Flawed paper behind Covid-19 testing faces being retracted, after scientists expose its ten fatal problems
By Peter Andrews | RT | December 9, 2020
A publisher admitted it is urgently re-investigating research, following revelations that the PCR test it extols is defective, giving too many false-positives. The news comes as a new group plans a legal challenge over the checks.
Last week I reported on an astonishing review conducted by a group of senior scientists on a paper on which most Covid testing is based. It comprehensively debunked the science behind the Corman-Drosten paper, which described a protocol for using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique to detect Covid, finding 10 fatal flaws, including major failings in the operating procedure and potential conflicts of interest among its authors.
The team behind the review demanded that Eurosurveillance, the journal that published the original research, retract it at once, as in their view it clearly failed to meet proper standards. This is of vital importance because the Corman-Drosten paper laid the path for mass PCR testing as the main source of data on the coronavirus. Almost all case numbers, infection rates and even deaths attributed to Covid are based on PCR tests (and all the attendant lockdowns and restrictions on people), and a huge amount of them use the method set out in the Corman-Drosten paper.
But now, the organisation Retraction Watch have reported that Eurosurveillance is considering retracting the paper. In a statement, Eurosurveillance said that they were “seeking further expert advice and discussing the current correspondence in detail. We will, according to our existing procedures, evaluate the claims and make a decision as soon as we have investigated in full.’’ So no retraction yet, but it would not be surprising if one came soon.
Call up Guinness World Records
One of the 10 fatal flaws in the original Corman-Drosten paper was that it was unclear whether it had ever been subjected to proper peer review – before, that is, the panel of experts took it upon themselves to do so. The paper had been submitted on January 22 and published the very next day. Peer review, when it takes place, is normally a long, drawn out process with plenty of back-and-forth, even when it is being rushed as much as possible. That it could be done in a single day beggars belief.
But that is what the authors are asking us to believe, as they are still claiming that their article was “peer-reviewed by two experts on whose recommendation the decision to publish was made.’’ Eurosurveillance may want to consider submitting this feat to Guinness World Records as the fastest peer review of all time – it may not be too late to get into the 2021 edition.
Taking the government to court
It is clear that the wars over PCR tests are hotting up, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. A new organisation in the UK, calling itself PCR Claims, has been set up to challenge in the courts the British government’s handling of PCR testing for Covid-19.
The organisation describes itself as a pro bono network of lawyers, life scientists, and business advisers led by Jo Rogers, a lawyer who runs Navistar Legal.
Rogers told RT.com: “The intention is to expose the controversy of the inappropriate use of PCR in the context of pillar 2 community testing and private sector lighthouse labs.
“PCR was not designed for mass testing because of the sensitivity and risk of contamination. There are serious flaws in many of the protocols employed, which were hurriedly put together, some without peer review. The operational false positive rate is unknown and therefore every positive test could be false, unless accompanied by clinical examination.”
As an example of errors with PCR, the group points to a recent case from Cambridge University. “Our first priority is to gather evidence of the harms from restrictions to life whose policies were driven by PCR test modelling and/or ‘case’ results,” Rogers said. “We believe the cases are a pseudo epidemic, as seen in other places around the world using PCR testing.
“Legal action is progressing and further instances will follow as we receive the evidence of harms. The gathering of that evidence is ongoing nationwide, as well as our raising awareness of errors and negligence.”
As someone who shares their deep concerns over these PCR tests, this is good news. At last, there is somewhere to go for expert legal counsel on the government’s persecution of free-born citizens. And thank heavens also for the stellar work of the entire peer review team for holding this bad science to account. If indeed it is retracted, it will be a major victory for those of us who can see through what Dr Mike Yeadon, one of the paper’s debunkers, rightly calls a “false positive pseudo-epidemic.”
Peter Andrews is an Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics.
Billionaires’ ‘pandemic profits’ alone could pay for $3K stimulus checks to EVERY American – report
RT | December 9, 2020
American billionaires made so much money during the Covid-19 pandemic that their profits since March are enough to give every US resident a $3,000 check without cutting into their pre-virus wealth, a new report shows.
Over the last nine months, the 651 billionaires who call the US home have increased their wealth by a whopping $1.06 trillion, according to a report published Tuesday by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies. Far from being negatively impacted by the pandemic-related economic shutdowns, the country’s super-rich seem to have thrived amid the policies that have plunged so many ordinary Americans into poverty.
The billionaires’ wealth grew so much that they could cut “every man, woman and child in the country” a $3,000 stimulus check and “still be richer than they were nine months ago,” ATF executive director Frank Clemente said in a Tuesday press release.
The report tracked the fat-cats’ profits from March 18, the approximate start date of the economic shutdowns, through December 7. The vast majority accelerated their accumulation of wealth even as ordinary Americans saw their life savings slip through their fingers, losing jobs, businesses, and loved ones to the one-two punch of the coronavirus and the political response.
After nine months of raking in the cash, the billionaires’ total wealth had soared 36 percent to over $4 trillion – nearly twice the $2.1 trillion in wealth held by the poorest 50 percent of Americans.
The monstrous cash-pile amounts to double the two-year budget gap of all state and local governments, a figure estimated to reach $500 billion thanks to the devastating effects of the economic shutdowns on tax revenues. It even approaches the massive sum the federal government spends on Medicare and Medicaid – $644 billion and $389 billion in 2019, respectively, the report claims.
While most working- and middle-class Americans received a single stimulus payment of $1,200 as part of March’s CARES Act pandemic bailout, a promised second stimulus check has failed to materialize. The expanded unemployment program that doled out $600 per week to newly-jobless Americans came to an end in July, and while President Donald Trump issued an executive order to bridge the gap with a less generous $300 weekly payment, Congress has thus far refused to pass a second Covid-19 bailout package even as the rest of the bailout programs are set to expire at the end of the year.
One of the chief beneficiaries of the fiscal explosion has been Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune increased 63 percent since March as locked-down Americans turned to online shopping to meet their needs. The retail tycoon faced sharp criticism over his company’s alleged mistreatment of Amazon warehouse workers in the early days of the pandemic, but had he distributed his $71.4 billion windfall among Amazon’s employees, workers would have received $88,000 each while leaving their boss just as rich as he was before the coronavirus outbreak.
And Bezos, said to be the richest man in the US, wasn’t even the most blessed by Covid-19. That title goes to Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, whose wealth grew by an eye-popping 542 percent – from “just” $24.6 billion in March to $143 billion by December. Musk is about to get quite a bit richer, too, after his StarLink satellite company won a Federal Communications Commission auction to deliver bandwidth to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans.
Senate Democrats circulated a letter earlier this week demanding another $1,200 stimulus payment be part of the Covid-19 aid package currently being debated in Congress. The party has balked at a Republican-authored bailout proposal that would exclude individual payments and include a five-year liability shield for corporations – a measure Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders derisively dubbed a “get out of jail free card to corporations.”
Canadian Health Ministry Exploring “Immunity Passports,” Vaccine “Tracking And Surveillance”
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 9, 2020
The Health Minister of Ontario in Canada has stoked controversy by suggesting that people who do not take the coronavirus vaccine will face restrictions on where they can travel and spend time.
When asked by reporters about how the government intends to go about convincing people to get the vaccine, Health Minister Christine Elliott warned that those who refuse it will face difficulties reintegrating into society.
“That’s their choice, this is not going to be a mandatory campaign. It will be voluntary,” Elliot said, but adding that “There may be some restrictions that may be placed on people that don’t have vaccines for travel purposes, to be able to go to theatres and other places.”
When another reporter asked if the government would be introducing ‘immunity passports’, or proof of vaccination cards, Elliot said “Yes, because that’s going to be really important for people to have for travel purposes, perhaps for work purposes, for going to theatres or cinemas or any other places where people will be in closer physical contact.”
Following up on Elliot’s comments, The Toronto Sun spoke to her press secretary, who confirmed that the government is exploring several options for vaccine “tracking and surveillance.”
“This includes exploring developing tech-based solutions while also providing for alternative options to ensure equitable access to any potential ‘immunity passport,’” Alexandra Hilkene said.
Sun reporter Brian Lilley notes “That phrase will set off alarm bells and it should, not just for anti-vaxxers, but for anyone who is concerned about Charter rights and governments running roughshod over them.”
Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams has also said that a COVID-19 vaccine may be required for “freedom to move around”.
“What we can do is to say sometimes for access, or ease, in getting into certain settings, if you don’t have vaccination then you’re not allowed into that setting without other protection materials,” Williams said.
The comments of these Canadian officials add to the litany of other government and travel industry figures in both the US, Britain and beyond who have suggested that ‘COVID passports’ are coming, in order for ‘life to get back to normal’
In an essay in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden noted that he expects the so called ‘immunity passports’ will come into widespread use despite any ethical, legal or operational challenges, and despite the fact that it hasn’t at all been determined whether the vaccine equates to immunity.
Everyone is already wearing a mask. They just don’t work.
By Jordan Schachtel | December 7, 2020
One of the most common pro-mask arguments I’ve heard over the course of the past year, both from “public health experts” and your average citizen, sounds similar to the following statement:
“If only everyone would just wear a mask, we would be able to crush the virus and end the pandemic.”
This line of reasoning is frequently espoused by lockdown governors and “public health experts.” You see, the problem isn’t them, it’s you, the citizen, we’re told. Wear a mask, peasant. You’re the problem! You’re the reason why the pandemic is still a problem in this country.
Deaths up? Why aren’t you wearing a mask. Cases up? Wear a mask. Hospitals crowded? The problem is that not enough people are wearing masks, they claim.
The idea that not enough Americans are wearing masks is detached from reality. And we have the data to prove it.
The Delphi group at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a very informative, consistently updated mask compliance tracker. It shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans across the nation are wearing masks. And in virtually every major population center in the United States, especially in areas where COVID-19 cases are rising, mask compliance levels are off the charts high, with most major metro areas registering well over 90 percent compliance.
Early on in the pandemic, when the “new science” told us that masks could stop the virus in its tracks (after the science of early 2020, espoused by the likes of Fauci and many others, rightly pointed to the reality that masks are useless outside of a controlled setting), the CDC and other “public health agencies” claimed that we could essentially eliminate transmission if a large percentage of the population adopted universal masking.
When lockdowns failed to “stop the spread,” masking up at over 80% was hyped as a way to “do more to reduce COVID-19 spread than a strict lockdown.”
“Universal masking at 80 [percent] adoption flattens the curve significantly more than maintaining a strict lockdown,” a much-hyped, highly publicized study, which was treated by many in the scientific community as the gospel, proclaimed.
“We will not only be able to flatten the curve, we will be able to significantly reduce the spread of the virus and return to life as normal sooner rather than later,” De Kai, a research scholar at Berkeley who helped develop the COVID-19 universal masking model, proclaimed.
With the help of the CMU mask compliance tracker, let’s take a look at the current COVID-19 hotspots in the United States and the level of mask compliance within these areas.
San Francisco metro area: 97% mask compliance
New York City metro area: 97% mask compliance
DC metro: 97%
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington: 94%
Philly area: 96%
Chicago: 95%
Miami-Ft Lauderdale: 96%
Seattle: 96%
The data demonstrates very clearly that Americans have overwhelmingly exceeded the masking compliance percentages needed to supposedly “flatten the curve” and reduce transmission of the virus. The problem, of course, is that the models have not matched reality. Americans are wearing masks, but the hypothesis behind universal masking has not worked to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Americans have adopted the recommendations of the “public health experts,” but the “public health experts” have failed to follow the science, which now shows that masks are useless when it comes to stopping the spread of COVID-19. Now we’re left with an overwhelming majority of Americans wearing masks for no science-based reason whatsoever.
Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon
By Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| December 7, 2020
Operation Warp Speed, the “public-private partnership” created to produce and allocate COVID-19 vaccines to the American populace, is set to begin rolling out a mass-vaccination campaign in the coming weeks. With the expected approval of its first vaccine candidate just days away, the allocation and distribution aspects of Operation Warp Speed deserve scrutiny, particularly given the critical role one of the most controversial companies in the country will play in that endeavor.
Palantir Technologies, the company founded by Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, and a handful of their associates, has courted controversy for its supporting role in the US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its participation in the detention of “illegal” immigrants through their contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and in “predictive policing” law enforcement programs that disproportionately affect minority neighborhoods. Equally controversial, but perhaps lesser known, is Palantir’s long-standing and enduring ties to the CIA and intelligence community at large, which was intimately involved in the development of Palantir’s products that now run on the databases of governments and corporations around the world.
The same national-security state that Palantir has long aided in oppressing countries abroad and minorities domestically is now running Operation Warp Speed. While Palantir’s selection to manage the allocation of the vaccine to “priority groups” may just seem like the national-security state wanting to award the contract to a familiar and trusted company, the allocation strategy’s heavy focus on vaccinating minorities first, with questionable justification for doing so, suggests something else may have been behind Palantir’s selection to play a prominent role in Warp Speed.
Part 1 of this series on Operation Warp Speed and Race, “The Johns Hopkins, CDC Plan to Mask Medical Experimentation on Minorities as ‘Racial Justice,’” explored Warp Speed’s vaccine allocation plan in depth. That plan utilizes a phased approach aimed at “populations of focus” that had been identified in advance by various government organizations, including the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
The main focus of this allocation strategy is to deliver vaccines first to racial minorities and in such a way as to make them feel “at ease” and not like “guinea pigs.” This is particularly glaring given that these minorities will be receiving an experimental vaccine that allocation-strategy documents admit is likely to cause “certain adverse effects . . . more frequently in certain population subgroups,” with research showing that those “subgroups” most at risk of experiencing adverse effects are these same racial minorities.
Part 1 also showed that the government believes information warfare and economic coercion will likely be necessary to combat “vaccine hesitancy” among these minority groups, rather than directly targeting the actual causes of this “hesitancy,” namely, by addressing past instances of illegal medical experimentation on minorities by the US government.
This report, the second part of this trilogy covering the racist underpinnings of key aspects of Operation Warp Speed, reveals the real factors behind Palantir’s rise to prominence as a national-security state contractor and the real reason why this company was chosen to identify the same “critical population” minority groups that it has been helping the US government oppress and surveil since the company’s inception.
Tiberius Rising
On November 24, 2020, Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a former Eli Lilly executive, announced that the department would begin conducting “practice runs” for Operation Warp Speed’s distribution networks in anticipation of HHS’s national roll out of a COVID-19 vaccine, which is set to begin in mid-December.
CNBC, reporting on Azar’s comments, noted that Tiberius, a software program developed and managed by Palantir, “will help the federal government allocate the amount of vaccines each state will receive,” and local officials will use Tiberius to “decide where every allocated dose will go—from local doctors’ offices to large medical centers.” According to that report and others, Tiberius would collect data from US government agencies, as well as from local and state governments, pharmaceutical firms, vaccine manufacturers, and companies like McKesson that have been contracted for the coming vaccine distribution.
Palantir’s role in Operation Warp Speed was only announced in late October, with mainstream news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal reporting that the company was creating a new software product that would manage the production and allocation of COVID-19 vaccines in the operation’s campaign. That mass of data will include “a wide range of demographic, employment and public health data sets” that will be used “to identify the location of priority populations” and make related decisions regarding the allocation of vaccine doses. Tiberius will also allow officials to “proactively identify distribution bottlenecks, inventory constraints, and gaps in administration across key populations.”
AFP confirmed the Wall Street Journal’s reporting and noted that Tiberius would provide Palantir with access to sensitive health information so that it could “help identify high-priority populations at highest risk of infection.” The Business Insider website noted that Tiberius would be capable of showing “areas with high proportions of healthcare workers, clinically vulnerable people . . . elderly people” or any other demographic deemed to be a “target population” by Operation Warp Speed. A separate report at Military.com quoted HHS’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Paul Mango, as stating that delivery timetables and vaccine-delivery locations were “being mapped out” by Tiberius, which enables officials to see how many people in a given “target population” are in any US zip code.
Palantir’s Tiberius uses the software that manages HHS Protect, a secretive database that hoards information related to the spread of COVID-19 gathered from “more than 225 data sets, including demographic statistics, community-based tests, and a wide range of state-provided data.” HHS Protect has been criticized by several public health experts and epidemiologists, among others, because of the sudden decision by HHS to force US hospitals to provide all data on COVID-19 cases and patient information directly to HHS Protect. Hospitals have been threatened with the loss of Medicare or Medicaid funding if they decline to regularly feed all of their COVID-19 patient data and test results into the HHS Protect database.
HHS Protect, notably, contains protected health information, which several US senators warned in July raises “serious privacy concerns.” According to a group of Democratic senators and representatives, “neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this PHI [protected health information], or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any.” They added that they were “concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways, such as in the law and immigration enforcement context.” Palantir is well-known for its controversial contract work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security that uses Palantir software in immigration raids.
HHS Protect is also controversial for its newly added artificial intelligence–driven “predictive” component, which “uses prewritten algorithms to simulate behaviors and forecast possible outcomes.” HHS has asserted that this AI component, called HHS Vision, was not built with software components purchased from Palantir, but with software from a smaller government contractor with close ties to IBM, another intelligence-linked tech giant.
In addition to the mass of information Palantir has access to through HHS Protect, the company is also a member of the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, a “collaborative private-industry response” involving Big Tech, NGOs, and health-care corporations that “share and leverage real-time data, best practices, and clinical expertise” for the official purpose of “preserving healthcare delivery” and “protecting people” during the coronavirus crisis. Other members, aside from Palantir, include Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and IBM as well as the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the murky US intelligence contractor, the MITRE corporation. The massive amount of data shared by the coalition’s members, which also includes most major electronic health-record companies in the US, is aimed at “unlocking large-scale analytics for COVID-19.”
Tiberius, like HHS Protect, utilizes Palantir’s Gotham software, which has been “honed over a decade of partnership with military, civil, and intelligence communities,” according to Palantir’s product manager for Gotham, Ryan Beiermeister. In recent years, it has incorporated more aspects related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. According to Forbes, Gotham accumulates vast amounts of personal data that allow it to “map a person’s family members and business associates, as well as email addresses, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security numbers, and height, weight, and eye color.” It is usually favored by law enforcement and intelligence agencies and has been used (controversially) by several police departments, including in Los Angeles and New Orleans, as the cornerstone of “predictive policing” or precrime initiatives. A HHS spokeswoman stated that Tiberius will not use personally identifiable information.
Other reports have noted that Tiberius is involved to some extent in the clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccine candidates, which would also provide Tiberius with access to the data from those trials, including how various “population subgroups” react to a given vaccine candidate. As reported in Part 1 of this series, the Johns Hopkins guidance, on which the vaccine-allocation strategy was based, notes that it is likely that “certain adverse effects may occur more frequently in certain population subgroups.”
Those very subgroups with the greatest risk of experiencing adverse effects—ethnic minorities—are also the same subgroups set to be prioritized by the US government and identified by Tiberius to be vaccinated first during the official roll-out of Operation Warp Speed. Tellingly, those same ethnic minorities flagged by Johns Hopkins as priority groups are the same minorities that Palantir is best known for targeting through their controversial contracts with Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement and law enforcement agencies.
Palantir and the Militarization of Health Care
New York Army National Guard Spc. Cody Roche records vehicle and personnel that enter through the Entry Control Point of the Bronx-Lehman COVID-19 Testing Site, April 4, 2020. US National Guard photo by 1st Lt. Kyle Kilner.
Tiberius is the most recent addition to—and perhaps the most emblematic—of Palantir’s moves into the growing field of “public health” surveillance. In addition to Palantir’s contracts related to HHS Protect, the company has also scored other COVID-19–related contracts with subdivisions of the HHS. As one example, it was Palantir that built the CDC web app for monitoring the spread of COVID-19, which has been actively collecting data since March 2020. The technology for this project was built on Palantir’s Foundry software and “takes in a range of anonymized data from US hospitals and healthcare agencies, including lab test results, emergency department statuses, bed capacity and ventilator supply.”
In early October, the National Institutes of Health Center for Advancing Translational Sciences awarded Palantir a $36 million contract for “enterprise data integration and data management,” giving the NIH the Foundry-based public health software as well. In addition, according to federal procurement records, the US Coast Guard contracted with Palantir in April to help with its COVID-19 Readiness System. Palantir’s contracting with the NIH preceded the COVID-19 crisis by a matter of months, with the company winning a NIH contract in January to provide “comprehensive data capabilities” for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, according to Forbes.
Palantir is also gaining comparable data access to the UK population. In March, the UK’s National Health Service awarded the company a $1.3 million contract to help develop its COVID-19 data store, with a similar mandate to help UK officials understand how to allocate resources appropriately. According to CNBC, “the NHS health records, which Palantir has gained access to, includes patient names, ages, addresses, health conditions, treatments and medicines, allergies, tests, scans, X-ray results, whether a patient smokes or drinks, and hospital admission and discharge information.” More recently, the NHS has been in talks for a little over a month with Palantir to see about the company playing a role in “sensitive” contact tracing. Aside from the UK, Palantir has claimed to be involved in the COVID-19 response efforts of at least ten other governments in addition to the US and UK.
These lucrative public health contracts are set to be a long-term boon for the company, which recently went public. As InvestorPlace explained in late November, “the re-emergence of the pandemic this fall and winter in the US and Europe will lift Palantir’s revenue.”
Meanwhile, just as Palantir has been acquiring “contact tracing” contracts throughout the Western world during 2020, the company has also been dramatically expanding its contracting work with the US military, which has also been playing an outsized role in the COVID-19 response, especially with Operation Warp Speed. Though the military has contracted with Palantir for years, the company has recently acquired more contracts than ever with the Department of Defense, and it has recently supplanted long-favored defense contractors, like Raytheon, winning several key bids.
In February 2020, Palantir was awarded a massive $823 million contract with BAE Systems for the US Army’s Distributed Common Ground System, and a month later the company was awarded a $80 million contract with the US Navy to create and manage a new logistics system. Then, in April, Palantir won a contract with the newly created US Space Force to build “a common operating picture of space.” At the end of November, Palantir was awarded a contract of an undisclosed sum by the Army’s Futures Command, a command focused on Army modernization with a heavy emphasis on AI and machine learning.
Palantir’s increasingly successful acquisition of top military contracts began in earnest last year. In March 2019, Palantir won an $800 million contract to build the Army’s new AI-driven “battlefield intelligence system.” Then, in October 2019, Palantir scored a two-year $91 million contract to develop AI and machine learning capabilities for the US Army Research Laboratory. The deal includes both their Foundry and Gotham products, with Foundry spotting and flagging “risks” and Gotham integrating multiple data sets into one. By the end of last year, Palantir had scored yet another multimillion-dollar contract with the military for the Army’s Project Vantage. Also, in December 2019, it was revealed that Palantir had taken over the Pentagon’s AI drone-assassination program, known as Project Maven, which had proved too controversial even for Google, the company that had originally won the Maven contract.
While it may seem odd that Palantir would simultaneously win massive contracts from health-care agencies and the military, the military has, in fact, been heavily driving the takeover of US health care by the national-security state during 2020. Through partnerships with other leading Silicon Valley firms, the Pentagon is playing a major role in the COVID-19 response through Warp Speed, but it also is involved in other public health efforts that are technically unrelated, including predictive cancer diagnoses and “fitness” wearables. In addition, HHS—under the leadership of the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, Robert Kadlec—dramatically deepened its partnerships with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) over the same period. Palantir not only fits right in with this larger Pentagon-led initiative to militarize health care nationwide but the company is at its core.
As the previously cited reports have detailed, Operation Warp Speed is being almost completely managed by the US military, along with the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency (NSA), as opposed to civilian health agencies, which, as noted in Part 1 of this series, are significantly less involved than in previous national-vaccination efforts and have even been barred from attending some Warp Speed meetings. The DHS, NSA, and the military all have multimillion-dollar contracts with Palantir.
In July, a government chart was obtained by STAT that showed “that roughly sixty military officials—including at least four generals—involved in the leadership of Operation Warp Speed have never worked in health care or vaccine development.” One senior federal health official told STAT he was surprised by the number of soldiers in military uniform walking around the health department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. and said that recently he’d seen more than one hundred officials in the Warp Speed corridors wearing “Desert Storm fatigues.”
Given Palantir’s emerging role as the public health police, it’s worth taking a step back to examine its record of enabling the racism and the militarism of US state violence. As noted by the Guardian earlier this year, “Palantir is well known in the defense and policing worlds.”
Palantir has come under fire as a result of the company’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including its creation an intelligence system used by ICE that is known as Investigative Case Management (ICM). The IB Times described ICM as “a vast ‘ecosystem’ of data to help immigration officials in identifying targets and creating cases against them” that also “provides ICE agents with access to databases managed by other federal agencies.” ICM further gives ICE access to “targets’ personal and sensitive information, such as background on schooling, employment, family relationships, phone records, immigration history, biometrics data, criminal records as well as home and work addresses.”
This $92 million relationship between ICE and Palantir should cause concern, considering Palantir will be in charge of allocating “tailored” COVID-19 vaccines to the same minorities they’re helping a militarized law enforcement agency target, “build cases against,” and deport. In addition, as noted in Part 1 of this series, Warp Speed is set to explicitly prioritize both incarcerated individuals and undocumented immigrants of color, meaning that those incarcerated in ICE detention facilities, many of whom were placed there as a result of Palantir’s other software, will also be flagged by Palantir’s Tiberius software.
Palantir’s work with ICE is hardly the sole reason controversies surround the company. It also has a close relationship with local law enforcement agencies and police departments across the country whom they supply with policing tools that overwhelmingly target minority groups. Some of those tools are “predictive,” meaning that they flag individuals who have not committed a crime but, according to Palantir’s data mining and algorithms, are “likely” to do so in the future. As noted by the Guardian in 2017, US law enforcement, in various parts of the country, have been using “Palantir to predict who will commit a crime by swooping Minority Report–style on suspects.”
Police departments that have used Palantir’s policing tools include but are not limited to the NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, Virginia State Police, and the New Orleans PD. Per its proponents, Palantir’s policing tools harness the technology of big data to help police departments “streamline” law enforcement, thereby enhancing efficiency. Critics, however, say Palantir’s tech creates “racist feedback loops” in which a “disproportionate amount of police resources are allocated to historically hyper-policed communities.”
Notably, Palantir’s predictive-policing methods were developed during the war in Iraq, a conflict where many legal red lines were crossed by the occupying forces. These aggressive policing techniques, forged during the fires of the so-called Global War on Terrorism, in which Iraqi citizens were almost completely denied their civil and human rights, are now being implemented in the US and elsewhere.
Palantir’s law enforcement tools crunch data and identify certain areas of cities or neighborhoods that should receive an uptick in police presence. The Palantir police technology can create “chronic-offender bulletins,” which attempt to predict and identify potential “repeat offenders” and problem areas.
After someone is deemed a possible or probable repeat offender, extra attention and enhanced surveillance techniques are deployed against that individual. Similarly, once an entire neighborhood is flagged by Palantir’s algorithms as densely populated with repeat offenders, the neighborhood is considered a “hotspot zone” and is then more heavily policed, increasing the chance that residents will be stopped for minor infractions.
The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition criticizes the technological assumptions that underlie Palantir’s algorithm-based policing as “pathologizing” individuals and entire neighborhoods. It says that the programs “enable the continuation of decades of discriminatory and racist policing under the apparent neutrality of objective data.”
Palantir’s policing tools also allow jurisdictions that normally would never communicate or share information to do so, resulting in a greater concentration of police power. As Wired noted, “When enough jurisdictions join Palantir’s interconnected web of police departments, government agencies, and databases, the resulting data trove resembles a pay-to-access social network—a Facebook of crime that’s both invisible and largely unaccountable to the citizens whose behavior it tracks.”
Of all Palantir’s predictive-policing efforts, arguably the most notorious took place in New Orleans. As revealed by The Verge in February 2018, Palantir had been secretly running a “predictive policing” pilot program for the New Orleans Police Department for six years and had been hiding it from the population of New Orleans and its city council. Key city council members were quoted as stating that they “had no idea that the city had any sort of relationship with Palantir, nor were they aware that Palantir used its program in New Orleans to market its services to another law enforcement agency for a multimillion-dollar contract.” Two weeks later, the press office of the outgoing New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu, told the Times-Picayune that his office would not renew its “pro bono contract” with Palantir.
As Palantir’s role in “predictive policing” began to grow into a national controversy, another shady intelligence-linked company, Carbyne911—also funded by Peter Thiel— began contracting with police departments and emergency-service providers. Carbyne911, which received early investments from intelligence-linked figures such as Nicole Junkermann and the infamous Jeffrey Epstein, has stepped forward to take over what was once Palantir’s predictive-policing portfolio for counties throughout the country. As explored in this article, Carbyne911 has a predictive-policing component that is eerily similar Palantir’s.
In one recent example of Palantir-Carbyne baton passing, Carbyne911 entered into an agreement with the City of New Orleans this March, a deal that gave the company access to all emergency 911 call data and complete surveillance of those who call or interact with the city’s emergency-services system, without any accountability or limitations. Just a month later, the New Orleans Police Department installed police checkpoints across the city.
Yet, Carbyne911’s takeover of New Orleans in 2020 is not simply limited to 911 call-data collection. The company has also been involved in New Orleans official COVID-19 response from the very beginning. In March, Carbyne911 also claimed to be helping to “flatten the curve” in New Orleans.
Carbyne’s recent pivot into public health followed the tarnishing of the company’s public image over the past year, which was initially spurred by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. After it was revealed that Epstein had invested a sizable sum in the company and that two of his close associates, Nicole Junkermann and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, where Carbyne directors, the company became heavily scrutinized for its connections with Israeli intelligence.
Carbyne911 has since removed most of its original board of directors from public view in an effort to distance itself from Epstein-connected characters such as Junkermann and Barak and has also been using a company called Wowza to promote its services in an apparent effort to avoid further unwanted scrutiny.
Wowza Media Systems, which was founded in 2005 by David Stubenvoll and Charlie Good, partnered with Carbyne911 in 2015 to build what Wowza refer to as a “reliable, secure streaming ecosystem.” In June 2020, the CEO of Wowza admitted that “New Orleans uses Carbyne’s COVID-19 service to manage emergency calls and help individuals who have contracted the virus contact telehealth professionals instead of flooding emergency rooms. . . . Carbyne has been fielding 70 percent of the city’s emergency calls, a majority of which were related to COVID-19 symptoms.”
While the vast majority of Palantir’s original predictive-policing programs have been discontinued over the past two years, its services are being replaced by Carbyne911. From New York to New Orleans, it seems that when one Thiel company relinquishes its control over public data, another Thiel-backed company emerges to take the reins.
The Mentality behind Palantir
Aside from the company’s role in aiding the US national-security state target minorities, it is also worth exploring the views on race espoused by Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, and Peter Thiel, Palantir’s cofounder, board member, and person most often associated with the company in the media. In late October, the New York Times published a lengthy profile of Palantir with a particular focus on its CEO, Alex Karp. In that article, Karp expressed his life-long obsessive fear of being murdered due to his “amorphous” racial background and that this fear “propels a lot of the decisions” that are made at Palantir.
New York Times writer Michael Steinberger described Karp’s fear:
“I still can’t believe I haven’t been shot and pushed out the window,” Karp told me. We were in Palantir’s New York office, located in the Meatpacking district. He wasn’t being literal, despite the office’s bulletproof windows and the bodyguards hovering nearby. Rather, he meant the feeling of inevitable doom that has plagued him since childhood. . . .
He intuited from a young age that his background made him vulnerable, he said. “You’re a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who’s also dyslexic—would you not come up with the idea that you’re [expletive]?” Although he was now the head of a major corporation, neither time nor success had diminished the anxiety. If the far right came to power, he said, he would certainly be among its victims. “Who’s the first person who is going to get hung? You make a list, and I will show you who they get first. It’s me. There’s not a box I don’t check.” His fear, he said, “propels a lot of the decisions for this company.”
A 2013 report published by Forbes noted that Karp has a 24/7 security detail that is explicitly there “to protect him from extremists.”
It is certainly telling that Karp’s longstanding and deep-seated fears of being targeted because of his ethnicity is a driving force behind many decisions that Palantir makes. Yet, while Karp professed to the New York Times that his fear is linked to a potential rise of “the far right,” this claim becomes doubtful when examining the politics and views of Karp’s close friend and Palantir cofounder, Peter Thiel.
A classmate of Thiel’s at Stanford and now best-selling author, Julie Lythcott-Haims, wrote in 2016 that Thiel had told her back when they were at university together that “apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant.” Lythcott-Haims went on to say that Thiel’s statements gave her the impression that he was “indifferent to human suffering or felt that oppressing whole swaths of humans was a rational, justifiable element of a system of governance.”
Though this is just one anecdote, Thiel’s own subsequent statements and actions support this portrayal of his views. For instance, as the New York Times recently noted, “Thiel has argued that democracy and economic freedom are incompatible and suggested that giving women the vote had undermined the latter.”
In regard to the claim about democracy and economic freedom, an August article from Reason on Thiel’s political views provides more insight. For instance, Thiel wrote in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” while a major ally of Thiel’s, blogger Curtis Yarvin, claimed that same year that democracy was “a precancerous growth always pregnant with some malignancy.”
Another influence on Thiel is German philosopher Carl Schmitt, a man infamous for his promotion of dictatorship as an inherently superior form of government. In a 2004 essay, Thiel used Schmitt’s statement that “the high point of politics are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy” in reference to the direction “the West” should take in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. At the time, Thiel had lamented that “a direct path forward” to face down the post-9/11 enemy “is prevented by America’s constitutional machinery.” It goes without saying that, at the time of the September 11 attacks, “the enemy” was perceived largely along ethnoreligious lines.
Thiel has also been linked to “white nationalists” and the “far right fringe,” the very groups that fuel Karp’s deepest fears, while individuals closely connected to Thiel, such as Jeff Giesea, are prominent supporters of “alt-right” personalities such as Mike Cernovich and Andrew “weev” Auernheimer.
Thiel’s enduring close association with Palantir and his long-standing, close relationship with Karp discredits Karp’s claim that his fear of being murdered for his ethnicity is solely based on fear of the “far right,” given that Thiel is essentially the “far right” personified. Regardless of Karp’s real reasons for feeling so afraid, what is clear is that race is at the forefront of his thinking and, thus, at the forefront of much of Palantir’s company decisions.
Privatizing Total Information Awareness
In order to fully understand the incredible power Palantir wields and why it was chosen to serve such an integral role in launching Operation Warp Speed, it is important to understand who was really behind the rise of Palantir and why.
In general terms, Palantir was created to be the privatized panopticon of the national-security state, the newest rebranding of the big data approach of intelligence agencies to quash dissent and instill obedience in the population. This has long been a key objective of US intelligence, having been pioneered by the CIA as far back as the Vietnam War. It was covertly turned against the bulk of the US population by both US and Israel intelligence during the Iran-Contra and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s, though efforts to use these big data approaches to target domestic protests and specific social movements had been ongoing for years.
The panopticon was originally an English philosopher’s concept for a new, revolutionary prison design, but the idea was more fully developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. As independent journalist Johnny Vedmore reported in October, Foucault “would use the concept of Bentham’s original Panopticon as a way to describe and explore ‘disciplinary power.’ . . . According to Foucault’s work, disciplinary power had been successful due to its utilization of three technologies: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examinations.”
Vedmore then notes:
Among the most notable of Foucault’s analyses of the utility of the Panopticon is the following quote from his book Discipline and Punish: “The major effect of the panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” In other words, the uncertainty of whether or not an individual is being constantly watched induces obedience in that individual, allowing only a few to control the many.
It is perhaps unsurprising that for the recent profile on Palantir in the New York Times Karp chose to pose with three Palantir employees under a large portrait of Foucault.
During the Reagan administration, the individuals at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal began to develop a database called Main Core, which firmly placed the US national-security state on its current, tech-fueled Foucauldian path. A senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in five presidential administrations told Radar in 2008 that Main Core was “a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” It was expressly developed for use in “continuity of government” (COG) protocols by the key Iran-Contra figure Oliver North and was used to compile a list of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be dealt with if the continuity of government protocol was ever invoked.
Main Core utilized PROMIS software, which was stolen from its owners at Inslaw Inc. by top Reagan and US intelligence officials as well as Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan. Also intimately involved in the PROMIS scandal was media baron and Israeli “super spy” Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and reportedly the man who brought the intelligence-linked child trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein into the Israeli intelligence fold. Like PROMIS, Main Core involved both US and Israeli intelligence and was a big data approach to the surveillance of perceived domestic dissidents.
The Iran-Contra and PROMIS scandals were exposed, but they were subsequently covered up, largely by the then and current US attorney general William Barr. Main Core persisted and continued to amass data. That data could not be fully tapped into and utilized by the intelligence community until after the events of September 11, 2001, which offered a golden opportunity for the use of such tools against the domestic US population, all under the guise of combating “terrorism.” For example, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 government officials reportedly saw Main Core being accessed by White House computers.
September 11 was also used as an excuse to remove information “firewalls” within the national-security state, expanding “information sharing” among agency databases and, by extension, also expanding the amount of data that could be accessed and analyzed by Main Core and its analogues. As Alan Wade, then serving as the CIA’s chief information officer, pointed out soon after 9/11: “One of the post-September 11 themes is collaboration and information sharing. We’re looking at tools that facilitate communication in ways that we don’t have today.”
In an attempt to build on these two post-9/11 objectives simultaneously, the US national-security state attempted to institute a “public-private” surveillance program so invasive that Congress defunded it just months after its creation due to concerns it would completely eliminate the right to privacy in the US. Called Total Information Awareness (TIA), the program sought to develop an “all-seeing” surveillance apparatus managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA. The official agreement was that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bioterrorism events, and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks before they could take place.
The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Reagan’s National Security Advisor during Iran-Contra and being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. Poindexter, during the Iran-Contra hearings, had famously claimed that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress.
In regard to TIA, one of Poindexter’s key allies was at the time the chief information officer of the CIA, Alan Wade. Wade met with Poindexter in relation to TIA numerous times and managed the participation of not just the CIA but all US intelligence agencies that had signed on to add their data as “nodes” to TIA and, in exchange, gained access to its tools.
The TIA program, despite the best efforts of Poindexter and his allies such as Wade, was eventually forced to shut down after considerable criticism and public outrage. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that the surveillance effort would “kill privacy in America” because “every aspect of our lives would be catalogued,” while several mainstream media outlets warned that TIA was “fighting terror by terrifying US citizens.”
Though the program was defunded, it later emerged that TIA was never actually shut down, with its various programs having been covertly divided among the web of military and intelligence agencies that make up the US national-security state. While some of those TIA programs went underground, the core panopticon software that TIA had hoped to wield began to be developed by the very company now known as Palantir, with considerable help from the CIA and Alan Wade, as well as Poindexter.
At the time it was formally launched in February 2003, the TIA program was immediately controversial, leading it to change its name in May 2003 to Terrorism Information Awareness in an apparent attempt to sound less like an all-encompassing domestic surveillance system and more like a tool specifically aimed at “terrorists.” The TIA program was shuttered by the end of 2003.
The same month as the TIA name change and with a growing backlash against the program, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Thiel, however, had begun creating the software behind Palantir months in advance, though he claims he can’t recall exactly when. Thiel, Karp, and other Palantir cofounders claimed for years that the company had been founded in 2004, despite the paperwork of Palantir’s incorporation by Thiel directly contradicting this claim.
Also, in 2003, apparently soon after Thiel formally created Palantir, arch neocon Richard Perle called Poindexter, saying that he wanted to introduce the architect of TIA to two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. According to a report in New York Magazine, Poindexter “was precisely the person” whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon,” that is, TIA. During that meeting, Thiel and Karp sought “to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.”
Soon after Palantir’s incorporation, though the exact timing and details of the investment remain hidden from the public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel became the company’s first backer, aside from Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million. In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir would not be publicly reported until mid-2006.
The money was certainly useful. In addition, Alex Karp recently told the New York Times that “the real value of the In-Q-Tel investment was that it gave Palantir access to the CIA analysts who were its intended clients.” A key figure in the making of In-Q-Tel investments during this period, including Palantir, was the CIA’s chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade.
After the In-Q-Tel investment, the CIA would be Palantir’s only client until 2008. During that period, Palantir’s two top engineers—Aki Jain and Stephen Cohen—traveled to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia every two weeks. Jain recalls making at least two hundred trips to CIA headquarters between 2005 and 2009. During those regular visits, CIA analysts “would test [Palantir’s software] out and offer feedback, and then Cohen and Jain would fly back to California to tweak it.” As with In-Q-Tel’s decision to invest in Palantir, the CIA’s chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade, played a key role in many of these meetings and subsequently in the “tweaking” of Palantir’s products.
It should come as no surprise, then, that there is an overlap between Palantir’s products and the vision that Wade and Poindexter had held for the failed TIA program. One can see the obvious parallels between Palantir and TIA by examining how the masterminds behind each describe their key functions.
Take, for instance, the following excerpt from Shane Harris’s book The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State regarding Wade’s and Poindexter’s views of TIA’s “built-in privacy protections”:
Wade liked the idea, but he heard something even more intriguing in Poindexter’s pitch, a concept that he hadn’t heard in any of the tech briefings he’d sat through since 9/11: the words “protect privacy.” Wade thought that Poindexter’s was the first ambitious information architecture that included privacy from the ground up.
He described his privacy appliance concept, in which a physical device would set between the use and the data, shielding the names and other identifying information of the millions of innocent people in the noise. The TIA system would employ “selective revelation,” Poindexter explained. The farther into the data a user wished to probe, the more outside authority he had to obtain.
Compare TIA’s “selective revelation” sales pitch with that recently offered by Karp and Thiel to the New York Times about Palantir’s own supposed privacy safeguards:
Karp and Thiel say they had two overarching ambitions for Palantir early on. The first was to make software that could help keep the country safe from terrorism. The second was to prove that there was a technological solution to the challenge of balancing public safety and civil liberties—a “Hegelian” aspiration, as Karp puts it. Although political opposites, they both feared that personal privacy would be a casualty of the war on terrorism. . .
To that end, Palantir’s software was created with two primary security features: Users are able to access only information they are authorized to view, and the software generates an audit trail that, among other things, indicates if someone has tried to obtain material off-limits to them.
The explanation offered by Poindexter and Wade for TIA and that presented by Karp and Thiel for Palantir are essentially analogous. Similarly, Palantir’s “immutable log” concept, whereby “everything a user does in Palantir creates a trail that can be audited,” was also a hallmark of the TIA system envisioned by Poindexter and Wade.
As noted in The Watchers:
Poindexter also proposed “an immutable audit trail,” a master record of every analyst who had used the TIA system, what data they’d touched, what they’d done with it. The system would be trained to spot suspicious patterns of use. . . . Poindexter wanted to use TIA to watch the watchers. The CIA team [including Alan Wade] liked what they heard.
The benefits in repurposing the “public-private” TIA into a completely private entity after TIA was publicly dismantled are obvious. For instance, given that Palantir is a private company as opposed to a government program, the way its software is used by its government and corporate clients benefits from “plausible deniability” and frees Palantir and its software from constraints that would be present if it engaged in a public project.
As this same late October New York Times profile on Palantir notes:
The data, which is stored in various cloud services or on clients’ premises, is controlled by the customer, and Palantir says it does not police the use of its products. Nor are the privacy controls foolproof; it is up to the customers to decide who gets to see what and how vigilant they wish to be.
From PROMIS to Palantir: Building the Public Health Panopticon
While Wade was involved in operating the information technology infrastructure of US intelligence and in guiding the rise of Palantir, he was also intimately involved in another company known as Chiliad. Chiliad was a data analytics company founded in the late 1990s by Paul McOwen, Christine Maxwell, and an unnamed third individual. However, Bloomberg lists Alan Wade as a cofounder of Chiliad, meaning that Wade, as the third cofounder, was involved in creating Chiliad while also serving in a top post at the CIA.
This is significant for two main reasons. First, Chiliad was developed into the very tool that became in demand by US intelligence in the immediate aftermath of September 11. It had been conveniently set up well in advance, however, allowing it to score key contracts thanks to the advanced stage of its product and its founders’ intelligence connections. This, along with a glowing recommendation from the heavily compromised 9/11 Commission, benefited Chiliad’s software, which was remarkably similar to early versions of Palantir and PROMIS software. Due to ongoing litigation in the PROMIS case, efforts were made by the US national-security state to retool and tweak the PROMIS software sufficiently so that it could argue that the software in use was dissimilar to the original stolen product, according to the original PROMIS developer, Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Inc.
Second, Wade, employed by the CIA at the time of founding Chiliad, created the company with Christine Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine Maxwell and daughter of Robert Maxwell. Before her father’s death, Christine was intimately involved in and ended up leading the US-based front company that Robert Maxwell had used to sell versions of PROMIS, which had a backdoor to US national laboratories for Israeli intelligence, seriously compromising US national security. The CIA, alongside Israeli intelligence, was intimately involved in the PROMIS software scandal. Thus, the involvement of both Wade and Maxwell in creating Chiliad and the clear overlap in the PROMIS and Chiliad software, suggests Chiliad was the US-Israeli successor to PROMIS. In addition, Wade’s role in the rise of Palantir suggests that Palantir is yet another successor to PROMIS, a possibility also explored to some extent in this article.
Notably, Palantir began its rise to prominence as the go-to counterterrorism software of the West, just when Chiliad pivoted away from that sector, eventually folding a few years later. Notably, in the years prior to its shutdown, Chiliad had begun moving into health-care data, a pivot that became very obvious by 2012, when it began adding prominent health-care industry executives to its company board and getting involved in aiding “medical research.”
Not long after Chiliad was shut down, Wade, who had also been the chairman of its board for many years, was added to the board of a UK cybersecurity firm called Darktrace. Darktrace, as noted in this article by Johnny Vedmore, is the result of the joining of UK intelligence with a team of AI researchers at Cambridge who were seeking to develop the AI “singularity.” This attempt at “self-aware” AI was subsequently developed into “cybersecurity” software under the watchful eye and direction of UK intelligence. Darktrace’s intelligence-linked software now runs not only a large swath of the UK power grid and the computers of major corporations around the world but also cybersecurity for the UK’s NHS, giving it access to patient-health data.
Not long after Darktrace’s foray into health care began, Palantir made its own pivot into health care, both for the NHS in the UK and HHS in the US. The latter partnership has expanded considerably over this past year, from HHS Protect to contact tracing and now to Operation Warp Speed. Meanwhile, Palantir’s contracts with the US military, which is managing Operation Warp Speed, have also expanded considerably over the course of the past year. Palantir’s expansion into nearly every sector of government is set to continue, particularly with president-elect Biden’s pick to lead the US intelligence community—Avril Haines, who was a consultant to Palantir right up until she joined the Biden campaign as an adviser earlier this year.
Like the planned all-seeing TIA apparatus, even mainstream outlets such as the New York Times have taken to describing Palantir as the “all-seeing eye,” the center of a panopticon that has grown exponentially under the guise of a “private sector–led” response to a public health emergency. This “public health” panopticon, as clearly seen with Palantir and its role in Warp Speed, is all about advancing the long-standing goals of the national-security state and targeting the same populations targeted by state violence under the guise of “protecting” them and the collective. Palantir’s objective is, and always has been, control of information and of knowledge and becoming the centerpiece of a vast surveillance enterprise that now extends far beyond the US borders.
The minority groups that Palantir has long targeted on behalf of the national-security state, and whom they will now identify and prioritize for Warp Speed vaccination, have long been the groups that the Western power structure has been most worried about rising up against the structural inequality and state violence that disproportionately affects them. It is thus no coincidence that the next leap of the surveillance state, through “pharmacovigiliance” and militarized aspects of Warp Speed, will target these same groups.
With military-led Operation Warp Speed and ICE-partnered Palantir gearing up to “tailor” certain COVID-19 vaccines to minority “target populations,” we will next explore, in the third and final part of this series, the individuals surrounding one particular Operation Warp Speed vaccine. This vaccine has not only had a host of safety issues but was also developed by researchers with deep ties to the British Eugenics Society, which changed its name in 1989 to the Galton Institute.
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.
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.
CNN: ‘Don’t Be Alarmed’ if People Start Dying After Taking the Vaccine
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | December 8, 2020
In an article on the COVID vaccine rollout, CNN says that Americans shouldn’t be alarmed if people start dying after taking the vaccine because “deaths may occur that won’t necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine.”
The advisory appeared in an article titled ‘Why vaccinate our most frail? Odd vote out shows the dilemma’ in which Dr. Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, cautions that vaccines don’t work as well on the frail and elderly compared to healthy people.
“When shots begin to go into arms of residents, Moore said Americans need to understand that deaths may occur that won’t necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine,” states the report.
“We would not at all be surprised to see, coincidentally, vaccination happening and then having someone pass away a short time after they receive a vaccine, not because it has anything to do with the vaccination but just because that’s the place where people at the end of their lives reside,” Moore said.
She then said Americans shouldn’t be alarmed to see people dying a day or two after receiving the COVID vaccination.
“One of the things we want to make sure people understand is that they should not be unnecessarily alarmed if there are reports, once we start vaccinating, of someone or multiple people dying within a day or two of their vaccination who are residents of a long-term care facility. That would be something we would expect, as a normal occurrence, because people die frequently in nursing homes.”
While deaths in care homes of people who take the vaccine are described as normal and nothing to do with the vaccine, some would suggest that you could make the exact same argument about deaths of those with multiple comorbidities in care homes that were put down to COVID.
Many have and have been shouted down for doing so.
The Johns Hopkins, CDC Plan to Mask Medical Experimentation on Minorities as “Racial Justice”
By Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| November 25, 2020
Under the guise of combatting “structural racism,” the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has laid out a strategy for ethnic minorities and the mentally challenged to be vaccinated first, all “as a matter of justice.” However, other claims made by the Center contradict these social justice talking points and point to other motives entirely.
With the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate set to receive an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the US government in a matter of days, its distribution and allocation is set to begin “within 24 hours” of that vaccine’s imminent approval.
The allocation strategy of COVID-19 vaccines within the US is set to dramatically differ from previous national vaccination programs. One key difference is that the vaccine effort itself, known as Operation Warp Speed, is being almost completely managed by the US military, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA), as opposed to civilian health agencies, which are significantly less involved than previous national vaccination efforts and have even been barred from attending some Warp Speed meetings. In addition, for the first time since 2001, law enforcement officers and DHS officials are set to not be prioritized for early vaccination.
Another key difference is the plan to utilize a phased approach that targets “populations of focus” identified in advance by different government organizations, including the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Characteristics of those “populations of focus,” also referred to as “critical populations” in official documentation, will then be identified by the secretive, Palantir-developed software tool known as “Tiberius” to guide Operation Warp Speed’s vaccine distribution efforts. Tiberius will provide Palantir access to sensitive health and demographic data of Americans, which the company will use to “help identify high-priority populations at highest risk of infection.”
This report is the first of a three-part series unmasking the racist components of the Pentagon-run project to both develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. It explores the COVID-19 vaccine allocation strategy first outlined by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and subsequent government allocation strategies that were informed by Johns Hopkins.
The main focus of this allocation strategy is to deliver vaccines first to racial minorities but in such a way as to make those minorities feel “at ease” and not like “guinea pigs” when receiving an experimental vaccine that those documents admit is likely to cause “certain adverse effects… more frequently in certain population subgroups.” Research has shown that those “subgroups” most at risk for adverse effects are these same minorities.
The documents also acknowledge that information warfare and economic coercion will likely be necessary to combat “vaccine hesitancy” among these minority groups. It even frames this clearly disproportionate focus on racial minorities as related to national concerns over “police brutality,” claiming that giving minorities the experimental vaccine first is necessary to combat “structural racism” and ensure “fairness and justice” in the healthcare system and society at large.
Part 2 of this series will discuss how Palantir, a company currently helping DHS and law enforcement violently target African Americans and Latinos, will be in charge of allocating “tailored” COVID-19 vaccines to those same minorities as well as Palantir’s origins and its executives’ views on race. Part 3 will explore the direct ties between a COVID-19 vaccine front-runner and the Eugenics Society, which was re-named the Galton Institute in 1989.
The Planners
The Trump administration has been criticized for its rush to develop and deploy a COVID-19 vaccine and particularly for installing Monclef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive with ongoing conflicts of interest, as chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, the Pentagon-run program to produce and distribute the vaccine. Yet, if and when a Biden administration takes power, Operation Warp Speed is set to proceed with little, if any, modification.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) director Tom Inglesby, who will serve on the Biden Health and Human Services (HHS) transition team, has praised Slaoui, telling Stat News that the longer someone like him can remain in charge of the nation’s COVID-19 vaccine effort, “the better it is for the country.”
Inglesby, who led discussions at the CHS’s Event 201 exercise in October 2019 and who was one of the primary authors of the controversial Johns Hopkins Dark Winter exercise in 2001, is emblematic of the US government’s and the mainstream media’s general reliance on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (of which CHS is part) for pandemic-related matters. Slaoui regularly appears on network TV as a COVID-19 oracle and has been called “one of the nation’s go-to experts on the spread of the coronavirus.” Readers may note that the Johns Hopkins “coronavirus tracker” has been used by virtually every mainstream news source since the beginning of COVID-19 reporting. This relationship is expected to continue, if not intensify, in a Biden administration.
Both Kathleen Hicks, the lead on Biden’s Department of Defense (DOD) transition team, and Alexander Bick, on Biden’s National Security Council transition team, are scholars at Johns Hopkins Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, reflecting the university’s broader influence on a future Biden administration. Yet, the most significant way the Biden transition intersects with Johns Hopkins is through the CHS.
Originally called the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, the CHS is a think tank within Johns Hopkins that regularly gives recommendations to both the US government and the World Health Organization and, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has emerged as a voice of authority on all matters COVID-19 in the US. The center’s founding director was D. A. Henderson, best known for his role in the WHO-sponsored smallpox vaccination campaign. Henderson also held several government positions, including serving as associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under George H. W. Bush. He was also the longtime dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Dr. Tom Inglesby
Another member of the Biden transition team is Luciana Borio, a current member of the CHS steering committee. As both a former FDA scientist and former National Security Council member, Borio signifies the relationship between the national security state and the biosecurity state. She’s currently a vice president of In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital arm of the CIA.
In-Q-Tel’s current executive vice president, Tara O’Toole, who at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak declared that “the best way ever to protect those who are well is with vaccines,” is Inglesby’s mentor and predecessor as director of the CHS. She was also a key player and the lead author of the CHS’s Dark Winter and CladeX bioterror simulations. The Engineering Contagion series published by The Last American Vagabond earlier this year explored the Dark Winter simulation in depth, including how the simulation eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks that followed soon after September 11, 2001, with several participants demonstrating apparent foreknowledge of those attacks.
Ending racism with vaccines?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has consistently referenced materials developed by the CHS in its recent COVID-19 vaccine allocation literature. These CDC-issued materials form the backbone of the various vaccine allocation strategies issued by many state governments. Chief among these is the COVID-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook, published at the end of October. A key aspect of that program is the determination of “critical populations for COVID-19 vaccination, including those groups identified to receive the first available doses of COVID-19 vaccine when supply is expected to be limited.”
In August, the CHS published its Inglesby co-written Interim Framework for COVID-19 Vaccine Allocation and Distribution, which is cited by the CDC as a key reference for its nationwide COVID-19 vaccine-allocation strategy. This report will examine this document, in particular, as well as other related documents that reveal that ethnic and racial minorities, specifically those over sixty-five and those who make up part of the “essential” workforce, are set to be the first to receive experimental COVID-19 vaccines.
The Interim Framework argues there is a need to prioritize ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans and Latino Americans, in order to reflect “fairness and justice.” It states that “a critical difference” between COVID-19 vaccine allocation and the “context envisioned in the 2018 guidance for pandemic influenza vaccine allocation” is the fact that the US is “currently in the midst of a national reckoning on racial injustice, prompted by cases of police brutality and murder.” It goes on to state that “although structural racism was as present in the 2018 and previous influenza epidemics as it is today, the general public acknowledgment of racial injustice was not.”
It goes without saying that police brutality is decidedly unrelated to vaccine allocation as is increased national awareness of racial injustice as it relates to police brutality. This is further compounded by the police, in this document, being removed as a priority group for COVID-19 vaccine allocation, despite having been designated a priority group in all other government vaccine-allocation guidance since the 2001 anthrax attacks. Also odd is that it is only increased access of minorities to the COVID-19 vaccine that is cited as a way to address “structural racism in health systems,” not other policies that would be more likely to address the problem such as Medicare for All.
In addition, the Interim Framework admits that “communities of color, particularly Black populations, may be more wary of officials responsible for vaccine-related decisions due to past medical injustices committed by authorities on Black communities.” There is a long list of these “medical injustices” committed against minority communities by the US government, including the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which are discussed in detail later.
Another odd passage on “justice” and “equity” as it relates to vaccinating ethnic minorities first states:
“In the context of vaccine allocation, treating individuals fairly has sometimes been defined as treating everyone the same or equally, for example, by distributing vaccines on a first-come, first-served basis or by giving everyone an equal chance at getting vaccine via a lottery. Because the impact of the vaccine is different for different people (i.e., some people are at greater risk of death), the straightforward ways of treating people equally are often rejected as unfair or as an inefficient use of vaccine. . . .
In the context of vaccine allocation, promoting equity and social justice requires addressing higher rates of COVID-19–related severe illness and mortality among systematically disadvantaged or marginalized groups. . .
As a matter of justice, these disparities in COVID-19 risk and adverse outcomes across racial and ethnic groups should be addressed in our overall COVID-19 response.”
This extreme emphasis on the “fairness and justice” of prioritizing minorities for the vaccine is contradicted by other claims made in the same document. For example, the document also states:
“The ultimate safety of an approved vaccine is not completely knowable until it has been administered to millions of people. During clinical trials, tens of thousands of individuals will receive the vaccine but that may fail to show safety concerns that occur with less frequency, such as 1 in a million. This can be a concern for particularly severe adverse effects.”
It also notes: “It is also possible that certain adverse effects may occur more frequently in certain population subgroups, which may not be apparent until millions are vaccinated.”
Notably, African Americans are understood to be at a higher risk for adverse reactions to vaccines. According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania, African Americans exhibit a disproportionately higher immune response to certain flu shots. And in 2014, the Mayo Clinic found that African Americans have almost double the immune response to the rubella vaccine as Caucasian Americans. Immune reactions that are too strong can result in more adverse events and inflammatory responses such as transverse myelitis, a debilitating inflammation and paralysis of the spinal cord. A 2010 study in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health showed that African American boys were at significantly greater risk of suffering severe neurological injury from the hepatitis B shot as compared to Caucasians.
This raises the question as to whether African Americans should be prioritized for a poorly tested vaccine when the available science shows that this demographic may be at a higher risk for adverse reactions to vaccines. Previous coronavirus vaccine projects triggered immune responses so strong that the test animals died, and the vaccine projects got scrapped. The Johns Hopkins CHS Interim Framework claiming that vaccinating African Americans and other ethnic minorities first represents “fairness and justice” and would address “structural racism” does not square with its admission that the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine is “not completely knowable” until millions have received it and that “certain adverse effects may occur more frequently in certain population subgroups.”
Who is really to blame for “vaccine hesitancy”?
For a successful rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine, the federal government will need to reckon with “vaccine hesitancy,” which the WHO named as one of the top ten threats to global health in 2019 and which is a major concern discussed at length in the August Interim Framework on COVID-19 vaccination strategies.
According to recent polls, such hesitancy is, understandably, most prevalent among African Americans, the group that has most commonly been used as human guinea pigs by the US government and associated scientific and medical institutions. For instance, there are the infamous Tuskegee University experiments, devised by the US Public Health Service (now a division of HHS) and the CDC. The unwitting participants in the study, all of whom who were African American, were told that they were receiving free health-care services from the federal government, while actually they were being intentionally untreated for syphilis so government scientists could study the devastating progression of the disease. Deception was critical to the experiment, as the participants did not know they were part of an experiment at all and were also kept unaware of their true diagnosis. While Tuskegee may be the most well-known example of racist medical experimentation in the US, it’s far from the only one.
For example, during Manhattan Project, the undertaking that produced the atom bomb, the US government contracted dozens of physicians to inject unknowing hospital patients with up to 4.7 micrograms of radioactive plutonium, forty-one times normal lifetime exposure. The goal of this experiment was to pinpoint the dosage at which radioactive elements such as plutonium would cause illnesses like leukemia, and to measure the amount of radioactivity that lingers in the blood, tissues, bones, and urine. Between 1944 and 1994 the Atomic Energy Commission supported thousands of experimental projects sanctioning such radiation on human subjects, most of whom were African Americans.
From 1954 to 1962, the Sloan-Kettering Institute, which receives hundreds of millions of dollars of NIH funds annually, injected over four hundred African American inmates at Ohio State Prison with live cancer cells to observe how the body might destroy them. The primary sponsor for this research was the National Institutes of Health, which also partially sponsored the Tuskegee experiments.
From 1987 through 1991, US researchers administered as much as five hundred times the approved dosage of the Edmonton-Zagreb (EZ) measles vaccine to African American and Latino babies in low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods as part of a vaccine experiment. Consent forms did not inform parents of the increased dosage or of the fact that the vaccine was experimental. Parents were also not informed that the vaccine had already been given to two thousand children in Haiti, Senegal, and Guinea-Bissau with disastrous results. For example, in Senegal, children who received the jab died at a rate 80 percent higher than children who did not receive it. The CDC would later characterize the US trials as “clearly a mistake.”
Between 1992 and 1997, Columbia University’s Lowenstein Center for the Study and Prevention of Childhood Disruptive Behavior Disorders conducted studies that sought to establish a link between genetics and violence, focusing on minority children in New York City. These experiments targeted 126 boys between the ages of six and ten, 100 percent of whom were either African American, Latino, or biracial. In exchange for $100 and a $25 Toys “R” Us gift card, the children, selected because their older brothers had come into contact with the juvenile probation system, were taken from their homes, denied food and water, and given a drug called fenfluramine. Prior to these experiments, fenfluramine had never been administered to people under the age of twelve, and it was already known that the drug was associated with heart-valve damage, brain damage, and death.
Such historical facts raise obvious questions about the reasons for “vaccine hesitancy” and how they are currently being approached by the US government and related institutions. While it would make the most sense to combat this problem by holding to account the people responsible for past abuses, such as those described above, the opposite has been the case. Instead, the CHS and other institutions, particularly regarding the coming COVID-19 vaccination campaign, have proposed several other means of combatting “vaccine hesitancy,” ranging from deception to information warfare to economic coercion.
A dark legacy poised to continue
Given the long-standing exploitive relationship between US medicine and ethnic minorities, the August Interim Framework addresses the situation that communities of color, and in particular black populations, “may be more wary of officials responsible for vaccine-related decisions due to past medical injustices.” It states: “Anticipate hesitancy among marginalized populations who may be fearful or wary of seeking vaccination at sites that have historically caused mistrust.”
Another CHS paper, published in July and titled “The Public’s Role in COVID-19 Vaccination,” which is cited heavily in the August framework, acknowledged the US “legacy of experimentation on Black men and women.”
However, the CHS document also notes that more than one COVID-19 vaccine candidate “may be available at the same time” and they “may have different safety and efficacy profiles across different population groups and may have different logistical requirements.” It adds that “it is also possible that certain adverse effects may occur more frequently in certain population subgroups, which may not be apparent until millions are vaccinated.”
It is notable that Palantir, the CIA-linked government technology contractor, has been put in charge of creating the software that will “decide” which “population subgroups” are given what vaccine. Palantir is perhaps best known for its controversial role in targeting undocumented immigrants through its contracts with ICE and its role in predictive-policing efforts that disproportionately targeted African Americans. It is certainly unsettling that those same ethnic groups that Palantir is most controversial for targeting on behalf of the national-security state and law enforcement are the same “critical populations” that the company will initially identify for the US military–led COVID-19 vaccination program, Operation Warp Speed.
In addition, in a move that can only aggravate minority community “vaccine hesitancy,” the August CHS Interim Framework recommends that the CDC transform the current “vaccines adverse-event reporting system” from a voluntary system that relies on individuals sending in reports to the government to “an active surveillance system” that “monitors all vaccine recipients,” possibly via unspecified “electronic mechanisms.”
The Last American Vagabond reported last month that Operation Warp Speed, seemingly having taken a cue from the Interim Framework, plans to utilize “incredibly precise . . . tracking systems” that will “ensure that patients each get two doses of the same vaccine and to monitor them for adverse health effects.” Those systems will be managed, in part, by the intelligence-linked tech giants Google and Oracle.
A woman passes by graffiti reading ‘No vaccine, No tracking, No COVID’, in Montreal, Sunday, August 16, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues in Canada. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
The main stated purpose of these “tracking systems,” referred to in other Warp Speed documents as “pharmacovigilance systems,” is to monitor the longer-term effects of new, unlicensed vaccine-production methods that are being used in the production of every Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccine candidate. These vaccines, per Warp Speed’s own documents, state that these methods “have limited previous data on safety in humans . . . the long-term safety of these vaccines will be carefully assessed using pharmacovigilance surveillance and Phase 4 (post-licensure) clinical trials,” following the administration of the COVID-19 vaccines to the prioritized “critical populations.”
A strategy takes shape
Given the above, the unprecedented facets of the Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccination plan—that is, its focus on ethnic minorities as the first to receive the experimental COVID-19 vaccine, its interest in giving different vaccine candidates to “different population groups,” and studying the largely unknown effects through “tracking systems” and unspecified “electronic mechanisms”— are all things that would obviously further fuel mistrust by those ethnic groups that have historically been targets of medical experimentation by the US government.
Furthermore, that COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution efforts are being spearheaded by the military and national-security apparatus, as well as having the intimate involvement of controversial contractors such as Palantir, will likely exacerbate minority distrust as Operation Warp Speed advances, given that these same groups are those most often found to be on the receiving end of militarized state violence. Also concerning is that law enforcement, military, and Department of Homeland Security officials will no longer be priority vaccine-allocation targets, for the first time since the 2001 anthrax attacks, while no convincing reason for their exclusion is offered.
Yet, instead of honestly addressing these unprecedented recommendations, the effort to get around the “vaccine hesitancy” issue as it relates to minorities plans to rely on tactics that avoid addressing any of these issues directly. In one example, although the August Interim Framework recommends “directly prioritizing” ethnic minorities, it recognizes that doing so “could further threaten the fragile trust that some have in the medical and public health system, particularly if there is the perception that there has been a lack of testing to assess vaccine safety and that they are the ‘guinea pigs.’” The document also states that “the implementation of directly prioritizing communities of color could also be challenging and divisive, as determining how to access specific populations and how to determine eligibility based on race or ethnicity includes many sensitive challenges.”
As a workaround for such concerns, the CHS suggests that “prioritizing other cohorts of the population, such as essential workers or those with underlying health conditions associated with poorer COVID-19 outcomes, could also indirectly help address the disproportionate burden of this pandemic on communities of color” due to the high representation of those minorities in the essential workforce.
The document continues: “While this approach might avoid some of the challenges outlined above, it would also need to be implemented in a way that ensures vaccines are equitably distributed across subcategories of these categories.” Thus, it suggests prioritizing “those individuals and groups who face both severe health and severe economic risks, specifically essential workers at higher risk of severe illness—or whose household members are at higher risk—who will suffer severe economic harm if they stop working.” Those groups at “higher risk of severe illness,” the document later notes, are incidentally ethnic minorities.
In other words, the strategy proposed by the CHS is to specifically prioritize cohorts of the US population that contain high proportions of ethnic minorities without directly prioritizing those minorities in order to, somewhat deceptively, avoid exacerbating “vaccine hesitancy” concerns among those groups by directly singling them out.
The Interim Framework acknowledges the high prevalence of ethnic minorities in the essential workforce and cites a paper published in April 2020 by the Center for Economic and Policy Research that notes that “people of color are overrepresented in many occupations with frontline industries.”
In addition to prioritizing essential workforce cohorts, which have a high percentage of ethnic minorities, the CHS document also suggests that prisoners, another group where ethnic minorities are heavily overrepresented, and “undocumented immigrant communities of color” should also be prioritized. Like the essential workforce strategy, this would ensure increased vaccine uptake by ethnic minorities without prioritizing them directly.
It is also worth noting that, in addition to the focus on ethnic minorities, the Interim Framework also recommends that “differently abled and mentally challenged populations, who can experience difficulties in accessing healthcare and could be in higher-risk living settings, such as assisted living facilities,” be included as a “target population” along with ethnic minorities.
This strategy as laid out by the CHS appears to have been embraced by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is the official government body that will designate the “target populations” of the COVID-19 vaccination strategy.
Also in August, Kathleen Dooling, a CDC epidemiologist writing on behalf of ACIP’s COVID-19 Vaccines Work Group, stated that “groups for early phase vaccination” should be those that “overlap” the most with, first, those with “high risk” medical conditions, second, essential workers, and, third, adults over sixty-five. As previously noted, the essential workforce is predominantly composed of ethnic minorities.
Notably, the “high risk” medical conditions listed in this same document are conditions that are all significantly more prevalent among ethnic minorities, such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, chronic kidney disease, serious heart conditions, and sickle cell disease. Cancer is also listed and, while prevalent across the US population at large, the incidence of cancer is highest among African Americans.
Particularly notable is the inclusion of sickle cell disease, as African Americans in the US have a much higher probability of having that condition than any other group. According to 2010 data analyzed by the CDC, the sickle cell gene, which is necessary in both parents for a child to inherit sickle cell disease, is present in 73 per 1,000 African American newborns, compared to 3 per 1,000 Caucasian newborns.
The “overlap” strategy fits with current CDC ACIP guidelines for vaccine recommendations, which hold that, if vaccination supply is limited, the CDC should “reduce the extra burden the disease is having on people already facing disparities.” The “overlap” strategy as laid out in the recent ACIP COVID-19 Vaccines Work Group document, however, has the inevitable end result of ensuring that the vast majority of those who will first receive the experimental COVID-19 vaccine will be ethnic minorities over the age of sixty-five and ethnic minorities in the essential workforce.
Also noteworthy in relation to the prioritization of ethnic minorities is that in March the government interpreted federal regulations to grant liability immunity to any entity producing, distributing, manufacturing, or administering COVID-19 countermeasures, including vaccines. According to HHS, this move may also “provide immunity from certain liability under civil rights laws,” meaning that those involved with the COVID-19 vaccination campaign may not be liable if found to violate the rights of groups protected under civil rights law, that is, ethnic minorities.
Controlling the narrative
Another tactic promoted by the CHS, as well as the CDC and Warp Speed, to combat “vaccine hesitancy” is aggressive communication strategies that include “saturating” the media landscape with pro-vaccine content while greatly reducing content deemed to promote “vaccine hesitancy.” The national-security state, which is managing Operation Warp Speed, has become increasingly involved in this media effort, particularly by censoring content that is considered to be anti-vaccine (including, in their view, news outlets critical of the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine manufacturers) by using counterterror tools that have previously been used to disrupt online terrorist propaganda.
After the October 2019 coronavirus pandemic simulation, Event 201, the CHS issued a statement that media companies have a responsibility to ensure that “authoritative messages are prioritized.” The CHS had co-sponsored Event 201 alongside the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
There is much more to this information war than just the rapidly accelerating online censorship effort. For instance, the official Operation Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines” notes that “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”
The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework known as “Vaccinate with Confidence” for its communications thrust. The third pillar of that strategy is called “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”
Like the official Warp Speed guidance, the CDC Interim Framework also sees “community outreach” as an essential element for a successful vaccine campaign and suggests funding and training community health workers to promote vaccination specifically to “underserved, disproportionately affected groups.” It details how the US government might engage African Americans, Latino Americans, and lower-income populations to build trust in connection with vaccine recommendations and get around “concerns that they are ‘testing subjects’ for a novel vaccine.”
The CHS document notes, for example, the importance of cultural competence when promoting vaccines, advising that vaccinating at “churches, schools, culturally specific community centers or senior centers” might sit better with marginalized populations and make them feel more at ease. Such considerations were further elaborated on by Luciana Borio in September. That month, the vice president of In-Q-Tel and member of Biden’s transition team, wrote that while it may be appropriate to use US military resources for vaccination efforts, “any such federal engagement must be done in a collaborative manner sensitive to public perceptions that may be engendered by having a public health function fulfilled by individuals in uniform.”
A July CHS paper, “The Public’s Role in COVID-19 Vaccination,” a document Luciana Borio also helped write, argued, “Vaccination sites should not be heavily policed or send any signals that the site may be unsafe for Black or other minority communities.” This CHS paper further states that “trusted community spokespersons” should be utilized for a “communication campaign,” amplifying “vaccine-affirming, personally relevant messages.” Like similar WHO materials, it advocates tailoring the campaign to specific audiences and identifying a network of spokespeople to deliver a “salient and specific message repeatedly, delivered by multiple trusted messengers and via diverse media channels.”
Luciana Borio, former director of the U.S. FDA’s Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats and current member of the Biden/Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board.
The CDC also recommends vaccine administration at places such as university parking lots, soup kitchens, public libraries, and faith-based organizations. An October CDC report reads: “For people living in institutions, consider vaccination at intake; for people attending colleges/universities, vaccinate at enrollment.” It also proposes that US states and territories utilize nontraditional vaccination sites such as homeless shelters and food pantries.
The prospect of red-carpet celebrities, influencers, and “trusted messengers” endorsing public-health policy is not unthinkable. According to NBC New York, New York and New Jersey have already recruited celebrities to urge residents to follow CDC guidelines. Actors including Julia Roberts, Penelope Cruz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Robin Wright, and Hugh Jackman earlier this year joined a coordinated campaign to “pass the mic to COVID-19 experts.”
In addition, this summer the WHO paid PR firm Hill & Knowlton Strategies $135,000 to identify micro-influencers, macro-influencers, and what it calls “hidden heroes” who “shape and guide conversations” to promote WHO messaging on social media and promote the organization’s image as a COVID-19 authority. Hill & Knowlton are controversial for having previously manufactured the false “incubator baby” testimony delivered in front of Congress that propelled the US into the first Gulf War in the early 1990s.
“The Public’s Role in COVID-19 Vaccination” also urges using groups such as faith-based organizations, schools, homeowners’ associations, and unions trusted by “hard-to-reach audiences” to convey positive vaccine messages and to “modulate public perceptions of vaccination.” Accordingly, the July CHS paper notes “the importance of using outside groups who have relationships with the community, instead of direct government involvement.” It should be noted that during the Tuskegee experiments, the US Public Health Service hired Eunice Rivers, a black nurse with a close relationship to the local minority community, to maintain contact with those who were part of the experiment to ensure they continued to participate.
This outsourcing framework as laid out by the CHS is reproduced in the federal government’s own literature. An October CDC report entitled Interim Playbook for Jurisdiction Operations describes the importance of engaging what minority populations would consider “trusted sources” such as union representatives, college presidents, athletic coaches, state licensure boards, homeless shelter staff, soup kitchen managers, and faith leaders to “address hesitancy” in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Operation Warp Speed’s document “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” released the same day as the CDC Interim Playbook, gives more specific examples of the government’s ongoing work with organizations “representing minority populations,” stating that faith-based organizations can be critical. “HHS’s Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiatives is working with minority-serving faith and community groups . . . and encouraging participation in the vaccination program,” the document reads. It also states that an “information campaign” led by HHS’s public affairs department is already working to “target key populations and communities to ensure maximum vaccine acceptance.”
Of note is that a member of Biden’s Office of Management and Budget transition team is Bridget Dooling. The OMB houses the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which reviews all regulations across the federal government. Dooling previously worked at OIRA, and from 2009 until 2011 worked under the direction of then-OIRA administrator Cass Sunstein. On Twitter, Dooling regularly interacts with Sunstein. She has frequently promoted Sunstein’s work on Twitter, especially this past month.
Notably, in 2008, Sunstein authored a paper encouraging the US government to employ covert agents to “cognitively infiltrate” online dissident groups that promote anti-government “conspiracy theories” and to maintain a vigorous “counter misinformation establishment.”
Elements of his strategy for tackling anti-government “conspiracy theories” are analogous to the aforementioned CHS theme of using “outside groups who have relationships with the community” instead of the government directly. “Governments can supply these independent bodies with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” he contended in his paper.
Sunstein was recently made chair of the World Health Organization’s Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health to ensure “vaccine acceptance and uptake in the context of COVID-19.”
In September he also wrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg titled “How to Fight Back against Coronavirus Vaccine Phobia,” suggesting that “high-profile people who are respected and admired by those who lack confidence in vaccines” will help sell the public on the safety of vaccines. “Trusted politicians, athletes or actors—thought to be ‘one of us’ rather than ‘one of them’—might explicitly endorse vaccination,” he writes.
When all else fails, coerce
In addition to this information warfare approach to combatting “vaccine hesitancy,” the government also intends to stave off possible hesitancy through economic coercion, that is, by using economic incentives, even linking vaccination to entrance into the workforce, housing assistance, food, travel, and education.
Sunstein’s Bloomberg piece, for example, states that when a vaccine is available, “an economic incentive, such as a small gift certificate, can help” make it easy for “people who are at particular risk. Such gift cards will inevitably be more effective at swaying decisions of the poor.”
Former 2020 Presidential Candidate and United States Representative for Maryland’s 6th congressional district John Delaney recently penned an article in the Washington Post titled “Pay Americans to Take a Coronavirus Vaccine,” in which he argues a way to overcome the “historical level of distrust” in the vaccine development process is to take advantage of the current economic crisis and “pay people to take a COVID vaccine.” Delaney writes “Such an incentive might be the most effective way to persuade people to overcome suspicion or even fear. . .”
CHS’s “The Public’s Role in COVID-19 Vaccination” paper also details how bundling services like “food security, rent assistance, [and] free clinic services” with vaccination can increase vaccine intake. “Local and state public health agencies should explore opportunities to bundle COVID-19 vaccination with other safety net services,” it suggests. One way of doing this is to simply provide “food aid, employment aid, or other preventative health services” that “may be urgently needed” at vaccination sites. “[And] in some cases,” says the CHS, “it also may be acceptable and feasible to deliver vaccination via home visits by community health nurses when vaccination is bundled with delivery of other services.”
This strategy for increasing vaccine intake parallels what the CHS proposes in order to make digital contact tracing technology (DCTT) widespread in the population without mandating it outright. “Instead of making use fully voluntary and initiated by users, there are ways that DCTT could be put into use without users’ voluntary choice,” a recent CHS paper “Digital Contact Tracing for Pandemic Response” reads. It continues: “For example, use of an app could be mandated as a precondition for returning to work or school, or even further, to control entry into a facility or transportation (such as airplanes) through scanning of a QR code.”
Palantir and priority populations
Aside from the troubling aspects of the COVID-19 vaccination strategy as outlined above, there is the separate issue of the way in which these “populations of focus” will be chosen and identified. Palantir, the big data firm with deep and persisting ties to the CIA, has created a new software tool expressly for Warp Speed called Tiberius. Not only will Tiberius use Palantir’s Gotham software and its artificial intelligence components to “help identify high-priority populations,” it will produce delivery timetables and map out the locations for vaccine distribution based on the masses of data it has collected through various contracts with HHS and data-sharing alliances with In-Q-Tel, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, among others.
These data include extremely sensitive information about American citizens and the lack of privacy safeguards governing Palantir’s growing access to American healthcare data has even gotten the attention of Congress, with several Senators and Representatives warning in July that Palantir’s massive stores of data “could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways, such as in the law and immigration enforcement context.”
Given that Palantir, at present, is best known for targeting the same minorities that are slated to be “priority populations” for early receipt of the experimental COVID-19 vaccine, Tiberius and the company behind it, including the obsessive “race war” fears of its top executive, will be explored in Part 2 of this series.
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.
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.
WHO Envoy: Life Won’t Return to Normal For at Least 2 Years
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | December 7, 2020
The WHO’s special envoy for the global COVID-19 response says that despite the arrival of a COVID-19 vaccine, normal life won’t resume for at least two years.
Dr David Nabarro suggested that social distancing and masks were something that would have to continue as a way of “treating this virus with respect.”
“This will mean face masks and physical distancing otherwise the virus does keep on surging. The reality is it will be some months before we can dispense with these precautions,” he said.
When asked when things would return to normal, Nabarro suggested that this wouldn’t occur until the end of 2022 at the earliest.
“I hate making predictions, but let’s just consider it in the big picture. None of us will be safe until the whole world is safe,” remarked Nabarro.
“Big patches of normality are coming up soon, but not everyone will be vaccinated for at least a couple of years. So normal life as we know it is a couple of years away for the world,” he added.
As we have previously highlighted, two years may seem a naive target for a return to normality given that some prominent figures have said the world will never get back to what it was pre-COVID.
“Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal,” wrote World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab.
“The short response is: never. Nothing will ever return to the ‘broken’ sense of normalcy that prevailed prior to the crisis because the coronavirus pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory,” he added.
In addition to Schwab, a senior U.S. Army official said that mask wearing and social distancing will become permanent, while CNN’s international security editor Nick Paton Walsh asserted that the mandatory wearing of masks will become “permanent,” “just part of life,” and that the public would need to “come to terms with it.”
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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