Seasoned veterinarians and livestock producers alike have been scratching their heads trying to understand the media’s response to the avian flu. Headlines across every major news outlet warn of humans becoming infected with the “deadly” bird flu after one reported case of pink-eye in a human.
The entire narrative is predicated upon a long-disputed claim that Covid-19 was the result of a zoonotic jump—the famed Wuhan bat wet-market theory.
While the source of Covid is hotly contested within the scientific community, the policy vehicle at the center of this dialectic began years prior to Sars-CoV-2 and is quite resolute in force and effect.
In 2016, the Gates Foundation donated to the World Health Organization to create the OneHealth Initiative. Since 2020, the CDC has adopted and implemented the OneHealth Initiative to build a “collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.”
In the aftermath of Covid-19, the OneHealth Initiative began taking shape, due largely in part to millions of tax dollars appropriated through ARP (American Rescue Plan) funding.
Through its APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Investigation System) the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) was given $300 million in 2021 to begin implementing “a risk-based, comprehensive, integrated disease monitoring and surveillance system domestically…to build additional capacity for zoonotic disease surveillance and prevention,” globally.
“The One Health concept recognizes that the health of people, animals, and the environment are all linked,” said USDA Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Jenny Lester Moffitt.
According to the USDA’s press release, the Biden-Harris administration’s OneHealth approach will also help to ensure “new markets and streams of income for farmers and producers using climate smart food and forestry practices,” by “making historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy capabilities in rural America.”
In other words, the federal government is using regulatory enforcement to intervene in the marketplace, in addition to subsidizing corporations with tax dollars to direct a planned economic outcome—ending meat consumption.
Climate-Smart Commodities – Planning the Economy through Subsidized Intervention
Under the recently announced Climate-Smart Commodities program, the USDA has appropriated $3.1 billion in tax subsidies to one hundred and forty-one new private Climate-Smart projects, ranging from carbon sequestration to Climate-Smart meat and forestry practices.
Private investors such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – who just committed $1 billion to the development of lab cultured meat-like molds, and meat grown in petri dishes, to
Ballpark, formerly known for its hot dogs but is now harvesting python meat, is rushing to cash in on this new industry, and the OneHealth/USDA certification program.
Culling The Herd – Regulatory Intervention in the Marketplace
Meanwhile, the last vestiges of America’s food freedom and decentralized food sources are quietly being targeted by the full force of the federal government.
The once voluntary APHIS System is poised to become the mandatory APHIS-15, which among many other changes, “the system will be renamed Animal Health, Disease, and Pest Surveillance and Management System, USDA/APHIS-15. This system is used by APHIS to collect, manage, and evaluate animal health data for disease and pest control and surveillance programs.”
Among those “many changes” that APHIS-15 is undergoing, one should be of particular interest to the public—the removal of all references to the voluntary* Bovine Johne’s Disease Control Program.
“Updating the authority for maintenance of the system to remove reference to the Bovine Johne’s Disease Control Program.”
According to the USDA/APHIS-15, expanded authority places disease tracing in their jurisdiction and the radio frequency ear tags are necessary for the “rapid and accurate recordkeeping for this volume of animals and movement,” which they say “is not achievable without electronic systems.”
The notice clearly spells out that RFID tags “may be read without restraint as the animal goes past an electronic reader.”
“Once the reader scans the tag, the electronically collected tag number can be rapidly and accurately transmitted from the reader to a connected electronic database.”
However, industry leaders and lawmakers alike have said the database will be used to track vaccination history and movement, and that this data may be used to impact the market rate of cattle and bison at the time of processing.
Centralized Control of Processing/Production via Public-Private Partnership Agreements
In addition to the vast new authority of the USDA funded through the OneHealth Initiative, and the ARP, the EPA has also created its own unique set of regulatory burdens upon the entire meat industry.
On March 25, 2024, the EPA finalized a new set of Clean Water Act rule changes to limit nitrogen and phosphorus “pollutants” in downstream water treatment facilities from processing facilities. While the EPA’s interpretation of authority and jurisdiction over wastewater is concerning long-term, the broader context of consolidated processing under four multinational meat-packing companies is of much greater concern for the immediate future.
With few exceptions, in the United States it is illegal to sell meat without a USDA certification. Currently, the only way to access USDA certification is through a USDA-certified processing facility.
According to the EPA, the new rules will impact up to 845 processing facilities nationwide, unless facilities drastically limit the amount of meat they process each year.
With processing capabilities being the number one barrier to market for livestock producers, and billions of dollars in grants being awarded to Climate-Smart food substitutes, the amount of government intervention into the marketplace becomes very clear.
The Rise of Authoritarianism and Economic Fascism – Control the Supply
The United States, once a consumer-demand free market society, is currently witnessing the use of government force, and intervention tactics to steer and manipulate the marketplace. Similar to 1930’s Italy, this is being achieved by the state within the state, through the use of selectionism, protectionism, and economic planning between public-private partnership agreements.
The long-term and unavoidable problem with economic fascism is that it leads to authoritarian and centralized control, from which escape is impossible.
As each industry becomes centralized and consolidated under the few, consumer choice simultaneously disappears. As choice disappears, so does the ability of the individual to meet their specific and unique needs.
Eventually, the individual no longer serves a role outside of its usefulness to the state—the final exhale before the last python squeeze.
On August 30, 2019, BioNTech entered into agreements with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). BMGF agreed to purchase 3,038,674 ordinary shares with nominal amount of k€ 3,039 of BioNTech for a total of k€49,864 (k$55,000). These agreements require BioNTech to perform certain research and development activities to advance the development of products for the prevention and treatment of HIV and tuberculosis. In the event of a breach of the underlying conditions, including such research and development activities, BMGF has the right to sell its shares back to BioNTech at the initial share price or fair market value, whichever is higher, subject to certain conditions. BioNTech’s ability to pay dividends is also limited under the terms of these agreements.
Less than two years after the Gates Foundation purchased the stock (pre-IPO) at $18 per share, it peaked on Aug. 6, 2021 at $389. At that price, the Foundation’s $55 million investment was worth $1,182,044,186.00 ($1.182 billion).
On September 18, 2019—just nineteen days after the Gates Foundation took its huge position in BioNTech stock— a report titled A World At Risk was published by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, which was founded in 2018 by the World Bank Group and the World Health Organization.
The report’s title page is illustrated with an image of a coronavirus, and its text is an urgent call to action for the world to invest far more in preparedness for a respiratory viral pandemic. As the report states on page 8:
The report mentions nothing about the need to invest in bolstering bio-laboratory safety. It expressly warns about the threat of a lethal respiratory pathogen “accidentally or deliberately released,” but its entire call to action is to invest a fortune to responding to such a pathogeninstead of preventing it from being released in the first place.
We now know that SARS-CoV-2 was officially detected in December of 2019 but probably emerged and started spreading in August or September of 2019—that is, around the same time A World At Risk was published.
The September 18, 2019 date of the report strongly suggests that someone doing bio-surveillance for the WHO in China obtained intelligence that a SARS coronavirus was already circulating.
Given that the Gates Foundation is the WHO’s second largest donor (after Germany, where BioNTech is headquartered) I wonder if this intelligence was passed to someone in the Gates Foundation months before December 31, 2019—the date the WHO claimed it received its first report of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan.
If so, it would enable the Foundation to obtain extremely valuable information about emerging infectious disease pathogens—naturally emergent or accidentally or deliberately released—long before other market players obtain this information.
“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” – George Orwell, 1984
The history of the GAVI alliance, a board that influences the direction and design of WHO’s global health policies, illustrates how these policies have been directly influenced by industry partners from 2000-2009, and not by an objective board selected by the WHO.
This direct influence was hidden from the public in 2009 when the alliance became known as the Gavi board. At this time its composition and function changed to hide the role that industry had played from 2000-2009 in changing the direction of global health policies to a new focus on vaccine production and global implementation.
History of the Gavi Board:
In 1998 the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) was established by the Head of the World Bank after a meeting with pharmaceutical companies and other agencies. The GAVI alliance was established on the advice of industry because the pharmaceutical companies were claiming that there was no incentive for them to provide vaccines to the developing countries.
This meeting led to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation providing the seed funding of $750 million in 1999 and governments then matched this figure to establish an alliance of private-public partnerships in 2000, to fund the vaccination programmes for all countries.
In 2000 the alliance was launched at the World Economic Forum (WEF), not the World Health Organisation (WHO), and it established a working party to work with the WHO to design the International Health Regulations (IHR), yet it was a body established outside of the WHO’s charter.
At this time all stakeholders in the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) were able to directly influence the design of the WHO’s Global Health Policies through this working party (2000-2009), including the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA). They could attend meetings and present information for policy development.
Other stakeholders in the GAVI at this time included the BMGF, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The influence of these stakeholders led to a new focus on vaccine production and implementation in the WHO’s global health policies.
These global policies were presented to countries in the International Health Regulations (IHR) that came into force in June 2007.
This direct influence of all stakeholders changed in 2009 when the GAVI alliance became known as the GAVI board. Its composition was changed to include only four permanent board members – UNICEF, BMGF, the World Bank and WHO – and other partners would be on a part-time basis.
This change to only four permanent board members, one of which was now the WHO, hides the fact that from 2000-2009 all stakeholders were able to directly influence the design of WHO’s global health policies.
The first recorded meeting of the Gavi board on its website is in 2009. It describes the role of the Gavi board as ‘being responsible for strategic direction and policy-making, oversees the operations of the Vaccine Alliance and monitors programme implementation’ .
This alliance of partners, many of whom profit from vaccines, make donations to the Gavi board and still influence global health policies in a more indirect fashion.
The WHO’s IHR are currently being amended with strong influence from this corporate alliance. If the amendments are approved, the draconian directives implemented during the COVID ‘pandemic’ years, will become binding on every WHO member country, whenever the director of the WHO declares another pandemic. This is removing fundamental human rights and objective scientific evidence from global health policies.
It is time for Australians to make our voices heard to ensure that Australia exits the WHO and joins the World Council for Health to protect both human health and fundamental human rights in all public health policies.
Here is the witness statement from ex-Qantas pilot, Captain Graham Hood, describing that lack of evidence for safety and efficacy that was used by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, to mandate this mRNA genetically-engineered injection (called a ‘vaccine’) in the Australian population – Ex-Qantas Pilot, Graham Hood, provides a witness statement in the Australian parliament.
Australian Medical Professional Society (AMPS) presents ‘Too Many Dead’ in Australia, but the Australian government will not investigate and the media does not report these facts.
The latest news about Brazil with international repercussions deals with a new outbreak of dengue fever, which has already affected more than 360,000 people and caused the death of at least 40. The case is notorious enough to have warranted a visit from Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the WHO, who said that the outbreak in Brazil was part of a global phenomenon.
Without claiming a connection, but honesty requires us to remember that this visit comes just a few days after Mr Adhanom declared in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, the imminence of “Disease X”, which would require restrictive measures at a global level, as well as an upsurge in the fight against “disinformation”.
In the light of the investigations and findings of Russian Ministry of Defence experts regarding the Ukrainian and international activities of Western biolaboratories, however, it may be relevant to take a closer look at some facts that unfolded a few years ago in Brazil.
According to the British company Oxitec’s own official sources (oxitec.com), billions of genetically modified mosquitoes have been released since 2011 with the aim of combating the spread of diseases such as dengue, zika and chikungunya, which periodically re-emerge and affect hundreds of thousands of Brazilians.
The operation is based on manipulating the genes of male Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes (the carrier and transmitter of these diseases) so that the offspring of their crossbreeding with normal female mosquitoes have stunted or defective development, which would eventually lead to the eradication of the mosquitoes and, consequently, dengue fever.
The first tests, such as those carried out in the city of Jacobina in Bahia, pointed to an 85 per cent rate of genetically modified eggs among the entire mosquito population in the city, which was read as a demonstration of the experiment’s success.
However, we saw the result of this optimism in 2019, when the journal Scientific Reports pointed out that experimentation with the Aedes Aegypti mosquito may have created a “supermosquito”. According to the publication, 18 months after the end of the aforementioned experiment, the genetic alterations of the transgenic mosquitoes were already present in the native insect population. Even in neighbouring districts and regions where no genetically modified mosquitoes were released, the mosquitoes had mixed genes.
It was conjectured at the time that these mosquitoes might be more resistant to insecticides and poisons. Doctor Lia Giraldo da Silva Augusto, an environmental health researcher and former member of CTNBio, said she believed there had been lobbying to favour the British company – which was facilitated by the fact that the company dealt directly with town halls in extremely poor cities.
She also denounces the fact that there was no long-term monitoring and that only short-term results were used to press for the commercial release of the transgenic mosquito.
This is not the first controversy involving Oxitec.
The citizens of Florida, more specifically the Florida Keys, have been fighting a battle for more than 10 years against the release of billions of genetically modified mosquitoes. According to various social organisations, such as the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, there is no evidence that GM mosquitoes limit the spread of diseases such as dengue, not least because there has been no independent study. Oxitec also claims that the results of its studies into the environmental and human impact of its transgenic mosquitoes is “confidential information”.
In 2018, for its part, the Cayman Islands government cancelled Oxitec’s project to spread transgenic mosquitoes after widespread popular pressure, supported by questions about the plan’s effectiveness and safety. The NGO GeneWatch UK released a report at the time, based on documents released by Oxitec itself, which indicated the ineffectiveness of the method used to suppress the mosquito population and prevent the spread of diseases such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya.
Despite these controversies and criticism from citizens’ groups concerned about the risks of Big Pharma manipulating nature for profit, Oxitec is still pushing ahead with projects in Panama, Djibouti, Uganda and the Marshall Islands, at least.
But who is really behind Oxitec? The British company was acquired in 2015 by the U.S. corporation Intrexon (which in 2020 changed its name to Precigen), which in 2020 sold Oxitec to the venture capital company Third Security LLC, which specialises in biotechnology.
Intrexon/Precigen has Third Security itself as its largest shareholder (38.87 per cent), with the other main investors being Germany’s Merck KGaA and the U.S. companies Patient Capital and BlackRock.
The transgenic mosquito project, however, has the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its main backer, and Bill Gates himself has been one of the main spokespeople for this idea of fighting mosquito-borne diseases through transgenic mosquitoes.
And this is where the “rabbit hole” gets deep. Bill Gates’ interest in controversial biological research programmes, including in Ukraine, is already well known.
In May 2022, for example, RT published a report by Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of the Radiological, Chemical and Biological Protection Force of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, in which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was implicated in a scheme to finance military biolaboratories in Ukraine – a scheme that also involves the participation of large pharmaceutical corporations, including the aforementioned Merck KGaA. In this scheme, medicines and vaccines would be tested on the Ukrainian population without meeting international safety standards, in order to reduce costs.
Igor Kirillov released another report in July 2023 that may be of interest to us. In this report, which is already the result of Russian investigations into Western biolaboratories in Ukraine, Kirillov emphasises the U.S. Department of Defense’s interest in studying mosquitoes that transmit infections such as dengue fever. He reiterates that Russia has evidence of dangerous experimentation with mosquitoes in special facilities, both in the U.S. and abroad, highlighting precisely Oxitec as a company with ties to the U.S. Department of Defence and capable of mass-producing infection vectors for dengue and other diseases.
Kirillov finally points to a correlation between the spread of the operations of these Western-linked biolaboratories and a growing incidence of unusual diseases in the territories in question.
With this, it is not our intention to launch empty speculations about Oxitec’s activities, but to emphasise the need for a strict Brazilian and Ibero-American biosafety policy that takes into account the Russian findings about the suspicious activities of biolaboratories linked to the U.S. government, the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation and Big Pharma.
Last night at dinner with Dr. McCullough, he asked me to do some research on the dread “Disease X” about which we’ve been hearing a lot of chatter since it was announced that the Davos crowd will be talking about it at their annual WEF meeting this January.
I agree that it’s always a terribly ominous sign when the WEF talks about saving humanity from a hypothetical threat. When those guys start chatting about saving us from an “unknown” pathogen, it’s a safe bet that bio-labs are already tinkering around with a “candidate pathogen.” The stated objective of their work is to develop vaccines against the candidate pathogen should it (God forbid) evolve to infect humanity.
Further investigation of the literature on Disease X led me to a book, published about a year ago, titled Disease X: The 100 Days Mission to End Pandemics, by Kate Kelland with a Forward by Tony Blair.
Ms. Kelland is a former Global Health Correspondent for Reuters and is now Chief Scientific Writer for CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations). As many readers of this Substack are aware, CEPI was founded in 2016 by the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation, and other key players in the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex.
Its Preliminary Business Plan, published in 2017, is a blueprint of what I call the Pandemic Predicting and Planning Industry, which positions itself to rake in billions of public money when the next infectious disease pathogen strikes humanity.
An attractive Englishwoman who studied French and German at Durham University, Ms. Kelland’s career as a news correspondent seems to have really taken off around the time of the 9/11 attacks. As she put it on her LinkedIn profile: “Two years in the lobby tracking the Blair government during the crisis surrounding the 9/11 attacks on the United States.” In 2009—probably with the arrival of the grossly overblown Swine Flu Pandemic—she became a Health and Science correspondent for Reuters.
A conference on Disease X at the WEF’s annual meeting is scheduled to take place in Davos on January 17, 2024. As it is described on the WEF website:
With fresh warnings from the World Health Organization that an unknown “Disease X” could result in 20 times more fatalities than the coronavirus pandemic, what novel efforts are needed to prepare healthcare systems for the multiple challenges ahead?
This session is linked to the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience and the Collaborative Surveillance Initiative of the World Economic Forum.
This first sentence raises the question: Why is the WHO issuing “fresh warnings… that an unknown “Disease X” could result in 20 times more fatalities than the coronavirus pandemic”? On what intelligence is the WHO basing its fresh warning? A Google search for “WHO issues fresh warning about Disease X” resulted in this report of 26 May 2023 headlined After WHO chief’s warning, ‘Disease X’ raises concern
It seems to me that all reasonable adults are justified in asking the question: What are these gangsters cooking up now?
The above timeline of announcements does indeed resemble the autumn of 2019, when the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex engaged in a huge amount of of chit-chat and pandemic planning simulations about a hypothetical “coronavirus” pandemic.
To make matters even more ominous, the chatter about Disease X is happening at the beginning of another election year, with Donald Trump once again leading in the polls and the representation of a man named “Joe Biden” challenging him.
With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations (U.N.) this month launched an “ambitious-country-led campaign” to promote and accelerate the development of a global digital public infrastructure (DPI).
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said its “50-in-5” campaign will spur the construction of “an underlying network of components” that includes “digital payments, ID, and data exchange system,” which will serve as “a critical accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”
“The goal of the campaign is for 50 countries to have designed, implemented, and scaled at least one DPI component in a safe, inclusive, and interoperable manner in five years,” the UNDP stated.
In September 2022, the Gates Foundation allocated $200 million “to expand global Digital Public Infrastructure,” as part of a broader plan to fund $1.27 billion in “health and development commitments” toward the goal of achieving the SDGs by 2030.
The Gates Foundation stated at the time that the funding was intended to promote the expansion of “infrastructure that low- and middle-income countries can use to become more resilient to crises such as food shortages, public health threats, and climate change, as well as to aid in pandemic and economic recovery.”
California-based privacy attorney Greg Glaser described the “50-in-5” campaign as “a totalitarian nightmare” and a “dystopian” initiative targeting small countries “to onboard them with digital ID, digital wallets, digital lawmaking, digital voting and more.”
“For political reasons, U.N. types like Gates cannot openly plan ‘one world government,’ so they use different phrases like ‘global partnership’ and ‘Agenda 2030,’” Glaser told The Defender. “People can add ‘50-in-5’ to that growing list of dystopian phrases.”
Another California-based privacy attorney, Richard Jaffe, expressed similar sentiments, telling The Defender the “50-in-5” initiative “point[s] to the much bigger issue of the globalization, centralization and digitalization of the world’s personal data.”
“My short-term concern is bad actors, and that would be individuals and small groups, as well as state mal-actors, who will now have a big fat new target or tool to threaten the normal operation of less technologically sophisticated countries,” he said.
Jaffe said Gates’ involvement “scares the hell out of him.” Derrick Broze, editor-in-chief of The Conscious Resistance Network, told The Defender that it is “another sign that this renewed push for digital ID infrastructure will not benefit the average person.”
“Projects like these only benefit governments who want to track their populations, and corporations who want to study our daily habits and movements to sell us products,” Broze said.
Initiatives to promote DPI globally also enjoy the support of the G20. According to The Economist, at September’s G20 Summit in New Delhi — held under the slogan “One Earth, One Family, One Future” — India garnered support from the Gates Foundation, UNDP and the World Bank for a plan to develop a global repository of DPI technologies.
‘World doesn’t need 50-in-5’
The 11 “First-Mover” countries launching “50-in-5” are Bangladesh, Estonia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Moldova, Norway, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Togo.
“Countries, regardless of income level, geography, or where they are in their digital transformation journey, can benefit from being part of 50-in-5,” the campaign states, adding that “with steadfast and collective efforts, the world can build a future where digital transformation is not only a vision but a tangible reality.”
According to Glaser, the 11 initial countries were chosen not because they are “digital leaders” but because the U.N. sees smaller nations as a “unique threat” because their leaders are occasionally accountable to the people.
“We have seen what happens to leaders of small nations who reject international intelligence agencies’ favorite products, such as COVID-19 vaccines, GMOs [genetically modified organisms] and petrodollars,” Glaser said. “U.N. programs like ‘50-in-5’ are a way for smaller countries to sell out early to Big Tech and preemptively avoid ‘economic hitmen,’” he added.
Speaking at the “50-in-5” launch event, Dumitru Alaiba, Moldova’s deputy prime minister and minister of Economic Development and Digitalization said, “The source of our biggest excitement is our work on our government’s super app. It’s modeled after the very successful Ukrainian Diia app [and] will be launched in the coming few months.”
"We are committed to enhancing & establishing key DPI components (digital ID, payments) .. The source of our biggest excitement is our work on our government's super app modeled after the very successful Ukrainian Diia app": Moldova Deputy Prime Minister Dumitru Alaiba, 50-in-5 pic.twitter.com/z173VsKqBr
At the same event, Cina Lawson, Togo’s minister of Digital Economy and Transformation, said, “We created a digital COVID certificate. All of a sudden, the fight against the pandemic became really about using digital tools to be more effective.”
According to Hinchliffe, Togo’s DPI system had seemingly benign origins, launching as a universal basic income scheme for the country’s citizens, “but shortly after that, they expanded the system to implement vaccine passports.”
Today, Togo became the first sub-Saharan African country whose digital COVID-19 vaccination certificate is recognized by the @eu_commission. Travelers with a Togolese certificate will be able to validly present it in the EU & vice versa. @AmbUETogo@KoenDoenspic.twitter.com/Uy9mRF8bkU
Togo’s vaccine passport was interoperable with the European Union’s (EU) digital health certificate. In 2021, the EU was one of the first governmental entities globally to introduce such passports. In June, the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the EU’s digital health certificate standards on a global basis.
Speaking at the G20 Summit in September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, “The trick is to build public digital infrastructure that is interoperable, open to all and trusted,” citing the EU’s COVID-19 digital certificate as an example.
The future is digital. I passed two messages to the G20:
→ We should establish a framework for safe, responsible AI, with a similar body as the IPCC for climate
→ Digital public infrastructures are an accelerator of growth. They must be trusted, interoperable & open to all
Four of the “First-Mover” countries are African. Shabnam Palesa Mohamed, executive director of Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Africa Chapter, told The Defender the “50-in-5” campaign will be used as a geo-political tool. “Africa is always a prime target because it is comparatively untapped digitally,” she said.
“Africa needs respect, food, water and peace,” she said. “It does not need DPI.”
Along similar lines, Hinchliffe said, “The world doesn’t need ‘50-in-5.’ The people never asked for it. It came from the top down. What the people want is for their governments to do their actual jobs — to serve the people.”
Digital ID intended to be ‘securely accessed’ by government, private stakeholders
According to The Economist, India is heavily promoting its digital ID technologies, first deployed domestically, for global implementation in “poor countries.” These technologies have garnered support and funding from Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation.
For instance, Lawson said Togo was issuing biometric digital ID “for all our citizens using MOSIP” — Modular Open Source Identity Platform — a system developed at India’s International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore.
MOSIP, backed by the Gates Foundation, the World Bank and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, is modeled after Aadhaar, India’s national digital ID platform — the largest in the world — which has been beset by controversy.
Glaser said Aadhaar “has been a nightmare for Indians. It is constantly hacked, including, for example the largest personal information hack in world history earlier this month, with personal information sold on the dark web.”
“Aadhaar is openly mocked in India,” Glaser said. “The only reason it is still used by the citizenry is because people have no practical choice. To participate meaningfully in Indian society, you need the digital ID,” he added.
A Business 20 (B20) communique issued following this year’s G20 summit called on “G20 nations to develop guidelines for unique single digital identification … that can be securely accessed (based on consent) by different government and private stakeholders for identity verification and information access within three years.”
In April, Nandan Nilekani, former chair of the Unique Identification Authority of India, told an International Monetary Fund panel on DPI that digital ID, digital bank accounts and smartphones are the “tools of the new world.” He added that if this is achieved, “Then, anything can be done. Everything else is built on that.”
“The lesson of course for the rest of the world is to never let digital ID take root in your society,” Glaser said. “Once a nation’s consumer class adopts digital ID with global partners, as in India, it is basically checkmate for that nation.”
‘When they say inclusive, they really mean exclusive’
According to The Sociable, DPI “promises to bring about financial inclusion, convenience, improved healthcare, and green progress.”
According to the “50-in-5” campaign, DPI “is essential for participation in markets and society in a digital era [and] is needed for all countries to build resilient and innovative economies, and for the well-being of people.”
But Hinchliffe refuted that assertion. “You don’t need digital ID and digital governance to provide better services to more people,” he said. “The tools are already available. It’s about incentives. Businesses, governments, and private citizens all have the power to come up with better solutions now, but why don’t we?”
Still, “inclusivity” is one of the key narratives employed to promote DPI. The “50-in-5” campaign states, “Countries building safe and inclusive DPI … can foster strong economies and equitable societies” and that DPI “promotes innovation, bolsters local entrepreneurship, and ensures access to services and opportunities for underserved groups, including women and youth.”
Experts who spoke with The Defender warned DPI has the potential to be exclusionary.
“While the United Nations, the Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation promote DPI as necessary for an ‘equitable’ world, the reality is that these tools have the potential for furthering exclusion of political activists, whistleblowers, and other individuals who hold controversial opinions,” Broze said.
Similarly, CHD Africa’s Mohamed claimed, “People, groups and organizations that pose a threat to the establishment will be targeted for digital surveillance and socio-economic isolation” via DPI. “This … is an easier way to control critical thinkers.”
Hinchliffe said DPI will “accelerate technocratic control through digital ID, CBDC and massive data sharing, paving the way for an interoperable system of social credit.”
Similarly, Glaser said, “With DPI, the U.N.’s plan is to issue everyone a social credit score in line with U.N. SDGs (Agenda 2030) … Your digital ID will become the new you. And from the perspective of governments and corporations, your digital ID will be more real than your flesh … required in various measures to travel, work, buy/sell, and vote.”
“When they say inclusive, they really mean exclusive, because the system is set up to exclude people who don’t go along with unelected globalist policies,” Hinchliffe said. “What they really want is for everybody to be under their digital control.”
Notably, a June 2023 WEF report titled “Reimagining Digital ID” concedes that “Digital ID may weaken democracy and civil society” and that the “greatest risks arising from digital ID are exclusion, marginalization and oppression.”
Making ID — digital or otherwise — mandatory may exacerbate “fundamental social, political and economic challenges as conditional access of any kind always creates the possibility of discrimination and exclusion,” the report adds.
Experts who spoke with The Defender said people must be given the choice to opt out.
“If the U.N. and its member states push the digital ID agenda, they must ensure that their respective populations have a simple way to opt out without being punished or denied services,” Bronze said. “Otherwise, the digital ID creep will eventually become mandatory to exist in society and we will see the end of privacy, and, in the long-term, liberty,” Broze said.
Jaffe said that while he does not oppose digital payment systems, he “would be vehemently opposed to the elimination of non-digital payment, like fiat paper currency,” calling this an issue of “freedom and privacy.”
Similarly, Hinchliffe said, “There should be non-digital alternatives available at all times and this should be a right of every citizen. Systems can fail. Databases can be breached. Governments can become tyrannical. Corporations can become greedy.”
‘The endgame is sovereignty by transhumanists’
Many of the initiatives that are backing “50-in-5” are themselves interlinked — in addition to their connections to entities such as the Gates Foundation.
For instance, the Omidyar Network, one of the supporters of “50-in-5,” has provided funding to MOSIP — as has the Gates Foundation.
The Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the UNDP and UNICEF participate in the Digital Public Good Alliance’s “roadmap” of entities that “strengthen the DPG [digital public goods] ecosystem.”
Earlier this year, Co-Develop invested in the establishment of the Center for Digital Public Infrastructure, which is headquartered at the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, and is also home to MOSIP. Co-Develop was co-founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, along with the Gates Foundation and the Omidyar Network.
And “endorsing organizations” of the World Bank’s “Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development” report include the Gates Foundation, the Omidyar Network, UNDP, Mastercard, ID2020 and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
Glaser said that Gates attained wealth by “monopolizing his operating system into every home and business worldwide” and “is doing the same now at the U.N. level with vaccines and DPI applications.”
“DPI platforms essentially outsource sovereignty to international governing bodies that do the bidding of financial entities like Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street,” he said.
“Companies with that much information on citizens hold enormous power to sabotage infrastructure [with] very few ethics to stop them,” Mohamed said.
“The endgame is sovereignty by transhumanists,” Glaser added. “The reason digital ID is an existential threat to society is because it separates people from their local governments, who have always worked cooperatively to prevent tyranny.”
“DPI is being sold to authorities on the grounds that it will include them in the worldwide economy, when in reality it will commodify their people and remove the ability of local authorities to ever govern meaningfully again,” he said.
Hinchliffe also connected DPI to policies that purport to combat climate change.
“With G20 nations committing to net-zero carbon emissions policies by around 2050 … restrictions will be placed on what we can consume, what we can purchase, and where we can go thanks to the widespread implementation of digital ID and CBDC to track, trace, and control our every move in … 15-minute smart cities,” he said.
“They openly talk about using DPI for ‘digital health certificates’ … and I believe that next will come carbon footprint tracking to monitor and control how you travel and what you consume,” Hinchliffe added, calling it “a future of constant surveillance and control.”
“If we can legislate and litigate to retain the right to traditional identification, then this categorically protects all of our rights,” Glaser added. “As long as the consumer classes of large nations like the United States resist digital ID, there is hope.”
“These schemes do little to nothing for the prosperity of the majority of Africans, but rather, they further the interests of a small economic and political class,” Mohamed said. “With growing economic disparity and anger, the attempt to waste more African resources on digital ID may lead to widespread revolt.”
“Generally, once Africans know what Bill Gates is about, they refuse to get involved in or support his activities,” she added.
Watch this Kitco News segment on the ‘50-in-5’ campaign:
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, a proponent of centralized control, has finalized a controversial collaborative digital partnership with the European Union. This agreement exhibits full commitment to the introduction of a digital identity system in Canada and the government is pursuing it, in part, under the guise of fighting online “disinformation.”
The Trudeau government’s announcement delineates the terms of the Canada-EU Digital Partnership, which aims not only to institute digital credentials for Canadians but also to bolster cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
The contentious partnership insists on a joint effort from Canada and the EU to bolster their respective bilateral and multilateral cooperation in forums like the G7 and the G20.
“The Digital Partnership will allow Canada and the EU to have a stronger common voice in multilateral fora, where appropriate, and bring jointly developed solutions to international partners and advance our joint strategic priorities,” the announcement states.
The G20, an influential conglomerate of the globe’s 19 major countries and the EU, has previously encouraged exploring the creation of “digital public infrastructure,” including potential digital identification systems and perhaps even a centralized digital currency.
This “digital public infrastructure” phrase is the same buzzword being used by the likes of The Gates Foundation and the UN, when it comes to pushing digital ID and payment systems.
Alarmingly for many Canadians that support the protection of civil liberties, Trudeau has demonstrated a seemingly unwavering allegiance to this digital ID agenda.
In 2017, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Under the MOU, the two entities agreed to share information to “facilitate the development of innovative products, including medical countermeasures,” such as diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics to combat disease transmission during a pandemic.
The FDA has MOUs with many academic and non-profit organisations, but few have as much to gain as Bill Gates, who has invested billions into pandemic countermeasures.
Experts are concerned the Gates Foundation could have undue influence over the FDA’s regulatory decisions of these countermeasures.
David Gortler, an ex-senior adviser to the FDA commissioner between 2019 and 2021, says he is “suspicious” of the MOU.
“If the Gates Foundation establishes an MOU with a regulator on a product they want to develop, it seems like it would be a conflict of interest. What if every other drug company did the exact same thing as the Gates Foundation?” he says.
David Gortler, former senior advisor to FDA commissioner 2019-2021
Gortler, now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC, explained that normally, meetings between developers and regulators are supposed to be an official part of the public record and subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.
“However, an MOU such as this can circumvent the usual requirements for the transparency of official communications,” says Gortler. “This way their communications can be kept secret.”
David Bell, a former medical officer for the World Health Organisation (WHO) who now works as a public health physician and biotech consultant, agrees that the MOU has potential to corrupt the regulatory process.
“The narrative is that philanthropic foundations can only be good, because they’re making vaccines and saving thousands of lives, so we need to cut the red-tape and help the FDA get stuff done quickly otherwise children will die,” says Bell. “But in reality, it has potential to corrupt the whole system.”
David Bell, physician and biotech consultant
Bell adds, “Speaking generally, close relationships between regulators and developers raise inevitable risks that shortcuts and favours will break down the rigorousness of the product review, putting the public at risk.”
Revolving door
The FDA has been roundly criticised for its “revolving door.” Ten of the past 11 FDA commissioners left the agency and secured roles with pharmaceutical companies they once regulated.
Similarly, the Gates Foundation hired high-ranking members of the FDA, who bring with them intimate knowledge of the regulatory process.
For example, Murray Lumpkin had a 24-year career at the FDA, serving as senior advisor to the FDA commissioner and representative for global issues. Now, he is deputy director of regulatory affairs at the Gates Foundation, and signatory on the MOU.
And Margaret Hamburg, who served as FDA commissioner between 2009 and 2015, is now on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gates Foundation.
Murray Lumpkin, deputy director regulatory affairs, Gates Foundation; Margaret Hamburg, scientific advisory board, Gates Foundation
Bell has no doubt that these appointments were strategic to “game the system” saying, “If I worked at the Gates Foundation, I would certainly hire somebody like Murray Lumpkin.”
The only way to fix the revolving door problem Bell says, is to have a ‘non-compete clause’ in their contracts.
“It might be that FDA employees cannot work for the people they’ve regulated for at least 10 years. There are places that have those rules – private companies have agreements that you can’t work for a rival,” said Bell.
The FDA dismissed questions about the potential for conflicts of interest, or the lack of transparency over its communications with the Gates Foundation. In a statement, the FDA said:
FDA regulatory decision making is science-based. Former FDA officials do not impact regulatory decisions. FDA only collaborates with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under the MOU as described.
Gates has billions at stake
Gates boasted about receiving a 20-to-1 return on his $10 billion investment into the “financing and delivery” of medicines and vaccines.
“It’s the best investment I’ve ever made,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Decades ago, these investments weren’t sure bets, but today, they almost always pay off in a big way.”
In Sept 2019, just prior to the pandemic, SEC filings showed the foundation purchased over 1 million shares for $18.10/share. By Nov 2021, the foundation dumped most of the stock for an average of $300/share.
Investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel reported the foundation pocketed approximately $260 million in profit – more than 15 times its original investment – most of it untaxed because it was invested through the foundation.
In his recent book, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic,” Gates warns that future pandemics are the biggest threat to humankind and that survival depends on global pandemic preparedness strategies, firmly positioning himself at the centre of shaping the agenda.
In October 2019, the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum hosted Event 201, which gathered government agencies, social media companies and national security organisations to war game a “fictional” global pandemic.
October 2019, Gates and WEF fund Event 201 to simulate a global pandemic response
The key recommendations from the event were that such a crisis would require the deployment of new vaccines, surveillance and control of information and human behaviours, by orchestrating the co-operation and co-ordination of key industries, national governments, and international institutions.
Several weeks later when the covid-19 pandemic emerged, many aspects of this ‘hypothetical scenario’ became a chilling reality.
The Gates Foundation, which holds shares in a range of drug companies including Merck, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, is now credited with wielding significant influence over the direction of the global response to the pandemic, saying its goal is to “vaccinate the entire world” with a covid-19 vaccine.
Global dominance
The Gates Foundation has poured millions into funding NGOs, media, and international agencies, earning Gates significant political clout.
Financial contributions to the media have garnered Gates favourable news coverage, boasting on the foundation’s website it committed almost $3.5 million to The Guardian in 2020 – 2023.
The UK medicines regulator – the MHRA – disclosed it took approximately $3 million in funding from the Gates Foundation in 2022, which would span across several financial years.
Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr labelled Gates “the most powerful man in public health” because he managed to steer the WHO’s pandemic strategy to focus primarily on vaccination.
Kennedy said in an interview that the WHO “begs and rolls over” for Gates’ funding, which now makes up over 88% of the total amount of the WHO’s donations by philanthropic foundations.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, Presidential Candidate
“I think [Gates] believes that he is somehow ordained divinely to bring salvation to the world through technology,” said Kenney. “He believes the only path to good health is inside a syringe.”
The Gates Foundation’s CEO Mark Suzman responded to concerns that the foundation has “disproportionate sway in setting national and global agendas, without any formal accountability to voters or international bodies.”
“It’s true that between our dollars, voice, and convening power, we have access and influence that many others do not,” admitted Suzman in his 2023 annual letter .
“But make no mistake – where there’s a solution that can improve livelihoods and save lives, we’ll advocate persistently for it. We won’t stop using our influence, along with our monetary commitments, to find solutions,” he wrote.
Updated July 2023 based upon article originally published in March 2022
It’s been three years since COVID-19 emerged as a dominant and, for some time, all-consuming issue. Now there are signs we are witnessing the unravelling of some of the key policy responses – blanket lockdowns and population-wide injections – that have been so aggressively promoted by many, although not all, governments around the world. There is also reluctance by many to concede there have been problems with the COVID-19 responses to date. However, doubts about the efficacy of lockdowns are now widely aired and well substantiated and there is increasing evidence for, and awareness of, the dangers surrounding the mRNA genetic vaccine. And it is at least clear that large numbers of people, including scientists and academics, are expressing views at odds with authority or mainstream claims that lockdowns reduce mortality and that mass injections are a rational and efficacious solution.
As debate over ‘The Science’ increases, more and more people now question whether or not there is more to COVID-19 in terms of underlying agendas, in particular with respect to global-level actors such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization (WHO) and so-called ‘Big Pharma’. In the early days of COVID-19 any such talk was immediately dismissed as ‘conspiratorial’ nonsense and, broadly speaking, people raising non-mainstream doubts about any aspect of the COVID-19 issue were subjected to vilification by ‘authoritative’ voices and corporate media.
Such dynamics were very much in evidence with respect to debate over the origins of COVID-19. And yet, today, the so-called ‘lab leak theory’, whatever its veracity, has moved from a ‘sphere of deviance’ to a ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’ with mainstream scientists through to legacy media and governments discussing it. At the same time, there is increased public awareness of various political agendas, for example the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ visions. Indeed, a refrain from some quarters is that yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s fact. So, if all this is not about a virus, what might actually be going on?
COVID-19 and the ‘Structural Deep Event’ concept
First and foremost, it is necessary to dispel the idea that any attempt to understand intersections between political-economic agendas and COVID-19 is absurd or crazy. Here, we can learn much from Professor Michael Parenti’s 1993 talk on conspiracy and class power:
No ruling class could survive if it wasn’t attentive to its own interests; consciously trying to anticipate, control or initiate events at home and abroad both overtly and secretly. It is hard to imagine a modern state if there would be no conspiracy, no plans, no machinations, deceptions or secrecy within the circles of power. In the United States there have been conspiracies aplenty … they are all now a matter of public record.
PARENTI, 1993
It is a fact, then, that powerful political and economic actors do not blindly and irrationally stumble through history but rather strategise, plan and take actions that are expected to achieve results. They may make mistakes and plans are not always successful, but that does not mean they do not try and sometimes succeed in their aims and objectives. For example the tobacco industry worked long and hard, and with some success, to shape scientific and political discourse regarding their product and delay public awareness of its dangers.
Second, it is also true that powerful actors can have clear perceptions of their interests and are guided by the desire to realise, protect and further them. Where those interests come from might be reducible to any number of material or ideological influences. But origins do not matter, powerful actors still have conceptions of their interests and what they want to do.
Third, in today’s world of weakening democracies, corporate conglomerates and extreme concentration of wealth, it is also true that many political and economic actors are extremely powerful, whether measured in relative or absolute terms. They have resources and skills at their disposal that others do not. One potent tool available is that of propaganda, which grants significant leverage and influence to those with the skills and resources to disseminate it. For those liberals who remain at peace with their world – believing that powerful actors simply relay their political, economic and social goals to knowledgeable publics who then consent, or refuse to consent, to those goals – the fact that propaganda is exercised extensively across liberal democratic states comes as a shock. Indeed, many mainstream scholars struggle to recognise the role of propaganda even in well documented examples such as that of the tobacco industry shaping the science on the harms of smoking or the bogus claims regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Recognising that propaganda is a major component of exercising power within so-called liberal democratic states logically removes any justification for the assumptions that a) powerful actors cannot or do not manipulate publics and b) citizenry are sufficiently autonomous and knowledgeable to always be able to grant or withhold consent.
And as Parenti observed, history is replete with examples of powerful actors successfully pursuing goals and manipulating populations in the process. In the days after 9/11, we now know that British and American officials were planning a wide-ranging series of actions – so called ‘regime-change’ wars – that went well outside the scope of the official narrative regarding combating alleged ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’. One British embassy cable stated, four days after 9/11, that ‘[t]he “regime-change hawks” in Washington are arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose [against international terrorism] could be used to clear up other problems in the region’. Within weeks British Prime Minister Tony Blair communicated with US president George W. Bush saying, amongst many other things, ‘If toppling Saddam is a prime objective, it is far easier to do it with Syria and Iran in favour or acquiescing rather than hitting all three at once’. As these two western leaders conspired at the geo-strategic level, a low-level ‘spin doctor’, Jo Moore, commented on the utility of 9/11 in terms of day-to-day ‘media management’, noting that it was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Jo Moore was forced to resign, Bush and Blair laid the tracks for 20-plus years of conflict in the international system, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the recently ended 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. And today, there is substantial evidence that the foundational official story regarding the 9/11 crimes is in fact false with the evidence clearly pointing toward the involvement of a number of state-level actors, including within the US.
Professor Peter Dale Scott (University of California, Berkeley) developed the concept of the ‘structural deep event’ and this is useful in capturing the idea that powerful actors frequently work to instigate, exploit or exacerbate events in ways that enable substantive and long-lasting societal transformations. These frequently involve, according to Scott, a combination of legal and illegal activity implicating both legitimate and public-facing political structures as well as covert or hidden parts of government – the so-called deep state which is understood as the interface ‘between the public, the constitutionally established state, and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power, and violence outside the government’. So, for example, Scott argues that the JFK assassination became an event that enabled the maintenance of the Cold War whilst the 9/11 crimes likewise enabled the global ‘war on terror’, and that both involved a variety of actors not usually recognized in mainstream or official accounts of these events. It is important to note that Scott claims his approach does not necessarily imply a simplistic grand conspiracy, but is rather based on the idea of opaque networks of powerful and influential groups whose interests converge, at points, and who act to either instigate or exploit events in order to pursue their objectives.
Applied to COVID-19, a ‘structural deep event’ reading would point toward a constellation of actors, with overlapping interests, working to advance agendas, and being enabled to do so because of COVID-19. Such a reading does not necessarily include or exclude the possibility of COVID-19 being an instigated event and one that functioned, in the widest sense, as a propaganda event enabling powerful actors to realise their goals. What are the grounds for seriously considering a ‘structural deep event’ reading?
The damaging COVID-19 response
There is now an overwhelmingly strong case to be made that the key responses to COVID-19 – lockdowns, cloth masking and mass injection – were, on their own terms, flawed.
A large swathe of scientists and medical professionals are now clearly and repeatedly warning governments and populations that lockdowns are harmful and ineffective whilst mass injection of populations with an experimental genetic vaccine resulted in substantialharms. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that the use of the PCR test, which gave a skewed impression of infection and death rates leading to the locking down of entire (healthy) populations for extended periods of time in response to a respiratory virus, and then attempting to submit people to an experimental injection on a repeated basis, were not scientifically robust policies. As of mid 2023, although causes are disputed, there continues to be worrying excess mortality across many countries. It is also now clear to many that the scale and nature of COVID-19 was exaggerated in a way that suggested the existence of an entirely new and unusually deadly pathogen that demanded drastic responses when, in fact, this was not the case.
It is also now apparent that a remarkable and wide-ranging propaganda effort, involving extensive use of behavioural scientists, was used to mobilise support for lockdowns and, later on, injections as well as exaggerate any threat posed. An early paper published in April 2020, authored by over 40 academics, presented a blueprint for how ‘social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts’. Furthermore, many Western governments have behavioural psychology units attached to the highest levels of government, designed to shape thoughts and behaviour, and these were engaged early on during the COVID-19 event. According to Iain Davis, in February 2020 the WHO had established the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health (TAG); ‘The group is chaired by Prof. Cass Sunstein and its members include behavioural change experts from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Prof. Susan Michie, from the UK, is also a TAG participant’. In the UK, behavioural scientists from SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour) reconvened on 13 February 2020 and subsequently advised the UK government on how to secure compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Broadly, these propaganda techniques included maximising perceived threat in order to scare populations into complying with lockdown and accepting the experimental genetic vaccines as well as utilising non-consensual measures involving incentivization and coercion through, for example, various mandates.
We also now know that propaganda activities included smear campaigns against dissenting scientists and, in at least one major case, were initiated by high-level officials: in Autumn 2020, Anthony Fauci and National Institute of Health director Francis Collins discussed the need to swiftly shut down the Great Barrington Declaration, whose authors were advocating an alternative (and historically orthodox) COVID-19 response focused on protecting high-risk individuals and thus avoiding destructive lockdown measures. Collins wrote in an email that this ‘proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises’. Rather than a civilised and robust scientific debate, a smear campaign followed. Furthermore, censorship and suppression appears to have been experienced widely across swathes of academia whilst the White House is currently being sued with respect to First Amendment violations against scientists including Professors Kulldorff and Bhattacharya from the Great Barrington Declaration.
The legacy corporate media, social media platforms and large swathes of academia appear to have played an important role in disseminating this propaganda and promoting the official narrative on COVID-19. The proximity of legacy corporate media to political and economic power has been well understood for many decades: concentration of ownership, reliance upon advertising revenue, deference to elite sources, vulnerability to smear campaigns and ideological positioning are all understood to sharply limit the autonomy of legacy media (these factors also arguably shape academia). With COVID-19 these dynamics are exacerbated by, for example, direct regulatory influence, such as Ofcom direction to UK broadcasters, and censorship by ‘Big Tech’ of views deviating from those of the authorities and the WHO. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) have coordinated major legacy media in order to counter what they claim to be ‘misinformation’, and this appears to have played a role in suppressing legitimate scientific criticism whilst elevating ‘official’ narratives. At the global ‘governance’ level, both the United Nations and the WHO promoted campaigns around combating alleged ‘disinformation’ and the so-called ‘misinfo-demic’. Currently moves are afoot to further strengthen elite control over media discourse via legislation aimed at preventing so-called ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’ and ‘online harms’ and which is being rolled out over multiple legislatures.
Finally, confirmation of direct involvement of US authorities with censorship decisions by the social media company Twitter has been presented in the ‘Twitter Files’ and, in the UK, further corroboration regarding the role and significance of a Counter Disinformation Unit within the UK government. Matt Taibbi’s work on the ‘Twitter Files’, presents what is described as the Censorship Industrial Complex, or Counter-Disinformation Industry, which links universities, foundations, NGOs and federal agencies and which have actively censored content on Twitter during the COVID-19 event. Critically, these censorship regimes dovetail with the aforementioned legislative developments relating to ‘disinformation’ and ‘online harms’.
Extreme and flawed policy responses – societal lockdown and mandated mass injection – combined with widespread propaganda activities aimed at securing the compliance of the population might be explicable in a number of ways. For example:
The cock-up thesis might be invoked to explain all of this as an irrational panic response by well-intentioned or ideologically driven actors who got things badly wrong and imitated each other while doing so.
It might be that these policy responses are the result of narrow vested interests and corruption.
Powerful actors might have sought to take advantage of COVID-19, even instigate the event, so as to advance substantial political and economic agendas and, as part of this, helped to promote advantageous narratives during the COVID-19 event.
Following two years of massive societal disruption aimed at containing a seasonal respiratory virus, and the persistence of some aspects of the COVID-19 narrative despite substantive scientific challenges, it is clearly necessary to take seriously the very real possibility that vested interests and substantial political agendas underly the COVID-19 event. So, what is the key evidence for explanations two and three?
Manipulation and exploitation of Health Agencies: Regulatory Capture at the NIH and CDC plus the World Health Organization and Pandemic Preparedness Agenda
Evidence for vested interests and corruption has come, in particular, from analyses of US regulatory bodies and the actions of the WHO. In particular, evidence has emerged showing that key authorities in the US – the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – under the influence of Anthony Fauci, the Chief Medical Officer to the US President, have suffered from conflicts of interest. The term ‘regulatory capture’ is frequently used to describe this situation. [2]
For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s detailed analysis of the US-led COVID-19 response in The Real Anthony Fauci, documents the corrupt relationship between so-called ‘Big Pharma’ and Anthony Fauci arguing that, to all intents and purposes, there has been regulatory capture whereby pharmaceutical companies and public officials enjoy mutually beneficial arrangements. This mutual infiltration is understood by Kennedy to underpin the COVID-19 response, especially the commitment to a ‘vaccine-only’ solution and suppression of preventative treatments such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). By way of example, Kennedy relays the case of Dr Tess Lawrie and WHO researcher Andrew Hill in which Hill appeared to confirm there was pressure to delay publication of results supporting the efficacy of Ivermectin. Regarding HCQ, Kennedy writes:
By 2020, we shall see, Bill Gates exercised firm control over WHO and deployed the agency in his effort to discredit HCQ’ …
On June 17, the WHO – for which Mr. Gates is the largest funder after the US, and over which Mr. Gates and Dr Fauci exercise tight control – called for the halt of HCQ trials in hundreds of hospitals across the world. WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ordered nations to stop using HCQ and CQ. Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium banned HCQ for COVID-19 treatment.
More broadly, the WHO has been important in terms of co-ordinating COVID-19 policy responses. Although notionally independent, the WHO has increasingly come under corporate influence via both the growth of corporate-influenced organisations such as Gavi (Global Vaccine Alliance), CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) and private financing via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The WHO is also currently negotiating the treaty on pandemic preparedness with the governments of member states to provide unprecedented powers to this organisation to enable rapid responses, transcending national governments, when the WHO declares pandemics in the future, thus centralising control and potentially overriding national sovereignty.
This line of analysis might lead to a conclusion that what we have experienced to date – harmful lockdowns and injection strategies underpinned by massive propaganda – is primarily the result of corruption, conflicts of interest and vested interests, rather than what could reasonably be described as good faith errors by politicians and bureaucrats.
The World Economic Forum and the ‘Great Reset’
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been associated by some analysts with the COVID-19 event and in 2020 Klaus Schwab, its founder, published a co-authored book titled COVID-19: The Great Reset. Schwab declared: ‘The Pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’. One key component of the political-economic vision promoted by the WEF is ‘stakeholder capitalism’ (Global Public-Private Partnerships, GPPP) involving the integration of government, business and civil society actors with respect to the provision of services. Another key component involves harnessing ‘the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, especially the exploitation of developments in artificial intelligence, computing and robotics, in order to radically transform society toward a digitised model. Slogans now frequently associated with these visions include ‘you will own nothing and be happy’, ‘smart cities’ and ‘build back better’.
It is also apparent that the WEF, as an organising force, has considerable reach. It has been involved with training and educating influential individuals – through its Young Global Leaders Programme and its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow – who have subsequently moved into positions of considerable power. It has also been noted that many national leaders (e.g. Merkel, Macron, Trudeau, Ardern, Putin, and Kurz) are WEF Forum of Young Global Leaders graduates or members and have ‘played prominent roles, typically promoting zero-covid strategies, lockdowns, mask mandates, and ‘vaccine passports’. In 2017 Schwab boasted:
When I mention our names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic forum. But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like prime minister Trudeau, president of Argentina and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for prime minister Trudeau and I will know that half of this cabinet or even more half of this cabinet are actually young global leaders of the World Economic Forum …. that’s true in Argentina, and it’s true in France now with the president a Young Global Leader
Corporate members of the WEF’s Forum of Young Global Leaders includes Mark Zuckerberg whilst ‘Global Leaders for Tomorrow’ included Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
Financial Crisis, the Central Banks and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
we intend to establish the equivalence with cash and there is a huge difference there. For example, in cash we don’t know who is using a $100 bill today … the key difference with the CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that.
A programmable CBDC potentially provides complete control over how and when an individual spends money, in addition to allowing authorities to automatically deduct taxes through a person’s ‘digital wallet’. According to some analysts, this development would also effectively remove any significant control over financial policy at the national level. Although decried as a ‘conspiracy theory’ in the early days of the COVID-19 event, it has now become clear that there is a determined drive toward implementing CBDCs and which has the potential to qualitatively change the character of national-level governance.
Technologies associated with programmable CBDCs overlap with those associated with 4IR and concepts regarding digitised society. Specifically, digital identity, a potential component of the intended CBDC, provides a basis for the creation of a digital grid upon which information relating to all aspects of an individual’s life will be available to governments, corporations and other powerful entities such as the security services. Also notable is the relationship between digital ID and the drive to create ‘vaccine passports’ as part of the COVID-19 response: Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation are central players in ID2020, alongside Gavi. The overall objective is to create a global-level digital ID framework that integrates with health/vaccination status. As with CBDC, the push to implement these frameworks is ongoing, not dissipating, and include the recent announcement by the WHO and EU of a ‘digital health partnership’ aimed at facilitating implementation of digital health certificates for health and travel controlled by the WHO. [3]
All of these political and economic agendas point toward a conclusion more closely aligned with the ‘structural deep event’ (Scott) thesis, in that they highlight the possibility that COVID-19 has been exploited to advance major political and economic agendas. As such, COVID-19 is itself primarily a propaganda event, instrumentalized in order to pursue political-economic agendas. This hypothesis is, at least in part, distinct from the idea that corruption and narrow vested interests explain most of what we have seen.
Threats to democracy and understanding what this all might mean
The political and economic processes identified regarding the WEF, WHO, digital ID, the central banks and CBDC, the pandemic preparedness agenda and the Censorship Industrial Complex/Counter-Disinformation Industry are not speculative or theoretical, they are directly observable and ongoing. They are also proceeding in the absence of serious scrutiny by legislatures and wider democratic debate whilst new ‘emergencies’ over war in Ukraine and the climate appear to be being exploited in order to maintain momentum even as COVID-19 recedes from view. Indeed, one scholar of political communication notes that ‘insidious scare tactics deployed during Covid are still being used in the field of climate communications, where they were first developed.’
It is also worth spelling out the potential interaction between these agendas and threats to democracy. It is now clear that populations have been subjected to highly coercive and aggressive attempts to limit their autonomy, including restrictions on movement, the right to protest, freedom to work and freedom to participate in society. Most notably, significant numbers of people were pushed, sometimes required, to take an injection at regular intervals in order to continue their participation in society whilst PCR test requirements for travelling, for example, have introduced further coercive elements into everyday life. These developments have been accompanied by, at times, aggressive and discriminatory statements from major political leaders with respect to people resisting injection. The threat to civil liberties and ‘democracy as usual’ is unprecedented. The economic impact has been dire and COVID-19 has seen a dramatic and continued transfer of wealth from the poorest to the very richest (see for example Oxfam, 2021 and Green and Fazi, 2023). And, today, the drive to create a regulatory framework via the pandemic preparedness agenda, which includes modification of the International Health Regulations, combined with the rolling out of online ‘harm’ legislation and the promotion of moral panic over ‘disinformation’ and ‘online harm’, all create an architecture that enables high levels of control over populations within ostensibly democratic polities.
Furthermore, the combination of a programmable CBDC, a ‘vaccine passport’ that determines access to services and real-world spaces and the availability of all online behaviours to corporations and governments, can enable a system of near total control over an individual’s life, activities and opportunities. This system of control can be seen in China with the social credit system currently being implemented in certain provinces. Integration of personal data and money though a digital ID would also allow individuals to be readily stripped of their assets. These developments reflect the rise of technocracy whereby government and society become increasingly controlled by experts and technicians and individual autonomy and democracy are curtailed. They can also be related to the transhumanist movement which enthusiastically looks forward to human-machine interfaces and their proclaimed potential to ‘perfect the human condition’.
Of course, it is still possible that the sustained adherence to lockdown and mass injection (in spite of growing evidence against their efficacy and safety) are explicable through reference to government blunders, whilst the parallel political and economic projects and rapid reduction in civil liberties are coincidences.
However, it would be remiss to set aside the fact that organisations such as the WHO and the WEF exist within a wider network, or constellation, of extremely powerful, non-elected political and economic entities made up of major multinational corporations, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), large private foundations and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These include, in no particular order, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and other central banks; asset managers Blackrock and Vanguard; global-level entities such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Club of Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, Chatham House, the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Council, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and major corporations including so-called ‘Big Pharma’ and ‘Big Tech’ such as Apple, Google (part of Alphabet Inc), Amazon and Microsoft. And, of course, governments themselves are part of this constellation, with the most powerful – the US, China and India – having considerable influence. In addition, the European Union (EU) supranational body, via its President Ursula von der Leyen, promoted the EU Digital COVID Certificate and also demanded at times that all EU citizens be injected.
As such, it is entirely plausible, if not increasingly likely, that the interests shared between multiple political and economic actors have manifested themselves in the form of concrete political and economic agendas which, in turn, have been advanced via the COVID-19 event. It is also possible that the current war in the Ukraine as well as climate issues are being exploited by many of the same actors and in a similar fashion. Along these lines, Denis Rancourt recently noted:
It is only natural now to ask “what drove this?”, “who benefited?” and “which groups sustained permanent structural disadvantages?” In my view, the COVID assault can only be understood in the symbiotic contexts of geopolitics and large-scale social-class transformations. Dominance and exploitation are the drivers. The failing USA-centered global hegemony and its machinations create dangerous conditions for virtually everyone.
An increasingly large body of work supports the understanding of COVID-19 as a structural deep event. Important and pathfinding analyses were provided in the early months of the COVID-19 event by Cory Morningstar, Whitney Webb and Piers Robinson, amongst others. James Corbett was one of the first to warn of the impending dangers of a biosecurity state all the way back in March 2020, whilst Patrick Wood alerted us to the dangers of technocracy long before the arrival of COVID-19.
In States of Emergency(2022) Kees van der Pijl argues there has been a ‘biopolitical seizure of power’ in which an intelligence-IT-media complex has crystallised as a new class block seeking to quell growing unrest and the strengthening of progressive social movements throughout the world. Under cover of Covid-19, and via ruthless exploitation of people’s fear of a virus, van der Pijl traces how this new class block is attempting to impose control via high-tech, digitised societies necessitating mandatory injections and digital ID, as well as censorship and manipulation of public spheres. In short, van der Pijl describes a total surveillance society involving massive concentration of power and the end of democracy. Kheriaty’s The Rise of the Biomedical State (2022) offers a detailed presentation of how COVID-19 provided the impetus for an emerging biosecurity state whilst Iain Davis’ Pseudopandemic (2022) presents the COVID-19 event as primarily a propagandised phenomenon functioning to enable the continued emergence of a technocratic order built around the Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP) and ‘stake-holder capitalism’ that has appeared primarily to serve the interests of what he describes as an elite ‘parasite class’. Simon Elmer’s (2022) analysis presents all of these developments in terms of the rise of a new form of fascism whilst Broecker (2023) emphasises the technocratic and anti-democratic underpinnings of the political developments ushered in under the cover of the COVID-19 event.
Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci, although focused on documenting the corruption with respect to public health institutions and ‘Big Pharma’, is clear about its consequences for our democracies. Early in the book he notes that Fauci ‘has played a central role in undermining public health and subverting democracy and constitutional governance around the globe and in transitioning our civil governance toward medical totalitarianism’. Later in the book, Kennedy discusses the interplay between military, medical and intelligence planners and raises questions about an ‘underlying agenda to coordinate dismantlement of democratic governance’:
After 9/11, the rising biosecurity cartel adopted simulations as signaling mechanisms for choreographing lockstep responses among corporate, political, and military technocrats charged with managing global exigencies. Scenario planning became an indispensable device for multiple power centers to coordinate complex strategies for simultaneously imposing coercive controls upon democratic societies across the globe.
Broadly in line with this analysis, the work of both Breggin and Bregginand Paul Shreyer argue that the political and economic agendasadvanced during the COVID-19 event had been long in the pipeline and point toward it being an instigated event as opposed to a spontaneous – naturally occurring – one that groups opportunistically took advantage of.
Along with all this, transhumanism, life extension or ‘enhancement’ through technology and digitalised society, observable in some of the output from the WEF and public musings of key individuals, appears to reflect a set of beliefs in technology and progress that can be traced back to Enlightenment thinking of the last 300 years. Philosophical debates over technology and what it means to be human have remained at the heart of the Enlightenment ‘project’, although perhaps deeply buried. Associated with this might be scientism as a religious cult of the West.
Attempts to attach a label to the complex political and economic processes we are witnessing include descriptors such as ‘global fascism,’ ‘global communism,’ ‘neo-feudalism,’ ‘neo-serfdom’, ‘totalitarianism,’ ‘technocracy,’ ‘centralization vs. subsidiarity,’ ‘stakeholder capitalism’, ‘global public-private partnerships,’ ‘corporate authoritarianism’, ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘tyranny’ and ‘global capitalism.’ Dr Robert Malone, inventor of part of the mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 injections, openly refers to the threat of global totalitarianism as does US presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr.
In summation, there are multiple and readily observable signs of political and economic actors working to variously instigate, exaggerate and/or exploit the COVID-19 event. At the same time there are no signs that those promoting the claim that COVID-19 represented an unusually dangerous health crisis are conceding any ground, even as the facts become clear that it was nothing exceptional and that the responses have been a disaster for public health and well-being. Both ideology and underlying agendas appear to be influencing the dynamics of current events, all of which are occurring in the context of major shifts in the distribution of power globally: witness the BRICS block and various geo-political realignments, including the increasingly likely strategic failure for the West in relation to the Ukraine war. None of this looks like the COVID-19 response was just some innocent and incompetent blunder by our scientific and medical establishments.
The tasks ahead
For those occupying corporate or mainstream positions in politics, media or academia, the fear of being tarred with the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label is usually enough to dampen any enthusiasm for serious evaluation of the ways in which powerful and influential political and economic actors might be shaping responses to COVID-19 to further political and economic agendas. But the stakes are now simply too high for such shyness and, indeed cowardice, to be allowed to persist. There are strong and well-established grounds to take analyses along the lines of the ‘structural deep event’ thesis seriously, as set out in this article, and there are clear and present dangers to our civil liberties, freedom and democracy.
Building on the work already started, researchers must explore more fully the networks and power structures that have shaped the COVID-19 responses and which have sought to move forward various political and economic agendas. Analysing more fully the techniques used, including propaganda and exploitation of COVID-19 as an enabling event, is now an essential task for researchers to undertake. It is also important to consolidate understanding of linkages with ongoing drives related to the UN sustainability agenda – e.g. 15 minute cities – and the climate agenda, all of which potentially involve technocratic and top-down policy approaches at odds with autonomy and democracy. Such work, ultimately, can not only deepen our understanding of what is going on; it can also provide a guide for those who seek to oppose what is being described by some as ‘global totalitarianism’ or ‘fascism’. It is of equal importance for scholars of democracy and ethics to further unpack the implications of these developments with respect to liberty and civil rights as well as, more widely, creative thinking with respect to alternative visions of social, political and economic organisation and including the development of parallel societies.
It could of course be the case that such a research agenda ultimately leads to a refutation of the ‘structural deep event’ thesis and confirmation that everything witnessed over the last three years has been simply cock-up or blunder. But it seems increasingly unlikely that this would be the result and evidence in support of the structural deep event reading is stronger now than ever. It is essential that critical research into the consequences of the COVID-19 response does not become bounded by an unwarranted assumption that all can be reduced to well- intentioned but erroneous responses. The stakes are high and it has never been more essential to seriously engage with uncomfortable possibilities – even if that means interrogating uncomfortable and alarming explanations.
Endnotes
1. Thanks to David Bell, Isa Blumi, Heike Brunner, Jonathan Engler, Nick Hudson and Ewa Siderenko for comments and input.
2. Sheldon Watts offers historic background illustrating how the establishment regularly rewrites the science to serve other purposes. In the case of Cholera, the main editors of The Lancet in the late 19th century actually contradicted their own findings of a previous decade in order to accommodate trade interests concerning the quarantining of British ships from India that would have harmed the British Empire’s economic model. From being a human communicable disease, it transformed into a dark-skinned disease of the orient. Watts, Sheldon. “From rapid change to stasis: Official responses to cholera in British-ruled India and Egypt: 1860 to c. 1921.” Journal of World History (2001): 321-374. Thanks to Isa Blumi for this reference.
The U.K.’s Royal Society — acclaimed as the world’s oldest scientific academy — last week issued a report saying there was “clear evidence” that lockdowns, masks, contact tracing, travel restrictions and other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were effective at reducing COVID-19 transmission “in some countries.”
However, in an article published Wednesday in UnHerd, Kevin Bardosh, Ph.D., research director at Collateral Global — which is “dedicated to researching, understanding and communicating the global impacts of policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic” — called the report “deeply flawed,” saying it revealed “an unfortunate detachment from reality in our prestigious scientific institutions.”
Bardosh called out the report, particularly for its use of the word “unequivocally,” which stated:
“In summary, evidence about the effectiveness of NPIs applied to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 shows unequivocally that, when implemented in packages that combine a number of NPIs with complementary effects, these can provide powerful, effective and prolonged reductions in viral transmission.”
Bardosh, whose work has focused on the epidemiology and control of human, animal and vector-borne infectious disease in over 20 countries, is co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications.
In this 2022 analysis of the unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy, published in BMJ Global Health, Bardosh and co-authors concluded: “mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policies have had damaging effects on public trust, vaccine confidence, political polarization, human rights, inequities and social wellbeing.”
Failure to ‘evaluate the harmful consequences’ of policies
Bardosh said the central problem with the Royal Society report — and similar work like last year’s Lancet Commission report and Nature’s review — is that they fail to comprehensively evaluate the harmful consequences of pandemic policies.
Instead they “exclude or minimize the uncomfortable outliers and data that question orthodoxy and sidestep the hard policy questions.”
Without such critical inquiry, “simple narratives and comfortable popular projections” become entrenched, said Bardosh, in part by the mainstream media’s constant repetition of messages — like “masks worked” and “lockdowns slowed the spread” — and by admonitions to not question the conclusions or the authorities or institutions responsible for pushing them.
Among the most glaring yet unexamined consequences, according to Bardosh, are the hundreds of millions of people pushed into poverty and food insecurity by COVID-19 pandemic mandates and the lost educational opportunities for children.
In another article in UnHerd, Bardosh called out the U.K. COVID-19 inquiry — after more than 40 child rights charities and advocates issued a “scathing indictment” — saying it “must address the harms to children,” and that “lockdown ‘experts’ need to be held to account.”
Bardosh wrote:
“Children were not vectors of disease, despite pervasive media propaganda that toddlers would kill grandma. They were at minuscule risk from severe outcomes. Schools were never places of high transmission, something known as early as April 2020.
“Yet the expert classes, media and politicians hyped the risk to kids, dressing it up in a garb of unquestionable moralism that fed on our deepest fears: hurting children.”
What’s wrong with the Royal Society analysis?
The Royal Society report found individual NPIs in isolation had no effect on transmission, and it considered only the reduction of transmission in its overall analysis, not the illness or death outcomes, Bardosh pointed out.
In its analysis of lockdown and social distancing data, the Royal Society inconsistently applied targeting of time periods and effect sizes, and failed to distinguish between voluntary and mandated behavior change, he said.
Bardosh further criticized the report for relying heavily on observational studies from high-income countries and for cherry-picking cases from countries like South Korea, New Zealand and Hong Kong while ignoring those from Sweden, India, Haiti and Nicaragua.
“For the 17% of the world that could stay home (about 500 million people) during the height of global lockdown, reports are now written that render the other 83% invisible,” he wrote.
The report’s review of the evidence on masks, noted Bardosh, contradicts the recently updated meta-analysis of 78 randomized control trials (RCTs) by Cochrane which, while admitting the flaws in the study, nonetheless found “the pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks” and “wearing N95/P2 respirators … may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness.”
In his article last week about mask mandates, Bardosh also cited the recent RCT studies of community-wide cloth masking in Bangladesh and Guinea-Bissau during the pandemic, which found little to no benefit from the interventions.
Bardosh wrote:
“Before Covid, population-wide medical masks were not viewed as a particularly effective tool for respiratory viruses. In a 2018 address at the National Academy of Medicine, science writer Laurie Garrett stated that ‘the major efficacy of a mask is that it causes alarm in a person and so you stay away from each other.’”
The many downsides of facemask use also remained unexplored in the report. In his masking article Bardosh wrote:
“Oddly, the pro-mask narrative ignores the … harmful effects on social and emotional cognition, the toxicity of poorly manufactured masks, environmental pollution, psychological and physical discomfort (especially in people with a history of trauma or abuse), as well as increased social conformity to illogical bureaucracy and greater acceptance of mass surveillance technologies.”
Collateral Global in April brought together a group of 30 scholars, activists and experts from across the globe to discuss the impacts of pandemic restrictions in low- and middle-income countries — many of which were not considered in the Royal Society study, according to Bardosh.
They issued a report calling for focusing on human rights and centering local actors’ knowledge and experience, disaggregating risk based on local conditions, consistent public investment in healthcare across the world, open and accurate information flow from central authorities to regional areas and back, and for governments to avoid unnecessary and unworkable restrictions on movement, freedoms and the economy.
They also called out the acceleration of the global trend toward authoritarianism, the unlawful granting of emergency powers to the state and the manipulation of public opinion through the exploitation of fear.
Bardosh warned of a global policy “domino-effect” where lockdown policymaking in major countries invariably leads, through political pressure, to the herding of lower-income countries into the same mandates, regardless of the social and economic harm.
A new ‘lockdown doctrine’?
Despite the shortcomings of the Royal Society report, it is already being used as a rallying point for a new global preparedness vision, according to Bardosh, to make sure that NPIs such as lockdowns are rolled out early in the next pandemic.
This is part of the 100-day mission roadmap promoted by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), Bardosh said.
CEPI, a global partnership of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust and the World Economic Forum (WEF), was launched in 2017 in Davos, Switzerland, home of the WEF.
CEPI is closely connected to efforts to develop a vaccine for “Disease X,” raising over a billion dollars from governments and organizations such as the Gates Foundation.
According to the 100 Days website, “In preparing for Disease X, it’s important to be clear about the knowns and the unknowns: The X in ‘Disease X’ stands for everything we don’t know” and “What we do know is that the next Disease X is coming and that we have to be ready.”
CEPI recently hosted the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit with the U.K. government “to explore how we can respond to the next ‘Disease X’ by making safe, effective vaccines within 100 days,” stating it has a $3.5 billion “pandemic-busting plan” that “will kickstart and coordinate this work.”
According to the Daily Mail, countries have pledged $1.5 billion for this plan.
Bardosh called this “our new lockdown doctrine.”
In a June article, he wrote that this doctrine represents the consolidation of the world’s resources toward pandemic preparedness and building “the critical infrastructure for rapid lockdown,” and that “Shutting down harder and faster next time is the wrong idea.”
Bardosh wrote:
“Sir Jeremy Farrar, previous director at the Wellcome Trust and current WHO [World Health Organization] Chief Scientist, warned the inquiry not to be complacent in our ‘new pandemic age.’
“Views expressed this week sounded similar to those outlined in Bill Gates’s recent book, ‘How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.’ The Gates Foundation has become the WHO’s second largest donor, giving it an oversized influence in determining the shape of future pandemic responses.
“In his book, Gates outlines a plan echoed so far in the U.K. inquiry: lock down fast and make reopening dependent on a vaccine.”
Bardosh warned the successful rollout of lockdowns, vaccines and therapeutics would require “mechanisms to shape public opinion, curtail civil liberties and deploy massive government spending programs.”
Bardosh sees the Royal Society report — driven by “powerful interests, spin and egos” — functioning as just such a mechanism, forming the latest brick in the wall of a new and expanding global command-and-control system.
“We have seen in the years since 2020,” he wrote, “that once you impose a slew of government mandates, repealing them is just as difficult.”
Bardosh hopes that “skeptical academic oddballs” like him can make enough noise to make a difference.
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
Public health tasted the power they gained during the pandemic and now they are hungry once more. Any excuse to make themselves relevant again and they will take it.
This time it happened in France’s capital, Paris. On Wednesday and Thursday, the city undertook its first ever large-scale mosquito control campaign after two people contracted dengue fever. It is also known as break-bone fever due to the joint pain that accompanies illness.
Although the individuals were infected with dengue whilst abroad, officials were concerned that the Asian tiger mosquito might bite them and spread the disease around the country.
That seems like a very small risk to me but apparently, nowadays, however small the risk, public health must intervene. So they closed roads and sent out stay at home alerts (mini local lockdowns), allowing insecticides to be sprayed around the city over a couple of days.
Naturally, the situation was blamed on climate change. Apparently, there have been hotter temperatures and increased flooding meaning the mosquitos are more likely to cause a problem.
Most people who get dengue don’t have any symptoms but it is estimated that around half a million people worldwide are hospitalised with the disease each year. Approximately 20,000 to 40,000 of these die, however with good healthcare, death is unlikely.
Dr Jolyon Medlock, head of medical entomology and zoonoses ecology at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) told the Telegraphnewspaper, that “in 10 to 15 years the UK will probably also have embedded populations of mosquitoes that pose a threat to health”.
At the bottom of the Telegraph article it says “Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security”.
Lo and behold, who do we find funding the Telegraph’s Global Health Security? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of course. The Telegraph insists that the support comes without strings but it seems like it does come with some benefits as the paper brags that “we were among the first to warn of an approaching pandemic”. However did they know!?
And is the break-bone fever panic really being caused by climate change? In 2017, it was announced that France and the Netherlands backed the release of Oxitec’s genetically modified mosquitoes to fight dengue, chikungunya and zika.
These mosquitos are meant to use a biological method to suppress wild populations of dangerous mosquitos. The genetically modified males don’t bite or transmit disease and when released, search for a female mate. Their offspring inherit a self-limiting gene that causes them to die before reaching functional adulthood. Seems a bit Jurassic Parky to me and if there’s one thing I learnt from Jurassic Park, it’s that life always finds a way.
Oxitec is also the company that released genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida… which is now seeing a rise in malaria. Definitely not connected though. Their business is supported by $18 million of funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But who is Oxitec? Founded in 2002 as a spinout from Oxford University, they were purchased by US based Intrexon and Third Security in early 2020.
Intrexon changed its name to Precigen in 2020, a year after creating the company as a subsidiary. Weirdly, if you try to go to Intrexon’s website you get taken to DNA.com which is just a landing page with a creepy logo.
Under its current name, Precigen, the company informs us that it “is a dedicated discovery and clinical stage biopharmaceutical company advancing the next generation of gene and cell therapies using precision technology to target the most urgent and intractable diseases in our core therapeutic areas of immuno-oncology, autoimmune disorders, and infectious diseases”.
I used to think this technology would bring great advancement to medicine but, since the pandemic, I think they are just playing with fire.
Scientists are developing a proprietary “early warning system” — powered by CRISPR gene-editing technology — to “detect and characterize deadly pathogens” in Africa “before they spread across the globe,” STAT News reported.
The surveillance system — dubbed Sentinel — was launched with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others. It uses “participatory” digital health tools developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Sabeti is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Harvard professor and director of the Broad Institute’s Sabeti Lab. Happi is a professor of molecular biology and genomics at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, an adjunct professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard and director of the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), a genomic research institute focused on Africa, which he co-founded with Sabeti in Nigeria.
Sentinel aims to use rapid testing at “points-of-care” — anywhere tests can be administered, including non-clinical settings — across rural Africa to identify and genetically sequence pathogens. Then researchers will use cloud-based technology to share that information across the public health information sphere.
Global public health researchers can then track and predict “threats” and use that information to rapidly develop new diagnostics and vaccines — what the researchers call a “virtuous cycle,” according to a 2021 paper published in Viruses by the developers.
The Sentinel project was officially launched in 2020 with funding from TED’s Audacious Project, backed by Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, Open Philanthropy, the Skoll Foundation and the Gates Foundation.
But DARPA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Wellcome Trust and others funded the development of the CRISPR technology the project will use to detect pathogenic threats.
“They fully intend to use synthetic biology to research, develop and test biological warfare weapons. That’s DARPA’s motivation for funding this.
“It fits in with Predict and its successor, also funded by USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], which is a front organization for the CIA, to go out into the world and find every exotic disease, fungus, toxin, virus they possibly can and bring them back here and then weaponize them in their BSL3 [biosafety level 3] and BSL4 labs.”
According to Boyle, the Broad Institute is one of the country’s leading DARPA-funded synthetic biology research centers.
Happi and Sabeti officially launched Sentinel in West Africa one month before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. By early February 2020, they were using it to deploy COVID-19 rapid testing and genomic sequencing in hospitals across Sierra Leone, Senegal and Nigeria — before anywhere in the U.S. was doing so, STAT reported.
“Experts” told STAT that Africa is a “hot spot for emerging infectious diseases” because the existing system of disease surveillance is too centralized and top-down.
Happi and Sabeti aim to change that, they said, by making disease surveillance “bottom-up” — getting “everyday Africans” and community frontline workers working as “sentinels” to surveil their friends and communities for diseases.
They said their project can change how disease surveillance works globally. “Everybody in the world should be a sentinel, a sentinel not only for his own immediate community, for his own country — but a sentinel for the globe,” said Happi.
‘Very wealthy people have figured out how they can get extremely rich from this’
The developers said the Sentinel program is needed because viruses can mutate at any time to become pandemic threats, and this system is designed to find them early.
Sabeti described the work in a video tweeted last year by Bill Gates.
Sentinel is designed to identify pathogens at the most localized level possible and then disperse diagnostic and genomic information as quickly as possible to public health officials and researchers designing treatments, vaccines and new tests.
Clinicians or others are meant to administer “point-of-care” tests that use CRISPR gene-editing technology, which turns gene editors into pathogen detectors through different techniques, some of which are still in development.
Sentinel’s first line of intervention is the SHINE (SHERLOCK and HUDSON Integration to Navigate Epidemics) diagnostic tool, easily administered at almost any location. It tests blood or urine samples and reveals the results on a piece of paper without any high-tech equipment.
Happi told STAT that administering the test is like “doing a PCR on a sheet of paper” and that it is so simple that his grandmother could do it in her village.
But SHINE — an improvement on Sabeti’s earlier Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter UnLOCKing, or SHERLOCK test — can test for only one pathogen at a time.
If that test fails to detect anything, Sentinel researchers launch their next-level test, CARMEN (Combinatorial Arrayed Reactions for Multiplexed Evaluation of Nucleic acids), which can screen for up to 16 pathogens at a time and must be implemented at a nearby rural hospital.
Research on the CARMEN technique was funded by DARPA, NIH, and Wellcome and published in Nature in 2020.
If CARMEN fails, the sample is “escalated” to a regional genomics hub, where every virus in the sample, “known or unknown,” is sequenced.
Researchers can use those sequences to quickly make new diagnostic tests for the newly identified pathogens, STAT reported.
The data collected through Sentinel is shared across healthcare clinics and public health officials’ proprietary mobile apps and cloud-based reporting systems developed by Dimagi — a Gates Foundation-funded for-profit tech company that targets low-income communities — and Fathom — a for-profit software developer funded by Sabeti labs.
Sabeti filed patents for the technology and co-founded a biotech startup, Sherlock Biosciences, to commercialize these tests for use in the U.S.
Sherlock also has startup funding from the Gates Foundation, Open Philanthropy and a number of other biotech venture capitalist companies.
With funding from DARPA, Battelle National Biodefense Institute, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the NIH and others, the Broad Institute and Princeton University researchers also used SHINE to create a rapid test for COVID-19.
Sabeti sits on the board and serves as a shareholder of the Danaher corporation, which develops research tools determining the causes of disease and identifies new therapies and tests of drugs and vaccines.
Happi also collaborates with the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute and bioengineering firm Ginkgo Bioworks to deploy Ginko’s automation technologies to his lab to sequence genomes.
But Sabeti told STAT that providing people with access to testing is her true priority. And she is on the board of a nonprofit that will work to send the tests her new company makes to low- and middle-income countries “at cost.”
Sentinel’s real contribution, Sabeti said, is its focus on “empowerment.”
Sabeti and Happi are currently field testing SHINE and CARMEN. In the process, they are training scientists in genomic surveillance and collecting hundreds of thousands of genomes.
STAT didn’t specify whether those are virus genomes or people’s genomes, but Boyle said the testing would make it possible to also collect the genomes of African people, which he said is a form of biopiracy.
Other notable collaborators on the 2021 Viruses paper that helped publicly launch Sentinel include Scripps Research Institute virologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., co-author of the now infamous Nature “Proximal Origins” paper used to promote the theory that COVID-19 evolved in nature. Andersen’s private communications later revealed he suspected a segment of the SARS-CoV-2 genome may have been engineered in a lab.
Examples of conflicts of interest among the Virus paper’s co-authors also include Anthony Philippakis, M.D., Ph.D., a venture partner at Google Ventures; Jonathan Jackson, CEO of Dimagi; and Robert Garry, Ph.D., Matthew L. Boisen, Ph.D., and Luis M. Branco, Ph.D., who all work for Zalgen Labs, a “biotechnology company developing countermeasures to emerging viruses.”
Garry also co-authored the “Proximal Origins” paper.
Dr. David Bell, a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health, told The Defender the Sentinel program reflected a broader problem with global public health priorities.
“Public health has become a for-profit industry that’s very, very lucrative,” Bell said. As a result, the field no longer works to provide people with better economies, sanitation, nutrition, access to basic medicines and research on major endemic infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and malaria.
Instead, research funding is diverted to “pandemic preparedness,” diseases that kill relatively few people.
Bell said:
“We’ve got to a point where very wealthy people have figured out how they can get extremely rich from this and they have enough money to completely control the agenda. So now they essentially control the agenda of global health.
“So you don’t hear much about sanitation and nutrition any more because that’s not where the people who are running the agenda can make their money.”
What they’re doing is not “intrinsically bad,” Bell said. “The question is whether it is proportionate to the need or is it a diversion of resources that in doing so will cause a net harm? And that’s a question that people won’t talk about.”
Sabeti, Happi and Broad Institute at forefront of viral hemorrhagic research in Africa for years
Sabeti, Happi and the Broad Institute have also been at the forefront of viral hemorrhagic fever research in Africa, including Lassa virus and Ebola.
Andersen, Garry, Sabeti and Happi all serve on the board of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC), founded in 2010 with funding from the NIH, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Tulane University.
Sabeti and Happi began working together in 2008, studying the virus that causes a viral hemorrhagic fever known as Lassa fever, which infects hundreds of thousands — most of whom recover — and kills about 5,000 people globally per year, according to recent estimates. Lassa fever is considered a category A (most dangerous) bioterror threat.
The Viruses paper provides an account of Sabeti and Happi’s work on Lassa. By mapping human genomic variation in West Africa, they found the Lassa virus existed for half a millennia there, but had gone undetected because people had developed genetic resistance to it.
And many people with Lassa were being misdiagnosed because they had nonspecific symptoms.
This work led them to an epiphany moment — “the realization that in many parts of the world, we are largely blind both to the prevalence of known infectious diseases and to the appearance of new threats,” the paper said.
By developing better diagnostic tools for local healthcare workers, the paper concluded, diseases can be detected and better treatments and vaccines and then even better diagnostic tools can be created, “instead of awaiting the next outbreak.”
Lassa virus is a BSL4 pathogen, the paper notes — although in West Africa it is studied at a research facility without that safety level — and it makes a plug for BSL4 research in Africa.
“With increased globalization and an ever-expanding human population, the need for large-scale research initiatives on BSL-4 pathogens remains acute,” it says.
“Further, as only one BSL-4 lab exists in the entire region of West Africa … even today, transnational partnerships are critical to allow ongoing investigation of BSL-4 pathogen samples.”
Their work on Lassa led the researchers to begin developing a broader surveillance model and then to establish ACEGID at Redeemer University with support from Tulane, the NIH and the World Bank.
ACEGID then, according to the article, played a key role during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which happened just as ACEGID was launched in March of that year.
Happi’s team identified the first case of Ebola in Nigeria and sequenced the genome of the Ebola virus in 2014, it said.
The mainstream press reported that the 2014 Ebola outbreak — which claimed 11,000 lives in West Africa — came from a two-year-old boy in Guinea playing in a bat-infested tree stump.
But U.S. Right to Know reported that independent evidence and phylogenetic analysis cast doubt on that narrative.
Chernoh Bah, an independent journalist and historian from Sierra Leone, reported errors in the established narrative identified through his interviews.
Research by investigative journalist Sam Husseini and virologist Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., built on Bah’s research and pointed to a leak at the U.S. government-supported research laboratory in Kenema, Sierra Leone, where the VHFC was doing research on Ebola and Lassa.
An article co-authored by VHFC’s Sabeti, Happi, Andersen and dozens of others published in Science argued that the Ebola outbreak had a zoonotic origin in Central Africa.
Happi’s lab also sequenced the Lassa virus in a 2018 outbreak.
According to an article in Nature, Happi’s sequencing also provided evidence that the Lassa outbreak had a zoonotic origin, rather than being from a mutation that made the disease more transmissible.
The Viruses paper said the success of ACEGID in addressing the Ebola crisis, along with its work on Lassa, laid the groundwork for Sentinel, launched just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Given that history, Boyle said:
“I wouldn’t trust anything Sabeti’s doing. And I’d be very skeptical of any claims that are being made [about Sentinel] given the involvement of DARPA, the involvement of Broad and Broad’s previous involvement at that Kenema lab with the outbreak of the Ebola pandemic.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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