glitches – same day as Putin and Biden gave speeches. The second was recorded by Aaron – Faulty Evidence and Moral Hazard.
There are slight differences between them. The text and slides below add some detail to both talks but the tone of voice and gestures in the talks likely convey things not in the text.
Welcome to a very conservative talk – based on a belief in the medical model and in evaluating the drugs we use thoroughly.
Slide 2: These quotes are a precis of key points in the deposition of Ian Hudson, Chief Safety Officer of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2000 in the Tobin v SmithKline trial.
Forty-Eight hours after starting Paxil Don Schell shot his wife, daughter and granddaughter and then himself. Hudson is being asked – Can SSRIs cause Suicide?
The jury dismissed Hudson’s Evidence Based Medicine view in favor of Evident Based Medicine and in this Civil trial found GSK guilty of negligence that resulted in the death of this family.
Hudson’s view, however, remains ensconced at the top of Britain’s drugs regulator, of which he was later the CEO – as well as FDA, EMA, TGA, Health Canada, WHO, and Boston institutions like Harvard, MRCT, and Vivli. Joe Biden and the Pope’s advisers will also endorse and tell their bosses to say – Yes RCTs are the Way the Truth and the Light.
Slide 3: Hudson’s views originate 70 years earlier in the work of a strange man – Ronnie Fisher.
Here you see Fisher smoking a pipe. He dismissed the later link between smoking and lung cancer, saying personality types predisposed to both cancer and smoking. Evidence was not Fisher’s strong point.
He had nothing to do with medicine and never ran an RCT. Controlled trials and randomization were there before Fisher and were no big deal but for no clear reason his book the Design of Experiments transformed what came next.
Fisher ran a thought experiment to characterize expert knowledge. He mentioned randomization as a means to control for any trivial unknown unknowns. Randomization later became semi-mystical.
Fisher’s expert knew parachutes worked so if we set up two groups, one with parachutes and the other not, we might randomize in case there was someone with webbed feet who might behave differently when falling. Otherwise, we would expect those wearing parachutes to live and those not to die – unless a chance strong wind lands a person in snow covered trees.
If randomization eliminated webbing as a factor, the only thing that could get in the way of an expert being right was chance and this could be assigned a statistically significant value. If 1 in 20 of those without parachutes lived we wouldn’t say the expert didn’t know what he was talking about. Fisher was characterizing expertise rather than characterizing an exploration of the unknown.
Randomization can’t control for ignorance.
Slide 4: Fisher’s expert is a Robin Hood who 19 times out of 20 can split a prior arrow lodged in the Bull.
Slide 5: But the trials done to license drugs especially antidepressants look more like this. A mismatch on this scale indicates medical RCTs are nothing like what Fisher had in mind.
Slide 6: The first RCT in medicine was a trial of streptomycin for tuberculosis. Tony Hill used randomization as a method of fair allocation – he was not managing mystical confounders. Hill helped put the effects of smoking on the map. He had no time for Fisher. He also knew doctors were not experts. His trial was not a demonstration of expertise.
Hill’s RCT found out less about streptomycin than a prior non-randomized trial in the Mayo Clinic, which showed it can cause deafness and tolerance develops rapidly.
Slide 7: Twenty years later, here is Tony Hill taking stock of controlled trials. In this 1965 lecture, he mentions that it is interesting that the people who are most heavily now promoting controlled trials are pharmaceutical companies.
Hill didn’t think trials had to be randomized. He thought double-blinds could get in the way of doctors evaluating a drug. He was a believer in Evident Based rather than Evidence Based Medicine.
Hill said we needed RCTs around 1950 to work out if anything worked. By 1960 he figured we had lots of things that worked – none of which had been brought on the market through an RCT – and he thought the need was to find out which drug worked best. This is not something RCTs can do – there is no such thing as a best drug. RCTs have instead become a way for companies to get weaker drugs on the market.
He said that RCTs produce average effects which are not much good in telling a doctor what to do for the patient in front of them.
All drugs do 3000 + things – one of which might be useful for treatment purposes. In focusing on one element, by default, Hill is saying RCTs are not a good way to evaluate a drug. All RCTs generate ignorance. But we can bring good out of this harm if we remain on top of what we are doing. Hill never saw RCTs replacing clinical judgement.
Slide 8: This 1960 RCT run by Louis Lasagna makes Hill’s point well. Thalidomide has therapeutic efficacy as a sleeping pill but the trial missed the SSRI-like sexual dysfunction, suicidality, agitation, nausea and peripheral neuropathy it causes.
Two years later, Lasagna was responsible for incorporating RCTs in the 1962 Food and Drugs Act Amendments – in order to minimise the chance of another thalidomide. By doing this, more than anyone else, Lasagna was the man who got us using RCTs
This trial would have licensed thalidomide today. The 1938 Act had no requirement for RCTs.
Slide 9: Many claim RCTs demonstrate cause and effect in a way no other study design can.
The 1950s was a golden age of new drugs that gave us the best antihypertensives, hypoglycemics, antibiotics and psychotropic drugs we have ever had without RCT input into any discoveries.
Imipramine was the first antidepressant. It and other antidepressants beat SSRIs in later RCTs. It can treat melancholia – SSRIs can’t. Melancholia comes with a high risk of suicide.
Imipramine was launched in 1958. At a meeting in 1959, European experts made clear that while it was a wonderful treatment imipramine made some people suicidal. Stop the drug and it clears. Re-introduce and it comes back. This was Evident Based Medicine showing this drug can cause suicide.
Like Fisher, let’s do a thought RCT of imipramine versus placebo in melancholia. The red dots here are suicides or suicide attempts.
Even though it can cause suicide, we would expect it to reduce the number of suicides because it treats this high risk condition. If you didn’t know better, this RCT would look like evidence antidepressants do not cause suicide.
Slide 10: Here is the data on the trials in mild depression that brought the SSRIs to market – mild depression because SSRIs are no use in melancholia. You see an increase of suicidal events compared to placebo in people at little or no risk of suicide.
Slide 11: This is what the data for imipramine look like in the same mild depressions. This is not a thought experiment – it was used as a comparator in SSRI trials. Now it too causes suicides.
RCTs can give us diametrically opposite answers. This is because these are not Drug Trials. They are Treatment Trials and if the condition and treatment produce superficially similar effects, randomized trials cause confounding rather than solve it. This is true for most medical conditions and their treatments.
People evaluating drugs in traditional clinical trials, before RCTs, knew this. When a patient becomes suicidal in a trial you have to use your judgement to work out what is happening but in RCTs clinicians are not supposed to use their judgment. RCTs are more objective than our judgments – supposedly.
Slide 12: Here is what a Drug Trial looks like. In healthy volunteer studies in the 1980s, companies found SSRIs cause volunteers to become suicidal, dependent and sexually dysfunctional. We heard nothing about these problems when the drugs launched in part because Drug Trials enabled companies to engineer Treatment Trials to hide these problems.
Slide 13: If you break a limb and get recruited to an RCT randomly applying casts to one limb – not necessarily the broken one – the trial will show random application beats placebo. Practicing Evidence Based Medicine rather than Evident based Medicine here would clearly be crazy.
Slide 14: Here is a James Webb telescope image. James Webb is marvellously bringing out the infinite individuality of stars.
In addition to randomization, Fisher put a premium on Statistical Significance. By 1980 every leading medical statistician was saying we need to get rid of statistical significance in favor of Confidence Intervals.
Confidence Intervals had been introduced by Gauss around 1810. Because of measurement error, the telescopes in use often failed to establish whether there was one or two stars in a location. Measurement errors should distribute nornally and so constructing confidence intervals could help us distinguish individual stars.
We have moved a long way forward in this respect with the James Webb telescope you see here.
Slide 15: Confidence intervals rushed into medicine in the mid-1980s. All the authorities on the right – many linked to Boston – argued they were much more appropriate than significance testing. They are appropriate for measurement error but are they any more a cure for ignorance than statistical significance?
Slide 16: Confidence intervals we are told allow us to estimate the size of an effect and the precision with which it is known. We have much more precise details on the likelihood of the Red Drug here killing you than we have for the Yellow Drug. The best estimate of the lethal effect for the Yellow Drug however is greater. The standard view is that if we increase the size of the Yellow Drug Trial we will have greater precision and know better what the risks are. As we shall see, this is wrong.
As things stand, if you are asked to take one of these drugs, should you be guided by precision or effect size? Ian Hudson, FDA and WHO say the only dangerous drug here is the Red One. This is because more than 95% of the data, more than 19 out of 20 lie to the right of the line through 1.0 – confidence intervals have defaulted into statistical significance.
I would take the Red rather than the Yellow one. This is not measurement error and we don’t know what confidence intervals represent when they are not representing measurement error.
Slide 17: Faced with claims Prozac causes suicide, Lilly analysed their clinical trials and claimed there is no evidence their drug causes suicide. Confidence Intervals are being spun here as indicating we don’t know Prozac causes suicide as nothing is statistical significant. This is Ian Hudson thinking – at odds with all statistical expertise. It’s wrong. The consistency across young and old, depression and eating disorders strongly suggests in real life there is an excess of suicidal events.
Slide 18: There is an intriguing mystery behind these figures. Here you see a representation of suicidal events that happened in the trials that brought Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft to market around 1990. You’ll note there are events under the word screening here. There is a 2 week washout period before a trial starts where people are whipped off their prior drugs before being put on the new treatment or placebo. This is a highly dangerous phase where people are in withdrawal and very likely to go on to a suicide attempt.
Slide 19: And here you see the moves companies made to avoid having a confidence interval excess of suicidal events on treatment. Companies only moved the events – not the people.
These moves were justified on the basis that people in the run in phase were not on active treatment – which is equivalent to being on placebo – but they often were withdrawing from active treatment which is highly dangerous. Some who stopped treatment at the end of the active phase of the trial committed suicide and were designated placebo too. Some on placebo, put on active treatment in the follow up period, committed suicide and were designated as placebo suicides on an intention to treat basis.
There are two articles from 2006 that bring out this point Did Regulators Fail and The Antidepressant Tale: Figures Signifying Nothing. The Antidepressant Tale gives other examples of confidence interval abuse.
After all these maneuvers, there was still an excess of suicidal events on these SSRIs but the confidence interval was no longer entirely to the right of 1.0. Confidence intervals have degenerated into statistical significance tests because regulators need a Stop-Go mechanism and statistical significance provides this. But doctors don’t need an external Stop-Go mechanism to replace their clinical judgement, so why do they go along with this?
Slide 20: Nobody noticed these maneuvers around 1990, but fourteen years in a crisis about children becoming suicidal on antidepressants, questions began to be asked. GSK and Pfizer responded:.
‘GSK did not intentionally submit any erroneous or misleading information to FDA. The suicide data submitted to FDA explicitly identified when events occurred during the placebo run-in period. FDA had all this information right from the beginning.’
“Pfizer’s 1990 report to FDA plainly shows … that 3 placebo attempts as having occurred during single blind placebo phases… FDA has neither criticized these data or the report as inappropriate, nor required additional analyses”.
These maneuvers breach FDA regulations and FDA staff noted this in memo’s at the time. But not only did FDA ignore these breaches of regulations senior figures, like Tom Laughren, put their name to articles that embraced these breaches of regulation – in one case in the cause of showing it was not unethical to have placebo controls in RCTs, as those on placebo were not at any greater risk than those on treatment.
There was much back and forth between FDA and companies in 1990. Was it criminal? Perhaps. I prefer the idea of strategic ignorance.
What I think we are seeing are events circling around a major crisis in knowledge production. This is not something you can expect FDA to take a lead on – they are not political actors, they are bureaucrats. Companies create knowledge or were creating the appearances of knowledge at this point, but doctors are surely primarily responsible for the creation of medical knowledge and doctors were missing in action around 1991– other than as spokespeople for companies.
Slide 21: The Sacred Mantra is that randomization controls for all possible confounders in all possible universes. The reality is randomization introduces confounders into clinical trials.
The images for the next 3 slides come from a GSK paper prepared in 2006 for submission to FDA. The small print is hard to read – the bold at the bottom gives you the key details.
The data for suicidal events on Paxil in Major Depressive Disorder trials in this first slide show it causes suicidal events. Even Ian Hudson would have to agree and these data were available at the time of the Tobin trials. But randomization is about to come to GSK’s rescue.
Slide 22: Faced with a problem like this, had GSK consulted me I’d have said do a trial in Intermittent Brief Depressive Disorders (IBDD). They might have said but there are trials of SSRIs in IBDD and they don’t work. I’d have said do one. They did and it had to be terminated early, Paxil did so poorly. I’d have said do another. Why – the figures for Paxil still look bad in this group?
Slide 23: But when you add the IBDD data to the MDD data, all of a sudden the figures say Paxil protects against suicidal events.
This scenario can happen every time a condition we are treating is heterogenous – that is dementia, diabetes, parkinson’s disease, breast cancer, back pain, hypertension – pretty well everything in medicine. In these cases randomization will act to hide effects good and bad and leave us able to use a problem a drug causes to hide a problem a drug causes.
Slide 24: Graphically this is what it looks like. The Red Drug here is the MDD curve alone – more than 95% of the data are to the right of the 1.0 line. The traditional wisdom is that adding some more events to the Red Drug above should give us a more precise version of the same estimate
In fact when you add a few more people, about 3%, we have shifted the curve to the opposite side of the 1.0 line. Its far a more precise confidence interval but this is a precision that speaks to our ignorance rather than to better knowledge. No medical statistics book ever hints at this possibility.
We could add 40 suicidal events to the paroxetine IBDD arm before Ian Hudson would have to admit paroxetine causes a problem – on the basis that the results are now statistically significant.
IBDD patients could be admitted to MDD trials – we have no way to distinguish them. Some patients become IBDD by virtue of a poor response to an SSRI.
Randomization in heterogenous conditions will hide effects drugs cause. It allows us to use an adverse effect a drug causes to hide the same adverse effect that drug causes. Confidence intervals do not help us work out what is going on in these cases.
Nor do they help in heterogenous drug responses. Lets take 20 Aarons who are all sedated by a Red Drug and 20 Davids all stimulated by it. The best estimate in the confidence interval in this case will lie on the 1.0 line, showing the drug has no effect. A method to distinguish between one and two stars should not produce an answer that there are no stars here. Algorithmic judgements cannot substitute for a human judgement.
Slide 25: Here is another problem with Confidence Intervals. Young men take Finasteride to restore a thick head of hair. We could count hairs and build confidence intervals around before and after hair follicle numbers.
Finasteride also causes suicide and permanent sexual dysfunction and like most drugs has 3,500 other effects. Confidence intervals for hair numbers before and after is one thing, but applying them to suicidality or sexual function, which were not measured in the trial, and for Merck to then claim on this basis that the science does not support a link between finasteride and suicide on the basis that not all the data lie to the right of the 1.0 line isn’t managing measurement error. It’s a confidence trick – that happens all the time.
Slide 26: There are more dead bodies on antidepressants in trials than on placebo, yet the RCTs as Ian Hudson told you show the drugs work. This is because most RCTs have a surrogate outcome. For antidepressants its the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression.
Fifteen years after its creation, Max Hamilton commented on his scale:
It may be that we are witnessing a change as revolutionary as was the introduction of standardization and mass production in manufacture. Both have their positive and negative sides
Hamilton saw this scale as a checklist of things to ask about in an interview – a mixed blessing.
Slide 27: Checklists are now viewed as more scientific than David Healy in a clinic asking you about your family. They will produce standardized but possibly disastrous interviews.
For instance, on this scale, there is a suicide item. Suicidality can stem from the illness or the drug. This needs a judgement call. If caused by the drug you should rate a Zero. If caused by the illness you might rate 3 or 4. If you just check yes for suicidality, the default is to the illness. Ditto for sex, and for sleep.
In the case of sleep, the illness can produce too much sleep or not enough sleep and each of the medicines can inhibit sleep or heavily sedate. There are 3 sleep questions. A scientific interview has a multitude of options requiring judgement calls.
In the 1980s, we brought problems to doctors needing help to get on with the lives we wanted to live. Since then, for drug companies, rating scales, sometimes left in the waiting room, ensure you do an interview that produces figures for which a company drug might seem an answer. Your interview will help you to help your patient to live the life Pfizer want him to live. Do that and you are no longer practicing medicine.
Slide 28: Many think RCTs are fine if only they were done by angels.
Study 329 was conducted in the very best university centres in North America. It has an authorship line to die for, starting with Marty Keller and including a Canadian Liberal Party Senator – Stan Kutcher. It was published in the Journal with the highest impact factor in child psychiatry. The article claims Paxil works wonderfully well and is safe for depressed teens.
What I am about to tell you applies to all industry trials across medicine.
Slide 29: Three years earlier, in 1998, GSK concluded Paxil didn’t work in Study 329 and was not safe. That could not be published so they were going to pick out the good bits of the data and publish them. The good bits formed the Keller et al 2001 paper.
This 1998 internal SKB document led New York’s Attorney General to file a fraud action against GSK. As part of the resolution of this, GSK agreed to make their Paxil trial data public. A decade later, GSK resolved a Dept of Justice action, which also involved Study 329, for $3 Billion dollars.
Slide 30: These actions gave a team of us an incentive to Restore Study 329 and we now had more raw data from this study than FDA or other regulators had seen for this or any company study.
Slide 31: In contrast to Keller, we found the 8-week acute phase showed no difference between Paxil or placebo. We found the same for the never published 6 month continuation phase – never published till we published it 18 years after the trial ended.
Slide 32: Keller noted 6 emotionally labile events in the trial, some of which might have been suicidality, 4 on paroxetine. But in our hands a fifth of the children on Paxil had a behavioral event mostly suicidality – 18 out of 93 children.
Suicide is not what I want to focus on. It’s the ability of company studies to hide adverse events. Our paper lists 10 ways to hide things. Coding – as in calling suicidality emotional lability, is top of this list – this is the first act of authorship but no reviewer or journal pays any heed to it.
Slide 33: In a Pfizer trial, at the same time, a man on active drug got agitated, poured gasoline/petrol on himself and set fire to it intending to kill himself but he only died from his burns 5 days later. Pfizer coded him as death by burns. Once the coding is done, the paper is all but written.
There is some chance FDA found out about this man because if you have to go to hospital or you die companies had to file a report outlining what happened and did so for this man.
Slide 34: But in Study 329, FDA know nothing about a 15 year old boy, 2 weeks after being put on Paxil, who was out on the street waving a gun, threatening to kill people. He was brought to hospital by the police. There was no report to tell FDA what happened. Thirty years ago companies found a way to legally avoid filing these reports. Companies are still using this trick in trials published this year in all major journals and regulators either don’t spot or are not bothered to close a very obvious loophole. In Study 329, 4 children vanished through this loophole.
Slide 35: The sentences on the right are the 3 sentences with which this article ends – the message is companies have created an impression that RCT articles are like tablets of stone brought down from the mountain top, commanding doctors to prescribe and us to take. But when we have access to RCT data, this raises questions – as science should – rather than issues commands.
In addition to Coding, Grouping is also an act of authorship. If you have 500 events in 93 children on Paxil, rather than list them all, cardiac events are usually grouped in a Cardiac group etc. Behavioral events are usually grouped in a Psychiatric group. GSK grouped all behavioral events under Neurological. This groups emotional lability with headaches and dizziness, which are very common. Grouped this way the behavior problems disappear. Grouped as Psychiatric, the problem is immediately clear.
The Restoring Study 329 article took over a year to get it published. What was fascinating was the BMJ did not contest the data but they were very exercised by the act of interpretation. They appeared to assume that the data had spoken and GSK faithfully transmitted what they had heard. They found it heard to grasp that GSK used a coding dictionary that even FDA had never heard of.
Any scientific analysis inevitably involves an act of authorship or interpretation. But BMJ found it hard to let us author the behavioral events out of the neurological group into a Psychiatry group. There is no such thing as data without an interpretation. Ideally the interpretation should command consensus but for BMJ this appeared to mean that we should adopt what GSK had done without question.
Slide 36: Everyone knows Prozac was approved for children who are depressed but not that Paxil was too. A year after the Keller paper came out, this is part of an FDA approvable letter for Paxil.
It says GSK have told FDA Study 329 is negative. FDA agree its negative – in fact all 3 trials are negative – but FDA will still approve Paxil for kids. FDA also agree with GSK’s suggestion not to mention the negative trials in the label of the drug. Why would FDA agree to this?
Before answering that, let me note FDA also viewed the Prozac trials in teens as negative.
Slide 37: This slide from Erick Turner’s 2008 article shows published adult ‘trials’ on various antidepressants, almost all indicating the drugs work well and are safe. Look at the sertraline column – 3 from the right. It shows two studies – the minimum needed for approval.
Slide 38: Another slide shows the trials as FDA viewed them. 46% of these trials are negative. Many published as positive were negative to add to the unpublished negative trials. Look at the sertraline column – only one positive study.
Why do FDA say nothing about this? Well if FDA said trials are negative – the companies might get sued for fraud or fined – as happened for Study 329.
Slide 39: Here you see the PTSD page of a 30 page document listing Zoloft articles in progress. These papers aim at capturing markets not at informing us on how to use Zoloft safely.
Pfizer did 4 Zoloft PTSD trials. All negative. FDA approved it on the basis of 2 trials with a minimal benefit for women. These good bits plucked out are what’s being published. You see under Status on the right two articles are complete and will be sent to the very best journals. On the left you see TBD – to be determined – when Pfizer decide which names would sell most Zoloft.
You saw a 24 person authorship line for Study 329 but the real author is not there. Across medicine studies of on-patent drugs are ghostwritten.
In the case of children’s antidepressant trials the entire literature was written by ghosts and there is a complete mismatch between the published claims and the data – the greatest mismatch in all of science. On the basis of published claims the use of these drugs is escalating rapidly in teenagers with predictably bad results.
Slide 40: Fifty years ago, Britain joined the EU and ran into trouble. Cadbury’s chocolate, their favorite chocolate, they were told, could not be called chocolate. It didn’t have the right quota of cocoa solids. British consternation over chocolate led to Brexit some decades later.
What FDA do is in their name – they regulate Food and Drugs. Faced with butter or chocolate or drugs, companies must meet an assay standard – so much cocoa solids, animal fats, or so many points on a Depression rating scale in 2 trials. Meet that and FDA let you use the words chocolate, butter, or antidepressant. It’s not FDA’s job to decide if this is good butter, or if chocolate is good for you, or to police the medical literature.
Sllide 41: Since 1990, however, regulators increasingly say they approve drugs on the back of a supposed positive Benefit-Risk ratio. This is Ian Hudson thinking. If there are no proven adverse effects and just a benefit then of course there is a positive Benefit-Risk ratio.
The medical act of bringing good out of the use of a poison is incompatible with all this.
We would all agree there is a positive benefit-risk ratio for parachute approval in terms of lives saved versus lives lost – even though some men might have difficulties making love in the weeks afterwards, owing to harness effects. If things aren’t clear enough for us all to endorse, regulators are de facto getting us to live the lives companies want us to live when they make Benefit-Risk claims.
Unlike parachutes, SSRI RCTs have more dead bodies on SSRIs than placebo. In addition. the commonest effect of an SSRI is to cause genital numbness in close to everyone who takes one within 30 minutes of a first tablet. Almost everyone will have the way they make love changed while on an SSRI and they may later find themselves unable to make love ever again, either because they can’t stop or because the drugs can wipe out sexual function for ever. This may be far more important to a person than any mood benefit.
But the focus on the mood effect, means the sexual effect was missed entirely in the trials regulators scrutinized both because that’s how trials work but also with a little extra gaming from companies.
Some years ago treating a man with OCD, I tried an SSRI – the first line treatment and then more heavy duty drugs when the SSRI didn’t work. All made him worse. One day he came in much better – he had stopped all his drugs but he was cured by going back smoking. He had also googled nicotine and OCD and found studies showing nicotine and related drugs can help OCD.
When I say the Art of Medicine lies in Bringing Good out of the Use of a Poison, people hiss at me but everyone would likely agree this man was bringing good out of the use of a poison. SSRIs however are prescription-only because we expect them to be more dangerous than over the counter alcohol and nicotine.
The important thing is that this man (perhaps with input from me) is the only person in a position to make a meaningful Benefit Risk call. I can’t see what role FDA could have in this. Benefit-Risk calls are an individual matter. Making the claims FDA now make puts them in a role of getting people to live the life Pfizer want them to live.
Am I making all claims on the basis of Citizen Research more than Expert input? No – among the articles this man found about nicotine and OCD was one whose significance passed him by. One of the authors was Arvid Carlsson, who created SSRIs and won a Nobel Prize for Medicine.
But when you have Skin in the Game, Motivation can be worth just as much as Expertise.
Slide 42: As a result of Ian Hudson’s views, as I wrote 25 years ago, everyone who participates in a company trial today puts all the rest of us in a state of Legal Jeopardy. We should boycott trials, until this changes. See Clinical Trials and Legal Jeopardy.
Slide 43: That article was 25 years ago, this is 25 days ago and argues everyone entering a trial now are deceived by consent forms that promise coverage for injuries, unaware that there are no injuries on modern treatment, or no injuries that can be admitted. See The Coverage of Medical Injuries in Compary Trial Informed Consent Forms.
Slide 44: However, since 2010, the US Supreme Court in the Matrixx case made it clear that Ian Hudson’s views do not apply to investors wanting to make up their mind about the Benefits and Risks of investing. We who are investing our lives in these treatments still do not have such rights.
Slide 45: The beating Tell Tale Heart of this talk came with the publication of this article 33 years ago this month, in which 3 Boston clinicians claimed fluoxetine caused 6 people to become suicidal. Analyzing the cases closely and following traditional clinical approaches for determining causality, this article nailed beyond doubt that fluoxetine could cause some people to become suicidal.
Lots of other groups reported similar findings. I published 2 cases of men, who were challenged, dechallenged and rechallenged with an SSRI. There was no other way to explain what happened them except that fluoxetine had caused it. This was Evident Based Medicine .
Slide 46: Almost the same week as my article came out, BMJ published an article in which Lilly claimed an analysis of their clinical trials showed no evidence fluoxetine made people suicidal. The cases being reported, therefore, were sad but anecdotal – and the plural of anecdote is not data. Depression was the problem not fluoxetine. Clinical trials are the science of cause and effect. Doctors, the public, media, and politicians were being asked – are you going to believe the science or the anecdotes?
This was a knowledge creation moment that likely had input from all companies and perhaps FDA. This article created Evidence Based Medicine and just as with RCTs 30 years earlier, the people most commonly exhorting doctors to practice EBM today are Pharma companies.
In fact, the original phrase is the plural of anecdotes is data – otherwise Google wouldn’t work.
The idea the disease is responsible for suicide attempts and suicides in healthy volunteers is hard to believe but companies can wheel out experts to say just that.
My key point is that the Teicher paper is the science – the Lilly data is an artefact. My challenge to you is which are you going to believe the Science or the Artefact?
The Science of Medicine lies in making hard judgement calls. The made by algorithm approach, combined with inappropriate statistics, creates artefacts not science.
You’ve seen earlier how Lilly cooked the books. When you get the trial data, the Evident Based Medicine and Evidence Based Medicine approaches here can be reconciled – as you might expect with real science.
But even there was an incompatability there isn’t a problem. Resolving discrepancies is how we do science.
This points to a deep problems with Lilly’s argument. They are not in the business of being scientific – resolving discrepant observations. Lilly’s argument is a religious one – a dogmatic one – they forbid us to believe the evidence of our own senses.
This is papal infallibility riding again.
Peter Drucker, the doyen of marketing gave us a secular update – the goal of marketing is not to increase the sales of Prozac, its to own the market. This was the moment Pharma took ownership of the market.
This ownership allows companies to dictate what the risks, the benefits and the trade-offs of drugs are. Allows them to force us to live the lives they want us to live rather than engage with the risky and unprofitable business of producing products that will help us to live the lives we want to live. Following this Artefact is profoundly alienating.
Slide 47: This faces us with a what is science question? The usual histories start with the foundation of The Royal Society in 1660, which established the ground rules for Science. Science would deal with matters that could be Settled by Data. Participants could be Xtian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, or Atheist, but participants were called on to leave these badges at the door and make a consensus based judgement call about the best way to explain the experimental outcome in front of them.
The histories of science emphasize the word Data. Settled is the more important word. Statistics played no part in this science. The experiments were events and didn’t need the descriptions statistics can provide. Science was emphatically not about replacing judgment calls with a statistical artefact. It only became so 33 years ago.
Slide 48: This account of our history overlooks an earlier event. In 1618, Walter Raleigh was executed – for being too close to those pesky Europeans. Raleigh was convicted on the basis of things said about him by people who did not come into court to be cross-examined.
Legal systems worldwide recognized the injustice of this and introduced Rules of Evidence. Hearsay could not be used as evidence. Jurors – a group of 12 people, Xtians, Hindus, Muslims, Atheists and Jews, can only base a verdict on material put in front of them that can be examined and cross-examined. The process of forcing 12 people with very different biases to come to a Verdict about what is in front of them is the essence of science.
Verdicts and diagnoses are provisional – the view that best fits the current facts. This might appear to contrast with the objectivity of science, but scientific views are similarly provisional. Scientists attempt to overturn verdicts with new data.
Let’s say I gave Aaron fluoxetine 33 years ago and he became suicidal. I could examine and cross-examine him, run labs and scans, raise the dose, stop the drug, add an antidote, check with colleagues has anyone else seen anything like this or can they explain it in any other way. Aaron is the data – all of the data. He is the apparatus in which the experiment is taking place.
If Aaron and I conclude fluoxetine made him suicidal and report this to FDA, the first thing FDA does is to remove his name. No-one can now examine or cross-examine him and come to a scientific view about whether there is a link or not. His injury has been made Hearsay – indeed misinformation.
If you are later injured in the same way and see tens of thousands of reports of suicidality on SSRIs on FDA’s adverse event reporting system, you cannot bring this into court because no-one can be brought into court. It’s Hearsay not Evidence.
Company RCTs are equally hearsay and should not be let into Court as evidence. Accessing the data in this case means accessing people – like Aaron or me – and we cannot do that with the people in company trials, who often don’t exist. Except rarely, the authors on the articles have seen none of these people and cannot speak to what happened either.
In contrast, if Aaron and I report his case in he New England Journal or the American Journal of Psychiatry as a Case Report, with our names on it, we can both be brought into Court.
Slide 49: By 1983 the view was emerging that RCTs offered the scientific and sophisticated way to establish if a drug had adverse effects as this quote by Rossi et al indicates:
Spontaneous reporting is “the least sophisticated and scientifically rigorous . . . method of detecting new adverse drug reactions.
A mid-career Lasagna, the man who more than anyone introduced RCTs, responded:
This may be true in the dictionary sense of sophisticated meaning ‘adulterated’ . . . but I submit spontaneous reporting is more ‘worldly-wise, knowing, subtle and intellectually appealing’ than grandiose, expensive RCTs.
Slide 50: Here you have an older Louis Lasagna saying:
In contrast to my role in the 1950s which was trying to convince people to do controlled trials, now I find myself telling people that it’s not the only way to truth.
Evidence Based Medicine has become synonymous with RCTs even though such trials invariably fail to tell the physician what he or she wants to know which is, which drug is best for Mr Jones or Ms Smith – not what happens to a non-existent average person.
Slide 51: Here is James Webb again to remind you that confidence intervals were a step on the way to revealing the individuality of stars. In medicine, statistical approaches operate against individuality.
Using Chance to control Bias does not foster clinical science, especially when we allow a mindless algorithm to replace clinical judgement. Clinical medicine, like law, and the first 300 years of science uses Bias to Control Chance and both medicine and law need to assert the validity of this approach.
Slide 52: Using Bias to control Chance rather than some algorithmic method of controlling Chance is critical when numbers enter the frame. This is our only defense against medical neo-liberalism.
Around 1980 Pharma began treating healthy people. They discovered that numbers for our peak flow rates, bone densities, blood pressure, lipids, or sugar provided opportunities to sell drugs. Up to 1980, we brought our problems to healthcare – seeking help to live the lives we wanted to live. After that health services began to give us problems and the amount of medicines consumed rose dramatically. We began treating numbers rather than people.
Remaining on top of data like this is difficult. Just after weighing scales for people were introduced in the 1860s, we got the first descriptions of anorexia nervosa. In the 1920s, weighing scales in drug stores came with norms for our ideal weight given our height and sex and eating disorders mushroomed. When scales migrated into our homes in the 1960s eating disorders became epidemic – in the countries that had weighing scales. Measurements can make both us and our doctors neurotic.
Slide 53: There is an extra element to the equation. The service industries emerged in the 1950s. Through to 1980, no-one viewed health as a service industry – doctors were professionals who exercised judgement the way a Judge might. But service industries have managers and health got managers. With this the exercise of clinical discretion, the jewel in the crown of Health Care became a problem for those who manage services.
The idea of bringing good out of the use of a poison does not compute for managers, insurers, politicians or increasingly the public.
Before 1980, clinicians mobilized the resources of the organization they worked to handle the risks your condition posed to you. Now instead you can palpably feel the clinicians you meet are managing the risks you pose to the organization we work for.
Slide 54: Managers manage what they can measure. For them figures have a sheen of scientific gold. We are re-running the King Midas story – this gold coating is incompatible with Human Care and Life.
This governance by numbers is the essence of the neoliberalism that began in Chile and Britain – treat the money supply numbers or inflation numbers regardless of what is happening a country. Medicine is the best place to see this and its deleterious effects in action – aggravated by the fact that bowing down before a golden algorithmic idol inhibits anyone from leading us out of this desert in which we now wander.
Slide 55: When the pilot here reports problems, safety systems pay heed because they know she won’t fly if they don’t because of the consequences for her.
Jane Frazer is the CEO of Citibank. Since the financial crisis, bankers have an Early Warning System. Who knows if it helps? The financial crisis was linked to a moral hazard. Bankers were outsourcing risk, knowing that if things crashed you and I would suffer but they would continue to collect their bonuses. This made it hard for them to do the right or brave thing.
If the doctor on the left reports a problem, no-one pays any heed. She too outsources risk putting pills that like mortgages look too good to be true in our mouths. This is morally hazardous. Like a mortgage, if a drug looks too good to be true it probably is. If we blow up, she continues to be well paid. There is no incentive for her to do the right thing.
Slide 56: This moral hazard is leading to a pharmaceutical crisis that maps onto the financial crisis of 15 years ago. Here is a recent New York Times image of Life Expectancy in the US. You’ll see it began dropping in 1980, when we began treating numbers rather than people and converted health into a service industry. This Fall cannot be attribued to COVID. My view is that it is most likely linked to polypharmacy. The UK has similar falling Life Expectancy data – again pre-COVID.
Slide 57: Drugs like guns are techniques – amoral. The morality of their use lies in us. If we stop thinking about what we are doing when we use them, we are highly likely to be diminished.
Like Guns, Drugs create an arms race. The country with the best Medical Techniques and Guns wins wars and both armament and medical developments have been driven forward by military needs – to keep men able to fight in the case of drugs.
There is difference between Guns and Drugs. The chemicals in drugs are always risky. The information that transforms those chemicals into medicines has become increasingly dangerous. At the moment, the Drugs Race is not a better Chemical Race – it’s about creating more effective propaganda. The best propaganda is invisible – in this case it masquerades as science. The greatest concentration of fake literature on earth now centers on the reports of RCTs on the Drugs our doctors give us.
With both Guns and Drugs there is a limit to effectiveness. In the case of the Atom Bomb it is so effective that it cannot be used. It is the same with Drugs, if you are on more than 3, the effectiveness of each falls off as you add more meds into the mix.
To get the most effectiveness you need to be on 3 or less. As of 2016, over 40% of over 45s in the United States were on 3 or more drugs every day of the year – this figure includes the people who never come to see doctors. Over 40% of over 65s are on 5 or more drugs every day of the week. Knowing what is happening teenagers, this can only increase.
We know that reducing medication burdens can increase life expectancy, reduce hospitalizations, and improve quality of life.
Slide 58: Reducing a medication burden is not easy – as this image from the movie The Hurt Locker illustrates. Many of these drugs explode on attempting to withdraw them. This is the primary medical task of our age and there will never be any RCTs to help us out. The best evidence will likely lie in clinical experience of tackling similar situations. Great if I have a walkie-talkie to clinical colleagues but my key partner in this is you – you bring cues from missing doses of some of these drugs, and your sense of what they are doing that I can only access through you. And of course you ultimately dictate which risks we take.
In the 1940s and 1950s, RCTs had a role when we didn’t know if things worked. From the 1960s we had so many good drugs that worked – brought on the market without an RCT in sight – a new role beckoned for RCTs – to work out what worked best. RCTs cannot do this and besides it did not suit company interests. Companies instead created Randomized Controlled Assays which among other things allow weaker and weaker drugs on the market.
The pressing medical need now is to get people off the meds they are on and RCTs and what is called EBM have little or no role to play in helping us with this.
Slide 59: If a doctor tries to modestly reduce medication burdens or recognize that in some cases a treatment might have become a problem, current public health systems will not accommodate her. In the US, it is current culture that will mobilize against this. The doctor will be told this would be a good private practice offer that people can choose, but the public health system expectation is that people want and should get more diagnoses and drugs.
This is because getting treatment to save our lives was once a privilege and wealth and public health systems want everyone to be able to access treatment. They cannot now see that these good intentions are killing people. Now we have to be wealthy to get off medicines to save our lives.
Canada now leads the world in MAiD – Medical Assistance in Dying. In places like Belgium and Holland young women are getting MAiD because they have drug induced treatment resistant depression. While there must be concerns when young women in their 20s get MAID for treatment resistant depression – an antidepressant induced illness – I’m not quibbling about the morality of MAiD – any good doctor will almost certainly have cases where MAiD is the caring thing to do.
What I am quibbling about is the morality of a system that encourages us to have any service we want, including MAiD, but denies us the option of having less services. Denies us a Greener, more sustainable HealthCare. At the moment, not even Green parties have got a handle on this.
Slide 60: This lady comes from an Arthurian Legend. Arthur has been out-fought by a Black Knight who spares his life if he can answer a riddle – What do Women Most Desire. He has a year to find the answer. He and his court hunt desperately for it. The day he is due to die, Arthur and his troop meet this woman who tells him that she has the answer to the riddle but one of his knights must become her husband. Gawain jumps down and offers himself up. Arthur answers the riddle, and a furious Black Knight lets him go.
Slide 61: Gawain gets married. Everyone at the Court is unhappy for him.
Slide 62: In the bedchamber Gawain can’t bear to look at her. She takes control and asks him – do you want me to look like this by night with you and the way I was by day in court or like this by day in court. He has no idea and says – whatever you want. This is the right answer.
The answer to both riddles is she, like us, wants to control her own life. There may be a disease that needs treating – but she doesn’t want us to tell her how to live life, or want her negative emotions eliminated with a pill. She may be doing better at living life than you or I.
The evidence based medicine we now practice creates a False We – a non-existent average person – a fairy tale.
Rather than paying heed to the non-existent average person who comes out of clinical trials, when we relearn that we can learn much more from the person right in front of us, she and others who come to see us will seem more interesting and as they sense that we will be more attractive to them – easier to work with.
A relationship based medicine is the only validly scientific form of clinical practice. If you can’t build up a relationship with people because you and they see a different doctor every time, a relationship in which you are looking closely at and listening attentively to them – perhaps even detecting if there is a change in their smell, you are not doing science. The person in front of you is the apparatus in which the experiment is taking place. The computer screen is not.
Both science and morality depend on collaboration. Collaboration creates a virtuous circle – an Us – that leaves us all better placed to live the life we want to live. It creates Social Capital.
Redesignate Company Trials as Assays
Government of the People by the People has been replaced by governance.
If it is not to perish entirely from the earth…
We need to do…
This may be the most important lecture I have ever given – it’s the longest at least. It has been heavily shaped by Dee Mangin, Peter and Julie Wood and everyone linked to RxISK – Bill James, Johanna Ryan, Peter Selley, Sarah Tilley, Mary Hennessey, Annemarie Kelly and many others who have worked behind the scenes but don’t want to be named and others whose comments on posts are often more illuminating than the posts themselves.
It has been shaped over a 25 year period by Andy Vickery, Cindy Hall, Skip Murgatroyd and Michael Baum who in the legal cases they involved me in brought me face to face with the many issues covered here.
It has been shaped by Jon Jureidini, Melissa Raven, Joanna Le Noury, and Elia Abi-Jaoude, who along with Mickey Nardo and Catalin Tufanaru, both now dead, were the team behind the Restoration of Study 329 – see the final article at Restoring Study 329.
It would not be possible to leave Peter Goetzsche out of the frame and an intense struggle to restore the Prozac trials in adolescents – along with the bravery of Ralph Edwards in publishing this paper. See Flat as Kansas.
Finally to complete a set of Peters, Peter Doshi has been one of the most remarkable people working on all these issues extraordinarily effectively.
There have been any number of fabulous media people like Shelley Jofre and Andy Bell who brought key issues to light, along with Ariane Denoyel and others who have grappled with the issues outlined here.
More recently, Dan Johnson, along with Yoko Motohama and Vincent Schmitt who have lost teenage sons to the drugs mentioned here, triggered the series of lectures noted above of which this is the third in the series. Jon Thompson and his colleagues in the math department in the University of New Brunswick, along with Peter Selley and colleagues in the Devon and Exeter Medical Society allowed me to dress rehearse and improve the talk.
I have stolen ideas from lots of people such as Steve Lanes – too many to acknowledge. As Steve’s example shows, some of the best help has come from people working in industry.
The Q and A after this talk in Boston reveals a tendency we all have to say things would be fine if industry just weren’t involved in trials. This is not my view. Industry don’t help but they are primarily exploiting medical failures to get to grips with the faultlines in RCTs – and a medical willingness to accept a simplistic solution to the problem of objectivity rather than engage with others in establishing what is objective or at least the best provisional version of objectivity.
This is the fourth part of a series in which Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
BILL Frist was the 2003-2007 US Senate majority leader who championed the USA’s biodefence projects and promoted the concept of a ‘Manhattan Project’ against a pandemic, described in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series. He was also the politician who sponsored the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) Act of December 2005 as soon as the World Health Organisation’s International Health Regulations had been amended to include a provision enabling WHO to declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC). Critically it was this Act that established indemnity for the manufacturers of therapeutics, vaccines or diagnostics released during the course of a public health emergency against any and all harm caused.
Also working to influence US national biosecurity policy was Dr Robert Kadlec, described in Part 3. Working with him, and principally under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security (founded by Dr Tara O’Toole in 1998) were other participants in Operation Dark Winter, the code name for a senior-level situational simulation conducted on June 22-23, 2001, designed to wargame a covert and widespread smallpox bio-terrorist attack on the United States. These biosecurity hawks included O’Toole and Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS).
When O’Toole was nominated some years later to serve in the Department of Homeland Security in 2009, critics warned of her paranoia. Microbiologist Dr Richard Ebright, one of the scientists who, in May 2021, called for a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into the origins of Covid-19, said it was a disastrous nomination: ‘O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration. [She] is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney . . . It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position . . . She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security’. Dr Ebright concluded: ‘She makes Dr Strangelove look sane.’
It was Kadlec who formed the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense in 2014 and began the planning his Manhattan Project in earnest. Those involved with him in this commission included Tom Ridge, the first Homeland Security Secretary, Donna Shalala, a former Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, Dr Margaret Hamburg, a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, Scooter Libby, formerly of Project for a New American Century (PNAC), William Karesh, the vice president of EcoHealth Alliance and an adviser to the WHO on reforms to the International Health Regulations (IHR), and Kenneth Wainstein, now the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis.
The Commission’s National Blueprint for Biodefense published in2015 called for major ‘reform’. Consider it the blueprint for Kadlec’s Manhattan Project, for the CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) strategy and for the subsequent changes to the WHO IHR required to make the plan work.
The list of the BioDefense Commissions ‘we must’ demands follows:
· revolutionise the development of Medical Countermeasures (MCM, which are vaccines and therapeutics) for emerging infectious diseases;
· fully fund and incentivise the MCM enterprise;
· remove bureaucratic hurdles to MCM innovation;
· develop a system for environmental detection that leverages the ingenuity of industry and meets the growing threat;
· overhaul the Select Agent Program (which oversees the possession, use and transfer of risky biological agents and toxins) to enable a secure system that simultaneously encourages participation by the scientific community;
· help lead the international community toward the establishment of a fully functional and agile global public health response apparatus.
Three years later in May 2018 when Johns Hopkins ran Clade X, a table top simulation around a novel parainfluenza virus, O’Toole was involved once again. Johns Hopkins CHS also co-hosted with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the better-known coronavirus simulation Event 201 in October 2019.
It was during a Clade X discussion on manufacturing capacity sufficient to end the fictitious pandemic through vaccination that O’Toole said: ‘Industry are more than willing to help but vaccines are very specific creatures that are difficult to turn to new purposes. We’re going to have to go to innovative manufacturing methods that will require a lot of leniency from the FDA and the understanding of the American people that we’re doing things on an emergency basis so every box in terms of safety and risk assessment may not be checked. But the vaccine is the only way forward.’ [My emphasis]
This was clear advocacy for vaccines as the exit strategy for the Clade X novel parainfluenza virus pandemic, and later once the Covid pandemic was underway, was to be the only exit offered to lockdown.
Today, O’Toole is an executive vice-president of the CIA spin-off venture capital firm In-Q-Tel in charge of a strategic initiative called BiologyNext. In April 2020 in a presentation to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) she said: ‘The bio-revolution is really founded on several core technologies that I’m going to simplify greatly. But it is all about being able to read, write, and edit the code of life. One of the most important recognitions of the past century in science, at least, is that life is written in code. And as Jason Kelly of Ginkgo Bioworks has put it: Biology is essentially programmable . . .
‘Ron Weiss, who is a synthetic biologist, predicted in 2014 that an RNA-based delivery method that allowed you to use RNA as a kind of platform to deliver new bits and pieces inside the cell would be a game-changing inflection point in synthetic biology. And the Covid-19 pandemic is giving us a chance to test that out. You may know that one of the vaccines that is coming on very quickly is made by Moderna. And it is a messenger RNA-based vaccine. So if that works, Ron Weiss’s prediction may come true.’ [My emphasis]
In August 2019 Kadlec’s department ran yet another table-top simulation, the Crimson Contagion. It simulated the impact of and response to the arrival in the US of an avian flu from China. It was a scoping exercise to identify legal authorities, US federal government funding resources and manufacturing capabilities for vaccines. It concluded that $10billion would be required to respond to a novel pandemic influenza strain.
A month later on September 19, 2019, President Trump signed the Executive Order on Modernizing Influenza Vaccines which launched the Manhattan Project by directing various US government departments and the US Department of Defense to propose a plan and a budget within 120 days – by January 17, 2020, to be precise.
Anthony Fauci’s diary, released following a freedom of information request, notes a teleconference concerning the ‘Global pandemic’ taking place on January 15, 2020, a date at which a global pandemic existed only in some people’s imaginations.
On January 23, 2020, after the Moderna vaccine announcement in Davos, Fauci had a conference call with Dr Richard Hatchett, CEPI’s CEO, and the following day, a Saturday, he had a senior leadership update with Dr Kadlec in advance of a meeting with Stephane Bancel of Moderna on Monday January 27. Perhaps Kadlec, Hatchett and Bancel were amongst the unnamed people on Fauci’s January 15conference call.
On January 30, 2020, when the WHO declared a SARS CoV2 Public Health Emergency of International Concern, just 7,818 patients were said to be sick with Covid, of whom only 82 were outside China. As far as Kadlec was concerned, this was now a shooting war.
Following CEPI’s announcement in Davos on January 23, US-based manufacturers Innovio Pharmaceuticals were miraculously ready to begin developing a Covid vaccine, and Moderna already had its funding to begin manufacturing the first batch of the vaccine co-owned and co-developed with Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for use in a human clinical trial.
The legislation that he and Frist had shepherded through Congress between 2003 and 2005 had concentrated power in the hands of the US Health and Human Services Secretary (and the US Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response) during public health emergencies.
The basic goals of the architects had been achieved. These, the American investigative paralegal Katherine Watt has argued, were to set up legal conditions in which all governing power in the United States would be automatically transferred from the citizens and the three constitutional branches into the hands of one person, the Health and Human Services Secretary, ‘effective at the moment the HHS Secretary himself declared a public health emergency, legally transforming free citizens into enslaved subjects’.
The HHS Secretary Alex Azar, to whom ASPR’s Kadlec reported, was the senior legal counsel at HHS when the PREP Act was passed in 2005. Azar co-operatively declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, backdating it to January 27.
He then made a PREP Act declaration on February 4, enhancing liability protection for any person or firm involved in developing countermeasures, including Innovio and Moderna.
The announcement said: ‘The world is facing an unprecedented pandemic. To effectively respond, there must be a more consistent pathway for Covered Persons to manufacture, distribute, administer or use Covered Countermeasures across the nation and the world.’
HHS Secretary determinations are unreviewable by the US courts.
Further research by Katherine Watt into another PREP Act declaration for medical countermeasures by Azar in March 2020 shows it effectively sidestepped the Nuremberg Code by stipulating that the ‘use’ of any counter measures ‘shall not be considered to constitute a clinical investigation’ while also removing the right to informed consent. As there is, by decree, no clinical trial, there are no stopping conditions for the use of said countermeasures.
It is startling how Dr Kadlec and his few associates have, over a period of more than 20 years, managed to orchestrate an undemocratic and unethical bio-security coup with global reach.
The Manhattan Project was renamed Operation WarpSpeed when it was launched in May 2020. The involvement of the US Federal Government which through the NIAID owns the patent for the spike protein used in the vaccines, and its Department of Defense that ran and financed Operation WarpSpeed, arguably elevates this War on Microbes Manhattan Project to an unprecedented bioweapon attack on humanity using an under-tested novel injectable pharmaceutical.
This is the third part of a series in which Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
WHEN it comes to the business of vaccines and biosecurity, the land of free enterprise is all up for large-scale state intervention to create and prop up markets. Some of the generals behind the biosecurity ‘Manhattan Project’ believe the War on Microbes is too important to leave to politicians or Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
In June 2020, former Senator Bill Frist appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, reminding them he’d argued the need for this project fifteen years earlier.
‘I called for and had outlined “a greater than Manhattan Project for the 21st century” with no less than “the creation, with war-like concentration, of the ability to detect, identify and model any emerging or newly emerging infection, natural or otherwise; for the ability to engineer the immunization and cure, and to manufacture, distribute and administer whatever may be required to get it done and to get it done in time”,’ Frist told the Senate in his testimony.
‘We have a dangerously inadequate vaccine manufacturing base in the United States. This must be rectified. Bottom line: there’s so little profit and so much uncertainty in vaccine manufacturing today. We must establish longstanding public-private partnerships with industry that are sustained and are not at risk of disappearing with each [Congressional] appropriations cycle. We cannot expect the private sector to independently invest billions of dollars developing antivirals and vaccines for novel viruses that we hope we’ll never need to use. That’s not a sustainable business model.’
For some years to come, Frist asserted, this should be the chief work of the nation, ‘for the good reason that failing to make it so would be to risk the life of the nation’.
Whether this idea originated from Senator Frist is another matter. Dr Robert Kadlec, the ‘General Ripper’ behind this new Manhattan Project, was at that time the leading biosecurity official in President George W Bush’s administration. He was at the April 2005 National Academy of Sciences Pandemic Influenza Symposium where an unidentified participant called for funding for a Manhattan-like Project to protect against a pandemic, calling it an insurance policy.
But the groundwork for this Manhattan Project was being laid even earlier. In June 2001, two months before the 9/11 atrocity, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) held a table-top exercise it called Dark Winter, simulating a smallpox bioterrorism attack on the US orchestrated by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Dr Tara O’Toole, who founded the CHS in 1998, was the principal designer of the exercise, butKadlec is credited with giving it its name. AColonel Randall Larsen, who’d hired Kadlec to work at the Air War College in the mid-1990s, was another designer of the exercise along with Tom Inglesby, the CHS’s current director.
Kadlec became the Homeland Security Director of Biosecurity Policy in January 2002 and soonafter attempted to restart the smallpox vaccination programme. In 2004, he launched Project Bioshield, a $5.6billion ten-year programme which created BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. This was intended to motivate US pharmaceutical companies to start developing biodefence products (medical countermeasures which are principally vaccines) ‘by providing a substantial guaranteed market, expediting governmental contracting practices and clarifying FDA regulatory requirements for products used in a public health emergency’.
Project Bioshield funding enabled the US government to stockpile smallpox and anthrax vaccines manufactured by the companies Bavarian Nordic and Emergent BioSolutions. Both companies and the industry lobby group Biotechnology Innovation Organization were amongst the funders of Kadlec’s Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense he founded ten years later, in 2014, when he was working as a paid consultant to Emergent BioSolutions.The company, founded by Fuad El-Hibri and originally known as BioPort Inc, purchased a vaccine factory and the rights to manufacture anthrax vaccine for the US military in 1998.
On his appointment as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) in 2017, Kadlec failed to declare a conflict of interests on his ethics forms, that in 2012 he and El-Hibri had co-founded an international biodefence company called East West Solutions LLC or that he had been employed by Emergent BioSolutions as a consultant. https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/05062020%20Kadlec%20Ethics%20Letter%20Updated%20signed%20pdf.pdf In September 2019, when Kadlec was ASPR and in control of the US national stockpile, Emergent BioSolutions was awarded a ten-year $2billion contract to replenish the US national stockpile of smallpox vaccine.
Emergent BioSolutions was later subcontracted to manufacture Covid vaccines for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson in the US. However the company’s poor manufacturing standards led to a Congressional investigation being launched in 2021.
Since Covid, the ‘war on microbes’ has not let up: attention simply moved on to the next opportunity to promote a vaccine. Each outbreak seems to follow the oft-repeated pattern of having been preceded by a Strangelove-like situational simulation based on a fictional scenario. Outbreaks of disease, requiring the WHO to declare a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) and public health authorities to announce a vaccination campaign, have a strange knack of occurring soon after the simulation exercises, ensuring the public health community is well prepared in advance.
In December 2020, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), whose interim vice president is the former US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Hamburg, conducted a consultation with experts for a table top exercise on ‘reducing high-consequence biological threats’ in preparation for the exercise to run at the Munich Security Conference in March 2021. The scenario involved a fictitious monkeypox outbreak. Hamburg was herself a player in the June 2001 Dark Winter smallpox table top exercise and is a member of the Biodefense Commission. At the 2021 Munich monkeypox simulation she was joined by a familiar roster of biosecurity figures including the ubiquitous Sir Jeremy Farrar, his old friend George Gao, the then head of the China CDC, Dr Chris Elias of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, US Senator Sam Nunn who played the President in Dark Winter, Luc Debruyne, Vice President of CEPI, Dr Michael Ryan, Director of the WHO Emergencies Programme, with whom Anthony Fauci was in weekly contact in early 2020 during the time that Covid was escalated to a pandemic, and Arnaud Bernaert the WEF’s Head of Shaping the Future of Health and Health Care.
Bernaert, Gao and Elias were involved in Event 201, the coronavirus table top exercise co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security, the Gates Foundation and the WEF in October 2019. In the WEF press release for Event 201 Bernaert said, ‘We are in a new era of epidemic risk, where essential public-private cooperation remains challenged, despite being necessary to mitigate risk and impact. Now is the time to scale up cooperation between national governments, key international institutions and critical industries, to enhance global capacity for preparedness and response.’
In May 2022, the WHO declared a monkeypox outbreak which was escalated to a full-scale Public Health Emergency of International Concern in July 2022. Bavarian Nordic, the Danish headquartered vaccine manufacturer belonging to a Washington-based consortium called the Alliance for Biosecurity, signed a contract with an unnamed European country to supply smallpox vaccines for use as a monkeypox vaccine. The company is a sponsor of Kadlec’s Biodefense Commission, and its largest shareholder is ATP, Denmark’s national pension fund. Other notable entities amongst its top five shareholders include Vanguard Asset Management and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund Norge Bank.
In Part 4 I will examine how Kadlec began preparations for his Manhattan Project two years before the 2016 US Presidential election.
This is the second part of a series in which Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence. You can read Part 1 here.
THE name Robert Kadlec may mean nothing to you, but anyone who has watched Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War era satirical masterpiece Dr Strangelove will quickly get the idea of who this man is.
Colonel Kadlec is the General Ripper of the War on Microbes. It is no small irony that the Biodefense Commission that Kadlec set up in 2014 is funded by the Hudson Institute, which was co-founded by Herman Kahn, the Rand Corporation war gamer. Kahn’s theory that nuclear war could be deterred if the Soviet Union believed the United States had second strike capability was the inspiration for Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove character and the film.
Kadlecbegan his career as an Air Force physician before he diverted into the world of biological weapons during the first Gulf War of 1990-91. He became an intelligence analyst for the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) on chemical and biological weapons. He subsequently became a member of the UN Weapons Inspection team in Iraq led by Dr David Kelly, who was found dead in 2003.
Kadlec was later (2014) to tell the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security that ‘while the United States was victorious in 1991, the scale and scope of Iraq’s biological weapons programme remained elusive despite the most intrusive inspection and monitoring regime ever conceived and implemented by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM).’
No conclusive proof was ever found that Iraq had biological weapons, but testimony in 1995 from a defector, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Colonel General Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid, intelligence which was later assessed as being of limited content and value, maintained the belief of Kadlec and others that they did exist, providing the pretext for the 2003 Iraq War which removed Hussein from power. This belief was no doubt bolstered in part because in the 1980s the Iraqi Technical and Scientific Import Division had (quitelegally) bought samples of an anthrax strain developed by US germ warfare researchers at Fort Detrick, from the American Type Culture Collection, a non-profit organisation in Manassas, Virginia, that provides samples of bacteria and viruses for scientific study. (Arguably the absence of concrete evidence reinforced rather than diminished this belief in the graveness of the threat.)
Between 1993-96 Kadlec served on the US Delegation to the Biological Weapons Convention. His thinking on biowarfare is set out in his contribution to a 1995 Air War College book called Battlefield of the Future.
In it he argued that biological weapons are the poor nations’ nuclear bombs: they could be made cheaply and easily in facilities with other legitimate purposes, are invisible and, if aerosolised, could be spread over wide areas using an agricultural crop duster. His contention was that they uniquely offered the possibility of ‘plausible deniability’ to the perpetrators because pathogenic agents could be mistaken for naturally occurring epidemics. His particular concern was that vaccines, which are highly specific in what they protect against, take ten to 15 years to develop.
Wired magazine reported on the US military’s desire for genetic vaccines to make soldiers ‘immune to all known pathogens’ in 1996. As if that wasn’t enough of an aspirational Pandora’s Box, it also reported the military’s desire for the capability of targeting enemy leaders using genetically engineered super pathogens ‘so selective in their behaviour they’re capable of targeting specific individuals, verifying their identities by means of their DNA sequences’.
It was immediately after 9/11 in 2001 thatKadlec became a special adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and subsequently appointed Director of Biosecurity Policy in the Homeland Security Department of President George W Bush, where he drafted a document calledNational Biodefense Policy for the 21st Century. This, in April 2004, became the Homeland Security Presidential Policy Directive 10. Kadlec wrote that theUnited States ‘will continue to use all means necessary to prevent, protect against, and mitigate biological weapons attacks perpetrated against our homeland and our global interests’.
Speaking about the need for a Homeland Biosecurity Policy,President G W Bush said: ‘Armed with a single vial of a biological agent, small groups of fanatics, or failing states, could gain the power to threaten great nations, threaten world peace. America, and the entire civilized world, will face this threat for decades to come. We must confront the danger with open eyes, and unbending purpose.’
Notably Kadlec’s 2018 update of this policy went much further. It declared the extraordinary intent to apply the US approach to countering weapons of mass destruction to all infectious disease outbreaks, naturally occurring or otherwise.
Returning to 2005, this was the year that saw Kadlec attending a National Academy of Sciences Symposium on Pandemic Influenza. This centred on the belief of American public health authorities thatthe recurrence of an influenza pandemic with high mortality was both inevitable and posed a grave threat to humanity. Becauseinfluenza rapidly mutates and is not usually particularly lethal it provideda good research model for biosecurity purposes, not to mention a useful tool for advancing policy objectives. The ubiquitous Imperial College London modeller Neil Ferguson told the symposium that disease containment required ‘a concerted international response – probably with teams on the ground chasing cases’, effectively laying the groundwork for ‘all means necessary’ not to stop at the US border.
Though the 1918 influenza pandemic was originally said to have been caused by H1N1 swine flu, today the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says it was caused by ‘H1N1 with genes of avian origin’. This is based onUS Army researchers who claimed in 1999 to have fully sequenced ‘Spanish Influenza’ (using PCR) from autopsy samples taken in 1918 and a sample retrieved from a victim buried in permafrost since 1918. They said the illness was more closely related to avian flu than any mammalian species.
Ferguson’s modelling on avian flu was published in August 2005, claiming that ‘if targeted action is taken within a critical three-week window, then an outbreak could be limited to fewer than 100 individuals within two months’, but if unchecked up to 200million could die. This was just one of his wildly improbable and spectacularly wrong forecasts.
It was claimed that if bird flu mutated to more readily infect humans, the mortality rate would be more than 50 per cent. Bird flu, which first appeared in Thailand’s huge commercial poultry flocks, serendipitously appeared just as an eight-year marathon effort to have the World Health Assembly of the WHO agree key amendments to the International Health Regulations was coming to a close. The significance of these amendments, finally adopted in 2005, is that they included a new provision toenable the Director General to declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC) on the recommendation of the WHO Emergency Committee. This mirrored the Public Health Emergency provision added to American public health law in 1983. Covid was declared a PHIEC by the WHO on January 30, 2020.
From 2003 to 2007, only 216 people died from bird flu. The threat and the headline fatality rate appear to have been overstated. Dr Nguyen Tuong Van of Hanoi’s Institute for Clinical Research, who treated some bird flu victims during the 2004 outbreak said, ‘Most people who die of bird flu are poor and not in the best physical condition in the first place.’
Jeremy Farrar’s 2004 paper on the Vietnamese outbreaks says rapid antigen testing was ‘less sensitive than PCR for diagnosis of influenza H5N1.’ Patients were given anti-viral drugs, mainly Tamiflu, which was developed by Gilead Sciences, a company chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, and almost all were mechanically ventilated, which itself elevates the mortality rate. Tamiflu may have been part of the problem. As a recent review of Tamiflu concludes: ‘A cocktail of pandemic panic, publicity propaganda, and scientific misconduct turned a new medicine with only modest efficacy into a blockbuster. It appears that the multiple regulatory checks and balances gave way as science lost its primacy and pharmaceutical enterprise lost no time in making the most of it.’
The 2005 WHO report Avian Influenza: Assessing the pandemic threat itself makes curious, and occasionally implausible, reading. According to this account, the ‘highly pathogenic’ bird flu, as it was usually described, was being spread asymptomatically by wild waterfowl (airborne bioterrorists to Kadlec’s way of thinking) to the small domestic free-range flocks kept by rural families in Asia, and that these birds were transmitting it to people. The real problem according to the business end of the report was that H5N1 bird flu was so ‘highly pathogenic’ that it was killing the chicken embryos used for flu vaccine manufacture. This made finding new methods of manufacturing them all the more desirable. Even better if these new methods could produce more vaccines, faster.
Another conundrum, Dr Jesse Goodman of the FDA told the NAS symposium, was the markets. ‘Markets – that is demand and sales – are the main drivers of manufacturing. No one is going to build factories just for a possible pandemic,’ he said.
The WHO had convened a meeting in November 2004 with all the major vaccine manufacturers to explore ways in which industry, regulatory authorities, governments, and WHO could collectively speed up the development of pandemic vaccines that could be made rapidly and in as large a quantity as possible. It was argued that wider use of seasonal vaccines would make the vaccines more commercially viable and the resulting increased production capacity would enable manufacturers to pivot production to pandemic strains whenever they should be needed.
Senator Bill Frist, the Republican Senate Majority leader at the time Kadlec was the leading bioterrorism expert in the Bush Jr Administration, full-throatedly echoed Kadlec’s thinking at the 2005 WEF at Davos, saying: ‘The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological. Why? Because unlike any other threat it has the power of panic and paralysis to be global.’ He also asserted: ‘We need to do something that even dwarfs the Manhattan Project,’ the codename for the US effort to devise an atomic weapon during the Second World War.
Next: Kadlec’s simulation exercises and his conflicts of interest.
In this series, Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence.
WHEN Dominic Cummings testified before Parliament in June 2021 and he was asked about the UK Covid Vaccine taskforce, he said: ‘What Bill Gates and people like that said to me and others at No 10 was, “You need to think of this much more like some of the classic programmes of the past – the Manhattan Project in World War Two or the Apollo programme – and build it all in parallel. In normal Government accounting terms, that is completely crazy, because if nothing works out you have spent literally billions building all these things up, and the end result is nothing – you get zero for it, it’s all waste.’
Gates is the promoter, facilitator and profiteer-in-chief of the great vaccine Manhattan Project but he certainly isn’t the originator of it. The call for a biosecurity Manhattan Project dates back to the George W Bush administration.
On July 11, 2019, a think tank called the Biodefence Commission held a panel discussion entitled A Manhattan Project for Biodefence: Taking Biological Threats off the Table. The objective was to ‘create a national, public-private research and development undertaking to defend the United States against biological threats’.
Dr Robert Kadlec, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) was a panellist. During the discussion Kadlec said, ‘It’s time to say “Go big, or go home” on this issue.’ Covid-19 gave him just the opportunity to implement this Manhattan Project as appears to have been intended.
Kadlec founded the Biodefense Commission in 2014 when he was a consultant to one of its donors, the vaccine manufacturer Emergent Biosolutions. The Hudson Institute, a think tank co-founded by Herman Kahn of the Rand Corporation, the pioneer of war gaming who was satirised as Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same name, is the Commission’s fiscal sponsor.
On Wednesday December 4, 2019, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held its annual hearing on US public health preparedness and response for seasonal and pandemic influenza. Testifying before it were Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Nancy Messonnier from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Dr Peter Marks from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Kadlec.
Seventy-six days earlier,on September 19, 2019, an Executive Order on Modernizing Influenza Vaccines in the United States to Promote National Security and Public Health had been signed by President Trump, directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the CDC and the FDA to ‘accelerate the adoption of improved influenza vaccine technologies’. The Departments of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense were to propose a plan and a budget for this effort within 120 days, in other words, before January 17, 2020.
The White House said: ‘Unfortunately, many of the vaccines we use today are produced overseas, using time-consuming, egg-based technology, which limits their effectiveness and makes production too slow to effectively combat a potential deadly influenza pandemic.’
Fauci may be the best known of the four witnesses but Kadlec is by far the most consequential. Kadlec, a retired US Air Force Colonel, and former Director of Biosecurity Policy in the George W Bush Administration, is the principal architect of 21st century US biosecurity policy. He said in his testimony: ‘ASPR’s mission is to save lives and protect Americans from 21st century health security threats.’
As a member of Bush’s Homeland Security Council he drafted the 2004 National Biodefense Policy for the 21st Century. He was the instigator behind the 2004 Project Bioshield Act that created a strategic national stockpile of anthrax and smallpox vaccines (manufactured by his Biodefense Commission’s funders). In 2005, as staff director to Senator Richard Burr’s Subcommittee on Bioterrorism, hedrafted the 2006 Pandemics and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA, pronounced ‘Papa’). This act created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response (ASPR) position. The ASPR controls the national stockpile of smallpox and anthrax vaccines and otherpublic health emergency medical equipment such as ventilators. During emergencies this Assistant Secretary has expansive powers enabling him or her to act as the single point of control co-ordinating national response. Kadlec was confirmed as ASPRin August 2017 after being recommended to President Trump by Senator Burr.
At the December 4, 2019 meeting of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Kadlec was asked what his department was doing to enhance American manufacturing capacity. He said: ‘On the issue of vaccines alone, I think the key thing is, I can’t go into the particulars but we’re going to have an announcement here shortly that will indicate some investments domestically to expand some of our newer technologies for vaccine manufacturing and I think the key thing there is, we are actively pursuing this in accordance with the executive order.’
Fauci testified that pursuant to Trump’s executive order his agency, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), was conducting and supporting research into new platform technologies including mRNA. Fauci said: ‘State-of-the-art technologies could be used to develop universal influenza vaccines as well as improve the speed and agility of influenza vaccine manufacturing.’
When Kadlec wasasked what the benefits were to the American people of investing in platform technologies such as mRNA he said: ‘The availability of such platform-based approaches would transform national preparedness against currently known threats as well as newly emerging threats in the future.’ Citing theASPR/BARDA funded development of a Zika vaccine made using mRNA technology he went on: ‘This technology has promise as a rapid platform for a number of infectious diseases, including influenza and novel diseases that may emerge in the future.
The Zika vaccine he referred to was being developed by Moderna, the US-based mRNA gene-therapy biotech. It didn’t have an influenza vaccine in development but it was actively working with Fauci’s NIAID to develop a ‘jointly owned coronavirus vaccine’. A prototype of this vaccine was sent to Dr Ralph Baric, the leading coronavirus expert who has worked collaboratively with Dr Shi Zhenghli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for animal testing on December 17, 2019.
Moderna’s European rival BioNTechannounced in August 2018 that it was in collaboration with Pfizer todevelop an mRNA flu vaccine. It was aiming to move this from the preclinical stage to phase 1 trials by the end of 2020. Professor Dr Ugur Sahin, co-founder and CEO of BioNTech said: ‘A significant presence in infectious disease supports our goal of building a global immunotherapy company that provides more effective and precise immune-mediated approaches for the prevention and treatment of serious illnesses, such as the prevention of flu and the treatment of cancer.’
BioNTech diversified from developing cancer therapies – none of which was successfully licensed – into vaccines after a provision in a 2009EU directive intended to enable genetic engineered viruses to be used in vaccines was identified in 2016 and interpreted by them and others as a regulatory loophole enabling gene therapies directed at infectious diseases to circumvent the more stringent and onerous Advance Medicines Clinical Trials protocols. In 2020, this flu vaccine research was pivoted to Covid vaccine research.
Using this regulatory back door, both the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) evaluated BioNTech’s mRNA Covid gene therapies as run-of-the-mill vaccines. The mRNA gene therapies contain no viruses; instead they genetically modify the recipient, reprogramming their cells to produce a protein from the virus that will stimulate their immune system to create a response against the virus, meaning the EU directive should not have been applicable.
During the launch of Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) at Davos in January 2017, Gates enthusiastically promoted mRNA vaccines. ‘Now there’s a new class of vaccine, DNA / RNA vaccine that we hope we can just change a small part of it, and so the manufacturing facility would already be there, the trials you would go through would be very quick. You would understand what end point, what correlate you want and so in an emergency, the regulators would understand what sort of protocol we’re going to use,’ said Gates.
‘With Ebola we had a scientific challenge that these platforms weren’t ready, we didn’t understand which country, what type of indemnity, and so there was a lot of fumbling around. It’s only by fixing those regulatory uncertainties and using these new platforms that we have a chance of getting that time to be less than a year.’
Gates’s foundation took an equity stake in BioNTech ahead of its October 2019 US stock market launch. When he was asked in 2017 about the danger of these platform vaccines making people less well, he said: ‘You are right that the safety threshold is really, really extremely high because we have to maintain the reputations of all the vaccines, convince parents in all these countries that these shots are really there to help your child out. Anything that you do to healthy people is going to have a tougher standard than, say, a new cancer drug, where if you don’t have the new drug, the outcome is going to be quite negative.’
This tougher standard was soon forgotten. The Pfizer/BioNTech product was pushed into use by the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority (MHRA) on December 2, 2020 using a ‘compassionate use’ mechanism called a Temporary Use Authorisation to bypass the European regulator during the last month that the UK was under European Union law. MHRA reviewed only a few hundred pages of summary data, not the full dossier.
The FDA has a pathway for accelerated approval of ‘vaccines licensed in other countries with competent regulatory authorities.’ p21 Emergency Use Authorisation of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as provided for under the 2004 Project Bioshield Act quickly followed in the US on December 11, 2020 and the European Medicines Authority (EMA) fell into line on December 21. Kadlec’s long-desired Manhattan Project was now detonating.
Part 2 of this series will focus on Dr Robert Kadlec, the principal planner of the US’s War on Microbes and of this biosecurity ‘Manhattan Project’.
Syndicates trend to the extreme over time because, as their wares become worthless or evolve to become common fare inside the market, the syndicate must handle more and more exotic forms of commerce, in order to capitalize upon their real value.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, the extant bootleg networks did not simply say, ‘Well done everyone. We can all go home now.’ To the contrary, they escalated their game. The value of a syndicate after all resides not in its illicit product, but rather in the strength and reach of the syndicate itself.
Several years ago my firm had the good fortune to be engaged to survey regions of North Carolina and Virginia for candidate locations where a major sporting goods manufacturer might consider locating their regional operations. The optimization models had all been run, and as is common in this type of discrete optimization, the degrees of freedom on the answer were very forgiving in terms of geography. This simply meant that the company could locate really anywhere they wanted within reason – and further then base their location selection upon subjective and qualitative factors, not hard heuristic-academic math. Most academics fail to grasp the fact that this is how the preponderance of real life, business, and science works. One must actually go there, immerse themself in the subject and observe for a period of time – not simply sit in a cubicle running mildly inductive Bayesian statistics, before attempting to drive home a conclusion. We have long ago lost the ethic to go there, poke it with a stick, and keenly observe. This as much an outcome of our pseudo-intellectual cultural push, as it is a form of syndicated action in itself. But that is the subject of another article entirely.
Skepticism is unrelenting, disciplined, incremental, and critical path foolishness.
It is the eye of neutrality, inside the mercenary tempest of curious passion.I did not know. I went and looked. Everything else was vanity.
Now of course this style of community selection we execute on behalf of a client, involves balancing decision factors which include community demographic strength, existence of similar industry players, existence of a strong base of freight and rail carriers whose nodes are economically leveraged, the availability of higher and technical education, available and negotiated tiered state incentives, Right to Work laws, community lifestyle, along with the overall positive impact the new entity will have on the local community and its true rate of unemployment (not the fake ‘economic’ statistic).
Foremost in this decision process however, is an assessment as to the makeup and feel of the local populace. What are the people in the community like? What does the working class value? Who are their dependents? How many people will show up to interview for a new job opening and how often will the average successful applicant turnover in that type of position? Such evaluations can only be ascertained by having an experienced professional actually go there and gain a feel for the community. I was fortunate that, in this instance that professional was me.
When 400 people showed up to interview for the first ten job openings at the site which we ultimately elected to implement, I got a lump in my throat – taking the impact to heart. The community was starved of such development. Finally, more opportunity lay in store for young persons than simply a challenging career in crystal meth.
Consolidation and extraction of earnings to elite paper-trading cronies and The Party’s socialist taxmasters, requires no business or governance skills at all. This is not ‘capitalism’, nor is it democracy. These are simply the unethical, nay diabolical actions of detached, hidden, and unaccountable Royalty. A syndicate itself, and nothing more.
The despair of a nation subject to such unethical Archons, is both palpable and measurable in terms of innocent lives.
Accordingly, I took 7 days to travel through the region and gain a feel for several candidate communities the team had identified. In order to protect the confidential nature of the expansion strategy my team had just developed for this client, I elected to tour the countryside under the auspices of ‘looking for good places to fly fish’. Although unlike my grandfather who taught me to tie flies and fly fish, I did not bear the rough-hewn hands of a fly fisherman. I was hoping to recapture that past hobby nonetheless. This constituted disinformation of course, in that while it was indeed true, it was not the ‘whole truth’. The whole truth in fact, was that I had been bound by a non-disclosure agreement with the client, from surrendering the whole truth in the first place.
It was during this journey that I bore the good fortune of staying at an Inn in Saluda, North Carolina called The Orchard Inn. Originally built by the Brotherhood of Clerks for Southern Railway in 1926, the farm-house style lodging named ‘The Mountain Home of Southern Railway Clerks’ was purportedly created as a “summer getaway for railroad employees and their families.” Although lacking actual accommodation for ‘families’ at the time, the lodge was also a convenient staging point around and respite from alcohol and spirits Prohibition laws which had been enacted under the Volstead Act in January of 1919.1 Both the Inn’s location along a famous Bootlegging Highway (Hwy 176 from South Carolina and into North Carolina, along which resides the infamous ‘dead-man’s curve’) and the fact that the lowest level of the lodge consisted of a series of garage doors to conceal and protect bootleg vehicles overnight, were no accident. The Inn is now reputed to be haunted, and possibly even circumstantially connected with several murders in the area, ‘back in the day’.
The Clerks’ Inn is now this elegant mountain retreat called The Orchard Inn (depicted by the color sketch at the top of this article), and is on the National Register of Historic Places.2 The proprietors of the Inn were gracious enough to stay up late with my curious self, and expound upon the entire history of the Inn, replete with old black and white photos of the lodge as it had transitioned through the last nine decades. The night air was cool and of low humidity, making our time on the outside wrap around deck rather enjoyable. My stay at the Inn was both a wonderful and informative experience. The community of Saluda itself ranked highly on our list of final candidates for my client’s regional operations and offices.
Daniel Okrent, in his book ‘Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition’, outlines that once Prohibition was repealed in 1933, very few bootleggers were actually released from prison. In fact, most of these mafia, syndicate, and graft network members were imprisoned for trafficking more than simply booze.3 In the end, the bootlegging networks themselves became the further genesis of mafia and finally drug dealing networks of today. You see, it was never about the ‘product’ in the first place. It is always indeed about the syndicate.
The paradox and point of this article resides in the following principle. The value of a syndicate is never in the product they hawk. The value of the syndicate resides in the strength, reach, and bribed benefactors of the syndicate itself. Once its product becomes accepted or moot, then the syndicate must graduate to even more extreme goods, more extreme forms, and even more extremist agenda. In actuality, they could care less about the people or causes they exploit for gain in this masquerade. Their ’causes’ are simply prima facie. After all, they are there to develop and groom the basis of power for their mafia, their party, their agency.
The syndicate soon realizes that it must escalate from alcohol to drugs, from tax evasion to money laundering, from faith to proscription, from freedom to fanaticism, from registration to control to embargo, from administration of standards to cartel activity, from mercy to profiting from trauma, from pharmaceuticals to removal of human rights, from profit to extraction, from choice to compulsion, from billionaire to trillionaire, from strip clubs to child pornography and sex trafficking, or from equal rights for all, to the moral supremacy of anyone who promotes aberrant behavior – no matter how harmful may be their difference of choice.
The syndicate is performing a puppeteer act for your amazement. They could care less about any of the causes or victims they adorn as badge-of-honor. That is why any form of extremism, the next shocking thing, will always suffice.
This is what a syndicate does after all, it escalates to the extreme as a reaction in keeping with its need to wrest and maintain power from out of the hands of a constitutionally represented populace. Such pretense constitutes our current state as a nation. As an ethical skeptic, I oppose rule by mafia, syndicate, cathedral, cabal, cartel, and finally and especially, The Party.
There was a dream which was America. This is not it. This is …not …it.
In 2020, prior to COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the Brighton Collaboration created a priority list, endorsed by the World Health Organization, of potential adverse events relevant to COVID-19 vaccines. We adapted the Brighton Collaboration list to evaluate serious adverse events of special interest observed in mRNA COVID-19 vaccine trials.
Secondary analysis of serious adverse events reported in the placebo-controlled, phase III randomized clinical trials of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in adults (NCT04368728 and NCT04470427), focusing analysis on Brighton Collaboration adverse events of special interest.
Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest of 10.1 and 15.1 per 10,000 vaccinated over placebo baselines of 17.6 and 42.2 (95 % CI −0.4 to 20.6 and −3.6 to 33.8), respectively. Combined, the mRNA vaccines were associated with an excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated (95 % CI 2.1 to 22.9); risk ratio 1.43 (95 % CI 1.07 to 1.92). The Pfizer trial exhibited a 36 % higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group; risk difference 18.0 per 10,000 vaccinated (95 % CI 1.2 to 34.9); risk ratio 1.36 (95 % CI 1.02 to 1.83). The Moderna trial exhibited a 6 % higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group: risk difference 7.1 per 10,000 (95 % CI –23.2 to 37.4); risk ratio 1.06 (95 % CI 0.84 to 1.33). Combined, there was a 16 % higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients: risk difference 13.2 (95 % CI −3.2 to 29.6); risk ratio 1.16 (95 % CI 0.97 to 1.39).
The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. These analyses will require public release of participant level datasets.
SARS-CoV-2COVID-19VaccinesCOVID-19 vaccinesmRNA vaccinesPfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine BNT162b2Moderna COVID-19 vaccine mRNA-1273NCT04368728NCT04470427Serious adverse eventsAdverse events of special interestBrighton CollaborationCoalition for Epidemic Preparedness InnovationsSafety Platform for Emergency vACcines
In March 2020, the Brighton Collaboration and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations partnership, Safety Platform for Emergency vACcines (SPEAC), created and subsequently updated a “priority list of potential adverse events of special interest relevant to COVID-19 vaccine trials.” [1] The list comprises adverse events of special interest (AESIs) based on the specific vaccine platform, adverse events associated with prior vaccines in general, theoretical associations based on animal models, and COVID-19 specific immunopathogenesis. [1] The Brighton Collaboration is a global authority on the topic of vaccine safety and in May 2020, the World Health Organization’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety endorsed and recommended the reporting of AESIs based on this priority list. To our knowledge, however, the list has not been applied to serious adverse events in randomized trial data.
We sought to investigate the association between FDA-authorized mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and serious adverse events identified by the Brighton Collaboration, using data from the phase III randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials on which authorization was based. We consider these trial data against findings from post-authorization observational safety data. Our study was not designed to evaluate the overall harm-benefit of vaccination programs so far. To put our safety results in context, we conducted a simple comparison of harms with benefits to illustrate the need for formal harm-benefit analyses of the vaccines that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. Our analysis is restricted to the randomized trial data, and does not consider data on post-authorization vaccination program impact. It does however show the need for public release of participant level trial datasets.
Pfizer and Moderna each submitted the results of one phase III randomized trial in support of the FDA’s emergency use authorization of their vaccines in adults. Two reviewers (PD and RK) searched journal publications and trial data on the FDA’s and Health Canada’s websites to locate serious adverse event results tables for these trials. The Pfizer and Moderna trials are expected to follow participants for two years. Within weeks of the emergency authorization, however, the sponsors began a process of unblinding all participants who elected to be unblinded. In addition, those who received placebo were offered the vaccine. These self-selection processes may have introduced nonrandom differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated participants, thus rendering the post-authorization data less reliable. Therefore, to preserve randomization, we used the interim datasets that were the basis for emergency authorization in December 2020, approximately 4 months after trials commenced.
The definition of a serious adverse event (SAE) was provided in each trial’s study protocol and included in the supplemental material of the trial’s publication. [2], [3], [4] Pfizer and Moderna used nearly identical definitions, consistent with regulatory expectations. An SAE was defined as an adverse event that results in any of the following conditions: death; life-threatening at the time of the event; inpatient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization; persistent or significant disability/incapacity; a congenital anomaly/birth defect; medically important event, based on medical judgment.
In addition to journal publications, we searched the websites of the FDA (for advisory committee meeting materials) and Health Canada (for sections of the dossier submitted by sponsors to the regulator). [5] For the FDA website, we considered presentations by both the FDA and the sponsors. [6] Within each of these sources, we searched for SAE results tables that presented information by specific SAE type; we chose the most recent SAE table corresponding to the FDA’s requirement for a safety median follow-up time of at least 2 months after dose 2.
For each trial, we prepared blinded SAE tables (containing SAE types without results data). Using these blinded SAE tables, two clinician reviewers (JF and JE) independently judged whether each SAE type was an AESI. SAE types that matched an AESI term verbatim, or were an alternative diagnostic name for an AESI term, were included as an AESI. For all other SAE types, the reviewers independently judged whether that SAE type was likely to have been caused by a vaccine-induced AESI, based on a judgment considering the disease course, causative mechanism, and likelihood of the AESI to cause the SAE type. Disagreements were resolved through consensus; if consensus could not be reached, a third clinician reviewer (PW) was used to create a majority opinion. For each included SAE, we recorded the corresponding Brighton Collaboration AESI category and organ system. When multiple AESIs could potentially cause the same SAE, the reviewers selected the AESI that they judged to be the most likely cause based on classical clinical presentation of the AESI.
We used an AESI list derived from the work of Brighton Collaboration’s Safety Platform for Emergency vACcines (SPEAC) Project. This project created an AESI list which categorizes AESIs into three categories: those included because they are seen with COVID-19, those with a proven or theoretical association with vaccines in general, and those with proven or theoretical associations with specific vaccine platforms. The first version was produced in March 2020 based on experience from China. Following the second update (May 2020), the WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS) adopted the list, and Brighton commenced a systematic review process “to ensure an ongoing understanding of the full spectrum of COVID-19 disease and modification of the AESI list accordingly.” [7] This resulted in three additional AESIs being added to the list in December 2020. The subsequent (and most recent fourth) update did not result in any additional AESIs being added to the list. [1].
We matched SAEs recorded in the trial against an expanded list of AESIs created by combining Brighton’s SPEAC COVID-19 AESI list with a list of 29 clinical diagnoses Brighton identified as “known to have been reported but not in sufficient numbers to merit inclusion on the AESI list.” [7] Sensitivity analysis was used to determine whether use of the original versus expanded list altered our results.
Risk ratios and risk differences between vaccine and placebo groups were calculated for the incidence of AESIs and SAEs. We excluded SAEs that were known efficacy outcomes (i.e. COVID-19), consistent with the approach Pfizer (but not Moderna) used in recording SAE data. The Pfizer study trial protocol states that COVID-19 illnesses and their sequelae consistent with the clinical endpoint definition were not to be reported as adverse events, “even though the event may meet the definition of an SAE.” [8] For unspecified reasons, Moderna included efficacy outcomes in their SAE tables, effectively reporting an all-cause SAE result. Because we did not have access to individual participant data, to account for the occasional multiple SAEs within single participants, we reduced the effective sample size by multiplying standard errors in the combined SAE analyses by the square root of the ratio of the number of SAEs to the number of patients with an SAE. This adjustment increased standard errors by 10 % (Pfizer) and 18 % (Moderna), thus expanding the interval estimates. We estimated combined risk ratios and risk differences for the two mRNA vaccines by averaging over the risks using logistic regression models which included indicators for trial and treatment group.
We used a simple harm-benefit framework to place our results in context, comparing risks of excess serious AESIs against reductions in COVID-19 hospitalization.
Peter Doshi, senior editor,
Fiona Godlee, former editor in chief,
Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief
The BMJ, London, UK
Correspondence to: P Doshi Pdoshi{at}bmj.com
Data should be fully and immediately available for public scrutiny
In the pages of The BMJ a decade ago, in the middle of a different pandemic, it came to light that governments around the world had spent billions stockpiling antivirals for influenza that had not been shown to reduce the risk of complications, hospital admissions, or death. The majority of trials that underpinned regulatory approval and government stockpiling of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were sponsored by the manufacturer; most were unpublished, those that were published were ghostwritten by writers paid by the manufacturer, the people listed as principal authors lacked access to the raw data, and academics who requested access to the data for independent analysis were denied.1234
The Tamiflu saga heralded a decade of unprecedented attention to the importance of sharing clinical trial data.56 Public battles for drug company data,78 transparency campaigns with thousands of signatures,910 strengthened journal data sharing requirements,1112 explicit commitments from companies to share data,13 new data access website portals,8 and landmark transparency policies from medicines regulators1415 all promised a new era in data transparency.
Progress was made, but clearly not enough. The errors of the last pandemic are being repeated. Memories are short. Today, despite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come.16 This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions.
Pfizer’s pivotal covid vaccine trial was funded by the company and designed, run, analysed, and authored by Pfizer employees. The company and the contract research organisations that carried out the trial hold all the data.17 And Pfizer has indicated that it will not begin entertaining requests for trial data until May 2025, 24 months after the primary study completion date, which is listed on ClinicalTrials.gov as 15 May 2023 (NCT04368728).
The lack of access to data is consistent across vaccine manufacturers.16 Moderna says data “may be available … with publication of the final study results in 2022.”18 Datasets will be available “upon request and subject to review once the trial is complete,” which has an estimated primary completion date of 27 October 2022 (NCT04470427).
As of 31 December 2021, AstraZeneca may be ready to entertain requests for data from several of its large phase III trials.19 But actually obtaining data could be slow going. As its website explains, “timelines vary per request and can take up to a year upon full submission of the request.”20
Underlying data for covid-19 therapeutics are similarly hard to find. Published reports of Regeneron’s phase III trial of its monoclonal antibody therapy REGEN-COV flatly state that participant level data will not be made available to others.21 Should the drug be approved (and not just emergency authorised), sharing “will be considered.” For remdesivir, the US National Institutes of Health, which funded the trial, created a new portal to share data (https://accessclinicaldata.niaid.nih.gov/), but the dataset on offer is limited. An accompanying document explains: “The longitudinal data set only contains a small subset of the protocol and statistical analysis plan objectives.”
We are left with publications but no access to the underlying data on reasonable request. This is worrying for trial participants, researchers, clinicians, journal editors, policy makers, and the public. The journals that have published these primary studies may argue that they faced an awkward dilemma, caught between making the summary findings available quickly and upholding the best ethical values that support timely access to underlying data. In our view, there is no dilemma; the anonymised individual participant data from clinical trials must be made available for independent scrutiny.
Journal editors, systematic reviewers, and the writers of clinical practice guideline generally obtain little beyond a journal publication, but regulatory agencies receive far more granular data as part of the regulatory review process. In the words of the European Medicine Agency’s former executive director and senior medical officer, “relying solely on the publications of clinical trials in scientific journals as the basis of healthcare decisions is not a good idea ... Drug regulators have been aware of this limitation for a long time and routinely obtain and assess the full documentation (rather than just publications).”22
Among regulators, the US Food and Drug Administration is believed to receive the most raw data but does not proactively release them. After a freedom of information request to the agency for Pfizer’s vaccine data, the FDA offered to release 500 pages a month, a process that would take decades to complete, arguing in court that publicly releasing data was slow owing to the need to first redact sensitive information.23 This month, however, a judge rejected the FDA’s offer and ordered the data be released at a rate of 55 000 pages a month. The data are to be made available on the requesting organisation’s website (phmpt.org).
In releasing thousands of pages of clinical trial documents, Health Canada and the EMA have also provided a degree of transparency that deserves acknowledgment.2425 Until recently, however, the data remained of limited utility, with copious redactions aimed at protecting trial blinding. But study reports with fewer redactions have been available since September 2021,2425 and missing appendices may be accessible through freedom of information requests.
Even so, anyone looking for participant level datasets may be disappointed because Health Canada and the EMA do not receive or analyse these data, and it remains to be seen how the FDA responds to the court order. Moreover, the FDA is producing data only for Pfizer’s vaccine; other manufacturers’ data cannot be requested until the vaccines are approved, which the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are not. Industry, which holds the raw data, is not legally required to honour requests for access from independent researchers.
Like the FDA, and unlike its Canadian and European counterparts, the UK’s regulator—the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency—does not proactively release clinical trial documents, and it has also stopped posting information released in response to freedom of information requests on its website.26
As well as access to the underlying data, transparent decision making is essential. Regulators and public health bodies could release details27 such as why vaccine trials were not designed to test efficacy against infection and spread of SARS-CoV-2.28 Had regulators insisted on this outcome, countries would have learnt sooner about the effect of vaccines on transmission and been able to plan accordingly.29
Big pharma is the least trusted industry.30 At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars.31 One pleaded guilty to fraud.31 Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue.32
The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future. The same applies to treatments for covid-19. Transparency is the key to building trust and an important route to answering people’s legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and treatments and the clinical and public health policies established for their use.
Twelve years ago we called for the immediate release of raw data from clinical trials.1 We reiterate that call now. Data must be available when trial results are announced, published, or used to justify regulatory decisions. There is no place for wholesale exemptions from good practice during a pandemic. The public has paid for covid-19 vaccines through vast public funding of research, and it is the public that takes on the balance of benefits and harms that accompany vaccination. The public, therefore, has a right and entitlement to those data, as well as to the interrogation of those data by experts.
Pharmaceutical companies are reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims.33 The purpose of regulators is not to dance to the tune of rich global corporations and enrich them further; it is to protect the health of their populations. We need complete data transparency for all studies, we need it in the public interest, and we need it now.
Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare that The BMJ is a co-founder of the AllTrials campaign. PD was one of the Cochrane reviewers studying influenza antivirals beginning in 2009, who campaigned for access to data. He also helped organise the Coalition Advocating for Adequately Licensed Medicines (CAALM), which formally petitioned the FDA to refrain from fully approving any covid-19 vaccine this year (docket FDA-2021-P-0786). PD is also a member of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, which has sued the FDA to obtain the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine data. The views and opinions do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Maryland.
Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
This is an anonymously posted document by someone who calls themselves Spartacus. Because it’s anonymous, I can’t contact them to ask for permission to publish. So I hesitated for a while, but it’s simply the best document I’ve seen on Covid, vaccines, etc. Whoever Spartacus is, they have a very elaborate knowledge in “the field”. If you want to know a lot more about the no. 1 issue in the world today, read it. And don’t worry if you don’t understand every single word, neither do I. But I learned a lot.
The original PDF doc is here was here: Covid19 – The Spartacus Letter
See also: References for "Spartacus" Anonymous COVID9 whistleblower document
Hello,
My name is Spartacus, and I’ve had enough.
We have been forced to watch America and the Free World spin into inexorable decline due to a biowarfare attack. We, along with countless others, have been victimized and gaslit by propaganda and psychological warfare operations being conducted by an unelected, unaccountable Elite against the American people and our allies.
Our mental and physical health have suffered immensely over the course of the past year and a half. We have felt the sting of isolation, lockdown, masking, quarantines, and other completely nonsensical acts of healthcare theater that have done absolutely nothing to protect the health or wellbeing of the public from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, we are watching the medical establishment inject literal poison into millions of our fellow Americans without so much as a fight.
We have been told that we will be fired and denied our livelihoods if we refuse to vaccinate. This was the last straw.
We have spent thousands of hours analyzing leaked footage from Wuhan, scientific papers from primary sources, as well as the paper trails left by the medical establishment.
What we have discovered would shock anyone to their core.
First, we will summarize our findings, and then, we will explain them in detail. References will be placed at the end.
COVID-19 is not a viral pneumonia. It is a viral vascular endotheliitis and attacks the lining of blood vessels, particularly the small pulmonary alveolar capillaries, leading to endothelial cell activation and sloughing, coagulopathy, sepsis, pulmonary edema, and ARDS-like symptoms. This is a disease of the blood and blood vessels. The circulatory system. Any pneumonia that it causes is secondary to that.
In severe cases, this leads to sepsis, blood clots, and multiple organ failure, including hypoxic and inflammatory damage to various vital organs, such as the brain, heart, liver, pancreas, kidneys, and intestines.
Some of the most common laboratory findings in COVID-19 are elevated D-dimer, elevated prothrombin time, elevated C-reactive protein, neutrophilia, lymphopenia, hypocalcemia, and hyperferritinemia, essentially matching a profile of coagulopathy and immune system hyperactivation/immune cell exhaustion.
COVID-19 can present as almost anything, due to the wide tropism of SARS-CoV-2 for various tissues in the body’s vital organs. While its most common initial presentation is respiratory illness and flu-like symptoms, it can present as brain inflammation, gastrointestinal disease, or even heart attack or pulmonary embolism.
COVID-19 is more severe in those with specific comorbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. This is because these conditions involve endothelial dysfunction, which renders the circulatory system more susceptible to infection and injury by this particular virus.
The vast majority of COVID-19 cases are mild and do not cause significant disease. In known cases, there is something known as the 80/20 rule, where 80% of cases are mild and 20% are severe or critical. However, this ratio is only correct for known cases, not all infections. The number of actual infections is much, much higher. Consequently, the mortality and morbidity rate is lower. However, COVID-19 spreads very quickly, meaning that there are a significant number of severely-ill and critically-ill patients appearing in a short time frame.
In those who have critical COVID-19-induced sepsis, hypoxia, coagulopathy, and ARDS, the most common treatments are intubation, injected corticosteroids, and blood thinners. This is not the correct treatment for COVID-19. In severe hypoxia, cellular metabolic shifts cause ATP to break down into hypoxanthine, which, upon the reintroduction of oxygen, causes xanthine oxidase to produce tons of highly damaging radicals that attack tissue. This is called ischemia-reperfusion injury, and it’s why the majority of people who go on a ventilator are dying. In the mitochondria, succinate buildup due to sepsis does the same exact thing; when oxygen is reintroduced, it makes superoxide radicals. Make no mistake, intubation will kill people who have COVID-19.
The end-stage of COVID-19 is severe lipid peroxidation, where fats in the body start to “rust” due to damage by oxidative stress. This drives autoimmunity. Oxidized lipids appear as foreign objects to the immune system, which recognizes and forms antibodies against OSEs, or oxidation-specific epitopes. Also, oxidized lipids feed directly into pattern recognition receptors, triggering even more inflammation and summoning even more cells of the innate immune system that release even more destructive enzymes. This is similar to the pathophysiology of Lupus.
COVID-19’s pathology is dominated by extreme oxidative stress and neutrophil respiratory burst, to the point where hemoglobin becomes incapable of carrying oxygen due to heme iron being stripped out of heme by hypochlorous acid. No amount of supplemental oxygen can oxygenate blood that chemically refuses to bind O2.
The breakdown of the pathology is as follows:
SARS-CoV-2 Spike binds to ACE2. Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2 is an enzyme that is part of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, or RAAS. The RAAS is a hormone control system that moderates fluid volume in the body and in the bloodstream (i.e. osmolarity) by controlling salt retention and excretion. This protein, ACE2, is ubiquitous in every part of the body that interfaces with the circulatory system, particularly in vascular endothelial cells and pericytes, brain astrocytes, renal tubules and podocytes, pancreatic islet cells, bile duct and intestinal epithelial cells, and the seminiferous ducts of the testis, all of which SARS-CoV-2 can infect, not just the lungs.
SARS-CoV-2 infects a cell as follows: SARS-CoV-2 Spike undergoes a conformational change where the S1 trimers flip up and extend, locking onto ACE2 bound to the surface of a cell. TMPRSS2, or transmembrane protease serine 2, comes along and cuts off the heads of the Spike, exposing the S2 stalk-shaped subunit inside. The remainder of the Spike undergoes a conformational change that causes it to unfold like an extension ladder, embedding itself in the cell membrane. Then, it folds back upon itself, pulling the viral membrane and the cell membrane together. The two membranes fuse, with the virus’s proteins migrating out onto the surface of the cell. The SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid enters the cell, disgorging its genetic material and beginning the viral replication process, hijacking the cell’s own structures to produce more virus.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike proteins embedded in a cell can actually cause human cells to fuse together, forming syncytia/MGCs (multinuclear giant cells). They also have other pathogenic, harmful effects. SARS-CoV-2’s viroporins, such as its Envelope protein, act as calcium ion channels, introducing calcium into infected cells. The virus suppresses the natural interferon response, resulting in delayed inflammation. SARS-CoV-2 N protein can also directly activate the NLRP3 inflammasome. Also, it suppresses the Nrf2 antioxidant pathway. The suppression of ACE2 by binding with Spike causes a buildup of bradykinin that would otherwise be broken down by ACE2.
This constant calcium influx into the cells results in (or is accompanied by) noticeable hypocalcemia, or low blood calcium, especially in people with Vitamin D deficiencies and pre-existing endothelial dysfunction. Bradykinin upregulates cAMP, cGMP, COX, and Phospholipase C activity. This results in prostaglandin release and vastly increased intracellular calcium signaling, which promotes highly aggressive ROS release and ATP depletion. NADPH oxidase releases superoxide into the extracellular space. Superoxide radicals react with nitric oxide to form peroxynitrite. Peroxynitrite reacts with the tetrahydrobiopterin cofactor needed by endothelial nitric oxide synthase, destroying it and “uncoupling” the enzymes, causing nitric oxide synthase to synthesize more superoxide instead. This proceeds in a positive feedback loop until nitric oxide bioavailability in the circulatory system is depleted.
Dissolved nitric oxide gas produced constantly by eNOS serves many important functions, but it is also antiviral against SARS-like coronaviruses, preventing the palmitoylation of the viral Spike protein and making it harder for it to bind to host receptors. The loss of NO allows the virus to begin replicating with impunity in the body. Those with endothelial dysfunction (i.e. hypertension, diabetes, obesity, old age, African-American race) have redox equilibrium issues to begin with, giving the virus an advantage.
Due to the extreme cytokine release triggered by these processes, the body summons a great deal of neutrophils and monocyte-derived alveolar macrophages to the lungs. Cells of the innate immune system are the first-line defenders against pathogens. They work by engulfing invaders and trying to attack them with enzymes that produce powerful oxidants, like SOD and MPO. Superoxide dismutase takes superoxide and makes hydrogen peroxide, and myeloperoxidase takes hydrogen peroxide and chlorine ions and makes hypochlorous acid, which is many, many times more reactive than sodium hypochlorite bleach.
Neutrophils have a nasty trick. They can also eject these enzymes into the extracellular space, where they will continuously spit out peroxide and bleach into the bloodstream. This is called neutrophil extracellular trap formation, or, when it becomes pathogenic and counterproductive, NETosis. In severe and critical COVID-19, there is actually rather severe NETosis.
Hypochlorous acid building up in the bloodstream begins to bleach the iron out of heme and compete for O2 binding sites. Red blood cells lose the ability to transport oxygen, causing the sufferer to turn blue in the face. Unliganded iron, hydrogen peroxide, and superoxide in the bloodstream undergo the Haber-Weiss and Fenton reactions, producing extremely reactive hydroxyl radicals that violently strip electrons from surrounding fats and DNA, oxidizing them severely.
This condition is not unknown to medical science. The actual name for all of this is acute sepsis.
We know this is happening in COVID-19 because people who have died of the disease have noticeable ferroptosis signatures in their tissues, as well as various other oxidative stress markers such as nitrotyrosine, 4-HNE, and malondialdehyde.
When you intubate someone with this condition, you are setting off a free radical bomb by supplying the cells with O2. It’s a catch-22, because we need oxygen to make Adenosine Triphosphate (that is, to live), but O2 is also the precursor of all these damaging radicals that lead to lipid peroxidation.
The correct treatment for severe COVID-19 related sepsis is non-invasive ventilation, steroids, and antioxidant infusions. Most of the drugs repurposed for COVID-19 that show any benefit whatsoever in rescuing critically-ill COVID-19 patients are antioxidants. N-acetylcysteine, melatonin, fluvoxamine, budesonide, famotidine, cimetidine, and ranitidine are all antioxidants. Indomethacin prevents iron-driven oxidation of arachidonic acid to isoprostanes. There are powerful antioxidants such as apocynin that have not even been tested on COVID-19 patients yet which could defang neutrophils, prevent lipid peroxidation, restore endothelial health, and restore oxygenation to the tissues.
Scientists who know anything about pulmonary neutrophilia, ARDS, and redox biology have known or surmised much of this since March 2020. In April 2020, Swiss scientists confirmed that COVID-19 was a vascular endotheliitis. By late 2020, experts had already concluded that COVID-19 causes a form of viral sepsis. They also know that sepsis can be effectively treated with antioxidants. None of this information is particularly new, and yet, for the most part, it has not been acted upon. Doctors continue to use damaging intubation techniques with high PEEP settings despite high lung compliance and poor oxygenation, killing an untold number of critically ill patients with medical malpractice.
Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19. Not Remdesivir, not Kaletra, not HCQ, and not Ivermectin. The reason for this is simple; for the patients that they have recruited for these studies, such as Oxford’s ludicrous RECOVERY study, the intervention is too late to have any positive effect.
The clinical course of COVID-19 is such that by the time most people seek medical attention for hypoxia, their viral load has already tapered off to almost nothing. If someone is about 10 days post-exposure and has already been symptomatic for five days, there is hardly any virus left in their bodies, only cellular damage and derangement that has initiated a hyperinflammatory response. It is from this group that the clinical trials for antivirals have recruited, pretty much exclusively.
In these trials, they give antivirals to severely ill patients who have no virus in their bodies, only a delayed hyperinflammatory response, and then absurdly claim that antivirals have no utility in treating or preventing COVID-19. These clinical trials do not recruit people who are pre-symptomatic. They do not test pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis.
This is like using a defibrillator to shock only flatline, and then absurdly claiming that defibrillators have no medical utility whatsoever when the patients refuse to rise from the dead. The intervention is too late. These trials for antivirals show systematic, egregious selection bias. They are providing a treatment that is futile to the specific cohort they are enrolling.
India went against the instructions of the WHO and mandated the prophylactic usage of Ivermectin. They have almost completely eradicated COVID-19. The Indian Bar Association of Mumbai has brought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for recommending against the use of Ivermectin.
Ivermectin is not “horse dewormer”. Yes, it is sold in veterinary paste form as a dewormer for animals. It has also been available in pill form for humans for decades, as an antiparasitic drug.
The media have disingenuously claimed that because Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug, it has no utility as an antivirus. This is incorrect. Ivermectin has utility as an antiviral. It blocks importin, preventing nuclear import, effectively inhibiting viral access to cell nuclei. Many drugs currently on the market have multiple modes of action. Ivermectin is one such drug. It is both antiparasitic and antiviral.
In Bangladesh, Ivermectin costs $1.80 for an entire 5-day course. Remdesivir, which is toxic to the liver, costs $3,120 for a 5-day course of the drug. Billions of dollars of utterly useless Remdesivir were sold to our governments on the taxpayer’s dime, and it ended up being totally useless for treating hyperinflammatory COVID-19. The media has hardly even covered this at all.
The opposition to the use of generic Ivermectin is not based in science. It is purely financially and politically-motivated. An effective non-vaccine intervention would jeopardize the rushed FDA approval of patented vaccines and medicines for which the pharmaceutical industry stands to rake in billions upon billions of dollars in sales on an ongoing basis.
The majority of the public are scientifically illiterate and cannot grasp what any of this even means, thanks to a pathetic educational system that has miseducated them. You would be lucky to find 1 in 100 people who have even the faintest clue what any of this actually means.
COVID-19 is airborne. The WHO carried water for China by claiming that the virus was only droplet-borne. Our own CDC absurdly claimed that it was mostly transmitted by fomite-to-face contact, which, given its rapid spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, would have been physically impossible.
The ridiculous belief in fomite-to-face being a primary mode of transmission led to the use of surface disinfection protocols that wasted time, energy, productivity, and disinfectant.
The 6-foot guidelines are absolutely useless. The minimum safe distance to protect oneself from an aerosolized virus is to be 15+ feet away from an infected person, no closer. Realistically, no public transit is safe.
Surgical masks do not protect you from aerosols. The virus is too small and the filter media has too large of gaps to filter it out. They may catch respiratory droplets and keep the virus from being expelled by someone who is sick, but they do not filter a cloud of infectious aerosols if someone were to walk into said cloud.
The minimum level of protection against this virus is quite literally a P100 respirator, a PAPR/CAPR, or a 40mm NATO CBRN respirator, ideally paired with a full-body tyvek or tychem suit, gloves, and booties, with all the holes and gaps taped.
Live SARS-CoV-2 may potentially be detected in sewage outflows, and there may be oral-fecal transmission. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, in the Amoy Gardens incident, hundreds of people were infected by aerosolized fecal matter rising from floor drains in their apartments.
The vaccines for COVID-19 are not sterilizing and do not prevent infection or transmission. They are “leaky” vaccines. This means they remove the evolutionary pressure on the virus to become less lethal. It also means that the vaccinated are perfect carriers. In other words, those who are vaccinated are a threat to the unvaccinated, not the other way around.
All of the COVID-19 vaccines currently in use have undergone minimal testing, with highly accelerated clinical trials. Though they appear to limit severe illness, the long-term safety profile of these vaccines remains unknown.
Some of these so-called “vaccines” utilize an untested new technology that has never been used in vaccines before. Traditional vaccines use weakened or killed virus to stimulate an immune response. The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines do not. They are purported to consist of an intramuscular shot containing a suspension of lipid nanoparticles filled with messenger RNA. The way they generate an immune response is by fusing with cells in a vaccine recipient’s shoulder, undergoing endocytosis, releasing their mRNA cargo into those cells, and then utilizing the ribosomes in those cells to synthesize modified SARS-CoV-2 Spike proteins in-situ.
These modified Spike proteins then migrate to the surface of the cell, where they are anchored in place by a transmembrane domain. The adaptive immune system detects the non-human viral protein being expressed by these cells, and then forms antibodies against that protein. This is purported to confer protection against the virus, by training the adaptive immune system to recognize and produce antibodies against the Spike on the actual virus. The J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines do something similar, but use an adenovirus vector for genetic material delivery instead of a lipid nanoparticle. These vaccines were produced or validated with the aid of fetal cell lines HEK-293 and PER.C6, which people with certain religious convictions may object strongly to.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike is a highly pathogenic protein on its own. It is impossible to overstate the danger presented by introducing this protein into the human body.
It is claimed by vaccine manufacturers that the vaccine remains in cells in the shoulder, and that SARS-CoV-2 Spike produced and expressed by these cells from the vaccine’s genetic material is harmless and inert, thanks to the insertion of prolines in the Spike sequence to stabilize it in the prefusion conformation, preventing the Spike from becoming active and fusing with other cells. However, a pharmacokinetic study from Japan showed that the lipid nanoparticles and mRNA from the Pfizer vaccine did not stay in the shoulder, and in fact bioaccumulated in many different organs, including the reproductive organs and adrenal glands, meaning that modified Spike is being expressed quite literally all over the place. These lipid nanoparticles may trigger anaphylaxis in an unlucky few, but far more concerning is the unregulated expression of Spike in various somatic cell lines far from the injection site and the unknown consequences of that.
Messenger RNA is normally consumed right after it is produced in the body, being translated into a protein by a ribosome. COVID-19 vaccine mRNA is produced outside the body, long before a ribosome translates it. In the meantime, it could accumulate damage if inadequately preserved. When a ribosome attempts to translate a damaged strand of mRNA, it can become stalled. When this happens, the ribosome becomes useless for translating proteins because it now has a piece of mRNA stuck in it, like a lace card in an old punch card reader. The whole thing has to be cleaned up and new ribosomes synthesized to replace it. In cells with low ribosome turnover, like nerve cells, this can lead to reduced protein synthesis, cytopathic effects, and neuropathies.
Certain proteins, including SARS-CoV-2 Spike, have proteolytic cleavage sites that are basically like little dotted lines that say “cut here”, which attract a living organism’s own proteases (essentially, molecular scissors) to cut them. There is a possibility that S1 may be proteolytically cleaved from S2, causing active S1 to float away into the bloodstream while leaving the S2 “stalk” embedded in the membrane of the cell that expressed the protein.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike has a Superantigenic region (SAg), which may promote extreme inflammation.
Anti-Spike antibodies were found in one study to function as autoantibodies and attack the body’s own cells. Those who have been immunized with COVID-19 vaccines have developed blood clots, myocarditis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, and multiple sclerosis flares, indicating that the vaccine promotes autoimmune reactions against healthy tissue.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike does not only bind to ACE2. It was suspected to have regions that bind to basigin, integrins, neuropilin-1, and bacterial lipopolysaccharides as well. SARS-CoV-2 Spike, on its own, can potentially bind any of these things and act as a ligand for them, triggering unspecified and likely highly inflammatory cellular activity.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike contains an unusual PRRA insert that forms a furin cleavage site. Furin is a ubiquitous human protease, making this an ideal property for the Spike to have, giving it a high degree of cell tropism. No wild-type SARS-like coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 possess this feature, making it highly suspicious, and perhaps a sign of human tampering.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike has a prion-like domain that enhances its infectiousness.
The Spike S1 RBD may bind to heparin-binding proteins and promote amyloid aggregation. In humans, this could lead to Parkinson’s, Lewy Body Dementia, premature Alzheimer’s, or various other neurodegenerative diseases. This is very concerning because SARS-CoV-2 S1 is capable of injuring and penetrating the blood-brain barrier and entering the brain. It is also capable of increasing the permeability of the blood-brain barrier to other molecules.
SARS-CoV-2, like other betacoronaviruses, may have Dengue-like ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement of disease. For those who aren’t aware, some viruses, including betacoronaviruses, have a feature called ADE. There is also something called Original Antigenic Sin, which is the observation that the body prefers to produce antibodies based on previously-encountered strains of a virus over newly-encountered ones.
In ADE, antibodies from a previous infection become non-neutralizing due to mutations in the virus’s proteins. These non-neutralizing antibodies then act as trojan horses, allowing live, active virus to be pulled into macrophages through their Fc receptor pathways, allowing the virus to infect immune cells that it would not have been able to infect before. This has been known to happen with Dengue Fever; when someone gets sick with Dengue, recovers, and then contracts a different strain, they can get very, very ill.
If someone is vaccinated with mRNA based on the Spike from the initial Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2, and then they become infected with a future, mutated strain of the virus, they may become severely ill. In other words, it is possible for vaccines to sensitize someone to disease.
There is a precedent for this in recent history. Sanofi’s Dengvaxia vaccine for Dengue failed because it caused immune sensitization in people whose immune systems were Dengue-naive.
In mice immunized against SARS-CoV and challenged with the virus, a close relative of SARS-CoV-2, they developed immune sensitization, Th2 immunopathology, and eosinophil infiltration in their lungs.
We have been told that SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines cannot be integrated into the human genome, because messenger RNA cannot be turned back into DNA. This is false. There are elements in human cells called LINE-1 retrotransposons, which can indeed integrate mRNA into a human genome by endogenous reverse transcription. Because the mRNA used in the vaccines is stabilized, it hangs around in cells longer, increasing the chances for this to happen. If the gene for SARS-CoV-2 Spike is integrated into a portion of the genome that is not silent and actually expresses a protein, it is possible that people who take this vaccine may continuously express SARS-CoV-2 Spike from their somatic cells for the rest of their lives.
By inoculating people with a vaccine that causes their bodies to produce Spike in-situ, they are being inoculated with a pathogenic protein. A toxin that may cause long-term inflammation, heart problems, and a raised risk of cancers. In the long-term, it may also potentially lead to premature neurodegenerative disease.
Absolutely nobody should be compelled to take this vaccine under any circumstances, and in actual fact, the vaccination campaign must be stopped immediately.
The vaccine and the virus were made by the same people.
In 2014, there was a moratorium on SARS gain-of-function research that lasted until 2017. This research was not halted. Instead, it was outsourced, with the federal grants being laundered through NGOs.
Ralph Baric is a virologist and SARS expert at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina. This is who Anthony Fauci was referring to when he insisted, before Congress, that if any gain-of-function research was being conducted, it was being conducted in North Carolina.
This was a lie. Anthony Fauci lied before Congress. A felony.
Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli are colleagues and have co-written papers together. Ralph Baric mentored Shi Zhengli in his gain-of-function manipulation techniques, particularly serial passage, which results in a virus that appears as if it originated naturally. In other words, deniable bioweapons. Serial passage in humanized hACE2 mice may have produced something like SARS-CoV-2.
The funding for the gain-of-function research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology came from Peter Daszak. Peter Daszak runs an NGO called EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth Alliance received millions of dollars in grant money from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (that is, Anthony Fauci), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (part of the US Department of Defense), and the United States Agency for International Development. NIH/NIAID contributed a few million dollars, and DTRA and USAID each contributed tens of millions of dollars towards this research. Altogether, it was over a hundred million dollars.
EcoHealth Alliance subcontracted these grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab in China with a very questionable safety record and poorly trained staff, so that they could conduct gain-of-function research, not in their fancy P4 lab, but in a level-2 lab where technicians wore nothing more sophisticated than perhaps a hairnet, latex gloves, and a surgical mask, instead of the bubble suits used when working with dangerous viruses. Chinese scientists in Wuhan reported being routinely bitten and urinated on by laboratory animals. Why anyone would outsource this dangerous and delicate work to the People’s Republic of China, a country infamous for industrial accidents and massive explosions that have claimed hundreds of lives, is completely beyond me, unless the aim was to start a pandemic on purpose.
In November of 2019, three technicians at the Wuhan Institute of Virology developed symptoms consistent with a flu-like illness. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric knew at once what had happened, because back channels exist between this laboratory and our scientists and officials.
December 12th, 2019, Ralph Baric signed a Material Transfer Agreement (essentially, an NDA) to receive Coronavirus mRNA vaccine-related materials co-owned by Moderna and NIH. It wasn’t until a whole month later, on January 11th, 2020, that China allegedly sent us the sequence to what would become known as SARS-CoV-2. Moderna claims, rather absurdly, that they developed a working vaccine from this sequence in under 48 hours.
Stephane Bancel, the current CEO of Moderna, was formerly the CEO of bioMerieux, a French multinational corporation specializing in medical diagnostic tech, founded by one Alain Merieux. Alain Merieux was one of the individuals who was instrumental in the construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab.
The sequence given as the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, is not a real virus. It is a forgery. It was made by entering a gene sequence by hand into a database, to create a cover story for the existence of SARS-CoV-2, which is very likely a gain-of-function chimera produced at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was either leaked by accident or intentionally released.
The animal reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 has never been found.
This is not a conspiracy “theory”. It is an actual criminal conspiracy, in which people connected to the development of Moderna’s mRNA-1273 are directly connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their gain-of-function research by very few degrees of separation, if any. The paper trail is well-established.
The lab-leak theory has been suppressed because pulling that thread leads one to inevitably conclude that there is enough circumstantial evidence to link Moderna, the NIH, the WIV, and both the vaccine and the virus’s creation together. In a sane country, this would have immediately led to the world’s biggest RICO and mass murder case. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Shi Zhengli, and Stephane Bancel, and their accomplices, would have been indicted and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Instead, billions of our tax dollars were awarded to the perpetrators.
The FBI raided Allure Medical in Shelby Township north of Detroit for billing insurance for “fraudulent COVID-19 cures”. The treatment they were using? Intravenous Vitamin C. An antioxidant. Which, as described above, is an entirely valid treatment for COVID-19-induced sepsis, and indeed, is now part of the MATH+ protocol advanced by Dr. Paul E. Marik.
The FDA banned ranitidine (Zantac) due to supposed NDMA (N-nitrosodimethylamine) contamination. Ranitidine is not only an H2 blocker used as antacid, but also has a powerful antioxidant effect, scavenging hydroxyl radicals. This gives it utility in treating COVID-19.
The FDA also attempted to take N-acetylcysteine, a harmless amino acid supplement and antioxidant, off the shelves, compelling Amazon to remove it from their online storefront.
This leaves us with a chilling question: did the FDA knowingly suppress antioxidants useful for treating COVID-19 sepsis as part of a criminal conspiracy against the American public?
The establishment is cooperating with, and facilitating, the worst criminals in human history, and are actively suppressing non-vaccine treatments and therapies in order to compel us to inject these criminals’ products into our bodies. This is absolutely unacceptable.
This section deals with some more speculative aspects of the pandemic and the medical and scientific establishment’s reaction to it, as well as the disturbing links between scientists involved in vaccine research and scientists whose work involved merging nanotechnology with living cells.
On June 9th, 2020, Charles Lieber, a Harvard nanotechnology researcher with decades of experience, was indicted by the DOJ for fraud. Charles Lieber received millions of dollars in grant money from the US Department of Defense, specifically the military think tanks DARPA, AFOSR, and ONR, as well as NIH and MITRE. His specialty is the use of silicon nanowires in lieu of patch clamp electrodes to monitor and modulate intracellular activity, something he has been working on at Harvard for the past twenty years. He was claimed to have been working on silicon nanowire batteries in China, but none of his colleagues can recall him ever having worked on battery technology in his life; all of his research deals with bionanotechnology, or the blending of nanotech with living cells.
The indictment was over his collaboration with the Wuhan University of Technology. He had double-dipped, against the terms of his DOD grants, and taken money from the PRC’s Thousand Talents plan, a program which the Chinese government uses to bribe Western scientists into sharing proprietary R&D information that can be exploited by the PLA for strategic advantage.
Charles Lieber’s own papers describe the use of silicon nanowires for brain-computer interfaces, or “neural lace” technology. His papers describe how neurons can endocytose whole silicon nanowires or parts of them, monitoring and even modulating neuronal activity.
Charles Lieber was a colleague of Robert Langer. Together, along with Daniel S. Kohane, they worked on a paper describing artificial tissue scaffolds that could be implanted in a human heart to monitor its activity remotely.
Robert Langer, an MIT alumnus and expert in nanotech drug delivery, is one of the co-founders of Moderna. His net worth is now $5.1 billion USD thanks to Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine sales.
Both Charles Lieber and Robert Langer’s bibliographies describe, essentially, techniques for human enhancement, i.e. transhumanism. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum and the architect behind the so-called “Great Reset”, has long spoken of the “blending of biology and machinery” in his books.
Since these revelations, it has come to the attention of independent researchers that the COVID-19 vaccines may contain reduced graphene oxide nanoparticles. Japanese researchers have also found unexplained contaminants in COVID-19 vaccines.
Graphene oxide is an anxiolytic. It has been shown to reduce the anxiety of laboratory mice when injected into their brains. Indeed, given SARS-CoV-2 Spike’s propensity to compromise the blood-brain barrier and increase its permeability, it is the perfect protein for preparing brain tissue for extravasation of nanoparticles from the bloodstream and into the brain. Graphene is also highly conductive and, in some circumstances, paramagnetic.
In 2013, under the Obama administration, DARPA launched the BRAIN Initiative; BRAIN is an acronym for Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies®. This program involves the development of brain-computer interface technologies for the military, particularly non-invasive, injectable systems that cause minimal damage to brain tissue when removed. Supposedly, this technology would be used for healing wounded soldiers with traumatic brain injuries, the direct brain control of prosthetic limbs, and even new abilities such as controlling drones with one’s mind.
Various methods have been proposed for achieving this, including optogenetics, magnetogenetics, ultrasound, implanted electrodes, and transcranial electromagnetic stimulation. In all instances, the goal is to obtain read or read-write capability over neurons, either by stimulating and probing them, or by rendering them especially sensitive to stimulation and probing.
However, the notion of the widespread use of BCI technology, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink device, raises many concerns over privacy and personal autonomy. Reading from neurons is problematic enough on its own. Wireless brain-computer interfaces may interact with current or future wireless GSM infrastructure, creating neurological data security concerns. A hacker or other malicious actor may compromise such networks to obtain people’s brain data, and then exploit it for nefarious purposes.
However, a device capable of writing to human neurons, not just reading from them, presents another, even more serious set of ethical concerns. A BCI that is capable of altering the contents of one’s mind for innocuous purposes, such as projecting a heads-up display onto their brain’s visual center or sending audio into one’s auditory cortex, would also theoretically be capable of altering mood and personality, or perhaps even subjugating someone’s very will, rendering them utterly obedient to authority. This technology would be a tyrant’s wet dream. Imagine soldiers who would shoot their own countrymen without hesitation, or helpless serfs who are satisfied to live in literal dog kennels.
BCIs could be used to unscrupulously alter perceptions of basic things such as emotions and values, changing people’s thresholds of satiety, happiness, anger, disgust, and so forth. This is not inconsequential. Someone’s entire regime of behaviors could be altered by a BCI, including such things as suppressing their appetite or desire for virtually anything on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Anything is possible when you have direct access to someone’s brain and its contents. Someone who is obese could be made to feel disgust at the sight of food. Someone who is involuntarily celibate could have their libido disabled so they don’t even desire sex to begin with. Someone who is racist could be forced to feel delight over cohabiting with people of other races. Someone who is violent could be forced to be meek and submissive. These things might sound good to you if you are a tyrant, but to normal people, the idea of personal autonomy being overridden to such a degree is appalling.
For the wealthy, neural laces would be an unequaled boon, giving them the opportunity to enhance their intelligence with neuroprosthetics (i.e. an “exocortex”), and to deliver irresistible commands directly into the minds of their BCI-augmented servants, even physically or sexually abusive commands that they would normally refuse.
If the vaccine is a method to surreptitiously introduce an injectable BCI into millions of people without their knowledge or consent, then what we are witnessing is the rise of a tyrannical regime unlike anything ever seen before on the face of this planet, one that fully intends to strip every man, woman, and child of our free will.
Our flaws are what make us human. A utopia arrived at by removing people’s free will is not a utopia at all. It is a monomaniacal nightmare. Furthermore, the people who rule over us are Dark Triad types who cannot be trusted with such power. Imagine being beaten and sexually assaulted by a wealthy and powerful psychopath and being forced to smile and laugh over it because your neural lace gives you no choice but to obey your master.
The Elites are forging ahead with this technology without giving people any room to question the social or ethical ramifications, or to establish regulatory frameworks that ensure that our personal agency and autonomy will not be overridden by these devices. They do this because they secretly dream of a future where they can treat you worse than an animal and you cannot even fight back. If this evil plan is allowed to continue, it will spell the end of humanity as we know it.
The current pandemic was produced and perpetuated by the establishment, through the use of a virus engineered in a PLA-connected Chinese biowarfare laboratory, with the aid of American taxpayer dollars and French expertise.
This research was conducted under the absolutely ridiculous euphemism of “gain-of-function” research, which is supposedly carried out in order to determine which viruses have the highest potential for zoonotic spillover and preemptively vaccinate or guard against them.
Gain-of-function/gain-of-threat research, a.k.a. “Dual-Use Research of Concern”, or DURC, is bioweapon research by another, friendlier-sounding name, simply to avoid the taboo of calling it what it actually is. It has always been bioweapon research. The people who are conducting this research fully understand that they are taking wild pathogens that are not infectious in humans and making them more infectious, often taking grants from military think tanks encouraging them to do so.
These virologists conducting this type of research are enemies of their fellow man, like pyromaniac firefighters. GOF research has never protected anyone from any pandemic. In fact, it has now started one, meaning its utility for preventing pandemics is actually negative. It should have been banned globally, and the lunatics performing it should have been put in straitjackets long ago.
Either through a leak or an intentional release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a deadly SARS strain is now endemic across the globe, after the WHO and CDC and public officials first downplayed the risks, and then intentionally incited a panic and lockdowns that jeopardized people’s health and their livelihoods.
This was then used by the utterly depraved and psychopathic aristocratic class who rule over us as an excuse to coerce people into accepting an injected poison which may be a depopulation agent, a mind control/pacification agent in the form of injectable “smart dust”, or both in one. They believe they can get away with this by weaponizing the social stigma of vaccine refusal. They are incorrect.
Their motives are clear and obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. These megalomaniacs have raided the pension funds of the free world. Wall Street is insolvent and has had an ongoing liquidity crisis since the end of 2019. The aim now is to exert total, full-spectrum physical, mental, and financial control over humanity before we realize just how badly we’ve been extorted by these maniacs.
The pandemic and its response served multiple purposes for the Elite:
Any one of these things would constitute a vicious rape of Western society. Taken together, they beggar belief; they are a complete inversion of our most treasured values.
What is the purpose of all of this? One can only speculate as to the perpetrators’ motives, however, we have some theories.
The Elites are trying to pull up the ladder, erase upward mobility for large segments of the population, cull political opponents and other “undesirables”, and put the remainder of humanity on a tight leash, rationing our access to certain goods and services that they have deemed “high-impact”, such as automobile use, tourism, meat consumption, and so on. Naturally, they will continue to have their own luxuries, as part of a strict caste system akin to feudalism.
Why are they doing this? Simple. The Elites are Neo-Malthusians and believe that we are overpopulated and that resource depletion will collapse civilization in a matter of a few short decades. They are not necessarily incorrect in this belief. We are overpopulated, and we are consuming too many resources. However, orchestrating such a gruesome and murderous power grab in response to a looming crisis demonstrates that they have nothing but the utmost contempt for their fellow man.
To those who are participating in this disgusting farce without any understanding of what they are doing, we have one word for you. Stop. You are causing irreparable harm to your country and to your fellow citizens.
To those who may be reading this warning and have full knowledge and understanding of what they are doing and how it will unjustly harm millions of innocent people, we have a few more words.
Damn you to hell. You will not destroy America and the Free World, and you will not have your New World Order. We will make certain of that.
See References for "Spartacus" Anonymous COVID-9 whistleblower document
COVID-19 is not a viral pneumonia — it is a viral vascular endotheliitis:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30937-5/fulltext
https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/41/32/3038/5901158
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.202152744
COVID-19 is not just a respiratory disease — it can precipitate multiple organ failure, including hypoxic and inflammatory damage to various vital organs, such as the brain, heart, liver, pancreas, kidneys, and intestines:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01693-6
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-hidden-long-term-cognitive-effects-of-covid-2020100821133
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0390-x
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embj.2020106230
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776538
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32921216/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41575-021-00426-4
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32553666/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23886-3
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34081912/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41581-021-00452-0
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7438210/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92740-9
Some of the most common laboratory findings in COVID-19:
https://www.uptodate.com/contents/covid-19-clinical-features
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7426219/
COVID-19 can present as almost anything:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0968-3
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.00526/full
COVID-19 is more severe in those with conditions that involve endothelial dysfunction, such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2772071
https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/cells/cells-10-00933/article_deploy/cells-10-00933.pdf
The vast majority of COVID-19 cases are mild and do not cause significant disease:
https://www.webmd.com/lung/covid-recovery-overview#1
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/7/9/ofaa286/5875595
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33289900/
In those who have critical COVID-19-induced sepsis, hypoxia, coagulopathy, and ARDS, the most common treatments are intubation, injected corticosteroids, and blood thinners like heparin, which often precipitate harmful hemorrhages:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7548860/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7448713/
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2103417
The majority of people who go on a ventilator are dying due to COVID-19 mimicking the physiology of ischemia-reperfusion injury with prolonged transient hypoxia and ischemia, leading directly to the formation of damaging reactive oxygen species:
https://www.journalofsurgicalresearch.com/article/S0022-4804(14)00176-0/fulltext
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13909
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625011/
https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201401-0168CP
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18974366/
The end-stage of COVID-19 is severe lipid peroxidation, where fats in the body start to “rust” due to damage by oxidative stress:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7768996/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7357498/
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ars.2021.0017
Oxidized lipids appear as foreign objects to the immune system, which recognizes and forms antibodies against OSEs, or oxidation-specific epitopes:
https://ard.bmj.com/content/annrheumdis/early/2020/08/04/annrheumdis-2020-218145.full.pdf
https://ard.bmj.com/content/80/9/1236
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7256550/
https://www.hss.edu/conditions_top-ten-series-antiphospholipid-syndrome-coronavirus-covid-19.asp
In COVID-19, neutrophil degranulation and NETosis in the bloodstream drives severe oxidative damage; hemoglobin becomes incapable of carrying oxygen due to heme iron being stripped out of heme by hypochlorous acid:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7757048/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7436665/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41418-021-00805-z
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221249262030052X
SARS-CoV-2 Spike binds to ACE2. Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2 is an enzyme that is part of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, or RAAS. The RAAS is a hormone control system that moderates fluid volume and blood pressure in the body and in the bloodstream by controlling sodium/potassium retention and excretion and vascular tone:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470410/
https://www.merckmanuals.com/home/multimedia/figure/cvs_regulating_blood_pressure_renin
This protein, ACE2, is ubiquitous in every part of the body that interfaces with the circulatory system, particularly in vascular endothelial cells and pericytes, brain astrocytes, renal tubules and podocytes,
pancreatic islet cells, bile duct and intestinal epithelial cells, and the seminiferous ducts of the testis, all of which SARS-CoV-2 can infect:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7167720/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.594495/full
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2020.573095/full
SARS-CoV-2 infects a cell as follows:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41401-020-0485-4
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abb2507
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1931312820306211
SARS-CoV-2 Spike proteins embedded in a cell can actually cause adjacent human cells to fuse together, forming syncytia/MGCs:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41418-021-00782-3
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33051876/
SARS-CoV-2’s viroporins, such as its Envelope protein, act as calcium ion channels, introducing calcium into infected cells:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-021-00519-4
https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-019-1182-0
The virus suppresses the natural interferon response, resulting in delayed inflammation:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s12276-021-00592-0
https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/viruses/viruses-12-01433/article_deploy/viruses-12-01433.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8310780/
SARS-CoV-2 N protein can also directly activate the NLRP3 inflammasome:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25015-6
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2020.01021/full
SARS-CoV-2 suppresses the Nrf2 antioxidant pathway, reducing the body’s own endogenous antioxidant enzyme activity:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18764-3
https://ctajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13601-020-00362-7
https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/ijms/ijms-22-07963/article_deploy/ijms-22-07963.pdf
The suppression of ACE2 by binding with Spike causes a buildup of bradykinin that would otherwise be broken down by ACE2:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7834250/
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/is-a-bradykinin-storm-brewing-in-covid-19–67876
This constant calcium influx into the cells results in (or is accompanied by) noticeable hypocalcemia, or low blood calcium:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7292572/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8041474/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871402121000059
Bradykinin upregulates cAMP, cGMP, COX, and Phospholipase C activity. This results in prostaglandin release and vastly increased intracellular calcium signaling, which promotes highly aggressive ROS release and ATP depletion:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S089158490700319X?via%3Dihub
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1218972/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2156053/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/bradykinin-b2-receptor-agonist
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/bradykinin
NADPH oxidase releases superoxide into the extracellular space:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4556774/
https://www.pnas.org/content/110/21/8744
Superoxide radicals react with nitric oxide to form peroxynitrite:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8944624/
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/23/5839
Peroxynitrite reacts with the tetrahydrobiopterin cofactor needed by endothelial nitric oxide synthase, destroying it and “uncoupling” the eNOS enzymes, causing nitric oxide synthase to synthesize more superoxide instead (this means that every process that upregulates NOS activity now produces superoxide instead of nitric oxide):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24353182/
https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/article/73/1/8/316487
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/bi9016632
This proceeds in a positive feedback loop until nitric oxide bioavailability in the circulatory system is depleted:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7276137/
Dissolved nitric oxide gas produced constantly by eNOS serves many important functions, but it is also antiviral against SARS-like coronaviruses, preventing the palmitoylation of the viral Spike protein and making it harder for it to bind to host receptors:
https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(20)34397-X/fulltext
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111989/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7754882/
The loss of NO allows the virus to begin replicating with impunity in the body (clearly, the virus has an evolutionary incentive to induce oxidative stress to destroy nitric oxide):
Those with endothelial dysfunction (i.e. hypertension, diabetes, obesity, old age, African-American race) have redox equilibrium issues to begin with, giving the virus an advantage:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-00454-7
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2020.605908/full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7430889/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19004510/
Due to the extreme cytokine release triggered by these processes, the body summons a great deal of neutrophils and monocyte-derived alveolar macrophages to the lungs:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.652470/full
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.720109/full
Phagocytic cells of the innate immune system are the first-line defenders against pathogens. They work by engulfing invaders and trying to attack them with enzymes that produce powerful oxidants, like SOD and MPO:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2012.00174/full
https://jlb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1189/jlb.0809549
Superoxide dismutase takes superoxide and makes hydrogen peroxide, and myeloperoxidase takes hydrogen peroxide and chlorine ions and makes hypochlorous acid, which is many, many times more reactive than sodium hypochlorite bleach:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/superoxide-dismutase
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/myeloperoxidase
In severe and critical COVID-19, there is actually rather severe NETosis:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.708302/full
https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/138999
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7184981/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7488868/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221249262030052X
Hypochlorous acid building up in the bloodstream begins to bleach the iron out of heme and compete for O2 binding sites. Red blood cells lose the ability to transport oxygen, causing the sufferer to turn blue in the face:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7757048/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0120737
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3863623/
Unliganded iron, hydrogen peroxide, and superoxide in the bloodstream undergo the Haber-Weiss and Fenton reactions, producing extremely reactive hydroxyl radicals that violently strip electrons from surrounding fats and DNA, oxidizing them severely:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332221000135
https://sites.kowsarpub.com/ans/articles/60038.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0300483X00002316?via%3Dihub
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/fenton-reaction
This condition is not unknown to medical science. The actual name for all of this is acute sepsis (but without the traditional hallmarks of sepsis, like shock):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4056356/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7886971/
https://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/10.2217/fmb-2020-0312
We know this is happening in COVID-19 because people who have died of the disease have noticeable ferroptosis signatures in their tissues, as well as various other oxidative stress markers such as nitrotyrosine, 4-HNE, and malondialdehyde:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ehf2.12958
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7264936/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213231721001300
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8180845/
When you intubate someone with this condition, you are setting off a free radical bomb by supplying the cells with O2. It’s a catch-22, because we need oxygen to make Adenosine Triphosphate (that is, to live), but O2 is also the precursor of all these damaging radicals that lead to lipid peroxidation:
https://www.nature.com/articles/pr2009174
The correct treatment for severe COVID-19 related sepsis is non-invasive ventilation, steroids, and antioxidant infusions:
https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/medicina/medicina-56-00619/article_deploy/medicina-56-00619-v2.pdf
Most of the drugs repurposed for COVID-19 that show any benefit whatsoever in rescuing critically-ill COVID-19 patients are antioxidants. N-acetylcysteine, melatonin, fluvoxamine, budesonide, famotidine, cimetidine, and ranitidine are all antioxidants:
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/omcl/2018/6581970/
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/62672
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6708076/
https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/88623
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000629529390218L?via%3Dihub
Indomethacin prevents iron-driven oxidation of arachidonic acid to isoprostanes:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0161463079900442
There are powerful antioxidants such as apocynin that have not even been tested on COVID-19 patients yet which could defang neutrophils, prevent lipid peroxidation, restore endothelial health, and restore oxygenation to the tissues:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10787-020-00715-5
Scientists who know anything about pulmonary neutrophilia, ARDS, and redox biology have known or surmised much of this since March 2020:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/NADPH_oxidase_Covid-19_Oxygen_treatment
In April 2020, Swiss scientists confirmed that COVID-19 was a systemic vascular endotheliitis:
https://www.usz.ch/en/covid-19-also-a-systemic-endotheliitis/
By late 2020, experts had already concluded that COVID-19 causes a form of viral sepsis:
https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/clinical-care/expert-severe-covid-19-illness-viral-sepsis
They also know that sepsis can be effectively treated with antioxidants:
https://jtd.amegroups.com/article/view/34870/html
None of this information is particularly new, and yet, for the most part, it has not been acted upon. Doctors continue to use damaging intubation techniques with high PEEP settings despite high lung compliance and poor oxygenation, killing an untold number of critically ill patients with medical malpractice:
https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13054-020-03049-4
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765302
Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19. Not Remdesivir, not Kaletra, not HCQ, and not Ivermectin. The reason for this is simple; for the patients that they have enrolled in these studies, such as Oxford’s ludicrous RECOVERY study, the intervention is too late to have any positive effect (i.e. these RCTs are designed in such a way that the use of antivirals is futile, therefore, these studies are deceptive and unethical by their very nature):
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/6/963/htm
The clinical course of COVID-19 is such that by the time most people seek medical attention for hypoxia, their viral load has already tapered off to almost nothing. If someone is about 10 days post-exposure and has already been symptomatic for five days, there is hardly any virus left in their bodies, only cellular damage and derangement that has initiated a hyperinflammatory response:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332220306867
It is from this group that the clinical trials for antivirals have recruited, pretty much exclusively (i.e. they do not test prophylaxis/early treatment, only changes to the mean duration of hospitalization for those already hospitalized):
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2023184
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34318930/
India went against the instructions of the WHO and mandated the prophylactic usage of Ivermectin. They have almost completely eradicated COVID-19:
The Indian Bar Association of Mumbai has brought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for recommending against the use of Ivermectin:
https://indianbarassociation.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IBA-PRESS-RELEASE-MAY-26-2021.pdf
Ivermectin is not “horse dewormer”. Yes, it is sold in veterinary paste form as a dewormer for animals. It has also been available in pill form for humans for decades, as an antiparasitic drug:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043740/
The media have disingenuously claimed that because Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug, it has no utility as an antivirus. This is incorrect. Ivermectin has utility as an antiviral. It blocks importin, preventing nuclear import, effectively inhibiting viral access to cell nuclei. Many drugs currently on the market have multiple modes of action. Ivermectin is one such drug. It is both antiparasitic and antiviral:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166354219307211?via%3Dihub
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/
In Bangladesh, Ivermectin costs $1.80 for an entire 5-day course:
Remdesivir, which is toxic to the liver, costs $3,120 for a 5-day course of the drug:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7386240/
Billions of dollars of utterly useless Remdesivir were sold to our governments on the taxpayer’s dime, and it ended up being totally useless for treating hyperinflammatory COVID-19:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/01/31/remdesivir-covid-coronavirus/?sh=7e6034e666c2
COVID-19 is airborne. The WHO carried water for China by claiming that the virus was only droplet-borne. Our own CDC absurdly claimed that it was mostly transmitted by fomite-to-face contact, which, given its rapid spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, would have been physically impossible:
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00869-2/fulltext
The ridiculous belief in fomite-to-face being a primary mode of transmission led to the use of surface disinfection protocols that wasted time, energy, productivity, and disinfectant:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4
The 6-foot guidelines are absolutely useless. The minimum safe distance to protect oneself from an aerosolized virus is to be 15+ feet away from an infected person, no closer. Realistically, no public transit is safe:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.03.20167395v1
Surgical masks do not protect you from aerosols. The virus is too small and the filter media has too large of gaps to filter it out. They may catch respiratory droplets and keep the virus from being expelled by someone who is sick, but they do not filter a cloud of infectious aerosols if someone were to walk into said cloud:
https://ajicjournal.org/retrieve/pii/S0196655305801439
The minimum level of protection against this virus is quite literally a P100 respirator, a PAPR/CAPR, or a 40mm NATO CBRN respirator, ideally paired with a full-body tyvek or tychem suit, gloves, and booties, with all the holes and gaps taped (in a pinch, surgical masks can be modified or worn a specific way to increase filtration):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7409952/
Live SARS-CoV-2 may potentially be detected in sewage outflows, and there may be oral-fecal transmission:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720325936
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249568
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0684-z
During the SARS outbreak in 2003, in the Amoy Gardens incident, hundreds of people were infected by aerosolized fecal matter rising from floor drains in their apartments (there is some valid concern that COVID-19 may also spread the same way, given its similarities to SARS):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539564/
https://www.neha.org/sites/default/files/jeh/JEH5.06-Feature-Environmental-Transmission-of-SARS.pdf
https://www.cleanlink.com/news/article/COVID-19-Could-Spread-Through-Dry-Floor-Drains–25600
The vaccines for COVID-19 are not sterilizing and do not prevent infection or transmission. They are “leaky” vaccines. This means they remove the evolutionary pressure on the virus to become less lethal. It also means that the vaccinated are perfect carriers. In other words, those who are vaccinated are a threat to the unvaccinated, not the other way around:
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0730-mmwr-covid-19.html
All of the COVID-19 vaccines currently in use have undergone minimal testing, with highly accelerated clinical trials. Though they appear to limit severe illness, the long-term safety profile of these vaccines remains unknown:
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/accelerated-covid-19-vaccine-clinical-95853/
https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/were-the-covid-19-vaccines-rushed
Some of these so-called “vaccines” utilize an untested new technology that has never been used in vaccines before. Traditional vaccines use weakened or killed virus to stimulate an immune response. The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines do not. They are purported to consist of an intramuscular shot containing a suspension of lipid nanoparticles filled with messenger RNA:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5439223/
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-delivery/Without-lipid-shells-mRNA-vaccines/99/i8
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/therapy/mrnavaccines/
The way they generate an immune response is by fusing with cells in a vaccine recipient’s shoulder, undergoing endocytosis, releasing their mRNA cargo into those cells, and then utilizing the ribosomes in those cells to synthesize modified SARS-CoV-2 Spike proteins in-situ:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2622-0
These vaccines were produced or validated with the aid of fetal cell lines HEK-293 and PER.C6, which people with certain religious convictions may object strongly to:
SARS-CoV-2 Spike is a highly pathogenic protein on its own. It is impossible to overstate the danger presented by introducing this protein into the human body:
It is claimed by vaccine manufacturers that the vaccine remains in cells in the shoulder, and that SARS-CoV-2 Spike produced and expressed by these cells from the vaccine’s genetic material is harmless and inert, thanks to the insertion of prolines in the Spike sequence to stabilize it in the prefusion conformation, preventing the Spike from becoming active and fusing with other cells:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20321-x
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behind-COVID-19/98/i38
However, a pharmacokinetic study from Japan showed that the lipid nanoparticles and mRNA from the Pfizer vaccine did not stay in the shoulder, and in fact bioaccumulated in many different organs, including the reproductive organs and adrenal glands, meaning that modified Spike is being expressed quite literally all over the place:
https://files.catbox.moe/0vwcmj.pdf
These lipid nanoparticles may trigger anaphylaxis in an unlucky few:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8441754/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7862013/
Messenger RNA is normally consumed right after it is produced in the body, being translated into a protein by a ribosome. COVID-19 vaccine mRNA is produced outside the body, long before a ribosome translates it. In the meantime, it could accumulate damage if inadequately preserved. When a ribosome attempts to translate a damaged strand of mRNA, it can become stalled:
https://elifesciences.org/articles/61984
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2018.00431/full
Certain proteins, including SARS-CoV-2 Spike, have proteolytic cleavage sites that are basically like little dotted lines that say “cut here”, which attract a living organism’s own proteases (essentially, molecular scissors) to cut them. There is a possibility that S1 may be proteolytically cleaved from S2, causing active S1 to float away into the bloodstream while leaving the S2 “stalk” embedded in the membrane of the cell that expressed the protein:
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab465/6279075
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00908-w
https://www.life-science-alliance.org/content/3/9/e202000786
SARS-CoV-2 Spike has a Superantigenic region (SAg), which may promote extreme inflammation:
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/41/25254
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-021-00502-5
Anti-Spike antibodies were found in one study to function as autoantibodies and attack the body’s own cells:
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-612103/v2
Those who have been immunized with COVID-19 vaccines have developed blood clots, myocarditis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, and multiple sclerosis flares, indicating that the vaccine promotes autoimmune reactions against healthy tissue:
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-july-13-2021
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccine/94061?xid=nl\_mpt\_DHE\_2021-08-17
SARS-CoV-2 Spike does not only bind to ACE2. It was suspected to have regions that bind to basigin, integrins, neuropilin-1, and bacterial lipopolysaccharides as well:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00958-0
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/3/992/pdf
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acschemneuro.0c00619
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abd3072
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0253347
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7799037/
SARS-CoV-2 Spike, on its own, can potentially bind any of these things and act as a ligand for them, triggering unspecified and likely highly inflammatory cellular activity:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7827936/
SARS-CoV-2 Spike contains an unusual PRRA insert that forms a furin cleavage site. Furin is a ubiquitous human protease, making this an ideal property for the Spike to have, giving it a high degree of cell tropism. No wild-type SARS-like coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 possess this feature, making it highly suspicious, and perhaps a sign of human tampering:
https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/JVI.01751-20
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/
SARS-CoV-2 Spike has a prion-like domain that enhances its infectiousness:
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202003.0422/v1
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0023664
The Spike S1 RBD may bind to heparin-binding proteins and promote amyloid aggregation. In humans, this could lead to Parkinson’s, Lewy Body Dementia, premature Alzheimer’s, or various other neurodegenerative diseases:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7988450/
This is very concerning because SARS-CoV-2 S1 is capable of penetrating the blood-brain barrier and entering the brain. It is capable of increasing the permeability of the blood-brain barrier to itself and other molecules by injuring and disrupting it directly:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-00771-8
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-021-00719-9
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33053430/
SARS-CoV-2, like other betacoronaviruses, may have Dengue-like ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement of disease:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7943455/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7454712/
https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)00392-3/fulltext
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/08/study-why-so-many-vaccinated-people-are-getting-sick/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220307311
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31826992/
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.22.457114v1
There is something called Original Antigenic Sin, which is the observation that the body prefers to produce antibodies based on previously-encountered strains of a virus over newly-encountered ones:
https://www.jimmunol.org/content/202/2/335
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin
In ADE, antibodies from a previous infection become non-neutralizing due to mutations in the virus’s proteins. These non-neutralizing antibodies then act as trojan horses, allowing live, active virus to be pulled into macrophages through their Fc receptor pathways:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement
https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/training/cme/ccm/page57857.html
It is possible for vaccines to sensitize someone to disease. There is a precedent for this in recent history. Sanofi’s Dengvaxia vaccine for Dengue failed because it caused immune sensitization in people whose immune systems were Dengue-naive:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2020.572681/full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3739535/
In mice immunized against SARS-CoV and challenged with the virus, a close relative of SARS-CoV-2, they developed immune sensitization, Th2 immunopathology, and eosinophil infiltration in their lungs:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0035421
We have been told that SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines cannot be integrated into the human genome, because messenger RNA cannot be turned back into DNA. This is false. There are elements in human cells called LINE-1 retrotransposons, which can indeed integrate mRNA into a human genome by endogenous reverse transcription:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33330870/
The vaccine and the virus were made by the same people. In 2014, there was a moratorium on SARS gain-of-function research that lasted until 2017:
https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/documents/gain-of-function.pdf
Ralph Baric is a virologist and SARS expert at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina. This is who Anthony Fauci was referring to when he insisted, before Congress, that if any gain-of-function research was being conducted, it was being conducted in North Carolina:
Ralph Baric: On the Front Lines of Coronavirus for Three Decades
Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli are colleagues and have co-written papers together:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985/
Ralph Baric mentored Shi Zhengli in his gain-of-function manipulation techniques, particularly serial passage, which results in a virus that appears as if it originated naturally. In other words, deniable bioweapons. Serial passage in humanized hACE2 mice may have produced something like SARS-CoV-2:
https://www.paul.senate.gov/newsweek-op-ed-congress-must-pursue-answers-about-origin-covid-19
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
The funding for the gain-of-function research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology came from Peter Daszak. Peter Daszak runs an NGO called EcoHealth Alliance:
https://peterdaszak.com/interceptdocs.pdf
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-function-research/
EcoHealth Alliance received millions of dollars in grant money from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (that is, Anthony Fauci), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (part of the US Department of Defense), and the United States Agency for International Development. NIH/NIAID contributed a few million dollars, and DTRA and USAID each contributed tens of millions of dollars towards this research. Altogether, it was over a hundred million dollars:
EcoHealth Alliance subcontracted these grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab in China with a very questionable safety record and poorly-trained staff, so that they could conduct gain-of-function research:
https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/pentagon-gave-millions-to-ecohealth-alliance-for-wuhan-lab/
Chinese scientists in Wuhan reported being routinely bitten and urinated on by laboratory animals:
In November of 2019, three technicians at the Wuhan Institute of Virology developed symptoms consistent with a flu-like illness:
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210524/wuhan-lab-researchers-illness
December 12th, 2019, Ralph Baric signed a Material Transfer Agreement (essentially, an NDA) to receive Coronavirus mRNA vaccine-related materials co-owned by Moderna and NIH:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6935295/NIH-Moderna-Confidential-Agreements.pdf
It wasn’t until a whole month later, on January 11th, 2020, that China allegedly sent us the sequence to what would become known as SARS-CoV-2:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200131114748.htm
Moderna claims, rather absurdly, that they developed a working vaccine from this sequence in under 48 hours:
https://www.businessinsider.com/moderna-designed-coronavirus-vaccine-in-2-days-2020-11
Moderna designed its coronavirus vaccine in 2 days — here’s how
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html
Stephane Bancel, the current CEO of Moderna, was formerly the CEO of bioMerieux, a French multinational corporation specializing in medical diagnostic tech, founded by one Alain Merieux:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane\_Bancel
https://www.himss.org/global-conference/speaker-stephane-bancel
Alain Merieux was one of the individuals who was instrumental in the construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-04-wuhan-lab-core-virus-controversy.html
http://english.whiov.cas.cn/ne/201712/t20171212_187624.html
The sequence given as the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, is not a real virus. It is a forgery:
https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html
RaTG13 – the Undeniable Evidence That the Wuhan Coronavirus Is Man-Made
https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/scientific-history-of-ratg13/
The animal reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 has never been found:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/26/1021263/bat-covid-coronavirus-cause-origin-wuhan/
The FBI raided Allure Medical in Shelby Township north of Detroit for billing insurance for “fraudulent COVID-19 cures”. The treatment they were using? Intravenous Vitamin C. An antioxidant. Which, as described above, is an entirely valid treatment for COVID-19-induced sepsis, and indeed, is now part of the MATH+ protocol advanced by Dr. Paul E. Marik:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31978969/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0883944119316107?via%3Dihub
The FDA banned ranitidine (Zantac) due to supposed NDMA (N-nitrosodimethylamine) contamination:
Ranitidine is not only an H2 blocker used as antacid, but also has a powerful antioxidant effect, scavenging hydroxyl radicals. This gives it utility in treating COVID-19:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1472-8206.2009.00810.x
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1347861319342203
The FDA also attempted to take N-acetylcysteine, a harmless amino acid supplement and antioxidant, off the shelves, compelling Amazon to remove it from their online storefront:
https://www.naturalproductsinsider.com/regulatory/us-senator-npa-press-fda-nac-supplements
https://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/Article/2021/05/11/CRN-This-is-not-the-final-word-on-NAC
https://www.naturalproductsinsider.com/regulatory/amazon-confirms-plans-removing-nac-supplements
On June 9th, 2020, Charles Lieber, a Harvard nanotechnology researcher with decades of experience, was indicted by the DOJ for fraud:
Charles Lieber received millions of dollars in grant money from the US Department of Defense, specifically the military think tanks DARPA, AFOSR, and ONR, as well as NIH and MITRE:
His specialty is the use of silicon nanowires in lieu of patch clamp electrodes to monitor and modulate intracellular activity, something he has been working on at Harvard for the past twenty years:
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2011/01/virus-sized-transistors
He was claimed to have been working on silicon nanowire batteries in China, but none of his colleagues can recall him ever having worked on battery technology in his life; all of his research deals with bionanotechnology, or the blending of nanotech with living cells:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/07/harvard-researchers-present-nanowire-devices-update/
The indictment was over his collaboration with the Wuhan University of Technology. He had double-dipped, against the terms of his DOD grants, and taken money from the PRC’s Thousand Talents plan, a program which the Chinese government uses to bribe Western scientists into sharing proprietary R&D information that can be exploited by the PLA for strategic advantage (this risk has been known for a very long time):
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/harvard-university-professor-indicted-false-statement-charges
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00291-2
https://www.research.psu.edu/sites/default/files/FBI_Risks_To_Academia.pdf
https://www.drdavidzweig.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Zweig-Kang-TTP.pdf
Charles Lieber’s own papers describe the use of silicon nanowires for brain-computer interfaces, or “neural lace” technology. His papers describe how neurons can endocytose whole silicon nanowires or parts of them, monitoring and even modulating neuronal activity:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6531316/
https://spectrum.ieee.org/human-cells-eat-nanowires
Charles Lieber was a colleague of Robert Langer. Together, along with Daniel S. Kohane, they worked on a paper describing artificial tissue scaffolds that could be implanted in a human heart to monitor its activity remotely:
Robert Langer, an MIT alumnus and expert in nanotech drug delivery, is one of the co-founders of Moderna:
https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-board-directors
His net worth is now $5.1 billion USD thanks to Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine sales:
Both Charles Lieber and Robert Langer’s bibliographies describe, essentially, techniques for human enhancement, i.e. transhumanism:
Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum and the architect behind the so-called “Great Reset”, has long spoken of the “blending of biology and machinery” in his books:
Since these revelations, it has come to the attention of independent researchers that the COVID-19 vaccines (and even some surgical masks) may contain reduced graphene oxide nanoparticles:
https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/graphene-oxide-the-vector-for-covid-19-democide/
https://www.orwell.city/2021/06/vaccination-vial-analysis-explained.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41428-020-0350-9
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6141029/
Japanese researchers have also found unexplained contaminants in COVID-19 vaccines:
Graphene oxide is an anxiolytic. It has been shown to reduce the anxiety of laboratory mice when injected into their brains:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142961221001058
https://graphene-flagship.eu/graphene/news/soothing-the-symptoms-of-anxiety-with-graphene-oxide/
Indeed, given SARS-CoV-2 Spike’s propensity to compromise the blood-brain barrier and increase its permeability, it is the perfect protein for preparing brain tissue for extravasation of nanoparticles from the bloodstream and into the brain:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsanm.8b02056
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168365916303236
Graphene is also highly conductive and, in some circumstances, paramagnetic:
https://www.livescience.com/graphene-hides-rare-magnetism.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0008622319305809
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6474003/
BRAIN is an acronym for Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies®. This program involves the development of brain-computer interface technologies for the military, particularly non-invasive, injectable systems that cause minimal damage to brain tissue when removed:
https://www.darpa.mil/program/our-research/darpa-and-the-brain-initiative
Various methods have been proposed for achieving this, including optogenetics, magnetogenetics, ultrasound, implanted electrodes, and transcranial electromagnetic stimulation. In all instances, the goal is to obtain read or read-write capability over neurons:
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-05-20
Wireless brain-computer interfaces may interact with current or future wireless GSM infrastructure, creating neurological data security concerns:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.00112/full
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/44252
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-03-31/braingate-wireless
A BCI that is capable of altering the contents of one’s mind would theoretically be capable of altering mood and personality, or perhaps even subjugating someone’s very will, rendering them utterly obedient to authority:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-012-9298-7
Mind reading and brain computer interface technology: the future is coming, fast
BCIs could be used to unscrupulously alter perceptions of basic things such as emotions and values, changing people’s thresholds of satiety, happiness, anger, disgust, and so forth:
http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2010/07/11518.html
Brain-machine interfaces may be used to study and regulate mood
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-019-0488-y
For the wealthy, neural laces would be an unequaled boon, giving them the opportunity to enhance their intelligence with neuroprosthetics (i.e. an “exocortex”):
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6893912
The people who rule over us are Dark Triad types who cannot be trusted with such power:
https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/babiak2010.pdf
https://fortune.com/2021/06/06/corporate-psychopaths-business-leadership-csr/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
• Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine Becomes First To Win FDA’s Full Approval (USAT)
• Does The FDA Think These Data Justify Approval Of A Covid-19 Vaccine? (BMJ)
• Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Carry 251 Times Viral Load (McCullough)
• FDA Ignores Both Science and Law (Denninger)
• Pfizer and Moderna Lost The Clinical Trial Control Group (CTH)
• Everything You Need to Know About Informed Consent (21CW)
• Statistical Fraud in the FDA Vaccine Approval Process (JoshM)
• The More Masks Fail, The More We Need Them (Ian)
• Pentagon To Mandate Covid-19 Vaccinations For All Military Personnel (RT)
• NYC Orders 150,000 Teachers & School Staff To Get Vaccinated (ZH)
• Truckers Threaten To Shut Down Australia Due to Covid Insanity (OI)
• Keeping Fear Alive (Tierney)
It’s been an insane 24 hours. You’d think a full approval of a vaccine would be a straightforward event, but the FDA just made things more, and extremely, complicated. First, a few bits and pieces from what they issued:
“COMIRNATY is the first COVID-19 vaccine to be granted FDA approval ”
also:
“These may not be all the possible side effects of the vaccine. Serious and unexpected side effects may occur. THE VACCINE IS STILL BEING STUDIED IN CLINICAL TRIALS.”
On August 23, 2021, FDA approved the biologics license application (BLA) submitted by BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH for COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older…
…the EUA will remain in place for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for the previously-authorized indication and uses, and to authorize use of COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) under this EUA for certain uses that are not included in the approved BLA…
COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) is the same formulation as the PfizerBioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and can be used interchangeably with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to provide the COVID-19 vaccination series…
C. There is no adequate, approved, and available [see Note 9] alternative to the emergency use of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID 19 Vaccine to prevent COVID-19.
[Note 9:] Although COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) is approved to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 16 years of age and older, there is not sufficient approved vaccine available for distribution to this population in its entirety at the time of reissuance of this EUA. Additionally, there are no products that are approved to prevent COVID-19 in individuals age 12 through 15, or that are approved to provide an additional dose to the immunocompromised population described in this EUA.
Conditions Related to Printed Matter, Advertising, and Promotion
X. All descriptive printed matter, advertising, and promotional material, relating to the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID 19 Vaccine shall be consistent with the authorized labeling, as well as the terms set forth in this EUA, and meet the requirements set forth in section 502(a) and (n) of the FD&C Act and FDA implementing regulations.
Y. All descriptive printed matter, advertising, and promotional material relating to the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID 19 Vaccine clearly and conspicuously shall state that:
” This product has not been approved or licensed by FDA, but has been authorized for emergency use by FDA, under an EUA to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) for use in individuals 12 years of age and older; and
” The emergency use of this product is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of the medical product under Section 564(b)(1) of the FD&C Act unless the declaration is terminated or authorization revoked sooner.
The original documents. Just check the dates. What happened to those?
Two high vaccination rates: Iceland Full Vaxxed 74%, Israel 62%
“The Pfizer-BioNTech emergency use authorization was based on clinical trials involving about 37,000 people.”
Well, not really, because they stopped those trials.
• Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine Becomes First To Win FDA’s Full Approval (USAT)
Eight months after authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in the USA, the Food and Drug Administration issued its full stamp of approval. Now that the companies’ detailed, so-called biologics license application has been granted, it’s likely that vaccination will be required by many companies, schools and other entities. The FDA decision clears the way for the companies to market their vaccine, which is not permitted without full licensure. And it may launch a race for booster shots, allowing doctors to prescribe extra Pfizer-BioNTech shots “off label” to anyone they think should get one. The FDA confirmed late last year through a more streamlined evaluation process that the vaccine, from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its partner, German startup BioNTech, was safe, effective and could be reliably produced.
The review of the 340,000-page license application was completed in just 97 days by FDA staff working “night and day,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which approves vaccines “We completed this in about 40% of the normal clock time for a submission of this magnitude,” he said. The license application was three times the size of the emergency use authorization submission, which weighed in at 110,000 pages. The companies have manufactured more than 2 billion doses, more than 200 million of which were administered in the USA, the most of any of the three vaccines allowed for use in the country. The full license includes four more months of efficacy and safety data, confirming trial results and detailing manufacturing processes.
The Pfizer-BioNTech emergency use authorization was based on clinical trials involving about 37,000 people. The full approval was based on study results involving more than 44,000 people followed for six months. The license applies only to those 16 and over, but the vaccine is allowed for those 12 to 15 under the previous authorization. “Based on the longer-term follow-up data that we submitted, today’s approval for those aged 16 and over affirms the efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine at a time when it is urgently needed,” Pfizer chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. “I am hopeful this approval will help increase confidence in our vaccine, as vaccination remains the best tool we have to help protect lives and achieve herd immunity.”
Not sure it’s a great idea for the FDA to have pissed off Peter Doshi, senior editor at The BMJ, one of the most reputable magazines around. Much more at the original (link).
• Does The FDA Think These Data Justify Approval Of A Covid-19 Vaccine? (BMJ)
On 28 July 2021, Pfizer and BioNTech posted updated results for their ongoing phase 3 covid-19 vaccine trial. The preprint came almost a year to the day after the historical trial commenced, and nearly four months since the companies announced vaccine efficacy estimates “up to six months.” But you won’t find 10 month follow-up data here. While the preprint is new, the results it contains aren’t particularly up to date. In fact, the paper is based on the same data cut-off date (13 March 2021) as the 1 April press release, and its topline efficacy result is identical: 91.3% (95% CI 89.0 to 93.2) vaccine efficacy against symptomatic covid-19 through “up to six months of follow-up.” The 20 page preprint matters because it represents the most detailed public account of the pivotal trial data Pfizer submitted in pursuit of the world’s first “full approval” of a coronavirus vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration. It deserves careful scrutiny.
[..] The elephant named “waning immunity”…“Waning immunity” is a known problem for influenza vaccines, with some studies showing near zero effectiveness after just three months, meaning a vaccine taken early may ultimately provide no protection by the time “flu season” arrives some months later. If vaccine efficacy wanes over time, the crucial question becomes what level of effectiveness will the vaccine provide when a person is actually exposed to the virus? Unlike covid vaccines, influenza vaccine performance has always been judged over a full season, not a couple months. And so the recent reports from Israel’s Ministry of Health caught my eye. In early July, they reported that efficacy against infection and symptomatic disease “fell to 64%.” By late July it had fallen to 39% where Delta is the dominant strain. This is very low. For context, the FDA’s expectation is of “at least 50%” efficacy for any approvable vaccine.
_
Delta may not be responsible Enter Pfizer’s preprint. As an RCT reporting “up to six months of follow-up,” it is notable that evidence of waning immunity was already visible in the data by the 13 March 2021 data cut-off… And it’s hard to imagine how the Delta variant could play a real role here, for 77% of trial participants were from the United States, where Delta was not established until months after data cut-off. Waning efficacy has the potential to be far more than a minor inconvenience; it can dramatically change the risk-benefit calculus.
The “six month” preprint based on the 7% of trial participants who remained blinded at six months Despite the reference to “six month safety and efficacy” in the preprint’s title, the paper only reports on vaccine efficacy “up to six months,” but not from six months. This is not semantics, as it turns out only 7% of trial participants actually reached six months of blinded follow-up (“8% of BNT162b2 recipients and 6% of placebo recipients had ≥6 months follow-up post-dose 2.”) So despite this preprint appearing a year after the trial began, it provides no data on vaccine efficacy past six months, which is the period Israel says vaccine efficacy has dropped to 39%. It is hard to imagine that the <10% of trial participants who remained blinded at six months (which presumably further dwindled after 13 March 2021) could constitute a reliable or valid sample to produce further findings.
Severe disease And on preventing death from covid-19, there are too few data to draw conclusions—a total of three covid-19 related deaths (one on vaccine, two on placebo). There were 29 total deaths during blinded follow-up (15 in the vaccine arm; 14 in placebo). The crucial question, however, is whether the waning efficacy seen in the primary endpoint data also applies to the vaccine’s efficacy against severe disease. Unfortunately, Pfizer’s new preprint does not report the results in a way that allows for evaluating this question.
_
Approval imminent without data transparency, or even an advisory committee meeting? …But here we are, with FDA reportedly on the verge of granting a marketing license 13 months into the still ongoing, two year pivotal trial, with no reported data past 13 March 2021, unclear efficacy after six months due to unblinding, evidence of waning protection irrespective of the Delta variant, and limited reporting of safety data. (The preprint reports “decreased appetite, lethargy, asthenia, malaise, night sweats, and hyperhidrosis were new adverse events attributable to BNT162b2 not previously identified in earlier reports,” but provides no data tables showing the frequency of these, or other, adverse events.) It’s not helping matters that FDA now says it won’t convene its advisory committee to discuss the data ahead of approving Pfizer’s vaccine. (Last August, to address vaccine hesitancy, the agency had “committed to use an advisory committee composed of independent experts to ensure deliberations about authorization or licensure are transparent for the public.”)
“..the jab allows vaccinated individuals to carry unusually high viral loads without becoming ill at first, potentially transforming them into presymptomatic superspreaders.”
• Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Carry 251 Times Viral Load (McCullough)
A groundbreaking preprint paper by the prestigious Oxford University Clinical Research Group, published Aug. 10 in The Lancet, includes alarming findings devastating to the COVID vaccine rollout. The study found vaccinated individuals carry 251 times the load of COVID-19 viruses in their nostrils compared to the unvaccinated. While moderating the symptoms of infection, the jab allows vaccinated individuals to carry unusually high viral loads without becoming ill at first, potentially transforming them into presymptomatic superspreaders. This phenomenon may be the source of the shocking post-vaccination surges in heavily vaccinated populations globally. The paper’s authors, Chau et al, demonstrated widespread vaccine failure and transmission under tightly controlled circumstances in a hospital lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam.
The scientists studied healthcare workers who were unable to leave the hospital for two weeks. The data showed that fully vaccinated workers — about two months after injection with the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine (AZD1222) — acquired, carried and presumably transmitted the Delta variant to their vaccinated colleagues. They almost certainly also passed the Delta infection to susceptible unvaccinated people, including their patients. Sequencing of strains confirmed the workers transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to one another. = This is consistent with the observations in the U.S. from Farinholt and colleagues, and congruent with comments by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conceding COVID-19 vaccines have failed to stop transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
_
On Feb. 11, the World Health Organization indicated the AZD1222 vaccine efficacy of 63.09% against the development of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. The conclusions of the Chau paper support the warnings by leading medical experts that the partial, non-sterilizing immunity from the three notoriously “leaky” COVID-19 vaccines allow carriage of 251 times the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 as compared to samples from the pre-vaccination era in 2020. Thus, we have a key piece to the puzzle explaining why the Delta outbreak is so formidable — fully vaccinated are participating as COVID-19 patients and acting as powerful Typhoid Mary-style super-spreaders of the infection.
_
Vaccinated individuals are blasting out concentrated viral explosions into their communities and fueling new COVID surges. Vaccinated healthcare workers are almost certainly infecting their coworkers and patients, causing horrendous collateral damage. Continued vaccination will only make this problem worse, particularly among frontline doctors and nurses workers who are caring for vulnerable patients. Health systems should drop vaccine mandates immediately, take stock of COVID-19 recovered workers who are robustly immune to Delta and consider the ramifications of their current vaccinated healthcare workers as potential threats to high risk patients and coworkers.
“..prior infection and recovery produces durable and stable immunity in essentially everyone who has a competent immune system..”
• FDA Ignores Both Science and Law (Denninger)
So the FDA has “fully approved” the Pfizer jab for Covid. In doing so standing alone they have broken the law and thus have irrevocably destroyed their authority and any reason for anyone to ever do anything based on them ever again. Let me explain. Under black letter law an EUA is illegal if there is an alternative that is considered safe, effective and available. This was the reason the FDA did not (for 18 months!) run the studies and evaluate them on other early-intervention drugs for Covid-19. We all know what they are. I’m living proof they work too, as are millions of others worldwide. But, more-importantly, this “full approval” voids all other vaccine EUAs for Covid-19. That is, under the law the Moderna and J&J instantly became illegal to offer or use within the United States.
The makers can apply for full authorization, of course, but the EUAs are void as of this morning and under black letter law cannot be administered to anyone in the United States as they are now unlicensed and unlawful products in human beings until and unless they are given full approval themselves. No medical provider can offer or administer any other than the Pfizer Covid-19 shot in the United States as of the moment of that approval. You can bet the law will be ignored; note MRNAs stock price this morning. It should have instantly been cut in half. In addition the FDA broke the law itself when it issued the “approval.” The law requires a full hearing and the data from the full set of trials; the trials are not capable of being completed until early 2022 by the original submissions and they deliberately did not hold the hearing. This is a black letter violation of the law as well, but nobody cares.
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As for me, I don’t give a crap. I’ve been infected, 98% certain it was Delta (because that’s all that’s circulating right now in the US where the index case I got infected by came from, and I know who it was) and am recovered. I hit it with meds immediately and I’m fine. I know, scientifically, it was Covid-19 and not some other virus as I now have IgG antibodies and did not for the previous 18 months which I know factually as I repeatedly tested myself. There is thus exactly zero medical benefit I can derive from the jabs. I will walk without fear into a Covid-19 ICU unit right now without any PPE on whatsoever.
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I have no fear of this virus because as with every other viral infection of note including those that are much more-dangerous than Covid, such as measles, prior infection and recovery produces durable and stable immunity in essentially everyone who has a competent immune system, and I do. Those of you who trust the jabs to be equally effective to an active infection and recovery are free to come with me. I will bet my life that I’m sterile immune to the virus as a result of said infection and recovery. Are you willing to place the same bet, given the many known failures to protect by the shot, including Jesse Jackson and his wife, both of whom are in the hospital with Covid-19 despite being vaccinated in a very public spectacle in January of this year? There you have it.
“..the FDA will grant approval on results that were intentionally constructed to produce only one outcome.”
• Pfizer and Moderna Lost The Clinical Trial Control Group (CTH)
According to the New York Times and multiple media outlets, Pfizer is expected to get full FDA approval today. “The move would make it the first Covid vaccine to go from emergency use authorization to full FDA approval.” With that in mind, it is worth a reminder that both Pfizer and Moderna stopped the clinical trials the FDA was using in their review: The Moderna and Pfizer vaccine tests were conducted, as customary, with a control group; a group within the trial who were given a placebo and not the test vaccine. However, during the trial -and after the untested vaccines were given emergency use authorization- the vaccine companies conducting the trial decided to break protocol and notify the control group they were not vaccinated. Almost all the control group were then given the vaccine.
Purposefully dissolving the placebo group violates the scientific purpose to test whether the vaccine has any efficacy; any actual benefit and/or safety issues. Without a control group there is nothing to compare the vaccinated group against. According to NPR, the doctors lost the control group in the Johnson County Clinicial Trial (Lexena, Kansas) on purpose: “(Via NPR) […] “Dr. Carlos Fierro, who runs the study there, says every participant was called back after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccine. “During that visit we discussed the options, which included staying in the study without the vaccine,” he says, “and amazingly there were people — a couple of people — who chose that.” He suspects those individuals got spooked by rumors about the vaccine. But everybody else who had the placebo shot went ahead and got the actual vaccine. So now Fierro has essentially no comparison group left for the ongoing study. “It’s a loss from a scientific standpoint, but given the circumstances I think it’s the right thing to do,” he says.
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People signing up for these studies were not promised special treatment, but once the FDA authorized the vaccines, their developers decided to offer the shots. Just so we are clear, the final FDA authorization and approval for the vaccines are based on the outcome of these trials. As noted in the example above, the control group was intentionally lost under the auspices of “the right thing to do”, so there is no way for the efficacy, effectiveness or safety of the vaccine itself to be measured. There’s no one left within the control group, of a statistically valid value, to give an adequate comparison of outcomes for vaxxed -vs- non-vaxxed. This is nuts. That NPR article is one to bookmark when people start claiming the vaccination is effective. How can the vaccine not be considered effective when there is no group of non-vaccinated people to compare the results to?
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Good grief, the entire healthcare system is operating on a massive hive mindset where science, and the scientific method, is thrown out the window in favor of ideological outcomes and self-fulfilling prophecies. The fact that the researchers and doctors, apparently under the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies that have a vested financial interest in the vaccine outcome, lost the control group on purpose is alarming. Of course, Big Pharma will promote the vaccine as beneficial, and the controlled media will promote that message with a complete disconnect from the clinical trial details, and the FDA will grant approval on results that were intentionally constructed to produce only one outcome.
Another video on informed consent is way below. Also from Canada.
• Everything You Need to Know About Informed Consent (21CW)
In Canada, informed consent to medical interventions – including vaccines – is the law. The same is true in the US, UK, EU, Australia, and New Zealand. But these governments, along with corrupt drug regulators, are now running roughshod over what were once sacrosanct laws prohibiting misleading and coercive medical procedures, and instead have unleashed a multibillion dollar media campaign of fear and mass-panic designed to pave-over the right to informed consent.
“Vaccine A is quite safe, and vaccine B is extremely dangerous. And yet the formula for PRR will produce the same result for vaccine A and B!”
• Statistical Fraud in the FDA Vaccine Approval Process (JoshM)
There are several systems for reporting vaccine reactions, including deaths, but the only one available to the public is VAERS. It is incomplete, because it relies on voluntary reporting, there is no incentive to report to VAERS, and it is a cumbersome process. We may compare reports of the COVID vaccines to past years, when there were also hundreds of millions of vaccinations, including annual flu shots and childhood vaccine schedules. The comparison is dramatic. There were more than twice as many deaths related to the COVID vaccines this year as the sum total of all vaccine deaths in the 30-year history of VAERS. Given this safety record, how is there any possibility of approval? Here is where the statistical fraud comes in. [I am grateful to have been alerted to this situation by Matthew Crawford]
The safety criterion they have chosen is an obscure computation called PRR for Proportional Reporting Ratio. As the name implies, it is based on RATIOS of different event types and is utterly blind to the ABSOLUTE RATE of such events. PRR measures the distribution of different kinds of adverse events, e.g. blood clots, heart attacks, and deaths. If those ratios are severely out of line with the great variety of vaccine reactions in the past, PRR would detect that. For example, if the new vaccines caused an extraordinary risk of myocarditis, but everything else was low, then PRR would flag that. But if myocarditis was just one risk among many that have been reported from past vaccines, then PRR would not pick that up.
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The real scandal is that PRR is blind to the absolute risk numbers. PRR is defined in such a way as to look for unusual PATTERNS of adverse events, but it is completely insensitive to unusual RATES of adverse events. Of course, it is the rates and not the patterns that are of primary concern, and the PRR is designed NOT to reflect that.
For example, suppose we have 2 vaccines:
Vaccine A has 1 reported death per million vaccinations, 3 reported heart attacks per million, and 20 reported headaches per million.
Vaccine B has 1 reported death per hundred vaccinations, 3 reported heart attacks per hundred, and 20 reported headaches per hundred.
Vaccine A is quite safe, and vaccine B is extremely dangerous. And yet the formula for PRR will produce the same result for vaccine A and B!
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Clearly, PRR is not an appropriate criterion for evaluating safety of any particular vaccine. Someone has arranged to cook the books.
“Regardless of the anti-science, despicable pieces regularly appearing in those outlets, such as suggesting that actually, masking kids is good for their learning ability.”
• The More Masks Fail, The More We Need Them (Ian)
The push for masking, as always, boils down to a combination of incompetence, cowardice, fear, and political pressure. Experts enjoy the ability to be seen as “doing something,” and must never appear to be “anti-mask,” since it would immediately discredit them in the eyes of their peers, the greater scientific community and their ideological compatriots. Politicians want the “get out of jail free” card that masking provides; the opportunity to blame others for poor results. The “it would have worked if you’d all just listened to me” line of defense. The media simply outsources all critical thinking to like-minded ideologues and refuses to acknowledge or take seriously the few brave experts willing to tell the truth.
And as a result, corporations, whose decision makers are exclusively influenced by the same media sources, like The New York Times, follow right along. Regardless of the anti-science, despicable pieces regularly appearing in those outlets, such as suggesting that actually, masking kids is good for their learning ability. But everywhere you look, the cultural groupthink is dramatically failing. Counties and states following the CDC’s new guidance are not succeeding, and those ignoring it are faring no worse. Locations that never removed masks, such as Hawaii and Japan, are seeing their highest numbers of the pandemic, but manage to escape the vitriol and hatred leveled at Ron DeSantis because they’re following orders and implementing what the hive mind of acceptable opinion mandates.
The dramatic, predictable failure resulting from the CDC’s science-ending reversal would, in a sane world, be cause for intellectually honest experts to revisit their guidance and accept that their efforts to “control” infections is always doomed to fail. But naturally, we’re seeing the exact opposite. The more masks fail, the more we need them.
Best VIDEO of 2020 pic.twitter.com/y3iK1ZoBFM
— Nicolas Teterel ∞/21 (@CryptojournalFr) August 19, 2021
One third has said they won’t comply. Maybe this is where the real fight will happen.
• Pentagon To Mandate Covid-19 Vaccinations For All Military Personnel (RT)
The Pentagon has said it will update its own guidance on Covid-19 vaccinations, mandating the jab for all military personnel, following the US drug regulator’s decision to fully approve the Pfizer vaccine. Speaking on Monday, US Department of Defense spokesman John Kirby said the military was aware of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to fully approve the Pfizer vaccine for use in people over 16, and was preparing to issue updated guidance to all service personnel. “We’re going to move forward making that vaccine mandatory,” Kirby told reporters. “We’re preparing the guidance to the force right now,” he stated, adding that the exact timetable for mandating the jab was still being worked out. Earlier on Monday, the FDA announced that the Pfizer jab had been fully approved for use in the US.
The shot has been administered under emergency-use authorization since mid-December 2020. The FDA added that the Pfizer vaccine will retain its emergency-use authorization for use in adolescents and for those requiring a third dose due to other health conditions. Earlier in August, the Washington Post reported that around 65% of active-duty military personnel were fully vaccinated, compared to around 59% of eligible Americans. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has previously encouraged all military personnel to get vaccinated against Covid. “To defend this nation, we need a healthy and ready force. I strongly encourage all DoD military and civilian personnel – as well as contractor personnel – to get vaccinated now and for military service members to not wait for the mandate,” Austin stated earlier in August.
“I do not expect a staffing shortage,” Porter said.”
• NYC Orders 150,000 Teachers & School Staff To Get Vaccinated (ZH)
As the NYT explained, education staffers are the first group of city workers to face a full vaccine mandate. The announcement also opens the door to a broader vaccine mandate of city workers, which the mayor said Monday the city was considering. Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio issued a mandate for city workers that allowed for those unvaccinated to submit for weekly coronavirus testing. “We know this is going to help ensure that everyone is safe,” Mr. de Blasio said during a news conference on Monday, adding that city schools had extremely low virus transmission last year. The mandate, the mayor said, will help the city “build on that success.”
While the mayor’s push is likely to prove unpopular with many rank-and-file members; the city’s teacher’s unions, and unions representing other DoE staff, have signed off on the new mandate (though they’re still negotiating about what might happen to workers who continue to refuse). UFT President Michael Mulgrew acknowledged that the city had the legal right to impose the mandate, but he told reporters details were still being hashed out. The city announced last month that any teacher who failed to comply with both the vaccination requirement, and the required weekly testing for those who didn’t get the jab, would be suspended without pay.
“While the city is asserting its legal authority to establish this mandate, there are many implementation details, including provisions for medical exceptions, that by law must be negotiated with the U.F.T. and other unions, and if necessary, resolved by arbitration,” Mr. Mulgrew said in a statement. Mayor de Blasio has insisted that even if negotiations stall, the mandate will still be implemented. Meisha Porter, the chancellor of NYC’s schools, said she expects a high level of compliance from school staff on the mandate. “I do not expect a staffing shortage,” Porter said.
No clue how serious this is, but it’s a good idea.
• Truckers Threaten To Shut Down Australia Due to Covid Insanity (OI)
Australia seems to be in the grips of COVID-induced insanity as people across the country are vigorously protesting against the lockdown measures imposed to curb the spread of the renewed bout of coronavirus outbreak. After violent ruckus witnessed on the streets of major Australian cities, including Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and dogs shot dead by a rural council in New South Wales to prevent volunteers from travelling during Covid restrictions, Australian truck drivers have threatened to shut down major highways across the country as a mark of protest against Covid lockdowns. Social media websites are awash with a video of a truck driver who said in his video that truck drivers are ‘planning to shut down the country’ to ‘remove the s*** government’.
He further warned the Aussies that their demonstration could end up choking supply chains and urged them to stock up on groceries to get them through the next couple of weeks. “It’s on. The truckies are doing it. The truckies are going to shut down the country,’ the man says in the video. What that means is you need to go shopping now, get what you can for the next week or two, load your fridge, freezers,” the truck driver could be seen saying in the video.
“The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor..”
• Keeping Fear Alive (Tierney)
Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end. So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust.
Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with. But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.
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The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world. The hypocrisy was deftly captured in a tweet by Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.”
Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. In fact, the current mortality rate among American children with Covid is lower than it was last year—and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with Covid is 99.995 percent. But instead of emphasizing these reassuring statistics, public-health officials like Jerome Adams, the surgeon general, keep looking for new ways to scare parents and children.
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“I’m an anesthesiologist,” he tweeted last weekend. “And a dad. And I can assure you in both capacities that your child will be far more comfortable if they’re in a face mask, than on a ventilator. If you’re making a choice on behalf of a child, please choose based on their comfort, vs yours.” He offered no new evidence that children are at heightened risk from the virus, much less any evidence that a mask would make any difference, but he did make sure to include a gruesome photograph of a child on a ventilator. It was a new low in public-health demagoguery, but unfortunately not so different from the fearmongering of other officials, the press, and social-media platforms. They lament that a minority of the public remains reluctant to get vaccinated without recognizing that their own tactics are a likely a chief cause of this reluctance. They have been misleading people for so long—and censoring challenges to their misinformation—that it’s no wonder polls show that an overwhelming majority of unvaccinated Americans say they don’t trust Fauci or the CDC.
An astute journalist I know once described carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a "delay-and-fail strategy" devised by the fossil fuel industry. The industry's ploy was utterly obvious to him: Promise to perfect and deploy CCS at some vague point in the future. By the time people catch on that CCS won't work, the fossil fuel industry will have successfully extended the time it has operated without onerous regulation for another couple of decades.
And because huge financial resources (mostly government resources) will have gone to CCS projects instead of low-carbon energy production, society will continue to be wildly dependent on carbon-based fuels (giving the industry further running room).
The trouble is that the cynical CCS strategy has already been under way and failing for more than two decades already. And yet, it is seeking a renewed lease on life with a proposal for a vast network of carbon dioxide pipelines "twice the size of the current U.S. oil pipeline network by volume." The public face of the effort is a former Obama administration secretary of energy with a perennially bad haircut, Ernest Moniz.
Moniz has a partnership with the AFL-CIO to push the idea. No doubt unions like the project because it would create a lot of jobs regardless of whether it actually addresses climate change.
Just for the record, here's a list of reasons that CCS doesn't work and likely will not work in any time frame that matters for addressing climate change:
It's very costly. Many of the pilot projects have been shut down because they are uneconomical.
Suitable underground storage is not abundant and frequently not near facilities that produce the carbon dioxide.
Long-term storage may fail, releasing the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere anyway. After all, one must have injection wells into the underground storage, wells that can leak if not properly maintained. Not least, there is no multi-decade record of successful, leak-free sequestration. And finally, there is no assurance that such storage facilities can be maintained properly for the many centuries required to have them actually protect the climate.
The carbon dioxide in some current viable CCS projects is used by the oil industry to flush out more oil from existing wells. That's hardly in keeping with the purpose of addressing climate change.
Energy expert Vaclav Smil did some calculations for an American Scientist magazine article that demonstrate the scale of the CCS challenge:
[I]n order to sequester just a fifth of current CO2 emissions we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering-compression-transportation-storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storages took generations to build. Technically possible—but not within a timeframe that would prevent CO2 from rising above 450 ppm.
Smil wrote that back in 2011. The latest reading in Hawaii at the often-cited Scripps Institution of Oceanography Mauna Loa Observatory is 418 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. The relentless upward slope of the observatory's graph of carbon dioxide concentration shows that the fossil fuel industry's tactics—of which delay-and-fail CCS is just one—are working splendidly.
It is troubling that a key official at the U.S. Department of Energy is taking the CCS plan seriously. One would think that decades of failure would finally make clear the false promises of the industry. But, of course, failure is the whole point of the CCS ruse. What's puzzling is that the failure to date has somehow become a rallying cry to try harder by building one of the biggest boondoggles ever conceived.
As I've stated before, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is of utmost importance that we all "follow the money". It's the only way to unravel the ever-complicated narrative that has evolved over the past 16 months. One of the key aspects of the issue is to track the allegiances and connections that key players have to each other. As you will see in this posting, a prime example can be found simply by looking at the connections that the Members of the Board of Directors at Pfizer have to other key players in the "COVID game".
Here is a graphic showing the Board as a whole
Now, let's focus on three members:
1.) Noting that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the gatekeeper that stands between our safety and the products being promoted by Big Pharma, here is the CV for Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb:
2.) Noting that Bill Gates, the world's pre-eminent untrained vaccinologist and epidemiologist, has the goal to vaccinate the entire world, hasn't yet seen a health condition that a vaccine couldn't fix and that he is the co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the second largest financial supporter of the World Health Organization, that the World Economic Forum is the architect and promoter of the dystopic post-pandemic Great Reset and that Facebook has been one of the gatekeepers of the pro-vaccine narrative, here is the CV for Pfizer board member Susan Desmond-Hellmann:
3.) Noting that the mainstream media has essentially been the mouthpiece of governments during the pandemic, that they have taken it upon themselves to create and disseminate COVID-19 fear porn and promote experimental COVID-19 vaccines 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and that Thompson Reuters is the world's leading provider of news and claims to be one of the "world's most trusted providers of answers", here is the CV for Pfizer board member James Smith:
Piece by piece, the puzzle comes together. While I am well aware that most major corporations want to attract board "talent" that will assist in promoting their business, the links between three of Pfizer's board members, the FDA, Facebook, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the WEF and Thompson Reuters is what can only be termed "an amazing coincidence".
A recent data release from a presentation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides COVID-19 vaccine consumers with some rather concerning data, particularly if they are under the age of 30.
Let's start with some background. Here is a graph from the CDC showing the weekly number of COVID-19 deaths for the age group 15 years to 24 years in brown and 25 years to 34 years in turquoise:
Here is a table showing how many Americans of varying age groups have died from COVID-19, pneumonia or influenza:
Note that only 2,704 Americans under the age of 30 had deaths that "involved COVID-19" or less than 0.46 percent of "COVID-19-involved" deaths for all age groups.
In the latest COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenario from the CDC dated March 19, 2021, we find the following table:
Note that the best estimate infection fatality ratio (IFR) for children between the ages of 0 and 17 years is 0.002 percent (20/1,000,000) and for people between the ages of 18 and 49 years, the best estimate infection fatality ratio is 0.05 percent (500/1,000,000).
Now, let's switch subjects and look at some additional physiological background to help us put this posting into context. Here are two definitions from the Mayo Clinic:
Overview - Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle (myocardium). Myocarditis can affect your heart muscle and your heart's electrical system, reducing your heart's ability to pump and causing rapid or abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias).
A viral infection usually causes myocarditis, but it can result from a reaction to a drug or be part of a more general inflammatory condition. Signs and symptoms include chest pain, fatigue, shortness of breath, and arrhythmias.
Severe myocarditis weakens your heart so that the rest of your body doesn't get enough blood. Clots can form in your heart, leading to a stroke or heart attack.
Complications - Severe myocarditis can permanently damage heart muscles and cause the following:
1.) Heart failure. Untreated, myocarditis can damage your heart's muscle so that it can't pump blood effectively. In severe cases, myocarditis-related heart failure may require a ventricular assist device or a heart transplant.
2.) Heart attack or stroke. If your heart's muscle is injured and can't pump blood, the blood that pools in your heart can form clots. If a clot blocks one of your heart's arteries, you can have a heart attack. If a blood clot in your heart travels to an artery leading to your brain before becoming lodged, you can have a stroke.
3.) Rapid or abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias). Damage to your heart muscle can cause arrhythmias.
Sudden cardiac death. Certain serious arrhythmias can cause your heart to stop beating (sudden cardiac arrest). It's fatal if not treated immediately.
Here is a graphic showing myocarditis:
Overview - Pericarditis is swelling and irritation of the thin, saclike tissue surrounding your heart (pericardium). Pericarditis often causes sharp chest pain and sometimes other symptoms. The chest pain occurs when the irritated layers of the pericardium rub against each other.
Pericarditis is usually mild and goes away without treatment. Treatment for more-severe cases may include medications and, rarely, surgery. Early diagnosis and treatment may help reduce the risk of long-term complications from pericarditis.
Complications - Early diagnosis and treatment of pericarditis usually reduces the risk of the long-term complications. Complications of pericarditis include:
1.) Pericardial effusion. Pericarditis is usually associated with fluid around the heart, which can lead to more serious complications.
2.) Chronic constrictive pericarditis. Some people with long-term (chronic) pericarditis develop permanent thickening and scarring of the pericardium, which prevents the heart from filling and emptying properly. This unusual complication often leads to severe swelling of the legs and abdomen and shortness of breath.
3.) Cardiac tamponade. This life-threatening condition can develop when too much fluid collects in the pericardium. Excess fluid puts pressure on the heart and doesn't allow it to fill properly. Less blood leaves the heart, causing a dramatic drop in blood pressure. Cardiac tamponade requires emergency treatment.
Here is a diagram showing pericarditis:
Now, let's look at the recent data release from the CDC from a COVID-19 vaccine safety update presentation on June 23, 2021by the Vaccine Safety Team. In this presentation, the author is looking at these two issues:
Here is a graph showing the preliminary reports of myocarditis/pericarditis for the mRNA vaccines by age and number of doses of vaccine:
Here are the symptoms experienced by the individuals under the age of 30:
Here is a graphic showing the number of cases of myocarditis/pericarditis following dose 2 of the mRNA vaccines for both males and females for all age groups. Note that the "expected" column is based on a U.S. population-based background incidence rate of myocarditis/pericarditis that was used in the safety assessment of the COVID-19 vaccines:
As you can see, among males under the age of 40 who have received the second mRNA vaccination, there is a significantly higher number of cases of myocarditis/pericarditis than expected, particularly among those between the ages of 12 and 24 (inclusive). The background rate would have predicted between 1 and 12 case of myocarditis/pericarditis for this age group, however, real world reports to the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) observed 347 cases or 28.9 times more cases than predicted.
Let's close this posting with a quote from this recent article found in the British Medical Journal dated June 23, 2021:
"On 23 June the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s safety committee said there was a “likely association” between the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna covid-19 vaccines and myocarditis and pericarditis in some young adults. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices said there was a higher than expected number of reports of heart inflammation in people aged 16-24 who had received the mRNA vaccines but that the benefits of vaccination still clearly outweighed the risks.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had received 1226 preliminary reports of myocarditis and pericarditis after about 300 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines up to 11 June. The US Food and Drug Administration said it would add a warning about the risk to information sheets for the mRNA covid vaccines. A joint statement signed by the US Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC, and medical organizations such as the American College of Physicians and American Medical Association emphasized that the side effect was “extremely rare” and that most cases were mild.
In the US the confirmed cases have mostly been seen in male adolescents and young adults and occur more often after the second dose than the first. CDC data showed that after 3 625 574 second doses administered to men aged 18-24 there were 233 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis, when two to 25 would have been expected. After 5 237 262 doses administered to women in this age group 27 cases were seen, against an expected two to 18. Vinay Prasad, a haematologist-oncologist and associate professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco, told The BMJ “There is a clear and large safety signal in young men and a clear but small signal in young women as well.”
While the USDA will add a warning to the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine information sheets, it is highly unlikely that these sheets will be seen by any of the young Americans being vaccinated.
While this may seem like a small number of cases given the millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses that have been administered to young Americans, the occurrence of myocarditis has the potential to result in a life-changing, negative health situation for an age group that had a negligible risk of dying from COVID-19 in the first place. For the youngest among the mRNA vaccine recipients, the occurrence of vaccine-related myocarditis could have a very palpable impact on their parents as well. While it is still unclear whether this serious adverse event is caused by the mRNA vaccines or merely associated with them, the purpose of vaccines is to benefit the person who gets it and not result in "net harm".
A new push is underway to sell wearable devices and sensors as the solution to the opioid and prison crises in the US. However, this “solution” is set to come at a major cost to civil liberties and human freedom in general.
May 20, 2021
18 minute read
In recent years, calls for radical prison reform and a solution to the U.S.’ opioid crisis have come to permeate national politics in the United States. With over two million people behind bars and more than 400,000 people dead from opioid misuse in the last two decades, these topics are often on the front page of major newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.
However, at the same time, the marketing of wearable technology, or wearables, as a solution to both of these hot-button issues has become promoted by key players in both the public and private sectors. Especially since COVID-19, these electronic devices that can be worn as accessories, embedded in clothes or even implanted under the skin, are frequently heralded by corporations, academics and influential think tanks as “cost effective”, technological solutions to these deeply rooted problems.
Yet, as will be covered in this article, the shift towards wearables may offer more costs than benefits, particularly when it comes to matters of civil liberties and privacy.
Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum, Source: Moritz Hager, WEF
On paper, the World Economic Forum (WEF, also known as the International Organization for Public Private Cooperation) is an NGO and think tank “committed to improving the state of the world.” In reality, it’s an international network of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth. The organization is best known for its annual gathering of the (mostly white, European and North American) ruling class. Each year hedge fund managers, bankers, CEOs, media representatives and heads of state gather in Davos to “shape global, regional and industry agendas.” As Foreign Affairs once put it, “the WEF has no formal authority, but it has become a major forum for elites to discuss policy ideas and priorities.”
In 2017, WEF Founder Klaus Schwab put out a book called “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The WEF uses the term Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) to denote the current “technological revolution” that is changing the way people “live, work, and relate to one another,” and with implications “unlike anything humankind has experienced before.” The 4IR is characterized by new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, 3D printing, and the “internet of things,” which essentially denotes embedding things with sensors – including human bodies in the form of wearables.
Like the industrial ‘revolutions’ that came before, the main theme for the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution is that it will allow companies to produce more, more quickly and for far less money.
In the book, Schwab positions wearable technology as key to helping companies become organized around remote work by providing one’s employers “with a continuous exchange of data and insights about the things or tasks being worked on.” In a similar vein, Schwab emphasizes the “wealth of information that can be gathered from wearable devices and implantable technologies.”
But unlike the industrial ‘revolutions’ of the past, the WEF’s 4IR aims to blur the distinction between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. And the WEF is a vocal advocate for wearables in their propensity to propel what it calls ‘human enhancement.’
In 2018, Schwab teamed up with WEF’s “Head of Society and Innovation” Nicholas Davis to write a follow up book entitled “Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”Having been with the organization for over a decade, Davis was the obvious choice to co-author this book as he now “lead[s] the theme of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” at the WEF.
Schwab and Davis see wearables as just a stepping stone for the 4IR, writing that wearable devices “will almost certainly become implantable” in the body and the brain. “External wearable devices, such as smart watches, intelligent earbuds and augmented reality glasses, are giving way to active implantable microchips that break the skin barrier of our bodies, creating intriguing possibilities that range from integrated treatment systems to opportunities for human enhancement,” they write.
The authors note the potential to “drive an industry of human enhancement” that would, in turn, enhance “worker productivity.” However, other groups, including those partnered with the WEF, see other potential applications for their use well beyond the workplace.
Deloitte, the world’s largest accounting firm and a longstanding partner of the WEF, has promoted wearables as a way to resolve the opioid epidemic. In 2016, Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights put out a report outlining how to fight the opioid crisis. The authors make the case that “technologists” and “innovators” should be part of the solution to the opioid crisis. Then, in 2018, the firm put out an article called “Strategies For Stemming The Opioid Epidemic,” explaining how data analytics could be used to help pharmacy benefit managers chart their course.
Ryan O’Shea, Source: LinkedIn
Other WEF partners are more directly involved in this effort. For example, WEF ‘Global Shaper’ Ryan O’Shea is the co-founder of Behaivior, a company that says it’s creating “technology to predict and prevent addiction relapses” using wearables. O’Shea, in addition to his WEF ties, is also the social media manager for Humanity Plus, formerly the World Transhumanist Association, which received $100,000 from Jeffrey Epstein in 2018 in addition to previous donations from Epstein-linked charities. Epstein also donated significant sums to Humanity Plus’ chair, Ben Goertzel.
According to the Behaivior website, the company’s mission is described as follows:
“We are creating software that can take real-time data streams from wearable devices that detect heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, motion, and galvanic skin response (which is related to stress levels). This data is combined with other digital information about behavior, such as GPS location. As behavior and physiology changes, our software screens users for whether or not they are in a pre-relapse craving state.”
The company markets itself as a solution for governments who want to cut down on costs. “Reducing addiction relapses not only saves lives, but it also saves significant amounts of money by reducing re-arrests, re-incarcerations,” the Behaivior site reads. According to government records, Behaivior has received $533,000 from the NIH since its founding. It also receives support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Science Foundation. Tellingly, the company describes their focus on opioid abuse as the company’s “initial use case,” implying that the technology may soon be applied to other illicit substances. In a section on their website entitled “Market Opportunities”, the company mentions the number of Americans “addicted to drugs and alcohol” and implies it could be used for any sort of substance addiction that people seek treatment for, including substances that are currently legal to purchase and consume.
Behaivior’s funding sources and partnerships- Source: https://www.behaivior.com
Last year, the NIH also gave another company, Emitech, $328,000 to make a “forearm bracelet for rapid, on-site opioid intake monitoring and alerting.” On their website, Emitech states that “our major target users will be law enforcement units”, but adds that they could be used at other facilities such as “drug treatment centers” and “anywhere drug tests are required.”
Not unlike the private companies they are funding, the federal government is also moving money towards wearables being used to detect other criminalized substances as well as ones that are legal in some or all states. The NIH has granted money to a few wearable alcohol sensors as well as a wearable cocaine sensor. Additionally, it’s made a grant available for “the research and development of digital markers for detection of acute marijuana intoxication.”
That the WEF network sees wearables as key to stemming the opioid epidemic is particularly significant given that the Biden admin has signalled that it will focus heavily on this crisis once the COVID-19 crisis subsides.
“The bottom line for the Biden administration is that the [opioid] crisis is going to come into full awareness once covid starts moving into the background, perhaps in the first half of 2021,” the Washington Post quoted a professor saying in December 2020.
In a much related manner, the ruling class also seems to be marrying the issue of mass incarceration with the wearables revolution.
“In a digital world with ankle bracelets and GPS devices, there is no reason to believe that physical imprisonment is the only option for those convicted of nonviolent offenses,” Darrell West wrote for the Brookings Institute in 2015. “Compared to incarceration, ankle bracelets and GPS devices seem far more tolerable. They keep offenders in society, are less punitive than prisons, and are much less expensive.”
West frames this digital incarceration as a desirable alternative where governments can cut costs but continue imprisoning the same amount of people as they do now. “Unless we find alternatives to physical imprisonment, the social and economic costs of jails will continue to sky-rocket,” he writes.
Ankle Bracelet maker Corrisoft’s Alternative to Incarceration via Rehabilitation Program, Source: Corrisoft
In 2013, the WEF-partnered Deloitte published an article on what it calls “virtual incarceration.” It envisions an automated monitoring system where parole officers can track people’s locations and an automated system sends “notifications to them when they have impending appointments, if they enter high-crime zones, or if their movements indicate that they are becoming more likely to commit a crime.”
The article also sees the use of this system as extending past the prison industry:
“ … Existing applications can already estimate blood alcohol content nearly as accurately as a breathalyzer—and predict the onset of depression. In the near future, contact with peer support groups, push notifications from case managers, and access to employers and other networks could be available at the touch of a button.”
A 2017 Australian Broadcasting Corporation article introduced something called the Technological Incarceration Project (TIP), a venture created by law professor Dan Hunter. The TIP proposes a form of “home detention” using “electronic sensors that monitor convicted offenders on a 24-hour basis.” This system, which Australian Broadcast Corporation calls an “internet of incarceration,” is meant to replace wardens and physical prisons, instead using advanced AI and machine learning to detect if a crime is about to be committed – and ensure that it doesn’t.
“Offenders would be fitted with an electronic bracelet or anklet capable of delivering an incapacitating shock if an algorithm detects that a new crime or violation is about to be committed,” it explains.
In 2018, Hunter co-wrote an article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology proposing this system as a “major revolution to the prison sector,” arguing that it would “result in the closure of nearly all prisons in the United States” and “end the prison crisis.” According to Swinburne University of Technology, where he is dean, Hunter’s work has been supported by theU.S. Government’s National Science Foundation.
The key to his revolution is an ankle bracelet with GPS tracking and an embedded conducted energy device, to administer the electric shock and incapacitate prisoners until the arrival of the police.
The article outlines the plan for technological incarceration in three components:
“First, offenders would be required to wear electronic ankle bracelets that monitor their location and ensure they do not move outside of the geographical areas to which they would be confined. Second, prisoners would be compelled to wear sensors so that unlawful or suspicious activity could be monitored remotely by computers. Third, conducted energy devices would be used remotely to immobilize prisoners who attempt to escape their areas of confinement or commit other crimes.”
Hunter and his co-authors argue that remote monitoring through wearable sensors is a superior alternative to traditional surveillance cameras. “ … Our proposal requires prisoners to wear a series of remote sensors—including those for sound, video, and movement—that are connected to central computer systems that can detect unauthorized behavior,” they write.
Hunter and his co-authors further insist that the third step, the “remote immobilization of offenders,” would actually make this technological incarceration more secure than a conventional prison, since there is no chance of prisoner escape.
Hunter’s model of incarceration is declared as a “system that can determine whether a prisoner is having a psychotic episode (from speech recognition and audio processing of a prisoner’s emotional states), is threatening another (from audio processing of the emotional states of all the people within the prisoner’s environment and video processing of the prisoner’s behavior), or is seeking to leave a designated zone (from GPS tracking).”
Of note is the fact that several prisons and jails in the US are already using biometric voice identification technology and geolocation tracking on prisoners and the non-prisoners they call on the phone.
Additionally, Hunter’s plan to use wearables to move away from traditional prisons, first outlined a number of years ago, seems closer to coming to fruition than it did a few years ago. For example, in 2019, the DOJ gave a grant to researchers at Purdue University, to help them develop a wearables-based monitoring system for those who would otherwise be in prison. The electronic monitoring system was deployed in Tippecanoe County Corrections in Indiana under a “home detention” program.
What’s more, the other half of Hunter’s plan, utilizing AI to process prisoner communications and prevent crime, is already underway across the U.S.
Amazon now markets its AI transcription services to both prisons and law enforcement. The company’s AI system employs speech-recognition technology and machine learning software to build a database of words. As reported by ABC News, “they then notify law enforcement partners when the system picks up suspicious language or phrasings.”
“A year from now, all that slang could be obsolete – so investigators are constantly feeding new intelligence about prison slang into databases tailored to their unique jurisdiction or regional area,” explained ABC.
“We’ve taught the system how to speak inmate,” said James Sexton, an executive at LEO Technologies, a company using Amazon’s transcription services.
Additionally, due to the COVID-19 crisis, the federal government has adjusted both opioid treatment policy and prison policy to cater more to new, wearables-based solutions.
Under the Trump Administration, the Federal Bureau of Prisons began prioritizing home confinement to limit the spread of COVID-19 in prisons. While those inmates were to report back to prison when the ‘coronavirus emergency’ was over, Biden recently extended the national emergency and the HHS expects the crisis to last at least through December.
Furthermore, also because of the COVID-19 crisis, the US Department of Health and Human Services amended its regulations in 2020 so that treatment for opioid addiction can now be done remotely. “The pandemic has made it possible to see a licensed provider from home,” reported the New York Times.
In addition, the use of these health-tracking wearables has grown by more than 35% during the pandemic. “All of these surveillance technologies, like many other COVID-19 mitigations, are being rolled out rapidly amidst the crisis,” explained the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Several wearable technologies have been marketed specifically as responses to the COVID-19 crisis, with a number focused solely on tracking the location of their users for social distancing or quarantining enforcement. “RightCrowd” is a lanyard employees can wear to help companies enforce social distancing and contact tracing at the office. “SafeZone” is a wearable sensor that emits a light when people get within six feet of one another, and is currently being used by the NFL. And, as reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), “Courts in Kentucky and West Virginia have mandated electronic ankle shackles for individuals who refused to submit to quarantine procedures after testing positive for COVID-19.”
The Oura Ring biometric tracker. Source: https://ouraring.com/
Yet many of today’s new wearables are capable of accessing data that goes far beyond one’s location. The Oura Ring, a finger worn sleep tracker, monitors your temperature in order to predict the onset of fever in COVID-19, and is currently being used by the NBA. Amazon’s Halo, a wristband, will soon be able to detect COVID-19 symptoms. Halo scans the user’s body and voice, monitors blood pressure, and is meant to “report back on your emotional state throughout the day.” And, in March 2020, the US FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization to armbands made by a company called Tiger Tech. The bands are designed to monitor blood flow and analyze pulse rate and hypercoagulation, an onset symptom of COVID-19.
Another company, BioIntellisense, calls itself a “new era of wearable devices that are medical grade that will allow doctors and nurses to collect data from patients that are outside of a hospital.” Its first product, the BioSticker, is the “first FDA-cleared single-use device for up to 30 days of continuous vital signs monitoring.” It’s a patch designed to be worn on the chest for what the company calls an “effortless remote data capture” experience. The company received $2.8 million from the DoD in December 2020 to make these wearable products available to both the military and the public.
As the New York Times put it last November, “the hot new covid tech is wearable and constantly tracks you.”
“The necessity to address the pandemic with any means available removed some of the regulatory and legislative impediments related to the adoption of telemedicine,” Klaus Schwab and French economist Thierry Malleret wrote in their book “COVID-19: The Great Reset,” published in July 2020. “In the future, it is certain that more medical care will be delivered remotely. It will in turn accelerate the trend towards more wearable[s],” they continue.
Policy alignment between the WEF and the current Biden administration here is clear. Former Secretary of State John Kerry – Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate – firmly declared in December that the Biden administration will support the Great Reset and that the Great Reset ‘will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine.’”
Alignment between the WEF and the U.S. federal government in this area can also be seen at the FDA. In September 2020, the U.S. FDA launched The Digital Health Center of Excellence, with the objective of “innovat[ing] regulatory approaches to provide efficient and least burdensome oversight.”
The head director of this new FDA project is Bakul Patel, who’s been “leading regulatory and scientific efforts related to digital health devices at the FDA since 2010,” according to the FDA.
Like many figures in the US federal government, Patel has close ties to the very industries he’s been tasked with regulating. He currently leads the Scientific Leadership Board of the Medicine Society (DMS), an organization which exemplifies the objective of the ruling class to integrate wearable technology into people’s daily lives. The group recently moderated a WEF panel on the “Wearable Data Trove” and is sponsoring an upcoming conference called “Wearable injectors and Connected Devices.”
The FDA’s Bakul Patel, Source: YouTube
One way the FDA’s new Digital Health Center of Excellence’s propensity towards wearables can be inferred is by examining the activity of some of the DMS’, and thus Patel’s, corporate funders – Deloitte, Takeda, Biogen, and Pfizer – all “strategic partners” of the WEF.
Takeda is piloting an app that functions on consumer wearables that collects cognitive and behavioral data to assess people for depression. Biogen recently began working with Apple to “test the value” of consumer wearables to collect and transmit biometric data on cognitive performance and brain activity to predict future ailments.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla authored an article featured on the WEF site, writing that wearable devices are “poised to become a valuable tool for incentivising healthy behavior,” and citing the examples of ‘smart’ eye contact lenses, skin patches, and “ear worn trackers.”
Bourla also wrote:
“Our Oncology business recently launched a free app, LivingWith, that helps cancer patients connect with loved ones, manage appointments and record how they’re feeling. The app also syncs with fitness wearables, allowing patients to share a more complete portrait of their health with doctors. And for patients with haemophilia, our Rare Disease business developed HemMobile Striiv Wearable, a device for tracking activity and heart rate, and logging infusions and bleeding episodes. Such detailed information will truly allow healthcare providers to deliver personalised care, and also empower patients to assume a more active role in managing their own health.”
In 2019, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer went as far as calling wearable tech a revolution, via sponsored content on STAT News. The company also collaborated with IBM and Amazon to develop an IoT (Internet of Things) system of wearable sensors that can measure patient indicators 24/7 “with the same clinical accuracy that a doctor collects in the office.”
As such, aside from rolling out wearables through programs targeting prisoners and drug users, the ruling class has indicated a desire to “mainstream” wearables by marrying them with the “future of healthcare.” In “COVID-19: The Great Reset,”Schwab and Malleret write that eventually, the use of AI and wearable technology will cause the distinction between public health systems and “personalized health creation systems” to break down.
Given that industry players like Pfizer and Biogen are at the forefront of the push for wearables, and that these players have traditionally been profit-centric in their motives, the trend towards wearable technology is virtually guaranteed to come at a cost.
Perhaps the most obvious cost will be the further degradation of privacy. Without a doubt, the adoption of these technologies will intensify the tendency for governments and corporations to spy on citizens and consumers.
For some, the ongoing public health crisis has mitigated much of the negative stigma around ‘wearing technology.’ “As tech analyst Rajit Atwal told ZDNET in October, “what may have been a market for this pre-COVID, there’s likely to be a potentially bigger market post-COVID or even during COVID in terms of people wanting to be more active in monitoring their health.”
“Do you give access to what is happening inside your body and brain in exchange for far better healthcare? People will give up their privacy in exchange for healthcare,” said Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor frequently featured at the WEF, in 2018. “And in many places, they won’t have a choice.” However, two years later, at the 2020 annual meeting of the WEF, Harari stated that the mass use of wearables would be a “watershed” moment that would herald the beginning of the era of “digital dictatorships.”
Source: The WEF’s Internet of Bodies Briefing Paper
The potential misuse of wearables by the public and private sectors have led critics to argue that the appeal of monitoring your own health shouldn’t detract from the fact that wearables are essentially wearable trackers. “It should not feel normal to be tracked everywhere or to have to prove your location,” wrote the EFF in June 2020.
From the New York Times:
“Civil rights and privacy experts warn that the spread of such wearable continuous-monitoring devices could lead to new forms of surveillance that outlast the pandemic — ushering into the real world the same kind of extensive tracking that companies like Facebook and Google have instituted online. They also caution that some wearable sensors could enable employers, colleges or law enforcement agencies to reconstruct people’s locations or social networks, chilling their ability to meet and speak freely. And they say these data-mining risks could disproportionately affect certain workers or students, like undocumented immigrants or political activists.”
“It’s chilling that these invasive and unproven devices could become a condition for keeping our jobs, attending school or taking part in public life,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told the New York Times.
Furthermore, wearables that track and contain one’s health data carry a particular threat. “Wearable technologies risk generating burdens of anxiety and stigma for their users and reproducing existing health inequalities,” wrote John Owens and Alan Cribb in the journal “Philosophy & Technology” in 2017. “Wearable technologies that subject their users to biomedical and consumerist epistemologies, norms and values also risk undermining processes of genuinely autonomous deliberation.”
What’s more, critics say that while ‘digital incarceration’ may seem like a desirable alternative to ‘mass incarceration,’ it’s simply incarceration by another name.
As author Michelle Alexander wrote in the New York Times in response to similar ‘e-carceration’ models that were popping up in 2018:
“Even if you’re lucky enough to be set “free” from a brick-and-mortar jail thanks to a computer algorithm, an expensive monitoring device likely will be shackled to your ankle — a GPS tracking device provided by a private company that may charge you around $300 per month, an involuntary leasing fee. Your permitted zones of movement may make it difficult or impossible to get or keep a job, attend school, care for your kids or visit family members. You’re effectively sentenced to an open-air digital prison, one that may not extend beyond your house, your block or your neighborhood. One false step (or one malfunction of the GPS tracking device) will bring cops to your front door, your workplace, or wherever they find you and snatch you right back to jail.”
“I find it difficult to call this progress,” Alexander explains. “As I see it, digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery … If the goal is to end mass incarceration and mass criminalization, digital prisons are not an answer. They’re just another way of posing the question.”
Some even see digital incarceration as a system worse than the physical system, in terms of privacy. “At first glance, these alternatives may seem like a win-win,” wrote Maya Schenwar in Truthout. “Instead of taking place in a hellish institution, prison happens “in the comfort of your own home” (the ultimate American ad for anything). However, this change threatens to transform the very definition of ‘home’ into one in which privacy, and possibly ‘comfort’ as well, are subtracted from the equation.”
“In a world of electronic monitors, predictive policing, interagency data sharing, hidden cameras, and registries, imprisonment extends not only beyond the walls of the jail or penitentiary, but beyond any contained space,” Schenwar continues. “In the new world of incarceration, your house is your prison. Your block is your prison. Your school is your prison. Your neighborhood… your city… your state… your country is your prison.”
Still from the Wearable Data Troves presentation at the WEF’s Global Technology Governance Summit.
Aside from privacy concerns, a less obvious side-effect of the wearables ‘revolution’ is its potential to fuel and propel the WEF’s broader vision for the future – something it calls stakeholder capitalism.
The WEF is committed to “advancing stakeholder capitalism,” a system in which private corporations are the “trustees of society.” (According to Schwab, the very reason he created the WEF in the first place was to “help business and political leaders implement [stakeholder capitalism].”)
Schwab’s model dictates that corporations should start expanding their definition of “value” away from shareholder returns. As such, the cornerstone to ‘stakeholder capitalism’ is data. In order for corporations to start making decisions that ‘benefit society,’ they need comprehensive metrics on what decisions would prove ‘valuable.’
Naturally, having people walking around wearing technology with one’s location data, medical history, real time vital signs, oral conversations, current emotional state and thus their “behavior” is a dream come true for the model.
And while the most marginalized populations, i.e. those likely to be locked up for drug offenses in the US, will be the first to be hit by this pervasive surveillance, the WEF network sees this as the vision of the future for us all.
Featured image: Still from RAND video “What is the Internet of Bodies”
Author
Jeremy Loffredo is a journalist and researcher based in Washington, DC. He is formerly a segment producer for RT AMERICA and is currently an investigative reporter for Children’s Health Defense.
Transcript of video (45 min) at the website. The video has some specifics specific to Netherlands media and politics, but apart from the names, the exact same processes and relationships exist in all advanced western states. The last section corresponding to "The Danger We are in Now" section on the World Economic Forum is especially important to see in the light of the financial relationships tracing all corporate ownership up to Vanguard, shown in the first part.
If you’ve been wondering how the world economy has been hijacked and humanity has been kidnapped by a completely bogus narrative, look no further than this video by Dutch creator, Covid Lie.
What she uncovers is that the stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. They all own each other. This means that “competing” brands, like Coke and Pepsi aren’t really competitors, at all, since their stock is owned by exactly the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments. This is the case, across all industries. As she says:
“The smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies whose names we have often seen…They are Vanguard and BlackRock. The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly.
A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost everything.
Bloomberg calls BlackRock “The fourth branch of government”, because it’s the only private agency that closely works with the central banks. BlackRock lends money to the central bank but it’s also the advisor. It also develops the software the central bank uses. Many BlackRock employees were in the White House with Bush and Obama. Its CEO. Larry Fink can count on a warm welcome from leaders and politicians. Not so strange, if you know that he is the front man of the ruling company but Larry Fink does not pull the strings himself.
BlackRock, itself is also owned by shareholders. Who are those shareholders? We come to a strange conclusion. The biggest shareholder is Vanguard. But now he gets murky. Vanguard is a private company and we cannot see who the shareholders are. The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig.
Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%.
In other words, these two investment companies, Vanguard and BlackRock hold a monopoly in all industries in the world and they, in turn are owned by the richest families in the world, some of whom are royalty and who have been very rich since before the Industrial Revolution. Why doesn’t everybody know this? Why aren’t there movies and documentaries about this? Why isn’t it in the news? Because 90% of the international media is owned by nine media conglomerates.
Covid Lie asks, “Who sponsors the organization and press agencies that produce our news? With Project Syndicate, we see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and the European Journalism Centre. The organizations that bring the news get paid by non-profit organizations, of the same elite that also owns the entire media but also a part of taxpayers money is used to pay them.”
Or, as George Carlin said, “It’s a small club and you ain’t in it.”
So when Lynn Forester de Rothschild wants the United States to be a one-party country (like China) and doesn’t want voter ID laws passed in the US, so that more election fraud can be perpetrated to achieve that end,what does she do?
She holds a conference call with the world’s top 100 CEOs and tells them to publicly decry as “Jim Crow” Georgia’s passing of an anti-corruption law and she orders her dutiful CEOs to boycott the State of Georgia, like we saw with Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball and even Hollywood star, Will Smith. In this conference call, we see shades of the Great Reset, Agenda 2030, the New World Order.
The UN wants to make sure, as does Schwab that in 2030, poverty, hunger, pollution and disease no longer plague the Earth. To achieve this, the UN wants taxes from Western countries to be split by the mega corporations of the elite to create a brand new society. For this project, the UN says we need a world government – namely the UN, itself.
And it is clear that the “pandemic” was orchestrated in order to bring this about. This video does an incredible job of explaining how it is all being done.
TRANSCRIPT
As you are watching millions fall into poverty because of the corona measures of the past year, even if the greatest economic crisis in history has not affected you yet, it will only be a matter of time until the rippling effects will hit you, as well
This is not fear-mongering but it’s a harsh reality. I also think we might mitigate the damage and may even do better, provided we are informed correctly about our situation. This is why I would like to show you a few facts you can easily check facts that are of crucial importance.
Less than a handful of big corporations dominate every aspect of our lives. That may seem exaggerated but from the breakfast we eat to the mattress we sleep on and everything we wear and consume in between is largely dependent on these corporations.
Those are huge investment companies that determine the course of money flow. They are the main characters of the play that we are witnessing. I know your time is valuable, so I summarize the most important data.
How does it work?
THE FOOD INDUSTRY
Let’s take Pepsico as an example. It is the parent company of many soda companies and snack companies. The so-called competitive brands are from factories from a few corporations who monopolize the entire industry. In the packaged food industry, there are a few big companies, like Unilever, the Coca-Cola Company, Mondelez and Nestlé.
In the picture, you see that most brands in the food industry belong to one of these corporations. The big companies are on the stock market and have the big shareholders in the board of directors.
On sources like Yahoo Finance, we can see detailed company info, such as who the biggest shareholders actually are. Let’s take Pepsico again, as an example. We see about 72% of stock is owned by no less than 3,155 institutional investors. These are investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments.
Who are the biggest institutional investors of Pepsico? As you can see, only 10 of the investors own together nearly one third of the stock. The top 10 of investors together amount to a value of $59 billion dollars but out of those ten, only three own more stock than the other seven. Let’s remember them and look up who owns the most stocks of the Coca-Cola Company, the biggest competitor of Pepsi.
The biggest lump of stock is again owned by institutional investors. Let’s look at the top 10 and start at the bottom six of them. Four of these institutional investors we also saw at the bottom six of Pepsico. These are Northern Trust, JPMorgan-Chase, Geode Capital Management and Wellington Management. Now, let’s look at the four biggest stock owners. They are BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. These are the world’s biggest investment firms, so Pepsico and Coca-Cola are not competitors, at all.
The other big companies that own a myriad of brand names, like Unilever, Mondelez and Nestlé are from the same small group of investors. But it’s not only in the food industry that their names come up. Let’s find out on Wikipedia, which are the biggest tech companies.
BIG TECH
Facebook is the owner of Whatsapp and Instagram. Together with Twitter, they form the most popular social media platforms. Alphabet is the parent of all Google companies, like YouTube and Gmail but they are also the biggest investor in Android, one of the two operating systems for nearly all smartphones and tablets. The other operating system is Apple’s IOS. If we add Microsoft, we see four companies making the software for nearly all computers, tablets and smartphones in the world.
Let’s see who are the biggest shareholders of these companies. Take Facebook: we see that 80% of the stock is owned by institutional investors. These are the same names that came up in the food industry; the same investors are in the top three. Next, is Twitter. It forms with Facebook and Instagram the top three. Surprisingly, this company is in the hands of the same investors, as well. We see them again, with Apple and even with their biggest competitor, Microsoft.
Also, if we look at other big companies in the tech industry that develop and make our computers, TVs, phones and home appliances, we see the same big investors, that together own the majority of the stock. It’s true for all industries. I’m not exaggerating.
THE TRAVEL INDUSTRY (AND ENERGY & MINING)
One last example, let’s book a holiday on a computer or smartphone. We search for a flight to a sunny country on Skyscanner or Expedia. Both are from the same small group of investors. We fly with one of the many airlines. Many of which are in the hands of the same investors and of governments, as is the case with Air France, KLM. The plane we board is, in most cases a Boeing or an Airbus, also owned by the same names. We book through Booking.com or AirBnB and when we arrive we go out for dinner and place a comment on Tripadvisor.
The same big investors show up in every aspect of our trip and their power is even bigger, because of the kerosene is from their oil companies or refineries. The steel from which the plane is made comes from their mining companies. This small group of investment firms and funds and banks are namely also the biggest investors in the industry that dig for raw materials.
Wikipedia shows that the biggest mining companies have the same big investors that we see everywhere. Also, the big agricultural businesses, on which the entire food industry depends; they own Bayer, the parent company of Monsanto, the biggest seed producer in the world but they are also the shareholders of the big textile industry. And even many popular fashion brands who make the clothing out of the cotton are owned by the same investors.
Whether we look at the world’s biggest solar panel companies or oil refineries, the stocks are in the hands of the same companies. They own the tobacco companies that produce all the popular tobacco brands but they also own all big pharmaceutical companies and the scientific institutions that produce medicine. They own the companies that produce our metals and also the entire car, plane and weapons industry, where a great deal of the metals and raw materials are used. The own the companies that build our electronics, they own the big warehouses and online markets and even the means of payments we use to buy their products.
To make this video as short as possible, I only showed you the tip of the iceberg. If you decide to research this with the sources I just showed you, then you will see that most popular insurance companies, banks, construction companies, telephone companies restaurant chains and cosmetics are owned by the same institutional investors we have just seen.
BLACKROCK & VANGUARD
These institutional investors are mainly investment firms banks and insurance companies. In turn, they, themselves are owned by shareholders and the most surprising thing is that they own each other’s stocks
Together, they form an immense network comparable to a pyramid. The smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies whose names we have often seen by now. They are Vanguard and BlackRock. The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly.
A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost anything
Bloomberg calls BlackRock “The fourth branch of government”, because it’s the only private agency that closely works with the central banks. BlackRock lends money to the central bank but it’s also the advisor. It also develops the software the central bank uses. Many BlackRock employees were in the White House with Bush and Obama. Its CEO, Larry Fink can count on a warm welcome from leaders and politicians. Not so strange, if you know that he is the front man of the ruling company. But Larry Fink does not pull the strings, himself.
BlackRock, itself is also owned by shareholders. Who are those shareholders? We come to a strange conclusion. The biggest shareholder is Vanguard. But now he gets murky. Vanguard is a private company and we cannot see who the shareholders are. The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig.
Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%.
Forbes, the most famous business magazine says that in March 2020, there were 2,095 billionaires in the world. This means that Vanguard is owned by the richest families in the world. If we research their history, we see that they have always been the wealthiest. Some of them, even before the start of the Industrial Revolution, because their history is so interesting and extensive, I will make a sequel.
For now, I just want to say that these families of whom many are in royalty are the founders of our banking system and of every industry in the world, these families have never lost power but due to an increasing population, they had to hide behind firms, like Vanguard, which the stockholders are the private funds and non-profits of these families.
NGOs AND FOUNDATIONS AND THEIR OWNERSHIP OF BIG PHARMA
To clarify the picture, I have to explain briefly what non-profits actually are. These appear to be the link between companies, politics and media. This conceals the conflicts of interests a bit. Non-profits, also called “foundations” are dependent on donations they do not have to disclose who their donors are they can invest the money in the way they see fit and do not pay taxes as long as the profits are invested again in new projects. In this way, non-profits keep hundreds of billions of dollars among themselves according to the Australian government, non-profits are an ideal way of financing terrorists and of massive money-laundering.
The foundations and funds of the families that are the richest stay in the background as much as possible. For issues that get much attention, the foundation of philanthropists are used that are lower in rank but very rich.
I want to keep it short, so I will show you the three most important ones that connect all industries in the world. They are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation of the controversial multi-billionaire, Soros and the Clinton Foundation. I will give you a very short introduction to show you their power.
According to the website of the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation is the biggest sponsor of the WHO. That was after Donald Trump quit USA financial support to the WHO in 2020. So the Gates Foundation is one of the most influential entities in everything that concerns our health. The Gates Foundation works closely with the biggest pharma companies, among which are Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Biontech and Bayer.
And we have just seen who their biggest shareholders are. Bill Gates was not a poor computer nerd who miraculously became very rich. He’s from a philanthropist’s family that works for the absolute elite. His Microsoft is owned by Vanguard, BlackRock and Berkshire Hathaway. But the Gates Foundation, after BlackRock and Vanguard is the biggest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway. He was even the member of the board there.
We would need hours if we wanted to uncover everything in which Gates, the Open Society Foundation of Soros and the Clinton Foundation are involved. They form a bridge to the current situation, so I had to introduce them.
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA
We need to start the next topic with a question. Someone like me, who never makes videos can, with an old laptop objectively show that only two companies hold a monopoly in all industries in the world. My question is, why is this never talked about in the media?
We can choose daily between all sorts of documentaries and TV programs but none of them cover this subject. Is it not interesting enough or are there other interests at play? Wikipedia, again gives us the answer. They say that about 90% of the international media is owned by nine media conglomerates. Whether we take the monopolist Netflix and Amazon Prime or enormous concerns that own many daughter companies, like Time-Warner, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast, Fox Corporation, Bertelsmann and Viacom, CBS, we see that the same names own stocks.
These corporations not only make all the programs, movies and documentaries but also own the channels on which those are broadcast. So, not only the industries but also the information is owned by the elite.
I will show you briefly how this works in the Netherlands. To start with, all the Dutch mainstream media are owned by three companies. The first one is De PersGroep [DPG Media], the parent company of the following brands (. Apart from the many newspapers and magazines, they also own Sanoma, the parent company of some of the big commercial Dutch channels. Many media outlets from abroad, like VTM are also owned by the De PersGroep.
The second one is Mediahuis, one of Europe’s biggest media concerns. In the Netherlands, Mediahuis owns the following brands. Until 2017, also Sky Radio and Radio Veronica were owned by Mediahuis, as were Radio 538 and radio 10.
And then there is Bertelsmann, which is one of the 9 biggest media firms. This company owns RTL, that owns 45 television stations and 32 radio stations in 11 countries. But Bertelsmann is also co-owner of the world’s biggest book publisher, Penguin Random House.
The stocks of these companies are owned by private funds of three families. Those are the Belgian Van Thillo family, the Belgian Leysen family and the German Bertelsmann-Mohn family. All three families sided with the Nazis in the War.
According to Wikipedia, for this reason, the Telegraaf, the Leysen newspaper was temporarily forbidden in the Netherlands after the war.
THE FAKE NEWS
To complete this overview, look at where the news comes from. The daily news of all these media outlets the diverse news media do not produce news. They use information and footage from the press agencies, .ANP and Reuters. These agencies are not independent. .ANP is owned by Talpa, John de Mol. Thomson-Reuters is owned by the powerful Canadian Thomson family.
The most important journalists and editors working for these agencies are members of a journalism agency, like the European Journalism Centre. These are one of the biggest European sponsors of media-related projects. They educate journalists, publish study books, provide training spaces and press agencies and work closely together with the big corporations, Google and Facebook.
For journalistic analysis and views, the big media use Project Syndicate. This is the most powerful organization in the field. Project Syndicate and organizations like I mentioned are together with the press agencies. The link between all worldwide media outlets when news anchors reap from their autocues [teleprompters], chances are that the text stems from one of these organizations. That is the reason that worldwide media shows synchronicity in their reporting.
And look at the European journalism center, itself. Again, the Gates Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. They are also heavily-sponsored by Facebook, Google, the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Who sponsors the organization and press agencies that produce our news? With Project Syndicate, we see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and the European Journalism Centre. The organizations that bring the news get paid by non-profit organizations, of the same elite that also owns the entire media but also a part of taxpayers money is used to pay them.
In Belgium, there are protests regularly, since Mediahuis and De Persgroep receive millions of euros from the government, while many are abroad…
THE DANGER WE ARE IN NOW
Well, this was a lot to chew on and I tried to make it as short as I could. I only used examples that I thought were necessary to create a clear overview. This helps to better understand our current situation, that can shed new light on past events
There will be enough time to dive into the past, but now let’s talk about today but my goal is to inform you about the danger we are in now. The elite governs every aspect of our lives, also, the information we get and they depend on a coordination, cooperation to connect all industries in the world to serve their interests. This is done through the World Economic Forum, among others, a very important organization.
Every year in Davos, the CEOs of big corporations meet national leaders, politicians and other influential parties, like UNICEF and Greenpeace. On the supervisory board of the WEF is former Vice President, Al Gore, our own minister, Sigrid Kaag, Feike Sijbesma, Chairman of the Royal Dutch State Mines and the Commissioner of the Dutch bank, Christine Lagarde, the Chairwoman of the European Central Bank. Also, politician, Ferdinand Grapperhaus’ son works for the WEF.
Wikipedia says that the annual fee for members is 35,000 euros “but over half of our budget comes from partners who pay the cost for politicians who otherwise could not afford membership.”
According to critics, the WEF is for rich businesses to do business with other businesses or with politicians. For most members, the WEF would support personal gain instead of being a means to solve the world’s problems. Why would there be many world problems if the industry leaders, bankers and politicians from 1971 onwards have gathered every year to solve the world’s problems?
Isn’t it illogical, that after 50 years of meetings between environmentalists and the CEOs of the most polluting companies, nature is gradually doing worse, not better; that those critics are right, it’s clear, when we look at the main partners that together make up more than half of the budget of the WEF. Because these are BlackRock, the Open Society foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many big companies, from which Vanguard and BlackRock own the stocks.
Chairman and founder of the WEF is Klaus Schwab, a Swiss professor and businessman. In his book, The Great Reset, he writes about the plans of his organization. The coronavirus is, according to him a great “opportunity” to reset our societies. He calls it “Build Back Better”. The slogan is now on the lips of all Globalist politicians in the world.
Our old society must switch to a new one, says Schwab. The people own nothing but work for the state to have their primary needs met. The WEF says it’s necessary for the consumption society the elite forced upon us is not sustainable anymore. Schwab says in his book that we will never return to the old normal and the WEF published a video recently to make clear that by 2030, we will own nothing but we will be happy.
THE GREAT RESET = THE NEW WORLD ORDER
You probably heard of the New World Order. The media wants us to believe that this is a conspiracy theory, yet it has been talked about by leaders for decades. Not just George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela but also world-famous philanthropists, like Cecil Rhodes, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and even George Soros.
The UN presented in 2015 their controversial Agenda 2030. It is almost identical to the Great Reset of Klaus Schwab. The UN wants to make sure, as does Schwab that in 2030, poverty, hunger, pollution and disease no longer plague the Earth.
Sounds nice but wait till you read the small print. The plan is that Agenda 2030 will be paid by us, the citizens. Just like they ask of us now to give away our rights for public health, they will ask us to give away our wealth to battle poverty. These are no conspiracy theories. It is on their official website. It comes down to this: The UN wants taxes from Western countries to be split by the mega corporations of the elite to create a brand new society. The new infrastructure, because fossil fuels are gone in 2030.
For this project, the UN says we need a world government, namely the UN, itself.
The UN agrees with Schwab that a pandemic is a golden chance to accelerate the implementation of Agenda 2030.
It is worrisome that the WEF and the UN openly admit that pandemics and other catastrophes can be used to reshape society. We must not think lightly about this and do thorough research.
We built Moderna on the guiding premise that if using mRNA as a medicine works for one disease, it should work for many diseases. And, if this is possible – given the right approach and infrastructure – it could meaningfully improve how medicines are discovered, developed and manufactured.
Recognizing the broad potential of mRNA science, we set out to create an mRNA technology platform that functions very much like an operating system on a computer. It is designed so that it can plug and play interchangeably with different programs. In our case, the "program” or “app” is our mRNA drug - the unique mRNA sequence that codes for a protein.
We have a dedicated team of several hundred scientists and engineers solely focused on advancing Moderna's platform technology. They are organized around key disciplines and work in an integrated fashion to advance knowledge surrounding mRNA science and solve for challenges that are unique to mRNA drug development. Some of these disciplines include mRNA biology, chemistry, formulation & delivery, bioinformatics and protein engineering.
When we have a concept for a new mRNA medicine and begin research, fundamental components are already in place.
Generally, the only thing that changes from one potential mRNA medicine to another is the coding region – the actual genetic code that instructs ribosomes to make protein. Utilizing these instruction sets gives our investigational mRNA medicines a software-like quality. We also have the ability to combine different mRNA sequences encoding for different proteins in a single mRNA investigational medicine.
We are leveraging the flexibility afforded by our platform and the fundamental role mRNA plays in protein synthesis to pursue mRNA medicines for a broad spectrum of diseases.
Within a given modality, the base components are generally identical across development candidates - formulation, 5’ region and 3’ region. Only the coding region varies based on the protein/s the potential medicine is directing cells to produce.
Learn how our Research Engine and Early Development Engine are enabling us to fully maximize the promise of mRNA to meaningfully improve how medicines are discovered, developed and manufactured.
Using mRNA to create medicines is a complex undertaking and requires overcoming novel scientific and technical challenges. We need to get the mRNA into the targeted tissue and cells while evading the immune system. If the immune system is triggered, the resultant response may limit protein production and, thus, limit the therapeutic benefit of mRNA medicines. We also need ribosomes to think the mRNA was produced naturally, so they can accurately read the instructions to produce the right protein. And we need to ensure the cells express enough of the protein to have the desired therapeutic effect.
Our multidisciplinary platform teams work together closely to address these scientific and technical challenges. This intensive cross-functional collaboration has enabled us to advance key aspects of our platform and make significant strides to deliver mRNA medicines for patients.
In an August 2018 New Yorker article, Elizabeth Kolbert asks, “Are today’s donor classes solving problems or creating new ones?” Kolbert describes a form of charity that aims to not just help people but to improve them. This “improvement” aligns with the giver’s particular vision of what constitutes improvement, of course. And the people who need to be improved are treated as children—for whom the donor, naturally, gets to decide what is best.
Kolbert describes how this form of giving becomes exploitation. We might add: not just exploitation, but elite-driven, highly self-interested social engineering. We see these characteristics on brilliant display in the philanthropy behind the modern LGBT movement.
The gay-rights movements and organizations that emerged during America’s sexual revolution in the 1960s bear little resemblance to the behemoth LGBT NGO juggernauts operating today. What started out as grassroots support for the legal and social acceptance of same-sex relations has turned into an effort at full-blown social transformation, with the addition of a fetish of adult men, known as transsexualism, to the LGB human-rights rainbow banner. Along with the rebranding of transsexualism as transgenderism, this movement has also successfully colonized and utilized disorders of sexual development, otherwise known as intersex conditions to drive its agenda. We have come a long way from Stonewall.
Perhaps the most insidious idea to be advanced under the LGBT banner today is the amorphous concept of “gender identity.” Gender identity refers to the way people see themselves with respect to socially constructed sex-role stereotypes. But is not just a descriptive term; it is also prescriptive—one has the right, according to advocates, to force others to recognize one’s chosen identity. And one has the right to change one’s body medically so that it better maps on to one’s gender identity. Given that the pharmaceutical lobby is the largest in Congress, and given that some of the most important philanthropists behind the modern LGBT movement have close ties to Big Pharma, this medical component is important to note.
“Gender identity” and “transgender” ideology emerged on the Western cultural landscape not more than a decade ago, but they have spread across the globe with the speed and ferocity of the SARS COVID pandemic—and they have created nearly as much havoc. Yet the massive concomitant changes we have already seen in language, law, medical and crime statistics, women’s safety zones, sports, accomplishments and educational opportunities, the medicalization of healthy children’s bodies, and K–12 curricula have not been driven by grassroots enthusiasm. Quite the contrary. They have been driven by the philanthropic funding provided by billionaires who are themselves invested in this radical ideology’s greatest beneficiaries: Big Pharma. Many of the most important philanthropists behind the transgender and gender-identity movements stand to make huge profits from body dissociation and the commoditization of human sex into medical identities.
Take Martine Rothblatt, a self-described transsexual and transhumanist who was the first individual to create a legal document supporting the idea that feelings of dissociation from our sexed bodies is normal. This legal document, later to become the International Gender Bill of Rights, legally normalizes body dissociation. Rothblatt later went on to become the top earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry, using his money and influence to promote the ideology and normalization of transgenderism. He believes that sexual dimorphism is morally equivalent to South African apartheid and must be dismantled.
Jennifer Pritzker, along with his family, one of the wealthiest in the United States, has poured huge sums of money into American institutions in order to advance the concept of body dissociation under the euphemism of “gender identity.” The Pritzker family has made vast investments in the medical industrial complex.
In 2000, another billionaire, Jon Stryker, heir to a multi-billion-dollar medical corporation, created another mammoth LGBT NGO, the Arcus Foundation. Stryker created such a global goliath of philanthropic funding with the stocks from his medical corporation that he had to create another organization to keep track of it all. In 2006 Arcus funded the creation of MAP, or Movement Advancement Project, to track the complex system of advocacy and funding that had already developed as a way of insinuating gender identity and transgender ideology into the culture.
Arcus deploys millions of philanthropic dollars each year to filter gender identity and transgender ideology into American law through their training of leaders in political activism, political leadership, transgender law, religious liberty, education, and civil rights. Some of its favored organizations include the Victory Fund, the Center for American Progress, the ACLU the Council for Global Equality, the Transgender Law Center, Trans Justice Funding Project, OutRight Action International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, Amnesty International, and GLSEN. In fact, Arcus is recorded to have given more than $58.4 million to programs and organizations doing LGBT-related work between 2007 and 2010 alone (it is far more than that now), making it the largest LGBT funder in the world. Jon Stryker gave over $30 million to the foundation himself in that period, through his stock in Stryker Medical Corporation.
Translation: A medical corporation with a vested interest in encouraging people to identify as transgender is directly funneling money and assets to its philanthropic foundation so that the foundation will do that encouraging on its behalf, thereby bringing more money and more clients (for life) to that corporation.
Arcus has funneled millions into other philanthropy organizations, such as Tides, Proteus and Borealis. There is no way to track whether these organizations are using Arcus money for the purpose of normalizing transgenderism, but one might surmise that the cause so dear to Arcus’s heart is not entirely ignored.
Along with the Pritzker family, Arcus has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to colleges and universities, including Columbia, Yale, Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, and many others. Arcus grants have gone to black coalitions in the U.S. and Africa, Latino organizations, Native American organizations, youth and teen organizations, the military, and Public Broadcasting Radio. Millions have been given to lesbian organizations, including in Africa, with the lion’s share going to Astrea Foundation for a special focus on its trans fund. Arcus funds sports organizations such as Athlete Alley and Youth Can Play. Hundreds of thousands have gone to Planned Parenthood. Arcus has made a significant grant to Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a dubious character in the transgender arena. The foundation has funded prison projects and immigration organizations with a focus on normalizing transgenderism in children. Arcus funds religious organizations across the world.
In 2015, together with the Novo Foundation, a philanthropic NGO run by Peter Buffet (son of Warren, who helped launch the project with a $90 million gift), Arcus earmarked $20 million for transgender causes specifically. In 2018 Arcus funded the Council For Global Equality, a coalition of 30 U.S. groups advocating for inclusion of LGBT issues in foreign affairs and development policies.
Whew. This is no small operation! And every Arcus grant is contingent upon the recipient’s affirmation of “diversity and inclusion policies”—policies that, of course, very much include the affirmation of gender-identity ideology and transgenderism.
Many more philanthropic actors are working to prop up the transgender and gender-identity movements, including Tim Gill and his Gill Foundation and George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. Like Martine Rothblatt, Jennifer Pritzker, and Jon Stryker, Gill, who is heavily invested in artificial intelligence, and Soros, who has broad investments in Big Pharma, stand to benefit financially from the demand for altered bodies and brains that they hope is the fruit of their philanthropic activity.
It is striking that this conflict of interest has been so little discussed. Even the American Psychological Association (APA), the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 118,000 members, is funded by Arcus philanthropy. In 2005 the APA created INET, to help member psychological organizations improve the well-being of sexual orientation and “gender diverse people.” Prior to the addition of gender identity and the arrival of Arcus money, the APA INET was solely focused on LGB issues. In 2008 the APA created the Task Force On Gender Identity and Gender Variance, and in 2015 it developed guidelines to assist psychologists in the provision of culturally competent, developmentally appropriate, and trans-affirmative psychological practice with “transgender” and “gender non-conforming” people. Psychologists were “encouraged“ to modify their understanding of gender, broadening the range of variation viewed as healthy and normative.
Can democracy withstand such philanthropy-driven “encouragement”? Can there be genuine democracy when, via the taxpayer-subsidized fig leaf of philanthropy, billionaires can so quickly and easily dismantle the reality of biological sex by suborning charities, politicians, researchers, and professional associations? We are in the midst of finding out.
Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist, artist, and concerned citizen. She has been following the money behind the transgender agenda for six years. She blogs at the 11th Hour.
Jennifer Bilek
8-10 minutes
In 2017, Jon Stryker, heir to Stryker Medical corporation, a corporation worth nearly 15 billion dollars, funded his LGBT NGO, Arcus Foundation, 30 million dollars, from his corporate stocks, consistent with his giving in previous years. Overall, he has personally funded his LGBT NGO half a billion dollars.
With gay marriage and many successful supreme court rulings being secured for LGB individual’s rights, in many western cultures, the focus of modern LGBT NGOs, like Arcus Foundation, have shifted. The new LGB + "social justice movement" has centered on depathologizing body dissociation and creating profitable medical identities via a burgeoning new gender industry. The projected market growth for amputations of healthy sex organs & medically constructed faux sex organs is being reported at anywhere between 1.5 billion to 200 billion dollars, depending on who is doing the reporting,
The human body is being commoditized into parts for sale: “Based on body parts, the Male to Female 'transition' surgeries are classified into genital, facial, and breast surgeries. The genital surgery segment is further categorized into vaginoplasty, orchiectomy, and phallectomy,” writes one blogger for Cosmetic Surgery Reviews. What is driving the booming market, according to Expert Market Research analysis, can be attributed to the rise in the health insurance policies for sex reassignment procedures and the growing technological advancements and rise in awareness about these surgeries which have contributed to a huge boost in the market. Global Market Insights, confirm that favorable government policies associated with gender transition surgeries is one of the major factors driving the industry demand. For instance, The Affordable Care Act is the government policy in the U.S. that provides insurance to the “transgender” and gender non-conforming population. The Affordable Care Act was initiated by Obama, who was helped into office by Penny Pritzker, a member of the billionaire Pritzker family, with their own investments in both the medical industrial complex (MIC) and the gender market. Penny Pritzker’s cousin, Jennifer, is a man claiming womanhood for himself who has funded myriad gender programs in medical, military and educational institutions across the globe.
What Expert Market Research doesn’t tell us but is plainly obvious, is that everywhere we turn, “transgender” surgeries are being marketed as positive, progressive and normal through Hollywood, its stars, the fashion industry and the rest of the media, which interface heavily with the medical industrial complex. .
The gender industry is being promoted by the MIC to serve MIC profits.
Arcus Foundation, again, is funded by Jon Stryker’s family stocks. Stryker Medical corporation is an American multinational medical technologies corporation based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Stryker's products include implants used in joint replacement and trauma surgeries; surgical equipment and surgical navigation systems; endoscopic and communications systems; patient handling and emergency medical equipment; neurosurgical, neurovascular and spinal devices; robotics, implants, as well as other medical device products used in a variety of medical specialties. Most of this equipment and these supplies are utilized in hospitals performing traumatic surgeries on young people’s sex organs. Are we to believe it is a coincidence that Stryker Medical Corporation and an LGBT NGO with a recent focus on transgenderism and medical idenitities, are so intergrally connected? We have all seen first-hand, through the opioid epidemic and the undue influence the Pharma Lobby has had over governments, just how far the medical industrial complex reach actually is and the machinations they use for profiteering.
In the United States, most of Stryker's products are marketed directly to doctors, hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Internationally, Stryker products are sold in over 100 countries through company-owned sales subsidiaries and branches as well as third-party dealers and distributors.
Arcus Foundation has created and funded a vast international political infrastructure to drive gender identity ideology - or disembodiment - globally, funding trans organizations, lgbt organizations, religious, cultural, legal, educational, sports, police, media, medical and psychiatric organizations, contingent on those organizations adopting gender identity ideology. The foundation has funded studies of children as young as three years old, with this purported, illusive “gender identity” at odds with their sexed bodies, that will set them on a lifetime path of medicalization.
There is no substantiating evidence that such a thing as gender identity exists. Yet, in all the countries promoting political bills which are erasing sex and replacing it with gender identity, Arcus Foundation’s footprint can be found in either direct funding to LGBT and "transgender" organizations pushing gender identity ideology, into schools and institutions in those countries, or through Stryker Medical which has 54 offices in 36 countries, across the world. Stryker employs 40,000 people worldwide, is one of America’s largest public companies and brings in vast revenues for the 75 countries where they sell their supplies and conduct research and development. Of the top ten countries using Stryker Medical supplies, at least eight of those countries are currently hotbeds of trans activism and political pressure driving gender identity laws, including the UK, Ireland, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia. America, home of Stryker Medical and it’s largest consumer base, along with Arcus Foundation, lead the pack. The next largest consumer base for Stryker Medical is the UK, where Arcus Foundation has another branch at Cambridge University.
Singapore is home to yet another branch of Stryker Medical. In Singapore, the subject of gender identity is heating up with their Minister of Education being accused of trying to interfere with student’s access to the use of wrong sex hormones and where he is calling for calm. As reported by Manchester University, Singapore is one of Asia’s most highly developed and successful free market economies, with a higher GDP than much of Europe. Multi-national corporations in Singapore include Bosch, Unilever, BMW, Walt Disney Company, Google, Facebook and Hewlett-Packard (All major corporate supporters of gender identity). Singapore is the Asian headquarters for these companies. The economy depends highly on exports of electronics, computer products and pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical companies that have their regional offices in Singapore include Ferring Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Merck & Co.
Ferring Pharmaceuticals, whose global site is in Ireland, make, advocate for and fund the use of puberty blockers, along with TENI (Transgender Equality Network Ireland), even after the Irish College of GPs no longer claim puberty blockers and hormonal sex changes are reversible.
Ireland, home to TENI, is a boiling cauldron of Trans rights activism. TENI is funded by Transgender Europe, which is heavily funded by Arcus Foundation (read: Stryker Medical). It is home to three branches of Stryker Medical and 19 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies.
Arcus Foundation, is posing as a human rights movement but it subsists on millions generated by Stryker Medical Corporation. Jon Stryker has strategically driven gender identity (body dissociation) as a positive progression and normal human expression, into our cultures, our institutions, our laws, and more importantly and dangerously, the global market place. Who else in the world, beyond the medical industrial complex could wield this much global power simultaneously? We cannot continue to avoid the elephant in the living room. Puberty blockers, wrong sex hormones, invasive surgeries on young people’s sex organs is not a human rights movement but driven by the medical industrial complex for profit. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand this. The evidence is right in front of us. The question is, will we face it in time to stop it?
The media is selling disembodiment as expression, for profit and they are including free shipping.
In less than a decade, the “transgender” “human rights” “movement,” (I am already running out of quotation marks) has morphed from "born in the wrong body," to “gender identity disorder,” to “gender dysphoria,” to “gender incongruence,” to “gender identity,” to “gender expression,” complete with its own line of make-up, fashion and body scars.
Geeze, I wonder why this contagion of young women wanting to have their healthy breasts amputated has emerged. Is it possible they are absorbing the messages that promote body dysphoria as progressive, cool and edgy by media conglomerates selling this exact message?
The culture was primed for this contagion by the media, which we’re groomed to believe, in most western cultures, is a free and open source of information in democratic societies. Remember all those stories, seven years back, of poor children “born in the wrong body,” boys with a love of the color pink and hair ribbons, meant to rip at our heart strings? Story upon story of families with young children who like the stereotypical things of the opposite sex flooded the media, across western cultures, always with the same narrative: discovery of an unacceptable identity, initial anxiety within the child and the family and then all of them eventually overcoming the disruption. The families came to realize it is another “normal” way to be human. Everyone lived happily ever after. Yea, right. The media coincidently forgetting to mention all the medical risks and problems for the rest of the child's life. NO BIG DEAL.
Seven years later, we have an epidemic of young women and many young boys as well, threatening their parents with suicide if their parents do not agree to allow their children to take wrong sex hormones and have surgeries on their sex organs on demand, while medical professionals affirm children’s disordered thinking. Advertising is nothing if not insidious which is what makes it so effective.
On one front we have Johnson & Johnson marketing these procedures as totally normal “cosmetic” surgeries, surgeons smiling into cameras at gender clinics, cheerleading the most macabre reenigeering of healthy human sex organs (open that link at your own risk), reality TV shows and mainstream magazines celebrating the castration of young men.
Men are walking fashion runways in pregnancy prothesis and young women are being displayed in underwear ad campaigns, their surgery scars from the amputation of healthy breasts promoted as empowerment. Meanwhile, journalists, academics, those engaged in politics and policy are all being censored for attempting to critique this, by the same media. Is this supposed to be an organic development, across countries and media platforms simultaneously?
Hollywood stars “parade their children” who like to wear the clothing associated with the opposite sex, as little accessories in their fashionable lives, for the media. Others are feeding Kool Aide to young people from magazine spreads who then want their own surgeries.
While the media inundates us with these messages, tax payers are forced to fund operations through new health insurance policies, for surgeries on young people's bodies that are not sick or injured. All the while the transactivists and their NGOs supporting the construct of “gender medical expressions” are depathologizing this monstrosity and attempting to sell the public the idea that sex exists on a spectrum, that human sexual dimorphism is a construct and that expressing how you feel about yourself by having your sex organs surgically rearranged is progressive. Access to wrong sex hormones are being offered to students on university campuses without medical oversight or recommendation while LGBT organizations, who fund the media in exchange for the media supporting their delusions, scream "human rights!!”
Media platforms are owned by massive corporate, conglomerates which interface with the medical industrial complex (MIC). People think they are reading Glamour, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired and The New Yorker, when they are actually reading Conde’ Nast, a corporate conglomerate with a huge investment in the MIC and gender as medical identity. Ditto for Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Bazar, Good Housekeeping, Oprah, Seventeen, Women’s Health, etc. which are actually part of the Hearst media conglomerate, with their own vast investments in the MIC and the gender industry. Ditto for those watching ABC, ESPN and Touchstone Pictures (among hundreds of other media platforms) owned by Disney, yet another conglomerate with big investments in the MIC, including the gender industry. Disney holds high prestige with the LGBT Human Rights Commission for their "diversity & inclusion" policies which is really corporate speak for homogeneity of thought and has funded $100,000,000 to children's hospitals across the country, including Texas Children's Hospital and Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, both of which have gender clinics. Pity the children caught in this coporate profiteering matrix. Meredith Corporation owns People Magazine (who covered the celebration of a young man's castration party), Parents, In Style, Health, Shape, and until about two minutes ago, owned Time Magazine (Let’s not forget their famous cover of Laverne Cox). Meredith, as any other media conglomerate, has its own health platforms and investments in the MIC. Time Magazine (of recent Eliot Page fame) was purchased by billionaire ($57 billion), Marc Benioff in 2018. But don’t expect things to get any better for allowable critique of the gender medical industry at Benioff’s new platform purchase, because you’ll be out of luck fast. Benioff is all on board for the violation of privacy, safety and rights of women and girls and is jumping in where Disney left off, bestowing a whopping $100.000,000. to another California children’s hospital. And oh look, they just happen to have a youth gender clinic too!
There aren’t many media conglomerates feeding us information and it only fits within the allowable purview of their corporate interests. They are all on board the gender-as-medical-identity train, leading us to believe this uniformity of thought is organic acceptance by the populace which encourages group think acquiescence. In other words, people are being brainwashed into believing that disembodiment for profiteering is a human right and that most people agree with this - when most people don't know feck-all about what is actually happening because all they see are slick advertisements by the MIC controlled media and messages from the LGBT NGO front who tell the media what to say. The mainstream media is being controlled and trained by LGBT NGOs fronting for the MIC and functioning as the arbiters of nothing less than reality itself.
We have to get clear that this apparatus of the gender medical industry is being strategically driven by capital, technological developments and the MIC through all our institutions, corporations and governments. While we are all arguing about what identity means, as it is overlaid with sex role stereotypes, the elites are running away with human sex. They are violating the boundary between male and female, opening markets to which our essential humanity becomes a-sky-is the-limit market to be mined.
Less than 2 weeks ago, Tanzanian Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan delivered the news that her country’s president, John Pombe Magufuli, had died of heart failure. President Magufuli had been described as missing since the end of February, with several anti-government parties circulating stories that he had fallen ill with COVID-19. During his presidency, Magufuli had consistently challenged neocolonialism in Tanzania, whether it manifested through the exploitation of his country’s natural resources by predatory multinationals or the West’s influence over his country’s food supply.
In the months leading up to his death, Magufuli had become better known and particularly demonized in the West for opposing the authority of international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) in determining his government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. However, Magufuli had spurned many of the same interests and organizations angered by his response to COVID for years, having kicked out Bill Gates-funded trials of genetically-modified crops and more recently angering some of the most powerful mining companies in the West, companies with ties to the World Economic Forum and the Forum’s efforts to guide the course of the 4th industrial revolution.
Indeed, more threatening than his recent COVID controversies was the threat Magufuli posed to foreign control over the world’s largest, ready-to-develop nickel deposit, a metal essential to electric car batteries and thus the current effort to usher in an electric, autonomous vehicle revolution. For instance, just a month before he disappeared, Magufuli had signed an agreement to begin developing that nickel deposit, a deposit that had been previously co-owned by Barrick Gold and Glencore, the commodity giant deeply tied to Israel’s Mossad, until Magufuli revoked their licenses for the project in 2018.
Running afoul of the most powerful corporate and banking cartels followed then by the mysterious onset of sudden regime change would normally garner considerable coverage from anti-imperialist independent media outlets, which recently covered similar events in Bolivia that led to the removal of Evo Morales from power. However, the very outlets that have extensively covered Western-backed regime change efforts for years have been entirely silent on the very convenient death of Magufuli. Presumably, their silence is related to Magufuli’s flouting of COVID-19 narrative orthodoxy, as these same outlets have largely promoted the official narrative of the pandemic.
Yet, regardless of whether one agrees with Magufuli’s response to COVID, his sudden departure and Tanzania’s new leadership is a defeat for a widely popular domestic movement that sought to mitigate and reverse the centuries-long exploitation of Tanzania by the West. Now, with Magufuli’s lengthy disappearance followed by his apparent sudden death from heart failure, the country’s future is now set to be determined by Tanzanian politicians with deep ties to the oligarch-beholden United Nations and the World Economic Forum.
In contrast to Magufuli, who routinely stood up to predatory corporations and imperialist designs on his country, Samia Suhulhu and Tanzanian opposition politician Tundu Lissu are poised to offer up their country’s resources, and their population, on the altar of the Western elite-driven 4th industrial revolution.
Magufuli was first elected with his running mate and now president of Tanzania, Samia Suhulu, back in 2015 with 58% of the vote. At first, the president was met with lavish praise from the same Western media outlets that would later seek to demonize him. For instance, a BBC report from 2016 reflected on Magufuli’s first year in office and noted his 96% approval rating. The report also quoted political analyst Kitila Mumbo, who remarked, “there is no doubt that President Magufuli is very popular among many ordinary Tanzanians” and added that “the president’s main promise of extending free education to secondary school, which came into effect in January, has been well received.”
Running mates John Magufuli and Samia Suhulu on a 2015 campaign flier. Source: 2015 FILE PHOTO
Also in 2016, CNN had reported that “the Tanzanian public has gone wild for its new President John Magufuli” and that “after sweeping to victory in October 2015, Magufuli has embarked on a remorseless purge of corruption.” The article reported that Magufuli had inspired a new term, as seen in Tanzanians’ social media posts:
“ … ‘Magufulify’ – defined as: ‘To render or declare an action faster or cheaper; 2. to deprive [public officials] of their capacity to enjoy life at taxpayers’ expense; 3. to terrorize lazy and corrupt individuals in society.’”
Indeed, Magufuli’s term was characterized by making decisions that benefited the majority of Tanzanians, largely at the expense of foreign corporations but also by overhauling a government known for its entrenched corruption and absenteeism prior to Magufuli’s rise. His administration cut the salaries of the executives at state-owned companies, as well as his own salary, from $15,000 to $4,000 USD. Some State parades and celebrations were reduced or cancelled to cover the expenses of public hospitals.
Healthcare had long been one of Magufuli’s priorities, and the life expectancy of the country significantly increased every year he was in office. In addition, in the previous 50 years of Tanzanian independence, only 77 district hospitals were constructed, whereas during the past 4 years alone, 101 such hospitals were constructed and equipped with local funds. By July 2020, the country had grown from a so-called lower income country to a middle income country, per the World Bank.
A recent report by the hawkish, US establishment think tank, the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), was highly critical of Magufuli, but noted the following about his political philosophy:
“Magufuli, who subscribes to his own homegrown “Tanzania first” philosophy, believes that Tanzania has been cheated out of profit and wealth by exploitative mabeberu (“imperialists”) since independence. To secure populist support, Magufuli has fashioned his agenda as a continuation of the socialist vision of Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who advocated self-reliance, an intolerance to corruption, and a strong nationalist character.”
Magufuli’s various conflicts with the mabeberu transpired throughout his presidency, targeting various projects and business ventures of corporations and oligarchs that have worked to exploit much of the Global South for decades. For example, in late 2018, Tanzania’s government ordered a stop to all ongoing field trials on genetically modified (GM) crops and the destruction of all plants grown as part of those trials. Those trials were being conducted by a partnership called the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project, which was a collaboration between Monsanto and the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, a non-profit funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, GM seed/agrochemical giant Syngenta, PepsiCo and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), long known to be a cut-out for the CIA. Then, in January of 2021, a month before Magufuli’s disappearance, Tanzania’s agriculture ministry not only announced a cancellation of all “research trials involving genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the country” for the second time, it also announced plans to institute new biosafety regulations aimed at protecting Tanzania’s food sovereignty by scrutinizing western GM seed imports.
Historically, the US has been particularly harsh to countries that resist the integration of GM biotech into their food systems. According to a State Department cable from 2007 published by Wikileaks, Craig Stapleton, then-US Ambassador to France, advised the US to prepare for economic war with countries unwilling to introduce Monsanto’s GM corn seeds into their agricultural sectors. He recommended the US “calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the E.U.” for the bloc’s resistance to approving some GM products. In another cable from 2009, a US diplomat stationed in Germany relayed intelligence on Bavarian political parties to several US federal agencies and the US Secretary of Defense, telling them which parties opposed Monsanto’s M810 corn seed and spoke of “tactics that the US could impose to resolve the opposition.”
The US government’s use of food as a weapon for imperialist agendas became de facto policy when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State during the Nixon administration. During that period, a classified report was produced by the State Department that argued that the population of the developing world threatened US national security and posited that food aid be used as an “instrument of national power” to advance US empire.
Magufuli’s role in robbing Big Ag of a foothold in Tanzania a month before his disappearance and death certainly casts suspicion on the circumstances surrounding his demise. Yet, if that weren’t enough, Magufuli, during the exact same time frame, greatly angered the most powerful commodity corporations in the world across the sectors of mining, oil and natural gas.
Particularly damaging to foreign corporate interests and agendas was Magufuli’s targeting of the foreign-dominated mining sector in Tanzania, which contains some of the world’s largest deposits of minerals essential to 4th industrial revolution-related technologies. With 500,000 tonnes of nickel, 75,000 tonnes of copper, and 45,000 tonnes of cobalt, Tanzania sits on a mountain of mineral wealth and, more specifically, minerals needed for next-generation batteries and hardware that are themselves essential to the effort to rapidly implement “smart” infrastructure and automation globally. Within Africa, Tanzania has the continent’s second largest mining sector, second only to South Africa.
In the years prior to Magufuli’s rise, Tanzania had offered relatively low tax rates and little regulatory oversight for mining companies. Yet, in 2017, Magufuli declared “economic warfare” on foreign mining companies and his administration followed through on the declaration, passing two laws that provided the government with a much greater share of the revenue from the exploitation of Tanzania’s natural resources. This, of course, came at the expense of foreign mining conglomerates. The new legislation also gave the government the right to renegotiate and/or revoke existing mining licenses that had been awarded prior to Magufuli’s presidency.
Soon after, Tanzania’s government took aim at Acacia Mining, which is now owned by Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold, and slapped them with $190 billion in fines for unpaid taxes and penalties. “It shouldn’t happen that we have all this wealth, sit on it, while others come and benefit from it by cheating us,” Magufuli said of the decision. “We need investors, but not this kind of exploitation. We are supposed to share profits.” In 2018, the administration went after Acacia again, fining them $2.4 million for contaminating local water supplies in residential areas.
The signing of the Kabanga Nickel Framework Agreement in January 2021. Source: https://www.kabanganickel.com/
2018 was also the year that Magufuli’s biggest rift with powerful mining corporations took place, one that potentially influenced his disappearance and subsequent death. The Kabanga nickel project, the largest, development-ready nickel deposit in the world, had been owned jointly by Canada’s Barrick Gold and commodities giant Glencore. In May 2018, Magufuli’s administration revoked the Barrick-Glencore license for the project, along with several others that included other nickel, gold, silver, copper and rare earth mining projects.
Angering Glencore in particular is a risky business. The commodities giant was originally founded by Marc Rich, an infamous asset for Israel’s Mossad who allowed Glencore profits to be used to finance covert intelligence activities. Rich and Glencore’s intelligence ties are discussed in greater detail in Part IV of Whitney Webb’s series on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Today, Glencore is closely linked with Nat Rothschild, the son and heir of the scion of the British-based branch of the elite banking family, who purchased a $40 million stake in the company and was largely responsible for orchestrating Simon Murray’s appointment as Glencore’s chairman as well as his close relationship with Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg.
Then, in January 2021, a month before Magufuli disappeared, the Kabanga Nickel project went forward without Glencore and Barrick Gold, with Tanzania successfully negotiating joint ownership of the mine with a company set up by Norwegian millionaire Peter Smedvig and two of his associates. Unlike the Barrick-Glencore project, in which Tanzania’s government had no financial stake, the new project gave Tanzania a 16% ownership stake in the mine, which is now required by law following Magufuli’s reform of the country’s mining sector.
The loss of Kabanga was clearly a grave one for Barrick Gold and Glencore given the central role nickel and this specific deposit in Tanzania are set to play in the production and implementation of “smart” technologies. Nickel, among other uses, is a key component of the next-generation batteries used in “smart” technologies, specifically in electric vehicles. As a result, the demand for nickel is projected to rise dramatically in the next few years, in part due to the current effort to phase out most motor vehicles and replace them with ones that are both electric and self-driving. The importance of nickel to the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution has been underscored by the World Economic Forum, which estimates that demand for high-purity nickel for EV battery production “will increase by a factor of 24 in 2030 compared to 2018 levels.” In addition, last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that “nickel is the biggest concern for electric car batteries.”
In addition to Tanzania’s valuable nickel reserves, it can be argued that Tanzania’s other most significant mineral wealth lies in its graphite reserves, which rank as the 5th largest in the world. In 2018, Oxford Business Group estimated that Tanzania would become one of the top three graphite producers on the planet. With the World Bank estimating that graphite demand will increase 500% in the next 30 years, Tanzania now holds a strong bargaining position in the global market. The global lithium-ion battery market is “expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.0% from 2020 to 2027,” and these batteries usually require both nickel and graphite, both of which are plentiful under Tanzania. As Elon Musk has put it, “lithium-ion batteries should be called nickel graphite batteries.”
Last year, Musk had tweeted that “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it,” in response to accusations that the US government had backed the 2019 coup in Bolivia so that Musk’s Tesla could acquire rights to the world’s largest lithium reserves, another mineral critical to electric vehicle battery production. A few months before Musk’s infamous tweet, the foreign minister of Bolivia’s coup government had written a letter to Musk that stated that “any corporation that you or your company can provide to our country will be gratefully welcomed” in relation to the country’s mining sector. These incidents underscore US empire’s current willingness to engage in regime change to ensure control of mineral deposits considered essential to emerging technologies and the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Logo for the latest iteration of the Kabanga Nickel mining project. Source: https://www.kabanganickel.com/
In the case of Tanzania, it is worth noting that Glencore, which had its ownership of the Kabanga nickel deposit revoked by Magufuli, is closely tied to the World Economic Forum and is part of the Forum’s Global Battery Alliance as well as its Mining and Metals Blockchain Initiative, both of which focus on supply chains for minerals deemed essential to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Also of interest is the fact that Tundu Lissu, the Magufuli government’s most vocal critic and a main source for all mainstream media Tanzania reporting, was formerly employed by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a US-based non-profit and “strategic partner” of the World Economic Forum. The WRI aims to build “clean energy markets” and “value supply chains,” supply chains which will inevitably depend on cheaply sourced raw materials like nickel, graphite, and cobalt.
The World Resource Institute has received no less than $7.1 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and, according to the WRI donor page, they’ve received no less than $750,000 from the West’s most powerful corporate actors including Shell, Citibank, The Rockefeller Foundation, Google, Microsoft, The Open Society Foundation, USAID, and the World Bank. Lissu praised news of Magufuli’s sudden death as a “relief” and an “opportunity for a new beginning” in Tanzania. Tellingly, he also spoke very positively of the country’s future under Magufuli’s Vice President and current President Samia Suhulu, suggesting that she will take the country in a direction very different than that of her predecessor.
Thabit Jacob, a Tanzanian academic at Denmark’s Roskilde University was quoted in UpStream as saying that Rostam Aziz — one of Tanzania’s wealthiest businessmen and ex-parliament member who had a major falling out with Magufuli over tax policy— could soon become a key player in the new government, “meaning big business will play a bigger role” in the country’s future. Rostam owns Caspian Mining, the single largest Tanzanian mining firm and a frequent contractor for Barrick Gold.
Under the Magufuli administration, Tanzania’s COVID-19 response policies ran counter to the international consensus, with the country declining to implement any major lockdowns or mask mandates. It should be noted that even the CFR relayed that these decisions had the democratic support of the masses, writing that “on-the-street sentiment suggests many Tanzanians agree with the government’s light-touch approach.”
Magufuli was also skeptical of adopting COVID-19 vaccines before they could be investigated and certified by Tanzania’s own experts, warning that they could pose safety concerns due to their rushed development. “The Ministry of Health should be careful, they should not hurry to try these vaccines without doing research … We should not be used as ‘guinea pigs'”, Magufuli had stated in January. “We are not yet satisfied that those vaccines have been clinically proven safe,” Tanzanian Health Minister Dr. Dorothy Gwajima later remarked at a news conference.
Magufuli refused to immediately agree to receive COVID-19 vaccines from COVAX, a public-private partnership between Gates’ GAVI and the World Health Organization which aims to deliver 270 million COVID vaccines – with 269 million of them being the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine – to the world “as soon as they’re available.” In recent weeks, major safety issues with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine have been identified by national regulatory bodies across Europe and Asia and numerous countries have suspended its use.
However, such nuance regarding the safety of “vaccine aid” was absent from the now ubiquitous mainstream narrative of Magufuli being “anti-science.” That narrative was first established as early as May 2020, when Magufuli exposed the inaccuracy of imported PCR testing kits after a goat, a piece of fruit, and motor oil all received ‘positive’ test results from the supplied kits. “There is something happening … we should not accept that every aid is meant to be good for this nation,” he proclaimed in a national address.
After this address, Bloomberg called Magufuli the “COVID-denying president.” Foreign Policy went as far as to dub the President as “Denialist in Chief” and asked if he was even “more dangerous than COVID-19.” Magufuli became the Western press’s poster boy for “COVID denial” while Tanzania became “the country that’s rejecting the vaccine.”
However, in the months that followed May 2020, the accuracy of PCR testing kits have been called into question, not only by mainstream media, but also “authoritative” global health bodies like the World Health Organization, thereby validating Magufuli’s initial critique. In a story titled “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be”, the New York Times reported that the “standard [PCR] tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus. . . and are not likely contagious.”
In November 2020, a landmark court case in Portugal ruled that the PCR test used to diagnose COVID-19 was not fit for that purpose, ruling that “a single positive PCR test cannot be used as an effective diagnosis of infection.” In their ruling, judges Margarida Ramos de Almeida and Ana Paramés referred to a study by Jaafar et al., which found that the accuracy of some PCR tests was only about 3%, meaning up to 97% of positive results could be false positives.
By December 2020, the World Health Organization had confirmed that the PCR test was ripe for false positives, warning that they could easily lead to COVID-free individuals receiving positive test results. The position that PCR testing kits are unreliable is not new science, as a 2007 New York Times article titled “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic that Wasn’t” wrote that the sensitivity of PCR testing kits “makes false positives likely, and when hundreds or thousands of people are tested, false positives can make it seem like there is an epidemic.” In addition, large batches of PCR test kits in the early phase of the COVID-19 crisis were contaminated with COVID-19 prior to their use, which was later found to have significantly skewed the number of cases reported in the early phases of the pandemic in the US and beyond.
Numerous examples of vaccines with severe adverse effects being pushed onto the Tanzanian people, combined with the widely reported safety issues surrounding the AstraZeneca/ Oxford vaccine that Tanzania would receive through COVAX, make the Western media’s “anti-science” characterization of Magufuli particularly inappropriate. For example, as far back as 1977, studies published in The Lancet established that the risks of the diphtheria tetanus pertussis (DTP) vaccine are greater than the risks associated with contracting wild pertussis. After mounting evidence linking the drug to brain damage, seizures, and even death, the U.S. phased it out in the 1990s and replaced it with a safer version called DTaP. A 2017 study funded by the Danish government concluded that more African children were dying at the hands of the deadly DTP vaccine than by the diseases it prevented. Researchers examined data from Guinea Bissau and concluded that boys were dying at 3.9 times the rate of those who had not received the shot, while girls suffered almost 10 times (9.98) the death rate. GAVI, subsidized by USAID and the Gates Foundation, has dumped over $27 million worth of the dangerously outdated DTP vaccine onto the Tanzanian health system as of today.
Furthermore, as detailed by Unlimited Hangout in December, the developers of the Oxford vaccine (the vaccine Tanzania would receive under COVAX), are deeply entangled with the eugenics movement and engage in ethically questionable activities regarding the intersection of race and science to this day. In 2020, The Wellcome Trust, the research institute where both of the lead developers of the Oxford vaccine work, was accused by the University of Cape Town of illegally exploiting hundreds of Africans by stealing their DNA without consent.
Also concerning is the fact that more than 20 European countries have halted use of the Oxford/ AstraZeneca vaccine due to a possible link to blood clot disorders and strokes. Even the New York Times has questioned if the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is a viable candidate, particularly for Africa. According to a Times article from February, South Africa halted use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford coronavirus vaccine after evidence emerged that the vaccine did not protect clinical trial volunteers from mild or moderate illness.”
In October 2020, Magufuli was reelected to a second, five year term, this time gaining a resounding 84.39% of vote. At the time, the US government-funded outlet Voice of America (VOA) quoted one Tanzanian, Edward Mbise, who told the outlet that “[they] all expected [Magufuli] to win due to what he has done … he has accomplished so many things that you can’t even finish listing all of them.”
However, Tundu Lissu, the leader of Magufuli’s main opposition party, alleged that the election had been fraudulent, but provided no evidence. According to the same VOA article, Lissu called for “citizens [to] take action to ensure all election results are changed.”
Lissu’s accusations of fraud were widely reprinted by Western media despite the lack of evidence. A BBC article was titled “President Magufuli Wins Election Amid Fraud Claims.” The Guardian, funded heavily by the Gates Foundation, _s_imilarly claimed that “Tanzania’s President wins re-election Amid Claims of Fraud.” In the US, the New York Times published a story called, “As Tanzania’s President Wins a Second Term, Opposition Calls for Protests.”
Neither mention of Magufuli’s approval ratings nor quotes from actual Tanzanian people were anywhere to be found in these articles, details which had been plentiful in Western mainstream media coverage of his first election victory. Quotes that did appear were usually from Lissu, now exiled in Belgium, or other members of his party.
Not long after Lissu’s claims had been uncritically repeated by major Western media outlets, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced sanctions on his last day in charge of the State Department that targeted Tanzanian officials who had allegedly been “responsible for or complicit in undermining the 2020 Tanzanian general election”. It is worth pointing out that the similarities between the election fraud accusations in Tanzania and those made in Bolivia just prior to the US-backed November 2019 coup are considerable.
Two weeks later, on February 5th, 2021, the Center for Strategic & International Studies suggested that the US might, as it often does, fund Magufuli’s political opposition, openly suggesting that the “the Biden administration has an opportunity to increase direct engagement with Tanzanian opposition politicians and civil society groups,” using Magufuli’s “dangerous” approach to COVID-19 as public justification.
That same week, _the Guardian’_s Global Development section (made possible through a partnership with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) published an article titled, “It’s time for Africa to rein in Tanzania’s anti-vaxxer president.” Predictably, this article, and others like it, sought to paint the African leader as a crazy conspiracy theorist, but left out the fact that Magufuli had earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in Chemistry before being elected president in 2015.
On March 9th, Tundu Lissu, the opposition leader formerly employed by the Washington-based and Wall Street-funded World Resource Institute, contended that Magufuli was critically ill with COVID-19. In a series of tweets, Lissu asserted that the then-president had been flown first to Kenya and then India to be treated for the virus. “We urge the government to come out publicly and say where is the president and what is his condition,” John Mnyika, another opposition leader, also publicly stated similar claims. The very first paper to run the story that Magufuli had COVID-19 was The Nation, a relatively new Kenyan newspaper that has received $4 million from the US-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Meanwhile, the Magufuli government repeatedly dismissed these claims as fake news. “He is fine and doing his responsibilities,” insisted Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa on March 12. “A head of state is not a head of a jogging club who should always be around taking selfies,” Constitutional Affairs Minister Mwigulu Nchemba had said at the time.
On March 11, just days before the announcement of Magufuli’s death and Suhulu’s appointment to the post of President, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the influential think tank closely tied to the Rockefeller family and the US political elite, suggested that a “bold figure within the ruling party [i.e. Magufuli’s party] could capitalize on the current episode to gain popularity and begin to reverse course …”
While a swift leadership transition in Tanzania might seem like an unexpected surprise to western financial interests, groups in the US who specialize in foreign meddling and regime change operations had been at work in Tanzania ever since Magufuli’s initial election victory. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government think/do tank which aims to “support freedom around the world,” pumped $1.1 million into different Tanzanian opposition groups and causes over the last few years. One co-founder of NED, Allen Weinstein, once disclosed to the Washington Post that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Carl Gershman, NED’s other co-founder, once told the New York Times that “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA . . .and that’s why the endowment was created.”
NED’s recent operations in Tanzania included projects to “organize young people to promote reform, and introduce them to new media tools that can assist in their efforts”, “recruit and train young artists to convey stories about governance”, financially support an opposition-friendly “satirical” news production that provides humorous commentary on current events to “encourage conversations”, as well as financially supporting the production of a “comprehensive televised civic education campaign” aimed at both COVID-related public awareness and “voter education.” The grantee for the funds, the Tanzania Bora Initiative, whose slogan is “transforming mindsets, influencing cultures” boasts of “empowering over 50 young Tanzanian political candidates.” The Tanzania Bora Initiative was also heavily supported by USAID while Magufuli was in office.
One wonders what effects these NED and USAID-funded efforts would have had on the country if Magufuli had not died in office. In January, the CIA-filled Jamestown Foundation began reporting on Tanzania’s “creeping radicalization issue” and eerily put forward the idea that “Tanzania could be primed to experience an increase in violence directed inward…” Though this thankfully never came to fruition, in other cases of Western-backed regime change, opposition groups funded by these same organizations have been known to stoke or create violence in order to justify Western intervention.
The Magufuli Administration wasn’t oblivious to the West’s regime change efforts. In the years following his election victory, Tanzanian police forces had raided meetings organized by the Open Society Foundations, a group infamous for their meddling initiatives in states targeted by the US’ foreign policy establishment.
Yet, despite his strong stands against the West, something about Magufuli’s approach had changed the day of his last public appearance on February 24th, 2021. That morning, the Tanzanian President had begun urging his countrymen to wear masks, something he had resisted doing for nearly a year after the WHO declared a pandemic, and urged them to begin taking health precautions.
Convenient for the powers that Magufuli had angered, his successor and VP, Samia Suluhu, hails from the United Nations’ World Food Programme and has a profile listed on the website of the World Economic Forum, suggesting a closeness with the circles her predecessor had rebuked. It still remains unclear if she has already reversed any of Magufuli’s policies, either economic or COVID-related, but some shifts seem likely given that her appointment has been met with pure celebration by the same institutional actors that actively worked to undermine President Magufuli.
Another potential indicator is the dubious discovery of a new COVID variant in Tanzania that reportedly has more mutations than any other variant. That variant’s discovery was announced just over a week following the announcement of Magufuli’s death and seems tailor-made to provide a public justification of a reversal of Tanzania’s government approach to COVID. Notably, the Tanzania variant was discovered by Krisp, “a scientific institute that carries out genetic testing for 10 African nations” that is funded by the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the governments of the US, the UK and South Africa.
Regarding a potentially imminent reversal of Tanzania’s COVID policy, the reaction of the top official at the World Health Organization may offer a clue. WHO General Director Tedros Ghebreyesus had no time to comment after receiving word of Magufuli’s sudden death, but quickly took to Twitter minutes after Suluhu’s swearing-in ceremony to congratulate the country’s first female president, telling her that he’s “looking forward to working with her to keep people safe from COVID-19, and end the pandemic.” Ghebreyesus was previously on the board of two organizations that Bill Gates had founded, provided seed money for, and continues to fund to this day: GAVI and the Global Fund, where Tedros was chair of the board.
Samia Suluhu Hassan’s WEF profile. Source: https://www.weforum.org/people/samia-suluhu-hassan
A few days before Ghebreyesus’ tweet, the State Department released a statement reaffirming the US’ commitment to supporting Tanzanians as they advocate for respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and work to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that “We hope that Tanzania can move forward on a democratic and prosperous path.” Vice President Kamala Harris had nothing to say in regards to the popular East African president suddenly dying, yet – like Ghebreyesus, she managed to send her best wishes to the newly sworn in Suluhu Samia on Twitter.
Billionaire-backed Human Rights Watch, whose revolving door with the US government is well documented, welcomed Magufuli’s death, publishing a piece entitled “Tanzania: President Magufuli’s Death Should Open New Chapter,” writing that the African leader’s sudden passing “provides an opportunity.” Notably, the same organization had supported the US-backed military coup in Bolivia as well as the Trump Administration’s regime change efforts in Nicaragua and had called for an increase of deadly U.S. sanctions on Venezeula’s Chavista government, even after the publication of a report by The Center for Economic and Policy Research which found that at least 40,000 Venezuelan civilians had already died due to the such sanctions.
Earlier this month, Judd Devermont, a former CIA senior political analyst on sub-Saharan Africa, in a CSIS piece titled “Will Magufuli’s Death Bring Real Change to Tanzania?,” wrote that, prior to Magufuli’s death, it was “believed that Suluhu was growing increasingly wary of Magufuli’s authoritarian policies. . .” Later in the article, the former CIA analyst accidentally disclosed his working definition of “authoritarianism” when he wrote: “Magufuli steered Tanzania toward authoritarianism by implementing a nationalist economic agenda characterized by stifled regional and international trade and a blow to foreign direct investment (FDI).”
However, the claim that Magufuli was against all foreign investment is misleading. Perhaps Devermont should have written that Magufuli’s policies were a blow to FDI from the West, as Magufuli, in the last months of his presidency and his life, was directly courting foreign investment from China.
In mid-December 2020, Tanzania Invests reported on a Magufuli meeting with Chinese leadership, after which Magufuli announced that Tanzania “welcomes traders and investors from China in various areas like manufacturing, tourism, construction, and trade for the benefit of both parties.” The report also noted that “Magufuli asked China to cooperate with Tanzania in investing in large projects by providing cheap loans” and that “Tanzania will further develop and enhance its long-standing relationship with China and will continue to support China on various international issues.” China is currently Tanzania’s top trading partner and Tanzania is the largest recipient of Chinese government aid in Africa. It is worth considering that this China pivot, particularly at a time when the US’ new Cold War with China is reaching new heights, played a role in Western-backed regime change efforts targeting Tanzania.
The fate suffered by President John Magufuli and Tanzania is similar to what happened in a neighboring country, Burundi, just six months ago. The president of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza, publicly refused to enact top-down mitigation measures in response to COVID-19, and was similarly vilified by US aligned press and think tanks. In May 2020, Nkurunziza expelled the World Health Organization from Burundi and, three weeks later, it was reported that he had died after suddenly going into cardiac arrest.
More recently, Zambia, which borders Tanzania and is set to hold elections this August, is currently angering some of the same actors that Magufuli had challenged in its government’s efforts to nationalize its copper mines and potentially other mining projects. In December, Zambian President Edgar Lungu announced that his government would acquire “a significant stake in some selected mine assets” in order to “create sufficient wealth for the nation.” Echoing Magufuli, Lungu had stated “We shall no longer tolerate mining investors who seek to [profit] from our God-given natural resources, leaving us with empty hands.”
In January, Lungu took a step towards nationalizing the copper mining sector after a protracted dispute with none other than Glencore. Copper, like nickel, graphite and lithium, is a metal critical to the success of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Western media reports on Lungu’s recent move quoted experts who urged Zambia’s government “to tread carefully” in its efforts to increase the role of the public sector in the nation’s mining industry.
Then, a week after Magufuli’s death was announced, Lungu’s main competitor in the upcoming election publicly accused Lungu of trying to have him murdered while some English language, pro-Western media outlets have already claimed that Lungu plans to rig the upcoming election in his favor and that the country “may burn” if the election has the “wrong” outcome.
Such examples reveal that the situation that has recently unfolded in Tanzania is hardly unique in today’s Africa. However, the domination of the media landscape with constant COVID coverage has made Western audiences largely unaware of the various regime change efforts that have taken place or are underway in the region. Unlike regime change efforts of the recent past, those targeting Africa, and also Bolivia, seem laser focused on mining assets deemed essential to establishing the supply chains needed to power the 4th Industrial Revolution.
With many of these countries having recently cozied up to China, it seems the regime change projects and proxy wars of the future are set to revolve, not around fossil fuels and pipelines, but over whether the East or the West will dominate the supplies of minerals needed to produce and maintain next-generation technology.
Not only has COVID kept reporting on these coups for minerals to a minimum, it has also lent a convenient cover for the demonization of leaders and the advancement of regime change in countries that are being targeted for other reasons that have everything to do with resources and little to do with a virus.
Author
Jeremy Loffredo is a journalist and researcher based in Washington, DC. He is formerly a segment producer for RT AMERICA and is currently an investigative reporter for Children’s Health Defense.
Author
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
Pfizer has been accused of “bullying” Latin American governments during negotiations to acquire its Covid-19 vaccine, and the company has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases, according to an investigation by the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
In the case of one Latin American country, demands made by the pharmaceutical giant led to a three-month delay in a vaccine deal being reached. For Argentina and Brazil, no national deals were agreed to at all with Pfizer. Any hold-up in countries receiving vaccines can lead to more people contracting Covid-19 and potentially dying.
Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded more than the usual indemnity against civil claims filed by citizens who suffer serious adverse events after being inoculated. They said Pfizer also insisted the governments cover the potential costs of civil cases brought as a result of Pfizer’s own acts of negligence, fraud, or malice. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs.
One government health official who was present in the unnamed country’s negotiations described Pfizer’s demands as “high-level bullying” and said the government felt like it was being “held to ransom” in order to access lifesaving vaccines.
Campaigners are already warning of a “vaccine apartheid” in which rich Western countries may be inoculated years before lower-income regions. Now, legal experts have raised concerns that Pfizer’s demands amount to an abuse of power.
“Pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t be using their power to limit lifesaving vaccines in low- and middle-income countries,” said Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “[This] seems to be exactly what they’re doing.”
Protection against liability shouldn’t be used as “the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of desperate countries with a desperate population,” he added.
Pfizer, which partnered with BioNTech, a German biotech, to make the vaccine, has been in talks with more than 100 countries and international bodies, and has supply agreements with nine countries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay. The terms of those deals are unknown.
Pfizer declined to comment on the allegations about its demands in negotiations, citing “ongoing negotiations which are private and confidential.”
The company told the Bureau in a statement: “Pfizer and BioNTech are firmly committed to working with governments and other relevant stakeholders to ensure equitable and affordable access to our COVID-19 vaccine for people around the world.” The company said that in addition to the nine Latin American countries with which it has struck supply agreements, it has “allocated doses to low- and lower-middle-income countries at a not-for-profit price, including an advance purchase agreement with COVAX to provide up to 40 million doses in 2021.” COVAX is a global initiative to pool purchasing power and ensure vaccine access for low-income countries. “We are committed to supporting efforts aimed at providing developing countries with the same access to vaccines as the rest of the world,” Pfizer said.
Most governments are offering indemnity — exemption from legal liability — to the vaccine manufacturers they are buying from. This means that a citizen who suffers an adverse event after being vaccinated can file a claim against the manufacturer and, if successful, the government would pay the compensation. In some countries people can also apply for compensation through specific structures without going to court.
This is fairly typical for vaccines administered in a pandemic. In many cases, adverse events are so rare that they do not show up in clinical trials and only become apparent once hundreds of thousands of people have received the vaccine (a 2009 H1N1 flu vaccine, for example, was eventually linked to narcolepsy). Because manufacturers have developed vaccines quickly and because they protect everyone in society, governments often agree to cover the cost of compensation.
However, the government officials from Argentina and the unnamed country who spoke to the Bureau said Pfizer’s demands went beyond those of other vaccine companies, and beyond those of COVAX, which is also requiring its member countries to indemnify manufacturers. This presents an additional burden for some countries because it means having to hire specialist lawyers, and sometimes pass complex new legislation, so manufacturers’ liabilities can be waived.
Pfizer asked for an additional indemnity from civil cases, meaning that the company would not be held liable for rare adverse effects or for its own acts of negligence, fraud or malice. This includes those linked to company practices — say, if Pfizer sent the wrong vaccine or made errors during manufacturing.
“Some liability protection is warranted, but certainly not for fraud, gross negligence, mismanagement, failure to follow good manufacturing practices,” said Gostin. “Companies have no right to ask for indemnity for these things.”
Mark Eccleston-Turner, a lecturer in global health law at Keele University in England, said Pfizer and other manufacturers have received government funding to research and develop the vaccines and are now pushing the potential costs of adverse effects back on to governments, including those in low- and middle-income countries. (Pfizer’s partner, BioNTech, was given $445 million by the German government to develop a vaccine and the U.S. government agreed in July to preorder 100 million doses for nearly $2 billion, before the vaccine had even entered Phase 3 trials. Pfizer expects to make sales of $15 billion worth of vaccines in 2021.)
In Eccleston-Turner’s opinion, it looks like Pfizer “is trying to eke out as much profit and minimize its risk at every juncture with this vaccine development then this vaccine rollout. Now, the vaccine development has been heavily subsidized already. So there’s very minimal risk for the manufacturer involved there.”
The Bureau spoke to officials from two countries, who all described how meetings with Pfizer began promisingly but quickly turned sour, and reviewed a report by the Brazilian Ministry of Health.
The Argentinian Ministry of Health began negotiating with the company in June and President Alberto Fernández held a meeting with the company’s general manager for Argentina the following month. During subsequent meetings Pfizer asked to be indemnified against the cost of any future civil claims, said an official from the president’s office. Although this had never been done before, the country’s Congress passed a new law in October allowing for it. However, Pfizer was not happy with the phrasing of the legislation, according to the official, who declined to be identified because the negotiations were confidential. The government believed Pfizer should be liable for any acts of negligence or malice. Pfizer, said the official, disagreed.
The government did offer to amend the existing law to make it clear “negligence” meant problems in the distribution and delivery of the vaccines. But Pfizer was still not satisfied. It asked the government to amend the legislation through a new decree; Fernández refused.
“Argentina could compensate for the vaccine’s adverse effects, but not if Pfizer makes a mistake,” said the official, who has detailed knowledge of the negotiations. “For example, what would happen if Pfizer unintentionally interrupted the vaccine’s cold chain [of -70 Celsius during transport and storage] … and a citizen wants to sue them? It would not be fair for Argentina to pay for a Pfizer error.”
The official said talks soon became tense and complicated: “Instead of giving in on some points, Pfizer demanded more and more.” In addition to the changes sought in the new law, it asked Argentina to take out international insurance to pay for potential future cases against the company (countries were also asked by vaccine makers and the WHO to do this during the H1N1 outbreak).
In late December, Pfizer made another unexpected request: that the government put up sovereign assets — which might include federal bank reserves, embassy buildings, or military bases — as collateral.
“We offered to pay millions of doses in advance, we accepted this international insurance, but the last request was unusual: Pfizer demanded that the sovereign assets of Argentina also be part of the legal support,” the official said. “It was an extreme demand that I had only heard when the foreign debt had to be negotiated, but both in that case and in this one, we rejected it immediately.”
The failed negotiations mean Argentinian citizens, unlike those in neighboring countries, do not have access to Pfizer’s vaccine, leaving them with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, AstraZeneca’s vaccine, and those delivered through COVAX. The government is also negotiating to acquire vaccines from Moderna, Sinopharm, and CanSino.
“Pfizer misbehaved with Argentina,” said Ginés González Garcia, Argentina’s former minister of health. “Its intolerance with us was tremendous.”
The same demands were made of Brazil’s Ministry of Health, according to a ministry statement. Pfizer asked to be indemnified against all civil claims and asked the ministry to put up sovereign assets as collateral, as well as create a guarantee fund with money deposited in a foreign bank account. In January, the ministry refused these terms, describing the clauses as “abusive.”
An official from the Latin American country that cannot be named described talks unfolding similarly. This person said the government began negotiating with Pfizer in July, before the vaccine was approved. There was a perception that Pfizer’s negotiators had a “good cop, bad cop” routine, with the “bad cop” pressing the government to buy more doses.
“[At that time] there was not a single drug or vaccine in the world with this kind of technology that had been shown to be safe and effective. … You had this lady putting pressure saying: ‘Buy more, you’re going to kill people, people are going to die because of you,’” the official said.
Negotiations became fraught when the company asked for additional indemnity, for civil cases alleging Pfizer’s acts of negligence, fraud, or malice. The government had never awarded any kind of indemnity before and did not want to waive liability, but Pfizer said this was non-negotiable. Negotiations continued and eventually a deal was signed that included the additional indemnity provisions, but after a delay of three months.
As Pfizer has only 2 billion doses to sell across the world this year — apparently on a first-come, first-served basis — the official is angry about a delay that likely pushed the country further back in the queue.
One of the reasons the government wanted Pfizer’s vaccines was because the company said they could be delivered quickly. Yet in the contract, Pfizer wanted to reserve the right to modify the schedule. There was no room for negotiation. “It was take it or leave it,” said the official.
The official added: “Five years in the future when these confidentiality agreements are over, you will learn what really happened in these negotiations.”
The FULL Snowden Interview
Here's my full interview with NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden — it’s the longest interview I've ever posted. [John Stossel]
I once was unsure if Edward Snowden -- who leaked documents showing that the NSA spied on Americans -- was a hero, or a traitor who made us all less safe.
Now I've done my research, and I think he's a hero. What do you think? Our full interview, above, will help you decide.
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SAN JOSE, Calif., and REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 22, 2021 — A group of influential technology and media companies has partnered to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a Joint Development Foundation project established to address the prevalence of disinformation, misinformation and online content fraud through developing technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content. Founding members Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic seek to establish a standardized provenance solution with the goal of combating misleading content.
C2PA member organizations will work together to develop content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enable publishers, creators and consumers to trace the origin and evolution of a piece of media, including images, videos, audio and documents. These technical specifications will include defining what information is associated with each type of asset, how that information is presented and stored, and how evidence of tampering can be identified.
The C2PA’s open standard will give platforms a method to preserve and read provenance-based digital content. Because an open standard can be adopted by any online platform, it is critical to scaling trust across the internet. In addition to the inclusion of varied media types at scale, C2PA is driving an end-to-end provenance experience from the capturing device to the information consumer. Collaboration with chipmakers, news organizations, and software and platform companies is critical to facilitate a comprehensive provenance standard and drive broad adoption across the content ecosystem.
The formation of the C2PA brings together founding members of the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and the Microsoft- and BBC-led Project Origin, unifying technical specifications under a single entity. The CAI is building a system to provide provenance and history for digital media, giving creators a tool to claim authorship and empowering consumers to evaluate whether what they are seeing is trustworthy. Project Origin has its roots in the production and distribution of news. The effort has focused on tackling disinformation in the digital news ecosystem by attaching signals to a piece of content to demonstrate its integrity and making this information available to those using it. With the foundation of the C2PA, technical standards will be unified while these two entities continue to pursue adoption, prototyping and education within their respective communities.
Today’s C2PA announcement builds on several recent advances in content provenance, including Project Origin’s efforts to develop a pipeline for signaling, certification and tracking the history of news content; the CAI’s first-ever end-to-end demonstration of provenance for captured media online; and Truepic’s development of the first native integration of hardware-secured photo capture smartphone technology.
Designing standards and technologies that can certify the source and provenance of online content is an important step forward in addressing rising concerns with the manipulation and manufacture of news and information. Companies interested in joining the C2PA can apply through [email protected].
Executive quotes
Adobe: “Adobe is proud to be a founding member of the C2PA along with our partners in technology and media. With the collective expertise of this group, we will accelerate the critical work of rebuilding the public’s trust in online content through broad and open adoption of a provenance standard at scale. We welcome everyone to join and participate in this effort so crucial to us all.”
– Dana Rao, General Counsel and Content Authenticity Initiative executive sponsor, Adobe
BBC: “It’s vital that news providers play a part in the battle against disinformation. We welcome the opportunity to participate in the C2PA provenance work, which has the potential to support audience confidence in news at a time when trusted sources of information are more important than ever.”
– Jatin Aythora, Chief Architect, BBC
Microsoft: “There’s a critical need to address widespread deception in online content — now supercharged by advances in AI and graphics and diffused rapidly via the internet. Our imperative as researchers and technologists is to create and refine technical and sociotechnical approaches to this grand challenge of our time. We’re excited about methods for certifying the origin and provenance of online content. It’s an honor to work alongside Adobe, BBC and other C2PA members to take this critical work to the next step.”
– Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer and Project Origin executive sponsor, Microsoft
Truepic: “Truepic was founded on the principle that provenance-based media authenticity is the only viable, scalable long-term solution to restoring trust in what we see online. We firmly believe that ecosystemwide adoption through an open standard is crucial to the long-term health of the internet. The C2PA will streamline the distribution of high-integrity digital content at scale, a vital step in restoring society’s shared sense of reality.”
– Jeffrey McGregor, CEO, Truepic
About Adobe
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
LONDON — According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, an economy is “the system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made and used.” For the last few centuries, this system has been dominated by the paradigm of capitalism, in which the private owners of capital, and not the state, control the trade of goods and services.
The slave trade and plantation economy of the early colonial period in America were among the original manifestations of this economic paradigm, as the European propertied classes asserted their newfound power over dwindling tributary systems and the interim feudal arrangements were replaced with John Locke’s quasi-religious notions of private property, which would come to conquer Western economic theory for the next three hundred years.
Today, that paradigm has exhausted the moral justifications its proponents have relied upon to maintain its supremacy and the naked truth of capitalism’s rapaciousness is laid bare, once again, as wealth inequality skyrockets while millions sink into poverty and resource wars continue to ravage entire nations across the world.
Having squeezed every last drop of “value” from the earth, and with no more land to settle or markets to discover, capital’s approaching apotheosis finds it looking for a lifeline by creating a virtual copy of itself, where intellectual property supplants physical property and human biological and behavioral processes are recast as a grotesque form of human labor.
Efforts are now underway to “translate” the real world into a digital counterfeit that can provide financial markets with the figures and statistics it needs to execute the contracts of the incipient human capital markets – an insidious new form of capital assembled from our genetic code and other kinds of data that will form the basis of a financialized wonderland, enforced by blockchain technology and constantly monitored and updated through the burgeoning biosecurity state.
Led by the world’s most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations, the so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn humanity into datasets, which they can use to create more profits for themselves and their clients.
For now, they don’t have enough to make it happen and we still have the power to make sure they can’t.
A return “to anything like normal” will require a Covid vaccination certificate, according to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been among the many world leaders advocating for vaccine passports, which the European Union expects to roll out as soon as this summer across its member states. The need for “a digital vaccination certificate” has reached total consensus in Europe, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while countries outside of the EU might soon get standards and enforcement protocols for vaccine credentials designed by a team of researchers and academics from the UK, Australia, Canada and the Caribbean.
Andy Knight, the University of Alberta political scientist who is leading the latter endeavor, funded by the Worldwide Universities Network’s (WUN) Research Development Fund, stressed in a recent interview that vaccination should not be treated as “a nationalistic issue,” asserting that global “security is no longer about military threats — it’s about health threats,” and warned against “a splintering of international cooperation,” which he said should be met through “an intersection between the public and the private” sectors.
Indeed, Knight’s sponsors are committed to the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals (SDG) – a set of 17 climate change-centered objectives, planned around public-private-philanthropic partnerships, which his research team will also knit into the six-month policy study. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and its associated philanthropic organizations, the UN’s SDG program stands out as one of the cornerstones of the Great Reset, which now features Covid-19 as the fulcrum of that project and underlies what pioneering independent researcher Alison McDowell, interviewed by MintPress for this article, calls “theological technofascism.”
Christened as the fourth sector, this merger of “the corporate state […] with nonprofits and religion,” as McDowell puts it, operates through so-called “benefit corporations,” a novel incorporation structure the rules of which were developed and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s B Lab. Based on the “environmental social governance” or ESG framework, Certified B Corporations allow company executives to be shielded to a considerable extent from their shareholders and, therefore, provided with an unprecedented measure of freedom as a result of the ostensibly socially and environmentally beneficial entity.
This new face of capitalism intends to function under the aegis of what is referred to as the “Impact Economy” — an idea that arose out of the ashes of the controlled demolition of the global financial system in 2008, which paved the way for hedge funds to replace banks as the dominant force in the world of global capital. That world is currently ruled by The Blackstone Group Inc., which controls a mind-boggling half trillion dollars under asset management, not to mention having the distinction of being the world’s biggest landlord and, ominously, the owner of the largest private DNA database on the planet.
The manufactured outrage of the richest banks and regulatory institutions in the aftermath of the 2008 subprime mortgage lending debacle elicited calls for a more “humane” capitalism. As the Great Recession was unfolding, the term “impact investment” was introduced to describe an economic model that delivers “social value through market-based practices” while birth was given to the buzzwords, like “sustainable development” or “carbon neutral,” coming out of organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF) or the United Nations.
Sir Ronald Cohen, whom McDowell identifies as one of the key figures in its development, as recently as 2019 declared that the impact economy was “overthrowing the dictatorship of profit and putting impact firmly by its side to keep it in its place.” The sophistry in this statement may not be immediately apparent, but the cunning words spoken by the chairman of an impact investment firm called Global Steering Group (CSG) reveal the magic trick the owners of capital want to pull on the world.
The Global Steering Group, funded by some of the world’s most powerful interests, hope to make “social justice” profitable. Source | GSG
Yet, despite Cohen’s brash confidence and that of his fellow evangelizers on the impact investment bandwagon, not everyone is convinced. Even the Rockefeller Foundation has found that bringing major players on board can be an uphill battle, admitting that it has yet to garner “support from funder collaboratives, despite trying for some of the well-known ones like MacArthur Foundation” and others. Nevertheless, perhaps no one understands that “upheaval can yield new understanding and opportunity” better than the Rockefeller Foundation.
The impact investment model is facing a challenge many startups do, which is a problem of scale. However, that’s a challenge it is well-positioned to meet and a problem that the model’s agents have been making sure they overcome by tapping into the largest horizontal market of all time: healthcare.
In October 2020, MintPress covered an organization called The Commons Project, which at the time was carrying out the first official tests of its CommonPass health passport app in Newark, New Jersey in the presence of CDC officials and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. A cursory look at the founders’ backgrounds revealed their ties to the CDC and covert intelligence operations around the world. One of the project’s founders, in particular, bears closer examination as we stand on the eve of a worldwide biosecurity regime.
Dr. Bradley A. Perkins led the CDC’s investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks as its Meningitis and Special Pathogens chief, making him the agency’s top anthrax expert. He would later be appointed as the agency’s Deputy Director of the Office of Strategy and Innovation, eventually heading the division, placing him in charge of a $11.2 billion budget and over 50 branch offices around the world. Perkins had risen in the ranks from his 1989 stint supervising a team of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a special unit originally formed to “catch the communists if they started spreading plague over the Korean peninsula.” Perkins was head of the CDC’s bioterrorism unit when he was tapped, along with five of his colleagues, to lead the anthrax investigation.
One could say that Perkins had reached the peak of his public service career during that time, working closely with then-CDC Director Julie Gerberding to create a “state-of-the-art” $2 billion emergency response capability for the Bush administration in the wake of the H5N1 Avian Flu epidemic. He would remain an influential voice at the nation’s top disease prevention outfit, where he seemed to be very intent on radically overhauling the country’s approach to public health – a desire he has carried over to his endeavors in the private sector, which include nearly four years as Chief Medical Officer of Human Longevity, Inc, a DNA sequencing firm founded by Dr. Craig Venter, the first man to sequence the human genome.
In 2017, just before Perkins would step down as Human Longevity’s CMO, he gave a rather enlightening presentation at the Aspen Institute’s Abu Dhabi Ideas conference. held at NYU that year, in which he went into considerable detail about what he and his colleagues in the DNA sequencing business really mean when they talk about changing public health. Sharing the panel session with other transhumanists pushing the genomic revolution on the world, like Aubrey de Grey, who currently serves as science advisor to Jeffrey Epstein’s transhumanist project, (now renamed Humanity +), Perkins expounds on the virtues of genomics as the next frontier in healthcare.
In a talk titled “Synthetic Life to Human Health,” Perkins explains how genomics is “going to be the next accelerant in extending high-performance human lifespan” and the four factors that have made this possible. First and foremost is the “radical decrease in the cost of whole genome sequencing,” which fell from approximately three billion dollars initially to roughly one thousand dollars or “about three thousand dollars if you include the analytic component” per DNA code map. The advent of cloud computing, which according to Perkins is “just barely adequate to begin to host this voluminous data, [which allows] us to manipulate and analyze it,” and the mainstream adoption of machine learning (AI) to “interpret” the data round out the next two factors.
Lastly, Perkins highlights the critically important shift from “volume-based health care to value-based health care.” Perkins is referring here to cold, hard cash as the rest of his seminar makes clear, given how genomics “will drive tremendous progress in life and health insurance [as well as] tremendous progress in healthcare delivery by powering a next generation of healthcare and healthcare models.”
“What we are about to embark on,” Perkins boldly predicts, is nothing less than “hacking the software of life,” and “for the first time, trying to understand all the instructions that build, operate and reproduce us as humans.” He illustrates his point with a disturbing anecdote about how genomic pioneer Venter “sat down at a computer with the notion that he could actually design a genome, a sequence of DNA letters; produce that genome artificially; insert it into a membrane and boot up life from scratch.”
Perkins considers that Venter’s 2010 brainstorm might have been even “more important” than the sequencing of the human genome, itself. The eureka moment when a Western scientist developed a God-complex is what will change “medicine from a clinical science supported by data to a data science supported by clinicians,” according to Perkins, who goes on to warn of the “profound disruption in our current format for the practice of medicine,” that he confidently states will no longer “be possible in the place that we’re going very shortly.”
Stored in Amazon’s cloud servers, Human Longevity’s bioinformatics platform is only one of several next-generation sequencing technologies designed to perform the type of comparative genome sequencing work Perkins and his life science industry colleagues are counting on to carry out what he estimates is “probably the largest scale enterprise ever” of “translating the language of biology in the form of linear DNA code into the language of health and disease.”
Perkins admits that “the genome in isolation, it’s not very useful” and that what the business of genomics basically boils down to is the “building [of] integrated health records,” in order to be able to correlate “high-quality clinical data” with the whole genome sequence. “We’re in the business of building a large database,” Perkins reveals. Without that, the genomic revolution is dead in the primordial waters, so to speak.
But, with CommonPass, Perkins is continuing to do all he can to build that database. After all, a biometric passport required at all ports of entry would go a long way to procuring a goldmine of genomic data. An opportunity not lost on the majority shareholders of another company Perkins was involved with even before launching the nonprofit or joining Human Longevity.
Fresh out of his long career at the CDC — and just a year after exhorting his fellow federal employees to pay heed to the “serious game” the agency was rolling out to “examine the estimated health impacts and costs associated” with major policy and health system changes “over a five-decade period” — Perkins joined Vanguard Health System as its Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer.
The publicly-traded cross-national operator of hospitals and clinics was controlled by The Blackstone Group from 2004 until it was sold off to Tenet Healthcare in 2011, forming the third largest investor-held hospital network in the United States. Tenet, like many other private equity-owned healthcare operations, has been roiled by controversy and corruption. Perkins took a tidy $1.9 Million package and moved on from Vanguard just before the merger. Just last year, Blackstone acquired Ancestry.com Inc. for a cool $4.7 billion, making the world’s largest private landlord the owner of the largest private DNA database in the world as well, containing the genome of 18 million people across 30 countries.
“Everything [needs to be] big and fast and scalable,” asserts Alison McDowell, who has been following the development of the burgeoning impact investment models being piloted across multiple verticals on her blog “Wrench in the Gears.” Named in honor of Mario Savio’s emotional speech to his fellow Berkeley students at the height of the anti-war movement in the United States, McDowell has managed to expose many of the “gears” that are moving this reinvention of capitalism based on the aggregation and manipulation of data in all its forms.
McDowell credits a talk she attended in 2017 at The Whitney Museum of American Art called “Race, Finance and the Afterlife of Slavery,” delivered by UC Davis professor Justin Leroy, for waking her up to the machinations behind the emerging models of financial exploitation and, in particular, the racialized nature of the novel financial instruments created for them, such as social impact bonds or SIBs.
Leroy presciently describes them as “racial capitalist instruments” and traces their lineage to maritime insurance and other financial innovations of the slave trade, positing that it was the slave trade itself that served as the “primary motivator leading to the development of robust insurance networks.” His citation of the Zong slave ship massacre – where hundreds of captive men were thrown overboard and later claimed as insured property by the ship’s captain – dovetails perfectly with the reality of how social impact bonds replicate capitalism’s penchant for commodifying human life.
In layman’s terms, a social impact bond secures funding for a given social program from private investors, who “risk” their money for a return based upon the “successful” completion of the program’s stated goals. As with any bond, these forms of securitized debt can be traded on the open market just like a repackaged subprime mortgage loan. More specifically, social impact bonds are investment vehicles that are tied to the value of a social service provided by a government entity, such as healthcare, or a function of the state, such as incarceration. It’s net effect, as Leroy points out, results in the transfer of public wealth into private hands.
Alison McDowell’s great contribution has been to track down how and where these kinds of impact investment tools are being tested — drawing the vital link between smart contracts, which rely on blockchain technology, and these new forms of dynamic securitized debt. “The data analytics informs the value of the securitized debt,” she told MintPress, stressing that the data itself will necessarily “be based on ‘baseline’ predictive profiling,” using “very simple and narrow” metrics in order to satisfy the scale and speed required by institutions like Goldman Sachs, which will be handling these assets.
“These are not meaningful numbers in terms of the person who’s in the [social] program,” McDowell says; since the success metrics will not be based on “an individual [data] quarry, it would be [from] groups of people” instead. This crucial fact — reflecting the predatory, common-denominator nature of capitalism — is vital to grasping the inherent danger built into these forms of “social finance” and how the noble-sounding names they’re wrapped in do not mitigate the harm that will inevitably result.
Nowhere is this more relevant than in the healthcare space, where massive quarries of genomic data are being hoarded by Blackstone and others, like Richard Branson’s recent acquisition of 23andMe in January through a special-purpose vehicle, in order to take the consumer DNA company public.
“When it comes to genetics, you need extraordinarily large data sets,” says Federation Bio CEO Emily Drabant Conley in regard to questions about Blackstone’s DNA trove. The former 23andMe executive explains that since “the genome itself is so vast and complicated and there’s so many differences between people,” the “low end of the bar” for potential customers like Big Pharma hovers around datasets of 10 million people.
Blackstone’s ability to monetize our DNA is not limited by existing markets, however. Its significant stake in healthcare, insurance and retail companies gives the private equity firm the capacity to mix-and-match the collective data sets they own to spin off new segments, along the lines of Ancestry.com’s Spotify partnership to design “DNA-designed music playlists” and other less benign behavioral and genetic dataset combinations.
An “all-encompassing picture of consumer behavior,” as a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business finance professor describes Blackstone’s enviable position, is only one side of the dystopian coin. Merged with genomic data, these data can produce truly nightmarish scenarios of fascist control. Much of McDowell’s research has focused on the education side of impact investing, which relies heavily on behavioral data via facial recognition and AI to create the financial social investment instruments around schooling.
Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman (left), pictured with the prime minister of Singapore and his wife, Rabbi Arthur Schneier and Henry Kissinger at an event for the “Appeal of Conscience Foundation.” Diane Bondareff | AP
Initiatives like the World Bank’s Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition (BSIC) are promoting the creation of “Ethereum blockchain solutions and applications that address global social and environmental issues” through its IXO protocol, which “enables anyone to deliver, evaluate or invest in sustainable development impacts, with crypto-economic proof of Impact.” Outfits like Social Finance Israel, founded by Sir Ronald Cohen, are driving the implementation of such protocols through multiple pilot programs to assess metrics like real-time data analytics, last-mile impact verification, and the viability of impact tokens (bond-specific cryptocurrencies) in education and other areas.
The Hong Kong-based Impact Oxygen Foundation (iO2) operates a social impact service platform in China called ShanZhai City, which deploys blockchain-based impact projects in that country as well as in Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Brazil. In 2018, the social impact startup’s CEO was invited to attend a two-day workshop created by banking giant UBS and the IXO Foundation “to create the next generation of impact financing mechanisms, using Web3 and blockchain technologies.” Earlier that year, ShanZhai City entered into a “strategic partnership” with IXO to “revolutionize social finance infrastructure.
This revolution entails the ability to “measure, evaluate, value, and tokenize verified impact data” obtained through our ubiquitous data-gathering, surveillance technologies, which will, in turn, hand it over to financial institutions to profit from the bets they make on poverty and misery around the world. In the meantime, the problem of scale persists and, as McDowell points out, all of their pilot programs put together do not add up to anything substantial. “My sense,” McDowell proposes, “is that the biometric health passport is what they’ll need” to achieve critical mass and finally kick off the fourth industrial revolution.
When Donald Trump cut funding to USAID’s PREDICT program in March 2020, there was some chatter about the irresponsibility of ending a program that for the last ten years had focused on collecting bat-borne coronaviruses in Asia just as a coronavirus pandemic was being declared. But, for all intents and purposes, the program had long been concluded.
The program’s creator Dr. Dennis Carroll; its global director Dr. Jonna Mazet; and Peter Daszak, the star scientist who had deposited thousands of coronavirus samples in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s database, had already gone on to form a new nonprofit to develop “a strategic response to the growing need to better predict, prevent, and respond to future viral pandemic threats and to protect us all from their worst consequences.”
Named the Global Virome Project (GVP), it quickly partnered with The Trinity Challenge, a global coalition “of partners united by the common aim of developing insights and actions to contribute to a world better protected from global health emergencies.” Its “founding members” include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook, Google, The London School of Economics, Glaxo-Smith Klein, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, Tencent and many others.
Perhaps more interesting is its list of ostensibly regular members, among whom we find
Pierre Omidyar’s Palantir, which has a controversial data management deal with the UK’s NHS; the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), whose board member and former chief medical advisor to the UK, Dame Sally Davies, leads the Trinity Challenge itself; and the ever-present Tsinghua University, to name just a few.
The web of interlocking memberships and associations between virtually all of these groups is an interminable and recursive rabbit hole, that eventually leads to the conclusion that it is all one big club striving to reach the same goal. In one particularly salient case, one of the most notorious names associated with the drive for global vaccination regimes, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is linked to a “boutique” social impact investment firm that backs a Trinity Challenge member.
The Trinity Challenge’s web of interlocking memberships. Source | thetrinitychallenge.org
Global Impact Advisors is a consulting firm out of San Mateo, California, which is headed by CEO Amy Adelberger, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alum who had the unique distinction of launching a $33 million tuberculosis mitigation partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology during her time there. Focusing “on the application of market-based solutions to global health and development challenges,” Adelberger’s firm seems to draw most of its clients from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and — given her role as the program manager of the TB program in China, her company’s continued focus on TB-related issues, and a nuanced reading of the section on public-private partnerships on the company website — it seems more than likely that Adleberger is simply fulfilling Gates Foundation’s own “hope” to effectuate the “national scale-up of [the] innovations across China” for which this and other multi-million-dollar partnerships with the same Chinese government entity were intended.
The Commons Project, as well, shares many of the same intertwining relationships with Big Pharma, Big Tech, academia and federal organizations on its board, leaving us with the inescapable feeling that a very well-organized, but relatively small collection of power brokers are hell bent on fashioning a data-driven economy in a desperate attempt to breathe new life into a system that nobody can buy into any more.
The missionaries of “free-market economics” are pulling out all the stops to convince us that they really do have the people’s best interest at heart this time, after centuries of ceaseless war, ruthless corruption and environmental devastation. Suddenly, a public health emergency has managed to peer into their soulless chasm and not only sparked a long-dead sense of compassion, but coincidentally provided them with all the solutions. The only catch is that we have to give up our humanity and live behind screens and speak to each other via encrypted messaging apps only.
Other than that, they assure us, everything is as it always should have been. They’ve seen the error of their ways and are ready to usher in a more humane, a more “sustainable” economic paradigm, in which the wealthy finally invest in the poor, the sick and the homeless as part of a new “moral” economy. But, the obvious question is, if misery becomes profitable, what incentive is there for its eradication?
Capitalism has invested in misery as long as it has existed and always found it immensely profitable. Creating a “digital twin” of the world affords immeasurably greater opportunities for profit, but also takes real human life offline and replaces it with “dots and dashes and electrical signals” that McDowell understands are of any use only to the financial markets.
A long, protracted, manufactured Cold War with China and revamped Eastern bloc has the potential to produce more refugees, more poverty, more trauma and more prisoners. In other words, more assets for the human capital markets. But, before that happens, they need our DNA to scale the pilot project and feed the starving leviathan as it thrashes about in a finite planet.
In his moving presentation about race, slavery and finance, Justin Leroy quoted America’s first African American doctor, James McCune Smith, to elucidate how the true nature of capitalism is never lost on its most exploited classes. The relevance of Smith’s exposition demands that this, the third and final part of “Dragon’s Blood Harvest at the Dawn of Human Capital Markets,” end with the physician’s seminal words published just before the end of the Civil War in 1864.
Smith’s clarity of vision allowed him to appreciate the treacherous heart of the system he knew was a slaver’s system, no matter what it chooses to label itself:
There is no political, religious or philanthropic agency at work that can encompass the entire abolition of slavery. In slave society, labor lies prostrate and capital dictates its own terms, which are perpetual subjugation. In other words, perpetual slavery. Far from this war diminishing the wish or power for capital to own labor, it will increase both. Colossal monopolies are parceling out even the free states for their ownership. The slave in the South will have namesakes in fact, if not in title, north of the Mason/Dixon line.”
Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera
Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
The U.S. ruling class deploys the military for three main reasons: (1) to forcibly open up countries to foreign investment, (2) to ensure the free flow of natural resources from the global south into the hands of multinational corporations, and (3) because war is profitable. The third of these reasons, the profitability of war, is often lacking detail in analyses of U.S. imperialism: The financial industry, including investment banks and private equity firms, is an insatiable force seeking profit via military activity.
The war industry is composed of corporations that sell goods and services to the U.S. government and allied capitalist regimes around the world. Investment banks and asset management firms hold most shares of every major public war corporation.
The best-known financial firms holding the stock of war corporations include: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Wellington Management.
Consider Parsons, a corporation that sells goods and services pertaining to construction, command and control, espionage, and day-to-day military operations. Parsons’ initial public offering in May 2019, valued at roughly $3 billion, earned it an industry Corporate Growth Award. The top holders of Parsons stock are investment banks and asset management firms—including the familiar Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street.
BlackRock offices on “the street.” [Source: fortune.com]
New business sectors of war are created and then flooded. For example, the provision of “cyber” was virtually nonexistent in U.S. military contracting until roughly four years ago. A war industry push to militarize IT infrastructure has yielded a bonanza in cyber contracts. Today, “cyber” goods and services are sold stand-alone or as additions to previous contracts.
Nearly every major war corporation sells cyber goods and services.
The top public war corporations include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, Textron, SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, CACI, Honeywell, PAE, Accenture, KBRWyle, Amentum, Jacobs, and AECOM.
They all sell cyber. The main exception is Huntington Ingalls, a major shipbuilder, which does not sell stand-alone cyber goods, although it does mandate cybersecurity as part of its supply chain. The top private war corporations—Sierra Nevada Corp. and General Atomics, run by the billionaire Ozmens and Blue Brothers, respectively—also sell cyber goods and services.
This single business sector of war, cyber, is worth billions annually. Claims of Chinese and Russian cyber hacks, fabricated or hyped by war industry think tanks and media affiliates, fuel government purchases of cyber goods and services. For its part, the U.S. government—first to use devastating new weaponry, from atomic weapons to cyber weapons, and first to attack Moscow with cyber weapons—positions its aggression as purely defensive.
Accusations of Russian hacking lend support to huge investment in cyber-security. [Source: theintercept.com]
In November 2018, Parsons—whose leadership is packed with bankers, career war profiteers, military and intelligence retirees, and a coal tycoon—was contracted for cyberspace operations mission planning in Centerville, Virginia. In May 2019, Parsons was contracted with nine other corporations to expand the cyberspace backbone of the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific of San Diego, California, a military unit whose mandate is to dominate all forms of space (cyberspace, airspace, and Earth’s orbit).
In January 2020, Parsons and other corporations were contracted by the same unit to further develop, oversee, and employ broad cyber technology integral to that mandate, from the continental United States, to Guam, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, to Bahrain, Djibouti, and Italy. This is just one example of one corporation. Corporate America blankets U.S. military cyber operations worldwide.
Parsons Corp. executives at New York Stock Exchange for launch of firm’s public listing. [Source: enr.com]
No business sector of war is off limits.
As recently as the early 1990s, it was considered sacrilege for corporate employees (“contractors”) to be involved in intelligence matters. Not anymore. U.S. intelligence (both civilian and military) is corporatized.
Consider the Defense Intelligence Agency. DIA was established in the 1960s to consolidate the military’s disparate intelligence activities. It did not consolidate much, as the individual military branches continued to run distinct military-intelligence operations.
Since the 1960s, DIA has expanded dramatically in size. Corporations carrying out DIA’s activities during the most recent fiscal year included work in its Science & Technology Directorate (five years, $990,000,000), its National Media Exploitation Center, and its Missile & Space Intelligence Center (MSIC).
Parsons carries out modeling and simulation and analysis within DIA’s MSIC. Corporations also run planning and analysis of DIA’s workforce, sell technical support to DIA, conduct employee vetting and background investigations, and work on technology transfer analysis and assessment.
Corporations like CACI, whose stocks are owned mostly by financial firms, functionally run U.S. military-intelligence. [Source: bizjournals.com]
Corporations even develop and run software that aids “in the identification of intelligence requirements, management of priorities, planning and production of intelligence products, enterprise data analytics, communication and other associated processes,” offering further opportunities for profit-hungry entities to steer the espionage ship. Corporations (e.g., Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, General Dynamics, Leidos, L3Harris, ManTech, PAE and SAIC, whose stocks are owned mostly by financial firms) functionally run U.S. military-intelligence, the operations of which ultimately enrich the U.S. ruling class.
[Source: scheerpost.com]
Wall Street plays the foundational role in the war industry by outright owning war corporations. Consider PAE, a subtle, potent corporation, which operates such diverse business sectors of war as vehicle maintenance, base operations, military construction, and military training. Gores Holdings III acquired PAE from Platinum Equity in early 2020. Gores then adopted the name PAE and took PAE public. PAE has since acquired the corporations CENTRA and Metis Solutions, which further increase PAE’s operations carrying out former governmental tasks within the U.S. military establishment and espionage agencies.
PAE CEO John Heller (right) accepting an award in 2016 as an “influential leader” in the area of government contracting. [Source: govconexec.com]
Again, all military and intelligence activity is up for grabs, even the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), a military range for testing and evaluating the war industry’s technology (e.g., anti-submarine weapons, sonar tracking, and communications). Some have nicknamed AUTEC the “Navy’s Area 51” because of the testing of high-tech unconventional weapons. [Area 51 is a testing range in Nevada where classified programs are worked on and experimental aircraft are flown.]
The Navy established AUTEC on Andros Island in the Bahamas to take advantage of the deep oceanic trench that runs along the east coast of the island. PAE is traditionally the go-to corporation that operates and maintains AUTEC, though a newly formed corporation known as Amentum recently took over some of these functions.
Aerial map of the Navy’s Area 51 in the Bahamas operated primarily by PAE. [Source: mysterywire.com]
The private equity firm Lindsay Goldberg owns Amentum, which was created in 2020 when AECOM, a massive engineering and project management firm, sold its management services business. Amentum now directs this business. Overseas, this management services business has recently transported equipment, cargo, and personnel around Europe; run logistics for prepositioned matériel in Germany, Kuwait, and Qatar; supported drone operations in the Middle East; and repaired support equipment and helped with maintenance at Navy sites in Comalapa, El Salvador. These operations now all belong to Amentum.
Virginia class submarine under construction for the Navy. [Source: lindsaygoldberg.com]
In November 2020, Amentum made another move: It acquired DynCorp, a corporation reported to have a deep history of mercenary activity in Latin America and the Middle East.
DynCorp CEO Lewis “Lou” Von Thaer (featured with DynCorp cap) visits with security contractors and soldiers in Afghanistan. [Source: twitter.com]
According to contract announcements, DynCorp has recently overseen war reserve matériel in the U.S., Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE; maintained military aircraft around the world, including in Honduras, Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait; sold aircraft maintenance to Sweden and Saudi Arabia; and run substantial worldwide training and equipping of forces, emergency construction, and logistics.
Big Finance wheels and deals war corporations, viewing bases, troops, and warzones as numbers through which to profit.
Another prominent financial player is Veritas Capital, which once owned DynCorp and now owns such corporations as Alion and Peraton, the latter of which is about to acquire Northrop Grumman’s IT business. Peraton’s recent sales to the U.S. military establishment have included: portable systems to foil radio-controlled explosive devices that sundry groups use to attack Western military forces that invade or occupy their countries; work on undersea drones; work to ensure nuclear missiles reenter Earth’s atmosphere properly; IT work that “directly supports American national security interests on the continent of Africa,” according to the contracting announcement; cyber activities for the Air Force Research Lab; and commercial satellite communications for Central Command. All is fair in profit and war.
Satellite device manufactured by Peraton. [Source: breakingdefense.com]
Big Finance sits at the top of the war industry by purchasing most shares of war corporations and by owning war corporations. Insatiable demand for profit places immense structural pressure on the Pentagon and Capitol Hill for sky-high U.S. military and intelligence budgets, broad deployment of troops overseas, and the opening up of governmental jobs to corporations.
The most well-known industry pressure comes in the form of lobbying both political parties and funding their congressional campaigns (with extra focus on members of pertinent committees, such as Armed Services, Intelligence, Appropriations, and Foreign Relations).
This produces tangible results. As Steven Semler of the non-corporate Security Policy Reform Institute calculated, Democratic votes on the National Defense Authorization Act
correlate strongly with the campaign cash members accepted from the war industry. On average, House Democrats who voted for the NDAA accepted four times the amount of war industry cash as those who voted against it. In the Senate, Democrats who cast supporting votes took in six times as much industry cash.
The Executive Branch is not exempt. Rapacious financiers—including hedge fund chiefs and venture capitalists—top the list of donors to the Biden Administration, though dark money groups prevent a full understanding of the overall campaign finance picture. Between July and September at least 67 billionaires and their spouses made contributions of more than $100,000 to committees supporting Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission.
[Source: trendmo.io]
Biden’s campaign received over $9 million from Donald Sussman, CEO of Palmora Partners, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, which has more than 260,000 shares in Raytheon, a preeminent weapons manufacturer and supplier of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which recently won a $100 million contract for Afghan Air Force training.
Donald Sussman [Source: businessinsider.in]
Another of Biden’s top donors, Jim Simons, who gave over $7 million, founded Renaissance Capital, which owns 1.2 million shares in Raytheon worth over $75 million, and 130,000 shares in Lockheed Martin worth $50 million.
Hedge fund billionaire and war profiteer James Simons was one of Biden’s top campaign donors. [Source: Mother Jones]
Big Tech is positioned prominently among donors to the Biden inauguration celebration. Biden has been clear on the campaign trail that he does not intend to cut the military budget, even going so far as stating, “I’ve met with a number of my advisors and some have suggested in certain areas the budget is going to have to be increased.” Biden’s advisors are part and parcel of the military-industrial-congressional complex. Cozying up to wealthy donors, Biden infamously assured them that “nothing would fundamentally change” in a Biden presidency.
Remnant of a Raytheon laser-guided bomb that killed 31 civilians in September 2016 in Yemen. [Source: masspeaceaction.org]
Corporate media prevent the public from understanding the nature of the problem. A handful of business interests owns media outlets in the United States. Profit drives corporate media. U.S. corporate media (e.g. CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews) share the same business model: air what attracts the highest ratings in order to get more advertising revenue.
Corporate media air info-tainment, designed not to inform or foster critical thinking. Informing the public is not a priority. Maintaining the existing economic order is.
To the extent that corporate media air any information at all, the information reflects the opinions of the ruling class and the dogma of Corporate America.
Politically conditioning the U.S. public, corporate media never blame the military-industrial-congressional complex or capitalism for any of the problems in the world. Aiming for high ratings and lucrative advertising revenue, corporate media self-censor and taper the spectrum of acceptable foreign policy debate. War corporations purchase advertisements on corporate “news” shows to further confine the debate. Corporate pundits and newscasters do not speak out against advertisers.
Corporate media hire career militants (e.g. former CIA Director John Brennan, MSNBC; former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell, CBS News; retired General Jack Keane, FoxNews) who further confine the debate. Retired generals and admirals regularly contribute to all forms of corporate media, often without disclosing existing ties to war corporations or financial investments in war.
[Source: mediaite.com]
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 allowed government to increase its propaganda in corporate media. Drawing funding from the wealthy donor class and large corporate interests, National Public Radio is similarly confined. NPR’s new CEO as of September 2019 is John Lansing, who recently led U.S. propaganda at the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
John Lansing, NPR’s new CEO, recently led U.S. propaganda at the U.S. Agency for Global Media. [Source: [npr.org]](https://www.npr.org/about-npr/758067452/npr-names-john-lansing-president-and-ceo)
Other industry pressure comes in the form of funding and running pressure groups [e.g. National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), Association of the United States Army (AUSA)] to dominate the Pentagon, administer arms fairs, and push favorable policies; funding think tanks to keep the narrative neoliberal and pro-war; recruiting retired generals and admirals (e.g. Dunford at Lockheed Martin, Mattis at General Dynamics, Winnefeld at Raytheon) to leverage their knowledge for financial gain; and flooding the Pentagon’s civilian offices with corporate executives (e.g., Esper and then Austin, Secretary of Defense; Lord, Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustainment; McCarthy, Secretary of the Army).
War profiteers serve their interests by getting their board members and executives on television to advocate for higher military budgets and war. [Source: nytimes.com]
Wars must be created and expanded, and military bases, through which to route goods and services, must be established and entrenched to satisfy investors. Notwithstanding, ending the wars first requires addressing the embedded profit motive, otherwise it is business as usual.
Christian Sorensen is an Air Force veteran and author of the new book entitled Understanding the War Industry. See CAM’s review of the book: Wars R Us: A Review of Christian Sorensen’s New Book.
An Austrian independent journalist, writing in German and google-translated, wrote the following article on February 7. I expand on it, below.
"In their fight against the low-cost HCQ - which, thanks to its anti-inflammatory and antithrombotic properties, has also proven effective in the early treatment of high-risk patients - the opponents published a fictional study in the Lancet (the Surgisphere scandal) and conducted studies of toxic overdoses in ICU patients (the “SOLIDARITY” and “RECOVERY” studies [and several others--Nass]). But ivermectin is very difficult to overdose, and unlike HCQ, it works as a prophylaxis against infection and even in ICU patients.
Hence, it would be much more difficult to design a deceptive study against ivermectin.
Dozens of studies and several meta-studies have already established that the inexpensive ivermectin is highly effective against Covid. In January even the US NIH had to change its stance from “negative” to “neutral”. Ivermectin's opponents had to act, but they knew it wasn't going to be easy this time.
Eventually a "solution" was found: the US pharmaceutical company Merck - one of the makers of the patent-free ivermectin - has published a statement in which it simply claims without evidence that its (unpublished) "analysis" has "no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic one Effect against COVID-19 from preclinical studies; no conclusive evidence of clinical activity or clinical effectiveness in patients with COVID-19 disease; and a worrying lack of safety data in the majority of studies. "
An employee of the US National Institutes retweeted the testimony of Merck quickly adding, "Merck's statement on Ivermectin is the leadership and commitment to quality translational science that we need to see from pharmaceutical / biotech." In reality, the assertion by Merck is completely unfounded and also contradicting its own history : after Merck has safely sold ivermectin for several decades, it is now suddenly questioning its safety."
Merck came out with a statement against the use of ivermectin for Covid on February 4, 2021. Merck's President and CEO is attorney Ken Frazier, who has presided over the company since 2011. He is highly respected for his successful management.
Frazier was the Merck general counsel who decided to fight every Vioxx case, and (it was claimed) this reduced Merck's liability from a potential $50 billion to about $5 billion dollars. Merck was liable for intentionally hiding the fact that Vioxx caused strokes and heart attacks, and had caused perhaps 50,000 excess deaths in users. Frazier soon ascended to the Merck presidency. In this role, he has been feted for "[standing up for what he believes in.](http://standing up for what he believes in)"
Frazier is black. His father was a janitor, his grandfather born a slave. He is said to idolize Roy Vagelos, a physician researcher and former Merck President and Chairman, for offering to provide and distribute ivermectin to the world's poor, for free, for however long it took to rid the world of river blindness (onchocerciasis). And so they have. It must be cheap to make.
Ivermectin was considered a breakthrough drug when it was developed by Merck from a unique streptomyces bacterial product in the 1970s.
According to the World Bank,
"In 28 countries of the 31 African countries where river blindness is endemic, people no longer go blind from the disease. This victory against river blindness has been possible because of a wonder drug called ivermectin, which now reaches and protects 100 million people across a vast swathe of Africa.... Looking back on 40 years of partnership, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim noted that back in the day when there were scant resources for global health, this decision to donate ivermectin for as long as was needed in Africa was a “game changing intervention” by Merck and all other partners."
According to StatNews, "In his remarks, Frazier would often conjure up this Merck, the valiant drug maker that was in it, in the words of founder George Merck, “for the people, not the profits.”
Frazier will be stepping down as CEO in the next few months, but will remain Merck's Chairman. He must have concurred with the decision to [suppress](http:// https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/) ivermectin for Covid.
The Merck advisory that came out on February 4 states:
We do not believe that the data available support the safety and efficacy of ivermectin beyond the doses and populations indicated in the regulatory agency-approved prescribing information.
It turns out that the benefits of ivermectin for Covid disease prophylaxis were known to some at least as early as April 2020, when there was a brief run on the OTC veterinary form of the drug.
Thanks to thenewsteader.com, I learned that a French company with US financial backing named MedinCell had announced last April that Australian researchers had shown that the drug was highly effective in vitro against SARS-CoV-2:
_An April 6, 2020 press release by the pharmaceutical company Medincell, which receives a lot of funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation states, “The FDA-approved Drug Ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro.”_
April 23, 2020: This Release was put out by Bloomberg: [MedinCell: Adapt and overcome in response to the Covid-19 crisis](http:// Adapt and overcome in response to the Covid-19 crisis)
Reading further into the MedinCell release, there is this gem:
“MedinCell announced on April 6, 2020, its Covid-19 project launched a few weeks ago. This program aims at developing a long-acting injectable Ivermectin formulation for several months to protect people who are not infected with Covid-19 in order to break the virus chain of transmission. Such a tool could play a decisive role in the management of Covid-19 pandemic, by enabling many people around the world, especially those most exposed and at risk, to protect themselves.”
MedinCell is developing an injectable version of Ivermectin specifically for the treatment/prevention of Covid-19. This delivery system is new for Ivermectin and therefore can be patented, and a cheap pill suddenly becomes a $3,000 a shot.
December 17, 2020: Covid-19: MedinCell presents positive first results from the clinical trial aiming at validating the safety of continuous administration of Ivermectin
If cheap ivermectin were widely available, it would make little sense to develop an injectable, long-acting form of the drug at a much higher cost.
This week we heard about two new Covid wonder drugs, from the University of North Carolina and Israel. None of these drugs make sense if a highly effective, unpatentable drug is freely accessible.
But why are we still looking for wonder drugs when we appear to already have one, ivermectin, whose developers won the Nobel prize for it in 2015?
Is it deja vu all over again? We seem to be repeating the hydroxychloroquine tale. Knowledge of that drug's benefit was somehow suppressed. One determined group of intensive care doctors have been trying to get the word out about ivermectin for many months, but have been prevented from accessing the mainstream media. After they finally got to present their data to a Senate hearing on December 8, clips from the hearing were removed from YouTube. (Google's YouTube also suppressed information on hydroxychloroquine.)
Merck's Ken Frazier needs to be known not as the good guy who continued his predecessor's program to donate ivermectin to stop river blindness, but as the bad guy who is trying to prevent Americans from purchasing ivermectin to save their lives. Merck is the only US manufacturer. Will Merck stop supplying it, as some manufacturers did with HCQ?
Let me repost the link to a compilation of the evidence on Ivermectin, which includes 38 studies. Its benefit is incontrovertible.
Many countries now give ivermectin out for free to their Covid patients. Here is a Nature article from October that, while trying to slam the drug, acknowledges its widespread use in Latin America. Nature is counting on readers' biases about western exceptionalism to blind them to the fact that developing countries wouldn't be wasting their money if it didn't work. Nor would their mortality rates be a fraction of ours. Shame on Nature for hiding the obvious. What is truly exceptional right now are the UK and US mortality rates, sadly.
And the kicker: Merck purchased the rights to an experimental drug for Covid, and has already contracted to sell at least 60,000 doses to the federal government, for at least $3,000 per dose.
In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.
The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were “likely Russian in origin,” but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.
Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community’s “likely” conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the “Russian hackers.” Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on “likely” Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds’ contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.
Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of “Russian hackers” in that event.
There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.
Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.
In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with the Justice Department quietly announcing, the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system had been breached in the hack—a “major incident” according to the department. This terminology means that the attack “is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people,” per NextGov.
The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack, SolarWinds software is also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that “fewer than ten” US government agencies had been affected, it’s likely that some of these agencies were compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were affected.
In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times.
Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code used to conduct the hack, stating that the hackers “routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote access was achieved—implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to operational security.” In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was “very very carefully orchestrated,” leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.
FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its “red team” suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft’s source code, raising concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.
FireEye’s account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is one of FireEye’s clients, and FireEye was launched with funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth being skeptical of the “free tool” FireEye has made available in the hack’s aftermath for “spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems.”
In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor with close ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin, who told Reuters in a widely quoted article that he “was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers were poring over Microsoft’s source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive.” “To me the biggest question is, ‘Was this recon for the next big operation?’” Slavin stated.
Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of election fraud in the 2020 election.
As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US, with a focus on the health-care industry, to the CTI League, a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working “for free” and led by a former Unit 8200 officer. “We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an industry leading secure software development company,” a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an email cited by Reuters.
It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in 2017, CyberArk was the company that “discovered” one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at the time they announced the tactic’s existence, released a free tool to identify systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.
In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was found by Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called Kazuar that was also first discovered by another Unit 8200-linked company, Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by Kazuar and “they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building their malware.” Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products, per Kaspersky employees.
Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed “the attribution at least to Russian intelligence,” only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been presented.
The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was “compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system,” per reports. This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had “a high degree of familiarity with the software.” While the way the attackers gained access to Orion’s code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
US investigators have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that—in addition to the above—the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern Europe, allegedly because “Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted” in those countries.
It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly “deeply rooted” in eastern European states both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media tycoon Robert Maxwell’s frequent and close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also Mogilevich’s business partner. In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be considered if the cybercriminals due prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has claimed.
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by the NSA to be one of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel’s list of espionage scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.
Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as “an IT Service Desk solution.” It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage’s products could be added to SolarWinds’ IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm. It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM, the Israeli military’s central computing unit.
Samanage was SolarWinds’ first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel. It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using Samanage’s research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition’s announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage’s automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.
Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage component of Orion was responsible for “ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events or performance issues [with Orion] are detected,” which was meant to allow “service agents to react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted.”
In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the compromise took place was also responsible for Orion’s alert system for critical events or performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the “hackers” access to millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.
Around the time of Samange’s acquisition by SolarWinds, it was reported that one of Samanage’s top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.
Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle. Oracle was originally created as a CIA spin-off and has deep ties to Israel’s government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development based there. Salesforce also recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to “predictively” diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.
Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.
Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and the inaugural chair of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders, including the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in “even more significant economic and social implications than COVID-19.”
Last year, the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a “digital pandemic” cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon. Cyber Polygon’s speakers in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore, who previously held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that crippled the world’s economy.
In addition to Samanage’s ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main investors behind Samanage’s rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the WEF’s founding “technology pioneers,” Isabel Maxwell (the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus and the country’s hi-tech sector.
At the time of its acquisition by SolarWinds, Samanage’s top investor was Viola Ventures, a major Israeli venture-capital firm. Viola’s investment in Samanage, until its acquisition, was managed by Ronen Nir, who was also on Samanage’s board before it became part of SolarWinds.
Prior to working at Viola, Ronen Nir was a vice president at Verint, formerly Converse Infosys. Verint, whose other alumni have gone on to found Israeli intelligence-front companies such as Cybereason. Verint has a history of aggressively spying on US government facilities, including the White House, and created the backdoors into all US telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook, on behalf of the US’ NSA.
In addition to his background at Verint, Ronen Nir is an Israeli spy, having served for thirteen years in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and he remains a lieutenant colonel on reserve duty. His biography also notes that he worked for two years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, which is fitting given his background in espionage and the major role that Israeli embassy has played in several major espionage scandals.
As an aside, Nir has stated that “thought leader” Henry Kissinger is his “favorite historical character.” Notably, Kissinger was instrumental in allowing Robert Maxwell, Israeli superspy and father of Ghislaine and Isabel Maxwell, to sell software with a back door for Israeli intelligence to US national laboratories, where it was used to spy on the US nuclear program. Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS software scandal.
In addition, Viola’s stake was managed through a firm known as Carmel Ventures, which is part of the Viola Group. At the time, Carmel Ventures was advised by Isabel Maxwell, whose father had previously been directly involved in the operation of the front company used to sell bugged software to US national laboratories. As noted in a previous article at Unlimited Hangout, Isabel “inherited” her father’s circle of Israeli government and intelligence contacts after his death and has been instrumental in building the “bridge” between Israel’s intelligence and military-linked hi-tech sector to Silicon Valley.
Isabel also has ties to the Viola Group itself through Jonathan Kolber, a general partner at Viola. Kolber previously cofounded and led the Bronfman family’s private-equity fund, Claridge Israel (based in Israel). Kolber then led Koor Industries, which he had acquired alongside the Bronfmans via Claridge. Kolber is closely associated with Stephen Bronfman, the son of Charles Bronfman who created Claridge and also cofounded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s.
Kolber, like Isabel Maxwell, is a founding director of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Maxwell, who used to chair the center’s board, stepped down following the Epstein scandal, though it’s not exactly clear when. Other directors of the center include Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad. Kolber’s area of expertise, like that of Isabel Maxwell, is “structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial transactions,” that is, arranging acquisitions and partnerships of Israeli firms by US companies. Incidentally, this is also a major focus of the Peres Center.
Other connections to Isabel Maxwell, aside from her espionage ties, are worth noting, given that she is a “technology pioneer” of the World Economic Forum. As previously mentioned, Salesforce—a major investor in Samanage—is deeply involved with the WEF and its Great Reset.
The links of Israeli intelligence and Salesforce to Samanage, and thus to SolarWinds, is particularly relevant given the WEF’s “prediction” of a coming “pandemic” of cyberattacks and the early hints from former Unit 8200 officers that the SolarWinds hack is just the beginning. It is also worth mentioning the Israeli government’s considerable ties to the WEF over the years, particularly last year when it joined the Benioff-chaired C4IR and participated in the October 2020 WEF panel entitled “The Great Reset: Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
Start Up Nation Central, an organization aimed at integrating Israeli start-ups with US firms set up by Netanyahu’s longtime economic adviser Eugene Kandel and American Zionist billionaire Paul Singer, have asserted that Israel will serve a “key role” globally in the 4th Industrial Revolution following the implementation of the Great Reset.
In addition to Viola, another of Samange’s leading investors is Gemini Israel Ventures. Gemini is one of Israel’s oldest venture-capital firms, dating back to the Israeli government’s 1993 Yozma program.
The first firm created by Yozma, Gemini was put under the control of Ed Mlavsky, who Israel’s government had chosen specifically for this position. As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, Mlavsky was then serving as the executive director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, where “he was responsible for investments of $100 million in more than 300 joint projects between US and Israeli high-tech companies.”
A few years before Gemini was created, while Mlavsky still headed BIRD, the foundation became embroiled in one of the worst espionage scandals in US history, the Jonathan Pollard affair.
In the indictment of US citizen Pollard for espionage on Israel’s behalf, it was noted that Pollard delivered the documents he stole to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was an apartment owned by Harold Katz, the then legal counsel of the BIRD Foundation and an adviser to Israel’s military, which oversaw Israel’s scientific intelligence-gathering agency, Lekem. US officials told the New York Times at the time that they believed Katz “has detailed knowledge about the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials.”
Subsequent reporting by journalist Claudia Wright pointed the finger at the Mlavsky-run BIRD Foundation as one of the ways Israeli intelligence funneled money to Pollard before his capture by US authorities.
One of the first companies Gemini invested in was CommTouch (now Cyren), which was founded by ex-IDF officers and later led by Isabel Maxwell. Under Maxwell’s leadership, CommTouch developed close ties to Microsoft, partially due to Maxwell’s relationship with its cofounder Bill Gates.
If the SolarWinds hack is as serious as has been reported, it’s difficult to understand why a company like Samanage would not be looked into as part of a legitimate investigation into the attack. The timing of Samanage employees gaining access to the Orion software and the company’s investors including Israeli spies and those with ties to past espionage scandals where Israel used back doors to spy on the US and beyond raises obvious red flags. Yet, any meaningful investigation of the incident is unlikely to take place, especially given the considerable involvement of discredited firms like CrowdStrike, CIA fronts like FireEye and a consultancy firm led by former Silicon Valley executives with their own government/intelligence ties.
There is also the added fact that both of the main methods used in the attack were analogous or bore similarities to hacking tools that were both discovered by Unit 8200-linked companies in 2017. Unit 8200-founded cybersecurity firms are among the few “winners” from the SolarWinds hack, as their stocks have skyrocketed and demand for their services has increased globally.
While some may argue that Unit 8200 alumni are not necessarily connected to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, numerous reports have pointed out the admitted fusion of Israeli military intelligence with Israel’s hi-tech sector and its tech-focused venture capital networks, with Israeli military and intelligence officials themselves noting that the line between the private cybersecurity sector and Israel’s intelligence apparatus is so blurred, it’s difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. There is also the Israeli government policy, formally launched in 2012, whereby Israel’s intelligence and military intelligence agencies began outsourcing “activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies.”
Samanage certainly appears to be such a company, not only because it was founded by a former IDF officer in the military’s central computing unit, but because its main investors include spies on “reserve duty” and venture capital firms linked to the Pollard scandal as well as the Bronfman and Maxwell families, both of whom have been tied to espionage and sexual blackmail scandals over the years.
Yet, as the Epstein scandal has recently indicated, major espionage scandals involving Israel receive little coverage and investigations into these events rarely lead anywhere. PROMIS was covered up largely thanks to Bill Barr during his first term as Attorney General and even the Pollard affair has all been swept under the rug with Donald Trump allowing Pollard to move to Israel and, more recently, pardoning the Israeli spy who recruited Pollard during his final day as President. Also under Trump, there was the discovery of “stingray” surveillance devices placed by Israel’s government throughout Washington DC, including next to the White House, which were quickly memory holed and oddly not investigated by authorities. Israel had previously wiretapped the White House’s phone lines during the Clinton years.
Another cover up is likely in the case of SolarWinds, particularly if the entry point was in fact Samanage. Though a cover up would certainly be more of the same, the SolarWinds case is different as major tech companies and cybersecurity firms with ties to US and Israeli intelligence now insist that Microsoft is soon to be targeted in what would clearly be a much more devastating event than SolarWinds due to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s products.
On Tuesday, CIA-linked firm FireEye, which apparently has a leadership role in investigating the hack, claimed that the perpetrators are still gathering data from US government agencies and that “the hackers are moving into Microsoft 365 cloud applications from physical, on-premises servers,” meaning that changes to fix Orion’s vulnerabilities will not necessarily deny hacker access to previously compromised systems as they allegedly maintain access to those systems via Microsoft cloud applications. In addition to Microsoft’s own claims that some of its source code was accessed by the hackers, this builds the narrative that Microsoft products are poised to be targeted in the next high-profile hack.
Microsoft’s cloud security infrastructure, set to be the next target of the SolarWinds hackers, was largely developed and later managed by Assaf Rappaport, a former Unit 8200 officer who was most recently the head of Microsoft’s Research and Development and Security teams at its massive Israel branch. Rappaport left Microsoft right before the COVID-19 crisis began last year to found a new cybersecurity company called Wiz.
Microsoft, like some of Samanage’s main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab’s book “Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” With the WEF simulating a cyber “pandemic” and both the WEF and Israel’s head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent “cyber winter”, SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet, if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to “reset” and then rebuild electronic infrastructure.
Before we dive into the current COVID-19 crisis, a bit more background on Gates is needed. In the last piece we discussed the history of the Gates Foundation’s investments. What is important to note is that by using the Foundation as the front organization, Gates can donate and influence hospitals, universities, media, governments, and health organizations. The Foundation clearly has the ability to shape the decisions made by some of the institutions they fund, including when these decisions go against the desires of the masses they claim to be helping.
For example, in 2017 Independent Science News released a report detailing how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid PR firm Emerging Ag $1.6 million to “recruit a covert coalition of academics to manipulate a UN decision-making process over gene drives.” Emails released by Freedom of Information Act Request reveal that the Gates’ recruitment effort was part of a plan to “fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents.” Gene drives are a controversial genetic extinction technology promoted as a way to eliminate mosquitoes with malaria, agricultural pests, and invasive species.
At the 2016 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, 179 international organizations called for a UN moratorium on gene drives. The opponents of this technology also circulated a letter, “A Call for Conservation with a Conscience: No Place for Gene Drives in Conservation,” signed by 30 environmental leaders who called for a “halt to all proposals for the use of gene drive technologies, but especially in conservation.” The Gates Foundation is heavily invested in gene driving technology and was not happy to see a diverse and unified push-back against gene driving. The Foundation hired Emerging Ag — who have their own web of connections to Big Pharma and Big Ag — to shut down the opponents of gene driving. Emerging Ag was successful and the moratorium was shot down.
Coincidentally, in 2016, the US National Academy of Sciences released a report on gene driving which was co-funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. DARPA is also invested in gene drive research. As The Guardian noted after the release of the NAS report:
“The same US defense research agency (DARPA) who paid for the NAS study have made it known that they are going all-in on gene drive research and development of ‘robust’ synthetic organisms. There is good reason to be worried.”
Moreover, Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, which monitors the impact of emerging technologies and corporate strategies on biodiversity, agriculture and human rights, told ISN that he believes gene drives are potential biological weapons that could have a “disastrous” impact on human life and food security. “The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field,” he stated.
Independent Science News also noted:
“This is also not the first time that the Gates Foundation has used academics to influence public and private opinion on genetic engineering technologies, as witnessed by its funding of the Cornell Alliance for Science.”
The private emails obtained by Independent Science News add to the mountains of evidence detailing how Gates is able to pressure organizations to carry out his interests, and that of his foundation.
Considering these alarming reports of Gates’ influence on public health policy, it is important to take a moment to examine the current response to COVID-19. When we look at the players and institutions involved, do we see Gates’ influence and money? If so, what does this mean for public health? Will Gates’ mammoth influence and finances allow him to personally direct the course of the COVID-19 recovery?
Let’s start by looking at Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and a leader in the fight against COVID-19. Unfortunately, when it comes to Fauci and NIAID we clearly see the influence of Bill Gates. In 2010, NIAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced their “Decade of Vaccines Collaboration,” calling for coordination across the “international vaccine community” and the creation of a “Global Vaccine Action Plan.” Dr. Fauci was appointed to the Leadership Council of the partnership. Similarly, Bill Gates has been partnering with the NIH for several years.
In late April, the news broke that Fauci’s NIAID donated a total of $7.4 million to research involving bat coronaviruses. The investments added fuel to the theory that COVID-19 might be a bioengineered virus which was purposefully or accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. The news of the funding begs the obvious question; did Gates’ money influence or fund the NIAID’s coronavirus research? Time will tell.
Another important player with connections to Gates is Dr. Deborah Birx, an American physician and diplomat serving as the United States Global AIDS Coordinator for Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump since 2014. She is currently the Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the Trump Administration’s White House Task Force. Birx also sits on the Board of The Global Fund, an organization which was promised a $750 million investment by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2012. The Global Fund also features board member Kieran Daly, the Deputy Director of Global Policy and Advocacy for the Gates Foundation.
“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a key partner of the Global Fund, providing cash contributions, actively participating on its board and committees, and supporting the Global Fund’s advocacy, communications and fundraising efforts,” the Global Fund states.
The Johns Hopkins University has been an equally important member of the global response to COVID-19. The university’s calculations of global infection and death rates are commonly cited in mainstream media. Yet, once again, we find the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been investing in Johns Hopkins for two decades.
Finally, it was recently reported that the organization known as the Wellcome Trust has partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and MasterCard to “catalyze the initial work” of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. The Accelerator is supposed to accelerate and evaluate “new and repurposed drugs and biologics to treat patients with COVID-19 in the immediate term.” What was not mentioned is that the Gates Foundation has been a “Trustee” of the Wellcome Trust for several years. Interestingly, in 2017, Mark Henderson, Director of Communications for Wellcome Trust participated in a panel called “Deep Dive: Preventing Pandemics.” Dr. Anthony Fauci also participated in the panel discussion.
One could chalk up Fauci and Wellcome Trust’s involvement with a panel about pandemics as perfectly reasonable — after all, these are professionals who are focused on global health. However, to ignore that Bill Gates’ fingerprints are all over the global health industry would be a mistake.
Based on The Gates Foundation’s track record of hiring PR firms to shut down detractors or using their money to influence institutions, one could be forgiven for assuming that the foundation would not be high on the list of potential leaders for a public health crisis. Unfortunately, as of May 2020, Bill Gates and his Foundation are still being promoted as heroes in the fight against COVID-19.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, both Bill Gates and the World Health Organization have stepped onto the center stage as the world looks to them for answers. By now, it is common knowledge that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the number one non-state donor to the WHO. The United States has been the top state donor but that may change under the Trump administration. Gates was also the first non-state individual to give a keynote address to the WHO general assembly.
According to a report by Politico, Bill Gates’ opinion (and money) has so much influence on the WHO that officials privately call it “the Bill Chill.” Sixteen officials speaking on the condition of anonymity told Politico that Gates has an out-sized influence on the politics of the WHO and few dare challenge him. “He is treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20,” a Geneva-based NGO representative stated.
The accusations of Gates’ influence were seconded by Foreign Affairs when they reported that “few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the World Health Organization are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.”
The WHO’s current Director General is Tedros Adhanom, a former Health Minister of Ethiopia. During his tenure as Minister of Health of Ethiopia, Tedros collaborated with the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to work on vaccines, among other health measures. Politico reported that prior to Tedros being selected for the WHO position in 2017 Gates was accused of supporting Tedros and using his influence to help win the nomination.
While most of the member country delegates expressed their belief that Gates is well intentioned, some feared that the Gates Foundation’s money comes from “big business” and could “serve as a Trojan horse for corporate interests to undermine WHO’s role in setting standards and shaping health policies.”
The most important takeaway is that the fees paid by WHO member countries account for less than a quarter of the $4.5 billion biennial budget — leaving Gates, governments, and other foundations to fill the gap. These donations are allocated for specific projects and the WHO cannot decide how to use them. In the case of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, those funds typically go towards vaccine programs.
No matter which way you approach the solutions being presented as the answer to the COVID-19 pandemic you will find Bill Gates’ fingerprints. Repeatedly he has used his money and influence to profit and steadily gain power without ever being elected to political office.
In part 3 of this investigation we will examine the strategies Bill Gates has called for in response to COVID-19. We will also see how Bill Gates and the Rockefeller family have both been predicting a situation like the one we are currently witnessing unfold. Finally, we will show how this crisis presents the perfect opportunity for Gates and his cohorts to reap massive profits and position themselves at the head of an emerging Technocratic State.
Soon after having been fired from his post as secretary of the treasury in December 2002, after a policy clash with the president, Paul O’Neill became a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite having just worked under and clashed with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn’t until O’Neill began answering to UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff as a member of the Center’s board that he chose to publicly denounce a superior as “evil.”
“He wants to destroy competition. He wants to be the only game in town,” O’Neill would later state of Romoff, adding that “after 18 months I quit [the UPMC board] in disgust” due to Romoff’s “absolute control” over the board’s actions. O’Neill subsequently noted that UPMC “board members who have wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars are not willing to take this guy on.” When pressed by a local reporter, O’Neill further elaborated that he had been told by other board members that they were “afraid” of Romoff because Romoff might “harm them in some way.”
O’Neill’s criticisms of Romoff are hardly an outlier, as local community activists and even a state attorney general have noted that UPMC’s board lets Romoff do as he pleases.
Jeffrey Romoff has ruled UPMC with an iron fist since his predecessor, Thomas Detre, had a heart attack in 1992. As a result of the Center’s massive wealth accumulation, at first spurred by his magic touch for receiving National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, Detre was able to use the financial power afforded to him to consolidate control over enough of the University of Pittsburgh to create his “own personal fiefdom,” which is now the stand-alone corporation known as UPMC.
Not long after Romoff took over the Center’s reins, he made his intentions clear to faculty and staff, stating at one 1995 UPMC meeting that his “vision” for the future of American health care was “the conversion of health care from social good to a commodity.” Motivated by profit above all else, Romoff aggressively expanded UPMC, gobbling up community hospitals, surgery centers, and private practices to create a “health-care network” that has expanded throughout much of Pennsylvania and even abroad to other countries, including China. Under Romoff, UPMC has also expanded into the health-insurance business, with 40 percent of the medical claims it pays out going straight back into places of care that are owned by UPMC—meaning UPMC is essentially paying itself.
In addition, since UPMC is officially a “charitable nonprofit corporation,” it is exempt from property taxes and has special access to the tax-exempt municipal bond market. UPMC can also solicit tax-deductible grants from private individuals and organizations, as well as governments. These grants totaled over $1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2017.
Despite these perks being officially justified because of UPMC’s “charitable institution” status, the UPMC board, with Romoff at the top, have seen their own multimillion-dollar-per-year salaries continue to climb. Perhaps this perk also comes from UPMC being a nonprofit corporation, as there are no stockholders to whom Romoff and the board must explain their increasingly exorbitant salaries. For instance, Romoff made $8.97 million last year as UPMC’s CEO, a marked increase over the $6.12 million he had raked in the prior year.
UPMC’s financial chicanery is so out of control that even Pennsylvania’s attorney general has taken action against it, suing UPMC in February 2019 for violations of the state’s charity laws based on their “unjust enrichment” and engaging in “unfair, fraudulent or deceptive acts or practices.” Though UPMC decided to settle out of court, the Center and Romoff came out of the affair relatively unscathed.
Now, thanks to the crisis caused by Covid-19, UPMC is once again on the path toward growing even larger and more powerful in pursuit of Romoff’s ultimate goal, which is, in his own words, to make UPMC the “Amazon of health care.”
In this fourth installment of the The Last American Vagabond series “Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex”, the “nonprofit” health-care behemoth that is UPMC is squarely placed at the intersection of post-9/11 “biodefense” public-private partnerships; corporate-funded academics who shape public policy on behalf of their private-sector benefactors; and risky research on dangerous pathogens that threatens to unleash the very “bioterror” that these institutions claim to guard against.
In January 2020, when much of the world remained blissfully unaware of the coming global pandemic, UPMC was already at work developing a vaccine to protect against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, known as SARS-CoV-2. That month, before the state of Pennsylvania had a single case of Covid-19, UPMC formed a “coronavirus task force,” which was initially focused on lobbying the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to obtain samples of live SARS-CoV-2 for research purposes. That research was to be conducted at the Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL) housed within UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research. A day after the director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex, revealed UPMC’s efforts to access the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he announced that the virus samples, containing an estimated 50 to 60 million coronavirus particles, were already en route to the university. At the time, UPMC was one of only a handful of institutions on the CDC’s short list to receive live SARS-CoV-2 samples.
UPMC later stated that they began work on a vaccine for Covid-19 on January 21st, weeks before the February 14th announcement that the virus was on its way to the university. That original vaccine candidate used the published genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, released in early January 2020 by Chinese researchers, to synthetically produce SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins that would be transported into cells by an adenoviral vector, which is commonly used in a variety of vaccines. The vaccine candidate was nicknamed PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine.
A little over a month after the live SARS-CoV-2 samples were received by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, UPMC received a $5 million grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international organization founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant was officially awarded to “an international academic-industry partnership” that the Center for Vaccine Research had recently formed with the Institut Pasteur in France and Austrian vaccine manufacturer Themis. Soon after, in May, Themis was acquired by vaccine giant Merck, which began recruiting volunteers for human trials earlier this month on September 11. Merck has incredibly close ties with UPMC, particularly its commercialization arm known as UPMC Enterprises.
The CEPI grant seems to have drastically altered the Center for Vaccine Research’s interest in the original adenovirus-vector vaccine candidate, PittCoVacc, as the CEPI grant was specifically aimed at funding a different vaccine candidate that instead uses the measles virus as a vector. The measles virus and the genetic manipulation of measles for use in the measles vaccine is, notably, the principal research interest and expertise of Center for Vaccine Research director Paul Duprex.
This measles-based vaccine candidate has been described as “a modified [genetically altered] measles virus that delivers bits of the new coronavirus into the body to prevent Covid-19” as well as an “attenuated [genetically modified yet weakened] measles virus as a vector with which to introduce genetic material from SARS-[CoV-]2 to the immune system.” The combination of this weakened measles virus and SARS-CoV-2, per Duprex, will produce a “more benign version of coronavirus [that] will acquaint a person’s immune system” with SARS-CoV-2. No vaccine using this modality has ever been licensed.
On April 2nd, less than a week after the CEPI award had been announced, the UPMC researchers who had developed the original vaccine candidate using the more traditional adenovirus-vector approach published a study in EBioMedicine (a publication of the medical journal Lancet) that reported promising results of their vaccine candidate in animal studies. The news that a US institution was among the first in the world to develop a Covid-19 vaccine candidate with promising results from an animal study was heavily amplified by mainstream US media outlets, with those reports noting that UMPC was requesting government permission to quickly move onto human trials.
This original vaccine candidate, however, was mysteriously dropped from subsequent reports and statements from UPMC regarding its Covid-19 vaccine efforts. Indeed, in recent months, Duprex’s statements on the center’s Covid-19 vaccine candidates no longer mention the once-promising PittCoVacc at all. Instead, new reports, citing Duprex, claim that the only UPMC vaccine candidates are the CEPI-funded measles-vaccine candidate and another, more mysterious vaccine candidate, whose nature has only been recently revealed by documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Equally odd is that recent media reports on the original vaccine candidate have stopped mentioning UPMC at all, instead citing only Themis, its new owner Merck, and France’s Institut Pasteur. There are no reports indicating a break-up of the original “academic-industry partnership” that had received the CEPI grant. It seems that this is what may have come to pass, as Duprex stated that the UPMC measles-vector vaccine candidate had partnered with the Serum Institute of India for mass production, first for trials and then for public use, depending on how the vaccine advances through the regulatory process. In contrast, Themis/Merck have stated that their vaccine is being produced in France. It remains unclear what the relation is between these two, and apparently analogous, vaccine candidates.
Though Duprex has been relatively forthcoming about the nature of the first UPMC vaccine candidate (i. e., the CEPI-funded measles-vector vaccine), he has been much more tight-lipped about its second vaccine candidate. In late August, he told the Pittsburgh Business Times that the second vaccine candidate that UPMC was developing “works by delivering genetic material coding for a viral protein instead of the entire weakened or killed virus as is standard in other vaccines.” Yet Duprex declined to state what vector will be used to deliver the genetic material into human cells. Recent FOIA revelations, nevertheless, have revealed that UPMC’s second vaccine candidate involves genetically engineering a combination of SARS-Cov-2 and anthrax, a substance better known for its potential use as a bioweapon.
The recently obtained documents reveal that the BSL-3 lab that is part of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research is conducting eyebrow-raising research involving combining SARS-CoV-2 with Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax infection. Per the documents, anthrax is being genetically engineered by a researcher, whose name was redacted in the release, so that it will express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is the part of the coronavirus that allows it to gain access into human cells. The researcher asserts that “the [genetically engineered anthrax/SARS-CoV-2 hybrid] can [be] used as a host strain to make SARS-CoV-2 recombinant S protein vaccine,” and the creation of said vaccine is the officially stated purpose of the research project. The documents were produced by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which held an emergency meeting on June 22nd of this year to “discuss specific protocols involving research with the coronavirus,” which included a vote on the aforementioned proposal.
UPitt-IBC-Minutes-from-July-2019-to-June-20201_Redacted
Edward Hammond, the former director of the Sunshine Project, an organization that opposed chemical and biological weapons and the expansion of “dual use” biodefense/bioweapon research, obtained the documents. Other FOIA documents recently obtained by Hammond have revealed an “explosion” of risky Covid-19-related research at other academic institutions, such as the University of North Carolina, which has already had lab accidents involving genetically engineered variants of SARS-CoV-2.
Hammond told The Last American Vagabond that the experiment, which he dubs “Corona-thrax,” is “emblematic of the pointless research excesses that often characterize the response of scientists to the federal government throwing billions of dollars at health crises.” Hammond added, “While I don’t think that Corona-thrax would be infectious, it falls into the categories of pointless and crazy. The biggest immediate risk of all this activity is that a researcher will deliberately or inadvertently create a modified form of SARS-CoV-2 that is even more difficult to treat, or more deadly, and this virus will escape the lab. It only takes a stray droplet.”
Jonathan Latham, a virologist who previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and who is the current editor of Independent Science News, agreed with Hammond that the Corona-thrax experiment is odd and said that he was “concerned here specifically about the research process and the risks of these specific experiments at Pittsburgh.” In an interview with The Last American Vagabond, Latham asserted that it is “unusual by historical standards . . . the combining of two highly pathogenic organisms in a single experiment.” He did note, however, that such studies for the purposes of vaccine research have become more common in recent years, as is made clear in a 2012 study.
Few experiments have been conducted that specifically utilize anthrax in this way. Since 2000, the studies that have examined the use of genetically modified anthrax as a potential vaccine vector have been affiliated with Harvard University. One of these studies was on the use of anthrax as a vector in a potential HIV vaccine and was jointly conducted in 2000 by Harvard researchers and the vaccine company Avant Immunotherapeutics (now part of Celldex).
Despite reporting positive preliminary results in their experiments, Avant/Celldex did not fund further experiments into a vaccine that used this anthrax-based modality, and it does not currently market or have any such vaccine in its product pipeline. This suggests that, for whatever reason, this company did not see much value in this vaccine, despite the preliminary study with Harvard claiming that the methodology was safe and effective.
The Harvard researchers involved in that 2000 study, however, continued to investigate the possibility of an anthrax-based HIV vaccine in 2003, 2004, and 2005, though without corporate sponsorship. Related yet different research has explored the use of “disarmed” anthrax components as an adjuvant in vaccines and as the basis for enzyme-linked immunospot assays.
The aforementioned Harvard researchers patented their methodology of using anthrax in this way for the production of a vaccine in 2002. This means that the anthrax-based “vaccine” currently being developed by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research would have to develop a new method that utilizes anthrax in much the same way so as not to infringe on the patent, which is unlikely. The other alternative is that UPMC would pay the patent holders for use of their methodology if they want to commercialize it in a vaccine. Yet, given UPMC’s business model in general, as well as that of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research specifically, this also seems unlikely.
Also odd is what sort of incentive UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research possesses for the Corona-thrax experiment. There are currently over a hundred vaccine candidates that use existing and tested vaccine platforms in pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine, a fact Duprex himself has acknowledged. As Hammond told The Last American Vagabond, “It is perfectly obvious that there are numerous existing vaccine platforms for Covid-19 and that some of them will, sooner or more likely later, succeed. There is no serious need for some sort of quite strange bacterial platform, much less one that happens to be anthrax. It’s completely unnecessary and frankly bizarre.”
Ribbon cutting for the Center for Vaccine Research – From left: Donald S. Burke, U. S. Congressman Mike Doyle, Arthur S. Levine, Dan Onorato, Mark A. Nordenberg.
The Corona-thrax experiment is being conducted at the Center for Vaccine Research’s Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL), where the center’s work with pathogenic agents, such as anthrax and SARS-CoV-2, is conducted.
The creation of UPMC’s RBL was first announced in 2003, when the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, then and currently led by Anthony Fauci) stated it would fund the laboratory’s construction with an $18 million grant. It was originally planned to be mainly “dedicated to research on agents that cause naturally occurring and emerging infections, as well as potential agents of bioterrorism.” The plan to create the lab was part of the US government decision to dramatically ramp up “biodefense” research in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The lab was also intended to work on “developing a vaccine program focusing on basic and translational research” related to viruses of pandemic potential that are at risk of being “weaponized,” including SARS. After the creation of the lab was initially announced, the project expanded, eventually becoming UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, which was launched in 2007. The Center for Vaccine Research was the second such institution to be officially added to the NIAID’s “biodefense” RBL network.
The opening of both this lab and UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research was made reality thanks to the efforts of the main authors of the June 2001 Dark Winter bioterror simulation, a controversial exercise that eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks as well as the initial, yet bogus, narrative that Iraq and Islamic extremist terror groups were responsible for those attacks. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was later revealed to be of US military origin. As noted in Part I of this series, participants in the Dark Winter exercise had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks and others were involved in the subsequent “investigation,” which many experts and former FBI investigators describe as a cover-up.
Dark Winter was largely written by Tara O’Toole, Thomas Inglesby, and Randall Larsen, all three of whom played integral roles in the founding or operations of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, along with O’Toole’s mentor, D. A. Henderson. UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity was launched in September 2003, just days before the NIAID announced it would fund the RBL lab that would later become the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research.
Notably, just days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, O’Toole, Inglesby, and Larsen personally briefed Vice President Cheney on Dark Winter. Simultaneously, Cheney’s office at the White House began taking the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin to prevent anthrax infection. In the weeks between that briefing and the 2001 anthrax attacks, Dark Winter participants and several associates of Cheney, namely members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) like Donald Kagan and Richard Perle, asserted that a bioterror attack involving anthrax would soon take place.
In the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, Henderson “was tapped by the federal government to vastly increase the number of [biodefense] labs, both to detect suspected pathogens like anthrax and to conduct bio-defense research, such as developing vaccines,” with the announcement of UPMC’s RBL being part of the launch of the O’Toole-led Center for Biosecurity at UPMC, where Henderson was named senior adviser. In 2003, the Center for Biosecurity was set up at UPMC partially at the request of Jeffrey Romoff to be “the country’s only think tank and research center devoted to the prevention and handling of biological attacks,” with UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research being the hub of a new “biodefense research” lab network Henderson was setting up and managing at the time. That network remains technically managed by the Fauci-led NIAID.
Also noteworthy is that the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, from its opening in 2007 until 2016, was Donald Burke. Burke is a former biodefense researcher for the US military at Fort Detrick and other installations and, immediately prior to heading the UPMC center, was a program director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he worked closely with O’Toole and Inglesby.
At the time of the 2003 announcement regarding the creation of what would become UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, Tara O’Toole stated:
“This new laboratory will enable University of Pittsburgh medical researchers to delve further into possible treatments and to develop vaccines against diseases that might result from bioterrorist attack or from natural outbreaks.”
A few years later, after she was nominated to a top post at the Department of Homeland Security, O’Toole was slammed by experts over her excessive lobbying “for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security.” Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright remarked at the time that “she makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” It was also noted in hearings that O’Toole had worked as a lobbyist for several “life sciences” companies specializing in the sale of biodefense products to the U.S. government, including Emergent Biosolutions – a very controversial company and a key suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The history of the Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL, particularly the network of people who prompted the lab’s creation, raises concerns about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment currently being conducted within the facility. This is especially true because the researcher conducting the experiment appears to be ignorant about key parts of the research he or she is conducting.
For instance, the FOIA-redacted researcher incorrectly states that a recombinant virus proposed for use in the study is incapable of infecting human cells, while the IBC members note that this is not the case. In addition, the unnamed researcher falsely claimed that one of the viral vectors for use in the investigator’s study did not express Cas9 (a protein associated with CRISPR gene editing) and gRNA (“guide RNA,” also used in CRISPR) and was unaware that handling those agents requires an enhanced BSL-2 lab (BSL-2+) as opposed to a typical BSL-2 lab.
Apparently such errors among researchers involved in Covid-19 research at UPMC is not an anomaly. During another UPMC IBC meeting included in the FOIA release, the IBC noted the following about a separate research proposal:
“In the investigator’s notes in responses to changes requested by the IBC pre-reviewers, the investigator indicates that RNA from SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infected cells will be obtained from BEI resources. Genomic RNA isolated from cells infected with SARS-CoV-1 is regulated as a Select Agent by the Federal Select Agent Program and neither the University nor this investigator are registered for possession and use of these materials [emphasis added] (SARS-CoV-1). The investigator must NOT obtain SARS-CoV-1 genomic RNA without prior consultation with the University’s RO/AROs for Select Agents.”
This part, in particular, caught the attention of Jonathan Latham, who noted that it was odd that “a university researcher is trying to obtain approval for an experiment which no one at the university is allowed to do.” Latham added in an interview that “apparently this applicant is totally ignorant of the regulatory environment and by extension the risks of SARS-CoV, which is a highly infectious virus whose escape from a lab has already led to at least one death.”
While Latham assumed that this was a “university researcher,” it is worth noting that the use of the UPMC Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL is not exclusive to researchers affiliated with the university. Indeed, as noted on the NIH website, “Investigators in academia, not-for-profit organizations, industry, and government studying biodefense and emerging infectious diseases may request the use of biocontainment laboratories,” including the RBL managed by the Center for Vaccine Research.
In addition, the Center for Vaccine Research website notes that “scientists from outside the University of Pittsburgh can work in the RBL through a collaboration or contract. Outside scientists must comply with all University of Pittsburgh training, documentation, regulatory, and medical requirements.” This means that outside scientists using the facility are also subject to IBC review. Both the NIH and Center for Vaccine Research sites note that, for an outside researcher to use the UPMC RBL facility, approval from the center’s director must be obtained.
Since the name of the Corona-thrax researcher is redacted, there is no way of knowing if he or she is affiliated with the university or a separate institution, corporation, or government agency. Regardless of who is conducting this experiment, however, it is possible to examine the history and motivations of the man who ultimately signed off on it—the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, Paul Duprex.
Director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex
Paul Duprex is a former chief scientist for Johnson & Johnson whose subsequent foray into academia was largely funded with research grants from the NIH and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Much of Duprex’s research has focused on recombinant (i. e., genetically engineered) viruses or viral evolution.
In terms of his research funded by DARPA, Duprex was most closely associated with DARPA’s “Prophecy” program, the creation of which was overseen by Michael Callahan. Callahan’s suspect past and his ties to the origin of the current Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan, China, were the subject of a recent Unlimited Hangout article by Raul Diego.
In that article, Diego notes that the now-defunct Prophecy program had “sought to ‘transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive’ through algorithmic programming techniques” and that the program further “proposed that ‘viral mutations and outbreaks’ could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development.”
By all indications, Prophecy was DARPA’s first major foray into “predictive” AI-powered health care, which has expanded considerably in the years since. It also involved a component, which Duprex was particularly involved in advancing, whereby the “predictive” viral evolutions algorithms would be “validated and tested . . . by using multiple selective pressures on at least three closely related virus strains in an experimental setting.”
Such experiments, like this study by Duprex, involved the genetic engineering of three viral pathogen strains and then seeing which would become most transmissible and virulent in an animal host. Such studies are often referred to as gain-of-function (GOF) research and are incredibly controversial given that they often create pathogens that are more virulent and/or transmissible than they otherwise would be. It is also worth noting that UPMC, before Duprex joined the center, had also received millions in funding from DARPA’s Prophecy program “to develop in vitro and computational models for predicting viral evolution under selection pressure from multiple evolutionary stressors.”
Duprex has also been involved in conducting research for DARPA’s current INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, a successor to Prophecy that “aims to harness viral evolution to create a novel, adaptive form of medical countermeasure—therapeutic interfering particles (TIPs)—that outcompetes viruses in the body to prevent or treat infection.” TIPs are genetically engineered viruses with defective genomes that theoretically compete with real viruses for viral components in the human body but “evolve with” the viruses they are meant to protect the body against and are “susceptible to mutation over time.”
The goal of the INTERCEPT program is to use TIPs as “therapeutics” and have them injected into the human body to “preemptively” protect against the virus from which a particular TIP was developed. It is worth noting that, while DARPA frames much of its gene-editing research (including its “genetic extinction” technology research) as being aimed at promoting either human or environmental health, it has also openly admitted that these same technologies are of interest to DARPA for their ability to “subvert” the genes of human adversaries of the US military via “genetic weapons.”
Duprex led an INTERCEPT study published in February of this year in which he and his coauthors explored how to create a synthetic TIP of the Nipah virus, a deadly virus with a fatality rate of over 70 percent. In that study, they used both wild and genetically engineered strains of Nipah virus. Notably, the Clade X pandemic simulation, which will be discussed in detail in the next installment of this series, involved a genetically engineered combination of the Nipah virus and a parainfluenza disease.
Clade X took place in 2018 and was led by much of the same team that was responsible for the 2001 Dark Winter bioterrorism simulation, including former FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. Another notable participant at Clade X was Julie Gerberding, former CDC director and current executive vice president at Merck, which has close ties to UPMC as well as the Center for Biosecurity’s failed “21st Century Biodefense” project.
A few months after publishing the study funded by DARPA’s INTERCEPT program, Duprex coauthored another study on the use of synthetic “nanobodies” (i. e., bioengineered synthetic nanoparticles acting as antibodies) that was published in August. This effort mirrors other DARPA “health-focused” projects. That study was funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the NIH, and Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
In addition to his ties to DARPA programs involving the genetic engineering of viral pathogens, Duprex is a leading advocate for controversial gain-of-function research and was appointed to direct UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research less than three months after the federal moratorium on GOF research ended.
In October 2014, five days after that moratorium was first imposed, Duprex gave a talk to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity entitled “Gain-of-Function Studies: Their History, Their Utility, and What They Can Tell Us.” In the talk, he asserted that “cross-species infection studies have already helped to improve surveillance in the field, have shed new light on basic influenza virus biology, and could assist in growing vaccine viruses better” and argues against the recently imposed moratorium.
In 2014, Duprex also wrote in a paper published in Nature that “GOF approaches are absolutely essential in infectious disease research; although alternative approaches can be very useful, these can never replace GOF experiments.” He added that, in his view, there were only two reasons for GOF research, the first being to “improve surveillance or to develop therapeutics” and the second being merely to learn “interesting biology.”
In that same paper, he also argued that “genetic engineering that is intended and likely to endow a low-pathogenicity, low-transmissibility agent with either enhanced pathogenicity or enhanced transmissibility may be appropriate if the benefits are substantial.” He also suggested in this 2014 paper that it “might” be necessary “to enhance pathogenicity of coronaviruses in order to develop a valid animal model for coronaviruses.” Years later, during the current coronavirus crisis, Duprex and other officials from the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research co-developed a Covid-19 research and development “blueprint” for the UN’s World Health Organization.
In addition, Duprex’s work for DARPA’s Prophecy program involved GOF research, as noted above, and the creator of that program, Michael Callahan – former head of DARPA’s biodefense therapeutics initiatives, is also a proponent of GOF who believes that such risky research is inseparable from “the research and development enterprise in the life sciences and for biotechnology.”
Duprex is also a founding member of Scientists for Science, a group of researchers (most of whom are involved in GOF research) who opposed the GOF moratorium and were “confident that biomedical research on potentially dangerous pathogens can be performed safely and is essential for a comprehensive understanding of microbial disease pathogenesis, prevention and treatment.” Another of the group’s founding members is Yoshihiro Kawaoka, whose controversial GOF experiments that made pathogenic viruses more deadly have garnered considerable media attention.
When the moratorium on GOF was lifted in December 2017, Duprex called it a “sign of progress,” adding that “on a personal level I’m really pleased these NIH funded scientists [conducting GOF research] get some clarity.” As previously mentioned, he became the Center for Vaccine Research’s director less than three months later, in March 2018.
After a cursory examination of the background of UPMC, its Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, and the man directing its Center for Vaccine Research, the question about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment becomes: Is this yet another ill-advised experiment by a lab led by a GOF enthusiast and fueled by a feeding frenzy over the billions of dollars thrown by the government and other entities into Covid-19 research? Or is there perhaps a more nefarious motive to genetically engineering something as bizarre as Corona-thrax?
While the latter question may appear conspiratorial, it is worth pointing out that the institutions most likely to have been the sources for the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks were conducting GOF research on anthrax funded by the Pentagon and the CIA that was justified as “improving” the controversial anthrax vaccine known as BioThrax.
For instance, Battelle Memorial Institute—a Pentagon and CIA contractor—began genetically engineering a more virulent form of anthrax “to see if the [anthrax] vaccine the United States intends to supply to its armed forces is effective against that strain.” While these experiments were going on, the embattled manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine now known as Emergent Biosolutions, entered into a contract with Battelle that gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” it was using in connection with the genetically modified anthrax program.
As noted in Part II of this series, BioPort was set to lose its Pentagon contract for anthrax vaccine entirely in September 2001, and the entirety of its anthrax vaccine business was rescued by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw concerns over BioPort’s corruption and its horrendous safety track record replaced with fervent demands for more of its anthrax vaccine. Furthermore, as noted in detail in Part III of this series, Battelle was the most likely source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. The ties between UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, Battelle, and Emergent Biosolutions will be discussed in the next installment in the series.
What is also notable about these Corona-thrax experiments occurring at UPMC are the ties of UPMC’s RBL and Center for Vaccine Research to another key component of the center’s “biodefense” complex, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. As previously mentioned, the people recruited to head this center at its founding in 2003 were intimately involved in the 2001 bioterror simulation Dark Winter, namely Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby.
While leading the UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, O’Toole and/or her successor Inglesby engaged in other notable bioterror simulations, including one that took place last year— Event 201, which eerily predicted the coronavirus crisis that began this year. Inglesby, who is also the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in addition to his post at UPMC, was the moderator at Event 201.
Though Event 201 has garnered considerable scrutiny in recent months, another but less well-known exercise in 2018 that involved O’Toole and Inglesby, examined how a bioterror attack involving a genetically engineered pathogen could trigger a Continuity of Government (CoG) scenario, a government roadmap for the imposition of martial law in the United States. As other investigative series of mine have noted, there have recently been a myriad of intelligence agency–linked simulations that predict the imminent imposition of martial law in the United States following the 2020 election.
It is also notable that George W. Bush’s controversial and classified update to CoG plans in 2007, known as Executive Directive 51, was directly inspired by Dark Winter, and Barack Obama’s subsequent executive orders on CoG gave near-complete control of American infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security in a such a situation. At the time Obama issued those executive orders, O’Toole was the DHS undersecretary for science and technology and also influenced those updates to the CoG plans. O’Toole is currently the executive vice president of the CIA’s In-Q-tel.
The simulation known as Clade X will be examined in greater detail in the next installment of this series as will the numerous and recent “predictions” from US government sources, controversial billionaires such as Bill Gates, and a web of individuals tied to UPMC who have warned that a bioterror attack or related public health catastrophe is set to take place in the United States in the latter half of 2020. As one high-ranking government official put it earlier this year, this allegedly imminent event will result in “the darkest winter in modern history.”
In August 2001, biopharmaceutical company BioPort faced imminent disaster. A series of company scandals, controversial federal bail-outs and severe, adverse health reactions among U.S. troops were causing both Congress and the Pentagon to reconsider its multi-million dollar contract to provide the military with an anthrax vaccine.
Formed for the sole purpose of acquiring a publicly-owned company in Michigan that held the exclusive license to manufacture the only FDA-approved anthrax vaccine in the United States, BioPort sought to quickly expand the size and scope of its contracts with the U.S. military. This strategy was made possible thanks to the former head of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William Crowe, who would prove highly instrumental in the rise of BioPort’s vaccine monopoly and its subsequent, aggressive hiring of former government officials as lobbyists.
Yet, soon after scoring these multi-million dollar contracts and securing a monopoly on anthrax vaccines, BioPort would claim that they were flailing financially and would subsequently be bailed out to the tune of $24 million at the Pentagon’s request, which cited “national security concerns” as justification.
However, Pentagon auditors had found that much of the money awarded to BioPort was unaccounted for and the money they were able to trace had failed to go towards renovating their vaccine production facility, which had lost its license until numerous sanitary problems (sanitary and otherwise) were fixed. Meanwhile, scores of soldiers who had suffered ill health effects from BioPort’s anthrax vaccine, some disabled for life, began speaking out, bringing BioPort’s most critical product and chief source of income under unwanted scrutiny.
While BioPort seemingly faced imminent ruin from these and other scandals in August 2001, the 2001 anthrax attacks that followed a month later came at just the right time for the company, as demand for their anthrax vaccine soon skyrocketed, resulting in new lucrative government contracts. Their license was also quickly renewed thanks to intervention from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) despite many of the problems with its production facility persisting.
Though they were conveniently rescued by the unfortunate events of 2001, BioPort would soon lobby for larger contracts than ever before, calling for a massive increase in government purchases of their controversial anthrax vaccine. Riding the fear caused by the 2001 anthrax attacks, they pushed for the government to stockpile anthrax vaccines, not just for the military, but for civilians, postal workers, police and many more who could potentially be put in harm’s way were the anthrax attacks to repeat themselves.
Jerome Hauer
One of their biggest proponents of expanding BioPort’s contracts was working for HHS at the time — Jerome Hauer, a man who not only had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks, but had also participated in the Dark Winter simulation that would also predict those same attacks just months prior. Hauer would, months later, be appointed to a newly created position at HHS, one which oversaw the new biodefense stockpile from which BioPort would be a major beneficiary.
BioPort would be then renamed and repackaged as Emergent Biosolutions in 2004. It would then hire even more well-connected lobbyists and add several big names from government and the private sector to its board. One of these “big names” was none other than Jerome Hauer, who was added to Emergent’s board soon after leaving HHS. Hauer still remains a company director and sits on three of its corporate governance committees.
Not only did Emergent Biosolutions profit from national anthrax fears, they would also cash in on subsequent pandemic panics and later receive substantial backing from the Bill Gates-backed Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). They would then turn their attention to the still-raging opioid addiction and overdose crisis by buying rights to the only drug approved for treating opioid overdoses at the scene while also suing any and all generic producers of this crucial, life-saving treatment.
Given its history, it should come as little surprise that Emergent Biosolutions is now set to profit from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. They are particularly well-suited to make record profits off of Covid-19, as they are backing not one, but two, vaccine candidates as well as an experimental blood plasma treatment already approved for trials in New York state, thanks in part to Jerome Hauer’s old boss, New York governor Andrew Cuomo. As noted in a previous article for The Last American Vagabond, the other main companies developing Covid-19 vaccines in the U.S. are strategic partners of the controversial Pentagon research agency DARPA, which has become increasingly aligned with HHS in recent years thanks to another Dark Winter participant, Robert Kadlec.
In this second installment of the series “Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex,” Emergent Biosolution’s rise to prominence, made possible through acts of blatant corruption and the public-private revolving door, will be explored. The clear nexus between Big Pharma, Government and University-affiliated “Biosecurity Centers” offers a startling look into the Biotech-Industrial Complex that has long dominated U.S. biodefense policy and is now guiding much of the U.S. government’s response to the Coronavirus crisis.
For half a century, Vladimir Pasechnik had been a model Soviet citizen, with his scientific prowess in the field of bioweapons earning him an honorary rank of general. However, having been granted such a title didn’t seem to inspire much loyalty when he made a call to the British embassy from a phone booth in France in 1989. The famed microbiologist subsequently defected to England, a decision that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall by a matter of months. Yet, few could have provided a more riveting view behind the Iron Curtain than Pasechnik, who regaled Whitehall with shocking tales of monstrous pathogens engineered as part of the Biopreparat, communist Russia’s top secret biological weapons program.
Pasechnik’s MI6 handler, Christopher Davis, shared all of the intelligence gathered with his counterparts in the United States, including claims that Biopreparat programs had developed antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax, tularemia and botulinum toxin. Ancient diseases like the plague had also been modified, according to Davis. When the stories ran out, Pasechnik was given a job at Britain’s own biodefense facilities at Porton Down, where he would remain for another decade before branching out and founding his own biotech firm.
The Western geopolitical establishment, however, wasted no time in cementing a new narrative of imminent, worldwide bioweapons threats following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s resignation in 1991 abruptly crashed the Cold War rhetoric market in the West and the massive military-industrial complex that had profited from those tensions remained revved up, yet lacking a boogeyman.
Pasechnik was just one of several Biopreparat alumni who had defected to Western countries, with another well-known example being Ken Alibek (born Kanatjan Alibekov), who defected to the US as opposed to the UK. Many of Alibek’s sensational claims and dire warnings regarding the Soviet bioweapons program in the 1990s would later be proven to be imaginative falsehoods. Despite this, Alibek retained influence in the biotechnology industry and Washington, where the ability to sell fear is often a sought-after trait.
Pasechnik, however, wasn’t so lucky, dying of a suspected heart attack in November 2001. He was one of 11 of the world’s top microbiologists to die under mysterious circumstances from November 2001 to March 2002.
In light of the claims made by Pasechnik, Alibek and others in the 1990s, a relatively small group of well-connected individuals — many of whom would later participate in the June 2001 Dark Winter simulation — asserted that Biopreparat presented an enduring threat, hypothesizing that defectors from the program might not turn to the West, but instead to rival regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Anthrax was quickly deemed to be one of the top threats by these bioweapons doomsayers and then, just months after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a competitive bid solicitation for the production of 6.3 million doses of the anthrax vaccine. Its previous contract, only a year before, had called for merely 700,000 doses by comparison.
The Michigan Biologic Products Institute (MBPI) had been founded in 1926 by the State to serve the vaccination needs of its largely rural population, many of whom worked on farms and required inoculation against naturally occurring anthrax spores and rabies. By the 1980s, the Institute stood alone as the only anthrax vaccine manufacturer in the U.S. after 1970s-era regulations had driven most private vaccine manufacturers out of business. MBPI’s anthrax vaccine was known as Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed (AVA) or BioThrax.
Aligning himself with policy recommendations issued by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy – a front for the controversial Koch brothers, Michigan’s governor, John Engler, cited the MBPI’s endemic financial losses to justify putting the nation’s only licensed anthrax vaccine manufacturer up for sale in 1996. However, upon closer examination, the real reason behind the decision had more to do with a sudden spike in demand by the lab’s only customer, the US government, and the MBPI’s inability to meet it.
The Michigan facility required massive renovations if it was to fulfill the needs of a national security establishment that had come to reconstitute itself around the threat of weapons of mass destruction and biowarfare, a threat largely manufactured by the stories of Soviet defectors. The Pentagon offered to pony up $1.8 million for the necessary renovations, but there were no takers — at least, none with a US passport.
That same year, perennial US defense contractor, Dyncorp, went into business with a shadowy group of biotech entrepreneurs from across the pond, forming the DynPort Vaccine Company, LLC., a combination of DynCorp’s name with that of its UK-based partner, Porton International, Inc. The latter company’s president, Zsolt Harsanyi, would also lead DynPort as the British firm began to lay the groundwork for its second attempt at securing a crucial monopoly within the American biotech space.
Porton International had come into existence as a result of the Thatcherite revolution that balkanized British public sector assets and distributed them among private interests that frequently had close and cozy ties with Thatcher-era officials and other UK politicians. Among these assets was the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR), a biotechnology arm of the United Kingdom’s infamous Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, commonly referred to as Porton Down, which also happened to house the UK’s own anthrax vaccine program.
Porton International began operations in 1982, when London financier, Wensley Haydon-Baillie, founded the company to develop a herpes medication invented by Dr. Gordon Skinner, which had stalled during clinical trials and never actually entered the market. In 1985, Haydon-Baillie secured exclusive rights to commercialize drugs developed by the CAMR, a sweetheart deal from the Thatcher government that drew in large investments from British Telecom and Lloyds Bank, among others, totaling £76 million. Haydon-Ballie profited handsomely from the venture, collecting annual dividends of half a million pounds and selling some of his shares for £24 million in 1986.
In 1989, Porton International acquired Sera-lab and Hazleton Biologics, Inc., providing it with an established distribution network. The following year, the company’s bid to outright purchase the 650-employee CAMR lab, would be accepted by British Health Secretary, Kenneth Clark, despite opposition from the staff who had voted against the takeover.
By the time the sale closed, Haydon-Ballie — once the 50th richest man in England — was on the brink of being forced out of Porton International over accusations of illicit enrichment. Around the same time, the anthrax vaccine was set to enter a bull market and Porton International was now in a prime position to reap the full benefits.
A year earlier in 1989, Ibrahim El-Hibri, a Venezuelan citizen who had made a fortune working for US telecommunications companies, had become a silent partner in Porton International. His son, Fuad El-Hibri, was made director of Porton Products, Ltd, a Porton International subsidiary, which was the conduit by which the El-Hibri family had made a killing selling anthrax vaccines to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states at $300 to $500 a dose. Fuad El-Hibri had previously been an intelligence contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton and an executive at the Wall Street giant, CitiGroup.
ADM William J. Crowe Jr., USN.
The elder El-Hibri had a knack for business that ran back decades to the 1970s when he lived in Qatar, where he befriended the then-head of US Central Command, Admiral William Crowe. The career military man kept in touch with El-Hibri through the years and perhaps even gave him a few business leads at a time when Crowe was also serving on the board of pharmaceutical behemoth, Pfizer. Crowe would later pick up the phone in late 1997 (officially at least, but probably well before) to make a proposition to his old friend.
In 1997, then-US Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen announced a plan to vaccinate every single member of the US Armed Forces against anthrax, which ultimately resulted in the vaccination of approximately 2.4 million troops by 2003. Admiral Crowe, who was serving as the US ambassador to the UK at the time, quickly contacted El-Hibri to discuss the US government anthrax vaccine market in light of this new Pentagon policy.
The only obstacle was getting his son, Fuad El-Hibri, a U.S. passport so that he could run the business stateside. To easily and quickly circumvent this issue, the politically-connected Admiral — with his deep ties to the Pentagon intact — was made a director of BioPort and given 10% of company stock, despite not having put a single penny into the company.
The stage was set to bring Porton International into the exclusive government contract business in the United States as BioPort, Inc. As luck would have it, Porton International’s president, Zsolt Harsanyi, had just received a ten-year DoD contract worth roughly $322 million through DynPort Vaccine Company, LLC, and — thanks to Michigan’s governor — the only licensed anthrax vaccine manufacturing plant in the country was back on the auction block.
In September 1998, BioPort acquired the MBPI facility through a $25 million package of loans, cash and promises to pay Michigan state more for the company in the future, promises that were later broken. It was later revealed that El-Hibri and other BioPort partners had only placed $4.5 million of their own money into this package.
As previously mentioned, the MBPI plant in Lansing, MI had come with issues and had been closed for renovations six months prior to its purchase by BioPort. However, the MBPI had received millions from the Pentagon to fix the issues identified by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that had affected the vaccine’s “stability, potency and purity.”
Along with these issues, BioPort had also inherited military contracts worth nearly $8 million for anthrax vaccines. They quickly secured another contract for the same totaling more than $45 million, with an additional $16 million in cash for immediate renovations — a sizable deal likely due to BioPort’s aggressive hiring of former Pentagon and federal officials as lobbyists in addition to Crowe’s own deep ties to the Pentagon.
Despite the massive influx of cash, BioPort did not spend the money on renovating the plant and its sanitary issues, likely due to the fact that the deal required the Pentagon to buy anthrax vaccines from BioPort even if the plant and the vaccines it had produced lacked a FDA license.
With the Pentagon obligated to buy the vaccine, regardless of whether it was usable, BioPort spent millions renovating its executives’ offices, as opposed to the vaccine factory, and millions more on bonuses for “senior management.” Pentagon auditors would later find that still millions more had gone “missing” and BioPort’s staff were unaware of the cost of producing a single dose of the vaccine.
Despite the clear mismanagement and corruption, BioPort demanded to be bailed out by the Pentagon, requesting even more money to replace what they had lost and squandered. Though Pentagon auditors argued that the company should be abandoned, top military officials cited “national security” and awarded BioPort with an additional $24.1 million. They also upped the price to be paid for each dose of the anthrax vaccine, which only has a shelf life of 3 years, from $4.36 to $10.64.
Congress would hold hearings on the bail-out, hearings that went nowhere. During one of those hearings, then-Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) would state the following:
“The message seems clear: If a company wants to make millions without providing a product or service, enter into a sole-source contract with the Department of Defense to produce vaccines. BioPort appears to have the government over a barrel.”
Unsurprisingly, this would only be the first of BioPort’s federal bail-outs.
With BioPort well aware of its powerful position early on, it dragged its feet in getting its factory relicensed and up to federal standards. Meanwhile, due to the nature of the contract, the Pentagon kept buying up large amounts of vaccines that were unusable, and arguably unsafe, while also still paying BioPort for storage of the useless product.
During this time, anthrax vaccine doses made prior to these renovations were being used on U.S. troops, with many of those soldiers claiming that the vaccine produced in the troubled facility had given them permanent headaches, joint pain, loss of memory and other, more severe symptoms. Some were even disabled for life. Congress again held hearings, but they were stuffed with BioPort employees posing as “experts” as well as others who supported the Pentagon’s contract with the company.
However, in 2000, the Pentagon did finally lose patience and demanded that BioPort stop making BioThrax. BioPort obliged, but kept receiving government money to keep it afloat. By August 2001, the Lansing facility was still unlicensed and BioPort was still demanding government money to keep it from going out of business. That month, Congress and the Pentagon began to publicly discuss abandoning BioPort. The Pentagon began preparing a report, due to be released in September 2001, that would detail a plan for letting BioPort go.
Fortunately for BioPort but unfortunately for the nation, the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks led to major increases in fear and panic that anthrax attacks could become a recurrent nightmare for the American public and that radical terror groups and rival nations sought to target, not just American soldiers with anthrax, but also the country’s civilians.
The ensuing panic led the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to intervene, returning BioPort its license in January 2002 despite persisting safety concerns at its vaccine production facility. BioPort was not content to merely see its past contracts with the Pentagon restored, however, as it began lobbying heavily for new contracts for anthrax vaccines intended for American civilians, postal workers and others. They would get them, largely thanks to HHS’ then-counter-terrorism adviser and soon to be HHS’ newest Assistant Secretary — Jerome Hauer.
As BioPort secured its control over the only licensed anthrax vaccine producer in the country in 1998, New York’s emergency crisis manager and bioterrorism expert, Jerome Hauer, was busy working and making doomsday contingency plans from his “bunker” on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7.
Put on the job by then-NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1996, Hauer had previously managed worldwide emergency response for technology giant IBM. He also was an adviser to the Justice Department, had briefed President Clinton on bioterror threats and was known to “consult regularly with Scotland Yard and the Israeli military.” It was reportedly Hauer’s idea to locate the city’s emergency management office at Building 7, even though placing it there was considered controversial at the time due to the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, bombings that were later revealed to have disturbing links to the FBI.
In 1999, the New York Times would describe Hauer’s job as “sitting around all day thinking up horrifying ways for things to be destroyed and people to die.” It would also note that Hauer described his expertise regarding specific emergency situations as follows: “helicopter crash, subway fire, water main break, ice storm, heat wave, blackout, building collapse, building collapse, building collapse.” His obsession with building collapses even led him to house “trophies” of the building collapses he had overseen and responded to. How odd then that Hauer’s multi-million dollar “bunker” itself would later fall victim to building collapse, falling into its own footprint in 7 seconds on September 11, 2001.
That fateful day, Hauer was no longer with NY’s Office of Emergency Management, having left in February 2000. However, in 2001, Hauer still worked at the World Trade center complex, running security for the buildings as managing director of Kroll Inc. Informally known as the “CIA of Wall Street”, Kroll was alleged to be an actual front for the CIA by French intelligence agencies, according to the Washington Post. Though it claimed to be mainly involved in corporate security and investigations, it also frequently investigated targets of Washington foreign policy, including Saddam Hussein. Kroll was also the company tapped to “reorganize” Enron in 2002.
Though Hauer should have been at his office at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, he did not show up for work that day and instead made TV media appearances, where he claimed that Osama bin Laden had been responsible for the attacks just hours after the towers collapsed in an interview with Dan Rather.
Yet, not all Kroll employees were as lucky as Hauer. John O’Neill had just begun working for Kroll and was at the World Trade Center that day, dying in the attacks. O’Neill had previously worked with the FBI and was the country’s top expert on Osama bin Laden and his activities. He had resigned in mid-2001 after his investigations into bin Laden were repeatedly blocked by his superiors, something that happened to numerous federal investigators prior to 9/11, and was subsequently offered a job at Kroll by none other than Jerome Hauer himself.
Also on the day of 9/11, Hauer had told top Bush administration officials to start taking the antibiotic Cipro to prevent infection via anthrax and Hauer would subsequently make public hints via mass media that foreign terrorists were working with Saddam Hussein to unleash an anthrax attack on the American public. All of this took place well before the first anthrax attack victim, photojournalist Robert Stevens, would even show symptoms.
Hauer had prepared for a scenario just like the anthrax attacks as part of the Dark Winter biowarfare simulation, which occurred just months prior and at a time when Hauer was a member of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian BioDefense, part of what is now the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, then led by Dark Winter co-author Tara O’Toole. The Dark Winter exercise and its current relevance are discussed in detail in Part I of this series.
Also of note is the fact that, while working for Kroll Inc. Hauer was also working for the Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a defense and intelligence contractor. There he became a co-worker of Stephen Hatfill, who Hauer had actually met years prior. At SAIC, Hatfill worked on developing protocols for handling “anthrax hoax letters,” a phenomenon present in Dark Winter and later during the actual 2001 anthrax attacks. Hatfill would later be accused of having committed those very attacks, but was later cleared of suspicion, winning a hefty multi-million dollar settlement from the government.
In addition to his work for SAIC and Kroll as the events of September 11, 2001 transpired, Hauer was also a national security adviser to then-head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Tommy Thompson. Hauer closely advised Thompson during the 2001 anthrax attacks and after, helping to shape HHS response and subsequent biodefense policy, which focused heavily on BioPort’s anthrax vaccine.
As the anthrax attacks unfolded, Hauer advised Secretary Thompson to establish a new office at HHS, the Office of Public Health Preparedness (OPHP), whose first acting director was Dr. D.A. Henderson, a former official with the World Health Organization and the original founder of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian Biodefense, which had sponsored Dark Winter and included Jerome Hauer as well as Dark Winter co-authors Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby. In early 2002, Hauer himself would replace Henderson as head of the newly created OPHP.
In May 2002, Hauer — while leading OPHP — co-authored a report with members of the Johns Hopkins Working Group, including O’Toole and Inglesby. In that paper, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Hauer, O’Toole, Inglesby and their co-authors argued that greater production and purchase of anthrax vaccine was necessary in light of the 2001 anthrax attacks and that government funding was also needed to research a new anthrax vaccine. They also asserted that the vaccine did not cause any significant adverse effects.
Notably, just months prior, O’Toole and Inglesby had come under scrutiny in their attempts to link the anthrax attacks to Al Qaeda, several months after that possibility had been ruled out completely by federal investigators and other independent scientists.
The paper authored by the Johns Hopkins Working Group would also come under scrutiny, particularly their recommendation that the government acquire more BioThrax. This was largely because the evidence from the attacks showed that antibiotics were much more effective and less expensive in responding to anthrax attacks, with subsequent studies claiming that calls for stockpiling more BioThrax “defy medical evidence and expert recommendations” based on lessons learned during the anthrax attacks.
Then, in June 2002, the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act was signed into law by President Bush, creating the post of Assistant Secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness, which was quickly filled by Hauer and gave him near-complete power over HHS’ biodefense policy and all HHS matters related to “national security.”
In July 2002, Hauer and his deputy William Raub helped push the Pentagon to restart vaccinating the troops, despite long-standing concerns over the vaccine’s safety. Per the new immunization program, the number of troops being vaccinated would “jump,” according to officials. However, the size of that increase was never made public. In addition, half of the Pentagon’s BioThrax purchases would be stockpiled for civilian use.
Though Hauer, O’Toole, Inglesby, the Pentagon and, of course, BioPort, continued to assert that BioThrax was safe for human use, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) would release its findings just months later that showed that the vaccine “caused adverse reactions in most recipients [85%] and helped prompt many Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard members to transfer to other units or leave the military between 1998 and 2000.” The Pentagon and HHS rejected the GAO’s conclusions.
Despite rejections from the Pentagon and HHS, the number of veterans suffering ill effects from BioThrax continued to mount. Even mainstream sources began to report on claims linking BioThrax to over 20 deaths and over 4,000 illnesses, 347 of which were deemed to be “serious.”
As a result, in March 2003, six military service-members and Defense Department civilian contractors sued the Pentagon, HHS and the FDA over the mandatory BioThrax vaccination policy, claiming that the way the vaccine had been administered in the 1990s and in the early 2000s was experimental.
This claim was based on the fact the FDA had not approved BioThrax for use against aerosol exposure to anthrax (i.e. anthrax inhalation). However, the Pentagon was using BioThrax to ostensibly protect soldiers from exposure to aerosol anthrax, which is the form of anthrax that would be encountered by soldiers in a bioweapon or bioterrorist scenario. Thus, the Pentagon was injecting soldiers with BioThrax for a use for which it was not federally approved, rendering its use experimental. Given that the federal mandating of experimental vaccines is illegal, a federal judge ruled that the Pentagon’s mandatory Biothrax vaccination program was illegal in October 2004.
The ruling was a blow to BioPort, which had reorganized that year and took on the name Emergent BioSolutions. However, BioPort/Emergent BioSolutions would find relief in 2006, when the Pentagon decided to resume mandatory anthrax immunizations among U.S. servicemen soon after the FDA decided to approve BioThrax as a treatment for anthrax inhalation.
Just months before the Pentagon’s BioThrax vaccine program was deemed illegal, Congress passed the Project BioShield Act, an act that was largely written by Emergent BioSolution lobbyists and greatly influenced by Robert Kadlec, who was then serving as the Homeland Security Council’s Director of Biodefense. The goal of the act was to allocate $5 billion to be used to purchase vaccines, including millions of doses of anthrax vaccine, and stockpile them in the event of a future bioterrorist attack. Given that these vaccines have a limited shelf life (three to four years in BioThrax’s case), the stockpile would continually need to be renewed as its contents gradually expired.
Not long after BioShield was signed into law, Emergent BioSolutions co-founded a lobby group called the Alliance for Biosecurity as part of its strategy to easily secure lucrative BioShield contracts. That lobby group saw Emergent BioSolutions join forces with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity, which was created in 2003 and populated with former members of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. At the time, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center was led by Tara O’Toole.
Though Emergent BioSolutions had contacts with the key organizations and people in the biodefense-industrial complex, the Bush administration and the military, BioShield initially didn’t go as planned for the company. Instead of pumping even more money into the controversial BioThrax, HHS decided to invest in a new anthrax vaccine that involved fewer doses and fewer adverse side effects, and thus less controversy.
In November 2004, HHS through BioShield awarded VaxGen Inc. a $877.5 million contract to produce a recombinant anthrax vaccine and was the first contract made via BioShield. In great contrast to Emergent’s past BioThrax contracts with the government, the VaxGen contract did not provide the company with government money until the vaccine was approved and subsequently delivered.
The VaxGen contract greatly concerned BioPort/Emergent Biosolutions for obvious reasons. In order to avoid losing their vaccine monopoly, they invested heavily in lobbying and spent $5.29 million on lobbyists from 2004 to 2007. By comparison, over that same period, VaxGen spent $720,000 on lobbyists.
One of those lobbyists was Jerome Hauer, who was also added to Emergent’s board shortly after leaving HHS. Despite Hauer having supported a new anthrax vaccine other than BioThrax while he had worked at HHS, Hauer suddenly began to insist that BioThrax was the solution. He also demanded that his replacement at HHS, Stewart Simonson, who was ultimately responsible for VaxGen’s BioShield contract, be stripped of his authority. Other lobbyists hired by Emergent at the time included two former aides to then-Vice President Dick Cheney and former aides to influential members of Congress.
The hiring of Hauer and others well-connected to the Bush administration and Congress was just part of Emergent’s aggressive lobbying against the VaxGen contract, as the company also employed mafia-esque tactics, telling lawmakers and government officials that U.S. civilians “were at risk of death without an immediately expanded stockpile of [BioThrax] anthrax vaccine” and threatening to “stop making the vaccine if the government chose not to buy its product for the stockpile.”
The war between Emergent BioSolutions and VaxGen spread to Congressional hearings, where Congressmen who had received thousands from Emergent’s then-CEO attacked the VaxGen BioShield contract, with one calling it “highly suspect” and angrily demanding that HHS explain why it had not purchased more BioThrax. It also spread to the press, where Emergent lobbyists wrote Op-Eds in influential newspapers.
Emergent even found unlikely supporters in “progressive” journalists like Jeremy Scahill, who wrote an article for The Nation in which he praised Jerome Hauer, framing him as a champion of public health preparedness who was at odds with Bush-era neocons (despite his membership in organizations stuffed with those same neocons). Scahill also strongly criticized Hauer’s successor Stewart Simonson and the VaxGen contract.
Scahill did not mention in his report that Hauer was then working as a lobbyist for Emergent BioSolutions or was a member of its board, despite interviewing him for the piece. Scahill didn’t even mention Emergent BioSolutions (or its previous name BioPort) once in the entire article, despite it being VaxGen’s main competitor.
Finally, in 2006, HHS terminated VaxGen’s contract after the company hit a developmental snag with its vaccine, declining to offer them the type of lifelines that Emergent BioSolutions had received on numerous occasions under its previous name BioPort.
After VaxGen’s contract with HHS was crushed, Emergent BioSolution’s anthrax vaccine monopoly remained intact, at least for a time. However, PharmAthene, another biotechnology company that had co-formed the Alliance for Biosecurity lobby group with Emergent, soon announced its plans to develop its own recombinant anthrax vaccine. This prompted Emergent to end up buying the essentially bankrupt VaxGen and acquiring the very VaxGen anthrax vaccine it had spent millions of dollars over several years to discredit.
A few years later, Emergent’s competitors made inroads with the Pentagon, with the military offering contracts for the anthrax vaccine developed by PharmAthene and another manufactured by PaxVax. Emergent aggressively challenged its competitors or bought them out in order to retain its monopoly, while also developing three new anthrax vaccines (one of which was the VaxGen vaccine) to satisfy government demand for a new anthrax vaccine. Only one, dubbed NuThrax, ever made any progress.
NuThrax, a combination of BioThrax and an adjuvant, would be yet another gold mine for Emergent Biosolutions. The company received $127 million from HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for early development. Meanwhile, they began to dramatically scale up their production of BioThrax with even more grants from BARDA. Then, in 2016, it received an additional $198 million from HHS for further development of NuThrax as well as a government promise to purchase up to 50 million doses for the national biodefense stockpile. That promise was made as part of a contract valued at up to $1.6 billion and was also made before NuThrax received approval by the FDA. To date, NuThrax still remains unapproved by the FDA.
It is worth noting that Hauer was not the only key government official that had aided BioPort and was later awarded with a position on its board of directors. A few years after Hauer became a board member of Emergent Biosolutions, the company added Dr. Sue Bailey to its board in 2007. Bailey had previously served as the Pentagon’s former top medical official during the late 1990s and played a key role in keeping the military’s anthrax vaccine program from being derailed from persistent concerns from veterans about its safety and adverse side effects.
Back in 1999, when Congress had held its hearings into the anthrax vaccine’s safety following concerns raised by affected veterans, Bailey was part of a panel of experts, which had included BioPort’s Admiral William Crowe. In her prepared statement, Bailey began by underscoring the urgency of the bioterrorist threat, claiming that “at least ten nation states and two terrorist groups“ possessed biowarfare capabilities and citing a 1958 study by Johns Hopkins University as proof that anthrax vaccinations were safe. She concluded by reassuring members of Congress that they had a “safe and effective vaccine to respond to a well-documented threat.” Neither of these statements would turn out to be true.
Another expert Dr. Katherine Zoon, who was then director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation, concurred with Dr. Bailey’s assessment regarding the safety of the anthrax vaccine in her statement. Zoon, who would subsequently hold key posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was also added to Emergent’s board of directors.
The statements that had been made by Zoon and Bailey at that hearing were a significant divergence from the FDA’s own appraisal on the long-term safety of the vaccine, according to testimony by Kwai-Cheung Chan of the General Accounting Office (GAO). Chan practically invalidated both Bailey’s and Zoon’s testimony by revealing that the studies they had cited were carried out on a completely different anthrax vaccine that was produced by Merck, not Emergent BioSolutions, among other details. Chan’s testimony made it clear that BioThrax had no safety track record at all. Not unlike Hauer, Emergent later rewarded Bailey and Zoon for their loyalty to the private sector as opposed to public health with board positions and lucrative stock options.
Though Emergent Biosolutions has enjoyed its privileged status regarding the anthrax vaccine for over two decades, it has long since branched out and profiteered from a variety of pandemic scares, including Ebola and Zika, and public health crises both globally and domestically. They have also acquired other vaccine monopolies, including the U.S.’ only licensed smallpox vaccine through their purchase of Sanofi, which came with a $425 million government contract and the promise of subsequent multi-year renewals on that contract for the ever-increasing national biodefense stockpiles.
Another drug monopoly acquired by Emergent Biosolutions has allowed them to profit handsomely off of the U.S.’ devastating opioid epidemic. In 2018, a year when the opioid crisis claimed the lives of nearly 70,000 Americans and was considered the top health crisis facing the nation, Emergent acquired the producer of Narcan, the only FDA-approved nasal spray of naloxone, which is used to treat opioid overdoses at the scene. At the time of acquisition, Emergent BioSolutions executive Daniel J. Abdun-Nabi referred to U.S. high schools and colleges as lucrative, “untapped markets” for Narcan.
Two months after Emergent completed its acquisition of the Narcan monopoly, HHS began recommending that doctors co-prescribe the drug alongside opioid painkillers. However, HHS offered no measures aimed at preventing the over-prescription of opioid painkillers like fentanyl and has remained silent regarding efforts to make opioid painkillers a controlled, schedule 1 substance. After the HHS recommendation regarding Narcan, several states subsequently passed laws requiring doctors to co-prescribe the nasal spray. Emergent’s sale of Narcan, which now costs $150 per dose, predictably spiked.
Regarding its Narcan monopoly, Emergent has long claimed that they are working to keep the drug affordable and they have even donated Narcan to public libraries and YMCAs as part of a major public relations push. However, Emergent’s same-old aggressive tactics still apply to Narcan, as they have sued any competitors aiming to market a cheaper, generic version of the drug. In addition, government promotion of Narcan as opposed to other, longer-term solutions to opioid addiction, have come under scrutiny, with some arguing that Narcan actually enables opioid addiction and may actually be worsening the crisis.
Emergent’s history of corruption and profiteering has in no way prevented them from cashing in on the Covid-19 global health crisis. On March 10, Emergent announced a partnership with Novavax to produce a Covid-19 vaccine, a vaccine also backed by the Bill Gates-backed Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). CEPI had previously partnered with Emergent Biosolutions, giving them over $60 million in 2018. Emergent further expanded its partnership with NovaVax on March 31.
Just 8 days after partnering with Novavax, Emergent partnered with yet another producer of a Covid-19 vaccine candidate, VaxArt. Unlike the Emergent-Novavax vaccine, the vaccine candidate co-produced with VaxArt will be oral and in pill form, “offer[ing] enormous logistical advantages in the roll-out of a large vaccination campaign,” according to VaxArt CEO Wouter Latoud.
While backing two of the most prominent vaccine candidates for Covid-19 gives Emergent an advantage in terms of profiting from whatever vaccines end up being approved for use by the government, Emergent’s star has risen during the current Coronavirus crisis largely thanks to its two experimental blood plasma treatments.
Announced just one day after their Novavax vaccine partnership, Emergent’s first experimental blood plasma treatment involves pooling and concentrating blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients, while the second uses plasma taken from horses that have been injected with parts of the virus. These treatments were slated to begin clinical trials later this year, but have been greatly aided by HHS’ BARDA, which falls under the authority of Robert Kadlec. These treatments are now expected to begin Phase II trials by late summer.
On April 3, BARDA awarded Emergent Biosolutions $14.5 million for the development of its blood plasma treatment. Though the sum is smaller than other contracts Emergent has received from BARDA in the past, the partnership allows Emergent to overcome its greatest obstacle in developing this product, a massive supply of blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients. Thanks to their partnership with BARDA, Emergent will gain access to blood donations made by recovered Covid-19 to public blood centers.
Emergent’s Dr. Lisa Saward confirmed this in a recent interview with TechCrunch, stating “we are overcoming [the lack of “source material” i.e. blood plasma] with the help of partnerships like that of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority within Health and Human Services, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases announced earlier this week.”
However, Emergent’s use of donated plasma to develop its product may prove controversial, since the plasma donated by recovered Covid-19 patients is currently being used as a treatment for seriously ill Covid-19 patients. The use of plasma to treat critical patients began late last month after New York’s state government first authorized its use in such cases, followed by the FDA’s offer to approve its use for critical Covid-19 patients nationwide on a case-by-case basis. Yet, thanks to the BARDA and Emergent partnership, a significant amount of that plasma will instead go towards helping Emergent corner yet another key market.
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In their World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret bring us the voice of would-be Global Governance.
Viewing the virtual-reality film “Collisions” at a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2016. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Diana Johnstone
**in Paris**Special to Consortium News
By titling their recently published World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, the authors link the pandemic to their futuristic proposals in ways bound to be met with a chorus of “Aha!”s. In the current atmosphere of confusion and distrust, the glee with which economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret greet the pandemic as harbinger of their proposed socioeconomic upheaval suggests that if Covid-19 hadn’t come along by accident, they would have created it (had they been able).
In fact, World Economic Forum founder Schwab was already energetically hyping the Great Reset, using climate change as the triggering crisis, before the latest coronavirus outbreak provided him with an even more immediate pretext for touting his plans to remake the world.
The authors start right in by proclaiming that “the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” that radical changes will shape a “new normal.” We ourselves will be transformed. “Many of our beliefs and assumptions about what the world could or should look like will be shattered in the process.”
Throughout the book, the authors seem to gloat over the presumed effects of widespread “fear” of the virus, which is supposed to condition people to desire the radical changes they envisage. They employ technocratic psychobabble to announce that the pandemic is already transforming the human mentality to conform to the new reality they consider inevitable.
“Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus … will thus speed the relentless march of automation…” Really?
“The pandemic may increase our anxiety about sitting in an enclosed space with complete strangers, and many people may decide that staying home to watch the latest movie or opera is the wisest option.”
“There are other first round effects that are much easier to anticipate. Cleanliness is one of them. The pandemic will certainly heighten our focus on hygiene. A new obsession with cleanliness will particularly entail the creation of new forms of packaging. We will be encouraged not to touch the products we buy. Simple pleasures like smelling a melon or squeezing a fruit will be frowned upon and may even become a thing of the past.”
This is the voice of would-be Global Governance. From on high, experts decide what the masses ought to want, and twist the alleged popular wishes to fit the profit-making schemes they are peddling. Their schemes center on digital innovation, massive automation using “artificial intelligence,” finally even “improving” human beings by endowing them artificially with some of the attributes of robots: such as problem-solving devoid of ethical distractions.
Engineer-economist Klaus Schwab, born in Ravensburg, Germany, in 1938, founded his World Economic Forum in 1971, attracting massive sponsorship from international corporations. It meets once a year in Davos, Switzerland – last time in January 2020 and next year in May, delayed because of Covid-19.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum, on Jan. 21, 2015. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A Powerful Lobby
What is it, exactly? I would describe the WEF as a combination capitalist consulting firm and gigantic lobby. The futuristic predictions are designed to guide investors into profitable areas in what Schwab calls “the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)” and then, as the areas are defined, to put pressure on governments to support such investments by way of subsidies, tax breaks, procurements, regulations and legislation. In short, the WEF is the lobby for new technologies, digital everything, artificial intelligence, transhumanism.
It is powerful today because it is operating in an environment of State Capitalism, where the role of the State (especially in the United States, less so in Europe) has been largely reduced to responding positively to the demands of such lobbies, especially the financial sector. Immunized by campaign donations from the obscure wishes of ordinary people, most of today’s politicians practically need the guidance of lobbies such as the WEF to tell them what to do.
In the 20th century, notably in the New Deal, the government was under pressure from conflicting interests. The economic success of the armaments industry during World War II gave birth to a Military-Industrial Complex, which has become a permanent structural factor in the U.S. economy.
It is the dominant role of the MIC and its resulting lobbies that have definitively transformed the nation into State Capitalism rather than a Republic.
The proof of this transformation is the unanimity with which Congress never balks at approving grotesquely inflated military budgets. The MIC has spawned media and Think Tanks which ceaselessly indoctrinate the public in the existential need to keep pouring the nation’s wealth into weapons of war. Insofar as voters do not agree, they can find no means of political expression with elections monopolized by two pro-MIC parties.
The WEF can be seen as analogous to the MIC. It intends to engage governments and opinion manufacturers in the promotion of a “4IR” which will dominate the civilian economy and civilian life itself.
The pandemic is a temporary pretext; the need to “protect the environment” will be the more sustainable pretext. Just as the MIC is presented as absolutely necessary to “protect our freedoms,” the 4IR will be hailed as absolutely necessary to “save the environment” – and in both cases, many of the measures advocated will have the opposite effect.
Public street art on 6th Street in Austin, Texas, depicting the impact of Covid-19 closings. (Leah Rodgers, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
So far, the techno-tyranny of Schwab’s 4IR has not quite won its place in U.S. State Capitalism. But its prospects are looking good. Silicon Valley contributed heavily to the Joe Biden campaign, and Biden hastened to appoint its moguls to his transition team.
But the real danger of all power going to the Reset lies not with what is there, but with what is not there: any serious political opposition.
Can Democracy Be Restored?
The Great Reset has a boulevard open to it for the simple reason that there is nothing in its way. No widespread awareness of the issues, no effective popular political organization, nothing. Schwab’s dystopia is frightening simply for that reason.
The 2020 presidential election has just illustrated the almost total depoliticization of the American people. That may sound odd considering the violent partisan emotions displayed. But it was all much ado about nothing.
There were no real issues debated, no serious political questions raised either about war or about the directions of future economic development. The vicious quarrels were about persons, not policy. Bumbling Trump was accused of being “Hitler,” and Wall Street-beholden Democrat warhawks were described by Trumpists as “socialists.” Lies, insults and confusion prevailed.
A revival of democracy could stem from organized, concentrated study of the issues raised by the Davos planners, in order to arouse an informed public opinion to evaluate which technical innovations are socially acceptable and which are not.
Cries of alarm from the margins will not influence the intellectual relationship of forces. What is needed is for people to get together everywhere to study the issues and develop well-reasoned opinions on goals and methods of future development.
Unless faced with informed and precise critiques, Silicon Valley and its corporate and financial allies will simply proceed in doing whatever they imagine they can do, whatever the social effects.
Serious evaluation should draw distinctions between potentially beneficial and unwelcome innovations, to prevent popular notions from being used to gain acceptance of every “technological advance,” however ominous.
Redefining Issues
The political distinctions between left and right, between Republican and Democrat, have grown more impassioned just as they reveal themselves to be incoherent, distorted and irrelevant, based more on ideological bias than on facts. New and more fruitful political alignments could be built through confrontation with specific concrete issues.
We could take the proposals of the Great Reset one by one and examine them in both pragmatic and ethical terms.
(Bob Mical, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
No. 1 – Thanks to the pandemic, there has been a great increase in the use of teleconferences, using Skype, Zoom or other new platforms. The WEF welcomes this as a trend. Is it bad for that reason? To be fair, this innovation is positive in enabling many people to attend conferences without the expense, trouble and environmental cost of air travel. It has the negative side of preventing direct human contact. This is a simple issue, where positive points seem to prevail.
No. 2 – Should higher education go online, with professors giving courses to students via internet? This is a vastly more complicated question, which should be thoroughly discussed by educational institutions themselves and the communities they serve, weighing the pros and cons, remembering that those who provide the technology want to sell it, and care little about the value of human contact in education – not only human contact between student and professor, but often life-determining contacts between students themselves. Online courses may benefit geographically isolated students, but breaking up the educational community would be a major step toward the destruction of human community altogether.
No. 3 – Health and “well-being”. Here is where the discussion should heat up considerably. According to Schwab and Malleret: “Three industries in particular will flourish (in the aggregate) in the post-pandemic era: big tech, health and wellness.” For the Davos planners, the three merge.
Those who think that well-being is largely self-generated, dependent on attitudes, activity and lifestyle choices, miss the point. “The combination of AI [artificial intelligence], the IoT [internet of things] and sensors and wearable technology will produce new insights into personal well-being. They will model how we are and feel […] precise information on our carbon footprints, our impact on biodiversity, on the toxicity of all the ingredients we consume and the environments or spatial contexts in which we evolve will generate significant progress in terms of our awareness of collective and individual well-being.”
Question: do we really want or need all this cybernetic narcissism? Can’t we just enjoy life by helping a friend, stroking a cat, reading a book, listening to Bach or watching a sunset? We better make up our minds before they make over our minds.
User being monitored in a biometrics lab. (Grish068, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
No. 4 – Food. In order not to spoil my healthy appetite, I’ll skip over this. The tech wizards would like to phase out farmers, with all their dirty soil and animals, and industrially manufacture enhanced artificial foods created in nice clean labs – out of what exactly?
The Central Issue: Homo Faber
No. 5 – What about human work?
“In all likelihood, the recession induced by the pandemic will trigger a sharp increase in labor-substitution, meaning that physical labor will be replaced by robots and ‘intelligent’ machines, which will in turn provoke lasting and structural changes in the labor market.”
This replacement has already been underway for decades. Along with outsourcing and immigration, it has already weakened the collective power of labor. But clearly, the tech industries are poised to go much, much further and faster in throwing humans out of work.
The Covid-19 crisis and social distancing have “suddenly accelerated this process of innovation and technological change. Chatbots, which often use the same voice recognition technology behind Amazon’s Alexa, and other software that can replace tasks normally performed by human employees, are being rapidly introduced. These innovations provoked by necessity (i.e. sanitary measures) will soon result in hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of job losses.”
Cutting labor costs has long been the guiding motive of these innovations, along with the internal dynamic of technology industry to “do whatever it can do.” Then socially beneficial pretexts are devised in justification. Like this:
“As consumers may prefer automated services to face-to-face interactions for some time to come, what is currently happening with call centers will inevitably occur in other sectors as well.”
“Consumers may prefer…”! Everyone I know complains of the exasperation of trying to reach the bank or insurance company to explain an emergency, and instead to be confronted with a dead voice and a choice of irrelevant numbers to click. Perhaps I am underestimating the degree of hostility toward our fellow humans that now pervades society, but my impression is that there is a vast unexpressed public demand for LESS automated services and MORE contact with real persons who can think outside the algorithm and can actually UNDERSTAND the problem, not simply cough up preprogrammed fixes.
“Corporate agility in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” session held in Tianjin,China, September 2018. (World Economic Forum, Faruk Pinjo, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
There is a potential movement out there. But we hear nothing of it, being persuaded by our media that the greatest problem facing people in their daily lives is to hear someone exhibit confusion over someone else’s confused gender.
In this, I maintain, consumer demand would merge with the desperate need of able-minded human beings to earn a living. The technocrats earn theirs handsomely by eliminating the means to earn a living of other people.
Here is one of their great ideas. “In cities as varied as Hangzhou, Washington DC and Tel Aviv, efforts are under way to move from pilot programs to large-scale operations capable of putting an army of delivery robots on the road and in the air.” What a great alternative to paying human deliverers a living wage!
And incidentally, a guy riding a delivery bicycle is using renewable energy. But all those robots and drones? Batteries, batteries and more batteries, made of what materials, coming from where and manufactured how? By more robots? Where is the energy coming from to replace not only fossil fuels, but also human physical effort?
At the last Davos meeting, Israeli intellectual Yuval Harari issued a dire warning that:
“Whereas in the past, humans had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance… Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new ‘useless class’ – not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.”
No. 5 – And the military. Our capitalist prophets of doom foresee the semi-collapse of civil aviation and the aeronautical industry as people all decide to stay home glued to their screens. But not to worry!
“This makes the defense aerospace sector an exception and a relatively safe haven.” For capital investment, that is. Instead of vacations on sunny beaches, we can look forward to space wars. It may happen sooner rather than later, because, as the Brookings Institution concludes in a 2018 report on “How artificial intelligence is transforming the world,” everything is going faster, including war:
“The big data analytics associated with AI will profoundly affect intelligence analysis, as massive amounts of data are sifted in near real time … thereby providing commanders and their staffs a level of intelligence analysis and productivity heretofore unseen. Command and control will similarly be affected as human commanders delegate certain routine, and in special circumstances, key decisions to AI platforms, reducing dramatically the time associated with the decision and subsequent action.”
So, no danger that some soft-hearted officer will hesitate to start World War III because of a sentimental attachment to humanity. When the AI platform sees an opportunity, go for it!
“In the end, warfare is a time competitive process, where the side able to decide the fastest and move most quickly to execution will generally prevail. Indeed, artificially intelligent intelligence systems, tied to AI-assisted command and control systems, can move decision support and decision-making to a speed vastly superior to the speeds of the traditional means of waging war. So fast will be this process especially if coupled to automatic decisions to launch artificially intelligent autonomous weapons systems capable of lethal outcomes, that a new term has been coined specifically to embrace the speed at which war will be waged: hyperwar.”
Americans have a choice. Either continue to quarrel over trivialities or wake up, really wake up, to the reality being planned and do something about it.
The future is shaped by investment choices. Not by naughty speech, not even by elections, but by investment choices. For the people to regain power, they must reassert their command over how and for what purposes capital is invested.
And if private capital balks, it must be socialized. This is the only revolution – and it is also the only conservatism, the only way to conserve decent human life. It is what real politics is about.
Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher and is also the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her lates book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr .
WASHINGTON — When President Trump unveiled Operation Warp Speed in May, he declared that it was “unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.”
The initiative — to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics — lacks the scale, and the degree of secrecy, of the effort to build the atomic bomb. But Operation Warp Speed is largely an abstraction in Washington, with little known about who works there other than its top leaders, or how it operates. Even pharmaceutical companies hoping to offer help or partnerships have labored to figure out who to contact.
Now, an organizational chart of the $10 billion initiative, obtained by STAT, reveals the fullest picture yet of Operation Warp Speed: a highly structured organization in which military personnel vastly outnumber civilian scientists.
The labyrinthine chart, dated July 30, shows that roughly 60 military officials — including at least four generals — are involved in the leadership of Operation Warp Speed, many of whom have never worked in health care or vaccine development. Just 29 of the roughly 90 leaders on the chart aren’t employed by the Department of Defense; most of them work for the Department of Health and Human Services and its subagencies.
Operation Warp Speed’s central goal is to develop, produce, and distribute 300 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by January — and the military is intimately involved, according to Paul Mango, HHS’ deputy chief of staff for policy. It has already helped prop up more than two dozen vaccine manufacturing facilities — flying in equipment and raw materials from all over the world. It has also set up significant cybersecurity and physical security operations to ensure an eventual vaccine is guarded very closely from “state actors who don’t want us to be successful in this,” he said, adding that many of the Warp Speed discussions take place in protected rooms used to discuss classified information.
“This is a massive scientific and logistical undertaking,” said Mango. “We are weeks away, at most, a month or two away from having at least one safe and effective vaccine.”
Despite the military’s dominance, the chart also includes Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases who was almost fired by Trump in February for warning the public about the growing Covid-19 pandemic. Public health and drug industry officials told STAT that Messonnier and Gen. Paul Ostrowski, her direct superior, serve as the initiative’s main contacts on all questions related to the distribution of an eventual vaccine. One public health official said that Ostrowksi, an expert on military acquisition, defers to Messonnier on matters of public health.
The military’s extensive involvement in the development and distribution of a vaccine is a departure from pandemics of the past, but it is fitting for Trump, who has gushed about his love for “my military” and “my generals.” While the military was tangentially involved in public health crises like the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, some public health leaders have raised concerns about what they see as their marginalization during the pandemic.
One senior federal health official told STAT he was struck by the presence of soldiers in military uniforms walking around the health department’s headquarters in downtown Washington, and said that recently he has seen more than 100 officials in the corridors wearing “Desert Storm fatigues.”
“Military personnel won’t be familiar with the health resources available in a community,” said John Auerbach, CEO of Trust for America’s Health, a group closely aligned with public health departments. “They don’t know who the doctors are or where the community health centers are located or what resources they have. They don’t know where the pharmacies are. Public health people do know, that’s part of what they do.”
The July 30 Operation Warp Speed organizational chart obtained by STAT details about 90 of the officials involved in the initiative. Roughly 60 work for the Department of Defense.
Military officials, however, contend that the U.S. Army excels at complex challenges — like distributing vaccines that might need to be transported at subzero temperatures.
“You know the old joke about, ‘You and what army,’ right?” said Andrew Hunter, a Defense Department expert at a Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They routinely do things that are more complex, even than this vaccine job, all the time.”
Mango told STAT the operation has kept some key personnel information under wraps out of concerns for the security of the entire vaccine supply chain, from the warehouses storing vaccines to the computer systems being used to coordinate the effort.
“The secretary has given us the order of being as transparent as we possibly can with one caveat: That we are not compromising anything that has to do with national security,” he said.
An HHS spokesperson declined to comment directly on the chart, citing precedent that the agency does not comment on leaked documents. But the spokesperson noted that at least 600 HHS officials are involved in Warp Speed. The majority of those employees are not captured by the chart obtained by STAT. Among the decision makers not included in the chart are Mango and HHS’ Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Bob Kadlec. Mango told STAT that he and Kadlec personally sign off on every business agreement made by HHS for Operation Warp Speed.
Mango also added that the vast majority of scientists working on Operation Warp Speed work for the companies the effort is funding.
“There’s really not a need for anyone to place scores of scientists inside HHS or DOD to get this done,” Mango said. “Quite honestly, we are not conducting any science whatsoever inside the government to support Operation Warp Speed, none.”
He also defended the military’s involvement in the initiative, though he insisted that it is primarily supporting efforts led by public health officials at the CDC.
“There are quite honestly certain logistical elements of this that the CDC has never, ever been asked to do, and why not bring the best logisticians in the world into the equation?” Mango said.
Beyond obtaining the internal document from a federal official, STAT interviewed companies funded by Warp Speed and more than a dozen key officials who have worked closely with the organization’s leaders. The reporting sheds light on the high degree of organization and specialization within the organization, as well as the extreme demands the initiative is placing on the companies it funds.
Operation Warp Speed’s central goal is to develop, produce, and distribute 300 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by January. The initiative has poured $10 billion into the clinical development and manufacturing of potential vaccine candidates, and it has stockpiled hundreds of thousands of doses of as-yet-unproven immunizations. Warp Speed has deals with six major drug companies hoping to develop Covid-19 vaccines and may seek more, the group’s chief adviser, Moncef Slaoui, told STAT earlier this month.
Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, approvingly called Operation Warp Speed a “talent show.”
“If you go through the organizational boxes of Operation Warp Speed, they’re very, very impressive,” Fauci told STAT in an interview Friday.
Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, with whom STAT shared the organizational chart, agreed that the initiative appears well-positioned to achieve its ambitious goals — and under a tight timeline.
“There is deep knowledge of science and on how to manage complex government operations,” said Inglesby. “It’s clearly operating in a challenging pandemic and political environment, and we won’t know if we have a safe and effective vaccine until the trials are finished. But it’s a highly competent group of people working to make it happen.”
Though HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Defense Secretary Mark Esper are at the top, the two key leaders are Slaoui, the formal civilian leader of the project, and Gen. Gustave Perna, the military lead who is the chief operating officer for Operation Warp Speed.
Under Slaoui are two major pillars, “Vaccine” and “Therapeutics.” Under Perna are three pillars, for “Plans, Ops and Analysis,” “Security and Assurance,” and “Supply, Production and [Distribution].”
But the complexity of the organization makes it difficult as an outsider to discern who is reporting directly to who, experts in business management who reviewed the chart told STAT.
“It’s confusing for sure,” said Robert Huckman, the chair of Harvard Business School’s health care initiative, who studies health care management and organization. Huckman added that the chart was more complex than most he’s seen. “It is more complex, but it’s a more complex endeavor, too … it may be that it simply reflects the complexity of what Operation Warp Speed is trying to do.”
“I can only imagine the headache that comes with trying to coordinate these different production processes,” said Raffaella Sadun, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who studies CEO behavior.
Slaoui’s tenure thus far at Warp Speed has been marked by outside concerns over his personal financial stake in some of the companies he is now overseeing. Slaoui, who holds roughly $10 million in GSK stock, is not bound by federal ethics rules because he is employed by an outside contractor, not the federal government. Slaoui has agreed to donate any increase in the value of that stock, although that agreement hasn’t placated critics.
“The first person to be fired should be Dr. Slaoui,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said at a hearing last week. “The American people deserve to know that Covid-19 vaccine decisions are based on science, and not on personal greed.”
But Slaoui knows firsthand, perhaps better than anyone else, what it takes to dramatically speed up the search for a vaccine. He played a pivotal role in GSK’s sprint to develop an Ebola vaccine in 2015. The effort ultimately failed, but he is so well-regarded at GSK that the company named its vaccine research center after him in 2016.
Perna, meanwhile, is a four-star Army general who previously managed virtually all of the Army’s logistics. He was even inducted into the Army’s own logistics hall of fame. He most recently served as head of Army Materiel Command, a sprawling job that handles virtually all of the Army’s equipment. The organization’s slogan is: “If a Soldier shoots it, drives it, flies it, wears it, communicates with it, or eats it — AMC provides it.”
During his tenure, Perna constantly pushed the Army to move faster, and to be more ready to go to war at a moment’s notice.
Below Perna and Slaoui are a team of military and civilian experts like Ostrowski, a former special forces soldier who handles the supply and distribution of an eventual vaccine, and Matt Hepburn, the initiative’s go-to vaccine coordinator. Hepburn cut his teeth working on high-tech military projects, including an initiative that developed sensors that could be implanted into soldiers to detect certain illnesses before the men and women ever showed symptoms. Hepburn also has a reputation for driving even the most accomplished scientists to work harder than they’ve ever worked before.
“If Matt is still the Matt I know, he will be on these people with a foot on their neck, making them go go go,” said Geoffrey Ling, Hepburn’s former boss at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
There are government outsiders deeply involved in the project, too. Larry Corey, one of the country’s leading AIDS researchers, describes himself as an “ex-officio” member of Warp Speed. Corey runs the Covid-19 prevention network, an assortment of existing HIV trial networks that now are running at least three of the Phase 3 Covid-19 clinical trials. While he’s not formally on the organizational chart, he takes part in thrice-weekly calls with Warp Speed. Corey, who is based in Seattle, is in constant cross-country coordination with one of the NIH’s top vaccine researchers, John Mascola, a formal member of the organization.
“We are sacrificing our time and energy on Operation Warp Speed. We have taken the pivot from everything else that we have done in our lives,” Corey said, regarding him and Mascola. Corey described waking up at 5 a.m. each day to get on calls with Warp Speed leaders at 5:30 a.m., and then enduring a deluge of conference calls until 6 p.m. When the day’s work is done, he turns to planning for the following day, which keeps him working until 11 p.m. He’s in bed by midnight.
“I don’t think his day is any different than my day,” Corey said of Mascola. Both, he was sure, are sleep-deprived.
Operation Warp Speed is much more than a splashy name for an initiative focused on doling out purchase orders. The benefits for companies who land a Warp Speed contract go far beyond just money, according to one of the companies with a contract.
SiO2 Materials Science, an Auburn, Ala.-based company that is making vials for the effort, used its status as an Operation Warp Speed grantee to force a vendor to cut production time from 75 days to just seven. It also leveraged its contract with Warp Speed to get its power turned on in the midst of a massive outage in just minutes — others had to wait days, according Lawrence Ganti, the company’s chief business officer. Operation Warp Speed also covered the costs of installing 32 new security cameras around the company’s facility after an assessment found the company’s physical security was lacking.
SiO2 received $143 million from Operation Warp Speed, a fraction of what larger companies have received, but the company still is required to provide monthly status reports to the government. The reports typically run up to 60 pages and are coupled with a four-hour meeting attended by multiple Warp Speed officials, according to Ganti. That’s in addition to biweekly “risk reports” and weekly site visits from the Army Corps of Engineers.
A second company funded by Warp Speed confirmed similar reporting requirements.
“Everybody has — or at least I had a stereotype of how the government operated. Nine-to-five, slow, kind of what you’d expect at the DMV … this is not that in any way,” said Ganti. “They seem to be working 24/7.”
The organizational chart also underscores which agencies are not as closely involved in the leadership of the effort: namely, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which took a leading role in coordinating vaccine distribution for other past pandemics, like the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. There are at least three staffers from each of the administration’s other major health agencies, like the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority or the National Institutes of Health.
Mango, the HHS deputy chief of staff, said the CDC has a more central role than the personnel chart implies. He personally interacts with Messonier multiple times a week, and there are frequent meetings between the DOD and CDC with 15-20 of her deputies, he said.
“What General Perna says at the start of every meeting, and he means it, is we are here for one reason, to support the CDC,” Mango said. “Anyone who is watching what is going on a daily basis would say the CDC is leading and the DOD is enabling and supporting.”
Chief Pentagon Spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman struck a similar tone.
“The Department of Defense has been clear in its role in Operation Warp Speed: We are providing the bandwidth of logistical expertise, including program management and contracting proficiency to this all-of-America effort,” he said in a statement. “The development and delivery of over 300 million vaccine doses harnesses public-private partnerships, academia, and industry – no one entity can do this alone.”
The Pentagon also declined to comment on the chart obtained by STAT, saying they do not comment on leaked documents.
The Food and Drug Administration is also largely absent from the organizational chart, though that is by design. Most FDA officials are barred from participating formally in Operation Warp Speed over concerns that their involvement would conflict with their mission to impartially review eventual vaccine applications. The one major exception is Janet Woodcock, who took a temporary leave as head of FDA’s drug center to lead the initiative’s efforts on therapeutics.
BARDA plays perhaps the most head-scratching role in Operation Warp Speed. The organization’s acting director, Gary Disbrow, a camera-shy bureaucrat who was catapulted into the job after the ouster of his boss, Rick Bright, is listed as co-leading the vaccine effort alongside Hepburn, and a number of other BARDA leaders are included in the chart.
But three sources told STAT that Disbrow, and BARDA more generally, are playing a marginal role in Warp Speed. “BARDA has been largely sidelined in all of this,” one pharmaceutical industry source told STAT.
Ganti of SiO2, however, told STAT that the company deals primarily with BARDA for all of its Warp Speed-related questions. Mango also told STAT BARDA officials meet with Warp Speed officials daily “to make sure contracts are moving along.”
BARDA also appears to be fronting a large chunk of the funding for the Warp Speed initiative, alongside the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense.
“We’re not going back to the same economy”, Fed Chair Powell said recently: “We’re recovering, but to a different economy, and it will be one that is more leveraged to technology – and I worry that it’s going to make it even more difficult than it was, for many workers.” Klaus Schwab, the Davos Chair, was more blunt: “Nothing will ever return to the ‘broken’ sense of normalcy that prevailed [earlier]. We … will be surprised by both the rapidity and unexpected nature of these changes – as they conflate with each other, they will provoke cascading effects and unforeseen outcomes”. Schwab makes it clear that the western élite will not allow life to return to normal, suggesting that rolling lockdowns and other restrictions may become permanent.
‘Recovering to a different economy’? Well, actually the creeping ‘coup’ has been residing in plain view for quite a while. The changes have been less noticed – partly because western élites have stuck fast to the free market narrative, whilst incrementally shifting over the decades to an oligarchical economy blossoming alongside the free market economy. Yet it has been an important metamorphose, for it has laid the ground-work for a more fundamental fusion of interests of business oligarchy and government. This fusion used to be called the ‘administrative state’, and was widely practiced in 19th Century Europe.
If we want to understand the roots to this ‘quiet coup’, we need to return to the ethos that emerged from WW2. It was ‘never again’ in terms of that terrible wartime bloodshed, and it encapsulated the notion that the spilt blood should be somehow ‘redeemed’ by moving to fairer, more equitable societies. These latter sentiments turned activist, culminating in the 1960s – an occurrence that frightened U.S. business élites.
The élites moved their ‘counter-revolution’. They lobbied; they lobbied hard, evolving their lobbying enterprise into an ‘industrial scale’ enterprise, employing ‘brigades’ of lawyers and encompassing big money. And now, trillions of dollars are at stake: K Street (the lobbying HQ in Washington) is where the legislative ‘sausage’ is actually assembled, and not the U.S. Congress. It is external to Congress, to whom it is ‘sold’ in a mutually beneficial exchange.
Gradually, one segment of the erstwhile radical Boomers quietly folded themselves into the new Big Corporate ethos, whilst another part entered into politics, eventually going on to become the nation’s political leaders. It is not hard to see how a common zeitgeist might emerge. It is half-heartedly woke, big corporate in outlook, and committed to the notion of élite ‘scientifically administered’ rule.
The point here is that there was never anything inevitable to this American-led ‘quiet’ oligarchic take-over. It was never immutable. It happened in America, as it had ‘happened’ earlier in 19th Century Europe. The Boomer radicals never were true ‘revolutionaries’ – and the oligarchs took advantage of their reticence.
The Boomer influx into the corporate and business world, however, did lay firstly, that key incremental shift towards a fusion of big business to government. Secondly, that fusion is now being consolidated through the programmes of pandemic monetary relief concentrated in the corporate sector. And the third step – today’s U.S. Tech war with China – is both further entrenching Silicon Valley and the corporate oligarchy, as well as opening the prospect to a bigger power-grab that is intended to entrench a small Techno-élite at the head of a global administration and in command of global digital money and assets. This is the Re-Set – it aims to forge the new global order to its advantage.
And so, back to Jerome Powell’s warning of a ‘recovery’ to “a different economy”. It does have a whiff of inevitability to it; that is to say, Powell is presenting the fact that the Fed is now ‘painted into a corner’ – whereas Schwab’s hyping of a ‘welcome paradigm shift’, by contrast, is different – it is an exceptionalist ideology, with nothing inherently inevitable about it. The two should not be confused. But whether Powell likes it or not, in the Coronavirus ‘new normal’, the free market segment of the West’s economy is indeed being systematically destroyed, at the same time that the major portion of stimulus is being channelled to the largest of large multinational corporations, and to systemically important Banks. It will indeed be a different economy. This fusion of government to big business has been reinforced during the pandemic, and that plainly helps facilitate those hoping for a fundamental re-set of the global order. The Tech war is the cherry on the cake – if Silicon Valley succeeds in its bid for Tech hegemony, these U.S. Tech giants will be global political players. They are near that already now.
Will the Technocratic coup succeed? Or, will the ideology – the oligarchic vision – behind it, simply descend into a zero sum game of big power Tech rivalry on a par with 19th Century great power rivalries? Let us recall that those rivalries did not end well. As things presently stand, Tech rivalry between U.S. and China – on account of the fundamental difference between Tech rivalry and ordinary commercial competition – makes a clash quite possible. What then is this inherent quality to Tech that differentiates it from ordinary commerce, and exacerbates the risk of 19th Century style warring?
It is this: Not so long ago, the digital economy was thought to soar above conventional geo-politics. The global Internet, aspiring to be free and open, was seen as a general-purpose technology – as revolutionary and as fungible as the internal combustion engine, and a good in the sense of ‘public commons’. This halcyon chimaera about Tech lingers on amongst the public, even as elements of Tech have assumed the darker function of surveilling, and disciplining society on behalf of ‘big brother’.
Fast forward to today: Data is the new ‘oil’, and has become the strategic commodity that governments are fighting over, trying to protect, defend and even hoard, to the exclusion of others. Every state now feels obligated have its national ‘AI strategy’ in order to ‘refine’ this new crude and to profit from it. If big powers used to fight over oil, today they wrangle (more disceetly perhaps) over data. Taiwan may simply be a pretext, behind which lurks American ambitions to dominate the norms and standards for the next decades.
The optimism spurred by the original internet as a global ‘good’ thus has receded in favor of a rivalrous clash for Technological hegemony – a clash that might easily one day turn ‘hot’. One might have assumed that the next generation of digital technology would continue the Internet pattern as ‘win-win’ for everyone, but it didn’t. Machine learning is different. Machine learning broadly refers to ‘modelling’ that is not pre-programmed – as in having instructions (code) that the computer then executes, but which instead uses a set of AI learning-models which enable the computers themselves to extract patterns from large data sets, and evolve their own algorithms (decision rules). These new algorithms that the machine evolves then are run against new data, problems and questions (which can be highly profitable – such as in Cloud analytics).
These algorithms indeed are useful tools and have their positive aspects. They are not particularly new, and machines are not particularly good at learning. They do not approximate human psyche (nor can they) and models that work well in the laboratory often fail in real life. But in particular areas, where there are good data sets, they can be transformative (i.e. medicine, physics, energy exploration, defence, etc.).
And this is where the dynamics of geo-political rivalry comes to the fore. It is because big data and advanced machine learning systems lashed together constitute a positive feedback loop, where better data feeds better analytics, which in turn, feeds bigger potential returns from other, separate data sets. It has, in short, an accumulative dynamic – more profit, more political heft; more brings forth more. And leaders and laggards in this ‘competition’ usually will be states. It is precisely this – the hunt for a positive feedback loop, and fear of falling behind – that can pull the globe apart, if we let it.
And it is this feedback characteristic in analytics that makes Big Tech rivalry different from normal commercial competition. Data and lightning-fast analytics ultimately will determine military primacy, as well as Tech standards’ leadership. Big Tech companies therefore draw the intense interest of governments, not simply as regulators, but as principal users, funders, and sometimes owners of technology. Hence the oligarchic fusion has a built-in intensifier, in this optic – the fusion of oligarchy and governance interests tightens.
Yet hot rivalry over data and algorithms analytis is not pre-ordained. Again, the point is that the present resort to Tech war reflects precisely a particular way-of-thinking – an ideology. Recently, China’s Global Times published a piece by Xue Li, a director at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which makes exactly this point:
“Based on Christian monotheism, the spirit of Roman law and Greek formal logic, Western civilization largely views problems and world order from the perspective of binary opposition. Therefore, they prefer forming alliances in diplomacy so as to restrain and even assimilate allies through mandatory mechanisms. This allows them to confront and even defeat the non-allies.
“At the same time, they firmly believe that every country must have a similar diplomatic philosophy, so it is necessary to encircle and even disintegrate emerging powers. They not only try to equate the history of Christian expansion … with the universal history of humanity, but also view the diplomatic concept of the Christian civilization over past 500 years as the world’s universal diplomatic philosophy. They do not realize that 500 years is a relatively short period in the history of human civilization, and that different civilizations have different views on diplomacy world order.”
Xue is right. The Tech narrative is being inflated and weaponised both to serve the western binary, adverserial mindset, but secondly too, to advance the notion of the scientifically administered, progressive state, representing the political essence of modernity, to which Europe has hewed since Napoleonic times. It is, as Xue points out, a particularly parochial (and dangerous) view.
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This has raised serious concerns among space agencies that we may be heading towards the creation of a “debris belt” that might lead to a critical climax known as a Kessler Syndrome event. The Kessler Syndrome, named after Donald Kessler, a scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, who warned about such an event in a 1978 paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, refers to the exponential increase in space junk leading to a tipping point that would in turn trigger a cascade of collisions between orbiting objects. This could make lower orbital space inaccessible for hundreds of years. In addition, it would dramatically impair, and likely disengage, telecommunication operations, weather forecasting, interfere with airline and GPS navigation, and military and national security surveillance and operations. There are no international treaties in place to deal with this crisis nor concerted collaborative efforts to limit the further trashing of space. In the meantime the US government spends enormous amounts of money simply monitoring 24/7 potential collisions and to maneuver functioning satellites out of harm’s way.
Since the launch of the first satellite, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik in 1957, there have only been 8,378 satellites lofted into the heavens thus far. That may not seem to be many over the course six decades, nevertheless the threats posed by space debris is becoming an issue of growing concern as satellite launches steadily increase annually. According to the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs, there were slightly under 5,000 satellites in the Earth’s orbit at the start of 2019. However the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that only 1,957 of these are actually operative. In other words, over 75 percent of orbiting satellites are revolving clutter.
If some space scientists are worried today about the potential of a Kessler Syndrome cascade, the implementation of 5G technology, the global installation of the “internet of things,” is going to accelerate the probability of this catastrophe astronomically.
Speaking before a 5G conference in Oslo last October, United Nation’s staff member Claire Edwards warned of the 5G efforts to dramatically colonize the lower orbital space with a minimum of 20,000 5G satellites by 2022. Without our governments’ and the Big Telecom Industry’s impatience to engulf the planet in 5G, and with the full support of the military and intelligence complexes, there would be absolutely no need for this kind of expansive satellite colonization of the Earth’s lower orbit.
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning to install 12,000 satellites alone, including 1,585 in low earth orbits (LEO) and 7,518 positioned at very low earth orbits (VLEO). He expects to control 50 percent of all internet traffic. Last month, SpaceX widened its ambitions to seek permission to launch an additional 30,000 satellites thereby raising the commercial space industry’s total to 53,000 — twenty-six times more than now orbiting the Earth. The Institute of Electric and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) estimates that the combined mass of Musk’s adventure will be ten times greater than the International Space Station. SpaceX is betting on the uncertain promise that when these Tesla Model-3 automobile sized VLEO satellites reach their final days, they will burn up during their descent through the atmosphere before reaching the Earth’s surface. The science shows otherwise. Much debris will remain in addition to reaching the Earth’s surface.
Besides satellites being damaged and inoperative from space clutter and solar storm events, satellites are not immortal. They have a limited lifespan. An LEO satellite’s average life is between 5-8 years above our atmosphere. In other words, starting in another eight years, all of these satellites will need to be replaced, further adding to the ocean of electronic waste. In addition., during the course of their life in orbit, many will malfunction or be damaged and need to be replaced. We have already trashed our oceans, so what is preventing us from doing the same in space?
Furthermore, despite what pro-5G voices wish us to believe, the roll out and ongoing maintenance of the 5G global blanket is not green and climate friendly. The steady launch of thousands of suborbital rockets will “create a persistent layer of black carbon particles in the northern stratosphere that could cause potentially significant changes in the global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone and temperature,” according to a paper released by the Aerospace Corporation. This will likely deplete the ozone by 1 percent and the polar ozone layer by as much as 6%. The report concludes that “[A]fter one decade of continuous launches, globally averaged radiative forcing from the black carbon would exceed the forcing from the emitted CO2 by a factor of about 10 to the fifth power.” Back in 1991, Aleksandr Dunayev at the Russian Space Agency was quoted by the New York Times, if there are “about 300 launches of the space shuttle each year [it] would be a catastrophe and the ozone layer would be completely destroyed.” And for several years, even with Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket potentially carrying 100 satellites for a single launch, this would still exceed Dunayev’s calculations. In other words, 5G is going to have a perilous carbon footprint at a time when we must drastically reduc our greenhouse gas emissions.
Although there are no conclusive directly caused risks to human health or the environment from orbiting telecom satellites, the entire 5G network will require millions of base stations and an estimated 200 billion transmitting objects blanketing the nations that sign on to this monstrous technological experiment. The number of EMF transmitting objects is expected to increase to over a trillion several years after full deployment. The human and environmental health risks of EMF emitting 5G base stations and transmitters have been reported extensively. Eight years ago the World Health Organization had already classified wireless as a Group 2B carcinogen and further medical evidence continues to pile up. There are now over 10,000 studies supporting the evidence of genetic and cellular damage to humans, animals, insects and plants, a variety of cancers, cardiovascular disease, neuropsychiatric disorders, reproductive dysfunction, and general EMF hypersensitivity symptoms such as chronic headaches, learning difficulties, sleep problems, fatigue and depression, etc.
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The full assault of 5G is dependent upon the satellite programs from companies such as SpaceX, OneWeb, Boeing, Iridium, Telesat Canada and Amazon collaborating in league with the telecom giants. The commercial space industry is an intricate factor in the 5G infrastructure estimated to be worth $32 billion. The wolves following behind 5G’s trashing of space is the recent appearance of a space debris removal industry, which is expected to be valued $2.9 billion by 2022. Key corporate vendors in this emerging business include Airbus, Astroscale, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. In our dystopian civilization, where one technological disaster leads to the creation of another for-profit industry, this is called job growth. Clearly, all the pieces are being put into place for a 5G deep state, a powerful edifice committed to the massive surveillance of every person and human activity.
Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including The War on Health, Poverty Inc and Silent Epidemic.
By now most environmentally conscious people understand that Jair Bolsonaro is a bad guy. Brazil’s president has scandalously blamed environmentalists for starting fires burning in the Amazon region, after having called for more “development” of the huge forests.
Canadians are lucky we have a prime minister who is not such an embarrassment and understands environmental issues, right?
While Justin Trudeau has called for better protection of the Amazon, his government and Canadian corporations have contributed to the rise of a proto fascist Brazilian politician who has accelerated the destruction of the ‘planet’s lungs’.
In 2016 Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in a “soft coup”. While Canadian officials have made dozens of statements criticizing Venezuela over the past three years, the Trudeau government remained silent on Rousseff’s ouster. The only comment I found was a Global Affairs official telling Sputnik that Canada would maintain relations with Brazil after Rousseff was impeached. In fact, the Trudeau government began negotiating — there have been seven rounds of talks — a free trade agreement with the Brazilian-led MERCOSUR trade block. They also held a Canada Brazil Strategic Dialogue Partnership and Trudeau warmly welcomed Bolsonaro at the G20 in June.
Bolsonaro won the 2018 presidential election largely because the front runner in the polls was in jail. Former Workers Party president Lula da Silva was blocked from running due to politically motivated corruption charges, but the Trudeau government seems to have remained silent on Lula’s imprisonment and other forms of persecution of the Brazilian left.
With over $10 billion invested in Brazil, corporate Canada appears excited by Bolsonaro. After his election CBC reported, “for Canadian business, a Bolsonaro presidency could open new investment opportunities, especially in the resource sector, finance and infrastructure, as he has pledged to slash environmental regulations in the Amazon rainforest and privatize some government-owned companies.”
Canada’s support for right-wing, pro-US, forces in the region has also favored Bolsonaro. Since at least 2009 the Canadian government has been openly pushing back against the leftward shift in the region and strengthening ties with the most right-wing governments. That year Ottawa actively backed the Honduran military’s removal of social democratic president Manuel Zelaya. In 2011 Canada helped put far-right Michel Martelly into the president’s office in Haiti and Ottawa passively supported the ‘parliamentary coup’ against Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo in 2012. In recent years Canada has been central to building regional support for ousting Venezuela’s government. The destabilization efforts greatly benefited from the ouster of Rousseff and imprisonment of Lula. Brazil is now a member of the Canada/Peru instigated “Lima Group” of countries hostile to the Nicolás Maduro government.
Ottawa has long supported the overthrow of elected, left leaning governments in the hemisphere. Ottawa passively supported the military coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and played a slightly more active role in the removal of Dominican Republic president Juan Bosch in 1965 and Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. In Brazil Canada passively supported the military coup against President João Goulart in 1964. Prime Minister Lester Pearson failed to publicly condemn Goulart’s ouster and deepened relations with Brazil amidst a significant uptick in human rights violations. “The Canadian reaction to the military coup of 1964 was careful, polite and allied with American rhetoric,” notes Brazil and Canada in the Americas.
Along with following Washington’s lead, Ottawa’s tacit support for the coup was driven by Canadian corporate interests. Among the biggest firms in Latin America at the time, Toronto-based Brascan (or Brazilian Traction) was commonly known as the “the Canadian octopus” since its tentacles reached into so many areas of Brazil’s economy. Putting a stop to the Goulart government, which made it more difficult for companies to export profits, was good business for a firm that had been operating in the country for half a century. After the 1964 coup the Financial Post noted “the price of Brazilian Traction common shares almost doubled overnight with the change of government from an April 1 low of $1.95 to an April 3 high of $3.06.”
The company was notorious for undermining Brazilian business initiatives, spying on its workers and leftist politicians and assisting the coup. The Dark side of “The light”: Brascan in Brazil notes, “[Brazilian Traction’s vice-president Antonio] Gallotti doesn’t hide his participation in the moves and operations that led to the coup d’État against Goulart in 1964.”
Gallotti, who was a top executive of Brascan’s Brazilian operations for a couple decades, was secretary for international affairs in the Brazilian fascist party, Acao Integralista. Gallotti quit the party in 1938, but began working as a lawyer for Brascan in 1932.
Historically, Canadian companies empowered fascists in Brazil. Today, corporate Canada appears happy to do business with a proto-fascist trampling on Indigenous rights and fueling climate chaos. Ottawa has also enabled Bolsonaro. At a minimum the Trudeau government should be pressed to follow French President Emmanuel Macron’s call to suspend free-trade negotiations with MERCOSUR until Bolsonaro reverses his wanton destruction of the earth’s ‘lungs’.
Money doesn’t grow on trees, and although people can make money out of trees, they cannot make trees out of money. This much may seem platitudinous, but it is worth keeping in mind.
What is true of trees is true of the natural world as a whole, including the human beings that are part of it. Nature is real; money is an abstraction. If money seems real that is because our institutions and practices are so deeply premised on beliefs in it. There is an important sense in which those institutionalized beliefs – in crediting it with a certain value – make money real; but it is not real in the way the natural world is real. If a bank goes bust, if a whole economy crashes, the social upheaval that follows may be immense, but life goes on – people will pick themselves up and start again (and some people, meanwhile, will likely have found a way to profit from it!). By contrast, if a species goes extinct, if an ecosystem collapses, then there is no prospect – certainly not on human timescales – of a recovery. The threat of extinction to our own species is the ultimate threat.
Extinction Rebellion has given publicity to critically important concerns of our time – the ecological crises as exemplified by dangerous climate change and biodiversity loss. But it also gives rise to some perplexity.
A circumstantial puzzle is how an apparently spontaneous social movement of protest comes to have the energetic backing of big business interests and even to receive notable support from influential sections of the corporate media.
On deeper reflection, what does it even mean to stage a rebellion against extinction? Rebellions usually involve a group of people rising up to protest or overthrow another group that wields unjust or illegitimate power over them. How can you ‘rebel’ against extinction? It is not as if you can choose to disobey the laws of nature.
The website that asserts the copyright © Extinction Rebellion, states certain demands directed at government. The moral clarity of their seemingly simple message, however, could be deceptive.
Two key demands are: “halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.”
These may sound like goals that any ethically rational person could wholeheartedly endorse, and yet, as a recent critical study by Cory Morningstar has demonstrated, what their pursuit entails does not necessarily correspond to what people might imagine.
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The NSO Group, a tech outfit based in Herzliya, a stone’s throw from Tel Aviv, specialises in producing such invasive software tools as Pegasus. The reputation of Pegasus is considerable, supposedly able to access data on targeted phones including switching on their cameras and microphones.
NSO’s spyware merchandise has now attained a certain, viral notoriety. When Mexican investigative journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas was butchered in broad daylight on a street in Culiacán, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, something reeked. The killing on May 15, 2017 had been designated a cartel hit, an initially plausible explanation given Valdez’s avid interest in prying into the affairs of organised crime in Sinaloa. But the smell went further. As Mexican media outlets reported in June 2017, the government of former president Enrique Peña Nieto had purchased the good merchandise of Pegasus. Three Mexican agencies had purchased spyware to the tune of $80 million since 2011.
Since then, Canadian research group Citizen Lab, in collaboration with Mexican digital rights outfit R3D and freedom of expression group Article 19, have made the case that the widow of the slain journalist, Griselda Triana, became a target of Pegasus spyware within 10 days of her husband’s death in 2017. According to the report, she was also targeted “a week after infection attempts against two of Valdez’s colleagues, Andrés Villareal and Ismael Bojórquez.” The group behind the infection attempts, named RECKLESS-1, is alleged to have links with the Mexican government.
Canadian-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz can also count himself amongst those targeted by Pegasus. In 2018, he claimed that his phone was tapped by NSO-made spyware, leading to a gruesome implication: that the Saudi authorities would have had access to hundreds of messages exchanged with the doomed Saudi journalist and fellow comrade-in-dissent Jamal Khashoggi.
In December, a suit was filed in Israel by Abdulaziz’s representatives Alaa Mahajna and Mazen Masri, alleging that the NSO Group had hacked his phone in the service of Riyadh. In court papers, it was alleged that the dissident was harangued by the same individuals behind Khashoggi’s murder, insisting that he pack his bags and return to Saudi Arabia.
Buried in the court documentation was the receipt of a text message purportedly tracking the shipment of a package; instead, it masked a link to the NSO Group. Once clicked, the link installed the spyware, turning the phone into an effective agent of surveillance. Soon after this took place, Abdulaziz’s family home in Jidda was raided by Saudi security forces. Two brothers were subsequently detained.
Last January, Maariv, an Israeli daily, investigated reports about telephone spyware supposedly used to bug the phone of the murdered Khashoggi. Khashoggi’s ending at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, facilitated by a death squad, was not handiwork NSO wanted to be associated with. The group had been, according to a statement in December, “licensed for the sole use of providing governments and law enforcement agencies the ability to lawfully fight terrorism and crime”. Misuse of products would lead to investigation and, depending on appropriate findings, a suspension or termination of the contract.
Shalev Hulio, the company’s CEO, was clear to emphasise his humanity, before distancing himself and his company from the killing. “As a human being and as an Israeli, what happened to Khashoggi was a shocking murder.” Hulio was also adamant that “Khashoggi was not targeted by any NSO product or technology, including listening, monitoring, location tracking and intelligence collection.” Could such precise denials be inadvertent confessions?
The cooperative umbrella for Israel is broadening. It seeks allies, or at least some form of accommodation with regional powers, to counter common enemies. With Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, one common foe remains a constant: Iran. The Israeli state’s licensing of such companies as the NSO Group implicates the policy of permitting the distribution of Pegasus and such products. License their use; license their consequences. Molly Malekar, of Amnesty International’s Israeli office, puts it simply: “By continuing to approve of NSO Group, the Ministry of Defence is practically admitting to knowingly cooperating with NSO Group as their software is used to commit human rights abuses.” Monitoring and killing dissidents and intrepid journalists tend to be nasty by-products. They, in a sense, have become the modern merchants of death, whose clients remain unsavoury regimes.
Last year's news that Monsanto/Bayer was successfully sued by a California man over its glyphosate-containing product, Roundup, shook the company badly. Lawyers for Dewayne Johnson claimed that exposure to glyphosate caused his cancer, a claim that is not unique given that over 800 cancer patients are suing Monsanto over similar claims. This follows a 2015 report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) which found that the organophosphate pesticides glyphosate, malathion and diazinon "may be carcinogenic to humans" as shown here:
Here, for your illumination, is a commercial for Roundup's Extended Control product.
Please notice how the gentleman in the advertisement is not using any form of protection (i.e. gloves or a mask) while applying the product. While this is sending a concerning message to consumers, it appears to be the least of the problems that Roundup has created for mankind.
According to a 2016 paper by Charles Benbrook, Roundup is now the most widely and heavily applied weed-killer in history. Here is a summary showing how much Roundup has been used since it was first introduced for commercial use in 1974 from his paper:
"Since 1974 in the U.S., over 1.6 billion kilograms of glyphosate active ingredient have been applied, or 19 % of estimated global use of glyphosate (8.6 billion kilograms). Globally, glyphosate use has risen almost 15-fold since so-called “Roundup Ready,” genetically engineered glyphosate-tolerant crops were introduced in 1996. Two-thirds of the total volume of glyphosate applied in the U.S. from 1974 to 2014 has been sprayed in just the last 10 years. The corresponding share globally is 72 %. In 2014, farmers sprayed enough glyphosate to apply ~1.0 kg/ha (0.8 pound/acre) on every hectare of U.S.-cultivated cropland and nearly 0.53 kg/ha (0.47 pounds/acre) on all cropland worldwide."
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The US Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided to approve renewal of the license for the controversial glyphosate pesticide, this, despite mounting and alarming evidence it is not only probably carcinogenic, but also cause of multiple other debilitating health problems. New research also claims glyphosate damage to human or animal DNA extends over generations.
The US EPA has just proposed to re-approve glyphosate, the main component of the widely-used Roundup pesticide marketed by Monsanto, now part of Bayer AG of Germany. The original web link to the EPA ruling, strangely enough, yields the message as of this writing: “Sorry, but this web page is not available for viewing right now.”
This makes detailed critique a bit more difficult. However, certain facts can be stated. First, the specific part of EPA making the ruling, its Pesticide Regulatory Office, according to GMO watchdog website Sustainable Pulse, is long known for ruling in favor of the chemicals industry, even using industry data to approve. They maintain that that was also the case here, with the EPA relying heavily on industry tests, not their own or other independent studies. Many of those studies have been proven false or badly biased, including that of the European Union’s EFSA.
Second, the EPA body chose to dismiss the 2015 determination of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), that determined glyphosate to be a “probable carcinogen,” a ruling that Monsanto has fiercely tried to deny despite mounting evidence.
Third, and most blatant, the latest EPA ruling ignored an earlier determination of another US Government body, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry that agreed with the IARC that there was a link between glyphosate and certain types of cancer. On April 8, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), of the US Department of Health and Human Services, released its long-awaited draft toxicological report on glyphosate which among other findings determined evidence for a link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the form of cancer that resulted in two major court defeats for Monsanto in the last year and another 13,400 pending lawsuits that have severely damaged the stock price of Monsanto parent Bayer by a drop of 40% since the controversial Monsanto acquisition, and caused a recent shareholder revolt against management.
Future Generations Endangered
Now results of an alarming new study have been published. Researchers at Washington State University found that serious tumors and other disease showed up in second and third generation offspring of rats exposed to glyphosate. They found that diseases and health abnormalities including “prostate, kidney and ovarian diseases, obesity, and birth abnormalities seen in second and third generation offspring of rats exposed to glyphosate.” They were “correlated with changes in epigenetic (DNA methylation) patterns in sperm.” The study was headed by Prof. Michael Skinner, a WSU professor of biological sciences.
Skinner’s study found that there were “dramatic increases” in several pathologies in the second and third generations. The second generation had “significant increases” in testis, ovary and mammary gland diseases, as well as obesity. In third-generation males, the researchers saw a 30 percent increase in prostate disease – three times that of the control population. The third generation of females had a 40 percent increase in kidney disease, or four times that of the controls.
The new Skinner study is the first study published that examines what is called the “generational toxicology” of glyphosate. It tested doses of glyphosate below the dose of glyphosate officially classed as harmless. This is highly relevant as glyphosate, by far the world’s most widely used pesticide, is used in agriculture and plant cultivation yearly over decades, leading to human and animal exposure over generations.
The testing methodology used by EPA and recommended by the OECD ignores the generational effects except in a most limited manner, suggesting that major harmful effects are going unnoted by the relevant regulatory authorities. While the Skinner study has been criticized by the industry, it clearly suggests that the rules for EPA or EU and likely other national regulators to determine health and safety of pesticide chemical exposures are in urgent need of revision to examine long-term multi-generational potential effects. The core principle relevant here is the accepted “precautionary principle” that states that governments have a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk until that risk has been definitely ruled out. With glyphosate that is clearly not the case that the health risks have been ruled out.
On Sunday an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed, killing all on board. Five month earlier an Indonesian Lion Air jet crashed near Jakarta. All crew and passengers died. Both airplanes were Boeing 737-8 MAX. Both incidents happened shortly after take off. Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are now grounded about everywhere except in the United States. That this move follows only now is sad. After the first crash it was already obvious that the plane is not safe to fly.
The Boeing 737 and the Airbus 320 types are single aisle planes with some 150 seats. Both are bread and butter planes sold by the hundreds with a good profit. In 2010 Airbus decided to offer its A-320 with a New Engine Option (NEO) which uses less fuel. To counter the Airbus move Boeing had to follow up. The 737 would also get new engines for a more efficient flight and longer range. The new engines on the 737 MAX are bigger and needed to be placed a bit different than on the older version. That again changed the flight characteristics of the plane by giving it a nose up attitude.
The new flight characteristic of the 737 MAX would have require a retraining of the pilots. But Boeing's marketing people had told their customers all along that the 737 MAX would not require extensive new training. Instead of expensive simulator training for the new type experienced 737 pilots would only have to read some documentation about the changes between the old and the new versions.
To make that viable Boeing's engineers had to use a little trick. They added a 'maneuver characteristics augmentation system' (MCAS) that pitches the nose of the plane down if a sensor detects a too high angle of attack (AoA) that might lead to a stall. That made the flight characteristic of the new 737 version similar to the old one.
But the engineers screwed up: The 737 MAX has two flight control computers. Each is connected to only one of the two angle of attack sensors. During a flight only one of two computer runs the MCAS control. If it detects a too high angle of attack it trims the horizontal stabilizer down for some 10 seconds. It then waits for 5 seconds and reads the sensor again. If the sensor continues to show a too high angle of attack it again trims the stabilizer to pitch the plane's nose done.
MCSA is independent of the autopilot. It is even active in manual flight. There is a procedure to deactivate it but it takes some time.
One of the angle of attack sensors on the Indonesian flight was faulty. Unfortunately it was the one connected to the computer that ran the MCAS on that flight. Shortly after take off the sensor signaled a too high angle of attack even as the plane was flying in a normal climb. The MCAS engaged and put the planes nose down. The pilots reacted by disabling the autopilot and pulling the control stick back. The MCAS engaged again pitching the plane further down. The pilots again pulled the stick. This happened some 12 times in a row before the plane crashed into the sea.
To implement a security relevant automatism that depends on only one sensor is extremely bad design. To have a flight control automatism engaged even when the pilot flies manually is also a bad choice. But the real criminality was that Boeing hid the feature.
Neither the airlines that bought the planes nor the pilots who flew it were told about MCAS. They did not know that it exists. They were not aware of an automatic system that controlled the stabilizer even when the autopilot was off. They had no idea how it could be deactivated.
Nine days after the Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610 ended in a deadly crash, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive. The 737 MAX pilots were aghast. The APA pilot union sent a letter to its members:
“This is the first description you, as 737 pilots, have seen. It is not in the AA 737 Flight Manual Part 2, nor is there a description in the Boeing FCOM (flight crew operations manual),” says the letter from the pilots’ union safety committee. “Awareness is the key with all safety issues.”
The Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed went down in a similar flight profile as the Indonesian plane. It is highly likely that MCAS is the cause of both incidents. While the pilots of the Ethiopian plane were aware of the MCAS system they might have had too little time to turn it off. The flight recorders have been recovered and will tell the full story.
Boeing has sold nearly 5,000 of the 737 MAX. So far some 380 have been delivered. Most of these are now grounded. Some family members of people who died on the Indonesian flight are suing Boeing. Others will follow. But Boeing is not the only one who is at fault. The FAA certifies all new planes and their documentation. I was for some time marginally involved in Airbus certification issues. It is an extremely detailed process that has to be followed by the letter. Hundreds of people are full time engaged for years to certify a modern jet. Every tiny screw and even the smallest design details of the hardware and software have to be documented and certified.
How or why did the FAA agree to accept the 737 MAX with the badly designed MCAS? How could the FAA allow that MCAS was left out of the documentation? What steps were taken after the Indonesian flight crashed into the sea?
Up to now the FAA was a highly regarded certification agency. Other countries followed its judgment and accepted the certifications the FAA issued. That most of the world now grounded the 737 MAX while it still flies in the States is a sign that this view is changing. The FAA's certifications of Boeing airplanes are now in doubt.
Today Boeing's share price dropped some 7.5%. I doubt that it is enough to reflect the liability issues at hand. Every airline that now had to ground its planes will ask for compensation. More than 330 people died and their families deserve redress. Orders for 737 MAX will be canceled as passengers will avoid that type.
Boeing will fix the MCAS problem by using more sensors or by otherwise changing the procedures. But the bigger issue for the U.S. aircraft industry might be the damage done to the FAA's reputation. If the FAA is internationally seen as a lobbying agency for the U.S. airline industry it will no longer be trusted and the industry will suffer from it. It will have to run future certification processes through a jungle of foreign agencies.
Congress should take up the FAA issue and ask why it failed.
When you tell an establishment Democrat that Google’s hiding and removal of content is a dangerous form of censorship, they often magically transform into Ayn Rand right before your eyes.
“It’s a private company and they can do what they like with their property,” they will tell you. “It’s insane to say that a private company regulating its own affairs is the same as government censorship!”
This is absurd on its surface, because Google is not separate from the government in any meaningful way. It has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance, pours massive amounts of money into federal lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy relationship with the NSA and multiple defense contracts.
“Some of Google’s partnerships with the intelligence community are so close and cooperative, and have been going on for so long, that it’s not easy to discern where Google Inc ends and government spook operations begin,” wrote journalist Yasha Levine in a 2014 Pando Daily article titled “Oakland emails give another glimpse into the Google-Military-Surveillance Complex“.
“The purchase of Keyhole was a major milestone for Google, marking the moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing Internet company and began integrating with the US government,” Levine wrote in a recent blog post about his book Surveillance Valley. “While Google’s public relations team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a false aura of geeky altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the Internet Age.”
And now we learn from Gizmodo that Google has also been helping with AI for the Pentagon’s drone program. A Google spokesperson reportedly told Gizmodo that the innovations it is bringing to the Defense Department’s Project Maven are “for non-offensive uses only,” which is kind of like saying the beer kegs you delivered to the frat house are for “non-intoxicating use only.” The DoD and its drone program exist to find and kill enemies of the US empire, and Google will be helping them do it.
“The department announced last year that the AI initiative, just over six months after being announced, was used by intelligence analysts for drone strikes against ISIS in an undisclosed location in the Middle East,” reports The Intercept on this story.
Google is not any more separable from the US government than Lockheed Martin or Raytheon are, yet it has been given an unprecedented degree of authority over human speech and the way people communicate and share information. Would you feel comfortable allowing Northrop Grumman or Boeing to determine what political speech is permissible and giving them the authority to remove political Youtube content and hide leftist and anti-establishment outlets from visibility like Google does?
Yesterday, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) released a memo written by an attorney, Jayme Sophir, which determined that Google did not violate United States federal law when it fired James Damore. Sophir reasoned that references to psychometric literature on sex differences in personality were “discriminatory and constitute sexual harassment,” and on these grounds, Damore’s firing was justified. Following the release of the NLRB memo, a number of scientists on Twitter expressed alarm at the justifications provided within the memo, which appeared to relegate the discussion of sex differences outside the realm of constitutionally protected speech.
The NLRB’s determination has emerged after Damore, together with another former Google engineer, filed a class action lawsuit against the company alleging an institutionalised culture of harassment towards people with conservative or libertarian political views. Their complaint is eye-opening. Damore and Gudeman lay out in detail the many ways in which this harassment occurs: a pervasive environment of disparaging jokes and demeaning language amongst colleagues; a climate of bullying, mocking, and personal attacks from superiors and others in power; an open endorsement by superiors of bullying (referred to internally as social pecking); an unwillingness by superiors and administrators to act upon threats of violence; the use of incentive programmes to promote and celebrate harassment; a set of training programmes that foment hostility through emotionalised and unnuanced company-endorsed lectures; and a number of other mechanisms that disincentivise or punish political expression, which in Damore and Gudeman’s case eventually led to their dismissals.
Google is far from the only Silicon Valley company where this occurs. A recent survey suggests the vast majority of conservative and libertarian employees at Silicon Valley companies are hesitant of being themselves at work, and that all but the very liberal feel less comfortable expressing their political views in the aftermath of Damore’s very public dismissal. Some of the responses were remarkable. One libertarian respondent claimed there’s a “concerted purge of conservative employees at Apple.” A conservative respondent experienced colleagues openly mocking conservatives and had to sit through “cruel mockery of my home state while others nodded and laughed along.” A Google employee claimed to have lost multiple talented colleagues who resigned rather than continue in “an increasingly extreme, narrow-minded, and regressive environment.”
Silicon Valley has historically had a reputation for being quite libertarian, but it appears to be becoming increasingly intolerant towards conservatives and even libertarians. Companies seem to be rapidly adopting a culture of social justice that is far more consciously activist than the libertarianism and/or moderate liberalism that preceded it. As a consequence, conservatives and libertarians are now viewed less as people with different views, and more as obstacles to moral progress, thus justifying their harassment.
Even today, in response to the Panama Papers, Number Ten continue to claim that Cameron put tax evasion “front and centre” of Britain’s G8 presidency and is now “ahead of the pack” on tax transparency.” Keen to hype up what will no doubt be another round of empty rhetoric and BRICS-bashing, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond has also chimed in: “We’ve got an anti-corruption summit here in May. This is a key agenda for the Prime Minister”.
What the Panama Papers demonstrate, however, is that the real, and hidden, key agenda for the British government is maintaining the offshore netherworld’s role as a conduit through which global funds, largely plundered from the global South, can escape democratic control to enter the City of London’s private banks.
Of the 215,000 companies identified in the Mossack Fonseca documents, over half were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, one single territory in what tax haven expert Nicholas Shaxson calls a “spider’s web” of well over a dozen separate UK-controlled dens of financial chicanery. In addition, the UK was ranked number two of those jurisdictions where the banks, law firms and other middlemen associated with the Panama Papers operate, only topped by Hong Kong, whose institutional environment is itself a creation of the UK. And of the ten banks who most frequently asked Mossack Fonseca to set up paper companies to hide their client’s finances, four were British: HSBC, Coutts, Rothschild and UBS. HSBC, recently fined $1.9bn for laundering the money of Mexico’s most violent drug cartels, used the Panamanian firm to create 2300 offshore companies, whilst Coutts – the family bank of the Windsors – set up just under 500. And, of course, David Cameron’s own father was named in the papers, having “helped create and develop” Blairmore Holdings, worth $20million, from its inception in 1982 til his death in 2010. Blairmore, in which Cameron junior was also a shareholder, was registered in the Bahamas, and was specifically advertised to investors as a means of avoiding UK tax. The Daily Mail noted that: “Even though he lived in London, the Prime Minister’s father would leave the country and fly to Switzerland or the Bahamas for board meetings of Blairmore Holdings – to ensure it would not have to pay UK income tax or corporation tax. He hired a small army of Bahamas residents, including a part-time bishop, to sign its paperwork – as part of another bid to show his firm was not British-based.”
Something like a privatised global constitution governs financial relationships affecting the life prospects of everyone on the planet. Not only does this entrench the pursuit of interests that run counter to social justice, ecological sustainability, and even real economic productivity.[1] It is implicated in a further, fundamental and all-encompassing, problem. War.
I want to explore the connection, but, first, why speak of a privatised constitution? As Katharina Pistor shows, the very existence of finance has the form of a set of legal contracts underwritten by legal norms and institutionalized means of enforcing them.[2] A critical problem, for the vast majority of us, is that the people with most power over the financial system are the least bound by any socially or politically mandated norms. A global rule of law relating to finance is determined by a kind of supra-political order that itself has no constitutional oversight. An essentially private constitution, created and imposed by a global elite, circumvents and subverts the politics of states and the will of peoples. Gunther Teubner points out that this neoliberal world order has a stratum of constitutional norms that provide transnational corporations with unlimited latitude for action;[3] Turkuler Isiksel highlights how private corporations’ investors’ rights can even colonise human rights regimes.[4] With more than three thousand international investment agreements in effect around the world, private corporations can sue signatory states in order to protect their interests in those states’ own territories. These disputes are heard in legal venues above the jurisdictional authority of states, mostly under the auspices of the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). As the ‘investment’ dimension of ‘trade and investment’ agreements comes to involve ever more egregious shifts of power from democratically legitimate authorities to private corporate actors, private rights are even effectively able to trump human rights.[5] From the standpoint of public concern, this looks like the rule of law gone rogue.
The privatised global constitution has taken shape in a period of intense and protracted warfare in many places around the world. The international banking system demonstrated remarkable resilience even throughout World War 2 and has continued to do so during the many further conflicts since.[6] The fact that the banking system is compatible with intense and persistent warfare can be regarded, I think, as demonstrated. The privatised financial constitution has not only survived but seems possibly even to have flourished in these circumstances. This could suggest a lack of incentive on the part of the financial elite to support measures to prevent or contain wars. Once we acknowledge that concern, we face a possibility that is more disturbing still: it could be that those who control the financial system have an active interest in the perpetuation of warfare.
Finance and war are interrelated in three quite general respects: finance needs to be raised in order to fund war; war can be used for the pillage that replenishes finance; war can serve as an outlet for the capital on which finance can draw profits, in particular through arms manufacture and its associated businesses. Those functions can be mutually reinforcing.
As Tim Wu explains in his energetic and original new book The Attention Merchants, a ‘facebook’ in the sense Zuckerberg uses it here ‘traditionally referred to a physical booklet produced at American universities to promote socialisation in the way that “Hi, My Name Is” stickers do at events; the pages consisted of rows upon rows of head shots with the corresponding name’. Harvard was already working on an electronic version of its various dormitory facebooks. The leading social network, Friendster, already had three million users. The idea of putting these two things together was not entirely novel, but as Zuckerberg said at the time, ‘I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.’
Wu argues that capturing and reselling attention has been the basic model for a large number of modern businesses, from posters in late 19th-century Paris, through the invention of mass-market newspapers that made their money not through circulation but through ad sales, to the modern industries of advertising and ad-funded TV. Facebook is in a long line of such enterprises, though it might be the purest ever example of a company whose business is the capture and sale of attention. Very little new thinking was involved in its creation. As Wu observes, Facebook is ‘a business with an exceedingly low ratio of invention to success’. What Zuckerberg had instead of originality was the ability to get things done and to see the big issues clearly. The crucial thing with internet start-ups is the ability to execute plans and to adapt to changing circumstances. It’s Zuck’s skill at doing that – at hiring talented engineers, and at navigating the big-picture trends in his industry – that has taken his company to where it is today. Those two huge sister companies under Facebook’s giant wing, Instagram and WhatsApp, were bought for $1 billion and $19 billion respectively, at a point when they had no revenue. No banker or analyst or sage could have told Zuckerberg what those acquisitions were worth; nobody knew better than he did. He could see where things were going and help make them go there. That talent turned out to be worth several hundred billion dollars.
Jesse Eisenberg’s brilliant portrait of Zuckerberg in The Social Network is misleading, as Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook manager, argues in Chaos Monkeys, his entertainingly caustic book about his time at the company. The movie Zuckerberg is a highly credible character, a computer genius located somewhere on the autistic spectrum with minimal to non-existent social skills. But that’s not what the man is really like. In real life, Zuckerberg was studying for a degree with a double concentration in computer science and – this is the part people tend to forget – psychology. People on the spectrum have a limited sense of how other people’s minds work; autists, it has been said, lack a ‘theory of mind’. Zuckerberg, not so much. He is very well aware of how people’s minds work and in particular of the social dynamics of popularity and status. The initial launch of Facebook was limited to people with a Harvard email address; the intention was to make access to the site seem exclusive and aspirational. (And also to control site traffic so that the servers never went down. Psychology and computer science, hand in hand.) Then it was extended to other elite campuses in the US. When it launched in the UK, it was limited to Oxbridge and the LSE. The idea was that people wanted to look at what other people like them were doing, to see their social networks, to compare, to boast and show off, to give full rein to every moment of longing and envy, to keep their noses pressed against the sweet-shop window of others’ lives.
Seven months after President Trump accused the pharmaceutical industry of “getting away with murder,” he is busy lining the pockets of large pharmaceutical companies worldwide by giving them more power to charge higher prices overseas. Their price monopolies are likely to be extended under a draft executive order promising “greater intellectual property protection” in multilateral and bilateral trade agreements. The North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, has already been pegged to harmonize foreign intellectual property standards to reflect those found in the United States. Canada, it seems, will be the first target of U.S. indoctrination.
The Canadian government has been repeatedly excoriated for its failure to parrot U.S. intellectual property laws, receiving numerous reprimands in congressional hearings and Office of the United States Trade Representative reports for daring to define its own standards of patentability. While the U.S. vehemently defends its own sovereignty and singularity, it seems like it cannot tolerate these principles in other nations.
That was certainly the view held by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly when, in November 2012, it filed an investor-state arbitration claim against the Canadian government for overturning two of its pharmaceutical patents. As McGill University’s E. Richard Gold recently described in STAT, disgruntled with its losses, Eli Lilly sued the Canadian government for $500 million for its “radical departure” from U.S. intellectual property standards. Five years later, the company has spent more than $12 million trying to educate the Canadian government on what is, and what is not, an acceptable margin of change in its domestic law.
The company’s strategy to mold Canadian law in its image ultimately prevailed. In June, the Canadian Supreme Court delivered a stunning decision, overturning decades of Canadian precedent to arrive at the same standard of patentability demanded by Eli Lilly and applied in the U.S.