Federal government is accused of using antiterrorism tech to target vaccine dissent
Using it against its own citizens
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | February 2, 2023
The US federal government is adopting military-grade AI that was used to crack down on ISIS to censor dissent by US citizens on issues like election fraud and vaccine hesitancy, according to the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, Mike Benz.
Private firms and universities have received millions of dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency, to develop tools similar to those developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC) program in 2011.
SMISC’s tools were used “to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information,” in the Middle East. In a report, Mike Benz detailed how the NSF and other organizations are using this technology to censor the speech of Americans.
“One of the most disturbing aspects of the Convergence Accelerator Track F domestic censorship projects is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad,” reads the report.
Speaking to Just the News, he said: “DARPA’s been funding an AI network using the science of social media mapping dating back to at least 2011-2012, during the Arab Spring abroad and during the Occupy Wall Street movement here at home. They then bolstered it during the time of ISIS to identify homegrown ISIS threats in 2014-2015.”
According to Benz, the NSF has adopted DARPA’s technology to target two groups of Americans: those skeptical of recent election results and those who claim COVID-19 vaccines could be harmful.
“The terrifying thing is, as all of this played out, it was redirected inward during 2016 — domestic populism was treated as a foreign national security threat,” Benz said.
“What you’ve seen is a grafting on of these concepts of mis- and disinformation that were escalated to such high-intensity levels in the news over the past several years being converted into a tangible, formal government program to fund and accelerate the science of censorship,” he said.
“You had this project at the National Science Foundation called the Convergence Accelerator,” Benz recounted, “which was created by the Trump administration to tackle grand challenges like quantum technology. When the Biden administration came to power, they basically took this infrastructure for multidisciplinary science work to converge on a common science problem and took the problem of what people say on social media as being on the level of, say, quantum technology.
“And so they created a new track called the track F program … and it’s for ‘trust and authenticity,’ but what that means is, and what it’s a code word for is, if trust in the government or trust in the media cannot be earned, it must be installed. And so they are funding artificial intelligence, censorship capacities, to censor people who distrust government or media.”
Benz noted how mainstream media and fact-checkers have become arbiters of truth, determining what is acceptable and unacceptable to post online, and how the pandemic has normalized “censorship in the name of public health.”
“What’s happened now is the government says, ‘Okay, we’ve established this normative foothold in it being okay to [censor political speech], now we’re going to supercharge you guys with all sorts of DARPA military grade censorship, weaponry, so that you can now take what you’ve achieved in the censorship space and scale it to the level of a U.S. counterinsurgency operation,’” Benz explained.
Atrocities Aren’t Accidents
Three years on, we have enough information on the pandemic architects to send them to prison. So why are they still getting away with murder?
Helen of desTroy | January 5, 2023
The information barrier separating establishment media consumers from pandemic heretics who do their own research is unmistakably crumbling. Every day, more doctors and more scientific papers are admitting that the mRNA gene therapy injections they once championed so fervently not only don’t protect the user from catching Covid-19 but may actually destroy their immune system, stop their hearts, or cause sudden death. Statisticians have incontrovertible proof of excess deaths in previously-healthy young people far outstripping any rise in mortality during the supposed height of the pandemic – or any other time in recent history, for that matter. The utterly avoidable carnage is such that even if we didn’t have an extensive psychological profile of the culprits, there would be no doubt it was premeditated and deliberate. And since those scumbags couldn’t resist leaving behind the usual array of PowerPoint slideshows, tabletop pandemic simulations, woefully fictionalized clinical trial data, and other criminal detritus, prosecution should be a breeze. After three years, we know more than ever about this criminal enterprise and the people responsible – certainly enough to make sure they never breathe free air again.
Except Anthony Fauci, architect of the steepest decline in life expectancy in American history, was allowed to gracefully bow out after 40 years bilking the taxpayer out of the highest salary in Washington as director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, his entire bloodstained career a case study in how to get away with murder. Bill Gates, not two years after threatening that the next pandemic would “get our attention,” has just conducted another tabletop pandemic simulation, this time whipping up an enterovirus that kills 15 million children, only to whine that no one trusts his miracle shots anymore. The WHO has designated “anti-vaxxers” public enemy number one, even accusing them of murder, while the New Yorker calls for permanent mask mandates and a coterie of washed-up celebrities insist the unvaccinated belong in jail. This is not the behavior of a criminal gang caught red-handed. What happened to “knowledge is power”? Why has humanity gone limp when it should be dealing the killing blow to these psychopaths and those giving them their marching orders?
As moribund as human civilization seemed in 2020, the world at the start of 2023 is practically unrecognizable. No longer mocking the TV-gullible in their fear-forts built of toilet paper and canned beans, we can’t even afford to stockpile such luxury objects – but religiously defend our penury as a necessary sacrifice, enduring cold showers so that a Nazi fetishist can climb into bed with BlackRock. A “democracy” whose citizens knew the system was rigged has become an indoctrination center where questioning that rigging is seen as a terrorism threat. A language once merely fraught with cliches and self-marginalizing semantic boobytraps has become one whose most loaded terms change definitions from day to day, where raising questions about why the linguistic ground is constantly shifting beneath one’s feet is dismissed as irrational.
“how do I work this darn memory-hole again?”
But it has always been like this, we’re reassured by the faceless “fact-checkers” who have formed an impenetrable biofilm over social media, nudging us into a homogenous future while rewriting the recent past to remove any stray genocide. If words are truly violence as so many of them insist, their body count surely rivals that of Fauci and his white-coated army. The word “gaslight,” overused to the point of meaninglessness, is no longer sufficient to describe the firehose of lies (lie-hose?), often presented directly alongside conflicting information, that assaults us when we turn on our computers or unlock our phones. But then, the narrative managers’ aim is not necessarily persuasion in the traditional sense but to infect the target’s perception and processing centers so that they begin to doubt their own reality, gradually substituting elements of the establishment’s fantasy, sacrificing those cumbersome human instincts for the reassurance of being a Team Player on the winning team. No one can withstand the lie-hose forever – there’s a reason you and everyone you know look like you’ve aged 10 years since you first heard the word “coronavirus” – but if it hasn’t drained you of your sanity yet, you may want to see about deprogramming your loved ones from the Cult of Corona. We’re going to need everyone we can get.
Not long ago, ruling class rag the Atlantic published what was supposed to be a plea for ‘pandemic amnesty,’ an apparent white flag bylined by economist Emily Oster that argued that because the government’s devastating policies had been adopted with good intentions, and no one could have possibly guessed what the results would be, it was important for those on all sides of the issue to forgive and move on. It was the equivalent of a typewritten letter from Genghis Khan breezily explaining that you shouldn’t be mad that his Golden Horde razed your village to the ground, slaughtered your livestock and had their way with your daughters, he just thought buildings looked better on fire, and by the way could those girls maybe smile more? – but forgiving you for not having a four-course dinner ready to accompany his post-coital cigarette. It has been clear since the scale of the mRNA bioweapon’s harms became apparent that the architects of the Covid-19 experiment would have to either play dumb (“We didn’t know!”) or go full Nuremberg (“Just following orders!”) if they hoped to avoid a public execution, but this – suggesting those responsible for the most horrific crime against humanity in recorded history should be essentially forgiven for their crimes with the excuse that they didn’t know better while their victims are encouraged to beg for mercy from their tormentors (and presumably sign away the right to demand reparations) was a bold strategy indeed. Unsurprisingly, Oster was digitally torn limb from limb for her trouble, and some people even called the public display of rage a victory, believing the outpouring of powerful emotions had spooked the predators. But others desperately reached for what they were sure was an olive branch this time, falling for the same promise that led them first to submit to solitary confinement, then to wearing a bacteria-laden rag around their face, and ultimately to having themselves injected repeatedly with an experimental gene therapy: the promise that things could, if they just obeyed enough rules, go “back to normal.”
One had to be willfully delusional to read sincerity in Oster’s plea for a small-r reset, however, given that her recommendations included vaccine mandates for schoolchildren and more mRNA shots for everyone. She left “willful purveyors of misinformation” out of her to-forgive list, perhaps understanding that an ideological in-group can’t rely on the usual surface markers of difference to choose an outgroup when it comes time to make sacrifices. A person seeking amnesty for their misdeeds generally starts by admitting they’ve done something wrong. They typically stop committing the crime they’re hoping to be forgiven for, or at least try not to be balls-deep in another while begging to be spared the consequences of the last. A show of contrition, if not full repentance, is obligatory, and one certainly doesn’t blame the victim for bleeding on the killer’s Sunday best. Clearly, things work differently in the New Normal.
The predators who shredded the Nuremberg Codes by enrolling humanity in this unlicensed clinical trial against our will have, if anything, doubled down on their criminality since relaxing the mandates and admitting the shots can’t stop the spread. Not content with eliminating religious and medical exemptions to vaccine mandates, California passed a law allowing the state to strip doctors of their medical licenses for sharing “misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic,” taking the censorship of legitimate information that has been de rigueur under the Big Tech-Big Brother collusion propping up the pandemic narrative to the next level and injecting the corporate-state even further into the once-inviolable doctor-patient relationship. Many universities, including Yale, still require students to be not only vaxxed but boosted, despite the growing body of evidence proving the risks far outweigh any benefits the shots might provide to young people. Governments, health authorities, even sites like WebMD full-throatedly champion a complete course of mRNA injections for everyone down to the last 6-month-old child. The narrative managers who refused to acknowledge the shots were anything other than safe and effective even as hundreds of thousands of bodies piled up outside their doors only just last month admitted the link between mRNA vaccines and myocarditis was even being (belatedly) studied – and even then insisted any cases were likely due to Covid-19, that the rare vaccine-linked case was mild, and that myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle – did not lead to cardiac-related death. Far from closing the book on this disastrous interlude, the Rockefeller Foundation announced less than six months ago that it was expanding its questionably-titled Mercury Project – another experiment undertaken without informed consent, this time with a focus on manipulating internet use behavior – to increase vaccine uptake by studying “how mis- and disinformation spreads” around the world, presumably in order to spread some of its own. Not to be outdone, Stanford University is offering an online course on how to con people into getting vaccinated. The Biden administration recently ordered tens of millions more doses of bivalent Moderna boosters, the mRNA component manufactured special-order by CIA-funded firm Resilience, even though few Americans are eager to play side-effect roulette with a concoction tested on eight mice. But these sociopaths never tire. And not only are they not finished with their game, they’re barely getting started.
The Gates Foundation – along with the Johns Hopkins Global Center for Health Security and its other usual partners – wasted no time smothering the fantasy of a Covid armistice in its cradle, simulating another deadly pandemic almost exactly three years after Event 201 – and two years after a smirking Bill, chiding world governments for failing to lavish sufficient resources on Covid-19, promised “pandemic two” would “get attention next time”. There is nothing subtle about “Catastrophic Contagion,” which stars an improbably named pathogen called Severe Epidemic Enterovirus Respiratory Syndrome (SEERS), a virus which targets the young (15 million of its 20 million casualties are children) and leaves those it doesn’t kill with paralysis and brain damage. While SEERS hails from a fictionalized country sitting on Venezuela’s land (Johns Hopkins goons are not subtle in their foreign policy ambitions), its participants are mostly African leaders who read their stilted lines (“no one is safe until we all are safe!”) to the approving nods of noticeably-paler health bureaucrats (Gates, red-faced WHO pearl-clutcher Mike Ryan, and Johns Hopkins’ own Tom Inglesby) running the exercise. Those who believe these simulations merely put health officials through their paces to ensure optimal performance when faced with the real thing may be surprised how little discussion of saving lives actually takes place, or how much the “mistakes” made during the exercises are meticulously replicated when they go live. The redistribution of wealth (from the hoi polloi to the parasite class) and the need for behavioral controls dominate the highlight reels, and October’s was an especially naked advertisement for the WHO’s latest power grab, which combines a sweeping new global “pandemic treaty” complete with legally-binding controls on speech and movement that supersede national laws with a proposed update to the International Health Regulations, which govern public health rule-making.
Video excerpts from Catastrophic Contagion reveal it doubled down on the need to “trust” narrative managers, corporations, and government institutions, the importance of holding ever more pandemic simulations (a pet project of Gates, whose eponymous foundation and Gavi Vaccine Alliance are shoo-ins for the lucrative contracts to host and run these “germ games”), and the need to silence dissident voices – all key planks of the global pandemic treaty, an ambitious power-grabbing agreement that will not only supersede individual countries’ laws but set up and fund (through the generous contributions of member nations) a transnational Ministry of Truth to determine what information can be shared during a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (a term that lost its last shred of meaning earlier this year when WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ignored the advice of his expert panel to declare monkeypox a PHEIC, despite its spread being almost exclusively limited to ultra-promiscuous gay men). Because PHEICs don’t expire – of the six declared since the classification was adopted in 2005, three are still in effect – that ministry would retain control of information indefinitely.
The ruling class have wasted no time in implementing the Johns Hopkins simulation’s conclusions, which play on longstanding anxieties regarding the seemingly inexorable decline of trust in authority in the age of the internet. Leading the crusade to revive trust in corporations – specifically social media, which suffered a fatal blow to its credibility when it emerged in September that all the major platforms were holding weekly meetings with at least 12 US government agencies and taking detailed orders from them on who and what to censor – is Elon Musk, hailed as a real-life Iron Man by people who should know better because he allowed a handful of journalists (and Bari Weiss) to post screenshots of what may or may not be internal Twitter communications that appear to confirm what was public knowledge three months ago. The effort to bring back trust in government – in the US at least – is in the sweaty hands of the Republican Party, who have promised to grill Fauci to within an inch of his life – now that he’s retired and can plead the Fifth until he dies in his sleep of old age. Taking on the rehabilitation of journalism is Tucker Carlson, who on the day Biden was supposed to (and predictably declined to) declassify the remaining government documents regarding the JFK assassination shared with his audience the blindingly obvious fact that the CIA was “involved” in Kennedy’s murder. And redeeming science is Andrew Huff, the Eco-Health Alliance whistleblower who blames the pandemic on sloppy containment procedures at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – even though he admits he quit working at the controversial facility in 2016, years before the fatal “lab leak” supposedly took place – muddying the waters of guilt and blame in a way that would make Emily Oster proud. Limited hangouts all, but the respite they provide from the usual lie-hose waterboarding sessions means they will be embraced, even trusted.
Any suggestion that bad pandemic policies were honest mistakes born of good intentions is frankly offensive given the amount of evidence to the contrary. Because we did know what would happen when the experimental conditions were imposed – that was the point of all those tabletop simulations. Face masks were known to be worse than useless for preventing respiratory illness, and only an absolute psycho would put one on a toddler who needs to see the mouths of his fellow humans to learn how to do things like smile or speak. There was no scientific evidence to support “social distancing,” and if you’d suggested locking Great-Aunt Imelda up alone in a plexiglas box with nothing but a TV and a grab-bag of midazolam and morphine to keep her company through her last days, you’d have been rightfully slapped. The harms of lockdowns were well-understood – yet like the rest of the medical knowledge held by human civilization in 2019, it supposedly deserted us in our hour of need. Scientists have known for years that loneliness poses a bigger risk to health than even obesity or smoking, that the elderly are in the greatest danger of becoming critically lonely, that vitamin D – absorbed from sunlight – is key to recovery from respiratory illness. But pointing any of that out got you exiled from polite society as a homicidal anti-science granny-killing lunatic washing your horse paste down with Trump-brand bleach. It clearly wasn’t a mistake that every “public health tip” the CDC issued was harmful and out of step with medical best practices. Had that been the case, there would have been at least a few “mistakes” on the side of wellness. Yet no one wanted to open the Pandora’s box of “the government is working against my interests” – certainly not when Chris Cuomo had just told them it was time to “sacrifice the me to the we,” the Year of the Team Player. Instead, putting aside everything they thought they knew about how to take care of their physical and mental health, they embraced the CDC’s strict limits on movement and association as a source of security – proof that Big Brother loved them and wanted them to be happy, even while he was quietly killing their grandparents to free up pension obligations.
Three years later, the standard response to the mounting evidence of permanent damage by mRNA shots is often anger – how could they?! – but rarely surprise. Given that Big Pharma’s track record is littered with corpses, no successful coronavirus vaccine has ever actually been manufactured despite decades of trying, and every other “public health intervention” of the pandemic has been based in part or in whole on lies, many of which had serious consequences for the rule-obeyers, it would have been truly shocking if these products were safe. As for “effective,” we knew by the end of 2020 that neither the Pfizer nor Moderna jab could stop transmission of the virus, but also that they hadn’t tried to. The CDC tried to claim otherwise, vaccine mandates were hastily adopted based on the “misunderstanding,” and millions of people lined up to get injected under that false premise, silencing any misgivings that might have interfered with following the advice of the Experts and crossing their fingers in the hope that this time they would get that return to Normal they’d been hearing so much about. But this required a level of willful suspension of disbelief that would have gotten one locked up as a delusional psychotic in the pre-Covid era, given Pandemic Pope Fauci’s history. The miniature Mengele pulled off a series of self–enriching scams over the course of the AIDS era, poisoning hundreds of thousands of innocent people – including tens of thousands of children – with drugs he knew were toxic, and given that he was never punished, he has merely repeated his old tricks, again and again. Accountability is a foreign concept in Washington, and in the misery-loves-company tradition of late-stage empire, we have exported this moral failure around the globe.
Given Pfizer’s literally record-breaking history of fraud and rampant criminality, one might ask why they were entrusted with being the public face of such a major project – hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars were riding on Warp Speed, after all, even though Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla isn’t a human-doctor at all but a veterinarian, having focused his education on “the biotechnology of reproduction” if Wikipedia is to be believed. Bourla was in charge of Pfizer’s animal vaccine division in 2010 when a diarrhea shot for pregnant cows, PregSure BVD, was discovered to be killing off as many as 15% of the calves who nursed from the jab recipients. They didn’t just die, they bled out of every hole in their bodies, including their pores. By denying everything and continuing to sell the shot outside Germany – where the problem had initially arisen – Bourla apparently distinguished himself as the man you want when you need to kill a lot of kids and get away with it. He also proved himself back in his veterinary days as a pioneer in expanding the definition of “vaccine” to include chemical castration, devising a shot for boars called ImproVac that he claimed was 99% as good as physically hacking their balls off (it’s unclear how he arrived at that figure, but then, it’s unclear what hole Pfizer pulled its effectiveness numbers out of either). Still think the Covid-19 shots’ disastrous effects on human fertility are a coincidence? Don’t tell Bourla – he understands why people fear his company’s products, but wants speaking up about the harm they cause to be criminalized. The US military was sending a very powerful message when it selected Pfizer and Bourla to be the standard-bearers of its mRNA bioweapon campaign. It is unfortunate for humanity that so few were listening.
These people do not expect to be punished, but if humanity is to continue as something other than a slave species, they must be, and immediately. It’s hard to think of any crimes that haven’t been committed in the course of the planning, setup, and perpetration of these power-grab-s fraud, corruption, murder, genocide, and the coercive pharmaceutical rape that will become depressingly common when so-called “health passports” or any other permutation of the World Economic Forum’s Known Traveler Digital Identity social credit score are adopted worldwide. Where once the unvaxxed could merely be threatened with job loss or expulsion from school, or denied entry into a business or country, once all systems are linked, refusing the shot will effectively get a person occluded from society entirely – unable to withdraw or spend money, unable to enter any buildings or board transportation, unable to unlock even their phone or computer to communicate with loved ones. Most people wouldn’t last a day as a locked-out ghost in the prison state the pandemic pimps are building.
But the spirit to resist is fading fast, with bodily integrity turning into an anachronism at the hands of a generation who have never experienced privacy. Kids born in the 2010s are likely to believe it’s perfectly normal to be summoned to a school clinic for injections without their parents’ knowledge, uninterested in what’s in the needle and neither asked nor asking to sign a consent form. They don’t know they have a choice. Gates may have declared the Covid-19 shots a failure, but his foundation has already poured billions of dollars into DARPA’s choicest nightmare material, “flying needles” competing with drugged food and even human vaccine vectors to penetrate anyone they can get their hands on.
The body is merely a sideshow for these psychopaths, however – the real target is the multi-layered rape of the mind, a specialty of military technology which sits at the core of the mRNA bioweapon. Unlike standard vaccines, the mRNA formulas deployed under cover of Covid-19 can cross the blood-brain barrier with their hypertoxic spike protein, triggering a cascade of inflammation, autoimmune dysfunction, and other reactions that can bring about permanent personality changes (on top of the damage caused by the virus itself). It’s anyone’s guess how well these changes can be controlled – if one can select for docility over brute stupidity, say, or an eagerness to please on top of the inability to defy – but one can imagine that like the lobotomies of old, they will become a popular way of dealing with inconvenient dissidents as pressure to decrease the overt appearance of prisons (so unsightly!) grows internationally. Of course if you shrink the prison to fit within the skull, the division between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ becomes literally a state of mind, one that can be artificially imposed from without – a possibility Fourth Industrial Revolution fetishists like Klaus Schwab no doubt already see for contraptions like Neuralink (the kindler, gentler brain-rape!) and a “battery-free” deep-brain stimulator that uses the patient as its battery.
The possibilities for remote implantation of thought and emotion are alarming – simply envision the targeted censorship the Biden administration conducted against opinions and social media users that displeased it over the last three years, deploying representatives from no fewer than 12 agencies to meetings with all the major tech platforms to silence individual citizens because its own narratives were so poorly constructed they regularly fell down under their own weight. Informed consent will be a thing of the past – when adoption of such devices is widespread enough, the narrative managers will literally be able to conduct mass sentiment like an orchestra.
On the metaphorical front, the WHO wants to make sure its good little citizens wash their brains as often as their hands, holding meetings about a global “infodemic” before it had even declared Covid-19 a pandemic and talking up the importance of “information hygiene.” Just as environmental watchdogs condemn chemical companies for dumping toxic waste into the planet’s water supply, the Ministry of Truth whose charter is being woven into the WHO’s global pandemic treaty will argue that spreading “conspiracy theories” and other unauthorized opinions is poisoning the collective consciousness with dangerous doubt and hate. As Catastrophic Contagion glibly explains, all of this death could have been avoided if we just placed our trust in the Corporate State. Those millions of dead kids the Global Health Security Center warns are waiting at the end of the next pandemic rainbow? That ‘poisoning’ is what happens when you do your own research. UNESCO’s “think before sharing” campaign – aimed at recruiting an internal thought-police officer within every good citizen to squelch the innate human desire to post interesting or troubling rumors, question authority, or otherwise fan the flames of “infodemics,” lest their content inspire some kind of extremist to action motivated by hate and physically hurt someone – is the first step toward declaring every individual’s thoughts part of the global commons. It’s the “I wear my mask to keep you safe” of thoughtcrime.
https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/p/whose-mind-is-it-anyway
But even that isn’t sufficiently intrusive for these parasites. Their ultimate goal is to hijack and ultimately replace the natural instincts that arise to meet a hostile occupying force, substituting trust, obedience and docility, the precursors to a slave species blissfully ignorant of our slavery – who will “own nothing and be happy,” in WEFspeak. How? They seem to have settled on the lie-hose – gaslighting on steroids – in the hope of making it so exhausting to continue thinking critically that the target just gives up, overwhelmed, their bullshit-detector overheating in the wake of 3 years of “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Eagerly studying its captive audience back in 2020 as it urged them to stay glued to the couch while warning them obesity was the primary indicator of death with Covid-19, the CDC found it didn’t take many waterboarding sessions with the lie-hose to induce a roaring epidemic of Stockholm syndrome. After just two months of mask mandates, shelter-in-place, and six-feet-apart rules, only 25% of New Yorkers said they’d feel safe if the restrictions were scrapped. How much harm do you think decades of “safe and effective” has done?
It’s tempting to believe that the narrative managers’ insistence on doubling down on obvious falsehoods despite undeniable proof to the contrary will simply relegate them to a Pravda-level epistemological irritant – everyone knows the narrative is false, even the individuals selected to propagate it, and while one must pay lip service to the narrative in public if one wants to maintain their socioeconomic status, one can always discuss reality in private with trusted people, informed by underground publications not subject to censorship. However, technology has enabled the kind of information control the worst excesses of the Eastern Bloc could only have dreamed of. I’ve already written at great length about the informational iron curtain being constructed to quarantine wrongthink on the internet and eventually prevent its uploading (and contemplation) altogether, and this project has advanced dramatically under cover of Covid-19, with even non-Google search engines like DuckDuckGo vigorously scrubbed of competing narratives to the extent the user hoping to quickly confirm a fact or a name instead ends up in a hall of mirrors with one narrative showing on every screen, its production values as impeccable as its lies are threadbare. But it’s the only narrative in town, save the user’s own imagination – and since the US school system ensures no trace of viable imagination survives the third grade, they’re basically defenseless. Forced to internalize what they know is a bogus narrative, even temporarily, they’ve nonetheless become complicit in their own reprogramming, and the lie-hose residue has a corrosive effect on their memories and even sensory input when these contradict the lies they’ve grudgingly swallowed just to survive. “If vaccines weren’t really safe and effective, wouldn’t all the doctors be screaming from the rooftops?”
Thus what appears to be ham-handed slopaganda can actually insinuate the narrative managers into the target’s decision-making centers – the rather self-explanatory process known as the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) – where a little bit of pressure exerted at the right moment can have an outsize effect. Mentally knocking the individual off-balance with a jolt from the lie-hose while they’re trying to observe and orient themselves ensures whatever they do next will be misinformed at best, heinously miscalculated at worst. If they blame themselves rather than the predatory outside influences leading them astray, the self-perpetuating feedback loop becomes difficult to break. Doubt leads to “distrust your gut”, only to learn when they become suddenly sick and read way too many articles about spike proteins that they’ve basically poisoned themselves and now can likely never board a plane because of blood clots, the normal self-preservation urge – to have the problem taken care of medically, to warn others, even to demand those responsible “fix it” – is muted by guilt and embarrassment over their willing participation in this act of self-destruction.
A recent Rasmussen poll revealed that 56% of Americans believe the vaccine is at least somewhat effective in preventing infection – a claim that even the CDC doesn’t try to make anymore. Even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence the shots are harmful – evidence they accept as legitimate! – no one wants to admit they’ve subjected themselves or their children to a totally preventable risk, especially one that could kill them.
There’s a sense that speaking up about vaccine harms will somehow manifest more of them – or worse, cause others to become vaccine hesitant, a fate generally agreed upon to be worse than death even though it has become increasingly hard to ignore the causative relationship between death and the vaccines themselves. Health authorities’ rapid pivot (as mandates dropped across the US and Europe) from ordering the population to roll up their sleeves or else to insisting the shots were always voluntary deprives the injured of a clear target for their rage and plants a nagging sense of responsibility for their own suffering. In the same way they were incentivized to get the shot in the first place through an absurd selection of bribes from Krispy Kreme donuts to lap dances, the vaccine-injured can be cajoled back into the fold through universal basic income payments or other benefits specifically for the jabbed. The more they can be made to identify with the experimental compound colonizing their bodies, the more easily they can be turned back against the unvaccinated, those selfish throwbacks who are Not Team Players.
And the retconning of the pandemic is running at full speed as the narrative managers insinuate themselves into humanity’s collective OODA loop. Americans running at top speed away from the bivalent boosters are concerned about physical discomfort, not the possibility of dying suddenly! Rebelling against authority means wearing masks forever! And that 40% surge in non-Covid excess mortality among 18- to 49-year-olds that has actuaries all spooked? That’s just stealth-Covid! Anti-vaxxers are to blame for traffic accidents, antisemitism, and even sudden death itself!
Narrative managers’ refusal to give even an inch on the Big Lie that this class of ‘vaccines’ are 100% “safe and effective” as cries to the contrary hit critical mass suggests another epistemological rug-pull is just around the corner. So when I saw an actual news story last month describing the pandemic as “the biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11” I most certainly did not believe my lying eyes. With so much evidence pointing to years if not decades of premeditation in the unleashing of Covid-19 and a profound intent to cause harm, the reemergence and sudden popularity of the “lab leak” theory of Covid-19’s origins plays much too perfectly into the hands of the interests behind the pandemic. Indeed, it was first floated by a representative of one of them all the way back in 2020.
Forget for a moment that the architects of this grand scam have already explained their evil plot to us in Bond-villain-esque detail, repeatedly, accompanied by long, short, and medium-length write-ups, complete with helpful video. The lab leak hypothesis may make more sense than the zoonotic-origin hypothesis (it would be hard not to) but it conveniently absolves the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation, the WHO, DARPA, BARDA, and the rest of the medical-totalitarian infrastructure – including the financial cartels that paid for the whole atrocity and have been reaping massive dividends – from responsibility for the millions of deaths ensuing from virus and injectable bioweapons alike by recasting what all evidence supports as a controlled release as mere accidental exposure. Like the deadly “mistakes” that governments supposedly made in responding to the outbreak, or the self-contradicting policies that “just don’t make sense” yet always err on the side of harm, tacitly admitting to a containment screw-up is their best option legally speaking for getting out of jail with their necks intact. But it simply doesn’t hold water with all the information currently in the public domain. I couldn’t completely rule out the possibility of an accidental leak when I wrote my first article on Covid-19 nearly three years ago, but even then the theory required extreme suspension of disbelief, given that its primary proponent was the same Israeli biowarfare specialist who spent the Bush II years telling anyone who would listen that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, specifically anthrax, and was responsible for the letters full of ominous white powder that had materialized on the desks of a handful of legislative and media opponents to the Patriot Act following a pattern set out in the events of 2001 Johns Hopkins tabletop simulation Dark Winter. The parallels between 9/11 and Covid-19 have been obvious since day one, but they do not include any “intelligence failures.”
It is very likely the ‘final’ narrative decided upon to explain the pandemic will center on an accidental release of some kind (perhaps more than one, to prevent any one country having to shoulder an unfair burden that could later result in its leaders letting slip what really happened), but this must not be allowed to stand. If the predatory parasites behind Covid-19 are allowed to walk on the grounds that the original pathogen’s release was just another “mistake,” we can all kiss our asses goodbye.
Medical totalitarianism is far more dangerous than any mere political dictatorship, no matter how repressive or violent. Most citizens of the latter regimes understand, even in the midst of hardcore reality mismanagement, that their enemies are ultimately human – bestial, perhaps, or even evil, but human nonetheless. However, the transnational capital class who built the Covid-19 experiment reviles traditional nation-states, and the WHO’s global pandemic treaty is so determined to communicate disdain for such unprofitable ideas like human dignity that it had language referencing the concept removed from the text. The catalyzing experience of Covid-19, recast for future newsreels as all of humanity uniting against a deadly invisible enemy, lends itself to War on Terror-like reductionism: “you’re either with us, or you’re with the virus.” Since no sane person could ever be pro-sickness, the growing crowd of opponents to vaccine mandates, killer lockdowns, ‘infodemic’ thought police, and mask fetishism can be written off as criminal insanity and taken out of circulation, forming a natural test reservoir for future clinical trials (the 21st century human sacrifice). With no natural enemies once it has seized the machinery of market and state under the guise of selfless do-gooderism, the public health technocracy can only continue to exist by demonizing and then sacrificing groups of its own constituents, creating the impression of a benevolent regime deftly battling the forces of “subversion” so that the masses can live their lives in peace. “First, they came for the anti-vaxxers, and I did not speak up, because I didn’t want to end up like Andrew Wakefield” is not an excuse when life and death hang in the balance.
Peter Hotez, the buffoonish tropical disease specialist who became a media darling for his ideological crusade against “anti-vaxxers” – a much-maligned group even before the Covid-19 experiment – has partnered with the WHO to condemn “anti-vaccine activism,” which he rechristens “anti-science aggression,” as “a major killing force globally.”
Hotez made the absurd claim last month that “Anti-science now kills more people than things like gun violence, global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and cyber attacks,” and while it’s tempting to laugh at his histrionics (or to simply point out that iatrogenesis – medical “error” – kills nearly 1 million Americans every year, topping cancer and heart disease), his demands for “political solutions” to the growing portion of the planet that disagrees with his medical totalitarianism are no laughing matter, given that he is backed by the WHO – which will be itching to cut its new global pandemic treaty teeth on a crowd-pleasing victim for its Ministry of Truth tribunals. He has repeatedly called for the Biden administration to sic the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department on those he deems insufficiently reverent of The Science, and thanks to a longstanding alliance with the ADL, he will likely get what he wants.
While it may be tempting to see the Covid-19 project as a failure – mandates rolled back, boosters sitting untouched on shelves or in landfills, doctors finally speaking up – this leaves out the big picture. When regarded as a coordinated operation to drive mad, enslave, and ultimately liquidate the human race, the Covid-19 experiment is shaping up to be a stunning success. This must be prevented at all costs.
COVID-19: Moderna Gets Its Miracle
BY WHITNEY WEBB |
UNLIMITED HANGOUT| OCTOBER 28, 2021
COVID-19 erased the regulatory and trial-related hurdles that Moderna could never surmount before. Yet, how did Moderna know that COVID-19 would create those conditions months before anyone else, and why did they later claim that their vaccine being tested in NIH trials was different than their commercial candidate?
In late 2019, the biopharmaceutical company Moderna was facing a series of challenges that not only threatened its ability to ever take a product to market, and thus turn a profit, but its very existence as a company. There were multiple warning signs that Moderna was essentially another Theranos-style fraud, with many of these signs growing in frequency and severity as the decade drew to a close. Part I of this three-part series explored the disastrous circumstances in which Moderna found itself at that time, with the company’s salvation hinging on the hope of a divine miracle, a “Hail Mary” save of sorts, as stated by one former Moderna employee.
While the COVID-19 crisis that emerged in the first part of 2020 can hardly be described as an act of benevolent divine intervention for most, it certainly can be seen that way from Moderna’s perspective. Key issues for the company, including seemingly insurmountable regulatory hurdles and its inability to advance beyond animal trials with its most promising—and profitable—products, were conveniently wiped away, and not a moment too soon. Since January 2020, the value of Moderna’s stock—which had embarked on a steady decline since its IPO—grew from $18.89 per share to its current value of $339.57 per share, thanks to the success of its COVID-19 vaccine.
Yet, how exactly was Moderna’s “Hail Mary” moment realized, and what were the forces and events that ensured it would make it through the FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) process? In examining that question, it becomes quickly apparent that Moderna’s journey of saving grace involved much more than just cutting corners in animal and human trials and federal regulations. Indeed, if we are to believe Moderna executives, it involved supplying formulations for some trial studies that were not the same as their COVID-19 vaccine commercial candidate, despite the data resulting from the former being used to sell Moderna’s vaccine to the public and federal health authorities. Such data was also selectively released at times to align with preplanned stock trades by Moderna executives, turning many of Moderna’s highest-ranking employees into millionaires, and even billionaires, while the COVID-19 crisis meant economic calamity for most Americans.
Not only that, but—as Part II of this three-part series will show, Moderna and a handful of its collaborators at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) seemed to know that Moderna’s miracle had arrived—well before anyone else knew or could have known. Was it really a coincidental mix of “foresight” and “serendipity” that led Moderna and the NIH to plan to develop a COVID-19 vaccine days before the viral sequence was even published and months before a vaccine was even considered necessary for a still unknown disease? If so, why would Moderna—a company clearly on the brink—throw everything into and gamble the entire company on a vaccine project that had no demonstrated need at the time?
The Serendipitous Origins of Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine
When early January 2020 brought news of a novel coronavirus outbreak originating in Wuhan, China, Moderna’s CEO Stéphane Bancel immediately emailed Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, and asked to be sent the genetic sequence for what would become known as SAR-CoV-2, allegedly because media reports on the outbreak “troubled” him. The date of that email varies according to different media reports, though most place it as having been sent on either January 6th or 7th.
A few weeks before Bancel’s email to Graham, Moderna was quickly approaching the end of the line, their desperately needed “Hail Mary” still not having materialized. “We were freaked out about money,” Stephen Hoge would later remember of Moderna’s late 2019 circumstances. Not only were executives “cutting back on research and other expenditures” like never before, but – as STAT News would later report – “cash from investors had stopped pouring in and partnerships with some drug makers had been discontinued. In meetings at Moderna, Bancel emphasized the need to stretch every dollar and employees were told to reduce travel and other expenses, a frugality they were advised would last several years.”
At the tail end of 2019, Graham was in a very different mood than Bancel, having emailed the leader of the coronavirus team at his NIH lab saying, “Get ready for 2020,” apparently viewing the news out of Wuhan in late 2019 as a harbinger of something significant. He went on, in the days before he was contacted by Bancel, to “run a drill he had been turning over in his mind for years” and called his long-time colleague Jason McLellan “to talk about the game plan” for getting a head start on producing a vaccine the world did not yet know it needed. When Bancel called Graham soon afterward and asked about this new virus, Graham responded that he didn’t know yet but that “they were ready if it turned out to be a coronavirus.” The Washington Post claimed that Graham’s apparent foreknowledge that a coronavirus vaccine would be needed before anyone officially knew what type of disease was circulating in Wuhan was a fortunate mix of “serendipity and foresight.”
Dr. Barney Graham and Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, VRC coronavirus vaccine lead, discuss COVID-19 research with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Sen. Benjamin Cardin and Rep. Jamie Raskin, March 6, 2020; Source: NIH
A report in Boston magazine offers a slightly different account than that reported by the Washington Post. Per that article, Graham had told Bancel, “If [the virus] is a coronavirus, we know what to do and have proven mRNA is effective.” Per that report, this assertion of efficacy from Graham referred to Moderna’s early stage human-trial data published in September 2019 regarding its chikungunya vaccine candidate, which was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as its cytomegalovirus (CMV) vaccine candidate.
As mentioned in Part I of this series, the chikungunya vaccine study data released at that time included the participation of just four subjects, three of whom developed significant side effects that led Moderna to state that they would reformulate the vaccine in question and would pause trials on that vaccine candidate. In the case of the CMV vaccine candidate, the data was largely positive, but it was widely noted that the vaccine still needed to pass through larger and longer clinical trials before its efficacy was in fact “proven,” as Graham later claimed. In addition, Graham implied that this early stage trial of Moderna’s CMV vaccine candidate was somehow proof that an mRNA vaccine would be effective against coronaviruses, which makes little sense since CMV is not a coronavirus but instead hails from the family of viruses that includes chickenpox, herpes, and shingles.
Bancel apparently had reached out to Graham because Graham and his team at the NIH had been working in direct partnership with Moderna on vaccines since 2017, soon after Moderna had delayed its Crigler-Najjar and related therapies in favor of vaccines. According to Boston magazine, Moderna had been working closely with Graham specifically “on [Moderna’s] quest to bring a whole new class of vaccines to market” and Graham had personally visited Moderna’s facilities in November 2019. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIH’s infectious-disease division NIAID, has called his unit’s collaboration with Moderna, in the years prior to and also during the COVID-19 crisis, “most extraordinary.”
The year 2017, besides being the year when Moderna made its pivot to vaccines (due to its inability to produce safe multidose therapies, see Part I), was also a big year for Graham. That year he and his lab filed a patent for the “2P mutation” technique whereby recombinant coronavirus spike proteins can be stabilized in a prefusion state and used as more effective immunogens. If a coronavirus vaccine were to be produced using this patent, Graham’s team would financially benefit, though federal law caps their annual royalties. Nonetheless, it would still yield a considerable sum for the named researchers, including Graham.
However, due to the well-known difficulties with coronavirus vaccine development, including antibody dependent enhancement risk, it seemed that commercial use of Graham’s patent was a pipe dream. Yet, today, the 2P mutation patent, also known as the ’070 patent, is not just in use in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, but also in the COVID-19 vaccines produced by Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, Pfizer/BioNTech, and CureVac. Experts at New York University School of Law have noted that the 2P mutation patent first filed in 2016 “sounds remarkably prescient” in light of the COVID crisis that emerged a few years later while later publications from the NIH (still pre-COVID) revealed that the NIH’s view on “the breadth and importance of the ’070 patent” as well as its potential commercial applications was also quite prescient, given that there was little justification at the time to hold such a view.
On January 10, three days after the reported initial conversation between Bancel and Graham on the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, Graham met with Hamilton Bennett, the program leader for Moderna’s vaccine portfolio. Graham asked Bennett “if Moderna would be interested in using the new [novel coronavirus] to test the company’s accelerated vaccine-making capabilities.” According to Boston, Graham then mused, “That way . . . if ever there came a day when a new virus emerged that threatened global public health, Moderna and the NIH could know how long it would take them to respond.”
Graham’s “musings” to Bennett are interesting considering his earlier statements made to others, such as “Get ready for 2020” and his team, in collaboration with Moderna, would be “ready if [the virus then circulating in Wuhan, China] turned out to be a coronavirus.” Is this merely “serendipity” and “foresight”, as the Washington Post suggested, or was it something else? It is worth noting that the above accounts are those that have been given by Bancel and Graham themselves, as the actual contents of these critical January 2020 emails have not been publicly released.
When the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was published on January 11, NIH scientists and Moderna researchers got to work determining which targeted genetic sequence would be used in their vaccine candidate. Later reports, however, claimed that this initial work toward a COVID-19 vaccine was merely intended to be a “demonstration project.”
Other odd features of the Moderna-NIH COVID-19 vaccine-development story emerged with Bancel’s account of the role the World Economic Forum played in shaping his “foresight” when it came to the development of a COVID-19 vaccine back in January 2020. On January 21, 2020, Bancel reportedly began to hear about “a far darker version of the future” at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where he spent time with “two [anonymous] prominent infectious-disease experts from Europe” who shared with him data from “their contacts on the ground in China, including Wuhan.” That data, per Bancel, showed a dire situation that left his mind “reeling” and led him to conclude, that very day, that “this isn’t going to be SARS. It’s going to be the 1918 flu pandemic.”
Stéphane Bancel speaks at the Breakthroughs in Cancer Care session at WEF annual meeting, January 24, 2020; Source: WEF
This realization is allegedly what led Bancel to contact Moderna cofounder and chairman, as well as a WEF technology pioneer, Noubar Afeyan. Bancel reportedly interrupted Afeyan’s celebration of his daughter’s birthday to tell him “what he’d learned about the virus” and to suggest that “Moderna begin to build the vaccine—for real.” The next day, Moderna held an executive meeting, which Bancel attended remotely, and there was considerable internal debate about whether a vaccine for the novel coronavirus would be needed. To Bancel, the “sheer act of debating” pursuing a vaccine for the virus was “absurd” given that he was now convinced, after a single day at Davos, that “a global pandemic was about to descend like a biblical plague, and whatever distractions the vaccine caused internally at Moderna were irrelevant.”
Bancel spent the rest of his time at the Davos annual meeting “building partnerships, generating excitement, and securing funding,” which led to the Moderna collaboration agreement with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations—a project largely funded by Bill Gates. (Bancel and Moderna’s cozy relationship with the WEF, dating back to 2013, was discussed in Part I as were the Forum’s efforts, beginning well before COVID-19, to promote mRNA-based therapies as essential to the remaking of the health-care sector in the age of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution). At the 2020 annual meeting attended by Bancel and others it was noted that a major barrier to the widespread adoption of these and other related “health-care” technologies was “public distrust.” The panel where that issue was specifically discussed was entitled “When Humankind Overrides Evolution.”
As also noted in Part I of this series, a few months earlier, in October 2019, major players in what would become the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, particularly Rick Bright and Anthony Fauci, had discussed during a Milken Institute panel on vaccines how a “disruptive” event would be needed to push the public to accept “nontraditional” vaccines such as mRNA vaccines; to convince the public that flu-like illnesses are scarier than traditionally believed; and to remove existing bureaucratic safeguards in the vaccine development-and-approval processes.
That panel took place less than two weeks after the Event 201 simulation, jointly hosted by the World Economic Forum, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Event 201 simulated “an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus” that was “modeled largely on SARS but . . . more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.” The recommendations of the simulation panel were to considerably increase investment in new vaccine technologies and industrial approaches, favoring rapid vaccine development and manufacturing. As mentioned in Part I, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security had also conducted the June 2001 Dark Winter simulation that briefly preceded and predicted major aspects of the 2001 anthrax attacks, and some of its participants had apparent foreknowledge of those attacks. Other Dark Winter participants later worked to sabotage the FBI investigation into those attacks after their origin was traced back to a US military source.
It is hard to imagine that Bancel, whose company had long been closely partnered with the World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation, was unaware of the exercise and surprised by the closely analogous event that transpired within three months. Given the accounts given by Bancel, Graham, and others, it seems likely there is more to the story regarding the origins of Moderna’s early and “serendipitous” push to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. In addition, given that Moderna was in dire financial circumstances at the time, it seems odd that the company would gamble everything on a vaccine project that was opposed by the few investors that were still willing to fund Moderna in January/February 2020. Why would they divert their scant resources towards a project born only out of Barney Graham’s “musings” that Moderna could try to test the speed of its vaccine development capabilities and Bancel’s doomsday view that a “biblical plague” was imminent, especially when their investors opposed the idea?
Moderna Gets to Bypass Its Long-Standing Issues with R & D
Moderna produced the first batch of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate on February 7, one month after Bancel and Graham’s initial conversation. After a sterility test and other mandatory tests, the first batch of its vaccine candidate, called mRNA-1273, shipped to the NIH on February 24. For the first time in a long time, Moderna’s stock price surged. NIH researchers administered the first dose of the candidate into a human volunteer less than a month later, on March 16.
Controversially, in order to begin its human trial on March 16, regulatory agencies had to allow Moderna to bypass major aspects of traditional animal trials, which many experts and commentators noted was highly unusual but was now deemed necessary due to the urgency of the crisis. Instead of developing the vaccine in distinct sequential stages, as is the custom, Moderna “decided to do all of the steps [relating to animal trials] simultaneously.” In other words, confirming that the candidate is working before manufacturing an animal-grade vaccine, conducting animal trials, analyzing the animal-trial data, manufacturing a vaccine for use in human trials, and beginning human trials were all conducted simultaneously by Moderna. Thus, the design of human trials for the Moderna vaccine candidate was not informed by animal-trial data.
Lt. Javier Lopez Coronado and Hospitalman Francisco Velasco inspect a box of COVID-19 vaccine vials at the Naval Health Clinic in Corpus Christi, TX, December 2020; Source: Wikimedia
This should have been a major red flag, given Moderna’s persistent difficulties in getting its products past animal trials. As noted in Part I, up until the COVID-19 crisis, most of Moderna’s experiments and products had only been tested in animals, with only a handful able to make it to human trials. In the case of the Crigler-Najjar therapy that it was forced to indefinitely delay, toxicity concerns related to the mRNA delivery system being used had emerged in the animal trials, which Moderna was now greenlighted to largely skip. Given that Moderna had subsequently been forced to abandon all multidose products because of poor results in animal trials, being allowed to skip this formerly insurmountable obstacle was likely seen as a boon to some at the company. It is also astounding that, given Moderna’s history with problematic animal trials, more scrutiny was not devoted to the regulatory decision to allow Moderna to essentially skip such trials.
Animal studies conducted on Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine did identify problems that should have informed human trials, but this did not happen because of the regulatory decision. For example, animal reproductive toxicity studies on the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine that are cited by the European Medicines Agency found that there was reduced fertility in rats that received the vaccine (e. g., overall pregnancy index of 84.1% in vaccinated rats versus 93.2% in the unvaccinated) as well as an increased proportion of aberrant bone development in their fetuses. That study has been criticized for failing to report on the accumulation of vaccine in the placenta as well as failing to investigate the effect of vaccine doses administered during key pregnancy milestones, such as embryonic organogenesis. In addition, the number of animals tested is unstated, making the statistical power of the study unknown. At the very least, the 9 percent drop in the fertility index among vaccinated rats should have prompted expanded animal trials to investigate concerns of reproductive toxicity before testing in humans.
Yet, Moderna declined to further investigate reproductive toxicity in animal trials and entirely excluded reproductive toxicity studies from its simultaneous human trials, as pregnant women were excluded from participation in the clinical trials of its vaccine. Despite this, pregnant women were labeled a priority group for receiving the vaccine after Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) was granted for the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines. Per the New England Journal of Medicine, this meant that “pregnant women and their clinicians were left to weigh the documented risks of Covid-19 infection against the unknown safety risks of vaccination in deciding whether to receive the vaccine.”
Moderna only began recruiting for an “observational pregnancy outcome study” of its COVID-19 vaccine in humans in mid-July 2021, and that study is projected to conclude in early 2024. Nevertheless, the Centers for Disease Control recommends the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine in “people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now, or might become pregnant in the future.” This recommendation is largely based on the CDC’s publication of preliminary data on mRNA COVID-19 vaccine safety in pregnant women in June 2021, which is based on passive reporting systems in use within the United States (i. e., VAERS and v-safe).
Even in the limited scope of this study, 115 of the 827 women who had a completed pregnancy during the study lost the baby, 104 of which were spontaneous abortions before 20 weeks of gestation. Of these 827 pregnant women, only 127 had received a mRNA vaccine before the 3rd trimester. This appears to suggest an increased risk among those women who took the vaccine before the 3rd trimester, but the selective nature of the data makes it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions. Despite claims from the New England Journal of Medicine that the study’s data was “reassuring”, the study’s authors ultimately stated that their study, which mainly looked at women who began vaccination in the third trimester, was unable to draw “conclusions about spontaneous abortions, congenital anomalies, and other potential rare neonatal outcomes.” This is just one example of the problems caused by “cutting corners” with respect to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine trials in humans and animals, including those conducted by the NIH.
Meanwhile, throughout February, March and April, Bancel was “begging for money” as Moderna reportedly lacked “enough money to buy essential ingredients for the shots” and “needed hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even more than a billion dollars” to manufacture its vaccine, which had only recently begun trials. Bancel, whose tenure at Moderna had long been marked by his ability to charm investors, kept coming up empty-handed.
Then, in mid-April 2020, Moderna’s long-time cooperation with the US government again paid off when Health and Human Services Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) awarded the company $483 million to “accelerate the development of its vaccine candidate for the novel coronavirus.” A year later, the amount invested in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine by the US government had grown to about $6 billion dollars, just $1.5 billion short of the company’s entire value at the time of its pre-COVID IPO.
BARDA, throughout 2020, was directly overseen by the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), led by the extremely corrupt Robert Kadlec, who had spent roughly the last two decades designing BARDA and helping shape legislation that concentrated many of the emergency powers of HHS under the Office of the ASPR. Conveniently, Kadlec occupied the powerful role of ASPR that he had spent years sculpting at the exact moment when the pandemic, which he had simulated the previous year via Crimson Contagion, took place. As mentioned in Part I, he was also a key participant in the June 2001 Dark Winter exercise. In his capacity as ASPR during 2020, Kadlec oversaw nearly all major aspects of the HHS COVID-19 response and had a key role in BARDA’s funding decisions during that period, as well as in the affairs of the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration as they related to COVID-19 medical countermeasures, including vaccines.
On May 1, 2020, Moderna announced a ten-year manufacturing agreement with the Lonza Group, a multinational chemical and biotech company based in Switzerland. Per the agreement, Lonza would build out vaccine production sites for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, first in the US and Switzerland, before expanding to Lonza’s facilities in other countries. The scale of production discussed in the agreement was to produce 1 billion doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine annually. It was claimed that the ten-year agreement would also focus on other products, even though it was well known at the time that other Moderna products were “nowhere close to being ready for the market.” Moderna executives would later state that they were still scrambling for the cash to manufacture doses at the time the agreement with Lonza was made.
The decision to forge a partnership to produce that quantity of doses annually suggests marvelous foresight on the part of Moderna and Lonza that the COVID-19 vaccine would become an annual or semiannual affair, given that current claims of waning immunity could not have been known back then because initial trials of the Moderna vaccine had begun less than two months earlier and there was still no published data on its efficacy or safety. However, as will be discussed Part III of this series, Moderna needs to sell “pandemic level” quantities of its COVID-19 vaccine every year in order to avoid a return of the existential crises it faced before COVID-19 (for more on those crises, see Part I). The implications of this, given Moderna’s previous inability to produce a safe product for multidosing and lack of evidence that past issues were addressed in the development of its COVID-19 vaccine, will also be discussed in Part III of this series.
It is also noteworthy that, like Moderna, Lonza as a company and its leaders are closely affiliated with the World Economic Forum. In addition, at the time the agreement was reached in May 2020, Moncef Slaoui, the former GlaxoSmithKline executive, served on the boards of both Moderna and Lonza. Slaoui withdrew from the boards of both companies two weeks after the agreement was reached to become the head of the US-led vaccination-development drive Operation Warp Speed. Moderna praised Slaoui’s appointment to head the vaccination project.
By mid-May, Moderna’s stock price—whose steady decline before COVID-19 was detailed in Part I —had tripled since late February 2020, all on high hopes for its COVID-19 vaccine. Since Moderna’s stock had begun to surge in February, media reports noted that “nearly every progress update—or media appearance by Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel—has been gobbled up by investors, who seem to have an insatiable appetite for the stock.” Bancel’s tried-and-tested method of keeping Moderna afloat on pure hype, though it was faltering before COVID-19, was again paying off for the company thanks to the global crisis and related panic.
Some critics did emerge, however, calling Moderna’s now $23 billion valuation “insane,” especially considering that the company had posted a net loss of $514 million the previous year and had yet to produce a safe or effective medicine since its founding a decade earlier. In January 2020, Moderna had been worth a mere $5 billion, $2 billion less than its valuation at its December 2018 IPO. If it hadn’t been for the onset of the COVID crisis and a fresh injection of hype, it seems that Moderna’s valuation would have continued to shrink. Yet, thankfully for Moderna, investors were valuing Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine even before the release of any clinical data. Market analysts at the time were forecasting Moderna’s 2022 revenue at about $1 billion, a figure based almost entirely on coronavirus vaccine sales, since all other Moderna products were years away from a market debut. Yet, even with this forecasted revenue, Moderna’s stock value in mid-May 2020 was trading at twenty-three times its projected sales, a phenomenon unique to Moderna among biotech stocks at the time. For comparison, the other highest multiples in biotech at the time were Vertex Pharmaceutical and Seattle Genetics, which were then trading at nine and twelve times their projected revenue, respectively. Now, with the implementation of booster shot policies around the world, revenue forecasts for Moderna now predict the company will make a staggering $35 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales through next year.
Moderna’s surging stock price went into overdrive when, on May 18, 2020, the company published “positive” interim data for a phase 1 trial of its COVID-19 vaccine. The results generated great press, public enthusiasm, and a 20 percent boost in Moderna’s stock price. Just hours after the press release, Moderna announced a new effort to raise $1.3 billion by selling more stock. It has since been revealed that Moderna had hired Morgan Stanley to manage that stock sale on May 15.
However, left largely unmentioned by the press or Moderna itself was that the ostensibly “scientific study” only provided data from 8 of the 45 volunteers—4 volunteers each from the 15- and 100-microgram dose cohorts—regarding the development of neutralizing antibodies. The age of these mysteriously selected 8 volunteers was also not published, and other key data was missing, making it “impossible to know whether mRNA-1273 [Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine] was ineffective [in the remaining 37 volunteers whose antibody data was not disclosed], or whether the results were not available at this point.” Meanwhile, in the highest-dose cohort, in which volunteers received 250 micrograms, 21 percent of volunteers experienced a grade 3 adverse event, which is defined by the FDA as “preventing daily activity and requiring medical intervention.”
STAT published a report the next day that was skeptical of Moderna’s press release and seemed to imply the data release was aimed at boosting the company’s stock valuation, which hit $29 billion after the news. STAT reporter Helen Branswell called this jump in valuation “an astonishing feat for a company that currently sells zero products.” Branswell’s report noted several things, including that several vaccine experts had noted that “based on the information made available [by Moderna], there’s really no way to know how impressive—or not—the vaccine may be.” Moderna later defended its withholding of key data in the press release, claiming that it was done to respect “federal securities laws and the rules of scientific journals” and to prevent a potential leak of the data from insiders at the NIH. Moderna executives have more recently claimed that the “timely” release of these selective data had been linked to their “desperate” fundraising efforts at the time and ultimately prevented them from “losing” the COVID-19 vaccine race.
The STAT report also noted that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which was running the trial referenced by Moderna in the press release, was completely silent on the matter, declining to put out a press release that day and declining to comment on Moderna’s announcement. This was described as uncharacteristic for NIAID, especially considering they were the part of the NIH co-developing the vaccine with Moderna and running the trial. STAT noted that, normally, “NIAID doesn’t hide its light under a bushel. The institute generally trumpets its findings.” In this case, however, they declined to do so. It emerged in early June 2020 that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who leads NIAID, had been displeased with Moderna’s decision to publish incomplete data on the trial, telling STAT that he would have preferred “to wait until we had the data from the entire Phase 1 . . . and publish it in a reputable journal and show all the data.”
Tal Zaks, Chief Scientific Officer at Moderna; Source: The Forward
It subsequently emerged that Moderna’s top executives, including chief financial officer Lorence Kim and chief scientific officer Tal Zaks, had used their insider knowledge of the coming press release to trade company stock that netted them several million each following the jump in Moderna’s stock that resulted from the press release’s positive buzz. A little over a week after the press release had been published, STAT reported that the top five Moderna executives had cashed out $89 million in shares since the company’s stock price had begun to soar earlier in the year. Per that report, the amount of trades by these five executives alone between January and May 2020 was “nearly three times as many stock transactions than in all of 2019.” By September 2020, the amount of stock shed by Moderna executives amounted to $236 million. Less criticized or even mentioned by the press was Moderna’s move, less than a month later, to create a tax haven in Europe for its European COVID-19 vaccine sales.
Though the trades were deemed slimy but legal, mainstream media reports essentially confirmed that the early release of the interim data was planned to “raise the share price of Moderna’s stock so that executives could cash in during the period of euphoria” that followed. Some watchdog groups called on the SEC to investigate Moderna executives for manipulating the stock market. The critical reporting on executive stock trades and Moderna’s release of incomplete data led the company’s stock to temporarily trend downward throughout the rest of May. As previously mentioned, Moderna has repeatedly attempted to explain away the timing of this particular press release, offering new explanations as recently as this week.
Moderna’s Shocking Claim about Its Vaccine Candidate
In mid-June 2020, researchers at the NIH and Moderna published a manuscript preprint of preclinical data for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. This preprint described the vaccine as employing a delivery system covered in a patent owned by the company Arbutus Biopharma and described the results of that vaccine in tests on mice. As discussed in Part I, Moderna has long been locked in a bitter legal dispute with Arbutus, which has threatened Moderna’s ability to ever turn a profit on any product that relies on Arbutus-patented technology regarding lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery systems for its mRNA products. Moderna has claimed for years it was no longer using the Arbutus-derived system on which it once entirely relied, with Bancel even going so far as to publicly call it “not very good.” However, Moderna has provided no real evidence that it no longer relies on the technology covered in the Arbutus patents. The June 2020 manuscript preprint from the NIH and Moderna provided evidence indicating that the same Arbutus-derived technology that had caused major toxicity issues in multidose products Moderna had previously attempted to develop was also being used in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
Yet, when Moderna’s chief corporate affairs officer, Ray Jordan, was challenged on this point by Forbes, Jordan asserted that the preprint’s data had been generated using a formulation of a COVID-19 vaccine that is not the same as the vaccine itself, stating, “While the authors of the preprint used the term ‘mRNA-1273’ for convenience of the reader, the preprint does not describe the cGMP process by which we make our messenger RNA and LNP or the final drug product composition in our commercial candidate (mRNA-1273).” When Forbes asked Jordan if he could provide any specifics, including the LNP molar ratio of the new LNP technology to prove that the LNPs in use in the COVID-19 vaccine were in fact different from those covered by the Arbutus patent, Jordan flat out refused.
Arbutus Biopharma’s office in Warminster, Pennsylvania; Source: Philadelphia Business Journal
Despite Jordan’s claims, a Moderna preclinical study regarding its COVID-19 vaccine was published a month later, and that July study noted that the Moderna vaccine used LNPs as described in a 2019 paper, which in turn reveals that the LNPs in question were the same as those used in the June study. This paper included the results from the study originally promoted by Moderna in May that led to a jump in Moderna’s stock price. Now published in full, the study generated lots of positive press, including a statement from the NIAID’s Fauci that “no matter how you slice this, this is good news.” A jump in US government funding of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine also shortly followed the study’s publication. At the time, CBS News remarked that Moderna’s stock price, which had been sliding since its late 2018 IPO, had been essentially rescued by the COVID-19 crisis, as “shares of Moderna—which has never brought a product to market over its ten-year existence—have soared as much as 380 percent since the start of the year as news emerged [in January] of its promising potential for producing a vaccine. [Moderna’s] stock price was less than $20 in early January and around $95 on Friday [July 17, 2020].” Today, by comparison, Moderna has consistently been trading above $300 a share.
Yet, if we take Ray Jordan at his word with respect to the preprint published in June, Moderna appears to have been engaged in rather slimy behavior. If Jordan was telling the truth, it appears that this July study, which appears to use the vaccine candidate containing the same LNPs as those described in the June 2020 preprint, also used a formulation not consistent with the company’s commercial vaccine candidate. If so, given that the July study was the same study referenced by Moderna’s controversial May press release tied to insider stock trades, Moderna appears to have used “positive” data generated by a vaccine candidate other than its commercial vaccine candidate to boost stock prices and ameliorate the company’s financial situation while also generating millions for executives. This, of course, says nothing about the separate but critically important issue that the vaccine candidate used in these studies, including the NIH study, is not necessarily the same as the commercial candidate used in clinical trials.
It seems that the only reason that Moderna would make such an outrageous claim to Forbes would be to distance its COVID-19 vaccine from its past controversies that largely have their root in Moderna’s LNP-related problems, which it had claimed to have already resolved. It is not clear if the motive behind such a gambit is principally related to the legal dispute with Arbutus or the past safety issues Moderna encountered with multidose therapies.
Adding to the confusion about the LNPs in use in Moderna’s products is that, a few days earlier in July, Moderna had published results on a separate vaccine candidate, this one for HIV, that appeared to use the exact same LNP technology that is covered by the Arbutus patent. The LNPs described in that study included the same components as those described in the Arbutus patent and the same molar ratio. Moderna appeared to be referencing this issue in their August 6, 2020, SEC filing, which states: “There are many issued and pending third-party patents that claim aspects of oligonucleotide delivery technologies that we may need for our mRNA therapeutic and vaccine candidates or marketed products, including mRNA-1273, if approved.”
By the end of 2020, Moderna claimed in a December filing with the SEC that, while it had “initially used LNP formulations that were based on known lipid systems,” that is, the Arbutus LNPs, it had “invested heavily in delivery science and ha[s] developed LNP technologies, as well as alternative nanoparticle approaches.” Despite the claims it made in this filing, however, it remained unclear as to whether the company’s COVID-19 vaccine was using Arbutus technology or the technology it purported to have developed on its own without infringing on Arbutus’s intellectual property.
Moderna’s claims that it now uses a different LNP system than the one that caused such major issues is based on the company’s development and implementation of a lipid structure now known as SM-102. This lipid structure was first revealed by Moderna in a 2019 publication under the name Lipid H, and, in that paper and since, Moderna has claimed that its LNP system is now superior to that which it previously used because it is using SM-102 instead of the original Arbutus lipids. However, it is critical to note that Moderna’s use of SM-102 does not necessarily mean the company is not violating the Arbutus patents, which cover the use of LNPs that combine cationic and PEGylated lipids in specific proportions.
Despite claims from Moderna that SM-102 resolved both the company’s patent-related and toxicity issues with its LNP system (as discussed in Part I), Moderna has declined to disclose SM-102’s exact structure or whether it carries a net positive charge at physiological pH, the latter of which could lead to proof of continued infringement on the Arbutus patent. In addition, there are no studies on the distribution, degradation, and/or elimination of SM-102 from the body, meaning that the accumulation of the lipids or their capacity to damage organs is not documented. The obvious lack of study of SM-102’s properties and effects on the human body was largely circumvented by public health authorities during the emergency approval process by using the same criteria for the Moderna vaccine candidate that is used for traditional vaccines that do not utilize the novel mRNA approach. These “traditional” criteria therefore do not include any requirements for data on LNP safety.
Overall, the evidence seems to point toward Moderna’s claims that its COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t use Arbutus-derived LNPs as being false. The other possibility is that Moderna attempted to modify the LNP system but only slightly so that potential identifiers, such as the molar ratio, remained the same. In this case, Arbutus could still claim that the LNPs currently in use by Moderna and in its COVID-19 vaccine infringe on their patent. It is also thus likely that the safety issues Moderna had acknowledged with this LNP system were largely unaffected if the potential modifications were indeed minor. Yet, if either of these scenarios is correct, the question becomes – Why wouldn’t Arbutus challenge Moderna once again to obtain royalty payments stemming from its COVID-19 vaccine?
The answer seems to lie mostly in optics and public relations. As STAT wrote last July, were Arbutus to sue Moderna over patent infringement in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, “that would mean taking the substantial risk that it would be perceived as a company holding up a desperately needed medicine out of concern for its bottom line.” This also seemed to be part of the motive behind Moderna’s altruistically framed promise not to enforce its own COVID-19–related patents until the pandemic is declared over. Observers have noted that this move by Moderna was not only a public relations boon for the company but also “set a disarming tone in the space that may serve to deter others in the space [e. g., Arbutus] from acting too defensively or aggressively,” largely due to “fear of the potential public relations backlash.”
While July 2020 brought a surge in valuation and positive press for Moderna and its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, it also brought an unfavorable ruling for Moderna in its long-running dispute with Arbutus, one that opened the door for Arbutus to file an injunction against Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, if they chose, to force the negotiation of a license with Moderna. The news led to Moderna’s stock price falling by 10 percent, wiping out $3 billion in value. However, most likely for the reasons outlined above, Arbutus ultimately declined to jump on the decision to block Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine from advancing in the hopes of securing royalties. Yet, they reserve the ability to do so, if and when the perceived urgency of the COVID-19 crisis fades.
Moderna has asserted that the decision would not affect its COVID-19 vaccine as the company was “not aware of any significant intellectual property impediments for any products we intend to commercialize.” Thus, Ray Jordan’s assertions and the lack of “clear and convincing” evidence that Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine relies on Arbutus-patented technology appears to have been sufficient for Moderna to make this claim. This seems to be due to a lack of interest by the mainstream media or federal agencies/regulators in demanding concrete evidence that Moderna’s LNP system used in its COVID-19 vaccine does not rely on Arbutus-patented technology.
Despite the issues raised above in relation to the vaccine study data published in June and July, the positive press attention—particularly after the July publication—translated just a month later into the US government entering into a significant supply agreement with Moderna on August 11, 2020. Per that agreement, the government would pay $1.525 billion for 100 million doses with the option to purchase an additional 400 million doses in the future, all of which it has since purchased. Per Moderna’s press release, the agreement meant that the US government had, by that point, paid $2.48 billion for “early access” to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Roughly a month later, it was revealed that the US government had been paying for much more. On September 10, 2020, BARDA joined long-time Moderna funder and “strategic ally” DARPA in scrutinizing contracts that had been awarded to the company due to Moderna’s failure to disclose the role government support had played in its numerous patent applications. The announcement came after Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), which advocates for protecting taxpayer investments in patents, found that none of the patents or applications assigned to Moderna in the company’s entire history had disclosed the considerable US government funding it had received at the time those patents were filed, which is required by the 1980 Bayh-Doyle Act and by the regulations of the Patent and Trademark Office. Per KEI, this translates into the US government owning certain rights over the patents, and thus US taxpayers may have an ownership stake in vaccines made and sold by Moderna.
Despite the clear evidence that Moderna failed to disclose the considerable amount of US government funding prior to and during the COVID crisis in its patent applications, Moderna responded to KEI and the BARDA/DARPA “scrutiny” by stating that it was “aware of and consults with our agency collaborators regarding our contractual obligations under each of these agreements, including those with respect to IP [intellectual property], and believe we comply with those obligations.” As of the writing of this article, BARDA and DARPA have taken no action against Moderna for their illegal omission about having received substantial government funding in their patent applications and filings. Instead, a month after DARPA claimed to be “scrutinizing” Moderna’s patent applications, it awarded the company up to $56 million to develop small-scale mobile means of manufacturing its products—namely, its COVID-19 vaccine and its personalized cancer vaccine.
Moderna: “Just Trust Us”
What quickly stands out about Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate over the course of its rapid development in 2020 was the willingness of federal agencies like NIH, BARDA, and others, as well as the mainstream press, to take Moderna at its word concerning critical aspects of its vaccine and its development, even when the evidence appeared to contradict its claims. This is particularly evident in Moderna claiming that it resolved its LNP issues, both in terms of toxicity and patent infringement, and those claims—despite the company’s refusal to release clear supporting evidence—being taken at face value. This is even more striking when one considers the multiple factors that Moderna was facing before COVID-19 and how the company faced collapse without the success of its COVID-19 vaccine, as this means Moderna was under considerable pressure to have its vaccine succeed.
While the controversial simultaneous conducting of animal and human trials was publicly justified in the name of the urgency of the COVID-19 crisis, can the other examples explored in this article be similarly justified in the name of urgency? Instead, several issues explored above appear to have been driven by conflicts of interest and corruption.
Adding to the ridiculousness is that Moderna got away with claiming that the NIH was conducting safety tests on a COVID-19 vaccine product different from their commercial candidate, without causing a major backlash in either the mainstream media or from the NIH itself. This is particularly telling as the May 2020 press release and suspiciously timed stock trading by Moderna executives and insiders did garner negative press attention. However, the subsequent revelation, per Moderna, that its press release was based on the study of a vaccine candidate that was not “necessarily the same” as their commercial COVID-19 vaccine candidate received essentially no coverage, despite raising the unsettling possibility that Moderna could have used another product to essentially rig preliminary data to be positive in order to advance their product to market and make millions through insider stock sales. How can the claims made by such a company be trusted at face value without independent verification? Furthermore, how can NIH studies of Moderna be trusted when Moderna has claimed that some of the studies that were ultimately factors in the vaccine’s emergency use authorization approval by the FDA utilized a different product than that which Moderna later successfully commercialized?
Moderna and the NIH were, nevertheless, taken at their word in November 2020 when they said that their COVID-19 vaccine candidate was 94.5 percent effective. At the time, the main promoters of this claim were Moderna’s Bancel and NIAID’s Fauci. The claim came shortly after Pfizer’s press release claiming its COVID-19 vaccine candidate was 90 percent effective. Not to be outdone by Moderna, Pfizer revised the reported efficacy of its vaccine just two days after Moderna’s November press release, stating that their vaccine was actually 95% effective to Moderna’s 94.5%. In the case of these claims, it was indicative of the now-established yet troubling practice of “science by press release” when it comes to touting the benefit of certain COVID-19 vaccines currently on the market. Since then, real-world data has shattered the efficacy claims that were used to secure emergency use authorization, for which Moderna applied at the end of November 2020 and received only a few weeks later in mid-December of that year.
As Part III of this series will explore, the EUA for the Moderna vaccine got around the issues raised in this article by treating the entire Moderna formulation as a traditional vaccine, which it is not, as traditional vaccines do not utilize mRNA for inducing immunity, and their safety and efficacy depend on several criteria that are entirely different from those of the more novel mRNA. Thus, the LNP issue, a perpetually sticky one for Moderna that it struggled to circumvent before the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, was largely evaded when it came down to, not just research and development, but receiving EUA. It appears that this sleight-of-hand by federal regulators was necessary for Moderna, after ten years, to finally get its first product on the market. As noted in Part I, were it not for the COVID-19 crisis and its fortuitous timing, Moderna might not have survived the severe challenges that threatened its entire existence as a company.
Part III will also examine how Moderna’s “Hail Mary” moment in the COVID-19 crisis was only the beginning of its miraculous rescue from a Theranos-like fate, as the company has not only expanded its partnership with the government but now with a CIA-linked firm. This shows that Moderna and key power players in Big Pharma and the US national-security state envision Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine being sold in massive quantities for several years to come. As previously noted, without annual or semiannual sales of booster doses, Moderna’s pre-COVID crisis will inevitably return. The push for Moderna booster-dose approval has advanced despite real-world data not supporting Moderna’s past claims of safety and efficacy for its COVID-19 vaccine, the recent decision of several European governments to halt the vaccine’s use, and the FDA’s own infighting and recent admissions that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is one of the more dangerous currently in use, particularly in terms of adverse effects on the cardiovascular system. The obvious question here then becomes – How costly will Moderna’s “Hail Mary” save ultimately be, not just in terms of the $6 billion US taxpayer money already spent on it, but also in terms of public health?
A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction
The Wellcome Trust teams up with former DARPA directors to usher in an age of nightmarish surveillance. Their agenda can only advance if we allow it.
BY WHITNEY WEBB |
UNLIMITED HANGOUT| JUNE 25, 2021
A UK nonprofit with ties to global corruption throughout the COVID-19 crisis as well as historical and current ties to the UK eugenics movement launched a global health-focused DARPA equivalent last year. The move went largely unnoticed by both mainstream and independent media.
The Wellcome Trust, which has arguably been second only to Bill Gates in its ability to influence events during the COVID-19 crisis and vaccination campaign, launched its own global equivalent of the Pentagon’s secretive research agency last year, officially to combat the “most pressing health challenges of our time.” Though first conceived of in 2018, this particular Wellcome Trust initiative was spun off from the Trust last May with $300 million in initial funding. It quickly attracted two former DARPA executives, who had previously served in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley, to manage and plan its portfolio of projects.
This global health DARPA, known as Wellcome Leap, seeks to achieve “breakthrough scientific and technological solutions” by or before 2030, with a focus on “complex global health challenges.” The Wellcome Trust is open about how Wellcome Leap will apply the approaches of Silicon Valley and venture capital firms to the health and life science sector. Unsurprisingly, their three current programs are poised to develop incredibly invasive tech-focused, and in some cases overtly transhumanist, medical technologies, including a program exclusively focused on using artificial intelligence (AI), mobile sensors, and wearable brain-mapping tech for children three years old and younger.
This Unlimited Hangout investigation explores not only the four current programs of Wellcome Leap but also the people behind it. The resulting picture is of an incredibly sinister project that poses not only a great threat to current society but to the future of humanity itself. An upcoming Unlimited Hangout investigation will examine the history of the Wellcome Trust along with its role in recent and current events.
Leap’s Leadership: Merging Man and Machine for the Military and Silicon Valley
The ambitions of the Wellcome Leap are made clear by the woman chosen to lead it, former director of the Pentagon’s DARPA, Regina Dugan. Dugan began her career at DARPA in 1996; she led a counterterrorism task force in 1999 before leaving DARPA about a year later. After departing DARPA, she cofounded her own venture capital firm, Dugan Ventures, and then became special adviser to the US Army’s vice chief of staff from 2001 to 2003, which coincided with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2005, she created a defense-focused tech firm called RedXDefense, which contracts with the military and specifically for DARPA.
In 2009, under the Obama administration, Dugan was appointed director of DARPA by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Much was made over her being the first female director of the agency, but she is best remembered at the agency for her so-called “Special Forces” approach to innovation. During her tenure, she created DARPA’s now defunct Transformational Convergence Technology Office, which focused on social networks, synthetic biology, and machine intelligence. Many of the themes previously managed by that office are now overseen by DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, which was created in 2014 and focuses on everything “from programmable microbes to human-machine symbiosis.” The Biological Technologies Office, like Wellcome Leap, pursues a mix of “health-focused” biotechnology programs and transhumanist endeavors.
Right before leaving the top role at DARPA, Dugan greenlighted the agency’s initial investments in mRNA vaccine technology, which led to DARPA’s investments in Pfizer and Moderna shortly thereafter. The DARPA scientist who lobbied Dugan to back the program, Dan Wattendorf, now works as the director of Innovative Technology Solutions at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
While Dugan’s efforts at DARPA are remembered fondly by those in the national-security state, and also by those in Silicon Valley, Dugan was investigated for conflicts of interest during her time as DARPA’s director, as her firm RedXDefense acquired millions in Department of Defense contracts during her tenure. Though she had recused herself from any formal role at the company while leading DARPA, she continued to hold a significant financial stake in the company, and a military investigation later found she had violated ethics rules to a significant degree.
Instead of being held accountable in any way, Dugan went on to become a top executive at Google, where she was brought on to manage Google’s Advanced Technology and Products Group (ATAP), which it had spun out of Motorola Mobility after Google’s acquisition of that company in 2012. Google’s ATAP was modeled after DARPA and employed other ex-DARPA officials besides Dugan.
At Google, Dugan oversaw several projects, including what is now the basis of Google’s “augmented reality” business, then known as Project Tango, as well as “smart” clothing in which multitouch sensors were woven into textiles. Another project that Dugan led involved the use of a “digital tattoo” to unlock smartphones. Perhaps most controversially, Dugan was also behind the creation of a “digital authentication pill.” According to Dugan, when the pill is swallowed, “your entire body becomes your authentication token.” Dugan framed the pill and many of her other efforts at Google as working to fix “the mechanical mismatch between humans and electronics” by producing technology that merges the human body with machines to varying degrees. While serving in this capacity at Google, Dugan chaired a panel at the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative called “Game-Changers in Technology” and attended the 2015 Bilderberg meeting where AI was a main topic of discussion.
In 2016, Dugan left Google for Facebook where she was chosen to be the first head of Facebook’s own DARPA-equivalent research agency, then known as Building 8. DARPA’s ties to the origins of Facebook were discussed in a recent Unlimited Hangout report. Under Dugan, Building 8 invested heavily in brain-machine interface technology, which has since produced the company’s “neural wearable” wristbands that claim to be able to anticipate movements of the hand and fingers from brain signals alone. Facebook showcased prototypes of the project earlier this year.
Dugan left Facebook just eighteen months after joining Building 8, announcing her plans “to focus on building and leading a new endeavor,” which was apparently a reference to Wellcome Leap. Dugan later said it was as if she had been training for her role at Wellcome Leap ever since entering the workforce, framing it as the pinnacle of her career. When asked in an interview earlier this year who the clients of Wellcome Leap are, Dugan gave a long-winded answer but essentially responded that the project serves the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, international organizations such as the UN, and public-private partnerships.
In addition to her role at Wellcome, Dugan is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored taskforce on US Technology and Innovation policy, which was formed in 2019. Other members include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, McKinsey Institute Global Chairman James Manyika, former head of Google Eric Schmidt and President Biden’s controversial top science adviser Eric Lander.
The other executive at Wellcome Leap, chief operating officer Ken Gabriel, has a background closely tied to Dugan’s. Gabriel, like Dugan, is a former program manager at DARPA, where he led the agency’s microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) research from 1992 to 1996. He served as deputy director of DARPA from 1995 to 1996 and became director of the Electronics Technology Office from 1996 to 1997, where he was reportedly responsible for about half of all federal electronics-technology investments. At DARPA, Gabriel worked closely with the FBI and the CIA.
Ken Gabriel – COO of Wellcome Leap. Source: Wellcome Leap
Gabriel left DARPA for Carnegie Mellon University, where he was in charge of the Office for Security Technologies in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. That office was created after 9/11 specifically to help meet the national-security needs of the federal government, according to Carnegie Mellon’s announcement of the program. Around that same time, Gabriel became regarded as “the architect of the MEMS industry” due to his past work at DARPA and his founding of the MEMS-focused semiconductor company Akustica in 2002. He served as Akustica’s chairman and chief technology officer until 2009, at which time he returned to work at DARPA where he served as the agency’s deputy director, working directly under Regina Dugan.
In 2012, Gabriel followed Dugan to Google’s Advanced Technology and Products Group, which he was actually responsible for creating. According to Gabriel, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin tasked Gabriel with creating “a private sector ground-up model of DARPA” out of Motorola Mobility. Regina Dugan was placed in charge, and Gabriel again served as her deputy. In 2013, Dugan and Gabriel co-wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review about how DARPA’s “Special Forces” innovation approach could revolutionize both the public and private sectors if more widely applied. Gabriel left Google in 2014, well before Dugan, to serve as the president and CEO of Charles Stark Draper Laboratories, better known as Draper Labs, which develops “innovative technology solutions” for the national-security community, with a focus on biomedical systems, energy, and space technology. Gabriel held that position until he abruptly resigned in 2020 to co-lead Wellcome Leap with Dugan.
In addition to his role at Wellcome, Gabriel is also a World Economic Forum “technology pioneer” and on the board of directors of Galvani Bioelectronics, a joint venture of GlaxoSmithKline, which is intimately linked to the Wellcome Trust, and the Google subsidiary Verily. Galvani focuses on the development of “bioelectronic medicines” that involve “implant-based modulation of neural signals” in an overt push by the pharmaceutical industry and Silicon Valley to normalize transhumanist “medicines.” The longtime chairman of the board of Galvani, on which Gabriel serves, was Moncef Slaoui, who led the US COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution program Operation Warp Speed. Slaoui was relieved of his position at Galvani this past March over well-substantiated claims of sexual harassment.
Jeremy Farrar, Pandemic Narrative Manager
While Dugan and Gabriel ostensibly lead the outfit, Wellcome Leap is the brainchild of Jeremy Farrar and Mike Ferguson, who serve as its directors. Farrar is the director of the Wellcome Trust itself, and Ferguson is deputy chair of the Trust’s board of governors. Farrar has been director of the Wellcome Trust since 2013 and has been actively involved in critical decision making at the highest level globally since the beginning of the COVID crisis. He is also an agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum and cochaired the WEF’s Africa meeting in 2019.
Farrar’s Wellcome Trust is also a WEF strategic partner and cofounded the COVID Action Platform with the WEF. Farrar was more recently behind the creation of Wellcome’s COVID-Zero initiative, which is also tied to the WEF. Farrar has framed that initiative as “an opportunity for companies to advance the science which will eventually reduce business disruption.” Thus far it has convinced titans of finance, including Mastercard and Citadel, to invest millions in research and development at organizations favored by the Wellcome Trust.
Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar with NTI Co-Chairman Sam Nunn, who led the 2001 Dark Winter exercise. Source: NTI.com
Some of Wellcome’s controversial medical-research projects in Africa, as well as its ties to the UK eugenics movement, were explored in a December article published at Unlimited Hangout. That report also explores the intimate connections of Wellcome to the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, the use of which has now been restricted or banned in several countries. As mentioned in the introduction, the Wellcome Trust itself is the subject of an upcoming Unlimited Hangout investigation (Part 2).
Jeremy Farrar, who was born in Singapore in 1961, had previously been director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, beginning in 1998. During that time, he authored numerous epidemiological research papers. He claimed in a 2014 Financial Times article that his decision to move to Vietnam was due to his disdain for conference halls full of white men. Southeast Asia was obviously a much less regulated environment for someone in the medical-research industry wishing to indulge in groundbreaking research. Although based in Vietnam, Farrar was sent by Oxford to various locations around the globe to study epidemics happening in real time. In 2009, when swine flu was wreaking havoc in Mexico, Farrar jumped on a plane to dive right into the action, something he also did for subsequent global outbreaks of Ebola, MERS, and avian flu.
Over the past year, many questions have arisen regarding exactly how much power Farrar wields over global public health policy. Recently, the US president’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, was forced to release his emails and correspondence from March and April 2020 at the request of the Washington Post. The released emails reveal what appears to be a high-level conspiracy by some of the top medical authorities in the US to falsely claim that COVID-19 could only have been of zoonotic origin, despite indications to the contrary. The emails were heavily redacted as such emails usually are, supposedly to protect the information of the people involved, but the “(b)(6)” redactions also protect much of Jeremy Farrar’s input into these discussions. Chris Martenson, economic researcher and post-doctorate student of neurotoxicology and founder of Peak Prosperity, has had some insightful comments on the matter, including asking why such protection has been offered to Farrar given that he is the director of a “charitable trust.” Martenson went on to question why the Wellcome Trust was involved at all in these high-level discussions.
One Fauci email, dated February 25, 2020, and sent by Amelie Rioux of the WHO, stated that Jeremy Farrar’s official role at that time was “to act as the board’s focal point on the COVID-19 outbreak, to represent and advise the board on the science of the outbreak and the financing of the response.” Farrar had previously chaired the WHO’s Scientific Advisory Council. The emails also show the preparation, within a ten-day period, of the SARS-CoV-2 “‘origins” paper, which was entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and was accepted for publication by Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. The paper claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could only have come from natural origins as opposed to gain-of-function research, a claim once held as gospel in the mainstream but which has come under considerable scrutiny in recent weeks.
Shaping the presentation of an origin story for a virus of global significance is something Farrar has been involved with before. In 2004–5, it was reported that Farrar and his Vietnamese colleague Tran Tinh Hien, the vice director at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, were the first to identify the re-emergence of the avian flu (H5N1) in humans. Farrar has recounted the origin story on many occasions, stating: “It was a little girl. She caught it from a pet duck that had died and she’d dug up and reburied. She survived.” According to Farrar, this experience prompted him to found a global network in conjunction with the World Health Organization to “improve local responses to disease outbreaks.”
An article published by Rockefeller University Press’s Journal of Experimental Medicine in 2009 is dramatically titled, “Jeremy Farrar: When Disaster Strikes.” Farrar, when referring to the H5N1 origin story stated: “The WHO people—and this is not a criticism—decided it was unlikely that the child had SARS or avian influenza. They left, but Professor Hien stayed behind to talk with the child and her mum. The girl admitted that she had been quite sad in the previous days with the death of her pet duck. The girl and her brother had fought over burying the duck and, because of this argument, she had gone back, dug up the duck, and reburied it—probably so her brother wouldn’t know where it was buried. With that history, Professor Hien phoned me at home and said he was worried about the child. He took some swabs from the child’s nose and throat and brought them back to the hospital. That night the laboratory ran tests on the samples, and they were positive for Influenza A.”
With Farrar now having been revealed as an instrumental part of the team that crafted the official story regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, his previous assertions about the origin of past epidemics should be scrutinized.
As the director of a “charitable trust,” Jeremy Farrar is almost completely unaccountable for his involvement in crafting controversial narratives related to the COVID crisis. He continues to be at the forefront of the global response to COVID, in part by launching the Wellcome Leap Fund for “unconventional projects, funded at scale” as an overt attempt to create a global and “charitable” version of DARPA. Indeed, Farrar, in conceiving Wellcome Leap, has positioned himself to be just as, if not more, instrumental in building the foundation for the post-COVID era as he was in building the foundation for the COVID crisis itself. This is significant as Wellcome Leap CEO Regina Dugan has labeled COVID-19 this generation’s “Sputnik moment” that will launch a new age of “health innovation,” much like the launching of Sputnik started a global technological “space age.” Wellcome Leap fully intends to lead the pack.
“Rulers” of the Gene-Sequencing Industry
In contrast to the overt DARPA, Silicon Valley, and Wellcome connections of the others, the chairman of the board of directors of Wellcome Leap, Jay Flatley, has a different background. Flatley is the long-time head of Illumina, a California-based gene-sequencing hardware and software giant that is believed to currently dominate the field of genomics. Though he stepped down from the board of Illumina in 2016, he has continued to serve as the executive chairman of its board of directors. Flatley was the first to be chosen for a leadership position at Wellcome Leap, and he was responsible for suggesting Regina Dugan for the organization’s chief executive officer, according to a recent interview given by Dugan.
Illumina Campus. Source: Glassdoor
As a profile on Illumina in the business magazine Fast Company notes, Illumina “operates behind the scenes, selling hardware and services to companies and research institutions,” among them 23andMe. 23andMe’s CEO, Anne Wojcicki, the sister of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, told Fast Company, “It’s crazy. Illumina is like the ruler of this whole universe and no one knows that.” The report notes that 23andMe, like most companies that offer DNA sequencing and analysis to consumers, uses machines produced by Illumina.
In 2016, Illumina launched an “aggressive” five-year plan to “bring genomics out of research labs and into doctors’ offices.” Given the current state of things, particularly the global push toward gene-focused vaccines and therapies, that plan, which concludes this year, could not have been any better timed. Illumina’s current CEO, Francis DeSouza, previously held key posts at Microsoft and Symantec. Also in 2016, Illumina’s executive teams forecast a future in which humans are gene tested from birth to grave for both health and commercial purposes.
Whereas most companies have struggled financially during the coronavirus pandemic, some have seen a massive increase in profits. Illumina has witnessed its share price double since the start of the COVID crisis. The company’s $1 billion plus in profits during the last tax year was obviously helped by the quick approval of the NovaSEQ 6000 machines, which can test a large number of COVID samples more quickly than other devices. An individual machine has a hefty price tag of almost $1 million, and thus they are mostly found at elite facilities, private labs, and top-tier universities.
Jay Flatley, Executive Chairman, Illumina, speaking at World Economic Forum in Davos 2018. Source: WEF
In addition to his long-standing leadership role at Illumina, Jay Flatley is also a “digital member” of the World Economic Forum as well as the lead independent director of Zymergen, a WEF “tech pioneer” company that is “rethinking biology and reimagining the world.” Flatley, who has also attended several Davos meetings, has addressed the WEF on the “promise of precision [i.e., gene-specific] medicine.” At another WEF panel meeting, Flatley, alongside UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, promoted the idea of making genomic sequencing of babies at birth the norm, claiming it had “the potential to shift the healthcare system from reactive to preventative.” Some at the panel called for the genomic sequencing of infants to eventually become mandatory.
Aside from Flatley as an individual, Illumina as a company is a WEF partner and plays a key role in its platform regarding the future of health care. A top Illumina executive also serves on the WEF’s Global Future Council on Biotechnology.
A New HOPE
Wellcome Leap currently has four programs: Multi-Stage Psych, Delta Tissue, 1KD, and HOPE. HOPE was the first program to be announced by Wellcome Leap and stands for Human Organs, Physiology and Engineering. According to the full program description, HOPE aims “to leverage the power of bioengineering to advance stem cells, organoids, and whole organ systems and connections that recapitulate human physiology in vitro and restore vital functions in vivo.”
Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/hope/
HOPE consists of two main program goals. First, it seeks to “bioengineer a multiorgan platform that recreates human immunological responses with sufficient fidelity to double the predictive value of a preclinical trial with respect to efficacy, toxicity and immunogenicity for therapeutic interventions.” In other words, this bioengineered platform mimicking human organs would be used to test the effects of pharmaceutical products, including vaccines, which could create a situation in which animal trials are replaced with trials on gene-edited and farmed organs. Though such an advance would certainly be helpful in the sense of reducing often unethical animal experimentation, trusting such a novel system to allow medical treatments to go straight to the human-testing phase would also require trusting the institutions developing that system and its funders.
As it stands now, the Wellcome Trust has too many ties to corrupt actors in the pharmaceutical industry, having originally begun as the “philanthropic” arm of UK drug giant GlaxoSmithKline, for anyone to trust what they are producing without actual independent confirmation, given the histories of some of their partners in fudging both animal and human clinical trial data for vaccines and other products.
The second goal of HOPE is to open up the use of machine-human hybrid organs for transplantation into human beings. That goal focuses on restoring “organ functions using cultivated organs or biological/synthetic hybrid systems” with the later goal of bioengineering a fully transplantable human organ after several years.
Later on in the program description, however, the interest in merging the synthetic and biological becomes clearer when it states: “The time is right to foster synergies between organoids, bioengineering and immunoengineering technologies, and advance the state-of-the-art of in vitro human biology . . . by building controllable, accessible and scalable systems.” The program description document also notes the interest of Wellcome in genetic-engineering approaches for the “enhancement of desired properties and insertion of traceable markers” and Wellcome’s ambition to reproduce the building blocks of the human immune system and human organ systems through technological means.
Transhumanist Toddlers?
The second program to be pursued by Wellcome Leap is called “The First 1000 Days: Promoting Healthy Brain Networks,” which is abbreviated as 1KD by the organization. It is arguably the most unsettling program because it seeks to use young children, specifically infants from three months to three-year-old toddlers, as its test subjects. The program is being overseen by Holly Baines, who previously served as strategy development lead for the Wellcome Trust before joining Wellcome Leap as the 1KD program leader.
Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/1kd/
1KD is focused on developing “objective, scalable ways to assess a child’s cognitive health” by monitoring the brain development and function of infants and toddlers, allowing practitioners to “risk-stratify children” and “predict responses to interventions” in developing brains.
The program description document notes that, up to this point in history, “our primary window into the developing brain has been neuroimaging techniques and animal models, which can help identify quantitative biomarkers of [neural] network health and characterise network differences underlying behaviours.” It then states that advances in technology “are opening additional possibilities in young infants.”
The program description goes on to say that artificial neural networks, a form of AI, “have demonstrated the viability of modelling network pruning process and the acquisition of complex behaviours in much the same way as a developing brain,” while improvements in machine learning, another subset of AI, can now be used to extract “meaningful signals” from the brains of infants and young children. These algorithms can then be used to develop “interventions” for young children deemed by other algorithms to be in danger of having underdeveloped brain function.
The document goes on to note the promise of “low-cost mobile sensors, wearables and home-based systems” in “providing a new opportunity to assess the influence and dependency of brain development on natural physical and social interactions.” In other words, this program seeks to use “continuous visual and audio recordings in the home” as well as wearable devices on children to collect millions upon millions of data points. Wellcome Leap describes these wearables as “relatively unobtrusive, scalable electronic badges that collect visual, auditory and motion data as well as interactive features (such as turn-taking, pacing and reaction times).” Elsewhere in the document there is a call to develop “wearable sensors that assess physiological measures predictive of brain health (e.g., electrodermal activity, respiratory rate, and heart rate) and wireless wearable EEG or eye-tracking technology” for use in infants and children three and under.
Like other Wellcome Leap programs, this technology is being developed with the intention of making it mainstream in medical science within the next five to ten years, meaning that this system—although framed as a way to monitor children’s brain functioning to improve cognitive outcomes—is a recipe for total surveillance of babies and very young children as well as a means for altering their brain functioning as algorithms and Leap’s programmers see fit.
1DK has two main program goals. The first is to “develop a fully integrated model and quantitive measurement tools of network development in the first 1000 days [of life], sufficient to predict EF [executive function] formation before a child’s first birthday.” Such a model, the description reads, “should predict contributions of nutrition, the microbiome and the genome” on brain formation as well as the effects of “sensimotor and social interactions [or lack thereof] on network pruning processes” and EF outcomes. The second goal makes it clear that widespread adoption of such neurological-monitoring technologies in young children and infants is the endgame for 1DK. It states that the program plans to “create scalable methods for optimising promotion, prevention, screening and therapeutic interventions to improve EF by at least 20% in 80% of children before age 3.”
True to the eugenicist ties of the Wellcome Trust (to be explored more in-depth in Part 2), Wellcome Leap’s 1DK notes that “of interest are improvements from underdeveloped EF to normative or from normative to well-developed EF across the population to deliver the broadest impact.” One of the goals of 1DK is thus not treating disease or addressing a “global health public challenge” but instead experimenting on the cognitive augmentation of children using means developed by AI algorithms and invasive surveillance-based technology.
Another unsettling aspect of the program is its plan to “develop an in vitro 3D brain assembloid that replicates the time formation” of a developing brain that is akin to the models developed by monitoring the brain development of infants and children. Later on, the program description calls this an “in-silico” model of a child’s brain, something of obvious interest to transhumanists who see such a development as a harbinger of the so-called singularity. Beyond that, it appears that this in-silico and thus synthetic model of the brain is planned to be used as the “model” to which infant and children brains are shaped by the “therapeutic interventions” mentioned elsewhere in the program description.
It should be clear how sinister it is that an organization that brings together the worst “mad scientist” impulses of both the NGO and military-research worlds is openly planning to conduct such experiments on the brains of babies and toddlers, viewing them as datasets and their brains as something to be “pruned” by machine “intelligence.” Allowing such a program to advance unimpeded without pushback from the public would mean permitting a dangerous agenda targeting society’s youngest and most vulnerable members to potentially advance to a point where it is difficult to stop.
A “Tissue Time Machine”
The third and second-most recent program to join the Wellcome Leap lineup is called Delta Tissue, abbreviated by the organization as ΔT. Delta Tissue aims to create a platform that monitors changes in human-tissue function and interactions in real time, ostensibly to “explain the status of a disease in each person and better predict how that disease would progress.” Referring to this platform as a “tissue time machine,” Wellcome Leap sees Delta Tissue as being able to predict the onset of disease before it occurs while also allowing for medical interventions that “are targeted to the individual.”
Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/delta-tissue/
Well before the COVID era, precision medicine or medicine “targeted or tailored to the individual” has been a code phrase for treatments based on patients’ genetic data and/or for treatments that alter nucleic acid (e.g., DNA and RNA) function itself. For instance, the US government defines “precision medicine” as “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.” Similarly, a 2018 paper published in Technology notes that, in oncology, “precision and personalized medicine . . . fosters the development of specialized treatments for each specific subtype of cancer, based on the measurement and manipulation of key patient genetic and omic data (transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, etc.).”
Prior to COVID-19 and the vaccine roll outs, the mRNA vaccine technology used by the DARPA-funded companies Moderna and Pfizer were marketed as being precision medicine treatments and were largely referred to as “gene therapies” in media reports. They were also promoted heavily as a revolutionary method of treating cancer, making it unsurprising that the Delta Tissue program at Wellcome Leap would use a similar justification to develop a program that aims to offer tailored gene therapies to people before the onset of a disease.
This Delta Tissue platform works to combine “the latest cell and tissue profiling technologies with recent advances in machine learning,” that is, AI. Given Wellcome Leap’s connections to the US military, it is worth noting that the Pentagon and Google, both former employers of Wellcome Leap CEO Regina Dugan and COO Ken Gabriel, have been working together since last September on using AI to predict disease in humans, first focusing on cancer before expanding to COVID-19 and every disease in between. The Delta Tissue program appears to have related ambitions, as its program description makes clear that the program ultimately aims to use its platform for a host of cancers and infectious diseases.
The ultimate goal of this Wellcome Leap program is “to eradicate the stubbornly challenging diseases that cause so much suffering around the world.” It plans to do this through AI algorithms, however, which are never 100 percent accurate in their predictive ability, and with gene-editing treatments, nearly all of which are novel and have not been well tested. That latter point is important given that one of the main methods for gene-editing in humans, CRISPR, has been found in numerous studies to cause considerable damage to the DNA, damage that is largely irreparable (see here, here and here). It seems plausible that a person placed on such a hi-tech medical treatment path will continue to need a never-ending series of gene-editing treatments and perhaps other invasive hi-tech treatments to mitigate and manage the effects of clumsy gene splicing.
Total Surveillance to Treat “Depression”
Wellcome Leap’s most recent program, launched just this week, is called “Multi-Channel Psych: Revealing Mechanisms of Anhedonia” and is officially focused on creating “complex, biological” treatments for depression.
Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/mcpsych/
Those behind Wellcome Leap frame the problem they aim to tackle with this program as follows:
“We understand that synaptic connections serve as the currency of neural communication, and that strengthening or weakening these connections can facilitate learning new behavioral strategies and ways of looking at the world. Through studies in both animal models and humans, we have discovered that emotional states are encoded in complex neural network activity patterns, and that directly changing these patterns via brain stimulation can shift mood. We also know that disruption of these delicately balanced networks can lead to neuropsychiatric illness.” (emphasis added)
They add that “biologically based treatments” for depression “are not being matched to the biology of the human beings they’re being used in,” and, thus, treatments for depression need to be tailored “to the specific biology” of individual patients. They clearly state that what needs to be addressed in order to make such personal modifications to treatment is to gain “easy access to the biological substrate of depression—i.e. the brain.”
Wellcome Leap’s program description notes that this effort will focus specifically on anhedonia, which it defines as “an impairment in the effort-based reward system” and as a “key symptom of depression and other neuropsychiatric illnesses.” Notably, in the fine print of the document, Wellcome Leap states:
“While there are many definitions of anhedonia, we are less interested in the investigation of reduced consummatory pleasure, the general experience of pleasure, or the inability to experience pleasure. Rather, as per the description above, we will prioritize investigations of anhedonia as it relates to impairments in the effort-based reward system—e.g. reduced motivation to complete tasks and decreased capacity to apply effort to achieve a goal.”
In other words, Wellcome Leap is only interested in treating aspects of depression that interfere with an individual’s ability to work, not in improving an individual’s quality or enjoyment of life.
Leap notes, in discussing its goals, that it seeks to develop models for how patients respond to treatments that include “novel or existing behavior modification, psychotherapy, medication, and neurostimulation options” while also capturing an individual’s “genome, phenome [the sum of an individual’s phenotypic traits], [neural] network connectivity, metabolome [the sum of an individual’s metabolic traits], microbiome, reward processing plasticity levels,” among others. It ultimately aims to predict the relationship between an individual’s genome to how “reward processing” functions in the brain. It implies that the data used to create this model should involve the use of wearables, stating that researchers “should seek to leverage high frequency patient-worn or in-home measurements in addition to those obtained in the clinic, hospital or laboratory.”
One of the main research areas included in the program looks to “develop new scalable measurement tools for reliable and high-density quantification of mood (both subjectively reported and objectively quantified via biometrics such as voice, facial expression, etc.), sleep, movement, reward system functioning, effort/motivation/energy levels, social interaction, caloric intake, and HPA axis output in real-world situations.” The HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis is mentioned throughout the document, and this is significant as it is both a negative and positive feedback system regulating the mechanisms of stress reactions, immunity, and also fertility in the human body. The latter is especially important given the Wellcome Trust’s ties to the UK eugenics movement. It is also worth noting that some commercially available wearables, such as Amazon’s Halo, already quantify mood, sleep, and movement.
The program’s authors go even further than the above in terms of what they wish to monitor in real time, stating, “We specifically encourage the development of non-invasive technology to directly interrogate human brain state.” Examples include “a non-invasive spinal tap equivalent,” “behavioral or biomarker probes of neural plasticity,” and “single-session neural monitoring capabilities that define a treatment-predictive brain state.”
In other words, this Wellcome Leap program and its authors seek to develop “non-invasive” and, likely, wearable technology capable of monitoring an individual’s mood, facial expressions, social interactions, effort and motivation, and potentially even thoughts in order to “directly interrogate human brain state.” To think that such a device would stay only in the realm of research is naive, especially given that WEF luminaries have openly spoken at Davos meetings about how governments plan to use such technology widely on their populations as a means of pre-emptively targeting would-be dissent and ushering in an era of “digital dictatorships.”
The focus on treating only the aspects of depression that interfere with a person’s work further suggests that such technology, once developed, would be used to ensure “perfect worker” behavior in industries where human workers are rapidly being replaced with AI and machines, meaning the rulers can be more selective about which people continue to be employed and which do not. Like other Wellcome Leap programs, if completed, the fruits of the Multi-Channel Psych program will likely be used to ensure a population of docile automatons whose movements and thoughts are heavily surveilled and monitored.
The Last Leap for an Old Agenda
Wellcome Leap is no small endeavor, and its directors have the funding, influence, and connections to make their dreams reality. The organization’s leadership includes the key force behind Silicon Valley’s push to commercialize transhumanist tech (Regina Dugan), the “architect” of the MEMS industry (Ken Gabriel), and the “ruler” of the burgeoning genetic-sequencing industry (Jay Flatley). It also benefits from the funding of the world’s largest medical-research foundation, the Wellcome Trust, which is also one of the leading forces in shaping genetics and biotechnology research as well as health policy globally.
A 1994 Sunday Times investigation into the Trust noted that “through [Wellcome Trust] grants and sponsorships, government agencies, universities, hospitals and scientists are influenced all over the world. The trust distributes more money to institutions than even the British government’s Medical Research Council.”
It then notes:
“In offices on the building’s first floor, decisions are reached that affect lives and health on scales comparable with minor wars. In the conference room, high above the street, and in the meeting hall, in the basement, rulings in biotechnology and genetics are handed down that will help shape the human race.”
Little has changed regarding the Trust’s influence since that article was published. If anything, its influence on research paths and decisions that will “shape the human race” has only grown. Its ex-DARPA officials, who have spent their careers advancing transhumanist technology in both the public and private sectors, have overlapping goals with those off Wellcome Leap. Dugan’s and Gabriel’s commercial projects in Silicon Valley reveal that Leap is led by those who have long sought to advance the same technology for profit and for surveillance. This drastically weakens Wellcome Leap’s claim to now be pursuing such technologies to only improve “global health.”
Regina Dugan’s Keynote at Facebook F8 2017. Source: YouTube
Indeed, as this report has shown, most of these technologies would usher in a deeply disturbing era of mass surveillance over both the external and internal activities of human beings, including young children and infants, while also creating a new era of medicine based largely on gene-editing therapies, the risks of which are considerable and also consistently downplayed by its promoters.
When one understands the intimate bond that has long existed between eugenics and transhumanism, Wellcome Leap and its ambitions make perfect sense. In a recent article written by John Klyczek for Unlimited Hangout, it was noted that the first director general of UNESCO and former president of the UK Eugenics Society was Julian Huxley, who coined the term “transhumanism” in his 1957 book New Bottles for New Wine. As Klyczek wrote, Huxley argued that “the eugenic goals of biologically engineering human evolution should be refined through transhumanist technologies, which combine the eugenic methods of genetic engineering with neurotech that merges humans and machines into a new organism.”
Earlier, in 1946, Huxley noted in his vision for UNESCO that it was essential that “the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable,” an astounding statement to make so soon after the end of World War II. Thanks in large part to the Wellcome Trust and its influence on both policy and medical research over the course of several decades, Huxley’s dream of rehabilitating eugenics-infused science in the post–World War II era could soon become reality. Unsurprisingly, the Wellcome Trust hosts the archive of the formerly Huxley-led Eugenics Society and still boasts close ties to its successor organization, the Galton Institute.
The over-riding question is: Will we allow ourselves to continue to be manipulated into allowing transhumanism and eugenics to be openly pursued and normalized, including through initiatives like those of Wellcome Leap that seek to use babies and toddlers as test subjects to advance their nightmarish vision for humanity? If well-crafted advertising slogans and media campaigns painting visions of utopia such as “a world without disease” are all that is needed to convince us to give up our future and our children’s future to military operatives, corporate executives, and eugenicists, then there is little left of our humanity to surrender.
Author’s note: Johnny Vedmore contributed to this report.
Why Black People Cannot Trust The Pfizer Vaccine
Unrecognizable female scientist with bacteriological protection suit investigating a vaccine in the laboratory
By Wesley Muhammad, Ph.D. | The Final Call | December 16, 2020
The Pfizer pharmaceutical company beat everyone to the punch by being the first Covid-19 vaccine to be granted Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA. There is an aggressive media and government campaign to “[push] blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans to the front of the [vaccine] line, ahead of whites.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs has apparently determined that these groups will be given priority for receiving the vaccine once it is available, despite the fact that 60 percent of the Covid-19 cases and 61 percent of the deaths among veterans are White (16 percent and 22 percent are Black, respectively).
But Black people have every reason to be profoundly suspicious of Pfizer as Pfizer has a history of doing horrendous medical experiments on Black people for profit. American drug companies routinely hop across borders in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America conducting risky drug experiments with little oversight. This is a legacy of the colonial view of “The Colony as Laboratory” for the Western powers.
Foreign drug trials in the Third World are cheaper, faster, and provide huge pools of human guinea pigs for experimentation with minimal red tape or regulation. In 2006 Rep. Tom Lantos of California, the senior Democrat on the International Relations committee, cited an unconscionable Pfizer case as an example of “large pharmaceutical companies, both here and in Europe … using these poor, illiterate and uniformed people as guinea pigs.”
At the beginning of 1996 Pfizer was sitting on a new, potentially billion-dollar blockbuster drug, according to Wall Street analysts. The antibiotic Trovan was not yet approved by the FDA. Pfizer had enrolled thousands of adults in Trovan clinical trials and they wanted to debut the drug as a therapy for bacterial meningitis, but there were a number of problems. There was already an effective treatment for meningitis available, the antibiotic ceftriaxone. But Pfizer’s biggest problem was children.
In order to gain maximum market share and achieve the predicted $1 billion per year from this drug, Pfizer needed to develop an oral form that proved safe for pediatric use. But Trovan had never been tested on children, and in animal models it caused liver toxicity and joint damage. In addition, bacterial meningitis was rare in the U.S. There were thus not enough children suffering from it for a convincing clinical trial. However, as luck would have it, a ready pool of children suffering from the disease had suddenly, coincidentally, and inexplicably become available—in Africa!
In 1996 an unprecedented epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis (CSM) erupted oddly in the Muslim half (the north) of Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa. This was Africa’s worst ever CSM outbreak. Hardest hit was Nigeria’s largest northern state, Kano. “For Pfizer, the timing was oddly fortuitous.” Together with the World Health Organization (WHO), Pfizer “volunteered” to help. Vaccines and effective antibiotics were already long in use and could have tamed this epidemic, but curiously these were not made adequately available. It is believed that local health officials were paid off in order to obstruct efforts to halt the epidemic.
Pfizer officials saw in the Nigerian outbreak “a unique opportunity to test their drug without the restrictions of FDA clinical study protocols.” The Pfizer team roared into Nigeria on a chartered DC-9 and roared out five weeks later. But between April 3 and May 15, 1996, Pfizer engaged in an indefensible, illegal medical experiment in Kano using 200 gravely ill Nigerian children as young as 3 years old, who were either given the unapproved experimental drug Trovan or inappropriate doses of the alternative, ceftriaxone. Pfizer never obtained authorization from the federal government of Nigeria to conduct the experiment within its borders and was unable to produce any records documenting that the children or their parents were informed that they were part of an experiment.
“For weeks, Pfizer dispensed Trovan to Nigerian children and babies with complete disregard for all scientific research protocols.” A report on the Kano Experiment from a Nigerian federal panel concluded that the experiment violated Nigerian law as well as international law. Pfizer did no long-term follow up on the children and left Nigeria without any significant information about the final health impact of Trovan on this group. We now know that, due to this illegal and unethical experimentation, the children suffered various degrees of adverse effects and long-term disabilities ranging from deafness to muteness, paralysis, brain damage, loss of sight, and slurred speech; 11 died.
The successful operation of Pfizer’s Kano Experiment relied on the corruption of the local health care system. Nigerian healthcare professionals were paid almost double their normal salary to participate in the study. Pfizer hired Nigerian doctor Abdulhamid Isa Dutse to run the Kano Experiment. However, Dutse was chief “only in name.” Actually, the experiment was directed totally from Pfizer’s U.S. office. Publications on Trovan inaccurately listed Dutse as the lead author, when in fact he was kept in the dark about experiment results; data that appeared in papers with his name on them was actually withheld from him. Later Dutse lamented:
“I have trusted people and am disappointed. I regret the whole exercise, I wonder why on earth I did this.” However, after the Kano Experiment, Dutse ascended to the position of dean of the Kano medical school. Dutse’s role in the Kano Experiment seems analogous to the roles of Nurse Eunice Rivers, scapegoat for the U.S Public Service’s infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and possibly of Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, made the face of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Covid-19 Vaccine today. On October 5, 2020 Dr. Dutse walked into Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, suffered a cardiac arrest and died.
During a 1997 FDA audit of the Nigerian Trovan trial or “Kano Experiment,” Pfizer produced as proof of authorization a fraudulent letterhead document granting clearance for the trial by a Nigerian ethics committee that did not exist at the time. Dutse revealed later that Pfizer instructed him to concoct and backdate the fraudulent ethics committee letter.
In 2007 the state of Kano sued Pfizer for U.S. $2.75 billion, while the Nigerian federal government sued for U.S. $8.5 billion in damages, alleging that the pharmaceutical giant “pretended it came (to Nigeria) to render humanitarian service” but in actuality “Pfizer devised a scheme under which it misrepresented and failed to disclose its primary motive in seeking to participate in giving care to the victims of the epidemic.” Nigeria even sought criminal charges against Pfizer officials, including the CEO at the time of the experiment, William Steer. To squash the case Pfizer continued to engage in unethical behavior.
In 2010 a U.S. diplomatic cable uncovered by WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer hired investigators to look for evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general Michael Aondoakaa in an effort to persuade him to drop the legal action. The cable reported a meeting between Pfizer’s country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and U.S. officials at the Abuja embassy on April 9, 2009, discussing using leaks to the local media to pressure the Nigerian attorney general to drop the cases against Pfizer. This effort failed. In 2011 Pfizer began making payments to the victims involved in the suit as part of a $75 million settlement. In the end, an incredible and unprecedented 12,000 Nigerians died from meningitis in the curious 1996 epidemic, despite the “help” pledged by the WHO and by Pfizer.
Now, that same Pfizer is trialing a brand new, never-before seen experimental vaccine platform—the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine—and Black people are to be “prioritized” in this grand experiment! The innovative and terrifying mRNA vaccine is the brainchild of a secretive Pentagon agency, a military technology R&D operation named the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA, as it is commonly known, “specializes in turning science fantasies into realities” but for military purposes. DARPA doesn’t actually invent things itself.
Instead, it outsources its scientific tasks to universities, military labs and defense contractors, such as Pfizer and Moderna. Pfizer has been an important military contractor for decades, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to do research and development for the Pentagon, including biodefense contracts as far back as 2013. In that year DARPA awarded Pfizer a $7.7 million contract to innovate the type of mRNA vaccine platform that is now being rolled out in “warp speed.” DARPA awarded Moderna a similar contract of up to $25 million in 2013 as well. Thus, behind both Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine BNT162b2 and Moderna’s mRNA vaccine mRNA-1273, is DARPA. This Covid-19 vaccine is thus a piece of military technology. And Black people are being invited to cut to the front of the line.
Yeah, we should be deeply suspicious.
This would not be the first time the government would have operationalized mass vaccinations for covert military purposes. In 2012 Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta confirmed the CIA’s unethical use of the cloak of public health and medicine to advance a military-intelligence objective by making operational use of vaccination programs. For example, the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan have vigorously opposed polio vaccination campaigns in their lands, charging that the U.S runs a spy network under the guise of these vaccine programs and also sterilizes Muslim children. Neither of these charges are mere “conspiracy theory” as they have been proven true.
In 2010 the CIA initiated a clandestine mission to locate (and then kill) Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan through the use of a fake “free vaccination” program targeting Pakistani women and children in areas surrounding Bin Laden’s presumed hideout. CIA agents recruited senior Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi to organize a sham hepatitis B vaccination operation and paid generous sums to health workers used in the plot. Nurses would travel from house to house looking for women ages 15 to 45 to cajole into taking their needle. Mothers were paid to vaccinate their children.
But none were given an actual Hep B vaccine. Rather, blood was drawn and then some concoction was injected into them. The aim of this vaccine ruse was allegedly the extraction of DNA from children of Bin Laden to confirm that he was in the area. Spies posing as polio vaccinators got close to Bin Laden’s home. The clandestine mission was apparently successful and on May 2, 2011 U.S. Navy Seals raided the three-story compound in the suburb of Abbottabad and killed Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban was proved correct to reject the free vaccinations of Western-affiliated campaigns as these campaigns were indeed cover for military/intelligence operations.
Thus, for reasons well beyond Tuskegee, Black people are rightly suspicious of the Covid-19 vaccines being rolled out in “warp speed.”
Wesley Muhammad holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies and is a student minister in the Nation of Islam. He is also a sought after speaker, author, member of the NOI Research Team and the Nation of Islam Executive Council. Follow him on Instagram @wesleymuhammad. This is part one in a series of articles.
Warp Speed Ahead: COVID-19 Vaccines Pave the Way for a New Frontier in Surveillance
By John W. Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | December 1, 2020
Like it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic with its veiled threat of forced vaccinations, contact tracing, and genetically encoded vaccines is propelling humanity at warp speed into a whole new frontier—a surveillance matrix—the likes of which we’ve only previously encountered in science fiction.
Those who eye these developments with lingering mistrust have good reason to be leery: the government has long had a tendency to unleash untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.
Indeed, “we the people” have been treated like lab rats by government agencies for decades now: caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
You don’t have to dig very deep or go very far back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace, making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.
Now this same government—which has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests (GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.) and used it against us, to track, control and trap us—wants us to fall in line as it prepares to roll out COVID-19 vaccines that owe a great debt to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for its past work on how to weaponize and defend against infectious diseases.
The Trump Administration by way of the National Institute of Health awarded $22.8 million to seven corporations to develop artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, etc., with smart phone apps, wearable devices and software “that can identify and trace contacts of infected individuals, keep track of verified COVID-19 test results, and monitor the health status of infected and potentially infected individuals.”
This is all part of Operation Warp Speed, which President Trump has likened to the Manhattan Project, a covert government effort spearheaded by the military to engineer and build the world’s first atomic bomb.
There is every reason to tread cautiously.
There is a sinister world beyond that which we perceive, one in which power players jockey for control over the one commodity that is a necessary ingredient for total domination: you.
By you, I mean you the individual in all your singular humanness.
Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.
These COVID-19 vaccines, which rely on messenger RNA technology that influences everything from viruses to memory, are merely the tipping point.
The groundwork being laid with these vaccines is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
If you were unnerved by the rapid deterioration of privacy under the Surveillance State, prepare to be terrified by the surveillance matrix that will be ushered in on the heels of the government’s rollout of this COVID-19 vaccine.
Everything we do is increasingly dependent on and, ultimately, controlled by our internet-connected, electronic devices. For example, in 2007, there were an estimated 10 million sensor devices connecting human utilized electronic devices (cell phones, laptops, etc.) to the Internet. By 2013, it had increased to 3.5 billion. By 2030, it is estimated to reach 100 trillion.
Much, if not all, of our electronic devices will be connected to Google, a neural network that approximates a massive global brain.
The end goal? The creation of a new “human” species, so to speak, and the NSA, the Pentagon and the “Matrix” of surveillance agencies are part of the plan.
Neuralink, a brain-computer chip interface (BCI), paves the way for AI control of the human brain. “In the most severe scenario, hacking a Neuralink-like device could turn ‘hosts’ into programmable drone armies capable of doing anything their ‘master’ wanted,” writes Jason Lau for Forbes.
There’s no limit to what can be accomplished—for good or ill—using brain-computer interfaces.
Clearly, we are rapidly moving into the “posthuman era.”
Transhumanism—the fusing of machines and people—is here to stay and will continue to grow.
In fact, as science and technology continue to advance, the ability to control humans will only increase. In 2014, for example, it was revealed that scientists have discovered how to deactivate that part of our brains that controls whether we are conscious or not.
Add to this the fact that increasingly humans will be implanted with microchips for such benign purposes as tracking children or as medical devices to assist with our health. Such devices “point to an uber-surveillance society that is Big Brother on the inside looking out,” warns Dr. Katina Michael. “Governments or large corporations would have the ability to track people’s actions and movements, categorize them into different socio-economic, political, racial, or consumer groups and ultimately even control them.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, control is the issue.
All of this indicates a new path forward for large corporations and government entities that want to achieve absolute social control. Instead of relying solely on marauding SWAT teams and full-fledged surveillance apparatuses, they will work to manipulate our emotions to keep us in lock step with the American police state.
Now add this warp speed-deployed vaccine to that mix, with all of the associated unknown and fearsome possibilities for altering or controlling human epigenetics, and you start to see the perils inherent in blindly adopting emerging technologies without any restrictions in place to guard against technological tyranny and abuse.
It’s one thing for the starship Enterprise to boldly go where no man has gone before, but even Mr. Spock recognized the dangers of a world dominated by AI. “Computers make excellent and efficient servants,” he observed in “The Ultimate Computer” episode of Star Trek, “but I have no wish to serve under them.”
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
Engineering Contagion: UPMC, Corona-thrax and “the Darkest Winter”
Researchers at a BSL-3 lab tied to the organizers of the 2001 Dark Winter simulation, DARPA, and the post-9/11 biodefense industrial complex are genetically modifying anthrax to express Covid-19 components, according to FOIA documents.
By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | September 25, 2020
Soon after having been fired from his post as secretary of the treasury in December 2002, after a policy clash with the president, Paul O’Neill became a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite having just worked under and clashed with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn’t until O’Neill began answering to UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff as a member of the Center’s board that he chose to publicly denounce a superior as “evil.”
“He wants to destroy competition. He wants to be the only game in town,” O’Neill would later state of Romoff, adding that “after 18 months I quit [the UPMC board] in disgust” due to Romoff’s “absolute control” over the board’s actions. O’Neill subsequently noted that UPMC “board members who have wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars are not willing to take this guy on.” When pressed by a local reporter, O’Neill further elaborated that he had been told by other board members that they were “afraid” of Romoff because Romoff might “harm them in some way.”
O’Neill’s criticisms of Romoff are hardly an outlier, as local community activists and even a state attorney general have noted that UPMC’s board lets Romoff do as he pleases.
Jeffrey Romoff has ruled UPMC with an iron fist since his predecessor, Thomas Detre, had a heart attack in 1992. As a result of the Center’s massive wealth accumulation, at first spurred by his magic touch for receiving National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, Detre was able to use the financial power afforded to him to consolidate control over enough of the University of Pittsburgh to create his “own personal fiefdom,” which is now the stand-alone corporation known as UPMC.
Not long after Romoff took over the Center’s reins, he made his intentions clear to faculty and staff, stating at one 1995 UPMC meeting that his “vision” for the future of American health care was “the conversion of health care from social good to a commodity.” Motivated by profit above all else, Romoff aggressively expanded UPMC, gobbling up community hospitals, surgery centers, and private practices to create a “health-care network” that has expanded throughout much of Pennsylvania and even abroad to other countries, including China. Under Romoff, UPMC has also expanded into the health-insurance business, with 40 percent of the medical claims it pays out going straight back into places of care that are owned by UPMC—meaning UPMC is essentially paying itself.
In addition, since UPMC is officially a “charitable nonprofit corporation,” it is exempt from property taxes and has special access to the tax-exempt municipal bond market. UPMC can also solicit tax-deductible grants from private individuals and organizations, as well as governments. These grants totaled over $1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2017.
Despite these perks being officially justified because of UPMC’s “charitable institution” status, the UPMC board, with Romoff at the top, have seen their own multimillion-dollar-per-year salaries continue to climb. Perhaps this perk also comes from UPMC being a nonprofit corporation, as there are no stockholders to whom Romoff and the board must explain their increasingly exorbitant salaries. For instance, Romoff made $8.97 million last year as UPMC’s CEO, a marked increase over the $6.12 million he had raked in the prior year.
UPMC’s financial chicanery is so out of control that even Pennsylvania’s attorney general has taken action against it, suing UPMC in February 2019 for violations of the state’s charity laws based on their “unjust enrichment” and engaging in “unfair, fraudulent or deceptive acts or practices.” Though UPMC decided to settle out of court, the Center and Romoff came out of the affair relatively unscathed.
Now, thanks to the crisis caused by Covid-19, UPMC is once again on the path toward growing even larger and more powerful in pursuit of Romoff’s ultimate goal, which is, in his own words, to make UPMC the “Amazon of health care.”
In this fourth installment of the The Last American Vagabond series “Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex”, the “nonprofit” health-care behemoth that is UPMC is squarely placed at the intersection of post-9/11 “biodefense” public-private partnerships; corporate-funded academics who shape public policy on behalf of their private-sector benefactors; and risky research on dangerous pathogens that threatens to unleash the very “bioterror” that these institutions claim to guard against.
The Odd Trajectory of UPMC’s Covid-19 Vaccine Efforts
In January 2020, when much of the world remained blissfully unaware of the coming global pandemic, UPMC was already at work developing a vaccine to protect against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, known as SARS-CoV-2. That month, before the state of Pennsylvania had a single case of Covid-19, UPMC formed a “coronavirus task force,” which was initially focused on lobbying the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to obtain samples of live SARS-CoV-2 for research purposes. That research was to be conducted at the Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL) housed within UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research. A day after the director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex, revealed UPMC’s efforts to access the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he announced that the virus samples, containing an estimated 50 to 60 million coronavirus particles, were already en route to the university. At the time, UPMC was one of only a handful of institutions on the CDC’s short list to receive live SARS-CoV-2 samples.
UPMC later stated that they began work on a vaccine for Covid-19 on January 21st, weeks before the February 14th announcement that the virus was on its way to the university. That original vaccine candidate used the published genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, released in early January 2020 by Chinese researchers, to synthetically produce SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins that would be transported into cells by an adenoviral vector, which is commonly used in a variety of vaccines. The vaccine candidate was nicknamed PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine.
A little over a month after the live SARS-CoV-2 samples were received by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, UPMC received a $5 million grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international organization founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant was officially awarded to “an international academic-industry partnership” that the Center for Vaccine Research had recently formed with the Institut Pasteur in France and Austrian vaccine manufacturer Themis. Soon after, in May, Themis was acquired by vaccine giant Merck, which began recruiting volunteers for human trials earlier this month on September 11. Merck has incredibly close ties with UPMC, particularly its commercialization arm known as UPMC Enterprises.
The CEPI grant seems to have drastically altered the Center for Vaccine Research’s interest in the original adenovirus-vector vaccine candidate, PittCoVacc, as the CEPI grant was specifically aimed at funding a different vaccine candidate that instead uses the measles virus as a vector. The measles virus and the genetic manipulation of measles for use in the measles vaccine is, notably, the principal research interest and expertise of Center for Vaccine Research director Paul Duprex.
This measles-based vaccine candidate has been described as “a modified [genetically altered] measles virus that delivers bits of the new coronavirus into the body to prevent Covid-19” as well as an “attenuated [genetically modified yet weakened] measles virus as a vector with which to introduce genetic material from SARS-[CoV-]2 to the immune system.” The combination of this weakened measles virus and SARS-CoV-2, per Duprex, will produce a “more benign version of coronavirus [that] will acquaint a person’s immune system” with SARS-CoV-2. No vaccine using this modality has ever been licensed.
On April 2nd, less than a week after the CEPI award had been announced, the UPMC researchers who had developed the original vaccine candidate using the more traditional adenovirus-vector approach published a study in EBioMedicine (a publication of the medical journal Lancet) that reported promising results of their vaccine candidate in animal studies. The news that a US institution was among the first in the world to develop a Covid-19 vaccine candidate with promising results from an animal study was heavily amplified by mainstream US media outlets, with those reports noting that UMPC was requesting government permission to quickly move onto human trials.
This original vaccine candidate, however, was mysteriously dropped from subsequent reports and statements from UPMC regarding its Covid-19 vaccine efforts. Indeed, in recent months, Duprex’s statements on the center’s Covid-19 vaccine candidates no longer mention the once-promising PittCoVacc at all. Instead, new reports, citing Duprex, claim that the only UPMC vaccine candidates are the CEPI-funded measles-vaccine candidate and another, more mysterious vaccine candidate, whose nature has only been recently revealed by documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Equally odd is that recent media reports on the original vaccine candidate have stopped mentioning UPMC at all, instead citing only Themis, its new owner Merck, and France’s Institut Pasteur. There are no reports indicating a break-up of the original “academic-industry partnership” that had received the CEPI grant. It seems that this is what may have come to pass, as Duprex stated that the UPMC measles-vector vaccine candidate had partnered with the Serum Institute of India for mass production, first for trials and then for public use, depending on how the vaccine advances through the regulatory process. In contrast, Themis/Merck have stated that their vaccine is being produced in France. It remains unclear what the relation is between these two, and apparently analogous, vaccine candidates.
Though Duprex has been relatively forthcoming about the nature of the first UPMC vaccine candidate (i. e., the CEPI-funded measles-vector vaccine), he has been much more tight-lipped about its second vaccine candidate. In late August, he told the Pittsburgh Business Times that the second vaccine candidate that UPMC was developing “works by delivering genetic material coding for a viral protein instead of the entire weakened or killed virus as is standard in other vaccines.” Yet Duprex declined to state what vector will be used to deliver the genetic material into human cells. Recent FOIA revelations, nevertheless, have revealed that UPMC’s second vaccine candidate involves genetically engineering a combination of SARS-Cov-2 and anthrax, a substance better known for its potential use as a bioweapon.
Corona-thrax
The recently obtained documents reveal that the BSL-3 lab that is part of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research is conducting eyebrow-raising research involving combining SARS-CoV-2 with Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax infection. Per the documents, anthrax is being genetically engineered by a researcher, whose name was redacted in the release, so that it will express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is the part of the coronavirus that allows it to gain access into human cells. The researcher asserts that “the [genetically engineered anthrax/SARS-CoV-2 hybrid] can [be] used as a host strain to make SARS-CoV-2 recombinant S protein vaccine,” and the creation of said vaccine is the officially stated purpose of the research project. The documents were produced by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which held an emergency meeting on June 22nd of this year to “discuss specific protocols involving research with the coronavirus,” which included a vote on the aforementioned proposal.
Edward Hammond, the former director of the Sunshine Project, an organization that opposed chemical and biological weapons and the expansion of “dual use” biodefense/bioweapon research, obtained the documents. Other FOIA documents recently obtained by Hammond have revealed an “explosion” of risky Covid-19-related research at other academic institutions, such as the University of North Carolina, which has already had lab accidents involving genetically engineered variants of SARS-CoV-2.
Hammond told The Last American Vagabond that the experiment, which he dubs “Corona-thrax,” is “emblematic of the pointless research excesses that often characterize the response of scientists to the federal government throwing billions of dollars at health crises.” Hammond added, “While I don’t think that Corona-thrax would be infectious, it falls into the categories of pointless and crazy. The biggest immediate risk of all this activity is that a researcher will deliberately or inadvertently create a modified form of SARS-CoV-2 that is even more difficult to treat, or more deadly, and this virus will escape the lab. It only takes a stray droplet.”
Jonathan Latham, a virologist who previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and who is the current editor of Independent Science News, agreed with Hammond that the Corona-thrax experiment is odd and said that he was “concerned here specifically about the research process and the risks of these specific experiments at Pittsburgh.” In an interview with The Last American Vagabond, Latham asserted that it is “unusual by historical standards . . . the combining of two highly pathogenic organisms in a single experiment.” He did note, however, that such studies for the purposes of vaccine research have become more common in recent years, as is made clear in a 2012 study.
Few experiments have been conducted that specifically utilize anthrax in this way. Since 2000, the studies that have examined the use of genetically modified anthrax as a potential vaccine vector have been affiliated with Harvard University. One of these studies was on the use of anthrax as a vector in a potential HIV vaccine and was jointly conducted in 2000 by Harvard researchers and the vaccine company Avant Immunotherapeutics (now part of Celldex).
Despite reporting positive preliminary results in their experiments, Avant/Celldex did not fund further experiments into a vaccine that used this anthrax-based modality, and it does not currently market or have any such vaccine in its product pipeline. This suggests that, for whatever reason, this company did not see much value in this vaccine, despite the preliminary study with Harvard claiming that the methodology was safe and effective.
The Harvard researchers involved in that 2000 study, however, continued to investigate the possibility of an anthrax-based HIV vaccine in 2003, 2004, and 2005, though without corporate sponsorship. Related yet different research has explored the use of “disarmed” anthrax components as an adjuvant in vaccines and as the basis for enzyme-linked immunospot assays.
The aforementioned Harvard researchers patented their methodology of using anthrax in this way for the production of a vaccine in 2002. This means that the anthrax-based “vaccine” currently being developed by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research would have to develop a new method that utilizes anthrax in much the same way so as not to infringe on the patent, which is unlikely. The other alternative is that UPMC would pay the patent holders for use of their methodology if they want to commercialize it in a vaccine. Yet, given UPMC’s business model in general, as well as that of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research specifically, this also seems unlikely.
Also odd is what sort of incentive UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research possesses for the Corona-thrax experiment. There are currently over a hundred vaccine candidates that use existing and tested vaccine platforms in pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine, a fact Duprex himself has acknowledged. As Hammond told The Last American Vagabond, “It is perfectly obvious that there are numerous existing vaccine platforms for Covid-19 and that some of them will, sooner or more likely later, succeed. There is no serious need for some sort of quite strange bacterial platform, much less one that happens to be anthrax. It’s completely unnecessary and frankly bizarre.”
The Crown Jewel of the Biotech-Industrial Complex
Ribbon cutting for the Center for Vaccine Research – From left: Donald S. Burke, U. S. Congressman Mike Doyle, Arthur S. Levine, Dan Onorato, Mark A. Nordenberg.
The Corona-thrax experiment is being conducted at the Center for Vaccine Research’s Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL), where the center’s work with pathogenic agents, such as anthrax and SARS-CoV-2, is conducted.
The creation of UPMC’s RBL was first announced in 2003, when the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, then and currently led by Anthony Fauci) stated it would fund the laboratory’s construction with an $18 million grant. It was originally planned to be mainly “dedicated to research on agents that cause naturally occurring and emerging infections, as well as potential agents of bioterrorism.” The plan to create the lab was part of the US government decision to dramatically ramp up “biodefense” research in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The lab was also intended to work on “developing a vaccine program focusing on basic and translational research” related to viruses of pandemic potential that are at risk of being “weaponized,” including SARS. After the creation of the lab was initially announced, the project expanded, eventually becoming UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, which was launched in 2007. The Center for Vaccine Research was the second such institution to be officially added to the NIAID’s “biodefense” RBL network.
The opening of both this lab and UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research was made reality thanks to the efforts of the main authors of the June 2001 Dark Winter bioterror simulation, a controversial exercise that eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks as well as the initial, yet bogus, narrative that Iraq and Islamic extremist terror groups were responsible for those attacks. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was later revealed to be of US military origin. As noted in Part I of this series, participants in the Dark Winter exercise had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks and others were involved in the subsequent “investigation,” which many experts and former FBI investigators describe as a cover-up.
Dark Winter was largely written by Tara O’Toole, Thomas Inglesby, and Randall Larsen, all three of whom played integral roles in the founding or operations of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, along with O’Toole’s mentor, D. A. Henderson. UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity was launched in September 2003, just days before the NIAID announced it would fund the RBL lab that would later become the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research.
Notably, just days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, O’Toole, Inglesby, and Larsen personally briefed Vice President Cheney on Dark Winter. Simultaneously, Cheney’s office at the White House began taking the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin to prevent anthrax infection. In the weeks between that briefing and the 2001 anthrax attacks, Dark Winter participants and several associates of Cheney, namely members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) like Donald Kagan and Richard Perle, asserted that a bioterror attack involving anthrax would soon take place.
In the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, Henderson “was tapped by the federal government to vastly increase the number of [biodefense] labs, both to detect suspected pathogens like anthrax and to conduct bio-defense research, such as developing vaccines,” with the announcement of UPMC’s RBL being part of the launch of the O’Toole-led Center for Biosecurity at UPMC, where Henderson was named senior adviser. In 2003, the Center for Biosecurity was set up at UPMC partially at the request of Jeffrey Romoff to be “the country’s only think tank and research center devoted to the prevention and handling of biological attacks,” with UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research being the hub of a new “biodefense research” lab network Henderson was setting up and managing at the time. That network remains technically managed by the Fauci-led NIAID.
Also noteworthy is that the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, from its opening in 2007 until 2016, was Donald Burke. Burke is a former biodefense researcher for the US military at Fort Detrick and other installations and, immediately prior to heading the UPMC center, was a program director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he worked closely with O’Toole and Inglesby.
At the time of the 2003 announcement regarding the creation of what would become UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, Tara O’Toole stated:
“This new laboratory will enable University of Pittsburgh medical researchers to delve further into possible treatments and to develop vaccines against diseases that might result from bioterrorist attack or from natural outbreaks.”
A few years later, after she was nominated to a top post at the Department of Homeland Security, O’Toole was slammed by experts over her excessive lobbying “for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security.” Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright remarked at the time that “she makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” It was also noted in hearings that O’Toole had worked as a lobbyist for several “life sciences” companies specializing in the sale of biodefense products to the U.S. government, including Emergent Biosolutions – a very controversial company and a key suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The history of the Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL, particularly the network of people who prompted the lab’s creation, raises concerns about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment currently being conducted within the facility. This is especially true because the researcher conducting the experiment appears to be ignorant about key parts of the research he or she is conducting.
For instance, the FOIA-redacted researcher incorrectly states that a recombinant virus proposed for use in the study is incapable of infecting human cells, while the IBC members note that this is not the case. In addition, the unnamed researcher falsely claimed that one of the viral vectors for use in the investigator’s study did not express Cas9 (a protein associated with CRISPR gene editing) and gRNA (“guide RNA,” also used in CRISPR) and was unaware that handling those agents requires an enhanced BSL-2 lab (BSL-2+) as opposed to a typical BSL-2 lab.
Apparently such errors among researchers involved in Covid-19 research at UPMC is not an anomaly. During another UPMC IBC meeting included in the FOIA release, the IBC noted the following about a separate research proposal:
“In the investigator’s notes in responses to changes requested by the IBC pre-reviewers, the investigator indicates that RNA from SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infected cells will be obtained from BEI resources. Genomic RNA isolated from cells infected with SARS-CoV-1 is regulated as a Select Agent by the Federal Select Agent Program and neither the University nor this investigator are registered for possession and use of these materials [emphasis added] (SARS-CoV-1). The investigator must NOT obtain SARS-CoV-1 genomic RNA without prior consultation with the University’s RO/AROs for Select Agents.”
This part, in particular, caught the attention of Jonathan Latham, who noted that it was odd that “a university researcher is trying to obtain approval for an experiment which no one at the university is allowed to do.” Latham added in an interview that “apparently this applicant is totally ignorant of the regulatory environment and by extension the risks of SARS-CoV, which is a highly infectious virus whose escape from a lab has already led to at least one death.”
While Latham assumed that this was a “university researcher,” it is worth noting that the use of the UPMC Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL is not exclusive to researchers affiliated with the university. Indeed, as noted on the NIH website, “Investigators in academia, not-for-profit organizations, industry, and government studying biodefense and emerging infectious diseases may request the use of biocontainment laboratories,” including the RBL managed by the Center for Vaccine Research.
In addition, the Center for Vaccine Research website notes that “scientists from outside the University of Pittsburgh can work in the RBL through a collaboration or contract. Outside scientists must comply with all University of Pittsburgh training, documentation, regulatory, and medical requirements.” This means that outside scientists using the facility are also subject to IBC review. Both the NIH and Center for Vaccine Research sites note that, for an outside researcher to use the UPMC RBL facility, approval from the center’s director must be obtained.
Since the name of the Corona-thrax researcher is redacted, there is no way of knowing if he or she is affiliated with the university or a separate institution, corporation, or government agency. Regardless of who is conducting this experiment, however, it is possible to examine the history and motivations of the man who ultimately signed off on it—the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, Paul Duprex.
Paul Duprex: DARPA-Funded Researcher and Gain-of-Function Enthusiast
Director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex
Paul Duprex is a former chief scientist for Johnson & Johnson whose subsequent foray into academia was largely funded with research grants from the NIH and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Much of Duprex’s research has focused on recombinant (i. e., genetically engineered) viruses or viral evolution.
In terms of his research funded by DARPA, Duprex was most closely associated with DARPA’s “Prophecy” program, the creation of which was overseen by Michael Callahan. Callahan’s suspect past and his ties to the origin of the current Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan, China, were the subject of a recent Unlimited Hangout article by Raul Diego.
In that article, Diego notes that the now-defunct Prophecy program had “sought to ‘transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive’ through algorithmic programming techniques” and that the program further “proposed that ‘viral mutations and outbreaks’ could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development.”
By all indications, Prophecy was DARPA’s first major foray into “predictive” AI-powered health care, which has expanded considerably in the years since. It also involved a component, which Duprex was particularly involved in advancing, whereby the “predictive” viral evolutions algorithms would be “validated and tested . . . by using multiple selective pressures on at least three closely related virus strains in an experimental setting.”
Such experiments, like this study by Duprex, involved the genetic engineering of three viral pathogen strains and then seeing which would become most transmissible and virulent in an animal host. Such studies are often referred to as gain-of-function (GOF) research and are incredibly controversial given that they often create pathogens that are more virulent and/or transmissible than they otherwise would be. It is also worth noting that UPMC, before Duprex joined the center, had also received millions in funding from DARPA’s Prophecy program “to develop in vitro and computational models for predicting viral evolution under selection pressure from multiple evolutionary stressors.”
Duprex has also been involved in conducting research for DARPA’s current INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, a successor to Prophecy that “aims to harness viral evolution to create a novel, adaptive form of medical countermeasure—therapeutic interfering particles (TIPs)—that outcompetes viruses in the body to prevent or treat infection.” TIPs are genetically engineered viruses with defective genomes that theoretically compete with real viruses for viral components in the human body but “evolve with” the viruses they are meant to protect the body against and are “susceptible to mutation over time.”
The goal of the INTERCEPT program is to use TIPs as “therapeutics” and have them injected into the human body to “preemptively” protect against the virus from which a particular TIP was developed. It is worth noting that, while DARPA frames much of its gene-editing research (including its “genetic extinction” technology research) as being aimed at promoting either human or environmental health, it has also openly admitted that these same technologies are of interest to DARPA for their ability to “subvert” the genes of human adversaries of the US military via “genetic weapons.”
Duprex led an INTERCEPT study published in February of this year in which he and his coauthors explored how to create a synthetic TIP of the Nipah virus, a deadly virus with a fatality rate of over 70 percent. In that study, they used both wild and genetically engineered strains of Nipah virus. Notably, the Clade X pandemic simulation, which will be discussed in detail in the next installment of this series, involved a genetically engineered combination of the Nipah virus and a parainfluenza disease.
Clade X took place in 2018 and was led by much of the same team that was responsible for the 2001 Dark Winter bioterrorism simulation, including former FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. Another notable participant at Clade X was Julie Gerberding, former CDC director and current executive vice president at Merck, which has close ties to UPMC as well as the Center for Biosecurity’s failed “21st Century Biodefense” project.
A few months after publishing the study funded by DARPA’s INTERCEPT program, Duprex coauthored another study on the use of synthetic “nanobodies” (i. e., bioengineered synthetic nanoparticles acting as antibodies) that was published in August. This effort mirrors other DARPA “health-focused” projects. That study was funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the NIH, and Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
In addition to his ties to DARPA programs involving the genetic engineering of viral pathogens, Duprex is a leading advocate for controversial gain-of-function research and was appointed to direct UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research less than three months after the federal moratorium on GOF research ended.
In October 2014, five days after that moratorium was first imposed, Duprex gave a talk to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity entitled “Gain-of-Function Studies: Their History, Their Utility, and What They Can Tell Us.” In the talk, he asserted that “cross-species infection studies have already helped to improve surveillance in the field, have shed new light on basic influenza virus biology, and could assist in growing vaccine viruses better” and argues against the recently imposed moratorium.
In 2014, Duprex also wrote in a paper published in Nature that “GOF approaches are absolutely essential in infectious disease research; although alternative approaches can be very useful, these can never replace GOF experiments.” He added that, in his view, there were only two reasons for GOF research, the first being to “improve surveillance or to develop therapeutics” and the second being merely to learn “interesting biology.”
In that same paper, he also argued that “genetic engineering that is intended and likely to endow a low-pathogenicity, low-transmissibility agent with either enhanced pathogenicity or enhanced transmissibility may be appropriate if the benefits are substantial.” He also suggested in this 2014 paper that it “might” be necessary “to enhance pathogenicity of coronaviruses in order to develop a valid animal model for coronaviruses.” Years later, during the current coronavirus crisis, Duprex and other officials from the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research co-developed a Covid-19 research and development “blueprint” for the UN’s World Health Organization.
In addition, Duprex’s work for DARPA’s Prophecy program involved GOF research, as noted above, and the creator of that program, Michael Callahan – former head of DARPA’s biodefense therapeutics initiatives, is also a proponent of GOF who believes that such risky research is inseparable from “the research and development enterprise in the life sciences and for biotechnology.”
Duprex is also a founding member of Scientists for Science, a group of researchers (most of whom are involved in GOF research) who opposed the GOF moratorium and were “confident that biomedical research on potentially dangerous pathogens can be performed safely and is essential for a comprehensive understanding of microbial disease pathogenesis, prevention and treatment.” Another of the group’s founding members is Yoshihiro Kawaoka, whose controversial GOF experiments that made pathogenic viruses more deadly have garnered considerable media attention.
When the moratorium on GOF was lifted in December 2017, Duprex called it a “sign of progress,” adding that “on a personal level I’m really pleased these NIH funded scientists [conducting GOF research] get some clarity.” As previously mentioned, he became the Center for Vaccine Research’s director less than three months later, in March 2018.
The “Darkest Winter” Looms
After a cursory examination of the background of UPMC, its Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, and the man directing its Center for Vaccine Research, the question about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment becomes: Is this yet another ill-advised experiment by a lab led by a GOF enthusiast and fueled by a feeding frenzy over the billions of dollars thrown by the government and other entities into Covid-19 research? Or is there perhaps a more nefarious motive to genetically engineering something as bizarre as Corona-thrax?
While the latter question may appear conspiratorial, it is worth pointing out that the institutions most likely to have been the sources for the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks were conducting GOF research on anthrax funded by the Pentagon and the CIA that was justified as “improving” the controversial anthrax vaccine known as BioThrax.
For instance, Battelle Memorial Institute—a Pentagon and CIA contractor—began genetically engineering a more virulent form of anthrax “to see if the [anthrax] vaccine the United States intends to supply to its armed forces is effective against that strain.” While these experiments were going on, the embattled manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine now known as Emergent Biosolutions, entered into a contract with Battelle that gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” it was using in connection with the genetically modified anthrax program.
As noted in Part II of this series, BioPort was set to lose its Pentagon contract for anthrax vaccine entirely in September 2001, and the entirety of its anthrax vaccine business was rescued by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw concerns over BioPort’s corruption and its horrendous safety track record replaced with fervent demands for more of its anthrax vaccine. Furthermore, as noted in detail in Part III of this series, Battelle was the most likely source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. The ties between UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, Battelle, and Emergent Biosolutions will be discussed in the next installment in the series.
What is also notable about these Corona-thrax experiments occurring at UPMC are the ties of UPMC’s RBL and Center for Vaccine Research to another key component of the center’s “biodefense” complex, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. As previously mentioned, the people recruited to head this center at its founding in 2003 were intimately involved in the 2001 bioterror simulation Dark Winter, namely Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby.
While leading the UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, O’Toole and/or her successor Inglesby engaged in other notable bioterror simulations, including one that took place last year— Event 201, which eerily predicted the coronavirus crisis that began this year. Inglesby, who is also the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in addition to his post at UPMC, was the moderator at Event 201.
Though Event 201 has garnered considerable scrutiny in recent months, another but less well-known exercise in 2018 that involved O’Toole and Inglesby, examined how a bioterror attack involving a genetically engineered pathogen could trigger a Continuity of Government (CoG) scenario, a government roadmap for the imposition of martial law in the United States. As other investigative series of mine have noted, there have recently been a myriad of intelligence agency–linked simulations that predict the imminent imposition of martial law in the United States following the 2020 election.
It is also notable that George W. Bush’s controversial and classified update to CoG plans in 2007, known as Executive Directive 51, was directly inspired by Dark Winter, and Barack Obama’s subsequent executive orders on CoG gave near-complete control of American infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security in a such a situation. At the time Obama issued those executive orders, O’Toole was the DHS undersecretary for science and technology and also influenced those updates to the CoG plans. O’Toole is currently the executive vice president of the CIA’s In-Q-tel.
The simulation known as Clade X will be examined in greater detail in the next installment of this series as will the numerous and recent “predictions” from US government sources, controversial billionaires such as Bill Gates, and a web of individuals tied to UPMC who have warned that a bioterror attack or related public health catastrophe is set to take place in the United States in the latter half of 2020. As one high-ranking government official put it earlier this year, this allegedly imminent event will result in “the darkest winter in modern history.”
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